STUDIES IN LITERATURE.
By the same Author.
SHAKSPERE: a Critical Study of his Mind and Art.
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EDWARD DOWDEN, LL.D.
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_0RNIA
PREFACE.
In bringing these Essays together I carry out the inten-
tion with which they were originally written. Without
forming a continuous study they circle around common
thoughts and topics, and so 1 in a measure belong to one
another. The' first three essays put in position some of
the subjects and persons treated in detail in the latei
essays ; there is therefore occasionally some repetition,
the first essays saying in brief what others express more
at large. I had intended to add to- these introductory
essays a fourth on the Mediaeval Revival, but I found
that this great movement could not be viewed as seemed
to me right without a more comprehensive survey than
was possible in the present volume ; and such an intro-
ductory essay happened not to be necessary in order to
place in position any of the subjects afterwards treated,
for even Lamennais belongs (as- Catholics will probably be
glad to admit) more to the democratic movement than
to the Catholic revival.
I have confined this volume to studies in English and
French literature. It is my wish on a future occasion
to follow up these essays with others treating of sub-
jects from the literature and thought of Germany.
Upon the whole I hav^ carrl more to understand than
b
vi Preface.
to object ; I Lave tried rather to interpret than to judge.
The imperfection of these attempts at criticism I have felt
in reading over my proof-sheets probably as vividly as
any other person is likely to feel it. Still I have
known that they are sincere records of the help which
certain great writers have given me, and it has also been
a happiness to me to be assured that in the case of some
of the writers treated my attempt to interpret has gone
— as far as it goes — at least on right lines.
For their courteous permission to reprint my 4 contri-
butions I thank the Editors of the " Fortnightly
Review," the " Contemporary Review," the " Cornhill
Magazine," the "Westminster Review," and the "Academy;"
and Mr M'Gee, the publisher of " Afternoon Lectures,
1869,"
X
[ ;]YERS1TTZ
CjllFOB*^
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND LITERATURE.
In" recent teaching of English. History something has
been done to promote the formation of a true feel-
ing of the continuity of our national life by setting
aside the arbitrary landmarks furnished by the acces-
sion of kings, and by an attempt to space out the
history of the people into its larger natural divisions.
The landmarks of closing and opening centuries may
seem yet more arbitrary or accidental than those placed
at the beginning and ending of the reigns of kings.
It happens, however, that each of the last three centuries
closed with an event, or a series of events, which may
be looked upon as marking the commencement of an
epoch, — an epoch in the spiritual life of England, if not
in her external history, and which is perceived with
special distinctness when viewed in relation to literature.
In 1588, the galleons of the Spanish Armada were
pulled down by the sea-dogs of Drake, or rolled at the
mercy of the Orkney wreckers. An immense conscious-
ness of power thrilled the nation into quicker life and
more daring achievement. Then upon the stage the
audacities of Marlowe's genius seemed hardly too extrava-
gant, md maturer force lived and acted
in lite ve had been lost. The last decade
of tha publication of the "Faerie Queen,"
A
2 The French Revolution and Literature.
the " Ecclesiastical Polity/' and the earliest Essays of
Bacon; it closed with the trumpet note of Shakspere's
"Henry V." still in the air. One hundred years later,
1688, William of Nassau landed at Torbay. Her dominion
of the seas England may date from the battle of La Hogue ;
the temperate freedom, the security and order guaranteed
by the Bill of Rights were as precious a possession, creating
a new social and political life, and this again a new
literature. It was not an age of ardour, enthusiasm,
and ambitious power, but rather a constitutional period,
loving compromise, moderation, and good sense, an age
of clubs and coffee-houses, of wits and beaux, when
poetry was not a prophecy but an accomplishment, when
the minor moralities of hoop and furbelow claimed the
reformer's attention, when philosophy came into the
drawing-rooms, and conversed in irreproachable accent.
