^ v.^. j 
 
 
OF THK 
 
 University of California. 
 
 ( rl K'J' OK 
 
 Received JAN 1895 . i8g . 
 
The GoLDEiT Guess 
 
 ESSAYS ON POETRY AND THE POETS 
 
 John Vance Cheney 
 
 AUTHOR OF •• THISTLE-DRIFT," *' WOOD-BLOOMS," ETC. 
 
 UiriVBIlSITT 
 
 rmt^ 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 
 
 10 MILK STREET 
 
 1892 
 
Copyright, 1891, by John Vance Cheney 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 The Golden Guess 
 
TO 
 
 lEtjmuntJ Clarence ^tetiman 
 
 GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF HIS DISTINGUISHED SERVICE 
 IN THE CAUSE OF SONG. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 These papers are by way of answer to questions 
 concerning the power and place, the principles and 
 tests, of the art of song. An attempt is made to 
 outline the " case " of poetry ; to run back the 
 record, and select the essentials established by the 
 common voice of the ages. Despite a touch here 
 and there for the sake of unity, or to bring the 
 subject down nearer to date, the fragmentary origin 
 remains apparent. Given out little by little during 
 a series of years, in the shape of talks to young 
 enquirers, the matter is, as now presented, rather 
 for such than for those older, who know these 
 things though they — too often — heed them not. 
 
 John Vance Cheney. 
 
 San Fkancisco, December 30, 1891. 
 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Old Notion of Poetry ... 1 
 
 II. Who are the Great Poets ? . . 43 
 
 III. Matthew Arnold 75 
 
 IV. What about Browning ? . . . 121 
 V. Tennyson and his Critics . . . 161 
 
 VI. Six Minutes with Swinburne . . 203 
 
 VII. Music, or the Tone Poetry . . .213 
 
 VIII. Hawthorne: 255 
 
 (1.) Mr. James's Hawthorne . . 
 
 (2.) The Hawthorne of the "Scarlet Letter" 
 
I write so 
 Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God — 
 The only speakers of essential truth. 
 
 Aurora Leigh. 
 
 Not winds to voyagers at sea, 
 
 Nor showers to earth more necessary be, 
 
 Than verse to virtue. 
 
 Cowley. 
 
 Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us. 
 
 Psalm xc:17. 
 
I 
 
 THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 
 
**^ 0? THB *^ 
 
 [TJ IT 17 BR SIT 
 
 THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 
 
 A PAPER entitled, "What is a Great Poet?" 
 contributed to the Forum for April, 1889, 
 contains these words: "Of late there have 
 seemed to me to be certain signs, especially in 
 America, of a revolt of the mob against our 
 literary masters." Whether or not the clause, 
 "especially in America" lends force to the 
 general statement, the further assertion that 
 the only way to stay the chaos impending is 
 to set up once more the "ancient laws and 
 precepts," is wholly true. Therefore it may 
 not prove amiss to marshal certain "dictes 
 and notable wise sayings" on the endangered 
 art of poetry. 
 
 " May the fools get a little wisdom, and the 
 wise a little poetry ! " So, with his keen percep- 
 
 3 
 
4 THE GOLDEN GUESS 
 
 tion of the world's need, exclaims the devout 
 scoffer, Heme. " It is indeed a pity," he says, 
 "that our great public knows so little about 
 poetrj" ; almost as little, in fact, as our poets." 
 We can readily believe Landor when he says, 
 "Readers of poetry hear the bells, and seldom 
 mind what they are ringing for," but we cannot 
 believe that often the wise fail to appreciate 
 poetry, that even the poets themselves are 
 wanting in knowledge of it, till we learn how 
 difficult it is to understand. 
 
 For a knowledge of the highest, the noblest, 
 poetry, the learned Porson says we must have 
 " generous, well-informed, and elevated minds." 
 According to Montaigne, whom Ben Jonson 
 and Shakespeare delighted to honor, " We have 
 more poets than judges and interpreters of 
 poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent 
 poem than to understand a good one. There 
 is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of 
 poetry that a man may well enough judge by 
 certain rules of art ; but the true, supreme, and 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 5 
 
 divine poesy is above all the rules of reason. 
 Whoever discerns tlie beauty of it with the 
 most assured and most steady sight, sees no 
 more than the quick reflection of a flash of 
 lightning. This is a sort of poetry that does 
 not exercise, but ravishes and overwhelms our 
 judgment." 
 
 We have the counterpart of Montaigne's 
 "quick reflection of a flash of lightning" in 
 Thoreau's observation that poetry "is not 
 recoverable thought, but a hue caught from 
 a vaster receding thought;" while Matthew 
 Arnold confirms the Frenchman and the New 
 Englander : — 
 
 " The critical perception of poetic truth is of 
 all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanes- 
 cent ; by even pressing too impetuously after it, 
 one runs the risk of losing it." 
 
 The difficulty of understanding poetry is 
 made plain by implication, in curious Cousin's 
 statement of the power and scope of it. "It 
 expresses," he says, " what is inaccessible to 
 
6 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 every other art. I mean thought, entirely dis- 
 tinct from the senses and even from sentiment, 
 thought that has no form, thought that has no 
 color, that lets no sound escape, that does not 
 manifest itself in any way, thought in its high- 
 est flight, in its most refined abstraction." 
 
 Lastly, we recall the memorable words of the 
 grand old iron-worker in literature, the brawny 
 blacksmith of letters, Carlyle : — 
 
 " To know [poetry] is no slight task ; but 
 rather that, being the essence of all science, it 
 requires the purest of all study for knowing it." 
 Again, " To apprehend this beauty of poetry, in 
 its full and purest brightness, is not easy, but 
 difficult : thousands on thousands eagerly read 
 poems, and attain not the smallest taste of it ; 
 yet to all uncorrupted hearts, some effulgences 
 of this heavenly glory are here and there re- 
 vealed ; and to apprehend it clearly and wholly, 
 to acquire and maintain a sense and heart that 
 sees and worships it, is the last perfection of 
 all human culture." 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 7 
 
 It would seem, then, that poetry is not simply- 
 hard, but very hard, the hardest of all the pro- 
 ductions of the human mind to understand. 
 We can believe Heine, now, and we shall not be 
 surprised to find the trustworthy critic of poetry 
 as rare as the pichiciago. In Cousin's " most 
 refined abstraction," in the evanescence, the 
 elusiveness, mentioned by Montaigne and 
 Thoreau, and finally in Carlyle's " essence of 
 all science," of all knowing, it is easy to see 
 whence the difficulty springs. 
 
 But the every-day " dictes " on the subject of 
 poetry, the lesser definitions of it, differ widely 
 from the Caxtonian dictes, from the great defi- 
 nitions. " A rhythmical creation of beauty " ; 
 "literary production which attains the power 
 of giving pleasure by its form as distinct from 
 the matter"; "imaginative passion", — the 
 dictes of this sort, while they are good in com- 
 parison with hundreds of others, do not arouse 
 a suspicion of the difficulty of poetry. They 
 do not stamp it as a high thing, " the supreme 
 
8 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 of power"; and these are the dictes that the 
 many read and accept. Hence, while so much 
 is said of poetry, so little is learned ; and hence 
 the "revolt" against the masters. 
 
 This imperfect understanding, this blurred 
 view of poetry, this indifferent attitude toward 
 it, is naturally, logically, one of the misfortunes 
 of our busy day. In the hurry of buying and 
 selling, of tilling and building, we have lost the 
 meaning poetry had to the leisurely ancients, 
 the importance they attached to it, — the large 
 meaning, the supreme importance. We no 
 longer give the poet and the prophet one name, 
 our muses are no longer " those that inquire." 
 When the thousand-eyed press, prevailing over 
 all privacy, informs us that a singer, in some 
 quarter of our vast possessions, is trilling new 
 ditties for the Christmas market, we do not 
 think of him as boring, as drilling, into the 
 heart, the secret, of life. It is to be feared, in- 
 deed, that he is not doing quite this ; still it 
 would bespeak a day of better things were we 
 wont to give him the benefit of the doubt. 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 9 
 
 Let us climb back to the source, and see if 
 from the calm height of the olden time we can 
 not get a clearer, a wider view. Poetry, like 
 all high and mighty powers, strikes root in the 
 rich black soil of mystery. In the old — really 
 the new — days it was deified ; the Greek gra- 
 ciously referring its origin to Orpheus, the 
 Northman styling it the " present, or the drink, 
 of Odin." Cicero, with Plato and Democritus 
 in mind, says, "I have often heard that no real 
 poet can exist without the spirit being on fire, 
 and without, as it were, a dash of madness." 
 " AiU insanit homo, aut versus facit " : here 
 Horace and tradition speak together. 
 
 The old ideas of poetry, differ as they may 
 in particulars, converge at this point ; viz., that 
 poetry is something beyond, above the man, 
 entering into him at certain times and under 
 certain conditions, and giving him superhuman 
 force of utterance. Hesiod is not enabled to 
 sing by his own effort ; quietly feeding his 
 lambs at the foot of Helicon, the muses must 
 
10 THE GOLDEN GUESS I 
 
 bring him a laurel bough, and bid him sing. 
 Lorn Cassandra does not wander on the hills, 
 uttering words of her own ; she is simply the 
 mouth-piece of Apollo. All this attributing of 
 the extramundane, of the preterhuman, attests 
 the power of poetry from the beginning. Man 
 could not reach its secret ; it was above him, 
 from a source far higher and mightier than him- 
 self. The ancients worshipped at the shrine of 
 poetry ; it was to them a goddess off whose 
 face, divinely fair, the veil was never lifted. 
 
 The old large meaning of poetry was still 
 abroad at a comparatively recent period. The 
 scholar. Sir Thomas Elyot, who died about the 
 middle of the sixteenth century, assures us of 
 this : — 
 
 " Semblably they that make verses, express- 
 ing thereby none other learning but the craft 
 of versifying, be not of ancient writers named 
 poets, but only called versifiers." Elsewhere 
 he nobly declares, " And poetry was the first 
 philosophy that ever was known, whereby men 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 11 
 
 from their childhood were brought to the 
 reason, how to live well, learning thereby not 
 only manners and natural affections, but also 
 the wonderful works of Nature, mixing serious 
 matter with things pleasant." 
 
 Later, we find Rare Ben, of the spacious 
 times, quoting Aristotle to a similar purport: 
 " A poet is that which by the Greeks is called 
 a maker, or a feigner ; his art, an art of imita- 
 tion or feigning, expressing the life of man in 
 fit measure, numbers, and harmony." 
 
 It is a pleasure in this connection to mention, 
 among the best sayings on poetry, one of the 
 neglected Blair's : "Poetry in its ancient, original 
 condition included the whole burst of the 
 human mind." 
 
 Such was the old poetry, and such the notion 
 of it. 
 
 Three men of our time have held closely to 
 the old notion : Carlyle, Emerson and Matthew 
 Arnold. We might well add a fourth, Ruskin. 
 With these men poetry is still a thing of infi- 
 
12 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 nite worth and beauty, the " unfallen speech " ; 
 and the poets are still *' God's prophets of the 
 beautiful." " The beauty of poetry," says the 
 fervent Scotchman, " dwells and is born in the 
 innermost spirit of man, united to all love of 
 virtue, to all true belief in God ; or rather, it is 
 one with this love and this belief, another phase 
 of the same highest principle in the mysterious 
 infinitude of the human soul." 
 
 Again, he says that the aim of poetry is to 
 incorporate the " everlasting reason of man in 
 forms visible to the sense, and suitable to it." 
 Still again, he exclaims, "Poetic creation — 
 what is this but seeing the thing sufficiently ? " 
 Life accurately, sufficiently seen, liigh truth 
 fastened in permanent forms of beauty — this 
 is the old notion. With Carlyle poetry is diffi- 
 cult, divine ; for what is hard and high, what 
 divine among mortals, if not the right seeing of 
 truth at its purest, truth in its first, far beauty, 
 — the right reading of the mystery we call 
 life? "The poet names the thing because he 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 13 
 
 sees it," says Emerson. To see, really see ; 
 here we hit the very heart of poetry and of 
 difficulty. Those winged words of Ruskin, 
 what are they? 
 
 " The greatest thing a human soul ever does 
 in this world is to see something, and tell what 
 it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people 
 can talk for one who can think, but thousands 
 can think for one who can see. To see clearly 
 is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one." 
 
 The beauty of poetry " one with all love of 
 virtue, of all true belief in God," says Carlyle. 
 " The poet, or the man of Beauty," says Emer- 
 son. . . . "God has not made some beautiful 
 things, but Beauty is the creator of the uni- 
 verse. . . . The love of truth, the love of good, 
 the love of beauty, these three are equal." 
 "Poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one," 
 says Ruskin. Is this empty rhetoric, or are 
 poetry, prophecy and religion, indeed, one and 
 the same? Arnold answers, " The strongest 
 part of our religion to-day is its unconscious 
 
14 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 poetry." And Emerson adds, " All that we call 
 sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is 
 the principal event in chronology. . . . The 
 religions of the world are the ejaculations of a 
 few imaginative men." 
 
 Poetry tells us " how to live well " ; " poetry 
 expresses the life of man in fit measure, num- 
 bers, and harmony " ; poetry incorporates the 
 " everlasting reason of man " : — these best of 
 sayings and that other excellent saying of 
 Emerson, " The poet turns the world to glass, 
 and shows us all things in their right series and 
 procession," we find again in what comes, 
 perhaps, the nearest to a definition of poetry : 
 " the noble and profound application of ideas to 
 life, under the conditions immutably fixed by 
 the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth." 
 
 " It is important," Arnold continues, " to hold 
 fast to this : that poetry is at bottom a criticism 
 of life ; that the greatness of a poet lies in his 
 powerful and beautiful application of ideas to 
 life, to the question how to live." 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 16 
 
 Only on this old high definition of poetry 
 can we pronounce it of first importance, " the 
 supreme of power." Only on these great terms 
 could Arnold find the right to declare, " The 
 future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, 
 where it is worthy of its high destinies, our 
 race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer 
 and surer stay." 
 
 On the old high definition, the right seeing of 
 life, expressed according to the immutable laws 
 of poetic truth and beauty, we have in poetry 
 a vital subject, the ruling power of man's mind 
 and heart since time was ; we have to deal 
 with man's happiness, his self-preservation. 
 
 Metaphysics has done its part toward helping 
 us to forget the old notion. It has been gath- 
 ered down on this bright subject ; it has so over- 
 grown it that the one thing first and last to be 
 searched for has been lost sight of. Who but 
 those heavy with the hangings and trappings of 
 the metaphysical armory could strive to separate 
 inseparables, to divide the real from the ideal ? 
 
 [TJiriVBRSITY] 
 
16 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 As if the ideal were not the spirit, the life, of 
 the real, the very real ! 
 
 "The true ideal is not opposed to the real, 
 nor is it any artificial heightening thereof ; but 
 lies in it, and blessed are the eyes that find it. 
 It is the mens divinior which hides within the 
 actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact into matter- 
 of-meaning for him who has the gift of second 
 sight." 
 
 If this saying of Lowell's does not contain all 
 we may wish to know, it contains all we can 
 know and all we need to know. " It is not 
 true," says Channing, " that the poet paints a 
 life which does not exist. He only extracts and 
 concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, 
 arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance." 
 
 Again, poetry has been recently defined as 
 "All writing tending to noble emotion, or re- 
 flection leading to such emotion, having for its 
 subject mankind or the rational universe, or 
 both, in relation to God, and using for the most 
 part the vehicle of rhythmical form.'* 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 17 
 
 There is much in this saying, but is it not 
 erroneous, fatally false, where it makes poetry 
 a thing solely for the emotions? Still, this say- 
 ing concerning the reception of poetry is better 
 than MilFs saying concerning the inception of 
 it. The poet " is not a poet," says Mill, " be- 
 cause he has ideas of any particular kind, but 
 because the succession of his ideas is subordi- 
 nate to the course of his emotions." 
 
 Can anything be plainer than that the right 
 seeing of so vast, so complex phenomena as life 
 exhibits must come of the " everlasting reason " 
 and come to the " everlasting reason " ; that it 
 is a matter of mind and for mind? Emotion 
 plays its part, but if the intellect ever leads and 
 controls anywhere, it is here. 
 
 "Good sense," says Coleridge, "is the body 
 of poetic genius; . . . poetic composition 
 is the result and pledge of a watchful good 
 sense, of fine and luminous distinction, and of 
 complete self-possession." " Poetry," says Car- 
 lyle, "turns on the power of intellect''. "The 
 
18 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 sign and credentials of the poet are," says 
 Emei'son, "that he announces that which no 
 man foretold. . . . He knows and tells." 
 
 "The truth of poetry," Mill continues, "is 
 to paint the human soul truly," it is the " delin- 
 eation of the deeper and more secret workings 
 of human emotion." 
 
 This is a part of the truth of poetry; the 
 whole truth of it is to see man and all that is 
 not man, to read aright, to interpret faithfully, 
 and to fix distinctly and imperishably in blazing 
 symbols, the primal laws, the meaning of life. 
 After all, the poet's originality is in inverse 
 ratio to his greatness. The great poet is the 
 word-for-word reporter : — 
 
 " For poetry was all written before time was, 
 and whenever we are so finely organized that 
 we can penetrate into that region where the air 
 is music, we hear those primal warblings, and at- 
 tempt to write them down, but we lose ever and 
 anon a word, or a verse, and substitute some- 
 thing of our own, and thus miswrite the poem." 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 19 
 
 For this reporting is required the " whole 
 burst of the human mind," and for the reception 
 of the report is required, as we have seen, sim- 
 plicity of vision, widened and strengthened by 
 the severest preparation of which mind and soul 
 are capable. The emotions may give, may re- 
 ceive, a great deal, but not all that was written 
 before time was. Coleridge, inspired by the 
 presence of his sleeping child, reports certain 
 phases of nature : — 
 
 " Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 
 Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
 With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
 Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
 Of mossy apple-tree, while the nighthatch 
 Smokes in the sunthaw; whether the eve-drops fall, 
 Heard only in the trances of the blast. 
 Or if the secret ministry of frost 
 Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 
 Quietly shining to the quiet moon." 
 
 Are we to say that this marvellous reproduc- 
 tion of nature, this exact seeing, this incision 
 and expression to the very life, is possible to 
 one who has no " ideas of a particular kind " ? 
 
20 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 Mill's saying that poetry is " thought colored by 
 emotions, expressed in metre and overheard," is 
 far better than his other saying. There is a 
 beautiful coloring of emotion in the lines quoted, 
 but the first thing we see is that the poet sees. 
 Sight does not rest upon the course of emotions, 
 it rests upon the eye. Coleridge sees, he "knows 
 and tells " ; tells in such a manner that we can 
 see in his few words more than we can see, 
 standing before nature herself. This reach and 
 compression mean sight and mind : sight and 
 mind so reach and compress, span thought's sky 
 with a single phrase, whisper divinity in a little 
 word. Emotion will not suffice here ; much less 
 will it suffice when we come to the right seeing 
 of life at large, in its infinite extent and variety. 
 Arnold says of religion that it is " morals touched 
 with emotion." So we may say that poetry is 
 thought, yes, morals, touched with emotion ; but 
 we can not say that the sun of poetry rises and 
 sets in emotion. 
 
 The exception that the old notion compels 
 
t The old notion o^ i*0EtRif 21 
 
 us to take to Mill's statement regarding the 
 emotion in poetry, is only partial; but when 
 he says that the poet "is not a poet because he 
 has ideas of any particular kind," the dissent 
 becomes total. The very pith of the old notion 
 lies in the affirmation that it is because the poet 
 has ideas of a particular kind that he is a poet ; 
 and probably the scientists will only too cheer- 
 fully agree with us when we add, the poet's 
 particular kind of ideas is not the scientific 
 kind. The aim of poetry, in the broad sense, is 
 one with that of philosophy and science, — the 
 truth ; but the method of poetry is not the 
 method of philosophy and science, nor is the 
 order of truth sought by it the order of truth 
 sought by these. Science and philosophy feel 
 their way, poetry opens instantly on the truth. 
 Poetry is literature ; and " the grand work of 
 literary genius," as Arnold's saying runs, " is a 
 work of synthesis and exposition, not of analy- 
 sis and discovery." Science is slow, it searches ; 
 poetry is swift, it sees : this, in brief, is the dif- 
 
22 THE GOLDEN GUESS t 
 
 ference in method. As to the difference be- 
 tween the kinds of truth sought, the poet's kind 
 of truth lies within or beyond the truth that 
 science toils patiently toward, step by step ; the 
 poet's kind of truth is the ideal, the very real. 
 
 " For double the vision my eyes do see, 
 And a double vision is always with me. 
 With my inward eye, 'tis an old man gray; 
 With my outward, a thistle across my way." 
 
 The scientist sees a thistle ; Blake, the poet, 
 with his eye on a thistle, sees an " old man 
 gray." The two things seen, differ widely, the 
 two methods differ as widely. So wide is the dif- 
 ference of method between the poet and the 
 scientist, that Blake, comparing his method with 
 Newton's, terms the scientist's method a sleep : 
 
 "May God us keep 
 From single vision and Newton's sleep." 
 
 The scientist's vision is single, stopping at the 
 obvious ; the poet's is double, stopping not short 
 of the inner, the central truth, the red heart of 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 23 
 
 life. Poetry leaps to the ultimate, essential 
 beauty, the grand unity. And Grod saw that it 
 was good : poetry never drops this note of glory. 
 Amid all the mutation and perturbation of 
 science and philosophy, poetry sees as first it 
 saw. Science and philosophy may hesitate, may 
 grope, may despair, poetry holds to the old vis- 
 ion of joy ; it is trustful, it is safe. Poetry is 
 an art. Why? Because of the kind of truth 
 it sees, the truth that is always beautiful, or, to 
 use the old synonym, that is always good ; be- 
 cause of its method of seeing, its leaping sight, 
 and because of its glowing report, alive and 
 shining with wonderful words, the perfection of 
 human speech. The poet's kind of truth is in 
 itself pleasurable ; his manner of report is cor- 
 respondingly pleasurable, stimulative of joy. 
 
 " Pleasure is not indispensable," says Lessing. 
 It depends on the kind of pleasure. The high 
 pleasure of the poet's kind of truth is indispen- 
 sable ; whatever else men let go they cling to 
 this. The Happy Isles are distant, science does 
 
24 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 not cany that far ; only poetry can safely 
 make the long, difficult journey. There is a 
 homely old saying, " The plaster must be as 
 broad as the sore." We are not at ease, we are 
 hurt by the world. Science applies its strip, 
 varying in breadth from year to year, but the 
 wound is not covered. We must apply the 
 "best part of our religion," the balm of 
 poetry, the joy announced so long ago, — And 
 God saw that it was good. Mill, finding that 
 the poet has no "ideas of a particular kind," 
 may consistently find Wordsworth's poetry no 
 more than the poetry of culture. We that be- 
 lieve a poet to have ideas of a particular kind, 
 and of the most exalted kind, find Wordsworth 
 a born seer, important, immortal ; he has the old 
 note of glory. This, not the part played by the 
 emotions, is the vital thing to discover ; and the 
 longer we speculate upon the emotions, the 
 longer is the discovery delayed : reasoning too 
 much, we fail to see. 
 
 The old notion makes the perception of truth 
 
1 THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 25 
 
 the immediate object of the highest poetry. 
 Here we are confronted by eminent authorities, 
 among them Coleridge. 
 
 " A poem," he says, " is that species of com- 
 position which is opposed to works of science, 
 by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, 
 not truth." 
 
 In his remarks on Wordsworth, this state- 
 ment is reaffirmed : Wordsworth's work de- 
 stroys the " main, fundamental distinction, not 
 only between a poem and prose, but even be- 
 tween philosophy and works of fiction, inas- 
 much as it proposes truth for its immediate 
 object instead of pleasure,^^ 
 
 Coleridge opposes poetry to science. So 
 far he is with us; we divide ways when it 
 comes to the cause of the opposition. We 
 have endeavored to show that the cause of the 
 opposition lies in the kind of truth sought. 
 Whether it lie here, or in the relative positions 
 of truth and pleasure, will be easier of decision, 
 perhaps, when we get farther along. As to 
 
^6 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 trenching on the ground of the moral philoso- 
 pher by putting truth first, how can a poet do 
 this ? Poetry has for its aim the moral, the 
 good, the beautiful ; poetry is also philosophic. 
 "Poetry is the first philosophy that ever was 
 known." To this we add Coleridge's own 
 words: "No man was ever yet a great poet, 
 without being at the same time a profound 
 philosopher." But while the poet is a moral 
 philosopher, it must not be forgotten that he is 
 first a seer ; employing the method of the seer, 
 the instantaneous method, the method of 
 
 beauty. Here is the difference, the difference 
 of method. We do not see how the poet can 
 trench on the ground of the moral philosopher ; 
 for this ground is the poet's by first occupancy. 
 "There are, indeed, both in Arabic and Per- 
 sian," says Sir William Jones, "philosophical 
 tracts on ethics, written with sound ratioci- 
 nation and elegant perspicuity ; but in every 
 part of the Eastern world, from Pekin to 
 Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wis- 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 27 
 
 dom have immemorially been poets, and there 
 would be no end of enumerating their works, 
 which are still extant in the five principal 
 languages of Asia." 
 
 Neither, indeed, do we see how the poet can 
 trench on the method of the moral philosopher ; 
 for the instant he does this he is no longer a 
 poet. 
 
 But is Coleridge flatly against us ? " Now," 
 he says, continuing his remarks on Words- 
 worth, "till the blessed time shall come when 
 truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be 
 so united as to be distinguishable in words 
 only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's 
 office to proceed upon that state of association 
 which actually exists in general, instead of 
 attempting first to make it what it ought to be, 
 and then to let the pleasure follow." 
 
 All poetry gives pleasure, and the pleasure 
 rises in kind and degree with the kind and 
 degree of the poetry. We speak of the highest 
 poetry, therefore of the highest pleasure; and 
 
28 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 has not the time come when high poetic truth 
 and high pleasure are inseparable ? Keats says, 
 " Beauty is truth, truth is beauty " ; and what 
 other power is so potent for pleasure as beauty? 
 It was on the trinity of truth, beauty, and 
 pleasure that Keats built, and built lastingly. 
 The truth of science cannot give the pleasure 
 under consideration, neither can the truth of 
 philosophy, these being put as the scientist 
 and the philosopher put them ; but put as the 
 poet puts them, they must yield pleasure; 
 while the truth of the poet, as uttered by 
 him, must yield the highest pleasure, the 
 pleasure being twin-born with the truth. The 
 poet's truth and expression form a perfect 
 whole of beauty, and a whole of beauty '' is a 
 
 joy." 
 
 Again, Coleridge makes an admission which 
 we will set against his formal declaration 
 regarding truth and pleasure. He says : 
 " The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed, a very 
 large proportion of the whole book), is poetry 
 
1 THE OLD NOTIOK OF POETRY 20 
 
 in the most emphatic sense ; yet it would not 
 be less irrational than strange to assert that 
 pleasure, and not truth, was the immediate 
 object of the prophet." 
 
 Finally, we add Coleridge's lines to Words- 
 worth : — 
 
 *' Of Truth profound, a sweet, continuous lay, 
 Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes." 
 
 Coleridge, the poet, sees clearer than Cole- 
 ridge, the metaphysician. " Truth's own natu- 
 ral notes " — these indeed Wordsworth's are, 
 and they are, too, a " lay," " sweet," pleasur- 
 able. It was the high, poetic truth that was 
 first with the ancient Hebrew poet; and it 
 would seem that poets since have kept truth 
 first just in proportion as they have approached 
 the ancient Hebrew poet's power. For what 
 other reason so much as for this, do Dante, 
 Shakespeare and Milton hold their places of 
 lofty isolation? Yes, truth was first with 
 these, it was first with Wordsworth ; and all, 
 
80 THE GOLDEN GUESS I 
 
 evenly with their bequest of poetic truth, have 
 bequeathed the inevitable, the identical legacy 
 of pleasure, the possession of joy. 
 
 As poetry is something different from 
 science and philosophy, something more than 
 these, so we find it something more than his- 
 tory, more than any of the other arts. Cer- 
 vantes tells us why it is more than history: 
 " The poet may say or sing, not as things were, 
 but as they ought to have been." Here we 
 have a return of the ideal, the true beauty, the 
 far, perfect unity. Be the theme nature, it 
 must be the spirit of nature, the life within and 
 behind, penetrated to, trilled, drilled, to — seen, 
 by the eye of imagination, and found good; 
 be the theme man, it is man not in his way- 
 wardness, not in his weakness, his despair, but 
 man at his best, in his rightful strength, armed 
 with faith, clothed in joy, transfigured in the 
 undimmed lustre, the gracious radiance poured 
 from the central sun of truth and beauty. 
 Plato, likewise, is simply the voice of the old 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 31 
 
 notion when he says, "Poetry comes nearer 
 than history to the vital truth." 
 
 And how stands poetry among the arts? 
 As Fuller finely says, " The arts may be said 
 to be arched together." In this arch of beauty, 
 poetry has a longer curve than painting, than 
 sculpture, than any other of the arts, music 
 excepted. We can trust Lessing on the arch 
 of beauty : — 
 
 " If not every trait employed by the descrip- 
 tive poet can produce an equally good effect 
 on canvas, or in marble, can every trait of the 
 artist be equally effective in the work of the 
 poet ? Undoubtedly, for what pleases us in a 
 work of art pleases not the eye, but the imagi- 
 nation through the eye. The same pictures^ 
 whether presented to the imagination by arbi- 
 trary or natural signs, must always give us a 
 similar pleasure, though not always in the 
 same degree." 
 
 The reference here is to a single phase of 
 the poet's power, the picturing power. Even 
 
32 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 under this restriction we shall find that the 
 sweep of poetry is immeasurably greater than 
 that of either of the two great picturing arts, 
 painting and sculpture. The painter puts one 
 picture on his canvas, the poet presents a 
 succession of pictures. New visions are con- 
 tinuously opening, not to distract from the 
 central picture, but in sympathy with it, 
 linked with it, circle within circle, to enrich 
 it to whatsoever extent the imagination may 
 be able to receive. Landscape painting is 
 defined by Hamerton as a "mindful interpre- 
 tation of mind ; that is to say, an interpreta- 
 tion by human genius of the mind that created 
 the world." Sir Thomas Browne says, "Art 
 is the perfection of nature. ... In brief, all 
 things are artificial, for nature is the art of 
 God." The office of painting, then, is to re- 
 produce by one kind of the art of man the art 
 of God. To see how limited the painter's 
 art is, compared with the poet's, we have but 
 to turn from the best landscape painting to a 
 poet's reproduction of natural scenery : — 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 33 
 
 " The point of one white star is quivering still 
 Deep in the orange liglit of widening mom, 
 Beyond the purple mountains ; through a chasm 
 Of wind-divided mist the darker lake 
 Reflects it; now it wanes, it gleams again. 
 
 Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist, 
 
 Behold it, rolling on 
 Under the curdling winds, and islanding 
 The peak whereon we stand, midway, around 
 Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests. 
 Dim twilight lawns, and stream-illumined caves, 
 And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist ; 
 And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains 
 From icy spires of sunlike radiance fling 
 The dawn." 
 
 Again, turn from 'any marine painting to 
 four lines of Coleridge : — 
 
 " Still as a slave before his lord. 
 The ocean hath no blast ; 
 His great bright eye most silently 
 Up to the moon is cast." 
 
 Before leaving this part of our inquiry — 
 if the thoughts be not already too familiar — 
 let us repeat some of Cousin's sayings on 
 poetry as one of the fine arts. 
 
84 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 " Art," he says, " is the representation of tlie 
 ideal; this definition gives us a standard by 
 which to compare and classify the fine arts. 
 The first rank should be assigned to the one 
 which, of all others, has the most distinct and 
 intelligible expression, — that is poetry. Next 
 comes music, whose material means, though 
 less determined and distinct than language, 
 produce emotions more profound and vivid 
 than the colors of a painting or the lines of 
 a statue. Painting, sculpture, and architect- 
 ure are placed last, because their action, more 
 limited, has in view works more special and 
 confined than that of poetry, or of music, 
 and consequently at a greater distance from 
 the ideal." 
 
 Cousin has another saying in this connec- 
 tion : " A word, especially a word chosen and 
 transfigured by poetry, is the most energetic 
 and universal symbol." 
 
 Poetry comes first because it reaches nearest 
 the ideal, because, music excepted, it has by 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 35 
 
 far the longer curve of the arch of arts. We 
 have also support for our view of the poet's 
 speech: his words are "chosen and trans- 
 figured." 
 
 Still keeping on the lower level of natural 
 description, note the magic choice, the trans- 
 figuration of the common, simple words in 
 Blake's " Evening Star : " — 
 
 " Thou fair-haired angel of the evening, 
 Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light 
 Thy bright torch of love — thy radiant crown 
 Put on, and smile upon our evening bed! 
 Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest the 
 Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew 
 On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes 
 In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on 
 The lake ; speak, silence, with thy glimmering eyes, 
 And wash the dusk with silver." 
 
 We hear too much, be it repeated, concern- 
 ing originality in poetry ; we should hear more 
 of perception, of penetration, of right seeing, 
 of the faithful report. 
 
 Those holding the Mill emotional theory, the 
 Macaulay magic-lantern theory, the amuse- 
 
36 THE GOLDEN GUESS t 
 
 ment, the drawing-room theory, or any other 
 belittling theory, of poetry, cannot accept its 
 inevitableness, its accuracy ; but those that 
 look to poetry as a support, those that lean 
 upon it, that put their preservation in its safe- 
 keeping, must receive it as the nearest approach 
 to truth. Right seeing is but another word for 
 accuracy ; truth is but still another word for it. 
 Coleridge's master, the Rev. James Boyer, gave 
 him early in life a wholesome lesson on the 
 accuracy, the logic, of what is commonly 
 deemed the loose, wayward method of poetry. 
 
 " I learned from him," Coleridge says, " that 
 poetry, even that of the loftiest and seemingly 
 the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as 
 severe as that of science ; and more difficult, 
 because more subtle, more complex, and depen- 
 dent on more and more fugitive causes." 
 
 The brilliant, ill-starred Buckle says, "The 
 most accurate investigators of the human mind 
 have hitherto been the poets." 
 
 But the best sayings, the very best, compre- 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 37 
 
 hensive as they are, after all how fragmentary 
 in the attempt to exhaust, to fasten the elu- 
 sive, the limitless, the deathless power of 
 poetry ! As we choose one here and there 
 among the many that may be readily recalled, 
 we simply emphasize the futility of the en- 
 deavor. Horace may say, " If the poet be 
 silent, you will not receive a reward for your 
 deeds of glory. . . . The muse forbids the noble 
 to die " ; Bacon may say, " Poetry conferreth 
 to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation " ; 
 Milton may say, " These abilities " [the poet's] 
 " are the inspired gifts of God, rarely bestowed, 
 and are of power to imbreed and cherish in a 
 great people the seeds of virtue and public 
 civility ; to allay the perturbation of the mind, 
 and set the affections in right tune ; and to cel- 
 ebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne 
 and equipage of God's almightiness " ; Voltaire 
 may say, " Poetry is the music of the soul, and 
 above all, of great and feeling souls " ; Doctor 
 Johnson may say. The poet " must write as the 
 
88 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 interpreter of Nature and the legislator of man- 
 kind, and consider himself as presiding over 
 thoughts and manners of future generations, as 
 being superior to time and place " ; Goethe may- 
 say, " Who twines from unmeaning green leaves 
 a wreath for merits of all kinds ? Who insures 
 Olympus, associates gods? Man's lofty spirit 
 revealed in the bard " ; Schiller may say. It is 
 the privilege of poetry "to give to humanity 
 its fullest possible expression, its most complete 
 utterance " ; Hegel may say, " The proper busi- 
 ness of poetry seems to be a representation of 
 the eternal, the ever important and universally 
 beautiful " ; Wordsworth may say, " Poetry is 
 the breath and fine spirit of all knowledge, it 
 is the impassioned expression which is in the 
 countenance of all science " ; Coleridge may say, 
 " Poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all 
 human knowledge, human thoughts, human pas- 
 sions, emotion, language " ; Carlyle may say, 
 " The poet penetrates the sacred mystery of the 
 universe — what Goethe calls the ' open secret ' 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 39 
 
 — open to all, seen by almost none *' ; Emerson 
 may say, The poet is a " sovereign, and stands 
 on the centre. . . the poets are liberating gods " ; 
 Thoreau, pressing close to the breast of Nature, 
 may say, " It is only by a miracle that poetry is 
 written at all"; constellation to constellation, 
 the brightest stars of literature may hallow- 
 poetry with their united glory ; age to age 
 may pay honor to poetry, joy bringing her 
 choicest offerings, and sorrow worshipping 
 silently at its shrine ; — still shall we 
 find the reverence unexpressed, the homage 
 poor. 
 
 Finally, he is a poet that sees anything, the 
 smallest thing, sufficiently ; he is a great poet 
 that sees life sufficiently. Yet this is not all ; 
 for out of the seeing must gush the clear, the 
 flowing, the glowing and glorious utterance. 
 " Poetry requires," says Emerson, " that splen- 
 dor of expression which carries with it the 
 proof of great thoughts." And it must not be 
 forgotten that a still older word for the poet 
 
40 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 than the "maker" is the "singer." Nature 
 gays, "I make many half poets, few whole 
 poets ; the hearers are many, the voices few." 
 We are all partial poets, or the whole poets 
 would speak in vain ; their bright singing 
 would be dark riddles to us. In our too gra- 
 cious moods, or because of our ignorance or 
 our forgetfulness of what poetry is, we some- 
 times try to patch up partial poets into whole 
 poets, to make our poets Nature's poets; it is 
 an empty endeavor. Time, the dispassionate 
 handmaid of Nature, undoes our work : the 
 partial poets, the poets that " tell " but do not 
 "know," the poets that "know" but cannot 
 " tell," drop away. Only those that " know 
 and tell," only Nature's own, remain. It is 
 affirmed that, the thought poetically conceived, 
 the bright-harnessed angel-words wait in order 
 serviceable. This is true of the whole poets; 
 this it is that makes them whole. It is not 
 true of the partial poets ; this it is, in turn, 
 that makes them partial. 
 
I THE OLD NOTION OF POETRY 41 
 
 According to the old notion, poetry is exceed- 
 ingly difficult; and for the exercise of it, for 
 the summoning forth of the soul of all things, 
 the incarnation of the spirit, the ultimate good, 
 the ever beautiful, in a becoming body, are 
 required the highest faculties of the mind, and 
 the nicest balance of these faculties. In this 
 "whole burst of the mind" are united high 
 seriousness, which never wanders from vital 
 principles, which reveres and holds to the ideal, 
 the very real ; experience the deepest and rich- 
 est; sympathy, quick to respond to the true, 
 the good, the beautiful, and, as a part of this, 
 the meekness Jesus speaks of as the vantage 
 ground of the child; hope, steadfast and 
 triumphant, the trust that refuses any darker 
 saying than He saw that it was good ; enthu- 
 siasm, love, which suffuses with the colors of 
 youth the gray of age and wisdom, which is 
 the flame that plays above the glowing but 
 motionless embers of the intellect ; desire, cease- 
 less, insatiable ; severity, severity of tliought. 
 
42 THE GOLDEN GUESS i 
 
 and lastly, that all may not be lost, severity of 
 speech, the dual severity which admits no 
 flaw, which is perfection : — 
 
 " For 'tis the eternal law 
 That first in beauty should be first in might.'* 
 
n 
 
 WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS? 
 
 uirivERsiTrl 
 
II 
 
 WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS? 
 
 In the course of our inquiry into the old 
 notion of poetry, we found the poet less a 
 comely youth with hair hanging in clustered 
 curls, and large, wild-rolling eyes, than an old 
 man with massive head bowed low, his white 
 locks falling like mist to the ground, his eyes 
 closed. We found him a listener, a wor- 
 shipper, a reporter, an interpreter, the mouth- 
 piece of the Voice. We found his message, 
 poetry, an immense power, the supreme phe- 
 nomenon of the human mind ; we found it 
 difficult and, of necessity, rare. When we say 
 great poets, we have in mind, perhaps, not 
 more than eight. Homer, ^schylus, Sopho- 
 cles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, 
 Milton — these, at least, the world pronounces 
 
 45 
 
46 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 great poets; and it is of these in particular 
 that Arnold speaks when he says that we are 
 to look to poetry for our solace and stay. 
 
 But are these the greatest poets? Are 
 these distinguished by the highest "serious- 
 iess," by the most "powerful and beautiful 
 application of ideas to life " ? Is it to these 
 that we should turn first for consolation and 
 strength, for inspiration, for glints of the 
 highest joy? 
 
 If we agree with Arnold concerning the 
 importance of letters, and the importance of 
 poetry as the best part of letters ; if we fur- 
 ther agree with him when he says, " To under- 
 stand that the language of the Bible is fluid, 
 passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed, and sci- 
 entific, is the first step toward a right under- 
 standing of the Bible " ; still concurring when 
 he says, "And as long as the world lasts, all 
 who want to make progress in righteousness 
 will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the 
 people who have the sense for righteousness 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS? 47 
 
 most glowing and strongest " ; — righteousness 
 being right-living, and the office of the highest 
 poetry being to instruct us in this, according 
 to the laws of poetic beauty and truth, — can 
 we finally agree with Arnold, can we indeed 
 find him consistent, when he rests upon the 
 great eight? The judgment indirectly passed 
 in his words, " As well imagine a man with a 
 sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help 
 of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a 
 sense for conduct not cultivating it by the 
 help of the Bible," — is this the logical con- 
 clusion of his splendid stretch of testimony? 
 If the first step toward a right understanding 
 of the Bible is to find it literature, is not the 
 second step to find that the best of biblical 
 literature is its poetry ? 
 
 Great minds, in the presence of the inscru- 
 table, opening on the noblest themes, are 
 imbued with imagination and emotion; they 
 rise to poetry, the " music of thought con- 
 veyed to us in the music of language." Prose 
 
48 THE GOLDEN GUESS n 
 
 does not serve at those supreme moments 
 when the intellect is pressed to its utmost, 
 when the very feelings rise to thought and 
 the spirit itself may be said to think. The 
 whole being rocks with the rhythm, to the 
 measure, of life, — life which certain philoso- 
 phers have admirably styled, " moving music." 
 Confucius, tottering about the house, face to 
 face with death, adopts the subtile, all-pervad- 
 ing cadence of poetry, audible in the sea and 
 winds, inaudible but ever present, as Pytha- 
 goras feigned — or said most truly — in the 
 singing realms of space : — 
 
 " The great mountain is broken, 
 The strong beam is thrown down, 
 The wise man has decayed." 
 
 The ancient Hebrew's appeal from the seen 
 to the Unseen, from the low to the Most High, 
 could not be made without eloquence; in its 
 most impassioned, its surest, its highest form, 
 it could not be made save in the golden 
 cadence of song. Here belongs a saying of 
 Hegel : — 
 
II WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 49 
 
 "This superiority, this impressiveness of 
 the Infinite, the immeasurable distance which 
 separates it from the finite — this is what the 
 art of the sublime should express. It is the 
 religious art, the sacred art par excellence; its 
 sole destination is to celebrate the glory of 
 God. This office alone poetry can fulfil." 
 
 ..." For to the glory of God and the sing- 
 ing of his glories, no man dares deny, man 
 was chiefly made," says old George Chapman ; 
 " and what art performs this chief end of man 
 with so much excitation and expression as 
 poesy, — Moses, David, Solomon, Job, Esay, 
 Jeremy, chiefly using that to the end above 
 said?" 
 
 It were hard to say where we may find the 
 most exalted exhibition of the right seeing of 
 life, if not in that half of the Old Testament 
 where the great round, bright words roll au- 
 gustly through the highest heavens of imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 In the sayings just quoted, we again find 
 
50 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 poetry and religion one, again find poetry rest- 
 ing on God. Poetry rests on God ; there the 
 ancient Hebrews rested as no other people 
 have. Poetry reposes on eternal life; there 
 the Hebrews reposed as no other people have ; 
 and in their seeing of life we have a right to 
 expect the highest poetry. We have a right 
 to expect this. Are we disappointed? Ar- 
 nold says : " If we are said to underrate, for 
 instance, the production of Corneille and 
 Racine in poetry, we may compare this pro- 
 duction in power, in penetrativeness, in criti- 
 cism of life, in ability to call forth our energy 
 and joy, with the production of Homer and 
 Shakespeare." May we not so say of Homer 
 and Shakespeare, in comparison with Isaiah and 
 the author of Job? Again, speaking of the 
 student of poetry, Arnold says : — 
 
 " As he penetrates into the spirit of the 
 great classical works, as he becomes gradually 
 aware of their intense significance, their noble 
 simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will be 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 51 
 
 convinced that it is this effect, unity and 
 profoundness of moral impression, at which 
 the ancient poets aimed; that it is this which 
 constitutes the grandeur of their works, and 
 which makes them immortal." 
 
 May we not say that all this, applicable 
 enough to the poets of Greece, to which it 
 mainly refers, is still more applicable to the 
 poets of the ancient Hebrews ? Why, then, 
 was Arnold wont to rest upon the poetry of 
 Greece ? Surely not because the substance of 
 the Greek poetry is to be put before the sub- 
 stance of the Hebrew poetry. If not the 
 substance, then it is the form that deterred 
 him from following his own theories to what 
 would seem to be their legitimate result. 
 Were the forms of the Hebrew poetry less 
 inevitably the result of the Hebrew substance, 
 we should still claim that the greater value of 
 the Hebrew substance would more than com- 
 pensate for the loss in form ; but is there a 
 loss in form? 
 
52 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 Let us first make sure that it was the intent 
 of the Hebrew poet to write poetry. Fried- 
 rich Bleek, in his "Introduction to the Old 
 Testament," says : — 
 
 "The distinction between the poetical and 
 prose stj^e of composition is the one that 
 can be perceived the most decidedly and cer- 
 tainly. The poetic style of the Hebrews is 
 not distinguished from the prose by any pre- 
 scribed metre, but by a certain rhythmical 
 measurement and division of the periods and 
 separate sentences, and also by many linguistic 
 peculiarities, the form of words, grammatical 
 constructions and inflections, which are not 
 used in the prose." Again, he says, "This 
 distinction between prose composition and that 
 which is allowable in poetry, prevails in all 
 languages ; but in no other language whatever 
 do we find the expressions which are unusual 
 in prose, and allowable solely in poetical com- 
 position, stamped so distinctly as they are in 
 Hebrew." 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 53 
 
 So it was by direct intention that the He- 
 brew poet wrote as a poet. Now as to the 
 forms he used: "But in the poetry of the 
 Hebrew, besides this aphoristic biblical form, 
 there is another peculiar law of living, breath- 
 ing thought and rhythmical motion, not in- 
 deed of words and syllables, but of images 
 and feelings, undulating in free symmetry like 
 the waves of the sea." 
 
 Schlegel's idea of the rhythm of thought 
 is both beautiful and true ; but though we 
 can know nothing of the quantity that entered 
 into the construction of Hebrew verse, are we 
 not warranted in inferring that, in addition 
 to the rhythm of thought, or of "senti- 
 ment," as another terms it, it had a rhythmi- 
 cal motion of words and syllables? The 
 ancient Hebrew poetry was not in Greek verse, 
 but can we say that it " was not in verse " ? 
 Mr. Theodore Watts speaks singularly well 
 on the point of rhythm : " Perhaps it may be 
 said that deeper than all the rhythms of art 
 
54 THE GOLDEN GUESS 
 
 II 
 
 is that rhythm which art would fain catch, 
 the rhythm of nature; for the rhythm of 
 nature is the rhythm of life itself. This 
 rhythm can be caught by prose as well as 
 by poetry, such prose, for instance, as that 
 of the English Bible. Certainly the rhythm 
 of verse at its highest, such, for instance, as 
 that of Shakespeare's greatest writings, is noth- 
 ing more and nothing less than the metre of 
 that energy of the spirit which surges within 
 the bosom of him who speaks, whether he 
 speak in verse or impassioned prose. Being 
 rhythm, it is of course governed by law, but 
 it is a law which transcends in subtlety 
 the conscious art of the metricist, and is only 
 caught by the poet in his most inspired 
 moods; a law which, being part of nature's 
 own sanctions, can of course never be formu- 
 lated, but only expressed as it is expressed 
 in the melody of the bird, in the inscrut- 
 able harmony of the entire bird-chorus of 
 a thicket, in the whisper of the leaves of 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 55 
 
 the tree, and the song or wail of wind and 
 sea." 
 
 In this admirable passage the ancient He- 
 brew poet, though read in translation, is paired 
 with our great dramatist : both have a " rhythm 
 deeper than all the rhythms of art." Had 
 Arnold meant this when he said the Hebrews 
 were without art, we should find, as we can- 
 not now, the last link in his chain of per- 
 ceptions and reasonings of the pure metal of 
 those that lead to it. One may say, if one 
 choose, that the Hebrew poets had something 
 higher than art ; we are content to say that 
 they had art, — art as adequate for the expres- 
 sion of their poetry as the art of the Greeks for 
 the expression of theirs. We say further that, 
 their subject-matter being incomparably higher, 
 their seeing of life wider and deeper by far, 
 than that of the Greek poets, their art was 
 correspondingly higher ; it was the virgin gold 
 worked into shapes beyond the cunning of even 
 the Grecian hand, the inevitable shapes of the 
 
56 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 high, hidden might of the elemental powers. 
 We say that their thoughts have a beautiful, 
 sympathetic body, in which they live and will 
 ever live. " L'art est une forme " ; such is 
 the form of the greatest art. 
 
 The theme of Homer is the "Anger of 
 Achilles." Around this revolves all his mas- 
 terly array of human action in a world practi- 
 cally without the pale of the one of all the 
 powers indispensable to the great critic of life — 
 moral law. It is not till after Homer's day that 
 we arrive at this law ; and how weak, how dim 
 and wavering, it is even in Euripides, compared 
 with the Hebrew poet ! " Poetic beauty and 
 poetic truth " Homer most assuredly has ; but 
 we cannot look to him for the most powerful 
 and beautiful criticism of life. Homer's theme 
 is the "Anger of Achilles," the Hebrew poet's 
 theme is, — 
 
 " The Eternal loveth the thing that is right." 
 
 It is true indeed that righteousness came into 
 Greek poetry ; it is equally true that it went 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 57 
 
 out again. It is equally true, also, that it 
 came into Hebrew poetry and stayed in it. 
 The Hebrew lyre was tuned to righteousness 
 from first to last. In the serious days of 
 northern Greece, in the great successors of 
 Homer, are to be found high criticisms of life, 
 but none comparable with the criticisms of 
 those who invariably give as a reason for 
 being of their song, — 
 
 " His word was in my tongue." 
 Great poetry, as we have said, rests on God, 
 and the great poetry is to be looked for on the 
 old ground, on Arnold's ground, among the 
 Hebrew poets ; they, and they alone, were, as 
 Fox says of Tyndale, " practised in God's mat- 
 ters." The Hebrew poet's higher, wider out- 
 look on life is evidenced by his God. The 
 Greek poet had gods that he could adequately 
 express ; of the Hebrew poet's God no words 
 could give the faintest outline. The expres- 
 sions of the worshippers of Zeus and of 
 Jehovah must differ; but to say that one has 
 
58 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 all the art, not only denies the cardinal prin- 
 ciple that noble conception has for its hand- 
 maid noble expression, but reduces form to 
 an inflexible, fixed thing. Form is pliant, it 
 follows the life. Nature has infinite forces of 
 life and infinite forms ; and it would seem that 
 in proportion as poets — not to consider other 
 artists — near the marvellous variety of nature, 
 the more do they vary from a fixed form of 
 expression. The Hebrew poets and Shake- 
 speare employ varieties of expression that, with 
 the Greek poetry as a standard, appear decid- 
 edly irregular ; but let us beware lest deceived 
 by a surface irregularity, we fail to see beneath 
 a deeper, a more subtile regularity, an order 
 closer to the order of the "art of God." 
 
 Whitman has a noteworthy saying in this 
 connection. " Poetic style," he says, " when 
 addressed to the soul is less definite form, out- 
 line, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half- 
 tints, and even less than half-tints." 
 
 These words are spoken in defence of a 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 59 
 
 certain obscurity; but if we stop with the 
 word " music," they are of equal or greater 
 value as a defence of the freedom of structure 
 characterizing the ancient Hebrew poetry. Let 
 us not forget that poetry is one thing and 
 sculpture another. Let us not be too sure that 
 the art of the Hebrew poets and of Shake- 
 speare is inferior to the art of the Greek poets ; 
 that beneath the apparent disobedience to rule 
 is not a deeper obedience, which deeper obedi- 
 ence springs of a lower, a harder, hold on life. 
 We think it indisputable that the Hebrew poets 
 had a firmer hold on life than the Greek poets 
 had ; hence that it is to the Hebrew poets that 
 we are to turn first for solace, for support, for 
 " self-preservation " 
 
 "Against the wreckful siege of battering days." 
 
 While by no means denying that in the 
 poetry of the Old Testament, as in other great 
 poetry, there is much that is not poetry, we 
 affirm that the under-current of great song is 
 
60 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 there, unfailing, and stronger than it is else- 
 where to be found. 
 
 From one point of view we do the Greek 
 poets injustice by comparing them with the 
 Hebrew poets through the medium of transla- 
 tion; for not only does the Hebrew expres- 
 sion lend itself more readily to translation, but 
 rarely may we meet with such prodigies of 
 reproduction as the chief translators of 
 the English Bible. An eminent critic says 
 of Tyndale, "He felt, by a happy instinct, 
 the potential affinity between Hebrew and 
 English idioms." This observation, besides 
 honoring Tyndale's genius, points to one of the 
 sources of the Hebrew poet's advantage over 
 the Greek poet when read in our own lan- 
 guage. From another point of view, the use of 
 translations is just ; for it discloses a most im- 
 portant fact, viz., that, allowance being made 
 for inferior translation, the ancient Hebrew 
 poetry is the only pure poetry, the only poetry 
 that is poetry through and through, the only 
 
II WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 61 
 
 poetry that holds its virtue against the sapping 
 accents of a stranger-tongue. This fact of 
 itself would seem to be sufficient to warrant 
 the statement that the highest poetry is to be 
 found, not in the adorable Homer, magnificent 
 witness that he was to the truths of nature and 
 of man, but in the Book of Job; that the 
 Hebrew muse 
 
 " Filled Isaiah's breast with more than Pindar's fire." 
 
 While admitting the gain of the Hebrew 
 poets over the Greek in translation, it is but 
 right to note one of the many serious disad- 
 vantages to the Hebrew poets, that of a 
 wretchedly scrappy arrangement. Probably it 
 would be difficult to exaggerate the havoc that 
 has been made in the continuity of the original 
 Hebrew. We have fragments of the sacred 
 song of the Hebrews, mutilated and patched as 
 it has survived the not very tender mercy of 
 centuries ; while of their secular song barely 
 enough remains to suggest what it was. 
 
62 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 " For an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to 
 the children of men." 
 
 Arnold, in his earnest, lucid and beautiful 
 manner, has testified to the excellence of this 
 Homeric expression. But for substance, for 
 form, for any of the attributes of poetry, 
 wherein is it to be put before 
 
 'Tor he 
 That feareth God shall come forth of them all," 
 or before 
 
 " Great peace have they which love thy law," 
 or before 
 
 " Be still, and know that I am God" ? 
 
 And where in iEschylus or in Sophocles, in 
 Dante or in Milton, shall we find an equal 
 number of lines the perfect form of which does 
 not shrink and shrivel in the presence of that 
 most august song that has ever fallen from the 
 lips of man, the 90th Psalm ? Recall the clos- 
 ing words, the words of all words for the sup- 
 plication of the sovereign poet : — 
 
 "Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 63 
 
 And where, forsooth, may we look in the 
 
 classics for solace, for defence against the 
 
 wreckful siege, such as is to be found in the 
 23d Psalm? 
 
 " He leadeth me beside the still waters, 
 He restoreth my soul." 
 
 We look in vain among the Greek poets for 
 this reach. And if we seek a God, where 
 shall we find another like the Unutterable One 
 grasped at with the last stretch of sublimity in 
 Job XXVI: 5-11? And where but in poets 
 with such a God shall we find a criticism of 
 life in any way comparable to this ? 
 
 " Man that is born of woman is of few days, 
 And full of trouble. 
 He Cometh forth like a flower, 
 And is cut down; 
 He fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not. 
 
 And surely the mountain falling cometh to naught, 
 
 And the rock is removed out of his place. 
 
 The waters wear the stones : 
 
 Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust 
 
 of the earth ; 
 And thou destroyest the hope of man. 
 Thou prevailest forever against him and he passeth: 
 Thou changest his countenance and sendest him away.'* 
 
64 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 No volumes in our knowledge give so nearly 
 complete a history of man as is written here. 
 All, all is compassed in the last eight words ; 
 words, to use the expression of Job, which do 
 indeed break us in pieces. But hark ! again the 
 old sweet words return, the words glowing for- 
 ever in the Hebrew poet's soul, burning on 
 steadfastly, brightly, behind the darkness : — 
 
 " Why art thou cast down, O my Soul ? 
 And why art thou disquieted within me ? 
 Hope thou in God.'* 
 
 The Hebrew poet's soul breathes a hope 
 which to the Greek poet was impossible : — 
 
 " My flesh also shall rest in hope, 
 
 Yet in my flesh shall I see God." 
 
 " The best that has been thought and said in 
 the world" has for its basis unshaken faith, 
 glorious hope ; and we have a larger utterance 
 of this than " the large utterance of the early 
 gods." In short, the Hebrew poet stands for 
 conduct not only, but for high right-seeing, for 
 
n WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 65 
 
 the nearest perfect expression of the mother- 
 life, the mother-music, in which we move. 
 
 " For though the giant ages heave the hill, 
 And break the shore, and everraore 
 Make and break and work their will ; 
 Though woild on world in myriad myriads roll, 
 Round us, each with different powers 
 And other forms of life than ours, 
 What know we greater than the soul ? 
 On God and god-like men we build our trust." 
 
 Only this trust, held in the measure that the 
 Hebrew poet held it, can help us to discern the 
 " hieroglyphic meanings of human suffering," 
 can lead us in the way of patience, can inspire 
 us, despite perplexity and sorrow and darkness, 
 with the light, the certainty, the joy, which the 
 poet finds the right to say shall be. 
 
 The recognized tendency of the poet to open 
 the heart of the things we say we know, and to 
 display them in the mother-light of beauty, 
 leads to a final reach toward what we say we do 
 not know, but hope for — the things that high- 
 est intuitions and widest experience say should 
 be ; and this last reach, this golden guess, is 
 
66 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 poetry's consummation. Poetry, in the exercise 
 of its highest function, takes up this world, this 
 life, where it breaks, crumbles under us ; takes 
 it up, and rounds all once more into symmetry, 
 pressing on unsatisfied to voice the spirit's 
 prophecy of the perfecting world, the perfect- 
 ing life, beyond. The ancient Hebrew poets ad- 
 dressed themselves to this ultimate revelation ; 
 and it is by their success here that they stand 
 apart from all other poets of whatever time or 
 race, the glory and the wonder of the world. 
 
 After the addition of Roman stoicism, yes, 
 after the incomparably greater addition of 
 Christianity, we can still learn from the Greek 
 poets, can still profit by study of them. We of 
 to-day can get a great deal from the song of old 
 Greece, but not this last revelation. The stamp 
 of manliness, the rigorous will, the blissful 
 indifference, the pleasant taking of what comes, 
 the patient questioning of nature, and the faith 
 in it, the blessing of health, the beauty of 
 beauties — the beauty of youth, openness, 
 
11 WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 67 
 
 clearness, freedom of mind, the best methods 
 of intelligence, — for all of these (and our need 
 of them is sore) we can go back and sit with 
 attentive Athens in the temple of Bacchus. 
 But when the lustre of youth and beauty grows 
 dim in our souls, as it grew dim in the soul of 
 Greece and departed from it; when the dark 
 problems lower, when the gray mist, gathered 
 of the ages, drifts in ; when the viewless bur- 
 den is fully on our shoulders, and we cannot 
 stand, — then we must turn, not to the poets 
 that avoided with so amazing grace the dark- 
 ness, the drift, and the weight, but to the poets 
 that met these face to face, met them, bore up 
 under them, conquered, leaving to the world 
 the imperishable heritage of hope. 
 
 While it is evident that the first aim of the 
 Hebrew poet is not the artist's aim, it seems 
 equally plain that no other poet has more faith- 
 fully obeyed the great underlying laws of 
 poetic construction. He may weave the finest 
 net-work of artificiality, as in that standing mar- 
 
68 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 vel of composition for all ages, the Book of 
 Job ; he may give a brilliant exhibition of met- 
 rical technics, as in Lamentations and in Psalm 
 119 ; but it is in the use, the choice, of words 
 — and there is the vital place — that we find 
 him without a peer. If we may credit Profes- 
 sor W. Robertson Smith, the very structure of 
 his language forced the Hebrew into poetry : — 
 
 ..." The key to the whole development of 
 the poetical literature of Israel is found in 
 the same psychological characteristics of the 
 race which are impressed on the vocabulary 
 and grammatical structure of the language. 
 The Hebrew tongue is sensuous, mobile, 
 passionate." 
 
 Here we have in the language itself the 
 essentials of poetry as set down by Milton. 
 The Hebrew poet's very language, preventing 
 him from metaphysics, made and kept him a 
 poet. Professor Smith goes on ; — 
 
 "Unfit for abstract speculation, valuing no 
 wisdom that is not practical, and treasuring up 
 
II WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 69 
 
 such wisdom in sententious rhythmical form, 
 enforced by symbol and metaphor, and warm 
 with the breath of human interest, — the 
 Hebrew is a poet, even in his philosophy." 
 
 If individual poets are born, why not nations 
 of poets ? A race of .poets — so we may name 
 the old Hebrews. 
 
 Professor Smith has described the genius of 
 the Hebrew tongue ; now let Dr. Curtius per- 
 form a like office for the Greek tongue. 
 
 " Far above all its sister tongues," says Dr. 
 Curtius, "the Greek must be regarded as a 
 work of art, on account of the sense prevalent 
 in it for symmetry and perfection of sounds, for 
 transparency of form, for law and organization. 
 . . . The Hellenes must have received the 
 material of language while it was yet a plastic 
 form; otherwise, they could never have suc- 
 ceeded in expressing, by means of it, as in the 
 most ductile clay, the whole variety of their 
 spiritual gifts, their artistic sense of form, as 
 well as that severity of abstract thought which^ 
 
70 THE GOLDEN GUESS ii 
 
 long before it manifested itself in the hooks of 
 their philosophers^ was already apparent in the 
 grammar of their language,'''^ 
 
 The lines italicized are rich in significance. 
 The philosopher, both in substance and method, 
 lies in embryo by the side of the poet in the 
 grammar of the Greek language; while the 
 Hebrew grammar gives no sign of any other 
 than the poet. The Hebrew had but to speak 
 to be a poet : — 
 
 " Mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me." 
 " The waters are hid as with a stone." 
 " The moon walking in brightness." 
 
 " Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds ? " 
 
 The poets of Greece reflect nature beauti- 
 fully, but if we are to see the very expression 
 of her countenance, if we are to feel her warm 
 breath, the throbbing of her heart, we must 
 turn to the poets of Palestine. 
 
11 WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 71 
 
 *' As when about the silver moon, when air is free from wind, 
 And stars shine clear to whose sweet beams, high prospects, 
 
 and the brows 
 Of all steep hills and pinnacles, thrust up themselves for 
 
 shows, 
 And even the lovely valleys joy to glitter in their sight. 
 When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her 
 
 light, 
 And all the sights in heaven seen that glad the shepherd's 
 
 heart," etc. 
 
 These lines of Homer have been greatly 
 admired, and it would be strange indeed had 
 they not been ; but the intense sympathy with 
 nature, the brooding pathos, is left for the hand 
 that wrote, — 
 
 " He quieteth the earth by the south wind." 
 
 When the Hebrew poet makes use of nature, 
 it is the gentle voice of the mother herself : — 
 
 " Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock 
 bring forth ? 
 Or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve ? 
 Canst thou number the months that they fulfil ? 
 Or knowest thou the time when they bring forth ? 
 They bow themselves, they bring forth their young ones, 
 They cast out their sorrows.'* 
 
 Hegel may call Homer the "Master-poet of 
 
72 THE GOLDEN GUESS u 
 
 living Nature," but after reading these lines, 
 one must say that if Hegel speak truly. Nature, 
 through the sons of another than the Greek 
 race, hushed the human voice, and spoke with 
 her own. 
 