Again a hundred years, 1789, and events long preparing
in France were born into the light of day ; the Deputies,
with Mirabeau and Robespierre among them, were
assembling at Versailles. Presently came Wordsworth,
to gather a relic from the ruins of the Bastille. William
Blake w T alked the streets of London, wearing the bonnet
rouge as emblem of the arrived millennium. Burke
announced the extinction of chivalry, and the advent of
the age of sophisters, economists, and calculators;. A
little later, and England possessed a poetry for the first
time not British so much as European. The Revolution
still lightened and thundered through the days of the
White Terror and the Holy Alliance, in the v<^ 00 of
Byron and Shelley.
Such a cataclysm as the French Revolution s
The French Revolution and Literature. 3
interrupt the continuity of history, yet in fact, though
such a crisis may mark a period, there is no interrup-
tion. The "Revolution is but an incident in a move-
ment much larger than itself. To some democratic
spirits 1789 dates as the year One;Jaefore it lies the
chaos of the great monarchies and of feudalism ; then in
a moment the demiurge, Revolution, said, " Let there
be light," and there was light. By a different class of
thinkers the entire eighteenth century, the sceculum
rationalisticum, is represented as a page inserted by
Satan in God's history of the human race ; the divine
Author, having completed his chapter, which contains
the story of the witch-burnings and the dragonnades, of
Madame de Montespan and of Nell Gwynn, nodded ovei
the best of all possible histories, when the author of evil
with malicious glee slipped in his chapter of profanity,
illuminated with the mocking face of his Voltaire, and
the obscene posturings of his Rousseau. The date of
each of these theories with respect to the eighteenth
century is assuredly gone by. There are symptoms- that
we have begun to trace our ancestry without any longer
hewing out of its trunk a portion of our family tree.
Mr Mark Pattison's essay on " Tendencies of Religious
Thought in England, 1688 — 17 50," was one of the
earliest studies of eighteenth century thought which can
truly be called critical, and it has been fruitful of results.
Mr Morley's "Burke," "Rousseau," "Voltaire," and
" Diderot," M. Taine's " Les Origines de la France con-
temporaine," Mr Hunt's " History of Religious Thought
in England," Mr Leslie Stephen's " English Thought in
the Eighteenth Century," are evidences that the perk
4 The French Revolution and Literature.
of passionate hostility to the sceculum rationalisticum
is at an end, and that the work of criticism is begun.
We can venture to be just to what lies so far behind us
across two generations of men. It is easy to foresee
that the injustice to be feared for some time to come
will be injustice to the reaction against the eighteenth
century. To understand Coleridge is fast becoming
more difficult than to understand Hume ; what was the
quickening air and light of philosophy to our fathers,
changes for us into a theosophic mist, vaguely luminous;
in the architecture of the Gothic revival, we are told,
may be read " the decay and enfeeblement of reason ;"
even our furniture must rationalize itself, and remind us
of the defmiteness of design, the moderation and good
sense of Chippendale.
Looking in a comprehensive way at the litera-
ture of the past eighty years, we may discern in its
movement four chief tendencies. vV^must not define
these too rigidly, or draw hard and fast lines ; nor must
we suppose that a human being can be explained and
set aside by being classified and labelled. Still it is of
use to observe and distinguish, as far as can be done in
sincerity of disinterested criticism, the most powerful
currents of the literature of our age. ..First, proceeding-
out of the last century, the revolutionary and democratic
movement arrests our attention. Such names as those of
Shelley, Byron, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Heine, Borne,
remind us of its importance. Proceeding out of the last
century also we perceive the scientific movement, not at
first powerfully affecting literature proper, but of late
years ever more and more tending to form a new
/
The French Revolution and Literature. 5
intellectual stratum or bed from which art-products,
appropriate to itself, may spring. It^will be felt at once
- — —
how profoundly the modern imagination is being
influenced by the single idea of Evolution ; and it may
be noted as a significant incident that within the last
year our chief imaginative creator in prose has had to
bear the reproach of suffering her genius to undergo
what has been styled a " scientific depravation." _Tho {
scientific and the democratic movements both contribute j
to create the school of thought represented even before/
the Revolution by Bentham, and subsequently by hisi
followers, the school of utilitarian ethics and philosophical
radicalism. Again, in opposition to the eighteenth cen-
tury we observe two movements : — 1. The Mediaeval
Revival ; 2. The Transcendental Movement.