 If we pass from tenderness and pathos to the 
 mutterings of the thunder that interrupted 
 Elihu; if we pass through the terrible storm 
 that rages still on the sacred page as it did in 
 the ears of Job and his counsellors ; if we pass 
 to the voice of the God of the thunder, we are 
 ushered into the presence of sublimity of con- 
 ception and expression reached only by the 
 people that, whatever their short-comings may 
 be, have a right, because of their unapproachable 
 poetry, to the name of the People of God. 
 
 Fronde's words concerning the book of Job 
 have the right ring : — 
 
 ..." A book of which it is to say little to 
 call it unequalled of its kind, and which will 
 one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand 
 on its own merits, be seen towering up 
 
II WHO ARE THE GREAT POETS ? 73 
 
 alone, far away above all the poetry of the 
 world." 
 
 The question is not, Did the author of Job 
 follow the rules of the epic as laid down by 
 Aristotle ? The question is not, Does Bishop 
 Cox speak accurately when he says, " Hebrew 
 poetry consists of every possible species of 
 poetical composition, and these are all carried 
 to the loftiest pitch of excellence ? " The ques- 
 tion is, If the Hebrew poets did not have what 
 Arnold would have us understand by "the 
 inexplicable form and texture that is eternal," 
 did they not really have it? The question is. 
 Whatever they had not, did they not have 
 before all other poets, the ability to criticise 
 life, to criticise it according to the laws of 
 poetic beauty and poetic truth ; did they not 
 have the strength, the splendid strength upon 
 which the world has leaned, now leans, and will 
 continue to lean, hardest for its support and 
 stay? 
 
 Arnold could find in Wordsworth a substi- 
 
74 THE GOLDEN GUESS ll 
 
 tute for style : " inevitableness," " expression 
 of the most truly expressive kind." We can- 
 not account for his failure to find this, if not 
 style, in the poetry of the ancient Hebrews. 
 We cannot find him consistent with himself in 
 turning first and last to the classics. Tyndale, 
 speaking of his early days at Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, says, "In the universities they -have 
 ordained that no man shall look at the Scrip- 
 tures until he be noselled [nursed] in heathen 
 learning eight or nine years." In the matter of 
 poetry are we not being noselled too long ? 
 
Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
m 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 *' * * * virtues like these 
 Make human nature shine, reform the soul, 
 And break our fierce barbarians into men." 
 
 Cato i. 4 : Addisok. 
 
 Could Matthew Arnold rise from his still 
 place and be induced to read the reviews of his 
 work published since he passed from sight, he 
 would find one declaring him primarily a poet, 
 another, essentially a critic. He would learn y^ 
 that, as a critic, he is to be trusted, now, for his 
 knowledge and insight, again, to be read princi- 
 pally for the personal flavor which makes appe- 
 tizing biased, not to say eccentric, judgments ; 
 he would discover that the sharp contradictions 
 concerning him cease only in the agreement 
 that his voice, whether with cadence of verse or 
 of prose, is the voice of doubt. Since Arnold 
 
 77 
 
78 THE GOLDEN GUESS m 
 
 was incapable of ambiguous expression, the 
 responsibility for this difference of opinion is 
 fixed upon his readers ; unless, indeed, his writ- 
 ings be, like those of the reviewers, a mass of 
 self-contradiction. As to self-contradiction, it 
 will hardly be denied that generally Arnold 
 was only less consistent than clear; hence the 
 clashing of the reviewers must be attributed 
 to lack of serious intent, of close, respectful 
 attention, of fulness of thought, of sobriety of 
 temper, of mellowness of judgment, — to the 
 absence of qualities that this lost leader along 
 the upper paths was wont to include in the 
 now so familiar word, culture. 
 
 Arnold declared his purpose to be a " disin- 
 terested endeavor to learn and propagate the 
 best that is known and thought in the world." 
 This is to take a high stand, and an inquiry 
 into his achievements should be conducted with 
 high-mindedness. The aim should be to get at 
 the heart of his life-labor, to lay hold on the 
 best of it; passing belittling questions as to 
 
m MATTHEW ARNOLD 79 
 
 whether he, at times, walked among us with an 
 iron spine, or occasionally paused to put his 
 finger on some minor blemish, and, by over- 
 nicety, magnify it to a plague spot. Three of 
 Arnold's round dozen volumes are poetry. The 
 relative bulk of these two kinds of writing is 
 noteworthy ; for where one's gift is, there, as a 
 rule, will it be exercised. Four times as many 
 volumes of prose as of verse indicates that the 
 writer's thought rides easiest in the vehicle of 
 prose. Indeed, Arnold has stated that he be- 
 lieved his essays to be his most important work, 
 especially the essays devoted to religion. It is 
 difficult to form a contrary opinion unless upon 
 the ground bSore stated, — the failure to bring 
 to an examination oi his writings a right mind 
 and temper. yS 
 
 It is said that, bofcausi Arnold began writing 
 in verse, verse is/ his nSiural voice. Verse is 
 the first voi^ of us all, of nations as well as of 
 individuals ; for it is the voice of youth. It is 
 the lumen purpureum juventae, glowing on into 
 
80 THE GOLDEN GUESS m 
 
 age, that tunes gray years to the measure of 
 song. The young writer of emphatically a 
 poetic temperament begins as a singer ; and it is 
 the test of time that shows him and the world 
 whether he is a poet, or merely a person poeti- 
 cally disposed. But if Arnold was not pri- 
 marily a poet, his bent toward poetry was so 
 strong, and his capacity for culture so rare, that, 
 all but in the face of elemental law, he climbed 
 to an enviable height the very Helicon. He 
 did not storm the outer gates of song, but by 
 most subtile ingenuity arrayed himself in the 
 shining robe of the elect, deceived them, and 
 passed quietly in as one of themselves. He 
 knew what poetry is, his faculties were obedi- 
 ent, his sympathies irresistible; art mothered 
 him after the wont of nature, that he might 
 match himself against the born son of the 
 muse. Insight, appreciation, patience — these 
 are the qualities that stamp the born critic ; and 
 so intrinsically was Arnold a critic, that he 
 seized not only the livery but the secret of the 
 
ra MATTHEW ARNOLD 81 
 
 creators, and advanced himself far along their 
 own lines. His was an unchallenged entry into 
 the outer gates of song ; it was only within the 
 golden circle of the lyrists that he could not 
 come. There is a limit to the victory of cul- 
 ture; much of Arnold's poetry is but thrice- 
 refined criticism, trebly refined pessimistic 
 criticism; and the portion of it that is pure 
 poetry is not song. The born critic could not 
 learn the born poet's lay ; but he could rise to 
 noble verse, indeed to as noble verse of the kind 
 as we have in the language. Stedman has 
 pointed to the fact that Arnold " almost falsified 
 the adage that a poet is born " ; the point here 
 made is, that valuable as " Sorab and Rustum," 
 " Thyrsis," and the " Scholar-Gypsy " are as x. 
 poetry, they are of still greater value as testi- 
 mony to the exceedingly rare gifts that made 
 the author the first critic of our time ; the first 
 critic, not literary nor religious nor social critic 
 merely, but the first critic foursquare, — fitted 
 to see the complex mystery called life as nearly 
 as it is as lies to-day in man's ability. 
 
82 THE GOLDEN GUESS in 
 
 Arnold's poems inspired by the Greek spirit 
 are drawn fresh from the font ; and if he is less 
 successful in the region of romance, ample 
 amends are made when we find that he has but 
 two peers among us in narrative verse. All his 
 metrical writing is welcomed by the cultured 
 mind, and more stress would now be put on his 
 bequest of verse were it not that, good and val- 
 uable as it is, his prose is of still greater worth. 
 Didacticism and pessimism constitute the main 
 objection to the body of his poetry, — too naked 
 4^aching, too free use of the " fearful gift," 
 the "glance of melancholy," too much malady 
 and too little melody, too little ease and spon- 
 taneity, too little of the bubbling music of joy 
 which the masters have taught us to demand. 
 Yes, there is too much of the tutor, of the " im- 
 medicable soul," and too little of the happy 
 pipe-player ; finally, too much of Etna and else- 
 where, and too little home matter; but the 
 gentle, self-centred spirit is ever present, and, 
 as a rule, the cunning of art. Philosophy 
 
m MATTHEW ARNOLD 88 
 
 proper, plodding philosophy, and poesy get 
 along together no better than youth and age ; 
 still, it would be an ungrateful world that could 
 feel no sense of indebtedness for such lines as 
 the following from a poem once withdrawn, 
 afterward put forth with misgivings : — 
 
 " Is it so small a thing 
 
 To have enjoyed the sun, 
 To have lived light in the spring, 
 
 To have loved, to have thought, to have done ; 
 To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling 
 foes? 
 
 I say: Fear not! Life still 
 
 Leaves human effort scope. 
 But, since life teems with ill. 
 
 Nurse no extravagant hope ; 
 Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then 
 despair." 
 
 But if Arnold does not greatly impress us as 
 a poet, the moment we meet him as a critic we 
 are in the presence of a master. Let not the 
 delicacy of touch deceive us as to the thorough- 
 ness of the work, fatal to confusion of the true 
 and the false as is the whirlwind of right- 
 
84 THE GOLDEN GUESS m 
 
 eous wrath. The preface to "Literature and 
 9\ Dogma " and that to Wordsworth's poems — 
 these two short essays of themselves proclaim 
 Arnold the keenest, the wisest critic so far 
 adorning English literature. The corner-stone 
 of his critical building is culture, the definition 
 of which — made with special reference to 
 Biblical criticism, but serving equally well else- 
 where — is " the acquainting ourselves with the 
 best that has been known and said in the 
 world, and thus with the history of the human 
 spirit; which turns out to be, in another shape, 
 and, in particular relation to the Bible, — get- 
 ting the power, through reading, to estimate 
 the proportion and relation in what we read." 
 "If we read but a very little," he continues, 
 " we naturally want to press it all ; if we read a 
 great deal, we are willing not to press the whole 
 of what we read, and we learn what ought 
 to be pressed and what not. Now this is really 
 the very foundation of any sane criticism." 
 Nor yet is this severe preparation sufficient ; 
 
m MATTHEW ARNOLD 86 
 
 there remains the gift unattainable, and so 
 rarely inborn, without which erudition, con- 
 science, patience, must fall short : — 
 
 "After we have acquainted ourselves with 
 the best that has been known in the world, 
 after we have got all the facts of our special 
 study, fineness and delicacy of perception to 
 deal with the facts is still required, and is, 
 even, the principal thing of all." 
 
 For one that shot his beams over the broad 
 
 field of life, it was easy to cover the centre of 
 
 the field, the flower-patch of literature, with 
 
 a flood of white light. Whether he considers 
 
 the Rev. Mr. Brooke's "Primer," or Macaulay's 
 
 estimate of Milton, or rises to the majestic 
 
 heights of Milton himself, the qualifications 
 
 that he has declared indispensable to his office 
 
 are manifest, and are employed with the same 
 
 care, the same temperate effectiveness. The 
 
 four cardinal virtues of a primer of English 
 
 literature are declared to be " clearness, brevity, 
 
 proportion, sobriety." ^^(f^»g^tL^^P3.rent 
 
 Of TH» 
 
86 THE GOLDEN GUESS in 
 
 enough; ay, but this and many another self- 
 evident truth were left for Arnold to fix in 
 imperishable utterance. A single sentence 
 etches Macaulay's strength and weakness : " A 
 style brilliant, metallic, exterior, making strong 
 points, alternating invective with eulogy, 
 wrapping in a robe of rhetoric the thing it 
 presents; not, with the soft play of life, 
 following and rendering the thing's very form 
 and pressure." 
 
 The memorable summing up of Milton's 
 powers — memorable not only because of its 
 masterliness, but as the last word to us of 
 this authentic voice — stands, a pyramid, on 
 the waste of every-day criticism : — 
 
 " That Milton, of all our English race, is by 
 his diction and rhythm the one artist of the 
 highest rank in the great style whom we have ; 
 this I take as requiring no discussion, this I 
 take as certain. The mighty power of poetry 
 and art is generally admitted. But where the 
 soul of this power, of this power at its best. 
 
in MATTHEW ARNOLD 87 
 
 chiefly resides, very many of us fail to see. It 
 resides chiefly in the refining and elevation 
 wrought in us by the high and rare excellence 
 of the great style. . . . Milton has made the 
 great style no longer an exotic here ; he has 
 made it an inmate amongst us, a leaven, and 
 a power." 
 
 If this exaltation of the critical spirit and 
 power is familiar now, the high voice so 
 recently silenced has made it so. " There was 
 no literary critic in England," says the veteran 
 Stoddard, " before Matthew Arnold." 
 
 The essentials of just criticism, admirably 
 registered in the preface to "Literature and 
 Dogma," are as admirably exemplified in the 
 preface to Wordsworth's poems, the impor- 
 tance of poetry and the seriousness of the 
 critic's task being restated with the accustomed 
 precision and incision : — 
 
 " Now poetry is nothing less than the most 
 perfect speech of man, that in which he comes 
 nearest to being able to utter the truth. It is 
 
88 THE GOLDEN GUESS iii 
 
 no small thing, therefore, to succeed eminently 
 in poetry. And so much is required for duly 
 estimating success here that about poetry it is, 
 perhaps, hardest to arrive at a sure general 
 verdict, and takes longest." 
 
 Arnold's definition of poetry, as a " criticism 
 of life," has been disparaged by writers from 
 whom were to be hoped better things. The 
 reviewers, not excepting the master spirit of 
 " The Athenaeum," seem to follow him but half- 
 way. To say that poetry is at bottom a " criti- 
 cism of life," is a materially different thing 
 from saying that it is wholly and directly a 
 criticism of life. The context of the phrase 
 must be considered in order to get the meaning : 
 " The greatness of a poet lies in his powerful 
 and beautiful application of ideas to life." That 
 is, the great poet must have profound, practical 
 ideas on man and nature, and must express 
 them "under the conditions immutably fixed 
 by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth." 
 
 Content to leave the definition of poetry — 
 
Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 89 
 
 new only in its phraseology — to its own 
 defence, let us see with what result the test is 
 applied to the poems of Wordsworth. Were 
 Arnold three-fourths Greek, seven-eighths form, 
 as many make him, Wordsworth would be one 
 of the first poets to repel him ; for, in the 
 words of the critic himself, "he has no 
 style." Plainly enough there must be a substi- 
 tute for style. What has Wordsworth in its 
 imperial place? He has "expression of the 
 highest and most truly expressive kind." 
 With a well-nigh faultless hand, the poet's 
 shortcomings are weighed against his noble 
 powers, till we come to the conclusion, equally 
 remarkable for accuracy and courage, — " I firmly 
 believe that the poetical performance of Words- 
 worth is, after that of Shakspeare and Milton 
 . . . undoubtedly the most considerable in our 
 language from the Elizabethan age to the 
 present time." 
 
 This is a cry in the wilds, but there is little 
 risk in asserting, even at this early day, that 
 
90 THE GOLDEN GUESS ill 
 
 the judgment is final. "Wordsworth has an 
 
 insight into permanent sources of joy." With 
 
 an article inserted, we have a volume in this 
 
 supplement of ten words, — " Wordsworth has 
 
 an insight into the permanent sources of joy." 
 
 A second supplement is to be found in the 
 
 "Memorial Verses," written some forty years 
 
 ago: — 
 
 " He found us when the age had bound 
 Our souls in its benumbing round; 
 He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease ; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth returned ; for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd. 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 If Arnold's estimate of Wordsworth be just 
 — and who will gainsay it ? — , we owe him a 
 debt smaller only than that due the poet him- 
 self. It required a mind open as the poet's 
 own, a spirit as responsive to the rhythmic 
 
Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 91 
 
 beat of universal life, to see and know him as 
 he is ; it required the ability that distinguishes 
 Matthew Arnold as a critic. The essay on 
 Wordsworth has been chosen as an example of 
 Arnold's critical ability, not simply because it 
 is regarded as adequate, just, but because the 
 subject is one that calls for a full showing of 
 the fundamental principles of criticism as he 
 understands them. 
 
 Arnold's estimate of Shelley's poetry has not 
 proved generally acceptable. What, in a word, 
 is the estimate ? The star-like light of spirit, 
 the floating, evanescent beauty, the exuberant 
 music — these remain, unchallenged ; but, with 
 greatness as the standard, a detracting charge is 
 made — the charge of unsubstantiality. The 
 subjects treated are declared to be not of the 
 highest importance : — 
 
 " Those who extol him as the poet of clouds, 
 the poet of sunsets, are only saying that he did 
 not, in fact, lay hold upon the poet's — the 
 great poet's — right subject matter; and in 
 
92 THE GOLDEN GUESS ni 
 
 honest truth, with all his charm of soul and 
 spirit, with all his charm of musical diction and 
 movement, he never, or hardly ever, did." 
 
 The excellencies of Shelley, if not insisted 
 on, are here plainly set down, while what is 
 conceived to be the main deficiency is brought 
 into prominence: his subjects are so remotely 
 related to the life of man that his work is 
 necessarily lacking in human interest, com- 
 pared, for example, with Wordsworth's, and 
 therefore less effective for the higher purpose 
 of art, which is to reflect, to purify, to enlarge, 
 to ennoble the life of man, to encourage and 
 sustain him in his best efforts to attain fulness 
 of being. — Arnold well knew that this exalted 
 purpose was not to be directly, baldly asserted. 
 He did not mean that the poet should preach 
 (though Wordsworth often fell to it, and he 
 himself has not suffered his master to make the 
 descent alone), but that the preacher's wisdom 
 and earnestness should be behind the utterance, 
 which, for its part, must mask and manage the 
 
ni MATTHEW ARNOLD 93 
 
 plain purpose according to the requirements of 
 art. — The standard of judgment, let us not 
 forget, is high, no lower than elementary law ; 
 and tried by it, Shelley stands in shadow. 
 Not to go beyond the shorter poems, the 
 inimitable " Lines to an Indian Air," compared 
 with those of the " Highland Reaper,'' are less 
 vital and abiding. Let the student of poetry 
 supplement what Arnold says of Shelley's song 
 with the Rev. Stopford Brooke's essay, " Some 
 Thoughts on Shelley," and he cannot get far 
 out of the way. If Arnold has fallen short 
 in the case of Shelley, he has shown us again 
 and again how to find the weak place ; and 
 he has more than once admonished us, when 
 the weak place is found, to leave it and pass 
 on to the next place that is strong. 
 
 Two articles on Arnold by an American 
 writer, with a charm of his own, have come 
 under our notice. They invite to particular 
 attention because one of them, a review of 
 Arnold's lecture on Emerson, voices a represen- 
 
94 THE GOLDEN GUESS ra 
 
 tative sentiment on this side of the Atlantic ; 
 and the other, a general survey of Arnold's 
 work, seems to us, excellent as it is in many 
 respects, to illustrate the tendency among his 
 critics to follow him only half-way. What 
 does Arnold say of Emerson? In the rough, 
 he says that "his observation of nature is 
 always marvellously fine"; that, while his 
 " insight is admirable," his " truth precious," 
 the secret of his effect is, after all, "in his 
 hopeful, serene, beautiful temper " ; that never 
 before had man such a sense of the inex- 
 haustible ness of nature, and such hope ; that 
 for his (Arnold's) ear the early utterances of 
 Emerson " brought a strain as new, and mov- 
 ing, and unforgetable, as the strain of . . . 
 Goethe " ; that Emerson's work is the most 
 important prose work of the century. Surely 
 this is a rich testimonial, and in it Arnold 
 shows again that, with all his insistence on 
 style, on the commanding forms of art, that 
 there are other things of greater value. The 
 
Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 95 
 
 lecture reveals no lack of admiration, of love ; 
 and surely it does not detract from Arnold's 
 matchless equipment for criticism that he can 
 put his heart aside and speak with the passion- 
 less accent of the years to come. Emerson has 
 not the "inestimable virtue of concreteness," he 
 is constrained to say : " he is not a great poet, 
 nor is he a great man of letters, because he 
 could not subdue his material to the readily 
 felt but inexplicable form and texture that is 
 eternal." Though the great poet, yes, the 
 great man of letters, be taken away, we have 
 left the great teacher, the great man, the great 
 isolated Emerson. 
 
 In the other paper, the one on Arnold's work 
 in general, it is stated that he "lays the em- 
 phasis upon the more select, the high-bred 
 qualities." While Arnold is constant to these 
 qualities, if we read him aright he lays the 
 emphasis on a no higher-bred quality than 
 right conduct, — plain, simple, well-doing. 
 " We have seen," he says, " what an immense 
 
96 THE GOLDEN GUESS iil 
 
 matter conduct is ; that it is three-fourths of 
 life. We have seen how plain and simple a 
 matter it is, so far as knowledge is concerned." 
 To the extent that Hellenism helps " to get rid 
 of one's ignorance, to see things as they are, 
 and by seeing them as they are, to see them in 
 their beauty " — to this extent do we find him 
 a Hellene, which is a very different thing from 
 finding him an embodiment of "pure Hellen- 
 ism." Hellenism with him stands for intellec- 
 tual power, Hebraism for moral power, and, 
 prone as he is to the intelligential side, we have 
 never failed to find him first and last on the 
 moral side, a fixture there. Whatever is added, 
 the foundation is morals : " In praising cul- 
 ture, we have never denied that conduct, not 
 culture, is three-fourths of human life." For 
 all the cry of Greek, we find Arnold less Greek 
 than Hebrew. In "Literature and Dogma," 
 the work he set most by, while the method of 
 interpreting the Scriptures is Hellenic, the pur- 
 pose is unmistakably Hebraic, — one steady 
 
ra MATTHEW ARNOLD 97 
 
 testimony to the enduring pith and marrow of 
 the Bible. The work breathes throughout the 
 true Hebrew spirit at its highest : '•''If ye know 
 these things, happy are ye if ye do them ! — the 
 last word for infirm humanity." But Arnold 
 is neither pure Greek nor pure Hebrew ; rather 
 a blending of the two, a student of the law of 
 human development. He is a disciple of cul- 
 ture, by which he means in the large, not " pure 
 Hellenism," but Hebraism plus Hellenism. 
 " All the love of our neighbor," are his words, 
 " the impulses towards action, help, and benefi- 
 cence, the desire for removing human error, 
 clearing human confusion, and diminishing 
 human misery, the noble aspiration to leave 
 the world better and happier than we found 
 it, — motives eminently such as are called 
 social, — come in as part of the grounds of cul- 
 ture, and the main and pre-eminent part." 
 " Hebraism, Hellenism," he says, " are neither 
 of them the law of human development ; they 
 are, each of them, contributions to human 
 
98 THE GOLDEN GUESS in 
 
 development." They are not the law, nor in- 
 deed do they seem the sum, the ultimate to 
 which Arnold is ever pointing. 
 
 Further on we find this statement : " Another 
 form which Arnold's Hellenism takes is, that it 
 begets in him what we may call the spirit of 
 institutionalism, as opposed to the spirit of 
 individualism. ... He always takes up for 
 the state against the individual, and for public 
 and established forms against private and per- 
 sonal dissent and caprice." 
 
 Were it not for the last word, " caprice,** 
 Arnold's position with regard to the individual 
 could hardly be wrested from this statement of 
 it. Arnold is against individual caprice, — 
 against individual ignorance, against the indi- 
 vidual at his lowest ; which is a different thing 
 from being opposed to individual steadfast- 
 ness and wisdom, to the individual at his best. 
 For what else than the advancement of the 
 individual is it that he proposes for him a " best 
 self, and right reason which may stand as a 
 
in MATTHEW ARNOLD 99 
 
 serious authority ? " The state, or whatever 
 higher power it may be, is to stand as the indi- 
 vidual should stand at his best ; it is to stand 
 against his caprice, is to stand for him, is 
 to be his very self, — his right, his best, self. 
 " We see then," he says, " how indispensable to 
 that human perfection which we seek is, in the 
 opinion of good judges [Renan and Wilhelm 
 von Humboldt], some public recognition and 
 establishment of our best self, or right reason." 
 Whether the plan prove feasible or not, 
 Arnold's intent is anything but "against the 
 individual." The state having been supreme in 
 Greece, it is easy to attribute Arnold's view of 
 the individual to his Hellenism, and, having 
 styled his view Hellenic, it is easy to make it 
 square with the old Greek view ; but it is once 
 more pressing Arnold's Hellenism too hard. If 
 to bear down so heavily on Arnold's Hellenism 
 is to misread him, to transfer a distorted politi- 
 cal opinion to the distant domains of religion, 
 literature, and art, to say that his regard for 
 
100 THE GOLDEN GUESS iii 
 
 institutionalism " makes him indifferent to the 
 element of personalism, the flavor of character, 
 the quality of unique individual genius, where- 
 ever found in art, literature, or religion" — 
 this is misinterpretation indeed. 
 
 Nor can we discover in Arnold's writings 
 ground for the statement that his strictures 
 against the dissenter spring from the fact that 
 the " dissenter stands for personal religion, 
 religion as a private and individual experience.'* 
 The gist of the teaching so warmly advocated 
 in "Literature and Dogma" is religion as a 
 personal experience. Israel's old sure proof of 
 being in the right way — the sanction of joy and 
 peace . . . this was a test which anybody could 
 at once apply. Again, Christ came to " restore 
 the intuition." What possible way is there of 
 coming at this sanction of joy and peace except 
 by personal experience ? and what is intuition, 
 apart from personal experience ? 
 
 Finally, the observation, " It is clear enough 
 that [Arnold] would sooner be a Catholic than 
 
Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 101 
 
 a Presbyterian or a Methodist," seems equally 
 wide of the mark. The critic says elsewhere 
 that Arnold accords to Protestantism moral su- 
 periority over Catholicism. In " Literature and 
 Dogma" Arnold avers that Protestantism has 
 the most light; and we had thought it beyond 
 dispute that, notwithstanding a leaning toward 
 the Catholic Church (he calls it a weakness, by 
 the way) because of the "rich treasures of 
 human life which have been stored within her 
 pale," or a leaning in any other direction, he 
 ranges himself unmistakably on the side of 
 morals and light. Other points in this paper 
 might be examined with a like result ; but per- 
 haps these few are sufficient to illustrate what 
 we mean by the tendency among Arnold's 
 critics to stop short of his full meaning. 
 
 As before said, just so far as the Greek 
 stands for intelligence, for the free play of 
 mind that sees things as they are, and finds life 
 joyous, beautiful, — just so far is Arnold a 
 Greek. The laws discovered and obeyed by 
 
102 THE GOLDEN GUESS iii 
 
 the Greeks are interesting to him, not because 
 they are Greek laws, but because they are ele- 
 mental laws, basal laws of our being. His 
 words are very clear here, as elsewhere : " The 
 generality of men attend only to the indica- 
 tions of a true law of our being as to conduct ; 
 and hardly at all to indications, though they 
 as really exist, of a true law of our being on 
 its aesthetic and intelligential side." 
 
 To classify poetry, for example, Arnold 
 adopts the Greek system ; not because it is 
 Greek, but because it is " natural," elemental. 
 For the constituents of a true poem, he turns 
 again to the Greek, as did Goethe and Coler- 
 idge, for the same reason. 
 
 What Arnold takes from Greece, Greece 
 took from nature herself, — the " natural truth." 
 Let us drop Hellenism for a time, and substi- 
 tute elemental laws that lead to intelligence, to 
 clear seeing. " The power of intellect and 
 science," he says, " the power of beauty, the 
 power of social life and manners, — these are 
 
1 
 
 III MATTHEW ARNOLD 108 
 
 what Greece so felt, and fixed, and may stand 
 for. They are great elements in our humani- 
 zation." Very true, but, " The power of con- 
 duct is another great element ; and this was so 
 felt and fixed by Israel that we can never with 
 justice refuse to permit Israel, in spite of all 
 his shortcomings, to stand for it." 
 
 Very true again, but, " In many respects the 
 ancients are far above us, and yet there is 
 something which we demand that they can 
 never give." If we set out with a thinker, let 
 us go the whole way. Arnold was not the 
 blind worshipper of the ancients that the fancy 
 of the impatient reviewer has painted. 
 
 We have travelled beyond the pale of litera- 
 ture. This was unavoidable ; for literature 
 with the author of " Literature and Dogma " is 
 but a part of the great whole of life. Arnold, 
 then, tried by the highest standard, is a great 
 critic ; a critic in the largest sense of the word, 
 a critic of life. He is a great critic because he 
 brings to bear on a variety of great subjects, 
 
104 THE GOLDEN GUESS iii 
 
 "V extensive knowledge, superior power of per- 
 ception, and clear, pure, adequate utterance. 
 To this equipment must be added signal 
 patience and gentleness of temper. Sober, 
 painstaking, he builds on a few primal laws. 
 
 Instead of trying to decide whether Arnold 
 accomplished more in this field or in that, or 
 whether he covered all the ground in each field, 
 it would seem wiser to ascertain what he did 
 accomplish in each field, and, better still, to 
 learn the sum of his discoveries. The first 
 step with him was to insist on knowledge before 
 forming belief, before rendering an opinion. 
 It is not the admonition of a theorist, but of a 
 worker, one who gave by choice a great part 
 of his time and strength to the toil of an 
 inspector of schools ; one who sought the thing 
 he pronounced indispensable, and who, as he 
 sought, put what he found into practical work- 
 ing:— 
 
 '* His life he to his doctrine brought." 
 
 y Arnold approached life from many sides ; some- 
 
in MATTHEW ARNOLD 105 
 
 times a literary critic, sometimes a poet, he 
 is always a moralist, a teacher, urging the 
 world in his frank, captivating way, to reach 
 toward the higher life. The catholicity of 
 his research, his freedom from trammels of 
 race, of age, of sect, taught him that truths, 
 wherever found, cannot conflict. His aim, his 
 service, was not to found a system ; it was to 
 establish rules of inquiry regarding the requi- 
 sites for a high, full life. He knew his limita- 
 tions, and accepted them. "The best that is 
 known and thought in the world " — get that, 
 he says, make it your own and act on it, and 
 the best is done that can be done. With this 
 maxim as a constant monitor, he endowed criti- 
 cism with unwonted seriousness, dignity, gra- 
 ciousness, and trustworthiness. He did more ; 
 lifting pure criticism as near perhaps as it may 
 rise to the plane of creative art, he spread 
 abroad the spiritual and intellectual influences 
 of receptivity and support, without which crea- 
 tive art finds itself at a cruel disadvantage, if, 
 
106 THE GOLDEN GUESS ni 
 
 indeed, it be not baffled. If he lacks in enthu- 
 siasm, he is no less earnest than serene. His 
 effect is not that of a sudden dawn of enlight- 
 enment; the process is slower and surer, being 
 a gradual expansion, a steady widening of the 
 mental and spiritual horizon. Of Arnold, first 
 of all, it may be said, He clears away the mists. 
 Neither a prophet nor a lawgiver, he is a re- 
 storer of neglected laws which have been since 
 time was, primal principles which are from 
 everlasting to everlasting. In religion, in art, 
 his plea is for the absolute and eternal. Nor 
 does it cease at the door of politics : — 
 
 "Perfection will never be reached; but to 
 recognize a period of transformation when it 
 comes, and to adapt themselves honestly and 
 rationally to its laws, is perhaps the nearest 
 approach to perfection of which men and 
 nations are capable. No habits or attachments 
 should prevent their trying to do this ; nor, 
 indeed, in the long run, can they. Human 
 thought, which all institutions are, inevitably 
 
ni MATTHEW ARNOLD 107 
 
 saps them, resting only in that which is absolute 
 and eternal.'* 
 
 How large the view is, how clear the vision, 
 the judgment how sane ! Here is a writer that 
 writes for something besides writing's sake ; a 
 writer that finds the great man greater than the 
 great prose writer, or the great poet ; a high 
 priest of culture that lodges his country's hope 
 in the stiff-necked Puritan middle class. 
 
 Before taking a final glance at Arnold as an 
 apostle of doubt, so called, a word concerning 
 his style, the secret of which, the critics gener- 
 ally seem to have missed. " Without range 
 and force of thought, all the resources of style, 
 whether in cadence or in subtlety, are not and 
 can not be brought out." Here is the key to 
 his style, warm from his own hand. A delicate 
 sense, a fine ear, can produce polished writing ; 
 for great writing must be added "range and 
 force of thought." Should this truth be desired 
 in concrete form, one has but to read the author 
 of " The Reverberator " on Arnold, then Arnold 
 
108 THE GOLDEN GUESS iii 
 
 on Milton. Arnold's style is the result of 
 knowledge, of thought power; this first, then 
 patient, intelligent training of the artist's 
 instinct. So nicely fitted is the word to the 
 thought that, when a thought is to be exactly 
 repeated, the exact word first used must be used 
 again. Writers opulent as he are not afraid 
 to borrow the words of another, nor do they 
 fear to face their own words a second time. It 
 is for the sake of the thought and euphony that 
 the synonym is so often rejected. The thought 
 is given a name that rings in the ear because 
 of its fitness as well as of its music ; it must 
 not be lost, for it cannot be replaced. ..." To 
 walk in awful observance of an enduring clew, 
 within us and without us, which leads to happi- 
 ness " — there is no other way to say this as 
 well. Arnold's oft-rung phrases, instead of 
 affectations, are formulated truths with catch- 
 words, which, once caught, cling like burrs. 
 They evidence, not trickery, but close knowl- 
 edge, of the sort that caused Emerson to set so 
 
in MATTHEW ARNOLD 109 
 
 highly by nicknames. Temperament enters into 
 the material of style ; and when we consider the 
 nature of the faults Arnold pointed out, there is 
 little room for censure. Sharp as his strictures 
 may be, he never, like the mighty " organ-voice " 
 when pamphleteering ; or, like the fervent, dys- 
 peptic Scotsman, so lately gone, when dealing 
 with other than his hero ; or, like the art critic 
 still indulging his wayward moods, lashing 
 right and left with his whip of thongs, — he 
 never, like these, tries titles with the common 
 scold. His earnestness is always accompanied 
 by a governing sobriety ; hence, the dissenter 
 listens respectfully. The man so admirable as 
 a coadjutor is winning even to his opposers. 
 He may say to-day, and again to-morrow, you 
 have "need of conduct, need of beauty, need 
 of knowledge, need of manners " ; he may go a 
 smart step further and call names, — Philistine ! 
 Barbarian ! but behind all is plainly to be seen 
 the gentle man, the generous helper, the amiable 
 lover of wisdom. 
 
110 THE GOLDEN GUESS in 
 
 Arnold insists on intelligence for the right 
 seeing of what may be termed the secular 
 phenomena of life ; crossing into the domain of 
 religion, he demands the same there. The 
 intelligence commended is on its way hither, 
 and he is convinced that certain old religious 
 beliefs cannot stand before it. With the fall of 
 these may go down, for the hour, much that 
 should remain, must remain in the fulness of 
 time, and he gives warning : — 
 
 " But at the present moment two things 
 about the Christian religion must surely be 
 clear to anybody with his eyes in his head. 
 One is, that men cannot do without it; the 
 other, that they cannot do with it as it is." 
 
 This is not an original discovery. We are 
 indebted to Arnold for presentations of this and 
 other familiar facts in a light so clear that they 
 seem new ; for a marshalling of wise words, 
 conciliatory as admonitory, in a wholly fresh 
 order and beauty of array. We have in him 
 a teacher that can take what is good from 
 
m MATTHEW ARNOLD 111 
 
 Catholic and from Protestant, from Christian 
 and from Pagan, from yesterday and from 
 to-day. We have in him a counsellor who has 
 sought widely and deeply, given up his splendid 
 powers mainly to one aim, — the ascertaining of 
 the best that has been told, and the recasting 
 of selections from it, in accordance with the 
 dictates of his rich mental and spiritual equip- 
 ment and with the need of the time. We may 
 listen to this counsellor ; he is in earnest, he has 
 our good at heart, and his stature makes him 
 one to be looked up to. Now, what does he say 
 about the Bible, about religion, and about 
 Christ? dismissing critics and interpreters, what 
 are his own words ? 
 
 " When the Bible is read aright, it will be 
 found to deal, in a way incomparable for effec- 
 tiveness, with facts of experience most press- 
 ing, momentous, real." 
 
 Again, " Protestantism has hold of Christ's 
 method of inwardness and sincerity; Catholi- 
 cism has hold of his ' secret ' of self-renounce- 
 
112 THE GOLDEN GUESS iii 
 
 ment. . . . Neither has his unerring balance, 
 his intuition, his sweet reasonableness,^^ 
 
 Again, " Christianity is truly . . . the great- 
 est and happiest stroke ever yet made for 
 human perfection." 
 
 Again, "And therefore it is so all-important 
 to insist on what I call the natural truth of 
 Christianity. . . . Jesus Christ and his pre- 
 cepts are found to hit the moral experience of 
 mankind, to hit it in the critical points, to hit 
 it lastingly." 
 
 Again, " And a certainty is the sense of life, 
 of being truly alive, which accompanies right- 
 eousness, . . . and here we may well permit 
 ourselves to trust Jesus." 
 
 Does not our apostle of doubt here write 
 himself down a disciple of belief? Because 
 some things in the Christian religion cannot be 
 believed, he says, you are letting all go. There 
 is a wiser way. Better too much belief than 
 too little ; but certain things in the Christian 
 religion you must believe, and they are valua- 
 
ra MATTHEW ARNOLD 113 
 
 ble beyond comparison. One critic, with well 
 nigh wicked quickness, has leaped to the con- 
 clusion that the master-work, " Literature and 
 Dogma," was written to carry Christianity over 
 into the Roman camp. The author himself 
 says, it " was written in order to win access 
 for the Bible and its religion to many of 
 those who now neglect them. ... To people 
 disposed to throw the Bible aside, 'Literature 
 and Dogma' sought to restore the use of it." 
 The aim is again declared in " God and the 
 Bible." 
 
 " But ' Literature and Dogma ' had altogether 
 for its object, and so, too, has the present work, 
 to show the truth and necessity of Christianity, 
 and its power and charm for the heart, mind, 
 and imagination of man, even though the pre- 
 ternatural, which is now its popular sanction, 
 should be given up." 
 
 We have come to the gist of the matter, the 
 elimination of the preternatural. This is not 
 the place to attempt a discussion of the fate of 
 
114 THE GOLDEN GUESS m 
 
 the preternatural in Christianity. We may say 
 simply that Arnold, believing, with many of the 
 foremost thinkers of the time, that its days are 
 well nigh numbered; seeing, indeed, unmis- 
 takable evidence of its elimination, urges the 
 acceptance of the surpassingly worthy residue 
 to which men can still cling, to which they 
 must cling do they lay claim to wisdom, to 
 common-sense, to even the crudest reasonable- 
 ness, do they have any hope of genuine hap- 
 piness. This is no doubter's rdle ; it is the 
 rdle of a believer, one come to the deliverance 
 of doubters. Whether the postulate, "the 
 Eternal, who makes for righteousness," suf- 
 fices, is open to question; but the admirable 
 method of inquiry, the rules for patient, pure, 
 high, full living, which are the foundation 
 of " Literature and Dogma," do not admit of 
 argument. Because one doubts, one is not 
 necessarily without faith. Arnold has faith; 
 not this faith, nor that, perhaps, but his 
 own. No soul strives after the fashion of his 
 
ra MATTHEW ARNOLD 116 
 
 without hope. He cannot see all that others 
 have professed, and that others still profess, to 
 see; but hope is in him, if not glowing, yet 
 rational and strong. He sees other than bril- 
 liant colors ; but surely life has sober hues, and 
 he was a student of life. The man that reaches 
 downward as tenderly as did he to the dumb 
 animal must feel a higher hand than his own 
 reaching down to him. It is true that Arnold, 
 with the first scientist and with the first poet 
 of his time, cannot believe all that has been, 
 and yet is, believed ; it is true that he leans 
 back hard on renouncement ; but it is equally 
 true that he is strong in hope, that he is 
 unshaken in faith, and true also that he can 
 give a reason for the faith that is in him. He 
 meets darkness, he finds a line, indeed, where 
 hope must stop, must stay on this side ; still 
 the darkness is rayed with the " light '' always 
 in his spirit and so often on his tongue, and 
 checked hope pauses, content, to wait for the 
 knowledge of the morrow : — 
 
116 THE GOLDEN GUESS ni 
 
 " And though we wear out life, alas! 
 Distracted as a homeless wind, 
 In beating where we must not pass, 
 In seeking what we shall not find ; 
 
 Yet we shall one day gain, life past, 
 Clear prospect o'er our being's whole; 
 Shall see ourselves, and learn at last 
 Our true aflfinities of soul.'* 
 
 Only strong hope sees the future for the 
 world that he predicts. Still staking his all 
 on knowledge, intelligence, and valor, he 
 says, — 
 
 "A clearing and enlarging spirit is in the 
 air; all the influences of the time help it. . . . 
 The one way to prevent or adjourn its working 
 is to keep education what is called a hole-and- 
 corner affair." 
 
 All life except the aimless, the grovelling, is 
 well worth living : — 
 
 *' How fair a lot to fill 
 Is left to each man still! " 
 
 Of a truth, Arnold is a man of sorrows ; but 
 his are not the griefs that force one into ignoble 
 
in MATTHEW ARNOLD %Vt 
 
 behavior. We may address him, as fitly as he 
 did the gypsy child, in the beautiful words, — 
 
 " Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own: 
 Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.'* 
 
 He is a man of sorrows, he is also a man of 
 joys. 
 
 " To feel that one is fulfilling in ani/ way the 
 law of one's being, that one is succeeding and 
 hitting the mark, brings us, we know, happiness ; 
 to feel this in regard to so great a thing as 
 conduct brings, of course, happiness propor- 
 tionate to the thing's greatness." 
 
 Here is the real, the whole Arnold; in the 
 domain of prose and on Hebrew ground. Not 
 in the poems inspired by the Greeks, masterful 
 as they are, nor yet in his still more masterly 
 criticism of the Greeks, do we get to the very 
 heart of the man. One may say that he hardly 
 seemed to know this himself, and perhaps it 
 should not be surprising that so few know it of 
 him. Arnold was at his highest when dealing 
 in prose with the eternal moralities as they 
 
118 THE GOLDEN GUESS • iii 
 
 were proclaimed by the impassioned Hebrews, 
 with the glorious outpouring of their "intui- 
 tion of God." After all his pr oneness to the 
 poetry of the Greeks, after all, and in spite of, 
 his declarations as to the necessity of leaning 
 upon it for solace, for self-preservation, he 
 really rested upon the poetry of the Hebrews. 
 Not till he reaches that does the weakness, the 
 pessimism disappear, and the full man come 
 forth in his strength. The one inconsistency 
 that we find in him — discussed in our endeavor 
 to answer the question, Who are the Great 
 Poets ? — is his reading of the milestones that 
 lead to the poetry of Greece the while his feet 
 are in the path that leads straight to the poetry 
 of Palestine. 
 
 Solon, hearing one of Sappho's songs, ex- 
 claimed, " I must not die till I have learned the 
 song." Arnold makes of this a text to ring 
 life long in the ears of an indifferent world: 
 You must not die till you have learned the poefs 
 song, Milton's great sayings on poetry, and 
 
Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 119 
 
 Wordsworth's greater saying than any of Mil- 
 ton's, that to be without poetry is to be without 
 God — these had been uttered; and Carlyle 
 and Emerson with isolated emphasis were 
 speaking contemporaneously to a like purport ; 
 but Arnold stood forth alone to preach without 
 ceasing the gospel of poetry. Though few, 
 ^ very few, critics have approached Arnold's 
 understanding of poetry, his mastery of it from 
 the finest point of technics up to the utmost 
 reach of the power of the art, after all, the dis- 
 tinctive thing to be said of him is that he first 
 proclaimed from day to day and from year to 
 year the evangel of song. 
 
IV 
 
 WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 
 
rv 
 
 WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 
 
 Not oo word spak he more than was neede, 
 And that was seid in forme and reverence. 
 
 — Chaucer. 
 
 When, at the beginning of the present 
 century, English singers, yoicing a protest 
 against the verse of the century before, reached 
 toward the drama, one, at least, of the tuneful 
 rebels obeyed the bent of his genius; for the 
 Browning of " Paracelsus " is radically the 
 same Browning found in the " Parleyings." 
 Now, who and what is Robert Browning in 
 the literary world? Admitted that he is a 
 thinker, an original, profound thinker; that 
 he is a philosopher, an unwearied prober of 
 man's mind and heart, an untiring, dauntless 
 searcher among the hidden, mysterious forces of 
 life, — is he, in addition, a poet, and, if so, how 
 
 123 
 
 [UHIVBRSITTj 
 
124 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 far a poet ? Would we pass on Browning, or 
 another, as a poet, the judgment must be by 
 the laws of poetry ; and the special point here 
 raised, is, that these laws demand not only the 
 poet's wisdom and vision, but the poet's utter- 
 ance, the poet's expression no less than the 
 poet's conception. Lay what stress we may 
 on Browning's defective expression, he is a 
 seer, one that sees the inside, the spirit of 
 things, — he is a poet ; and, wanting in the con- 
 structive power of the dramatist, he may be 
 best styled a dramatic poet, with the reminder 
 that his dramatis personce are objective, are 
 drawn in the purely dramatic method in char- 
 acter and situation only, the voice being invari- 
 ably the voice of Browning. The poet wholly 
 dramatic is thoroughly objective in method, is 
 lost in the absorbing personages that come and 
 go at his bidding ; while Browning, though he 
 enter into both the substance and the situation 
 with a singular liveliness of sympathy, does not 
 surrender his resistless individuality. Be it 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 125 
 
 scoundrel or saint, the turn of expression, the 
 ictus, is Browning's. The work is strong, 
 intensely forcible when at its highest, but the 
 writer's persistent personality divides honors 
 with the imaginary speaker to whom we would 
 give undivided attention. We cannot let go 
 the adjective dramatic, neither can we retain it 
 unqualified. 
 
 To go back to first principles, if we abide 
 by the Miltonic dictum — poetry is " simple, 
 sensuous, passionate " — rarely can we put our 
 finger down and say, here Browning is a poet. 
 If we square by the old rule — old as poetry 
 itself, though formulated anew by Matthew 
 Arnold — " the noble and profound application 
 of ideas to life is the most essential part of 
 poetic greatness," though every page be crowded 
 with ideas, these always prying at some unyield- 
 ing root of life, we are little better off ; for the 
 application must be " under the conditions 
 immutably fixed by the laws of poetic beauty 
 and poetic truth." First principles bid us bear 
 
126 THE GOLDEN GUESS IV 
 
 in mind this mucii, if no more : poetry is the 
 kind of writing that is not prose, with a charm 
 of its own and an unmistakable, imperishable 
 individuality. 
 
 On Burke's authority, Sheridan's eloquence 
 was something better than either prose or poet- 
 ry, but, inasmuch as we are not informed what 
 the something was, we are obliged to keep to 
 the old two divisions ; and such is the confu- 
 sion abroad that we must insist on the absolute 
 independence of these divisions, the one of the 
 other, affirming that poetry is always poetry, 
 and prose always prose. Furthermore, strange 
 as it may seem, it has become necessary to 
 restate the old truth that the various kinds of 
 poetry, differ widely as they may, have in com- 
 mon qualities — imagination, method or manner 
 of thought, suggestive force, atmosphere, music 
 — that serve emphatically for classification as 
 song ; in other words, that they reveal at once, 
 together with their several characteristics, their 
 kinship, their membership of one family. 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 127 
 
 Were it the design to establish a high posi- 
 tion for Browning as a poet, among his shorter 
 pieces " Childe Roland " would prove, perhaps, 
 the happiest selection. The imagination is 
 strong, the creative power strikingly manifest ; 
 while the treatment of the favorite motto, 
 " Push forward on your own lines," comes 
 unwontedly near to fulfilling the demands of a 
 noble poem. The wandering line of the fool 
 could suggest a poem to no other than a gen- 
 uine poet, and could suggest such a poem to a 
 poet of a high order only. The mystic union 
 of nature and the spirit of man under fearful 
 conditions overlapping the bounds between the 
 natural and the supernatural, invests the com- 
 position with an atmosphere akin to that of — 
 solitary creation in the realm of marvel ! — the 
 " Ancient Mariner." 
 
 " As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair 
 In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud 
 Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. 
 One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, 
 Stood stupefied, however he came there: 
 Thrust out past service from the devil's stud I 
 
128 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 Alive ? he might be dead for aught I know, 
 With that red gaunt and coll oped neck a-strain, 
 And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane ; 
 Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; 
 I never saw a brute I hated so ; 
 He must be wicked to deserve such pain." 
 
 There is the Coleridgian imagination — minus 
 the music. The fact that " Childe Roland" 
 has marched so well toward the rear in the line 
 of favor may be excusably adduced as one item 
 of proof that the disciples of Browning follow 
 their lord rather through all the world than 
 into the thin air of song. 
 
 After " Childe Roland," " Andrea del Sarto " 
 presents, from the poet's stand-point, perhaps 
 the strongest claim for admiration. The dark 
 side, so tempting to Browning, is turned toward 
 us, but streaked by a glorious light. Were it 
 possible to forget " Evelyn Hope " and certain 
 lines that spring to mind at the mention of 
 "By the Fireside," "Andrea del Sarto," of 
 itself, would put it beyond dispute that Brown- 
 ing can be simple, sweet, delightful. 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 129 
 
 ** But had you — oh, with the same perfect brow, 
 And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, 
 And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird 
 The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare — 
 Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind I 
 Some women do so." 
 
 Were Browning always what he is in " Childe 
 Roland," in " Andrea del Sarto," in " Fra Lippo 
 Lippi," and " My Last Duchess," — not to 
 name such longer poems as " Pippa Passes " 
 and "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," — what he is 
 there in kind if not in degree, we should be 
 spared our ineffectual scepticism and — the 
 Societies. It is because, at one time, he is con- 
 tent with mere ingenuity, dropping to out-and- 
 out juggling, indulging in preposterous hodge- 
 podge; because, at another time, he fails to 
 distinguish between metaphysic, psychologic 
 disquisition and poetry, between cacophonic 
 cataloguing and the direct, swift, entrancing 
 measures of song; because he is not averse 
 from veiling his concepts with word mists all 
 but impenetrable, his skill running to encysted 
 
130 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 intricacies — linked riddles long drawn out ; 
 because in drawing his pains through rhyme's 
 vexation he draws them through our own; 
 because he commonly disobeys the kind laws 
 that have helped him to his enviable height, as 
 they have helped the great singers of all ages, 
 — it is for these reasons, among others, that we 
 hesitate to pronounce Robert Browning from 
 first to last a poet, — 
 
 *' Steadfast and rooted in the heavenly muse, 
 And washed and sanctified to Poesy." 
 
 The fiery Pegasus is turned and wound up 
 and down many a page ; but the angel is not in 
 the saddle, the world is not witched. We may 
 cheerfully, enthusiastically, grant the poet's 
 heart always, often the poet's head ; but the 
 poet's voice, save in rare calls, no. 
 
 Those of Browning's readers that have not 
 progressed beyond the stage of the beautiful in 
 art, must be aware that he has, too, a fondness 
 for subjects unpleasant, not to say repelling. 
 Perhaps it was unfortunate in this particular 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 131 
 
 that the poet exposed himself so early in his 
 career to the sanguinary saturation of Italian 
 life. Were he more a Briton in his books, we 
 should escape not a little intrigue and very 
 un-English obliquity. 
 
 Reference has been made to a questionable 
 substitution of vivisection for verse, of meta- 
 physics for metre and rhythm, and to a prevail- 
 ing opaqueness ; now let us take our bearings, 
 and, laying a little firmer hold of our first prin- 
 ciples, see if we can indicate what part of 
 Browning's important gift to the world is 
 poetry. 
 
 For sound, wholesome advice on the subject 
 of poetry we may turn confidently to Cole- 
 ridge; a metaphysician, too, by the way, but 
 never when in his singing robes. This master 
 among poets and critics, says : — 
 
 " But if the definition sought for be that of a 
 legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the 
 parts of which mutually support and explain 
 each other ; all in their proportion harmonizing 
 
132 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 with, supporting, the purpose and known influ- 
 ences of metrical arrangement. The philo- 
 sophic critics of all ages coincide with the 
 ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally- 
 denying the praises of a just poem, on the one 
 hand, to a series of striking lines or distichs, 
 each of which absorbing the whole attention of 
 the reader to itself, disjoins it from its context, 
 and makes it a separate whole, instead of a 
 harmonizing part ; and on the other hand, to an 
 unstained composition, from which the reader 
 collects rapidly the general result unattracted 
 by the component parts. The reader should be 
 carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the 
 mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a rest- 
 less desire to arrive at the final solution ; but 
 by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by 
 the attractions of the journey itself." 
 
 The most superficial reader must detect the 
 unevenness of Browning's work. Single verses 
 and groups of verses shine and blossom, very 
 jewels in a heap of sand, lovely roses " emongst 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 133 
 
 the wicked weeds." An instance of these iso- 
 lated excellencies is the extension of Sir 
 Thomas Browne's " The circle of our felici- 
 ties makes but short arches," in the splendid 
 line, — 
 
 ** On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect 
 round." 
 
 After all, Browning's writing goes best in the 
 bulk ; it is the general result that we enjoy, 
 being oftener rather distracted than attracted 
 by the component parts. And it is too true 
 that, as a rule, we miss, with the mutual sup- 
 port and explanation, the " known influences of 
 metrical arrangement." Consequently, though 
 curiosity be roused, we journey much of the 
 way unaccompanied by the pleasure Coleridge 
 commends and commands ; we feel the grasp of 
 a strong hand, but it is not the hand of the 
 enchanter. Now, if these touchstones be gen- 
 uine, and properly applied in the present case, 
 it is evident that only here and there in Brown- 
 ing's work, virile, inspiring, as it is, may we 
 
184 THE GOLDEN GUESS rv 
 
 find a " legitimate," a " just,'' poem. As before 
 stated, the poet must be judged by the laws of 
 poetry ; and the purpose of this paper will be 
 achieved if by it any student of poetry, whether 
 sought in Browning or another, be persuaded 
 to make sure, first, that he takes the poetry 
 road, not the prose road, then that he sets out 
 with the right foot, the poetic foot, forward, not 
 the left foot, the philosophic foot. If the 
 intent be to get the surest word spoken on 
 poetry, counsel will be taken of authorities 
 on the laws of poetry ; application will be 
 made to a Coleridge of yesterday, or to an 
 Arnold, Lowell, Stoddard, or Stedman of to- 
 day. This, for such information from the posi- 
 tive concurrence of the ages as appertains 
 strictly to poetry. Now we make bold to say 
 that this consensus approves the following three 
 propositions : first, that immediate theory, 
 direct philosophy, is most difficult, most dan- 
 gerous in poetry, fatal in the hands of all save 
 the greatest poets ; second, that poetry and 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 135 
 
 beauty are inseparable ; third, that the maxim 
 of White of Selborne, " As long as there is any 
 incubation going on, there is music," is as true 
 in poetry as in ornithology. Great Words- 
 worth and greater Milton have taught us the 
 distinction between naked philosophy and 
 poetry, and between naked and flayed theology 
 and poetry, by sadly practical illustrations. 
 Plainly, it is possible for an old traveller to 
 lose the poetry road, and 
 
 ** He needs must wander that has lost his way." 
 He must wander, and he may flounder. 
 
 But, the small morals of verse wanting, we 
 are told that Browning discards them for thfe 
 massive keys of life. If Browning's keys open 
 to things " essential and eternal in the heart," 
 why are they so unwieldy in the master hand ? 
 If his gates open to the white realm of life, why 
 should they grate, much as did the black bar- 
 riers that threatened Erebus ? 
 
 "... leaving truth, 
 And virtue, difficult, abstruse and dark; 
 Hard to be won, and only by a few ; 
 
136 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 Strange should He deal herein with nice respects, 
 And frustrate all the rest! Believe it not; 
 The primal duties shine aloft — like stars; 
 The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless, 
 Are scattered at the feet of man — like flowers. 
 The generous inclination, the just rule. 
 Kind wishes, and good actions, and pure thoughts — 
 No mystery is here." 
 
 If no mist shrouds the deep of primal duties, 
 will the " religious poet of the future " sound 
 them with a fog-horn ? 
 
 *' Is thy strait horizon dreary ? 
 
 Is thy foolish fancy chill ? 
 Change the feet that have grown weary 
 
 For the wings that never will. 
 Burst the flesh and live the spirit ; 
 
 Haunt the beautiful and far; 
 Thou hast all things to inherit, 
 
 And a soul for every star." 
 
 Here is didacticism pure and simple, still it is 
 poetry. Here is plain advice, plain English as 
 well, still it is the vera vox. 
 
 "The very essence of truth," says Milton, 
 " is plainness and brightness." Browning pays 
 little court to these, little court to beauty. 
 " No beauty to be had but in wresting and 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 137 
 
 writhing our own tongue " ? Rare Ben's ques- 
 tion acquires the accent of prophecy. Indiffer- 
 ence to beauty is a serious defect ; in poetry it 
 is an offence, only less heinous than the sacri- 
 fice of clearness. If a literary composition 
 have not perspicuity and some sort of beauty, 
 the remaining virtues have a task before them 
 to save it to poetry. " The first law of art, 
 the law of beauty," says Lessing. "In poetry,'* 
 says Lowell, " language is something more than 
 merely the vehicle of thought ; ... if there is 
 a beauty of use, there is often a higher use of 
 beauty." Heretofore the testimony has been 
 on the side of beauty. 
 
 Music is an element of beauty; and Coler- 
 idge's words, before quoted, are, the "known 
 influences of metrical arrangement." This 
 point, with Coleridge, is one long definitely 
 settled. Elsewhere he uses, perhaps, the most 
 remarkable language yet spoken on the value 
 of music in verse : " The sense of musical 
 delight with the power of producing it, is a 
 
138 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 gift of the imagination^ Here, music is not 
 a happy attachment to the creative faculty, but 
 is of the very stuff of it. It is not merely orna- 
 mental, it is integral, vital. Very well ; granting, 
 for the moment, that Browning's work fulfils all 
 the other demands of poetry, is it, as a whole, — 
 
 *' The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world 
 are stirred, 
 The music that robes it in language beneath and beyond 
 the word"? 
 
 If the answer be in the negative, it is not, as a 
 whole, poetry; much less poetry of the better 
 class, which, in consideration of the source, it 
 must be if poetry at all. Listen ! there is 
 whispering among our first principles: " Opu- 
 lent in thought as Browning is, ' rich ' as he is 
 ' with the spoils of time,' he is poor in speech ; 
 the occasion being rare when he commands the 
 befitting, the indispensable, the indisputable 
 delivery of the sons of song." Browning's 
 flashing scalpel is turned on his own energetic 
 intellectuals, and it is hinted that he has what 
 Hawthorne terms " too much of one sort of 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 139 
 
 brain, and hardly any of another." So close, 
 so singular, is his thinking, the whispering goes 
 on, that it would be hard enough to follow him 
 were the expression clear; but when to the 
 difficulty of the thought is added abrupt, ellip- 
 tical language, tearing its way in torrents, the 
 reader that is not an athlete ceases to pursue 
 out of sheer fatigue. 
 
 Not a few good minds and true lend a will- 
 ing ear to our saucy intangibles. These speak 
 still more boldly, saying not only that they can- 
 not follow Browning as a poet, but that they 
 must stand and shudder at such bruising of 
 song's flowerets with the armed hoof of hostile 
 paces. They declare that the limits of the 
 human mind are no longer respected, that 
 patience is strained even to its undoing ; that 
 they are beset with too many metrical pieces, 
 with too much in one piece, yes, with too much, 
 altogether too much, in each piece of af piece : — 
 
 ** Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth 
 Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, 
 Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved." 
 
140 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 Was it fancy? or did we catch even a cry, Give 
 us once more the old Homeric nod I We cer- 
 tainly heard, — 
 
 " A thousand circlets spread 
 And each misshape the other.'* 
 
 In one who has shown so little capacity for 
 improvement in art, our old-fashioned, out- 
 spoken friends find that the tendency towards 
 verbosity and obscurity has naturally increased 
 with years, till " Ferishta's Fancies " and the 
 " Parleyings " and their congeners are but 
 whirlwinds of disquisitory dust. The lovers 
 of the old poetry and censors of the new, pass- 
 ing from the form to the matter, leave us to 
 infer that they are not so sure of getting from 
 the sower of the " Red Cotton Night-Cap 
 Country " garden more lettuce than nettles. 
 They cannot make certain that Browning strikes 
 habitually to the heart of wisdom. They are 
 positive of singularly spirited displays of singu- 
 lar mental situations, of an astonishing extol- 
 ment of the odd, a deification of the queer; 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 141 
 
 beyond this they seem to be unable to go. 
 Finally, there is a consensus of opinion, among 
 the blunt old-time dissenters, that mental gym- 
 nastics the very cleverest, keenest analysis, 
 most skilful vivisection and psychologic prob- 
 ing, subtlest casuistry, daring speculation, daz- 
 zling wealth of learning, humor, satire, fire 
 truly volcanic, all these combined — as, indeed, 
 they are, to-day, in this one author and in him 
 only — do not make a poet ; poetry being the 
 " blossom, the fragrance/ of all human knowl- 
 edge, human passion, emotion, language," — a 
 very different thing from the root, stalk, 
 branches, or even the leaves, of these mar- 
 vellous plants. Persistent wilfulness, habitual 
 disobedience to the primal laws of simplicity 
 and beauty — this cloud tormentingly lowers as 
 they turn the thousand pages of Browning, 
 dulling the clear, delightful impression of true 
 poetry. When they that " have bene watered 
 at the muses* well " speak, they find that it is 
 without circumlocution and with no uncertain 
 
142 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 sound ; and they fear that it is only when the 
 poetic life is gone out that the eagles of expla- 
 nation are gathered together. 
 
 To speak temperately, steering between the 
 extremes of the doubters and the adorers, we 
 may hope to hit a just mean when we affirm 
 that there is this fundamental trouble with the 
 bulk of Browning's writing : his favorite kind 
 of truth is not the poet's kind, and his processes 
 with it are not the poet's processes. Both be- 
 long rather to the prose of philosophy and 
 science. The thought is often important, but, 
 whether important or not, it has an alien look 
 in the field of song. The Browning plant is 
 not entirely native, bright, and clean ; flower as 
 it may, it has a viscous stalk, thick with the 
 insects of speculation. This, by the bye, is far 
 from saying that the poetic field is not ulti- 
 mately to be enriched by the Browning growths ; 
 like the inedible sedges, the rankest among them 
 may serve to mass the soil, and so prepare firm 
 ground for the sweet food of song. Bright 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 143 
 
 truths set forth in transfigured words — this 
 expression certainly does not help to describe 
 the greater part of Browning's work, the part 
 of which we speak ; it does help to describe the 
 work of the poet. 
 
 Browning's work lacks proportion ; it is 
 wanting in judgment, in taste. The lack of 
 taste really includes all. 
 
 "Oh, too absurd — 
 But that you stand before me as you stand! 
 Such beauty does prove something, everything! 
 Beauty's the prize-power which dispenses eye 
 From peering into what has nourished root — 
 Dew or manure: the plant best knows its place. 
 Enough, from teaching youth and tending age 
 And hearing sermons, — haply writing tracts, — 
 From such strange love-besprinkled compost, lo, 
 Out blows this triumph!" 
 
 The hand that could write this in quiet, needed 
 only the stimulus of excitement to pen the 
 notorious twelve lines to Fitzgerald. 
 
 An eminent linguist has said that the "poetic 
 form embodies the highest expression of the 
 human intellect " ; and this may be taken as 
 
144 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 the sentiment of the cultured world. The 
 importance of form admitted, it is diverting to 
 see with what ingenuity the point at issue is 
 evaded in the overshadowing presence of the 
 poet under review. An illustrious American 
 singer and critic sajs, " But if form means the 
 production of that which stimulates and re-en- 
 forces thought by powerful emotion, the subsi- 
 dence of which leaves the thoughts as a key of 
 life and a rule for conduct, no one has given 
 truer examples of it than Browning." The key 
 to certain phases of life Browning may put in 
 our hand, and — though not always, if we com- 
 prehend him — safe rules for conduct ; but no 
 one could know better than the author of the 
 words quoted, that they amount simply to an 
 adroit dodge. It is one thing to speak as chair- 
 man of a " Browning Society," quite another 
 thing to speak as a free roamer in the literary 
 field. What this same critic says about form 
 as he saunters in the open field, it were hard to 
 better : — 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 145 
 
 ** And we men through our bit of song run, 
 Until one just improves on the rest, 
 And we call a thing his, in the long run, 
 Who utters it clearest and best." 
 