We have here the large outlines of a map of nine*
teenth-centurv literature. In religion the Mediaeval
Revival became the Catholic reaction on the Continent,
the Oxford movement in England ; in art, it became
Romanticism. But Romanticism is a name which
covers many and various things. In Scott the interest
in the middle ages is part of the aroused historical
imagination of modern times ; in Victor Hugo it is
part of the reaction against the classical fadeurs of
the last century, part of the modern demand for a
richer life in art, more variety, keener sensations,
greater freedom and animation ; in Uhland it expresses
the revival of national life in Germany ; in others of the
German romantic poets, it is a thin sentimentalism,
united with an impotent desire to restore art by means
of a fictive faith. The Transcendental Movement
6 The French Revolution and Literature.
opposes the empirical philosophy of the eighteenth
century, not like the Mediaeval Revival by a return to a
past age, or an appeal to authority, but by an appeal to
something higher, more divine, in man, than the senses
or the understanding ; it opposes the mechanical deism
of Paley and the mechanical atheism of La Mettrie by
the discovery of God immanent and omnipresent in
nature and in man. The German philosophical systems
from Fichte to Hegel belong to this movement ; it
appears, modified by other elements, in the teaching
of Wordsworth in his earlier years, of Coleridge, and of
Carlyle ; in the vague pantheism of Goethe ; and in the
lives and writings of that remarkable group of New
England reformers, of whom Emerson and Theodore
Parker have been the most widely known, and have
indeed exercised an European influence.
It is important to note that as time went on, the
spirit of the Revolution and the genius of transcendental
philosophy approached, recognised each other as fellow-
workers, or at least as fellow-enthusiasts on man's
behalf, and joyously embraced. Even the Catholic re-
action was for a time partially drawn into the great
wave of democratic feeling ; a strange composition of
forces produced that eddy, from which Lamennais
escaped to go forward in the pursuit of knowledge and
of freedom, and from which others escaped to return
to the calm of authority and the certitude of dogma.
In the Revolutionary movement and its development,
we distinguish two degrees or stages. Although from
the first the Revolution was rich in constructive forces,
its earlier work was in the main destructive ; the
The French Revolution and Literature. 7
new ideals and enthusiasms embodied in the watch-
words "liberty, equality, and fraternity," were sought
to be realized in the spirit of metaphysical thinkers
and theorists ; and the rights of the individual
were more considered than the duties of man as a
member of society. The Revolutionary movement in
its first stage, then, was destructive, metaphysical,
individualistic. From about 1830, dates a series of
attempts at a revolutionary reconstruction, which should
be positive and socialistic in character. How ready a
soil the imagination of the time furnished to the germs
in the air appears from the remarkable power exerted
by the ideas of Saint-Simon upon Heine and Young
Germany, by those of Pierre Leroux upon the enthusi-
astic genius of George Sand, and by Fourier upon
members of the Brook Farm Association.
The French Revolution, like every great national
movement, both resumed the past and prophesied the
future. We must beware of viewing it, in relation to
literature, as an isolated phenomenon. There are at
least three great influences succeeding one another, and
closely connected — all earlier in date than 1830 —
which we must distinguish : first, the Critical movement,
or Aufkl&rwng, which passed in the latter half of the
eighteenth century from England to France, and was inf
most active progress from 1760 to 1790; secondly, the 1
Revolution 1790 — 1800 ; thirdly, the wars of the Con-
sulate and Empire 1800 — 1815. The literature of the
early years of the present century is sometimes treated
as if it were dominated by the second of these great
movements alone ; in fact, it exhibits the active
8 The French Revolution aud Literature.
influence of all three, together with that of many lesser
currents of tendency. It is well in considering the
career of each important writer of the time, to note the
date at which he reached early manhood. One born
like William Godwin, in the commencement of the
Seven Years' War, would have been exposed to the
critical movement before the age of five-and -twenty, and
would have advanced towards the Revolution together
with that movement. In 1791, he had reached the
midpoint of the Scriptural threescore years and ten,
when in spite of public calamity which might befall
the cause he cherished, he could (had his political
idealism not sufficed to sustain him) still bear up and
steer right onward, and was little likely to change his
creed because some bright hopes became less bright. One
born like Wordsworth, some fourteen years after Godwin,
could hardly have drunk deep of the pre-Revolu-
tion philosophy, unless he were a youth of precocious
intellectual power; he would not have come up out of
the midst of the eighteenth century with the Revolu-
tionary idea ; but in the morning of life it would seem
to him, when the splendours of the Revolution first
appeared, that he moved in the great morning of the
world. Faith in the immense promises of the time
would be no mere product of the intellect, but a
" pleasant exercise of hope and joy."
" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."
But could such a faith bear the stress which the stern
3^ears brought ? It had been a part of the dawn, and
as the sun darkened before the noon, Wordsworth's
UNI 1
The French Revolution and Literature. 9
exercise of hope became a desperate hoping against hope,
until at last he found abiding sources of light and
strength elsewhere than in the European Revolution.
One born like Byron, in the year before the meeting of
the States- General, would be yet a child when Napoleon
stilled the last struggles of Revolution under the sway
of military despotism ; he would have endured none of
the trial and exhaustion which the early enthusiasts on
behalf of democracy underwent, but he would be aware
of a great void in the world surrounding him — of faiths
that had fallen, of forces that had been spent. There
is no environment more fraught with peril to a man
framed with great capacities for joy than one which
leaves him without a social faith, and throws him back
upon his own craving heart and its unsatisfied passions.
We may describe the Revolution as consisting of three
parts — the intellectual doctrine ; the revolutionary
emotions, hopes, hates, fears, ardours, aspirations; and,
last, the actual facts of external history. These served
as tests to exhibit the elements of which the natures of
men exposed to their influence were constituted. If
one's mind were nourished only by concrete fact informed
by ideas, it might be difficult to view with tolerance a
political doctrine which was still disembodied, still
expecting to be incarnated in institutions ; such was the
case with Burke. If one's intellect were so purely
theoretical that concrete facts were to it but illusions,
and theories the only realities, then it might be possible
to hold the revolutionary doctrine without a question or
a doubt through all the failures of Constitutions, the fall
of parties, and the ever-intensifying terror ; such was the
io The French Revolution and Literature.
case with Godwin.* If one possessed an essentially
lyrical nature, the basis and substance of which con-
sisted of emotion, it might disclose itself in such a fine
indiscretion as that of Burns, when he — a British excise-
man — despatched his gift of four carronades to the
French Convention, with an autograph letter. Real
life, the step-mother of poets, reads hard lessons to her
impulsive half-children, and Burns, whose carronades
were captured at Dover, made piteous profession of his
loyalty to the British Constitution, dearest to him of all
things next after God, when he pictured to himself his
wife and his little ones turned adrift into the world.
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey are commonly
spoken of together in reference to the Revolutionary
movement, as if the relations to it of all three were
identical in kind. But, in truth, the test applied by the
Revolution detected the differences of their characters
quite as much as it revealed the presence of a common
element. There was a certain sternness and stoicism at
the heart of Wordsworth's enthusiastic joy. His intellect
and emotions acted with consentaneity as long as the
concrete facts of French history permitted this ; hence
his faith was ardent, and his emotions were massive.
When, by the pressure of facts, he was driven into
alienation from France, his distress was proportionately
great and prolonged. In London, Wordsworth heard
the greatest philosophical orator of England launch forth
his magnificent ridicule against all systems built on
abstract rights, —
* It should be observed, however, that violent revolutions were, upon
principle, condemned by Godwin.
The French Revolution and Literattire. 1 1
" The majesty proclaim
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time ;
Declare the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom, and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insist
Upon the allegiance to which men are born."
Nor did Wordsworth see and hear Burke without inspir-
ation and gratitude. But it was not any antagonist of
the Revolution, it was the Revolution itself, which forced
Wordsworth to examine the intellectual basis of his
republican faith. As a concrete historical movement
the Revolution could not justify itself to his conscience;
all the more desperately for a time he clung to republican
theories ; but the intellect, divorced from imagination
and the vital movements of admiration, hope, and love,
served with Wordsworth but to make all faiths dubious,
and he underwent in consequence that spiritual crisis,
terminating happily in recovery, of which the history is
told in " The Prelude." It may be questioned whether
Wordsworth, after he had parted with his democratic
convictions and earned the name of renegade, did not
retain a truer democratic sense of the dignity of manhood
than is possessed by writers who deal fluently in the
platitudes of fervid Republicanism, and do lip-worship to
Humanity, while they exhibit in their temper and their
themes all that can render humanity the reverse of
worshipful.