 " What to others a trifle appears, 
 Fills me full of smiles or tears." 
 
 The idea was once Blake's. It is now Words- 
 worth's : — 
 
 " To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 The ground taken by some defenders of 
 Browning as an artist, that his form is a law 
 unto itself, is not tenable until it be shown that 
 their master is more masterly than their mas- 
 ter's masters, who essentially agree among 
 themselves, and with whom he does not agree. 
 
 How used it to sound ? Let us hear it once 
 more — the happy accent of the old masters : — 
 
 ** Monsters unnatural I you that have been covetous 
 Of your own father's death, gape you for mine now ? 
 Cannot a poor old man, that now can reckon 
 Even all the hours he has to live, live quiet. 
 For such wild beasts as these, that neither hold 
 A certainty of good within themselves, 
 
146 THE GOLDEN GUESS IV 
 
 But scatter others' comforts that are ripen'd 
 
 For holy uses ? is hot youth so hasty, 
 
 It will not give an old man leave to die, 
 
 And leave a widow first, but will make one. 
 
 The husband looking on ? May your destructions 
 
 Come all in hasty figures to your souls I " 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " My father oft would speak 
 Your worth and virtue, and as I did grow 
 More and more apprehensive, I did thirst 
 To see the man so prais'd; but yet all this 
 Was but a maiden-longing, to be lost 
 As soon as found ; till sitting in my window, 
 Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god 
 I thought (but it was you) enter our gates; 
 My blood flew out, and back again as fast, 
 As I had pufif'd it forth and suck'd it in 
 Like breath; then was I call'd away in haste 
 To entertain you. Never was a man, 
 Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd 
 So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss 
 Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep 
 From you forever; I did hear you talk. 
 Far above singing ; after you were gone 
 I grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd 
 What stirr'd it so: Alas! I found it Love." 
 
 Is it not like coming from a conservatory 
 into the open air ? The longing maiden, as the 
 old poet saw her, could print her thoughts in 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 147 
 
 lawn as a pastime. Think of the task had she 
 come within ken of the author of " Two in the 
 Campagna " ! The dear little thing would be 
 still at it, — 
 
 ** With fingers weary and worn, 
 With eyelids heavy and red,'* 
 
 her needles turned divining-rods, the letters 
 grown hieroglyphs, and the virgin lawn stretch- 
 ing away from her virgin lap into interminable 
 space. 
 
 We cannot help feeling that the old-stylers 
 are right in the opinion that certain things in 
 this mutable world are pretty well fixed, after 
 all; among them, the few underl5dng principles 
 of literature, whether verse or prose. In our 
 appeal to authority (for such, not originality, is 
 the aim of this paper) going no further back 
 than 1589, let us call up old George Putten- 
 ham, author of " The Arte of English Poesie." 
 " Six points," he says, " set downe by our 
 learned forefathers for a generall regiment of 
 all good utterance, be it by mouth or by writ- 
 
148 THE GOLDEN GUESS IV 
 
 ing." It must have " decent proportion " ; " it 
 ought to be voluble upon the tongue, and tun- 
 able to the eare " ; it must not be " tediously 
 long " ; it must be of an " orderly and good 
 construction " ; it must be " sound, proper, and 
 naturall speech " ; it should be " lively and 
 stirring." 
 
 Coleridge speaks plainly, while the older law- 
 giver passes a severe sentence : a large propor- 
 tion of Browning's work is shut out, not only 
 from the presence of poetry but, from the pre- 
 cincts of " good utterance." Browning need 
 follow no predecessor in the application of the 
 fixed laws of poetic utterance, but he must 
 apply these laws in some way ; he must estab- 
 lish the kinship. Where he does this, he is a 
 poet ; where he does not do this, whatever else 
 he may be, he is not a poet. The judgment 
 here formed is, that he often fails in this partic- 
 ular ; hence, that only a part, the smaller part, 
 of his writing can be called "just," "legiti- 
 mate," poetry. 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 149 
 
 Though the two be dissimilar enough, Brown- 
 ing has many points in common with Byron. 
 Both build on the strong foundation of com- 
 mon-sense ; both have a fondness for foreign 
 themes, and their literary appetites crave the 
 flavor of the forbidden fruit ; both are followers 
 of the off-hand method, the one frequently mis- 
 taking oratory for poetry, the other talk for 
 song; and neither fosters the precious faculty 
 that tells what to omit and when to stop. 
 Byron's fame is paying the penalty : posterity 
 is busy weeding and whittling. Again, thought 
 on this vigorous man-of-the-world writer, oddly 
 enough, calls up the thin, mild visage of our 
 revered Concord recluse. Both are poets, both 
 are teachers, both struggle when it comes to the 
 poetic utterance ; though it must be said that 
 the success of Emerson in his crystal inter- 
 vals of emancipation, is beyond the reach of 
 even the Browning of forty years ago. Yet 
 again, between Browning and a third brother 
 is a still more striking family likeness. Fully 
 
150 THE GOLDEN GUESS rv 
 
 as robust, fully as neglectful of form, fully as 
 intent on the promulgation of a gospel, fully 
 as positive and stanch, marching at the head 
 of his following of apologists, is this brother 
 number three — or, better, number one — who, 
 lounging on Yankee grass, sends his " yawp " 
 over the roofs of the world. Let the lawgivers 
 of the " poetry of the future " name the strains 
 of these mighty pipers as they may, those of us 
 cabined in the present — " bound in to saucy 
 doubts and fears " — can fasten the fact that 
 they two are of one blood. 
 
 Browning's awkwardness, abruptness, and 
 obscurity are said to spring from a desire for 
 condensation. Well, waiving the more prob- 
 able cause, congenital anfractuosity of intellect, 
 how is condensation best effected ? Is it by 
 omitting the parts of speech indispensable to a 
 complete sentence, or by focusing the thought 
 in few words? To borrow from Hazlitt, is it 
 by the decomposition of prose that we arrive at 
 the composition of poetry? Browning con- 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 151 
 
 denses by the phrase, elaborates by the volume. 
 For example, to set forth the lesson that we 
 should lead a full life, and, having so done, 
 be ready to rest, he will write perhaps a book ; 
 while a true economist in expression teaches 
 the same lesson in four verses : — 
 
 ** I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; 
 Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art; 
 I warmed both hands before the fire of life; 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 
 
 That is true condensation; moreover, good 
 English, the result of pure art — simple, direct, 
 beautiful. One cannot let go such a quatrain ; 
 it stands, a " Mecca of the mind." Gray, too, 
 aimed at condensation, but what does he couple 
 with it ? " Extreme conciseness of expression,'* 
 he says, " yet pure, perspicuous, and musical." 
 And what does Coleridge couple with conden- 
 sation ? His words are, " Boundless fertility, 
 and labored condensation of thouglit, with per- 
 fection of sweetness in rhythm and metre — 
 these are the essentials in the budding of a 
 
152 THE GOLDEN GUESS IV 
 
 great poet. Afterward habit and consciousness 
 of power teach more ease — prcecipitandum li- 
 herum spiritumy Comparatively few of Brown- 
 ing's verses linger in memory ; had he the power 
 of artistic, of true condensation, it would be 
 otherwise. 
 
 Much is said about Browning's emotional 
 nature. He is rich in emotion, as he is in intel- 
 lect, but the same obstacle in the way of his 
 taking the reader's mind confronts him when 
 his goal is the reader's heart ; and it has grown 
 to even more formidable proportions. It is 
 clear, interesting thought, spoken with the 
 " golden cadence," that starts the flesh creeping 
 as we read ; the golden cadences are 
 
 ** The golden keys that ope 
 The sacred, sympathetic source of tears." 
 
 One of the sincerest of Browning's admi- 
 rers, speaking of his style, uses the adjective 
 " chatty." This seems to us a decidedly happy 
 hit. 
 
 Browning's Letters and Chats — perhaps that 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BKOWNING? 153 
 
 were not a bad title for much of the work 
 now labelled so thoroughly, so prodigiously. 
 Right admirable letters and chats they are, for 
 the most part ; poetic, too, at times ; but poetry 
 — the very titles forbid it. Women chat, men 
 chat; but the muses, if they drop to it, it is 
 after a fashion no nearer our own than that of 
 " The Talking Oak." The familiar quality, the 
 hail fellow well met, the slap on the shoulder 
 element, is very strong in Browning; an evi- 
 dence of good nature, of warm sympathy, of 
 delightful comradeship, but hardly the evidence 
 to advance the claim of the artist. Art, the 
 most genial, smacks of the aristocratic ; art, the 
 most benevolent, gentle, sympathetic, maintains 
 a certain austerity. The muses, though they 
 draw very near, never suffer us to put our 
 hands on them ; many may believe it a personal 
 experience, but no man has held Beauty herself 
 in his arms. 
 
 As has been said, there is a tendency, at pres- 
 ent, to blur the sharp line dividing prose from 
 
154 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 verse. The fence is down, for example, between 
 Sir Thomas Browne, De Quincey, Carlyle, 
 Ruskin, and the field of song. Truly enough 
 Ruskin's characteristic tribute to the mosses 
 comes closer to poetry than many a page of 
 Browning, yet it is simply prose. Ruskin, a 
 consummate master of style, never forgets that 
 poetry is a different thing from prose ; that it 
 has a longer and a higher reach, that it has a 
 subtile inexplicable power which prose may not 
 hope to attain. All his descriptive writing put 
 together, he says, is not worth three lines of 
 Tennyson. 
 
 That Browning crosses and recrosses the 
 dividing line between poetry and prose, is 
 proven by the fact that much of his work loses 
 little or nothing, in fact gains, by passing 
 back, here and there, into pure prose, the prose 
 of a sympathetic, scholarly interpreter. The 
 obscurity, the circuitous crudeness and the hair- 
 splitting make welcome an abbreviated, straight- 
 forward, half -prose rendering ; and we need look 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 155 
 
 for no further proof that work of which this 
 may be truly said, is devoid of poetic form, if 
 not of poetic substance, and, consequently, is 
 not poetry. 
 
 " Whatever lines," says Coleridge, " can be 
 translated into other words of the same lan- 
 guage, without diminution of their significance, 
 either in sense or association, or in any other 
 feeling, are so far vicious in their diction." . . . 
 " That ultimatum which I have ventured to 
 propose as the infallible test of a blameless 
 style ; namely, its untranslatableness in words 
 of the same language without injury to the 
 meaning." 
 
 A scholarly expositor may give us, in terms 
 half and half of poetry and prose, the gist of 
 the advocate's argument in the " Ring and the 
 Book," and we will thank him, perhaps ; but we 
 would emphatically excuse him from a corre- 
 sponding version of the lines from the old dram- 
 atists before quoted. The poet suffers no man 
 or thing to come between him and the reader. 
 
156 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 And this brings us back to the sign-manual of 
 the poet's perfect work — beauty. 
 
 In the midst of the present useless and dis- 
 tressing struggle to twist poetry from what it is 
 and ever must be, we shall do well to listen 
 once more to the simple, direct, manly, lan- 
 guage of the noblest poet of our American 
 soil : — 
 
 " Poetry is that art which selects and ar- 
 ranges the symbols of thought in such a man- 
 ner as to excite it the most profoundly and 
 delightfully. ... I suppose that poetry differs 
 from prose, in the first place, by the employ- 
 ment of metrical harmony. It differs from it, 
 in the next place, by excluding all that dis- 
 gusts, all that tasks and fatigues the under- 
 standing, and all matters which are too trivial 
 and common to excite any emotion whatever. 
 ... To me it seems that one of the most 
 important requisites for a great poet is a lumin- 
 ous style. The elements of poetry lie in 
 natural objects, in the vicissitudes of human 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING? 157 
 
 life, in the emotions of the human heart, and 
 the relations of man to man. He who can 
 present them in combinations and lights which 
 at once affect the mind with a deep sense of 
 their truth and beauty, is the poet for his own 
 age and the ages that succeed it. It is no dis- 
 paragement either to his skill or his power that 
 he finds them near at hand ; the nearer they lie 
 to the common track of the human intelligence, 
 the more certain is he of the sympathy of his 
 own generation, and of those which shall come 
 after him. The metaphysician^ the subtle thinker^ 
 the dealer in abstruse speculations^ whatever his 
 skill in versification^ misapplies it when he aban- 
 dons the more convenient form of prose and per- 
 plexes himself with the attempt to express his 
 ideas in poetic numbers,^^ 
 
 Ay, the fadeless wreath, the eternal benedic- 
 tion, can never be on the head of metaphysics : — 
 
 ** Blessings be with them, and eternal praise, 
 Who gave us nobler loves and nobler cares — 
 The poets — who on earth have made us heirs 
 Of truth and pure delight by heavenbj lays." 
 
158 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 What is the conclusion ? That, if we are to 
 know and respect the poet, we must first know 
 and respect poetry; that, if Browning be not 
 from first to last a poet, he is a poet, and, at his 
 best, a poet of all but the noblest proportions ; 
 that, if he be too often, if he be wontedly, lower 
 than the angels of song, he may still have, does 
 have, his own far-raying brightness, shining, 
 now, as one of the resistless forces of his age, 
 destined to shine hereafter, — 
 
 ** A light and landmark on the cliffs of fame." 
 
 All cannot be in any one man. Browning 
 stirs the sluggish blood, rouses the spirit, points 
 out the path to victory. He is a leader in this 
 world where leaders are too few ; a very bolt- 
 thrower, sending his hissing missiles into the 
 camp of sham, cowardice, littleness, and all 
 meanness ; he is a rounded, complete man ; a 
 helper, a teacher, a strong, unfailing friend. 
 All cannot be in any one man : were it not 
 well for the fervor of devoted discipleship to 
 
IV WHAT ABOUT BROWNING ? 159 
 
 beware the wrong that would crown him that 
 has laurels enough with wreaths he cannot 
 wear? 
 
 This for Browning in particular; and gen- 
 erally on the matter of form — for here the 
 discussion hinges — it behooves us not to 
 forget the continuous testimony of the ages 
 to the inexorable n ess of the august power so 
 lightly set aside. Shall we outgrow the golden 
 cadence ? Heaven forbid ; for in that day will 
 a thing of beauty be no more a joy ; and music, 
 scorning the ground, will have returned to her 
 native height. Personally, we throw in our lot 
 here with the old-stylers, who cannot rejoice in 
 such progress, who cannot believe in it. We 
 do not ask for the old Hebraic ring, or for the 
 clear brook-song of Greece ; we avoid the word 
 classic ; we rest content with the one simple 
 line of beauty, the eternal curve of the sky, bent 
 graciously over all ; we would leave music free 
 as it has been since the beginning in the voice 
 of waters, of birds, and of the air slumbering on 
 
160 THE GOLDEN GUESS iv 
 
 her instrument ; we bespeak no special sound 
 or shape or color of beauty, — but Beauty her- 
 self we cannot let go. Give us thought, give 
 us learning, the more the better ; but it must be 
 spoken with the golden cadence, it must bring 
 the scent and bloom of the upper fields, it must 
 remind of the features, of the motion, of the 
 sole glory of the goddess herself, if it would 
 charm, captivate, the souls of men. On the 
 shield of song and of art an unwavering hand 
 has graven the words copied on the shield of 
 Elpinus, — / hold by being held. 
 
V 
 
 TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 
 
V 
 
 TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 In a recent communication to the St. Jameses 
 Gazette^ Mr. Gosse writes as follows : — 
 
 " As we look around us in the Anglo-Saxon 
 world, nay, on the continent of Europe also, 
 we see no living figure which approaches that 
 of Tennyson in literary dignity. . . . This is, 
 perhaps, the moment to ask ourselves why Lord 
 Tennyson and not another is the confessed first 
 man of letters of the present age. In what 
 does his pre-eminence consist? To what quali- 
 ties of his mind and work does he owe it? 
 No question is more difiicult to answer, because 
 the reply depends on the combination of a 
 great number of wholly intangible forces. 
 Still, an answer shall be attempted. In the 
 first place, no pretence is made by the admirers 
 163 
 
164 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 of Lord Tennyson to claim for him eminence 
 over all his contemporaries in intellect or 
 knowledge. He is wise and full of intelli- 
 gence ; but in mere intellectual capacity or 
 attainment it is probable that there are many 
 who excel him. This, then, is not the direction 
 in which his greatness asserts itself. He has 
 not headed a single moral reform, nor inaugu- 
 rated a single revolution of opinion ; he has 
 never pointed the way to undiscovered regions 
 of thought; he has never stood on tip-toe to 
 describe new worlds that his fellows were not 
 tall enough to discover ahead. In all these 
 directions he has been prompt to follow, quick 
 to apprehend, but never himself a pioneer. 
 Where, then, has his greatness lain? It has 
 lain in the various perfection of his writing.'* 
 
 If the words "all his contemporaries" take 
 us out of the order of poets, a comparison is 
 made, here, between things too unlike for 
 comparison ; for, as we have tried to show 
 elsewhere, often the poet's kind of truth, and 
 
V - TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 165 
 
 always his intellectual processes in getting at 
 and presenting it, differ from those of other 
 reporters of life. To argue that Tennyson has 
 not headed a moral reform, has not inaugurated 
 a revolution of opinion, does no more toward 
 settling the question of his " intellect or knowl- 
 edge " than to assert that he has not compiled a 
 volume of the "New English Dictionary," or 
 that he has not met and routed the oratorical 
 forces of Premier Gladstone. If, on the other 
 hand, we are to remain within the circle of 
 poetry, we have simply to reply that the state- 
 ment;, "No pretence is made by the admirers 
 of Lord Tennyson to claim for him eminence 
 over all his contemporaries in intellect or 
 knowledge," is too sweeping. Eminence in 
 intellect and knowledge over his contempo- 
 raries in song — we have nothing to do with 
 others — is just what some of us do claim for 
 the laureate. And if asked on what this claim 
 is grounded, we answer, " On his sympathy 
 with essential truths, the poet's truths, the 
 
166 THE GOLDEN GUESS V 
 
 truths that tell us ' how to live well.' " By 
 his grasp of these, and by the absence of 
 attempts to grasp things unessential, to grasp 
 at things out of mortal reach ; in other words, 
 by his power of discrimination, by the rare 
 quality of sound judgment on vital questions, 
 we claim that Tennyson has demonstrated his 
 superiority in intellect and knowledge to any 
 English singer of his day, Wordsworth ex- 
 cepted. What was it Thackeray said to Bayard 
 Taylor? "Tennyson is the wisest man I 
 know." And what did Fitzgerald write of the 
 poet when he was midway in the twenties ? * " I 
 felt a sense of depression at times from the 
 overshadowing of a so much more lofty intel- 
 lect than my own; this (though it may seem 
 vain to say so) I never experienced before, 
 though I have often been with much greater 
 intellects ; but I could not be mistaken in the 
 universality of his mind; and perhaps I have 
 derived some benefit in the now more distinct 
 consciousness of my dwarfishness." 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 167 
 
 As to the " new worlds '' and the " undis- 
 covered regions of thought," it is not too 
 much to say that, since the exhaustive dis- 
 coveries of the ancient Hebrew and Greek 
 poets, the great poets of all lands and times 
 have found ample room for the play of their 
 powers in traversing anew and reporting more 
 in detail, according to the bent of their several 
 abilities and to the demand of their day, the 
 regions and worlds they were not the first to 
 enter, — the domain that every man enters that 
 is born into time, and that every man must 
 abide in, whether he will or no, till under cover 
 of the dismissing shadow he takes his way, 
 once and for all, out of it. Tennyson, then, 
 shows his superiority in intellect by refusing to 
 strain after new regions and new worlds, and 
 by husbanding his strength for a right interpre- 
 tation of so much as is interpretable of the 
 regions and worlds so familiar and yet so 
 dimly seen. The grand mistake of Tennyson's 
 most intellectual compeer, has been his standing 
 
168 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 on tip-toe for the discovery of new worlds be- 
 yond the ken of song ; this and his neglect of 
 the requirement of song second only to respect 
 for its boundary lines, — expression. He has 
 stood on his tip-toes, and his followers — beg- 
 ging their pardon — have stood on their heads ; 
 yet, here we are, in the same old regions, in the 
 same old worlds. The great poet is not given 
 to gymnastics either in thought or in speech ; 
 he simply stands fair and square on his feet. 
 So Tennyson stands, toe and heel on solid 
 ground. 
 
 A nice balance of noble faculties, whole- 
 ness of power — this, we take it, indicates 
 strength of intellect. There is no crack here 
 like that, for example, in the brain of lovely 
 old Cardinal Newman ; no twist like that in 
 the brain of Browning; no abnormal develop- 
 ment like that in the faculties of Swinburne. 
 Browning sees, knows, innumerable things, but 
 his intellect is defective in the part or portion 
 of it that determines which are the poetic 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 169 
 
 things; yes, which are the things, whether 
 for the poet or for the prose writer, for the 
 man, letters aside, it is worth while to strive 
 for, to spend time over. Again, when he sees 
 aright, his tongue, so far as concerns the needs 
 of poetry, is prone to balk his sight : he sees, 
 but cannot tell. Swinburne, on the contrary, 
 limited in vision, has immeasurable utterance. 
 From Browning we get too much matter, from 
 Swinburne too little. Tennyson is superior 
 in intellect to these one-sided poets in that 
 he is two-sided ; to these half-poets in that he 
 is a whole poet : he discriminates and sings, he 
 sees, knows, and tells. While Mr. Gosse is 
 right in ascribing to Tennyson's work the 
 quality of " various perfection," this is by no 
 means taking the measure of the poet. As 
 cannot be said too many times, " the power of 
 the poet turns on intellect." 
 
 Nor do we think that complete success 
 attends a like effort of a second eminent 
 scholar and critic — ar wooer of the muse, too 
 
170 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 — Professor Dowden. In his essay entitled 
 " Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning," he 
 says : — 
 
 "Mr. Tennyson has a strong sense of the 
 dignity and efficiency of law — of law under- 
 stood in its widest meaning. Energy nobly 
 controlled, and ordered activity delight his 
 imagination. Violence, extravagance, immoder- 
 ate force, the swerving from appointed ends, 
 revolt — these are with Mr. Tennyson the 
 supreme manifestations of evil." 
 
 This is well said ; and, in his respect for 
 law, Tennyson does not forget — what we 
 should least of all forget that he remembers — 
 the law that governs the poet. It is his respect 
 for this particular law that has fostered his 
 genius into the fulness, the luxuriousness, of 
 its blossoming. But Professor Dowden finds 
 that respect for law, while it fortunately does 
 not shut out the idea of God from Tennyson's 
 poetry, permits only a slight recognition of 
 "special contact of the soul with the Divine 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 171 
 
 Being in any supernatural ways of quiet or 
 of ecstasy." In other words, Tennyson, stand- 
 ing on the ground of modern science, is " pre- 
 cluded " from " all spiritual rapture." 
 
 We must not decide that Tennyson is defi- 
 cient in spiritual rapture, or enthusiasm, be- 
 cause he never lets it overwhelm his judgment 
 when in the temple of art and in the presence 
 of his readers. This would be as wrong as to 
 decide that his reach of mind is short because 
 he never attempts to soar in regions where 
 there is no air to stay the wings. Spiritual 
 rapture, or enthusiasm, is indispensable to the 
 great poet, but it must be of the right kind. 
 Sir Thomas Browne, according to Coleridge, 
 was a "sublime enthusiast, yet a fantast, a 
 humorist, a brain with a twist." Professor 
 Dowden gives us the " sublime enthusiast," 
 but makes no mention of the important " yet " 
 and what follows. Enthusiasm has been de- 
 fined by one that was no stranger to spirit- 
 ual rapture, as a " divine serenity." It will 
 
172 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 hardly be denied that Tennyson has this kind 
 of enthusiasm. 
 
 But, suppose for a moment, that Tennyson 
 fails as an enthusiast, moreover that he stands 
 convicted of British insularity, moreover that 
 he lays too little stress on the "distinguished 
 success " of " heroic failure " — suppose these 
 shortcomings and many others proved; may 
 the student of poetry hope to increase his 
 knowledge by heeding a counsellor, never so 
 scholarly, that can compare any lines of 
 Tennyson with such lines as these? 
 
 " When liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, 
 
 nor the second or third to go, 
 It waits for all the rest to go — it is the last. 
 When there are no more memories of heroes and martyrs. 
 And when all life, and all the souls of men and women are 
 
 discharged from any part of the earth. 
 Then only shall liberty, or the idea of liberty, be discharged 
 
 from that part of the earth. 
 And the infidel come into full possession." 
 
 This is poetry ! This is the sort of compo- 
 sition in which " there is found for the eyes a 
 certain phosphorus, for the taste a certain nee- 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 173 
 
 tar, for the attention an ambrosia " ! This is 
 poetry, and Kinglake's Sphinx nothing but 
 prose I 
 
 Incredible as it sounds, the Professor of 
 English Literature in the University of Dublin 
 would have us understand that the liberty lines 
 are poetry. Other critics, distinguished for 
 their attainments, would have us understand 
 the same thing. We must withhold our 
 assent; indeed, we must cry out against this, 
 and ever after view with suspicion the move- 
 ments of these learned leaders often as they 
 set foot on the poet's ground. When a coun- 
 sellor in poesy, ay, a poet, can call the liberty 
 lines poetry, can so far forget what poetry is, 
 he can easily fail to discover who is sponsor 
 for it in our time. Next it will be hardly less 
 difficult to find that the laureate's work is to 
 remain to a certain type "futile and false"; 
 not more difficult, in fact, than it is for us to 
 perceive that we are to meet forthwith a 
 doughty champion of Browning — not so much 
 
174 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 of Browning, the poet, as of Browning, the 
 analyist, the specialist in complex emotions, 
 or Browning, the rhapsodist, the exhorter. 
 
 Though Professor Dowden is discussing the 
 philosophy of Tennyson and Browning, he 
 claims to remember that they are "before all 
 else artists"; his avowed aim is to deal with 
 poetry as well as with philosophy. He con- 
 tinues : " As we started with the assumption 
 that Mr. Tennyson has a vivid feeling of the 
 dignity and potency of law^ let us assume, for 
 the present, that Mr. Browning vividly feels 
 the importance, the greatness and beauty of 
 passions and enthusiasms, and that his imagi- 
 nation is comparatively unimpressed by the 
 presence of law and its operations." We have 
 to read but a page of Browning, perhaps, to be 
 convinced that he is " comparatively," perhaps 
 superlatively, "unimpressed by the presence 
 of law " ; it is harder, however, to make sure 
 that he feels deeply the " beauty " of the pas- 
 sions. Unquestionably he has a distinct per- 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 175 
 
 ception of their " greatness " ; but had he as 
 distinct a perception of their beauty, or of the 
 beauty of aught else, he would display, as a 
 poet, a proportional perception of the beauty 
 of poetic expression, of the loveliness of poetic 
 utterance. Poetry is no more soul than body, 
 and the fact that Browning is comparatively 
 unimpressed by this law of beauty, establishes 
 at the start his artistic relation to Tennyson. 
 
 But setting aside the artist for the philos- 
 opher, does not Professor Dowden's analy- 
 sis, after all, support our view of Tennyson's 
 pre-eminence in intellectuality, in worth, sanity, 
 wholesomeness ? Both Tennyson and Brown- 
 ing are declared to be optimists, both believe 
 in the progress of the race ; but, while with 
 Browning this progress is "dependent on the 
 production of higher passions and aspirations," 
 with Tennyson the chief instruments of it are 
 a " vast increase of knowledge and of political 
 organization." Important as intuitions and 
 yearnings are, it would seem safer to look 
 
 Of mn 
 
 VTriVBRSITT; 
 
 oar 
 
176 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 for progress among the masses of the modern 
 world through knowledge, gained from long 
 experience, and wisely applied to their gov- 
 ernment, than to look for it through the 
 highest passions and aspirations. Indeed, 
 it is not easy to understand how the loftiest 
 aspirations can make headway, unguided by 
 sober, plodding knowledge. The practical 
 class which, first and last, ask poets what they 
 teach, are most freakish folk ; for the teaching 
 that pleases them best is, oddly enough, illy 
 fitted to the uses of this world. It may be 
 excellent for some other world — where, by 
 the bye, they may have their own poets — but 
 to be practical for us at present it must serve 
 upon the humble mother ground. Thus far, 
 judgment has been found more useful to the 
 denizens of earth than has passion; and it 
 is simply consistent in one that puts the pas- 
 sions befoi« judgment, to give not a little time 
 and strength to the laudation of failure. A 
 series of failures, if it be operative for ins true- 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 177 
 
 tion, puts ribs into the suspicion that the 
 victim is not obeying the safest rules of con- 
 duct for the world he inhabits. 
 
 But we are making a far journey for matter 
 not as good as we have at home. 
 
 "If you miss Browning's psychology," says 
 Stedman, "you find [in Tennyson] a more 
 varied analysis, qualified by wise restraint." 
 Again, " In Tennyson's artistic conscientious- 
 ness, he is the opposite of that compeer who 
 approaches him most nearly in years and 
 strength of intellect." 
 
 Of a truth, Tennyson's admirers do claim for 
 him superiority in intellect and in knowledge 
 over his contemporaries in song, one and all; 
 and the reason for their claim is to be found in 
 the old definition of the great poet, the old and 
 eternal definition, formulated anew by Matthew 
 Arnold : " The great poet is he that makes the 
 most powerful application of essential ideas to 
 life ; this always under the laws of poetic beauty 
 and poetic truths 
 
178 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 A clear, steady outlook on the world, an eye 
 as sure to catch the gold of the star as the star 
 is to give it out to the darkness, — the gift of 
 the seer; sympathy, earnestness,^ desire swift 
 and strong, thrice admirable under perfect con- 
 trol, — the gift of temperament ; melody, mar- 
 vellous melody, and harmony of utterance ; 
 illumination, the last far charm of art, the 
 occasional accent beyond the reach of art — 
 the gifts of voice, — all tliis must be found in 
 a great poet; it is all found in Tennyson. 
 This seems to us the fact to begin with in an 
 attempt to reach the secret of the laureate's 
 power. From this starting-point we naturally 
 proceed on direct lines, and we are not likely 
 to be bogged in secondary questioning which 
 finds him neither an epic nor a dramatic poet ; 
 which finds he has spoken cautiously, perhaps 
 narrowly, on questions political and' theologi- 
 cal ; has failed to prove himself in person or by 
 pen a graceful mover in society, or the hailest 
 of fellows well met ; and which, for a culminat- 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CKITICS 179 
 
 ing discovery, finds lie has not risen to the 
 sublimity of Mr. Swinburne's notion of woman. 
 
 " The best and bravest of my own contem- 
 poraries/' says Froude, " determined to have 
 done with insincerity, to find ground under 
 their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain ; 
 but to learn how much, and what we could 
 honestly regard as true, and believe and live by 
 it. Tennyson became the voice of this feeling 
 in poetry ; Carlyle in what was called prose." 
 
 Let us attain to this notion of Tennyson's 
 strength and valor, and we shall hardly stick 
 fast in the quagmire of lesser findings. 
 
 The severely " classic " taste of Fitzgerald 
 led him to decide that we have the heart of 
 Tennyson in the volume of 1842. " In Memo- 
 riam " had to him the " air of being evolved by a 
 poetical machine " ; though, he did not omit 
 to add, one of the "highest order." We 
 understand by this that in so sustained a work 
 there is wanting the impression of the inevit- 
 able ; the inevitable as it is shown, for example, 
 
180 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 in the matchless bugle song. The effect pro- 
 duced by a lyric that leaps forth, finished, all 
 aglow with the amazing radiance that is beyond 
 the reach of labor — true it is that this can- 
 not be produced by a long poem ; but, on 
 the other hand, neither can the lyric, however 
 spontaneous, however suggestive of the god, 
 evidence the sturdy staying-power justly recog- 
 nized as an important part of the great poet's 
 heritage. If the " lyrical oestrus " of " Mari- 
 ana," of the " Lady of Shalott," is not to be 
 found in " In Memoriam " or in the " Idylls," 
 neither is the lyrical oestrus of " L' Allegro," of 
 "II Penseroso," to be found in "Paradise Lost," 
 or in " Samson Agonistes." In estimating the 
 genius of Tennyson, we need not, we should 
 not, occupy ourselves with his round sixty 
 years of singing ; still we can illy spare " The 
 Princess," we cannot spare " In Memoriam," 
 and the " Idylls of the King." With " Becket," 
 forceful as it is, with "Queen Mary," and 
 " Harold " ; with the " Cup," and the " Falcon," 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 181 
 
 and emphatically with the •' Promise of May," 
 the case is different : these we may fitzgerald 
 out of the count. 
 