The great events in France affected Coleridge in a
different manner. In the year 1800 he strenuously I
opposed, in the Morning Post, the adage fashionable in
ministerial circles, " Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin ; "
but this he did with no private and personal motive.
1 2 The French Revolution and Literature.
He asserts, and the assertion was undoubtedly correct,
that he had never been at any period of his life a convert
to Jacobinical principles. It was in 1793, after the
September massacres and the execution of the King,
that Wordsworth wrote his " Letter to the Bishop of
LlandafT," in which he haughtily maintains the cause of
the Republic. "Before 1793," said Coleridge (and
Coleridge was two years younger than Wordsworth), " I
clearly saw, and often enough stated in public the horrid
delusion, the vile mockery of the whole affair. When
some one said in my brother James's presence that I was
a Jacobin, he very well observed, ' No ! Samuel is no
Jacobin ; he is a hot-headed Moravian !' Indeed, I was
in the extreme opposite pole." His feelings and his
imagination, Coleridge declares, did not^^gpp^kindled
in the general conflagration, " and I confess I should be
more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if
they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though
my little world described the path of its revolution in an
orbit of its own." Coleridge's passionate sympathy was
given to France, and when England took up arms against
the Republic, he, like Wordsworth, was smitten with
grief and shame. It was through a haughty ideality of
youth, to which mere pain and blood-shedding seemed
worthy of slight regard, that Wordsworth for a time
sustained his courage in presence of the dark facts of
contemporary history. Coleridge was in possession of a
philosophical doctrine, which enabled him to accept the
same facts with a certain equanimity. In one of the
addresses delivered at Bristol in 1795, and which formed
his first prose work, the youthful apostle of the doctrine
The French Revolution and Literaha r e. 13
of philosophical necessity (a doctrine which he afterwards
so earnestly repudiated) cautions his hearers against the
danger of indulgence in the feelings even of virtuous
indignation. Thinking patriots have accustomed them-
selves " to regard all affairs of man as a process ; they
never hurry, and they never pause." Vice is " the effect
of error, and the offspring of surrounding circumstances;
the object therefore of condolence, not of anger/'
Coleridge, at the age of twenty-three, and while the
exciting events in France were still in progress, speaks
with that judicial tone, that grave benevolence, that ap-
parent superiority to the illusions of passion, which often
betoken the presence of ardent feelings resolving to
justify themselves by a cultivated moderation of tone.
And in truth, Coleridge lived and moved more among
the abiding#BMBBtf thought, and less in the ebb and
flow of the world, than at this time did Wordsworth.
To Wordsworth the affairs of man did not seem a
" process :" —
" I revolved
How much the destiny of man had hung
Still upon single persons."
And in the inexperience of his youth it seemed to him,
1 that possibly through himself, an insignificant stranger,
yet " strong in hope, and trained to noble aspirations,"
with a spirit thoroughly faithful to itself, the needed
direction and moving power might be found for distracted
France ; if this could not be, if failure were decreed
against his hopes and efforts, he was prepared to accept,
for the sake of France, life as a sacrifice or the sacrifice
of death. Coleridge's dream of pantisocracy had just
14 The French Revolution and Literature.
*
resolved itself into air, before he delivered his Bristol
" Conciones ad Populum." Although in later years it
may have been with a smile that he related his dream
of a little society, which " in its second generation was
to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal age
with the knowledge and genuine refinements of European
culture," at the time the designed experiment of human
perfectibility was the object of earnest thought and hope.
Wordsworth never regretted that his youth was one of
enthusiastic ardour, of impassioned faith, although his
faith and ardour subsequently took upon themselves a
new and more spiritual body. And Coleridge did not
find his early self worthy of that hard ridicule, which
manhood too often bestows upon a youth which possesses
the appropriate beauty and virtue of youth ; if after-
wards he smiled, the smile was like that of one who,
sound and sweet in heart, sees from the calm elevation
of later years the joys and fears of boy and girl lovers.
" Strange fancies, and as vain as strange ! yet to the
'ntense interest and impassioned zeal, which called forth
and strained every faculty of my intellect for the
organization and defence of this scheme, I owe much of
what I at present possess, my clearest insight into the
nature of individual man, and my most comprehensive
views of his social relations, of the true uses of trade
and commerce, and how far wealth and relative power
of nations promote and impede their welfare and inher-
ent strength." That there was a real and deep con-
tinuity in the development of Coleridge's political and
religious opinion may be denied by party spirit ; by
disinterested criticism H cannp*- fail to be recognized.
The French Revolution and Literature. 15
While Wordsworth, rendered grave by the September
massacres, remained at Blois, and Coleridge perhaps was
planning his College escapade, by which a train of
gunpowder was to inscribe upon the singed grass of the
lawns of St John's and Trinity the words Liberty and
Equality, a singular conjunction took place between the
most soaring spirit among the children of Revolution,
and her earthiest and ugliest urchin, — William Blake
became the saviour of Tom Paine. Mr Gilchrist has
related how in the quaint upper room over bookseller
Johnson's little shop, met the apostles and prophets of
the eighteenth-century evangel, — Dr Price and Dr
Priestley, William Godwin, whom Blake liked little,
stoical Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the irascible
Fuseli, false prophet of high art. The practical good
sense and tact of the visionary Blake saved Paine
from an English prison, and sent that " rebellious
needleman," elected representative by the Pas de
Calais, to take his seat in the Convention. In Blake's
enormous mythology the genius of Revolution was
an honoured divinity. Its historical apparition, how-
ever, although Blake hailed that apparition with en-
thusiasm, was less to him than its eternal essence, its
" spiritual form." From a rich feeling for concrete
fact like that possessed by Burke, the mind of Blake
was of course as remote as was that of Godwin ; but
while the Revolution gave visible shape for Godwin
to intellectual formulae, apparent through the crimes and
evil passions of men, it was in Blake's conception a new-
born joy, incarnating an eternal reality of the imagina-
tion. A joy, and also a terror, sprung from the marriage
1 6 The French Revolution and Literature.
of heaven and hell, of reason and desire. Reason, self-
restraint, law, duty, apart from energy and desire, were
in Blake's eyes deadening impositions of Urizen, the evil
god of prohibition, and they found their earthly repre-
sentatives in prisons and in churches. The Lord, in
" Faust," recognizes the need, for man's uses, of
Mephistopheles, the spirit of negation. But with Blake
the devil, as he is called by the adverse party, is as truly
god as the other claimant of that name, or, in plain
speech, impulse, desire, freedom, are as great and sacred
as reason, law, restraint. Man, unparcelled into body
and spirit, is all holy, and the supreme of things ; the
unpardonable sin is to denaturalize or extinguish desire,
to slay a living joy.
In truth Blake went astray in only a single particular,
■ — in being born on this earth. His right place was
that of minister to the archangels of Goethe's Pro-
logue in Heaven, to whom love is its own law, and who
gather strength and beatitude from the sight of the
Lord :
" Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken."
But precisely because Blake could not ever lose what
he conceived to be the essence of the Revolution, which
lived in him as part of his purest self, he could the more
easily detach himself from the historical movement.
Less able to endure the harshness of the evil days than
was Wordsworth in his haughty ideality, Blake, after
the September massacres, tore off his cockade, and wore
his bonnet rouge no more. At a happier moment, in
1790, appeared at the end of " The Marriage of Heaven
The French Revolution and Literature. ij
and Hell," Blake's " Song of Liberty." Freedom is
born from the womb of the " Eternal Female," the
mother force of the spirit of man ; it is a marvellous
babe, a terror to the world with its fiery limbs and
naming hair ; a prophetic thrill runs through the earth,
" shadows of prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the
rivers;" alarm and hatred and jealousy are roused to
crush the new-born terror ; the gloomy King who hates
liberty leads his starry hosts through the wilder-
ness, and promulgates his ten commands ; but the son
of fire in his eastern cloud " stamps the stony law to
dust, . . . crying, ' Empire is no more ! and now the
lion and the wolf shall cease.'" The song closes with a
chorus proclaiming the triumph of gratified desire : " For
everything that lives is holy." To the end, as Mr
Gilchrist tells us, Blake always avowed himself a
" Liberty Boy." An antinomian tendency is a character-
istic common to many mystics ; it is rarely that the
antinomianism is so pure and childlike, yet so impas-
sioned, as it was in the case of Blake.