 " Barons and bishops of our realm of England, 
 After the nineteen winters of King Stephen — 
 A reign which was no reign, when none could sit 
 By his own hearth in peace; when murder common 
 As nature's death, like Egypt's plague, had fiU'd 
 All things with blood ; when every doorway blush'd, 
 Dash'd red with that unhallow'd passover; 
 When every baron ground his blade in blood ; 
 The household dough was kneaded up with blood ; 
 The mill-wheel tum'd in blood; the wholesome plow 
 Lay rusting in the furrow's yellow weeds, 
 Till famine dwarf t the race — I came, your Kingl 
 Nor dwelt alone, like a soft lord of the East, 
 In mine own hall, and sucking thro' fools' ears 
 The flatteries of corruption — went abroad 
 Thro' all my counties, spied my people's ways ; 
 Yea, heard the churl against the baron — yea. 
 And did him justice; sat in mine own courts 
 Judging my judges, that had found a King 
 Who ranged confusions, made the twilight day, 
 And struck a shape from out the vague, and law 
 From madness. And the event — our fallows till'd, 
 Much com, repeopled towns, a realm again." 
 
 Becketf Act I., Scene 3. 
 
 *• Menoeceus, thou hast eyes, and I can hear 
 Too plainly what full tides of onset sap 
 
182 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 Our seven high gates, and what a weight of war 
 
 Rides on those ringing axles! jingle of bits, 
 
 Shouts, arrows, tramp of the hornfooted horse 
 
 That grind the glebe to powder! Stony showers 
 
 Of that ear-stunning hail of Ares crash 
 
 Along the sounding walls. Above, below, 
 
 Shock after shock, the song-built towers and gates 
 
 Reel, bruised and butted with the shuddering 
 
 War-thunder of iron rams ; and from within 
 
 The city comes a murmur void of joy. 
 
 Lest she be taken captive — maidens, wives. 
 
 And mothers with their babblers of the dawn, 
 
 And oldest age in shadow from the night, 
 
 Falling about their shrines before their Gods, 
 
 And wailing * Save us.' " 
 
 Tiresias. 
 
 Though the excellencies of these verses may 
 be beyond the reach of any other living Eng- 
 lish poet, we miss in them the revelation, the 
 mystic individuality, of the young bard that 
 sang " Morte d' Arthur," and, holding the line 
 of triumph, passed on to the maturity of *' In 
 Memoriam," and to the perfect art of " Guine- 
 vere," a poem where strength and beauty move 
 together unobstructedly and with unbroken 
 step for the longest time recorded in the annals 
 of our language. Landor could rise to the 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 183 
 
 style of " Becket," yes, Beddoes could give us 
 
 snatches of it, could in a short, dramatic flight, 
 
 surpass it : — 
 
 " The rest that build up the great hill of life, 
 From the crutch-riding boy to his sweet mother, 
 The deer-eyed girl, and the brown fellow of war, 
 To the grey head and grandest sire of all 
 That's half in heaven, — all these are forth to-night. '* 
 
 "But "Morte d'Arthur," "Ulysses," "Titho- 
 nus," " Guinevere," are — we were about to 
 say it — as far from " Becket " as " Becket " is 
 from " Festus." 
 
 If we are to omit the "Promise of May," 
 it is equally a duty to pass "Locksley Hall 
 Sixty Years After " ; this, not because of the 
 presence of any particular sentiment, but 
 simply because of the absence of poetry. We 
 deny the right of criticism to aflSrm that 
 this piece of writing is a personal revelation ; 
 by so doing the privilege of the poet is 
 violated, and his province miserably nar- 
 rowed. Neither of the " Locksley Halls " 
 necessarily reveals more than the phrase and 
 
184 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 accent of speech of the young or of the old 
 Tennyson. 
 
 Though, as Fitzgerald rightly said, we had 
 the heart of Tennyson in the work of the first 
 twenty years of his authorship, now that we 
 have the "Princess," "In. Memoriam," and 
 the "Idylls," what is the proper attitude to 
 assume toward these grand amplifications, these 
 splendid supplements, possible to the increased 
 wisdom of years ? Shall we begin rightly with 
 their twofold gift of wisdom and beauty by 
 opining that the poet is over-modest in asserting 
 that the great threnody does not solve the 
 mysteries of life ; by deciding that the joints 
 show too plainly in the "Idylls," or that the 
 dSnouement is ethically or aesthetically deficient ? 
 This is to begin at the wrong end, at the little 
 end. Native sympathy, naked sight, will see 
 the death song as the gentlest yet manliest of 
 records; the brave, unbroken revery of grief; 
 the quiet quest of united heart and head, 
 endeavoring to fathom and voice their sorrow, 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 185 
 
 to find, as far as in us lies, a solution for, and a 
 stay against, torturing mystery, to find solace 
 for an ever-present, all but insupportable loss. 
 We shall come upon philosophy, great phil- 
 osophy, in these renewed breathings of 
 profoundly pathetic music, yet the philosopher 
 will not once displace the poet ; and we shall 
 share in a complete victory of song where 
 sturdier bards, in the clash of thought and 
 voice, have come out with soiled plumes and 
 broken blades, ay, bleeding with mortal 
 wounds. This tallest poetic monument of 
 our time displays throughout, the unchallenged, 
 unshared characteristic of Tennyson. Sus- 
 tained as the effort is, close as the one high 
 theme is held to, the thing said once is not 
 to be said again ; no cunning can better it. 
 Native sympathy, naked sight, will see in 
 this slow, patient growth of as many years as 
 Chatterton lived, a much fuller, more diversi- 
 fied and extensive flowering than that of 
 "Lycidas" or of "Adonais." There will be 
 
186 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 found the rich report of long and solemn vigils, 
 of a close and protracted watch on nature and 
 on man ; a report which, beyond the imposing 
 presentation of personal discoveries, sums the 
 discoveries of others, among whom are num- 
 bered the strongest intellects and best hearts of 
 our day. Full trust, lucid exposition — never 
 black analysis — courageous prophecy, — here 
 is a return to the old office of the poet ; it is, 
 after all, not the mourner but the seer, the 
 teacher — the seer that sees so deeply and so 
 plainly, the teacher that teaches so sweetly 
 we are hardly conscious of being taught — 
 it is, after all, the seer, the teacher, that is 
 foremost in " In Memoriam." The great truths 
 of morals and religion are once more set up, 
 this time in the trying light of modern learn- 
 ing, and with the unobstructed subtilty of 
 modern art. Such being the view of " In 
 Memoriam," the " Idylls " will appear firstly 
 as of the shadowy, evasive substance of legend; 
 secondly, it will be seen that the far-off, elu- 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 187 
 
 sive material is subdued by consummate work- 
 manship to the use of the poetic art of to-day ; 
 setting forth once more, in a manner fresh as 
 admirable, valiant, struggling man and the 
 lovely rulers, right or wrong, of his for- 
 tunes. 
 
 Full trust, lucid exposition, courageous 
 prophecy, perfect art — surely after a wrestling 
 bout with the giant Browning, after the din of 
 Swinburne, it is difficult to speak temperately 
 of Tennyson. The moment we enter his 
 presence, we have escaped chaos, we are rid 
 of unprofitable labor, are no longer stunned by 
 the empty sounds of fury ; we have no blasting 
 to do to get at his meaning, we have no wish 
 to put him out as a general conflagration. 
 Once more in the Enchanted Land, we are 
 guests of the lord of it. As runs the story 
 of the "wise birds" in the records of the 
 red man, — 
 "The spirits of Sun-place have whispered him words"; 
 
/ 
 188 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 he sings, we listen and are at rest. It is a 
 great privilege in these forgetful, distrustful, 
 and rebellious days, to meet again one of the 
 good old order of the Sons of Song ; large 
 brained, large hearted, serious, self-contained, 
 hopeful, clear and sweet of speech. 
 
 If Chaucer was the " first finder of our fair 
 language," Tennyson is the last finder of it; 
 and because of this, not less than because of 
 his years, is to be numbered among the fathers 
 of song. The initial tribute due him is, that, 
 long as he has sung, he has never misappre- 
 hended nor forgotten his office. Wholly in 
 sympathy, always in touch, with the rapid 
 development of knowledge characterizing the 
 period, the one singer found in the front rank 
 of the marvellous march of science, while 
 absorbing all and subduing it to continuous 
 use, he has encroached on the province neither 
 of the pulpit, of the platform, nor of the 
 editorial chair ; but, leaving to moralists and 
 propagandists what is rightfully theirs, has 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 189 
 
 reverently kept the old poetry road. The 
 name Tennyson is at once a guaranty for pure 
 song, and a warning against every vicious 
 mixum compositum of literature ; throughout 
 the laureate's work, poem by poem and line by 
 line, is heard a sovereign rebuke to the 
 effrontery of rattling, brassy poetastry and 
 husky mongrelism. 
 
 We hear, of late, hoarse apostate voices raised 
 to banish youth and beauty ; but they will 
 hardly cry barren the double font, the twin-fed 
 spring whence issue all the rivers of song, 
 whence issues this last river of it, the long 
 golden flow of Tennysonian melody, for a half- 
 century singing up the commonplace to the 
 level of the rare, for a half-hundred years sing- 
 ing the monotonous days bright with ever- 
 changing radiance. Has Tennyson fallen short, 
 has he offended ? He may be forgiven all, for 
 the sake of his allegiance to the beautiful, to 
 the good. All latter-day clamor to the con- 
 trary, the poet holds the old place ; he is still 
 
190 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 the servant of beauty. Each singer has his 
 own way of serving ; Tennyson has his way, as 
 individual as it is faithful. Keats was truly 
 the chosen darling of beauty; his wavy head 
 was seldom raised from her breast, where it 
 soon sank, pillowed forever. Tennyson, of a 
 hardier nature, a man grown, beauty's lover, is 
 a true son of the rugged race of man ; who, if a 
 familiar figure at gatherings of the gods, is 
 there in the employ of the good mother ground. 
 He goes but to return duly, bringing with him 
 lavish gifts for our solace and delight. This 
 poet has wings, still in his highest flight he 
 soars no higher than the heart and head of 
 humanity, mindful that, — 
 
 . . . *< the talk 
 Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk 
 Of the mind's business, is the undoubted stalk 
 True song doth grow on.'* 
 
 We have said that Tennyson may be par- 
 doned many shortcomings for the sake of the 
 bottom virtue of being first and last a poet. If, 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 191 
 
 poet of the ground, he is, unlike Shelley, poet 
 of the air ; if he is unlike Keats, in that even 
 the realized fairyland of Greece cannot draw 
 him from the parent soil; if, unlike Words- 
 worth, he is always a poet, he has still fewer 
 points in common with the Georgian torrent, 
 the resistless misanthrope, who deemed his 
 habitual achievement an impossibility. "No 
 poetry," Byron writes Murray, "is generally 
 good — only by fits and starts — and you are 
 lucky to get a sparkle here and there." The 
 " sparkle " theory will work, last of all, in the 
 case of Tennyson. His is the steady glow be- 
 tokening the poet always a poet; and by this 
 constancy, this excess, of light, perhaps the 
 clearest-sighted of his readers — accustomed to 
 the heavy dappling of shadow in the region of 
 fit-and-start song — are not a little blinded. A 
 recent observer has registered a much wiser 
 saying than Byron's, applicable alike to the 
 work of the poet singly and to that of his 
 period : " Great excellence has from the begin- 
 
192 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 ning of things been more uniform than medioc- 
 rity." Uniformity of great excellence — the 
 expression is pre-eminently pertinent to the 
 verse of our venerable representative of song 
 for the present time. 
 
 Nor is uniformity of excellence all ; the uni- 
 formity is discoverable along many distinct, 
 widely diverging lines. When we consider 
 Tennyson, we must bear in mind not simply 
 inimitable lyrics, some of them unsurpassed in 
 any language; not simply magic landscapes 
 which so mate the mind and heart dwelling on 
 them that it were hard to say whether they 
 belong most to nature or to man, — the human 
 rippling of the "Brook Song," the human 
 honey-dropping of the "Talking Oak"; not 
 simply the exquisitely rich descriptions of " A 
 Dream of Fair Women," or of "The Palace 
 of Art " ; not simply the profound passion 
 of "Love and Duty," or the burning words of 
 " Fatima " ; not simply the exhaustive satire of 
 " Sea Dreams " ; not simply the august dra- 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 193 
 
 matic power of " Morte d' Arthur," " Tithonus," 
 " Ulysses," or " St. Simeon Stylites," these 
 vying in might and magnificence with the lines 
 of the blind Titan of the " Paradises " ; not 
 simply the manly strength, the womanly loveli- 
 ness, the day and the night, the wondrous 
 round of the seasons, — the twofold passion of 
 earth and of the soul, borne to us in the wholly 
 new strains of the " Idylls " ; not simply their 
 composite, epic picture of humanity in its 
 might and in its weakness, fragrant, permeated 
 with the very breath of nature, and quick with 
 her fervor, yet hung aloft in the upper realm 
 of art; not simply this, nor yet that long, 
 glorious toil up through the darkness of doubt 
 to the white height of hope and peace, — the 
 divinely isolated " In Memoriam " ; — not sim- 
 ply one, but all of these and their high-born 
 kindred must we remember when we would 
 take the stature, not of the English lord, 
 but of the English poet, plain old Alfred 
 Tennyson. 
 
194 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 For more years than span the average life of 
 man his song has flowed, a full river of delight, 
 nourishing on either bank nearly every variety 
 of growth known to the inexhaustible soil of 
 song. It were meet to pause and reflect upon 
 the blessings that have come of this long, long 
 summer of song. Poetry is not the only gainer 
 by it, the sister arts have been great gainers ; 
 which means corresponding gain, immense 
 benefit, accrued to the souls of men. To 
 Tennyson more than to any other man of to-day 
 we owe the atmosphere in which song and 
 music, and painting and sculpture may live; 
 an air congenial enough to the best interests 
 of man to preserve among its treasures the 
 steadily imperiled, the always assaulted sense 
 of beauty. 
 
 Travel when and whither he may, this one 
 
 poet, we say, keeps the old poetry road. 
 
 " All nature widens upward; evermore 
 The simpler essence lower lies. 
 More complex is more perfect, owning more 
 Discourse, more widely wise." 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 195 
 
 The poet is a teacher ; but the teaching must 
 not be that of the schoolmaster, flat didacticism, 
 instruction laid down in " utter nakedness." 
 A poet might well preserve these verses, but 
 it was getting too far away from the excellent 
 substance of poetry, from the flawless material 
 that goes to the making of the "Palace of 
 Art " ; too far away from poetry, and too near 
 this : — 
 
 ** How comes law to bear eluding ? Not because of impo- 
 tence: 
 
 Certain laws exist already which to hear means to obey; 
 
 Therefore not without a purpose these man must, while 
 those man may 
 
 Keep and for the keeping, happy gain approval and 
 reward." ('* La Sasiaz.") 
 
 Habitually vital and interesting in matter, 
 straightforward, chaste and beautiful in speech, 
 — always a poet, and in many points a poet 
 of the first rank, a master of 
 
 '* high and passionate thoughts 
 To their own music chanted " — 
 
196 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 this tells in outline the story of Tennyson's 
 genius. 
 
 And which shall we call him, the poet's 
 poet or the people's poet? Here we gain 
 another glimpse into his individuality, his sweep 
 of feeling, his elasticity of intellect, his power 
 of accommodation. It were difficult to name 
 another poet to be commended with like confi- 
 dence to every inquirer, from the man of busi- 
 ness to the visionary, from the shop-girl to the 
 scholar, from the artisan to the artist. Again, a 
 poet of nature, like Burns, he is equally a poet 
 of art, like — whom? 
 
 " The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face, 
 Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still.'* 
 
 In the union of art and nature, in the creation 
 of an all-pervading, all-absorbing atmosphere, 
 Tennyson yields to none ; and, Milton and Col- 
 eridge excepted, we have had no other so em- 
 phatically a master of the music of words — 
 words rich in meaning — since Shakespeare. 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 197 
 
 Stedman says of his music that it is passion 
 itself; a statement to be profitably pondered by 
 those of the opinion that passion is not among 
 Tennyson's possessions. The faculty of musical 
 utterance, as Coleridge observes, is not an at- 
 tachment to the poet, but an integral part of the 
 imagination. Coleridge thought in music when 
 he wrote verse, Tennyson thinks in music. The 
 music and the meaning in his lines are more 
 than interwoven, they are interfused; and so 
 perfect is the fusion that the voice 
 
 " overtakes • 
 
 Far thought with music that it makes," 
 
 and, attesting virtues but imperfectly expressed 
 by the phrase, the Virgil of English verse, af- 
 firms the enchanter. 
 
 We are indebted to Tennyson, the poet, 
 as we are to Matthew Arnold, the critic, for 
 insistence on the eternal trutli that poetry 
 is one thing, and prose, the best of it, quite 
 another. In suppressed lines of the laureate's 
 written in boyhood, we may find a more open 
 
198 THE GOLDEN GUESS V 
 
 proclamation of this than in many a line 
 
 mature poets permit to stand. The verses 
 
 in the "Juvenilia" about the dying lamb, 
 
 prove the young author to be of the distinct 
 
 race of poets : — 
 
 " In a time 
 Of which he wots not, run short pains 
 Through his warm heart ; and then from whence 
 He knows not, on his light there falls 
 A shadow ; and his native slope 
 Where he was wont to leap and climb 
 Floats from his sick and filmed eyes, 
 And something in the darkness draws 
 
 It is easy to perceive differences between such 
 poems as '/At a Solemn Music," "Ode on a 
 Grecian Urn," "Three Years She Grew," "The 
 Forsaken Merman," Hunt's " Grasshopper and 
 Cricket," and Emerson's "Snow-Storm"; is it 
 less easy to perceive that they have certain es- 
 sential poetic elements in common, that they are 
 all begotten and born of the royal family of 
 song? Tennyson's work is one constant exhibi- 
 tion of this kinship ; and it is here, in the very 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 199 
 
 beginning, that he divides ways with his most 
 illustrious contemporary. Song is an inherit- 
 ance, perhaps the most precious of our inherit- 
 ances. It has come down to us in an unbroken 
 line from the great seers of old; and it is Tenny- 
 son's fortune to stand in the direct line of trans- 
 mission, to sing songs that are a legitimate 
 development of the ancestral strains. Hence, 
 while others, too, are abreast with the ideas of 
 our time, he is more successful than another in 
 the beautiful application of them to life ; his 
 every verse, every word, being a double voice, 
 — a protest against the unlawful and temporary 
 in song, and a plea for the beautiful and abid- 
 ing, for the flower, for the fragrance of thought 
 and speech. 
 
 ** So from the root 
 Springs lighter the green stalk; from thence the leaves 
 More aery; last the bright consiimraate flower 
 Spirits odorous breathes." 
 
 The bright consummate flower breathing 
 odorous spirits — such is the ancestral song, 
 
200 THE GOLDEN GUESS v 
 
 such is each transmission of it, such is Ten- 
 nyson's singing. 
 
 As a last word, let us go for poetry not to 
 the critic, foreign or native born, but to the 
 poets themselves. And when we come to Ten- 
 nyson we shall emphasize, not his sensitiveness 
 to the presence of law and order, but that 
 strange, inexpressible quality found even in so 
 small compositions as the lyrics of the " Prin- 
 cess " ; the supernal something that insures what 
 the vastest schoolmastership in verse has never 
 compassed, — immortality. Let us go to the 
 poems themselves. Then philosophy will be 
 the last thing that we shall think of inquiring 
 about, metaphysics the last thing that we shall 
 dream of inquiring about. We shall not ask 
 the poet's plant for a list of the ingredients 
 from which it sucked up the life that we see in 
 its graceful shape and lovely colors, that we 
 smell in its delicate fragrance. We shall drink 
 in with delighted eyes whatever crude phil- 
 osophic material has helped the light and the 
 
V TENNYSON AND HIS CRITICS 201 
 
 warm winds and the pure dews of inspiration 
 to nourish its perfect being ; we shall do 
 this unconsciously and blissfully, nothing 
 in our minds and hearts but the beautiful 
 flower and the wondrous fragrance, the blos- 
 som and the breath of the deathless plant of 
 song. 
 
VI 
 
 SIX MINUTES WITH SWINBURNE 
 
VI 
 
 SIX MINUTES WITH SWINBURNE 
 
 After speaking as we have of the superi- 
 ority of the laureate's subject-matter and 
 of his intellectual and emotional grasp of it, 
 we found further that we must style him the 
 greatest living master of words. In saying 
 this we were not unmindful of the unique 
 genius of the younger English singer to whom 
 we are indebted for startling manifestations of 
 the technics of his art. Our expression con- 
 cerns words rich in meaning, words that voice 
 inspiration, that are the tongue of profound 
 poetic thought. Mastery of the diction be- 
 fitting great poetry is not discoverable in num- 
 berless words, each word new to its fellow, or 
 in ringing repetitions of a few favorite words. 
 
 205 
 
206 THE GOLDEN GUESS vi 
 
 The great poet is not prodigal, but sparing, of 
 speech; none but Shakespeare — and he, rarely 
 — dare sow with the whole sack. " Poetry 
 teaches," says Emerson, " the enormous force 
 of a few words, and in proportion to the inspi- 
 ration, checks loquacity. " Here is the place 
 to begin to take the measure of the author of 
 the masterly " Atalanta in Calydon." His fling 
 at Whitman and Tupper, that they merely "ac- 
 cumulate words, " is of the boomerang sort, 
 returning to fall too near the feet of the 
 redoubtable thrower. For, speaking strictly 
 and with great poetry as the standard, Swin- 
 burne's astonishing feats of rhythm are less 
 poetry than a kind — and necessarily an infe- 
 rior kind — of music. Too definite for music, 
 they are too indefinite for poetry; nor are 
 they so much human breath as wind blown 
 through an animate harp, — hot, waste-born 
 blasts, the heat of which, like the wind de- 
 scribed by Saadi, makes the marrow boil in 
 the bones. 
 
VI SIX MINUTES WITH SWINBURNE 207 
 
 An uncontrollable flow of words, we say, 
 tells against inspiration, opposes poetry. 
 Poetry turns on intellect, on luminous, search- 
 ing thought. This first ; again, as it strikes 
 us, Swinburne's verse, as a whole, does not 
 exhibit among its excellencies the choice of 
 vital subjects, subjects that repay the patient 
 gaze of the seer. Nor do we always find the 
 more fruitful of the subjects selected well 
 thought out ; and when they are well thought 
 out we are moved to say that the verbal execu- 
 tion is still disproportionate to both the theme 
 and the ideas. Take, for example, the grandly 
 sonorous "Ave atque Vale." Here the thought 
 is appropriate and sufficient; while the music 
 per 86 is worthy of the noblest subject-matter. 
 The defect in this ode is, that the subject- 
 matter being ignoble, the disproportion be- 
 tween the music and the thought defeats the 
 effect aimed at, the high poetic effect, attained 
 only by a nice balance of thought and ex- 
 pression. 
 
208 THE GOLDEN GUESS vi 
 
 "Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over, 
 Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet, 
 Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet 
 Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover, 
 Such as thy vision here solicited, 
 Under the shadow of her fair, vast head, 
 The deep division of prodigious breasts, 
 The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep, 
 The weight of awful tresses that still keep 
 The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests 
 Where the wet hill-winds weep '' ? 
 
 When the poet, wholly a poet, looks into 
 Heaven he finds the lowest circle of it at least 
 a few feet 
 
 "Above the howling senses' ebb and flow." 
 
 Imagine Tennyson rising to the realm of 
 spirits only to plunge to this monstrously 
 mundane, this "hyperbrobdingnagian business " I 
 The wondrous verbal cunning granted, it is 
 a little strange that the subjective poverty 
 of this dirge has not prevented eminent critics 
 from mentioning it so favorably in connec- 
 tion with "Lycidas," with "Adonais," and with 
 *' Thyrsis." As one of our authorities in liter- 
 
VI SIX MINUTES WITH SWINBURNE 209 
 
 ature has said, " The poet's office is to be a 
 voice." Ay, but he does not stop there ; a 
 voice lifting " to a purer ether and a wider 
 reach of view." Shortcoming in this particu- 
 lar is insufferable when the song essays the 
 life beyond. 
 
 We breathe " purer ether " here : — 
 
 " There entertain him all the saints above, 
 In solemn troops, and sweet societies 
 That sing, and singing in their glory move, 
 And wipe the tears forever from his eyes." 
 
 There is purer ether here : — 
 
 *' That light whose smile kindles the universe. 
 That beauty in which all things work and move, 
 That benediction which the eclipsing curse 
 Of birth can quench not, that sustaining love 
 Which through the web of being blindly wove 
 By man and beast and earth and air and sea. 
 Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 
 The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me, 
 Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality." 
 
 Though our feet keep the green English 
 fields in " Thyrsis," there, too, the spirit takes 
 an upper, a "happier air." On the wings of 
 these three threnodies we take a long flight 
 
210 THE GOLDEN GUESS vi 
 
 heavenward; the dirge for Baudelaire, with 
 its marvellous melody and harmony, after all 
 suffers us to get no higher than the twin 
 sphericities of Her Stript Prodigiousness. In- 
 deed, it is less a flight upward than a dig 
 downward : the atmosphere, the sights and 
 sounds, are of the underground : — 
 ** Some dim derision of mysterious laughter 
 
 And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs — 
 These only, these the hearkening spirit hears, 
 Sees only such things rise." 
 
 A strain from " In Memoriam," in compari- 
 son, seems wafted from the angelic choir : — 
 
 " Thy voice is on the rolling air; 
 
 I hear thee where the waters run ; 
 Thou standest in the rising sun, 
 And in the setting thou art fair. 
 
 Far off thou art, but ever nigh; 
 
 I have thee still, and I rejoice; 
 
 I prosper, circled with thy voice; 
 I shall not lose thee tho' I die." 
 
 But subject-matter and thought-power aside, 
 considering Swinburne simply as an artist in 
 
I 
 
 VI SIX MINUTES WITH SWINBURNE 211 
 
 words, is he wholly masterful in technics ? 
 There is a good old rule that the highest art is 
 to conceal art. Will it be said that it is the 
 wont of the genius before us to do this ? Will 
 it be affirmed that he can be read without the 
 attention being first, if not last, on the art, 
 open and persistently conspicuous? Will it 
 be declared possible for this poet to snatch a 
 grace beyond the reach of art? It seems to 
 us much safer to say that if he passes the 
 limits of the artistic it must be for the region 
 of the artificial : — 
 
 " O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping 
 
 Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet." 
 
 It is Swinburne's misfortune, both as an 
 artist and as a seer, to be too original. The 
 poet is a reporter, a translator, not the maker, 
 of life; and with the matter of life we must 
 have the compliant manner. Swinburne gives 
 comparatively little of the matter, and surely 
 his is not the manner, of life. What he con- 
 
212 THE GOLDEN GUESS vi 
 
 temptuously terms Byron's "rhetoric" gives 
 much more of both. Byron, at his best, pro- 
 duces by simple means great effects; Swin- 
 burne, at his best, surprises us with deftness 
 in the use of technics, intricate as unsuspected. 
 Says a critic whom Mr. Swinburne admires, 
 " We do not ask from the poet linguistic feats, 
 difficulties overcome. We expect to be de- 
 lighted, entranced, even inspired, so that we 
 also, his readers, feel for a time that we, too, are 
 of the prophets." Swinburne's art, indispu- 
 table as it is, falls short of this high illusion. 
 
VII 
 
 MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 
 
VII 
 
 MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 
 
 MusAEUS terms music "man's sweetest 
 joy." With this sweetest joy the air of 
 Greece was filled. At home and in the public 
 place, toil and recreation alike were set to the 
 measures of song, the old and the young to- 
 gether invoking the mystic might that made 
 the trees and rocks thrill and wax nimble under 
 the playing of Orpheus ; the rhapsodist tuned 
 his harp before beginning to recite Homer, and 
 the tragic choruses of the later poets swept 
 over the thousands assembled, in one long wave 
 of stately melody. From Homer down, the 
 Greek poets were musicians ; indeed, the 
 sacred nine were all singers, and the pagan 
 heaven, like our own, is thronged with rejoi- 
 cing choristers. The Greeks deified poetry, and 
 
 215 
 
216 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 with it they deified music ; for these two were 
 one : the old poetry was literally song, it was 
 all sung. In the olden time the philosopher, the 
 lawgiver — the Greek word for law means also 
 song — the priest, the prophet, was a poet and 
 a singer ; setting his words to melody, he sang 
 them, accompanying his voice with a musical 
 instrument. But long before the rise of 
 Athens and of Rome — always profiting by the 
 example of Athens — we find the Egyptians 
 and the Hebrews accepting music as a divine 
 art, and paying it the highest honor. The 
 Egyptians held it in reserve for the noblest use, 
 protecting it by law from debasing innovations ; 
 while First Chronicles so blossoms with the 
 glorious public demonstrations of the great 
 poet and musician king, one is ready to be 
 lieve the ark, mounted in a new cart, was 
 being continuously driven from the house of 
 Abinadab : — 
 
 " And David and all Israel played before God 
 with all their mighty and with singing^ and with 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 217 
 
 harps, and with psalteries, and with timbrels, 
 and with cymbals, and with trumpets,^^ 
 
 The Psalms, again, are one mass of proof 
 that music and poetry, among the ancient 
 Hebrews, ministered to all the moods of those 
 "strong, excepted souls," that they were the 
 voice of their deep experience of life — deep 
 beyond all depths reached since, imperishable 
 in expression, on record forever. Music was 
 the national solace and delight. What pathos 
 in good old Barzillai's refusal to go up with the 
 singing king to Jerusalem : — 
 
 " Can thy servant taste what I eat or what I 
 drink, can I hear any more the voice of the sing- 
 ing men and singing women P^^ 
 
 The same haunting accent stamps that last, 
 memorable chapter of Ecclesiastes, where the 
 desolation is consummated at the hour when 
 " all the daughters of music shall be brought 
 low.'' And Jeremiah, when foxes hold the 
 once-glorious Hill of Zion, and the skies 
 of his people are black with famine, does 
 
218 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 not forget, amid such calamities, the loss of 
 music : — 
 
 " The elders have ceased from the gate^ the 
 young men from their musics 
 
 Meagre though it may have been, of itself, 
 as compared with our own, we probably under- 
 rate the music of the cultured ancients. In 
 view of their intellectual and spiritual advance- 
 ment, of the variety of their instruments, of 
 the lofty character of the ceremonies to the aid 
 of which music was summoned, it must have 
 been, considered independently of poetry, no 
 despicable power. The effect of music and 
 poetry, with their accessories, combined as they 
 were, for example, in the odes and tragedies 
 of Greece, we know was prodigious ; but music, 
 pure, simple — this, too, had its power. The 
 Spartans moved to the fight to the tune of the 
 flute, and Pericles and Socrates, no less than 
 the bewitching and not wholly blameless Lamia, 
 played it to enhance the passing of the quiet 
 hour. 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 219 
 
 The growth of music has been slow; it 
 was the last plant of art to come into full 
 flower. We are largely indebted to the poets 
 for its advancement. To make a new hole in 
 the flute, to add a string to the lyre, was once 
 a perilous experiment. It required courage as 
 well as skill and enthusiasm ; for the innova- 
 tion was often condemned, and the rash genius 
 bidden to resume the old instrument and the 
 old tune. Timotheus could not smite as he 
 might please ; the addition of four new strings 
 was a sufficient cause for the interference of 
 the Spartan Parliament. It spoke, and he was 
 compelled to vent his thought and passion on 
 the old seven strings. In that far-off year, 346 
 B. c, the wisdom then in power deemed that 
 to enlarge the scale was to make music effem- 
 inate. It erred, but the mistake is only further 
 testimony to the sacredness of the power strug- 
 gling toward the noonday light of our time. 
 