The eighteenth century closed with moral exhaustion, /
enthusiasms burnt to ashes, the melancholy of discovered
illusions, and the remorse and yearning that follow upon
a supreme work of destruction. To continue an ardent
Republican during the experiences of the years from
1790 to 1800, a man must needs have been either
singularly idealistic, or of a very stoical temper. " In
long-continuing revolutions," wrote De Tocqueville, "men
are morally ruined less by the faults and the crimes that
they commit in the heat of passion or of their political
convictions, than by the contempt that in the end they
B
18 The French Revolution and Literature.
»
acquire for the very convictions and passions that moved
them ; when wearied, disenchanted, and undeceived, they
turn against themselves, and consider their hopes as
having been childish — their enthusiasm, and, above all,
their devotion, absurd. None can conceive how often
the mainspring of even the strongest minds is broken by
such a catastrophe. . . . It is difficult to imagine . . the
extreme fatigue, apathy, indifference, or, rather, contempt,
for politics into which a long, terrible, and barren struggle
had thrown men's minds." To escape from such fatigue
and ennui, Paris for a time abandoned itself to reckless
pleasure. " The amusements in Paris," says a contem-
porary, " are now not interrupted for a single instant,
either by the terrible events that take place, or by the
fear of future calamities. The theatres and public places
were never so crowded. At Tivoli, you hear it said that
things will soon be worse than ever : on appelle la Patrie
la Patraque,* and through it all we dance." " I do not
find in history," writes De Tocqueville again, " a single
event that contributed more to the well-being of future
generations, or more entirely demoralized the generation
that brought it to pass." f
There was one spirit, however, who, pipe as they might,
would not dance. In 1799, appeared the "Reveries"
of Senancour, which preceded his " Obermann," and
foretold a literature — some of it of a much more recent
j a te — inspired by the sentiment of the void, the barren
sadness, the sterility of life. The loss of faith within,
* Patraque, an old worn-out machine.
+ "France before the Consulate," in De Tocqueville's Memoir and
Remains, vol. i. pp. 272—276. See also the close of Edgar Quinet'a
History of the Revolution.
The French Revolution and Literature, 19
the ruins of a world without, measureless desire awakened
by the sense that the old boundaries were gone, and a
new destiny was opening for the spirit of man, impotence
to satisfy that desire, no wing to explore the new horizons
— such was the malady of Obermann. And he sought
healing beneath the glacier and the unchanging Alpine
snows. To chill his too feverish heart, to calm the rest-
less pulse, to numb the pain of being, was the demand
of his nature. Not change, not the play and colour of
life, not the song and the dance, but resignation, solitude,
silence, the white field of snow, a permanency of accepted
grief —
" I turn thy leaves : I feel their breath.
Once more upon me roll ;
That air of languor, cold, and death
Which brooded o'er thy soul.
* # # *
" Though here a mountain murmur swells
Of many a dark-bough'd pine,
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high pasturing kine —
" Yet, through the hum of torrent lone,
And brooding mountain bee,
There sobs I know not what groundtone
Of human agony."
In this literature of despair two characteristics
especially strike the reader — a conception of the great-
ness of ideal man, and of his boundless capacity for
pleasure and for pain ; and, with this, a sense of the
pettiness and sterility of the actual life of man. Despair
with the writers of the early part of the century is not,
as with Schopenhauer and Hartmann, a theory or doctrine,
with its metaphysic of pessimism, and its benevolent
20 The French Revolution and Literature.
ethics of pessimism ; it has no social purpose ; it is an
individual experience, while at the same time it is la
onaladie du siecle. It is negative and dissolving, where-
as the pessimism of our own day aspires to be con-
structive, and to furnish a creed and a rule of life. In
Obermann, to the common sadness of the time is added
the suffering- which arises from his individual feeble-
ness. Even if the cup of life were brimming with joy,
Obermann could hardly lift the cup to his lips. It was
not until a second revolution had passed over France,
and the muttering of renewed thunder was again in the
air, that Senancour found that deliverance from desire,
that permanency of calm, which he bad sought. He
found them, not beneath the grey " cone of Jaman " and
the "blue profound," but in the cemetery at Sevres,
where they engraved upon the tombstone words of his
choice from his " Libres Meditations " — Eternite, deviens
inon asyle !