 The details of this long struggle, the intro- 
 duction of notation, of the time-table, of 
 
220 THE GOLDEN GUESS Vii 
 
 printing; the successive improvements of in- 
 struments — for example, the step from the 
 dulcimer to the harpsichord, from the harpsi- 
 chord to the spinet, from the spinet to the 
 piano-forte ; the labors of the Provencal poets, 
 of the monks -of the Middle Ages, the con- 
 flicts of secular and sacred song ; the com- 
 posers who, one after another, enlarged the 
 work of their predecessors, — all this we pass 
 with a glance. 
 
 Italy and Germany long had the lead, but 
 England was one day to enter the lists with 
 verve and vigor of her own. If it was at the 
 touch of Italian charm that Shakespeare's 
 songs and Milton's mask were set to delightful 
 music, before the days of Anglo-Italian art 
 there were English composers of noble masses 
 and matchless madrigals ; and we do not forget 
 that it was with the thoroughly English Purcell, 
 born in 1658, that music began a series of 
 epochal victories unbroken to this day. 
 
 Early in the eighteenth century, we see. 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 221 
 
 standing side by side, two colossal composers, 
 two Saxons, established in majesty,   — George 
 Friedrich Haendel and Johann Sebastian Bach. 
 Clear, bracing, sublime Haendel ; inexhaustible 
 Bach, music flowing from his soul with the 
 grace and purity of the water-brooks — at last 
 the time has come when they begin to take 
 their just rank as men, as intellects, as august 
 mind and soul powers, two of the sovereign 
 few destined to sway the world. The work of 
 these stupendous geniuses, and that of their 
 contemporaries and successors, is our inherit- 
 ance. Have we a right notion of this work ? 
 
 Rousseau defines music as the " art of com- 
 bining sounds in a manner agreeable to the 
 ear." This is one of the small definitions, the 
 like of which we have found barring the way to 
 a true estimate of poetry. To know music it 
 is necessary, as in the case of poetry, to return 
 to the old high notion. If the Egyptians, as 
 before noted, protected music by legal meas- 
 ures, the Greeks regarded it as of so great 
 
 >*^ 0? THB 
 
222 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 importance to the individual and to the state 
 that any deviation from the standard of pro- 
 priety, whether in the chant or in the recitative 
 of religious service, in the hymns to the gods 
 or in the voluptuous songs of revel at the 
 feasts of love and wine, was an unpardonable 
 offence. The findings of the Greeks in the 
 case of music are valuable, because, as on 
 other lines of investigation, they strike to the 
 root, fix elementary principles. The first step 
 is to acknowledge the power of music : " Musi- 
 cal training is a more potent instrument than 
 any other, because rhythm and harmony find 
 their way into the secret places of the soul, 
 on which they mightily fasten." 
 
 So Greece speaks to us in the voice of Plato, 
 whose idea England's Addison simply repeats 
 when he says, music can " manage all the man." 
 It is well, if possible, to learn how this fasten- 
 ing, this managing, is brought about; but the 
 first thing, the main thing, is to know that, by 
 one method or another, it is accomplished. 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 223 
 
 With the Greeks, then, and with the pro- 
 foundest students of life since the Greeks, let 
 us know, for once and all, that in dealing with 
 music we have to do with a power that shares 
 with poetry the sovereignty among the mys- 
 terious forces of intellectual and spiritual 
 life. 
 
 From Rousseau to Cousin is a long step. 
 " The peculiar power of music," says Cousin, 
 " is to open to the imagination a limitless career, 
 to lend itself with astonishing faculty to all our 
 moods. ... It awakens more than other arts 
 the sentiment of the infinite." 
 
 Here we begin to perceive something of the 
 immense meaning and of the extended opera- 
 tion of music. " The special and peculiar 
 sphere of music," says Hegel, " is sentiment, 
 always with the understanding that this may 
 be in the highest degree charged with intel- 
 lectual vitality." These excellent words are 
 especially valuable because of their acknowl- 
 edgment of the intellectual element in music. 
 
224 THE GOLDEN GUESS vn 
 
 Great music not only may, but must, be charged 
 with sight, with mind. 
 
 Mr. Hamilton pauses, in the midst of delight- 
 ful writing on landscape painting, to give 
 additional testimony to the presence of the 
 intellectual element : — 
 
 " I am inclined to believe that the communi- 
 cative powers of musical sounds are habitually 
 underrated. They deserve passing allusion 
 here in connection with landscape painting, 
 because music, like landscape art, is not strictly 
 what is called an intellectual pursuit, and is 
 held in exceedingly low estimation by all who 
 are insensible to it. But may not these vague, 
 musical expressions of thought and feeling be 
 the only expression possible for those thoughts 
 and those feelings? I have often felt, whilst 
 listening to great music, that something was 
 thereby communicated to me which could not 
 reach me through any other channel. Literary 
 expression is, no doubt, more practical and posi- 
 tive ; but are we quite sure that it is higher, 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 225 
 
 merely because it is more definite ? The same 
 narrow spirit of classification which roughly 
 sets down landscape painting as unmeaning, 
 would put music below poetry ; but the more 
 we understand it, the more embarrassing it 
 appears to settle its place. It may be that 
 music expresses aspirations that words cannot 
 express, and these aspirations may very possibly 
 be higher than those we utter verbally." 
 
 The reach of music toward the heart of 
 things is even longer than that of poetry ; and 
 we may say of it more emphatically that it 
 seeks the spirit, busies itself with the infinite. 
 
 "Musical! How much lies in that! All 
 inmost things, we may say, are melodious ; 
 naturally utter themselves in song. The mean- 
 ing of song goes deep. Who is there that, in 
 logical words, can express the effect music has 
 on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable 
 speech, which leads us to the edge of the 
 infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that I 
 . . . See deep enough, and you see musically ; 
 
226 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 the heart of Nature being everywhere music if 
 you can only reach it." 
 
 Such is the voice of Carlyle, speaking as 
 nobly of music as he has spoken of poetry. It 
 is a breath from the clear upper air; the marshes 
 of parlor amusement lie far below. We are on 
 the high level held by the master spirits. 
 
 "Music," responds Thoreau, "is the sound of 
 the universal laws promulgated. It is the only 
 assured tone. There are in it such strains as 
 far surpass any man's faith in the loftiness of 
 his destiny." And still another voice is borne 
 to us from the hill-top. It is Heine's : " Perhaps 
 music is the last word of art." 
 
 Poetry baffles us at last; music eludes us at 
 the very beginning of our pursuit. Music is 
 more elementary than poetry ; it is the mother 
 beauty. Poetry borrows from music, while 
 music is self-sufficient, asking no return. It 
 outstrips poetry in swift, leaping suggestion, it 
 makes a yet severer demand on the imagination. 
 Music is the parent life, the ever-sounding 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 227 
 
 sea, out of which, from age to age, have risen 
 all the shapes of excelling and imperishable 
 utterance. Formless in one sense, in another 
 sense it is all form. Submit Chladni's glass 
 plates, strewn with sand, to musical vibrations, 
 and the sand takes symmetric figures. We may 
 be sure that behind the melody there is Nature's 
 gesture, made with nicest obedience to the laws 
 of grace. The place of music among the 
 beauties is peculiar, it is the beauty of move- 
 ment: music is motion. Aristotle bends his 
 thought to this point: "Why," he asks, "do 
 rhythms and melodies, which are composed of 
 sound, resemble the feelings; while this is not 
 the case with tastes, colors, or smells? Can it 
 be because they are motions, as actions are also 
 motions? Energy itself belongs to feeling, and 
 creates feeling. But tastes and colors do not 
 act in the same way." 
 
 Helmholtz, quoting Aristotle approvingly, 
 gives us a saying too important to be omitted : 
 " It [music] arrogates to itself, by right, the rep- 
 
228 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 resentation of states of mind which the other 
 arts can only indirectly touch." We find this 
 testimony often repeated. Music speaks for 
 that in us which, otherwise, would have little 
 or no expression. Where poetry fails to utter 
 the mind and heart of man, where it ceases to 
 speak for and to these, there music makes a 
 beginning; it is the last accent of aspiration. 
 Hence, the vagueness of music, which is often 
 termed a weakness, is really its strength; the 
 indefiniteness is a necessity of the high message. 
 It may be well to dwell a moment on this 
 point ; for, if it be well taken, to music in the 
 noblest exercise of its office, words are a 
 burden, a weight upon its wings. Music and 
 poetry may unite in the production of beau- 
 tiful, of sublime work; but each has its own 
 peculiar power, and is most effective in its 
 sole strength, and within its own limits. 
 Nature guards faithfully, jealously, the bound- 
 ary lines of the arts; they cannot be blurred 
 without loss, cannot be obliterated without fail- 
 
vn MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 229 
 
 ure. The genius of Wagner can work wonders, 
 but no genius can transcend elementary laws. 
 Because of his confusion of the arts, if for no 
 other cause, Wagner could not sound the depth, 
 could not soar to the height, familiar to the free 
 but law-abiding Beethoven, the Shakespeare of 
 the world of sound. The heart of Wagner's 
 error is his opposition to nature : so far as con- 
 cerns the highest results of art, the elements 
 brought together are internecine. Because 
 music expresses what poetry cannot, and poetry 
 expresses what music cannot, is no reason why 
 the two, serving together, should double the 
 power of utterance. The circles of these two 
 arts are not coincident. The circle of poetry is 
 the smaller, it lies within the circle of music; 
 and not till music passes beyond the domain of 
 poetry does it come to its own. We are greatly 
 indebted to Wagner, but our debt to him does 
 not efface the fact that the distinct forms of 
 expression that he strove to unite in one grand 
 whole do not unite, cannot unite, in the per- 
 
230 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 fection possible to either form in the exercise of 
 its own sole energy. The line between prose 
 and poetry is fixed and ineffaceable; the line 
 between poetry and music is fixed and inefface- 
 able; the line dividing each art from the art 
 nearest it is fixed and ineffaceable. If all be 
 uncertain farther on, thus far, at least, we may 
 make sure. As for the world, so for the arts, 
 the golden compasses have swung through the 
 vast profundity, and the Voice has said : — 
 
 ** Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, 
 This be thy just circumference." 
 
 Heine is right : music is in itself a revelation. 
 This voice to the spirit is serious and truthful. 
 We have made bold to affirm elsewhere that 
 the first aim of great poetry is truth ; the same 
 must be affirmed of great music. " I take 
 music in a very serious light," says the pure 
 Mendelssohn, " and I consider it quite inadmiss- 
 ible to compose anything I do not thoroughly 
 feel. It is as if I were to utter a falsehood; 
 
vn MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 231 
 
 for notes have as distinct a meaning as words, 
 perhaps even a more definite sense." Music, 
 like poetry, rests finally on truth. Haydn, 
 with his simple, child-like trust, wrote always 
 in remembrance of his God. At the head of 
 the first page he penned In nomine Domini ; at 
 the end of the work, Lau% Deo, Music, like 
 poetry, rests finally on God. Consequently 
 we find the noblest minds and hearts of history 
 leaning on these two arts, twin-born in divinity. 
 The heart and intellect of all in our knowl- 
 edge, the man of sorrows, about to go out with 
 his chosen twelve on that agonizing errand into 
 the silent hills, first clad himself in the strength 
 of song. Of all the testimony to the power of 
 music and poetry, this record is the most preg- 
 nant and precious : " And when they had 
 sung an hymn they went out into the Mount of 
 Olives:' 
 
 The thinkers and tellers, the reporters, the 
 masters of ideas and of expression, who furnish 
 and fix in beauty nearly all the truths for 
 
232 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 a hundred, perhaps a thousand, years, those 
 destined to completeness, to the maturity of 
 which man is capable, but rarely reaches, — the 
 Solomons, the Platos, the Shakespeares, the 
 Beethovens, — recognize the high, first powers 
 that govern them and their fellows, they 
 homage music. Whither we turn, to whatever 
 clime or race of yesterday or of to-day, the 
 souls we know and love best we find knowing 
 and loving music. These find it a source of 
 perpetual power, a font of life. Where were 
 the Reformation without the man so filled with 
 music that for one of his hymns Frederick the 
 Great could find no smaller name than "God 
 Almighty's Grenadier March " ? " Luther's 
 music," says Carlyle, " is heard daily in our 
 churches. . . . The great Reformer's love of 
 music, of poetry, it has often been remarked, 
 is one of the most significant features in his 
 character. He it was, emphatically, who stood 
 based on the spiritual world of man, and only 
 by the footing and miraculous power he had 
 
Vli MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 233 
 
 obtained there, could he work such changes in 
 the material world." 
 
 The leading minds and souls — it cannot be 
 too often repeated — lean upon poetry and 
 music, and their tributes to these arts are of 
 vastly greater importance to us than the dis- 
 cussion of technical details. 
 
 Hear Heine once more, as he recalls the 
 impression made on him by the playing of 
 Paganini : " There was not one ray of hope 
 or consolation in the bottomless depths of 
 those tones. When the saints of. Heaven hear 
 such sounds^ the praises of God die on their 
 lips, and weeping, they hide their pious heads." 
 
 The question is less what does music mean, 
 than what may music not mean to the ear 
 attuned? Jean Paul Richter, warning music 
 off with frantic gesture, utters the wild cry, 
 " Away ! Away I Thou tellest me of things 
 that I have not known in all this life, and 
 shall never know ! " It is of music that Milton 
 speaks when he says ; — 
 
234 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 "I was all ear, 
 And took in strains that might create a soul 
 Under the ribs of death." 
 
 Milton, like Luther, was more than a lover 
 of music, he was a musician. In his verse the 
 musician is wont to move step by step with 
 the poet. "At a Solemn Music" is a river of 
 harmony, of itself justifying the title, "Organ 
 Voice of England." 
 
 ' Where the bright seraphim in burning row 
 Their loud, uplifted trumpets blow, 
 And the cherubic host in thousand choirs 
 Touch their immortal harps of golden wires " — 
 
 when will the music of words rise to nobler 
 strains? Browning finds in music "earnest of 
 a heaven"; Coleridge finds in it one of the 
 strongest arguments for immortality. Music 
 lifts us into the clear, upper air, toward the 
 high dwelling-place. Jean Ingelow has some 
 beautiful lines on its descent from the upper 
 home: — 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 235 
 
 ** We know they music made 
 In heaven, ere man's creation; 
 But when God threw it down to us that strayed. 
 It dropt with lamentation, 
 And ever since it doth its sweetness shade 
 With sighs for its first station." 
 
 "Music is all said to be the speech of 
 angels," speaks Carlyle; "in fact, nothing 
 among the utterances allowed to man is felt 
 to be so divine." The greater, the more orig- 
 inal — that is, the more receptive — the intel- 
 lect, the richer is the tribute to music. Let 
 Cardinal Newman bear witness : " Take another 
 instance of an outward and earthly form or 
 economy under which great wonders unknown 
 seem to be typified; I mean musical sounds, as 
 they are exhibited most perfectly in instrumen- 
 tal harmony. There are seven notes in the 
 scale ; make them fourteen ; yet what a slender 
 outfit for so vast an enterprise ! What science 
 brings so much out of so little? Out of what 
 poor elements does some master create his new 
 world I" 
 
236 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 Intellect, be it observed, must go to creation, 
 to the creation of a " new world." Only meta- 
 physics has an excuse for not seeing a truth 
 plain as that in Hegel's saying, "Intellect 
 and emotion are two inseparable elements 
 of spirit " ; and yet the hard judgment, the wis- 
 dom, underlying the emotion in great music is 
 often not so much as suspected. The sym- 
 pathetic, straight-seeing student finds it out. 
 " No man," says one of George Eliot's charac- 
 ters, "has too much talent to be a musician. 
 Most men have too little. . . . We [the mu- 
 sicians] help to rule the nations, and make the 
 age as much as any other public men. We 
 count ourselves on level benches with legis- 
 lators." Stronger yet is the language of 
 George Sand: "Music expresses all that the 
 mind dreams and foresees of mystery and 
 grandeur. It is the manifestation of a higher 
 order of ideas and sentiments than any to 
 which human speech can give expression. It 
 is the revelation of the infinite." 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 237 
 
 Such testimony must give us the case, soon 
 or late ; one day we shall be rid of the emotion 
 fallacy both in music and in poetry. Because 
 some gifted child composes meritorious sonatas, 
 at six years of age ; because a Blind Tom ren- 
 ders, after a fashion, compositions of the mas- 
 ters; because an idiot whistles tunes cor- 
 rectly, the vanity of a certain kind of intellect 
 is not to look down on music, is not to ascribe 
 it wholly to the emotions. Women exhibit a 
 richer, a finer, development of the emotional 
 nature ; where are the female composers ? To 
 glance at Beethoven's face is to see that he is a 
 strong man^ one of the giants of mind. Brain, 
 the creative power, fairly stares from it. It is 
 the face of one that has confronted life in all its 
 aspects, the face of one before whose steady 
 gaze the darkness of mystery is shot through 
 with rays of eternal day. Beethoven's face is 
 an index of the only mind among the moderns, 
 unless it be Michael Angelo's, that we mate 
 with the mind of Shakespeare ; it is the face of 
 
238 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 one that could record life in the purest, the most 
 exacting and imaginative language known to 
 man. As the days go on, fewer and fewer will 
 affirm that there is more of life, of the human 
 soul, and all that is essential to it, in " Hamlet " 
 than in the '* Ninth Symphony." Where the 
 words of the poet cease, the tones of the musi- 
 cian begin to sound, and the wondrous circle of 
 life, of knowledge, of love and hope, is closed. 
 To make these two masters our own is worth 
 all the effort required ; and it is immense. In- 
 deed, effort, unaided, can never accomplish this ; 
 we must be, in a measure, word poets and tone 
 poets ourselves. Beethoven was from youth an 
 enthusiastic student of Shakespeare. "How 
 shall I set to work to compose ? " young Wag- 
 ner asks Beethoven. " Read Shakespeare," 
 is the answer. Shakespeare has his rightful 
 place, Beethoven is yet to take his. The few 
 know him as he is ; when he comes to be so 
 known by the many, it will be an era in culture. 
 "So that genius exists," runs a saying of Schu- 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 239 
 
 bert, " it matters little how it appears, whether 
 in the depths, as with Bach ; on the heights, as 
 with Mozart; or in the depths and on the 
 heights at once, as with Beethoven." From 
 the depths to the heights — that is the range 
 of Beethoven. Schubert speaks of Beethoven 
 as we do of Shakespeare. He knows the speech 
 of music, he has sat lovingly at the feet of the 
 greatest master of that language. 
 
 A cultured critic, speaking of the scherzo 
 movement of Beethoven's "Seventh Symphony," 
 says, "No language can explain the depth of 
 thought enshrined in those awful notes sus- 
 tained by the horns in that wonderful episode 
 in D Major." The words are "depth of 
 thought.'^ One that knows Beethoven knows 
 intellect, intellect in one of its most astounding 
 phases. When that opulent and impudent 
 brother sent up his card to the poor musi- 
 cian — " Beethoven, Land-owner," what was 
 scrawled on the back of it before it was re- 
 
240 THE GOLDEN GUESS Vil 
 
 turned? Emotion-owner? No; "Beethoven, 
 Brain-owner." 
 
 It is our wont to think of the musician 
 merely as one skilled in some particular line of 
 the art's development. With the great musi- 
 cian we cannot stop there ; we must go on, as 
 did the servants of Saul in their report of the 
 royal poet and musician. Not only is he "cun- 
 ning in playing^^' but also a " mighty^ valiant 
 man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, 
 and a comely person^- Nor is the description 
 finished yet : " and the Lord is with him,'' 
 Assuredly, if the Lord is with any that cling 
 their little time to our whirling world, He is 
 with the great seers of life, the poets and the 
 musicians ; and if we are to know life, it is to 
 these seers we must turn. Culture, full life — 
 this it is we seek. It can never be obtained till 
 we add to the revelations of the Hebrew and 
 the Greek poets, of Dante, of Shakespeare and 
 Milton, the revelations of their compeers. Bach, 
 Haendel, and Beethoven. If it is well to remem- 
 
Vli MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 241 
 
 ber that the shapes of "Paradise Lost" rose 
 before the sightless eyes of Milton, it is equally 
 well to remember that the strains of the " Nine 
 Symphonies " surged, a sea, in the deaf ears of 
 Beethoven. Shakespeare opened a new world ; 
 Beethoven opened a newer and more startling 
 world. After all the leading up to them, the 
 symphonies were a revelation. We shall not 
 have the last revelation of life, — to say it once 
 more — until we know the poets, the seers ; but 
 we must know both the word poets and the 
 tone poets, both the seers of speech and the 
 seers of pure sound. 
 
 The wisdom of the world, both ancient and 
 modern, attests the value of music as a means 
 of culture. Milton in his exordium to youth 
 bids them be familiar with the "solemn and 
 divine harmonies of music, . . . which, if wise 
 men and prophets be not extremely out, have 
 a great power over dispositions and manners, 
 to smooth and make them gentle from rustic 
 harshness and distempered passions." In the 
 
242 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 " Spirit of Laws " we find a fuller statement. 
 " That judicious writer, Polybius," says Mon- 
 tesquieu, "informs us that music was necessary 
 to soften the manners of the Arcadians, who 
 lived in a cold, gloomy country; that the in- 
 habitants of Cynaetha, who slighted music, were 
 the crudest of all the Greeks, and that no 
 other town was so immersed in luxury and 
 debauch. Plato is not afraid to affirm that 
 there is no possibility of making a change in 
 music without altering the frame of govern- 
 ment. Aristotle, who seems to have written 
 his politics only in order to contradict Plato, 
 agrees with him, notwithstanding, in regard to 
 the power and influence of music over the 
 manners of the people. This was also the 
 opinion of Theophrastus, of Plutarch (Life 
 of Pelopidas), and of all the ancients ; an 
 opinion grounded on mature reflection, being 
 one of the principles of their polity." History 
 silences all question concerning the power of 
 music as a lever to better living. Matthew 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 243 
 
 Arnold, while so earnestly urging us upward 
 to a higher life, should have put music with 
 poetry as a mighty helper. He should have 
 bade these go hand in hand as of old ; for much 
 of the " best that has been thought and said in 
 the world " is to be found in the tone poetry. 
 
 Lovers of music associate its power with the 
 future ; it points them to high estates, to rich 
 possessions, somewhere in waiting. The future 
 and infinity — of these music speaks as by a 
 native necessity, by a special and sovereign 
 prerogative. Music inspires hope, pictures the 
 splendors of immortality. But the reach of 
 music into the future is hardly more char- 
 acteristic than its peculiar haunting of the 
 past. "It recalls," says Coleridge, "the deep 
 emotions of the past with an intellectual sense 
 of proportion." — Here, also, we are not left in 
 doubt as to the intellectual in music. — George 
 Eliot felt strongly the power of music over 
 the past. . . . "To feel," she says, "its won- 
 
244 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 drous harmonies searching the subtlest wind- 
 ings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life 
 where no memory can penetrate, and binding 
 together your whole being, past and present, 
 in an unspeakable vibration/' Jean Paul states 
 the power of music over the past and the future 
 in a single sentence : " When I hear music, it 
 is as if I heard a loud past or a loud future.'' 
 The pathos of poetry often finds its nearest 
 perfect expression in a call to the past; it is 
 so with music. Music identifies itself with a 
 person, place, or experience with all the sub- 
 tilty of an odor. No power can more vividly 
 recall a vanished form or face. Chaucer's 
 lover bears witness to this : — 
 
 " And if he hearde song or instrument, 
 Then would he weepe." 
 
 Music is universal in its ministry ; rare is the 
 time, place, or condition that it may not serve. 
 There are individuals without music; but we 
 have no record of a nation destitute of it. An 
 old voyager says of the Sagaleen Islanders, 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 245 
 
 "They can all educe pleasing sounds from a 
 large stalk of celery, or a species of euphor- 
 bium, open at both ends. They blow into the 
 smaller end, and the sound does not badly 
 resemble the soft tones of the trumpet.'* All 
 nations have music; and while it has been, 
 and is, to a greater or less degree character- 
 istic, it is destined to become more and more, 
 as the art advances, a test of the temper of 
 the people giving it birth, a decisive factor of 
 national life. Confucius, a century before 
 Plato, said, " Wouldst thou know if a people 
 be well governed, if its manners be good or 
 bad, examine the music it practises.'* 
 
 We need not fear lest we exaggerate the 
 importance of music ; it is the heart's bread. 
 How sweet the help to wear away the long days 
 
 " When on the knap of yonder hill, 
 The shepherd tunes his quill " I 
 
 The quill is tuned on the grassy height, while 
 within doors 
 
246 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 " All at her work the village maiden sings, 
 Nor while she turns the giddy wheel around, 
 Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things." 
 
 If Ovid's miner is singing his untaught music 
 amid the clanking of his chains, the sailor is 
 trolling his wild song in mid-ocean: wherever 
 toil is, there, too, is music. 
 
 But, while finding that music is not only the 
 friendliest, but, at its highest, the purest of 
 arts, of the powers that hold sway over heart 
 and mind, can we go so far as to find, with Jean 
 Paul, that it is unable to express the impure ? 
 On the contrary, if we bear in mind that music 
 is the most direct expression of desire, that it 
 is emphatically the voice of our inmost secrets, 
 that it may utter pleasingly thoughts and feel- 
 ings that would offend, even shock, us if 
 couched in the cruder form of words, we shall 
 be more likely to conclude that its strength may 
 be as dangerous when perverted as it is benefi- 
 cent when rightly employed. The powers have 
 a white and a black side. As far back as the 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 247 
 
 days of Amos, we find music inveighed against 
 as the accessoiy in iniquity of them that " lie 
 upon beds of ivory^ and stretch themselves upon 
 their couches^ and eat the lambs out of the flock^ 
 and the calves out of the midst of the stall ; . . . 
 that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves 
 with the chief ointmentsJ^ Here, plainly enough, 
 music is the companion of sloth, gluttony, and 
 all the tribe of debauch. There is a severe 
 Talmudic saying that serves in this connection : 
 " The ear that often listens to music shall be 
 rooted out." And Plato has a pertinent word : 
 " Damon will tell you what sounds are capable 
 of corrupting the mind with base sentiments, 
 or of inspiring the contrary virtues." He 
 says further, that the Egyptians permitted only 
 certain moral music to reach the ears of the 
 young. When the Trojan lover declines to 
 battle with Menelaus, Hector scoffs at 
 
 " His graceful form, instilling soft desire, 
 His curling tresses and his sylvan lyre." 
 
248 THE GOLDEN GUESS vn 
 
 And there is no mistaking the drift of Gloster's 
 "lascivious pleasing of the lute." The lute 
 as touched in the lady's chamber, and the 
 " low, voluptuous music " winding through the 
 "Palace of Sin," tell us that Jean Paul and 
 Montesquieu go too far when they affirm that 
 music cannot express the impure, that it is the 
 only art that does not corrupt the mind. 
 
 Much has been said, old and new, of the 
 power of music over disease. Pythagoras rec- 
 ommends it for mental disorders, while Thales 
 is said by means of it to have stayed the rav- 
 ages of a pestilence at Sparta. Undoubtedly 
 music is remedial in cases of nervous affection, 
 is medicinal to unquiet minds. In a runic 
 chapter of " Hava-mal," music and poetry com- 
 bine to produce a panacea : " I am possessed of 
 songs ; such as neither the spouse of a king, 
 nor any son of man can repeat ; one of them 
 is called the Helper : it will help thee at thy 
 need, in sickness, grief, and all adversities." 
 
 *' Grief who need fear 
 That hath an ear ? '* 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 249 
 
 asks a sixteenth century poet ; and Shakespeare, 
 as always, comes to the heart of the matter at 
 a stroke : — 
 
 ** In music is such art, 
 Killing care and grief of heart." 
 
 Nor does the influence of music stop with 
 man. The lines beginning, 
 
 " For do but note a wild and wanton herd," 
 are a masterly exhibition of its control over the 
 creatures beneath him*. 
 
 Given music's power over manners and mor- 
 als, its influence in religion is obvious. There 
 is serious truth in Dr. Holmes's 
 
 " Not all the preaching, O my friend, 
 Comes from the church's pulpit end." 
 
 Milton tells us what church music should be 
 — a thing, unfortunately, very different from 
 what it is — 
 
 ..." With sweetness through mine ear 
 
 Dissolve me into ecstasies. 
 
 And bring all heav'n before mine eyes." 
 
250 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 It is too true that we no longer take either 
 music or poetry for what they are. The old 
 notion has well nigh faded out. Pythagoras 
 deemed it a wise expenditure of his time to ad- 
 vance the art by careful research, Aristotle to 
 dwell on its power over morals, Plato to explain 
 its use as a means of bringing man into har- 
 mony with himself and his surroundings ; our 
 wise men, our philosophers, think best to busy 
 themselves with other things. Were it not bet- 
 ter in the matter of music, as in the matter of 
 poetry, to return to the old notion, to hold dear 
 the companionship of this most friendly, this 
 beneficent and unfailing power ? Reflect, for a 
 moment, how closely it is interwoven with every 
 fibre of life. Music has attended the world 
 from its birth : it is an inheritance of the ele- 
 ments, a gift to all living things, rising higher 
 and higher till it moves the mind and heart, 
 and shapes the expression, of immortal man. 
 Carlyle is right: the heart of nature truly is 
 music. Touch her, move her, anywhere, and 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 251 
 
 the response is melody. The singing of the 
 Egyptian sands is typical of nature throughout : 
 all is music, all is song. It was a profound 
 imagining of Pythagoras, that music of the 
 spheres. Soon as man listened he heard a voice, 
 and felt that it reached so far beyond the human 
 limit that perchance the roving stars might 
 catch it, to repeat upon their shining round. 
 This is too beautiful, too true, an imagining for 
 the great poets to overlook. We come upon it 
 again in " Paradiso," again in the Christmas 
 ode, — 
 
 ** Ring out ye crystal spheres," 
 
 and once more as an ornament of the one 
 perfect love poem of the world : — 
 
 ** There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims." 
 
 Shakespeare knew the power of music. Only 
 music itself can surpass the strength and deli- 
 cacy of his words concerning it. No other 
 
252 THE GOLDEN GUESS vii 
 
 poetry comes so near as Shakespeare's to slipping 
 back from articulation into the mother sound : — 
 
 ** That strain again! it had a dying fall: 
 Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south, 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
 Stealing and giving odour ! " 
 
 The "Tempest" is one superb verbal sym- 
 phony. Soft, viewless viols of love lure Fer- 
 dinand to Miranda's bower : — 
 
 *' Where should this music be ? I' th' air or th' earth ? 
 It sounds no more ; and sure, it waits upon 
 Some god o' th' island." 
 
 Sweet breathings, as from the realm of sleep, 
 
 enchant even savage Caliban ; while stern voices 
 
 of the grand chorus hymning forever the good 
 
 and beautiful, stun the guilty soul of King 
 Alonso : — 
 
 ** Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it, 
 The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, 
 That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd 
 The name of Prosper: it did base my trespass." 
 
 Next after the golden cadence of Milton, in 
 its tribute to the music of nature, we may place 
 
VII MUSIC, OR THE TONE POETRY 263 
 
 that subtlest passage of Wordsworth, where the 
 beauty of natural music passes into the very 
 being of the lovely listener, and becomes visible 
 in her features : — 
 
 " The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face." 
 
 Yes, nature is all music ; earth, sea, and air 
 sing their numberless songs and play their 
 myriad instruments forever; but it is in the 
 eternal soul of man that are to be heard the 
 ravishing melodies, the divine harmonies. The 
 man shut out from these stands amid deplorable 
 desolation. Dismal, indeed, is his inheritance, 
 a heart "dark as Erebus." Shakespeare can 
 pronounce the curse on him whose ears are 
 closed ; for the blessing on him that has ears 
 to hear, even Shakespeare has no language. 
 
VIII 
 
 HAWTHORNE 
 
 '^ Of THl"^^ 
 
 uiriVBiisiTr! 
 
VIII 
 
 HAWTHORNE 
 
 (1.) Mr. James's Hawthorne 
 
 (2.) The Hawthorne of the " Scarlet Letter " 
 
 I 
 
 Though in strictness Hawthorne is not to 
 be numbered among the poets, we shall go 
 rather right than wrong if we take him at 
 the word of the author of the "Vision of 
 Sir Launfal " : " He was certainly the greatest 
 poet, though he wrote in prose, . . . that 
 America has given to the world." And since 
 Mr. James's study of Hawthorne has been 
 deemed, on the whole, a commendable survey 
 of our great romancer's genius, the more con- 
 venient, and perhaps the more profitable, way 
 to express our view of Hawthorne, and at the 
 same time to touch once more on what we 
 257 
 
258 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 conceive to be the right lines of criticism, is 
 to begin with a little scrutiny into Mr. James's 
 qualification for his task, and a brief considera- 
 tion of his method in the prosecution of it. 
 
 If there is any one quality requisite for a 
 critic, it is sympathy with his subject, and we 
 should hardly look first to Mr. James as the 
 man most likely to be alive with sympathy for 
 Hawthorne. Hawthorne stands for idealism, 
 imagination, and, Mr. James would add, for the 
 American spirit ; while Mr. James is a realist, 
 born and bred, a citizen of the world withal, 
 wont to delight in girding at the land that gave 
 him birth. 
 
 Disqualification is suggested at the very 
 start ; the opening page of this contribution to 
 the " English Men of Letters " series betrays a 
 suspicious loftiness: "His [Hawthorne's] works 
 consist of four novels, and the fragment of an- 
 other, five volumes of short tales, a collection 
 of sketches, and a couple of story-books for 
 children ; and yet some accaunt of .thq man and 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 269 
 
 the writer is well worth giving." Quantity, of 
 course, may become a factor of an author's title 
 to remembrance ; where, however, the quality 
 is as fine, as choice, as it is in Hawthorne, a 
 model cosmopolitan might find a better way of 
 apprising us of the fulness of his resources 
 than by instituting a search for it at the 
 outset. Had only four little volumes of Haw- 
 thorne been found, — the " Scarlet Letter," 
 "Mosses from an Old Manse," the "Blithedale 
 Romance," and a volume of the short tales, 
 — probably Mr. James's Hawthorne would 
 never have been born ; but, finally, having 
 found the chary romancer worth writing about, 
 he proceeds, on the regulation line of the later 
 scientists, to deplore his environment. "If," 
 he says, "there is something very fortunate 
 for him in the way that he borrows an added 
 relief from the absence of competitors in his 
 own line, and from the general flatness of the 
 literary field that surrounds him, there is, 
 also, to a spectator, something almost touching 
 
260 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 in his situation.'* Starting from the "almost 
 touching" point, our realistic critic is very 
 successful in following up the environment ; 
 so successful, indeed, that the figure environed 
 is well nigh lost sight of. " We are struck," 
 he continues, " with the large number of ele- 
 ments that were absent from them [his circum-* 
 stances], and the coldness, the thinness, the 
 blankness . . . present themselves so vividly 
 that our foremost feeling is that of compassion 
 for a romancer looking for subjects in such a 
 field." Then follows a list of things missing, 
 the schedule finally closing after the true 
 Anglican manner: "No great universities, nor 
 public schools, — no Oxford, nor Eton, nor 
 Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, 
 no pictures, no political society, no sporting 
 class — no Epsom nor Ascott. " 
 
 Who is really the misser, the mourner, here? 
 We feel that it is not so much Hawthorne as 
 Mr. James. Hawthorne may mention some of 
 these missing things, but it is left for Mr. 
 
HAWTHORNE 261 
 
 James to lay stress upon them, and that not 
 always with the accent of the true critic : " The 
 natural remark in the almost [not " touching," 
 this time, but "lurid"] lurid light of such an 
 indictment would be that, if these things are 
 left out, everything is left out. The American 
 knows that a good deal remains; what it is 
 that remains — that is his secret, his joke, as 
 one may say. It would be cruel in this. terrible 
 denudation, to deny him the consolation of his 
 natural gift, that 'American humor' of which 
 of late years we have heard so much." 
 
 If sympathy with his subject is one of the 
 first requisites for the critic, hardly second 
 comes a proper attitude toward all subjects, — 
 a patient, impartial spirit, a right temper. 
 
 "Hawthorne," says Mr. James, "was in his 
 disposition an unqualified and unflinching 
 American; he found occasion to give us the 
 measure of the fact during the seven years 
 that he spent in Europe towards the close of 
 his life ; and this was no more than proper on 
 
262 THE GOLDEN GUESS viil 
 
 the part of a man who had enjoyed the honor 
 of coming into the world on the day on which, 
 of all the days in the year, the great Republic 
 enjoys her acutest fit of self-consciousness. 
 
 " This seems to me to express very well the 
 weak side of Hawthorne's work — his constant 
 mistrust and suspicion of the society that sur- 
 rounded him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid, 
 national consciousness. It is, I think, an indis- 
 putable fact, that Americans are, as Americans, 
 the most self-conscious people in the world, and 
 the most addicted to the belief that the other 
 nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to 
 undervalue them. They are conscious of being 
 the youngest of the great nations, of not being 
 of the European family, of being placed on the 
 circumference of the circle of civilization rather 
 than at the centre, of the experimental element 
 not having as yet entirely dropped out of their 
 great political undertaking. The sense of this 
 relativity, in a word, replaces that quiet and 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 203 
 
 comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards 
 its own position in the world, which reigns 
 supreme in the British and in the Gallic 
 genius." 
 
 Such passages as these — and they are of the 
 pervading atmosphere of the volume — we think 
 aside from the true purpose, off the right line 
 of criticism. The writing of them is something 
 worse, indeed, than pressing minor points; it 
 is impertinence. Mr. James's avowed purpose 
 is rather criticism than biography, and he is so 
 nice in the matter that the tone of Mr. Lath- 
 rop's biography fails to please him ; " his tone," 
 he says, " is not to my mind the truly critical 
 one." Unmistakably, the goal is true criticism ; 
 but were it reached, there would be no occasion 
 to observe that the Hawthorne that is, and will 
 be remembered, is not the Hawthorne of the 
 " English Notes," nor could we get the impres- 
 sion that so much room is given the " Notes " 
 less as a means of interpreting Hawthorne's 
 genius than as a field wherein may be exer- 
 
264 THE GOLDEN GUESS vin 
 
 cised a certain serene, cosmopolitan, polished 
 causticity. 
 
 Hawthorne's "exteriority" in English society 
 admitted, we have done little toward ravelling 
 the imagination that produced the " Scarlet Let- 
 ter." The sympathetic, serious critic does not 
 trouble himself over Ascotts and Epsoms and 
 exteriorities, he escapes the fate of miring in 
 the environment. Nothing can be clearer than 
 that it is merely as a background to give his 
 personified forces of the universal mind and 
 heart body and lodgment that Hav/thorne uses 
 his own people and the soil from which he 
 sprang. Provinciality is not at the core ; it is 
 the setting for phenomena of life elementarily 
 identical in all times and in all places. 
 
 " American intellectual standards are vague, 
 and Hawthorne's countrymen [Hawthorne's 
 countrymen, not Mr. James's own] are apt to 
 hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand 
 and a somewhat agitated conscience " ; never- 
 theless, we are constrained to say, that there 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 265 
 
 are those among us with culture and skill 
 enough, not only to distinguish Mr. James's 
 Hawthorne from the original but, to perceive 
 that constitutional differences between the 
 critic and the romancer make the critic more 
 at ease in deviations from his theme. Haw- 
 thorne's "Journal," for example, is in the 
 direct way of his work, and is a standing puzzle 
 to him. " Outward objects," he says, " play 
 much the larger part in it; opinions, convic- 
 tions, ideas pure and simple are almost absent." 
 On failure to discover a better raison d'etre for 
 the day-book, the note-book, than mere exer- 
 cise, a morning jog round the writer's course 
 to keep in training, Mr. James could have 
 profited by conference with a fellow-country- 
 man, no other than the son of Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorne. 
 
 "Hawthorne endeavors," says the son, "to 
 balance his rare faculty of insight by the com- 
 paratively common faculty of out-sight; and 
 the volumes of his note-books are the patent 
 
266 THE GOLDEN GUESS viil 
 
 records of this study." When one recalls the 
 minute detail with which it is often Haw- 
 thorne's pleasure to picture a scene (for ex- 
 ample, the old Pyncheon garden when Phoebe 
 trips out into it on the first morning of her 
 visit), the purpose of the dry catalogue of nat- 
 ural appearances becomes unmistakable. The 
 bare items before the writer, his ever-ready im- 
 agination adorns them and groups them in a 
 picture of singular beauty, giving to his airy 
 concepts substance and verisimilitude. 
 
 Plainly, cosmopolitan tendencies and linguistic 
 skill are not, of themselves, effectual for criti- 
 cism. Our experienced guide is, after all, 
 unfamiliar with the way, even to the degree of 
 never having discovered the innate impulse, 
 the push of nature, in the born writer that 
 forces him into authorship despite a thousand 
 obstacles. If we mis-read him on this point, 
 certain it is that he so far fails to comprehend 
 Hawthorne as to number him among the artisans 
 of letters, who coolly weigh the pain and pleas- 
 
vm HAWTHORNE 267 
 
 ure, the gain and loss of authorship with that of 
 any business or trade. " It strikes the observer 
 to-day," he says, " that Hawthorne showed 
 great courage in entering a field in which the 
 honors and emoluments were so scanty as the 
 profits of authorship must have been at that 
 time." Shortsighted, belittling as this comment 
 is, for one-half the reward — the " honors " — 
 it contradicts a gratuitous statement closely 
 preceding : " If the tone of the American world 
 is in some respects provincial, it is in none 
 more so than in this matter of the exaggerated 
 homage rendered to authorship. . . . There 
 is no reason to suppose that this was less the 
 case fifty years ago." 
 
 Again, if Hawthorne's environment, bald as 
 Galba's head, his ne plus ultra of provinciality 
 and his pitiful exteriority among Britons, 
 trouble Mr. James, his transcendental tenden- 
 cies positively shock him. We had thought no 
 sensibilities too fine for a portrayal of Haw- 
 thorne ; but, really, one unable to look without 
 
268 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 a shudder on the every-day Thoreau out on 
 a cross-lot stroll, is not the chosen reporter of 
 the owly flights in which our Yankee enchanter 
 so delighted. 
 
 But, perhaps we have gone far enough to 
 indicate our reasons for finding that nature 
 seems not to have equipped Mr. James for just 
 the task in hand, that he moves "rather in a 
 maze than in a way." After all, he is at times 
 so close on the right line of criticism and always 
 so crafty in word-handling, one cannot find 
 fault with a will. We wish we might remem- 
 ber only the right and important things so 
 admirably said, that it were not a duty to bear 
 in mind also the wrong and trivial things Set 
 down with the same well-bred solicitude. We 
 wish it were possible to wave off an alien, if 
 graceful, shape posed between us and Haw- 
 thorne, an airy nothing, yet with substance 
 enough to bewhisper us, " I serve Sir Censor to 
 the Thames." 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 269 
 
 II 
 
 Now, turning from the " thin New Englander 
 with a miasmatic conscience," the abuser of the 
 "fanciful element" of a "certain superficial 
 symbolism," — turning from Mr. James's Haw- 
 thorne to the Hawthorne that was and is, 
 let us remember that, the shyest, most soli- 
 tary of men, he passed his youth mainly in the 
 company of nature, his own thought, and a 
 few books. Among the first read of the few 
 books were, we are told, the " Faerie Queene " 
 and "Pilgrim's Progress," which might well 
 strengthen his native bent toward allegory. 
 The lad was writing short stories in a random 
 way before he went to Bowdoin, at seventeen. 
 While Hawthorne may be called, to the last, a 
 desultory writer, he was a continuous brooder, 
 and such energy as he expended was always in 
 the direct line of his chosen work. Men that 
 the world calls idle are, often, very busy after 
 their own fashion. Hawthorne's was a long 
 
270 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 and lonely vigil before the world found him 
 out. When it did find him, it discovered no 
 novice, but a ripe artist. His isolation and 
 obscurity worked in the main to his advantage. 
 He, himself, was thoroughly convinced of this. 
 "And now," he says, "I begin to understand 
 why I was imprisoned so many years in this 
 lonely chamber, and why I could never break 
 through the viewless bolts and bars ; for if I 
 had sooner made my escape into the world, I 
 should have grown hard and rough, and been 
 covered with earthly dust, and my heart might 
 have become callous by rude encounters with 
 the multitude. But living in solitude till the 
 fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew 
 of my youth, and the freshness of my heart." 
 We rightly turn to age for counsel, to youth for 
 action ; but youth, too, has a wisdom of its 
 own. " People always fancy that we must 
 become old to become wise," says Goethe ; 
 "but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to 
 keep ourselves as wise as we were." — "Years 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 271 
 
 and travel," he says again, " are not indispensa- 
 ble to the ripening of every mind. Knowledge 
 of the world is inborn with the genuine poet. 
 He needs not much or varied observation to 
 represent it adequately. I wrote 'Gotz von 
 Berlichingen ' at two and twenty." 
 
 Julian Hawthorne, who sees his illustrious 
 father's purpose and achievements in a clear 
 light, says his endeavor was ''to investigate 
 and analyze, without danger or confusion, the 
 problems and perplexities of the human heart." 
 We would add to this, for the use of the artist : 
 to investigate heart problems for the use of the 
 artist. This is included in the aim of the 
 novelist ; it is by his method that Hawthorne 
 is set at a distance from the novelist. His 
 method is rather that of the poet; he sym- 
 bolizes heart problems instead of presenting 
 actual personages. This method, applied to 
 the peculiar themes selected, resulting often in 
 a somewhat chilling mist and intangibleness, as 
 of ghosts, demands so much imagination from 
 
272 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 the reader, and appeals so lightly to the 
 affections, that he can never be, in the wide 
 sense, popular. His is the realm of personified 
 abstractions, these often touched in by a few 
 delicate lines ; and it is not every one that can 
 follow him as he summons forth and reviews 
 the dim, impalpable shapes that come and go at 
 his command. Were these abstractions of the 
 lighter, of the surface, phenomena of the heart, 
 Hawthorne's airy visitors would be easier to 
 fellowship with ; but we should then be under 
 the " spell," — begging Mr. James's pardon, — 
 the " spell " of a mere necromancer, instead of 
 subjects of a kingly imagination, daring, strong, 
 as it is subtile and restrained. Hawthorne 
 was imagination in the flesh. Imagination and 
 fancy load his most fragile theme ; and to strip 
 them away would be to leave a skeleton one 
 would hardly deem it possible to so build on 
 and vivify as to make it a thing of beauty. 
 Here is Hawthorne's skill and charm; and, 
 conscious of it, he was perpetually adding to 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 273 
 
 the number of the meagre, hard-outlined notes 
 of natural appearances, — so distressing, baffling, 
 to Mr. James, — by cunning use of which he 
 held warp and weft of gossamer to the ground. 
 Had Hawthorne employed fancy only, he would 
 have left an enviable reputation; as it is, the 
 employ of it seems to have been frequently the 
 indulgence of a native bent as a means of rest 
 from the exhausting exercise of pure imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 The problems of the heart, considered with 
 reference to the use of the artist, occupied 
 Hawthorne's mind ; but one problem in particu- 
 lar had for him an unfailing fascination, — 
 that of the penalty of transgression. Mr. 
 James speaks well of this salient feature, 
 running the tendency back to the grim, Puritan 
 source, and happily expressing the manner of 
 Hawthorne's escape from the disasters conse- 
 quent on this line of thought as exhibited by 
 his less fortunate, less artistic ancestoi-s and 
 predecessors. " He contrived," says Mr. James, 
 
274 THE GOLDEN GUESS viil 
 
 " by an exquisite process, best known to himself, 
 to transmute the heavy moral burden into the 
 very substance of the imagination, to make it 
 evaporate in the light and charming fumes of 
 artistic production." It were hardly safe to 
 say, however, that had Hawthorne been without 
 a drop of Puritan blood, he would not have hit 
 on this dark theme ; for it lends itself so readily 
 to the wonder-working power of the imagina- 
 tion. No theme has fastened more firmly on 
 the mind and heart of man from the call to 
 Adam in the garden down to the epochal 
 productions of Dante and Milton. 
 
 While Hawthorne's themes are essentially 
 serious, vital, the treatment develops no more 
 didacticism than is unobtrusively conveyed by 
 great art. His convictions are strong, settled. 
 He had thought and solved for himself as far 
 perhaps as he deemed it possible or profitable ; 
 but his charming books are of the poet's sort, — 
 the blossom, not the root, of conviction. In 
 short, Hawthorne was a teacher only so far as a 
 master artist is constrained to be. 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 276 
 
 But imagination does not, of itself, make a 
 great artist; the imagination must be regu- 
 lated by judgment or taste. If Hawthorne, 
 soaring in his tenuous domain, is never morbid, 
 neither is he made dizzy or confused by his 
 highest flights ; indeed, his self-possession is 
 one of the most admirable features of his 
 genius. We have only to compare him with 
 Poe, in this particular, to perceive the advan- 
 tage of soundness at the core. Be the reader 
 agitated as he may, he feels that the hold 
 of his guide is steady: the guide also is 
 moved, but he will not falter, much less fall 
 in a spasm before the terrors of his own 
 creation. Though the man and the author, or 
 artist, are distinct, Emerson's maxim applies: 
 the great utterance must have a man behind it. 
 Coleridge expresses the same thought when he 
 says that sound sense is at the bottom of all 
 true poetry. Hawthorne was a genuine man, a 
 man with decided peculiarities, but a sane, 
 brainy, full-hearted, earnest man. As has been 
 
276 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 remarked, he often gives play to light fancies, 
 but even on the sunny sward of elfin merriment 
 is sure to creep the shadow, evincing the sober, 
 brooding mind. The element of restraint 
 includes the sense of humor; and Hawthorne 
 owed much to this sense. Indeed, without it, 
 he, of all authors, would fall short. 
 
 The "Scarlet Letter," which lifted Haw- 
 thorne to instant fame, was not published until 
 the author was forty-six years old. The 
 " House of the Seven Gables " and the " Blithe- 
 dale Romance " followed within the next three 
 years. While these three romances exhibit 
 individual excellencies, the public is undoubt- 
 edly just in giving the first place to the 
 " Scarlet Letter " ; and the space remaining 
 wdll be devoted to an examination of it in 
 illustration of the working of Hawthorne's 
 mind. 
 
 Let this noblest effort of the imagination 
 that America has produced, and one of the 
 most glowing in our language, be introduced in 
 
vin HAWTHORNE 277 
 
 the words of the author himself. Hester is on 
 the scaffold in the Market Place; standing 
 there, awaiting sentence. 
 
 "The unhappy culprit sustained herself as 
 best a woman might, under the heavy weight of 
 a thousand unrelenting eyes. ... Of an im- 
 pulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified 
 herself to encounter the stings and venemous 
 stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in 
 every variety of insult ; but there was a quality 
 so much more terrible in the solemn mood of 
 the popular mind, that she longed rather to 
 behold all those rigid countenances contorted 
 with scornful merriment, and she herself the 
 object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the 
 multitude, — each man, each woman, each little 
 shrill-voiced child contributing their individual 
 parts, — Hester Prynne might have repaid them 
 all with a bitter, disdainful smile. But, under 
 the leaden infliction which it was her doom to 
 endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must 
 needs shriek out with the full power of her 
 
278 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down 
 upon the ground, or else go mad at once." 
 
 Never was sensitive, shrinking woman more 
 pitifully placed, the resources of torture are all 
 but exhausted : pressing the babe to her breast, 
 the scene becomes blinding with terror, and for 
 a time her eyes shut against it, while thought 
 reverts to the sweet days of innocence. 
 
 " Standing on that miserable eminence, she 
 saw again her native village, in Old England, 
 and her paternal home. She saw her father's 
 face, with its bald brow and reverend white 
 beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Eliza- 
 bethan ruff; her mother's too, with the look of 
 heedful and anxious love which it always wore 
 in her remembrance, and which, ever since her 
 death, had so often laid the impediment of a 
 gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. 
 She saw her own face, glowing with girlish 
 beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the 
 dusky mirror in which she had been wont to 
 gaze at it." 
 
vm HAWTHORNE 279 
 
 It would be hard to find the law of contrast 
 working more effectively than in this depiction 
 of the scene before the physical eye and that 
 before the eye of memory. But, dreadful as is 
 the stare of the throng, picture that shape in 
 the midst of it which can make Hester thankful 
 for the vast, cold stare, as a screen against it and 
 its blear organs of vision. She can forget all 
 the other horrors confronting her, at the thought 
 of the near time when she feels she must meet, 
 alone, the old misshapen master of learning, 
 years before made her husband. Thought on 
 this further punishment is interrupted by the 
 voice of a famous young clergyman, seated by 
 the Governor, surrounded by all the pomp of 
 office and by other of her judges, from not one 
 of whom can she hope for the feeblest reach of 
 sympathy. Not so ; the situation is worse than 
 that. One word from him whose voice she 
 hears, can draw the iron from her soul, can bid 
 the terrible realities before her fade like the 
 guests of a vision ; but the young man, the pale 
 
280 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 preacher, the idol of his flock, her pastor, her 
 lover, the father of her child, will not utter it. 
 If he speak, it must be, as now, in language 
 even more grievous to bear than his silence. 
 
 " ' Hester Prynne,' said he, leaning over the 
 balcony and looking down steadfastly into her 
 eyes, 'thou hearest what this good man says, 
 and seest the accountability under which I 
 labor. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul's 
 peace, and that thy earthly punishment will 
 thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I 
 charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow- 
 sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent for 
 any mistaken pity and tenderness for him ; for, 
 believe me, Hester, though he were to step 
 down from a high place, and stand beside thee 
 on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so 
 than to hide a guilty heart through life.' " 
 
 The difference between the forlorn woman's 
 understanding of these words and the meaning 
 to the bystanders ! we have no more tragic 
 situation in our literature. Pity wavers, for 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 281 
 
 the moment, between the woman, and the man 
 from whom weakness can force such words. 
 
 " ' Woman, transgress not beyond the limits 
 of Heaven's mercy ! ' cried the Rev. Mr. 
 Wilson, more harshly than before. ... ' Speak 
 out the name ! ' . . . 
 
 " ' Speak, woman ! ' said another voice, coldly 
 and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about 
 the scaffold. ' Speak, and give your child a 
 father ! ' 
 
 " ' I will not speak ! ' answered Hester, turn- 
 ing pale as death, but responding to this voice 
 which she too surely recognized." 
 
 I will not speak! — these four words atone 
 for a life of sin. The tragic power of this scene 
 far transcends that in Hamlet where the stroll- 
 ing players drive the crowned assassin of buried 
 Denmark beyond the reach of the eager eyes 
 of the dead king's son. Perhaps the chord of 
 pity was never struck more surely : it wakes to 
 endless vibrations. 
 
 Later we. have woman in her mother's 
 
282 THE GOLDEN GUESS viil 
 
 strength, when, at the Governor's Hall, stern 
 men threaten to take from her all that is left, 
 her child. Fettered by fidelity to her masked 
 lover, she will not betray the father; but their 
 child must not be wrenched from her breast. 
 
 " ' God gave her into my keeping,' repeated 
 Hester Prynne, raising her voice almost to a 
 shriek. ' I will not give her up ! ' And here, 
 by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young 
 clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to 
 this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as 
 to raise her eyes. ' Speak thou for me ! ' cried 
 she. ' Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge 
 of my soul, and knowest me better than these 
 men can. I will not lose the child ! Speak for 
 me I Thou knowest — for thou hast sympathies 
 which these men lack ! — thou knowest what is 
 in my heart, and what are a mother's rights, 
 and how much stronger they are when that 
 mother has but her child and the scarlet 
 letter!'" 
 
 It is not in the power of human nature to 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 283 
 
 long endure the strain of such concealment as 
 the Rev. Dimmesdale's. In the damp, cold, 
 dark night, he gropes his way to the fateful 
 scaffold, mounts it, and stands, a statue, till his 
 limbs begin to grow rigid beneath him. Though 
 the victory is incomplete, remorse has given 
 fierce battle to cowardice. Hester passes, on 
 her way home from watching at a death-bed. 
 
 " ' Come up hither, Hester, thou and little 
 Pearl,' said the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale. ' Ye 
 have both been here before, but I was not with 
 you. Come up hither once again, and we will 
 stand all three together.' " 
 
 As they stand there, in the darkness of the 
 night, pathos reaches its limit in the pleading 
 of little Pearl, now come to girlhood, that 
 the clergyman will stand in the same dread 
 place with her mother and herself to-morrow 
 noon-tide. 
 
 Listen to the clergymen when, at last, 
 covered with the honors of a festal day, he 
 steps from the admiring procession, once more 
 
284 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 to ascend the scaffold. Remorse has now 
 finished the fight, won the victory, and he 
 appears on the pedestal of shame between 
 Hester Prynne and little Pearl. 
 
 " ' People of New England, ... ye that 
 have loved me I ye that have deemed me holy ! 
 behold me here, the one sinner of the world. 
 . . . Now, at the death hour, he stands up be- 
 fore you. . . . Stand any here that question 
 God's judgment on a sinner ? Behold ! Be- 
 hold a dreadful witness of it ! ' " 
 
 The repentant transgressor forgives his perse- 
 cutor, kisses his little Pearl, bids farewell to 
 Hester, and sinks rapidly into unconsciousness. 
 Has the wretched man purchased peace at last, 
 may he hope ; and what of her he leaves 
 behind? Hawthorne does not omit this last 
 touch with which to complete the desolation. 
 " ' Shall we not meet again ? ' whispers Hester, 
 bending her face down close to his. 'Shall 
 we not spend our immortal life together? 
 Surely, surely, we have ransomed one aii other, 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 285 
 
 with all this woe ! Thou lookest far into eter- 
 nity with those bright, dying eyes! Then tell 
 me what thou seest.* 
 
 " 'Hester, Hester, ... I fear! I fear ! ' " 
 Hester's last words to the dying man move 
 depths untouched by Charoba over the body of 
 Gebir, the king, wedded and lost in the same 
 hour. This scene, on and about the scaffold of 
 the bleak New England town, was much more 
 like that at 
 
 ..." the feast of Ceplieus, when the sword 
 
 Of Phineus, white with wonder, shook restrained, 
 
 And the hilt rattled in his marble hand." 
 
 We have said that Hawthorne's characters 
 are personified forces of the human mind and 
 heart. Old Roger Chillingsworth, in the dis- 
 guise of an injured husband seeking revenge, 
 is really the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale's guilty con- 
 science incarnate. He follows the clergyman 
 stealthily, steadily, sure as death itself of his 
 prey. Hawthorne is rarely, if ever, more 
 subtile than in the quiet but fierce contest 
 
286 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 between these two men: such strokes and 
 parries are possible only to consummate art. 
 After the discovery of the fatal sign on the 
 preacher's bared breast, the old man's malice 
 increases rapidly, and he soon becomes a very 
 devil. The inevitable result of Chillings worth's 
 incessant goading — the gnawing of conscience 
 — is a weakening of his victim's manhood. 
 This Hester must perceive ; and once more 
 woman's strength towers over mountainous 
 calamity, infusing the drooping man with 
 courage and hope. It is the same strange 
 might of woman, when too far driven, that, 
 turned into a wicked channel, could shake with 
 its terrible tongue the frame of valiant 
 Macbeth. 
 
 In passing, if Hester reminds us of Lady 
 Macbeth, the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale reminds 
 us more strongly of Hamlet. A clew to 
 Hawthorne's order of thought is found in his 
 frequent suggestion of parallels with Shake- 
 speare, and few with other writers. 
 
vni HAWTHORNE 287 
 
 The "Scarlet Letter" is so saturated with 
 pathos that the least lovable character in it 
 makes a heavy demand upon pity. The words 
 of hoaiy Roger Chillingsworth to Hester in 
 the prison, have the old Hebraic ring, insuring 
 immediate sympathy : — 
 
 "'One thing, thou that wast my wife, I 
 would enjoin upon thee. Thou hast kept the 
 secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine ! 
 There are none in this land that know me. 
 Breathe not to any human soul, that thou didst 
 ever call me husband ! Here, on this wild 
 outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent ; 
 for, elsewhere, a wanderer, and isolated from 
 human interests, I find here a woman, a man, 
 and a child, amongst whom and myself there 
 exist the closest ligaments. No matter whether 
 of love or hate ; no matter whether of right or 
 wrong ! thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong 
 to me. My home is where thou art, and where 
 he is. But betray me not ! '" 
 
 Here again, in the words we have italicized, 
 
288 THE GOLDEN GUESS viil 
 
 is that last touch which only the subtilest 
 genius can give. 
 
 As for Hester's long, dreary after-years 
 amidst the prejudice and scorn of the Puritan 
 settlement — Hagar herself, with her babe in 
 the wilderness, did not know so awful a 
 solitude. Little Pearl inspires the same un- 
 failing sentiment of commiseration. In the 
 picturing of Pearl, who is no other than the 
 personified sweet of pleasure touched with 
 the bitterness of bliss forbidden, Hawthorne 
 puts his nimble fancy into a frock, giving it 
 a pair of bright, black eyes, and shining curls. 
 Her elfin dance over the grass — that is 
 Hawthorne's airy thought at play on soberest 
 ground. 
 
 As before observed, one of the elemental 
 charms of Hawthorne's pictures is the back- 
 ground of nature. Faithful to nature, still he 
 exercises in the highest degree the artist's 
 privilege, touching in his own light and shade, 
 adding the enchanting atmosphere of imagina- 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE - 289 
 
 tion. Compare the nature in the " Forest 
 Walk," where Pearl asks her mother about 
 the Black Man, with the nature in the scene 
 where Hester's life-load is for the moment 
 lifted by the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale's consent 
 to escape with her. The natural objects are 
 much the same, but their expression changes, 
 like that of a human face, in sympathy with 
 the emotions to which they are mute ministers. 
 This is the poet's method of dealing with 
 nature — a signal excellence, for example, of 
 Tennyson's verse — the method that evidences 
 the creative power, that betokens the excelling 
 gift of imagination. 
 
 As a student of the human heart, Hawthorne 
 is eminently successful in what is deemed the 
 last conquest — the mastery of the heart of 
 woman. Hester, utterly abandoned, unable to 
 gain entrance to the church because of the 
 crowd, stands on the outside, by the scaffold, to 
 catch the accent of the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale's 
 tones as he proceeds in his marvellous dis- 
 
290 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 course. " Muffled as the sound was, by its 
 passage through the church walls, Hester 
 Prynne listened with such intentness, and 
 sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had 
 throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart 
 from its distinguishable words^ 
 
 This revelation of woman's nature, is obvi- 
 ously of a very different school from the 
 fastidious, cuticular school which informs us, 
 perchance, whether a woman puts out a match 
 with a puff of breath or by flourishing it in 
 her fingers. 
 
 In the course of Hawthorne's steady probing 
 into the secrets of the passions, we continually 
 meet with startling suggestions ; such as the 
 possible identity, at bottom, of love and hate. 
 Another peculiarity is the deft stroke by which 
 scene and incident are invested with a haunting 
 quality. After Hester's refusal to betray the 
 partner of her guilt, what . happened as she 
 passed back into her cell ? 
 
 " It was whispered by those who peered after 
 
VIII HAWTHORNE 291 
 
 her, that the scarlet letter threw a lurid 
 gleam along the dark passage-way of the in- 
 terior." 
 
 To find that touch again, we must go back to 
 the " Ancient Mariner," to " Christabel." And 
 who but Hawthorne would have hit on the 
 device of making poor, persecuted Hester look 
 into the convex mirror of the polished breast- 
 plate hanging in the Governor's Hall, there to 
 see with the physical eye the letter, frightfully 
 magnified, that was perpetually reflected from 
 all faces and things inanimate upoii her spirit- 
 ual sight? 
 
 It is hardly necessary to add that success, 
 such as Hawthorne's, implies the happiest ex- 
 pression. Not to dwell on Hawthorne's style, 
 simple mention ma}'- be made of his power of 
 condensation, his exquisite application of the 
 law of contrast, his repose, his judgment or 
 taste ; and, over and above all, his poet's skill in 
 suggestiveness and in the creation of atmos- 
 phere, his primal power of pure, bold, sustained 
 
292 THE GOLDEN GUESS viii 
 
 imagination — imagination which, for purity 
 and subtilty has been equalled in English 
 literature perhaps not more than once before 
 since the robe fell from the shoulders of the 
 unapproachable Elizabethan. 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 
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