Sainte-Beuve has named Obermann the genuine Rene.
Some years before Coleridge planned his pantisocracy,
and a little later than the time when William Blake
was making his inquisition into the n^stery of evil, in
his "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," and was chanting
his Song of Liberty. Chateaubriand set foot on the soil
of the New World. For a while, remote from the civil
strife, he wandered in the virginal solitudes, exhaling his
soul in reverie, or making acquaintance with the noble
savage, — not precisely the noble savage of Rousseau, but
one who had appreciated the beauties of a sentimental
Christianity, and united a kind of Active innocency of
nature with the emotional refinements and curiosities of
The French Revolution and Literature, 21
civilization. Rousseau had found an eloquent pupil in
the founder of nineteenth century literature in France,
but in place of the intensity and diseased ardour of
Rousseau, which made him an initiator, we find in
Chateaubriand a dissolving spirit of reverie, a measure-
less sigh of regret, a background of melancholy horizons,
washed in for their artistic effect. After the clear and
hard thinking of the eighteenth century, came the day-
dream of the sentimentalist ; after the advance, a pause ;
after energy, lassitude; after hope, recollection. Were
Catholicism and feudalism fallen, and in ruins ? De
Maistre, " the Catholic Hobbes of the Revolution," would
come and rebuild the Bastille for the human spirit ;
Chateaubriand, " poet-laureate of Christianity," would
come to sit upon the ruins and sing.
The faith of Chateaubriand, as far as he possessed a
faith, was that of the eighteenth century, — he was a
deist : but his sentiment belongs to the nineteenth cen-
tury. A dying mother had grieved over his lack of
Christian belief; the beauties of Christianity supplied
charming themes for tender rhetoric ; in fine, there was
a vacancy for a laureate, and he would wear the poetic
wreath. The historical sentiment for Christianity in
Chateaubriand may, perhaps, indicate an advance from
the school of evidential writers in England, who were
so busily engaged for half a century in proving that the
apostles were neither enthusiasts nor impostors ; but
Chateaubriand's historical sentiment is not robust, a
martyr interests him as a moonlight ruin might, very
charming things may be said about each of them. Nor
did he possess a political any more than a religious faith ;
22 The French Revolution and Literature.
what he really represents is the void left by the loss of
faiths. " Je me suis toujours etonne," wrote Chateau-
briand of his contemporary Chamfort, " qu'un homme qui
avait tant de connaissance des hommes, eut pu dpouser
si chaudement une cause quelconque." The sadness of
Rene' is not a strenuous pain ; it is vague and veiled, the
romanticism of sorrow, a musical reverie with no definite
theme, a grief not uniform, grey, monotonous, but one
shot through with a play of shifting colours. Senti-
mentalism is the feminine of cynicism ; the genius of
Chateaubriand may be described as the feminine cor-
relative of the genius of Byron.
Chateaubriand, in a passage inspired by characteristic
vanity, draws a parallel between himself and Byron, each
the founder of a new literature, each of noble rank, and
he somewhat querulously complains that the English poet
nowhere makes due acknowledgment of obligations to
his French predecessor. But " Childe Harold ' is in
every way the offspring of a more masculine imagina-
tion than "Rene." Although its central figure has been
taken for a representative of the English jeunesse doree,
few young English aristocrats, it may be suspected,
could have felt with Childe Harold the largeness of
European interests, in the past and in the present, in
the material and in the moral orders. As we read the
poem we assist at the rise and fall of empires, in the
court, the camp, the council-chamber. Under the veil
of superficial cynicism there appears in " Childe Harold "
a robust enthusiasm for what is great, beautiful, and
heroic in European history ; in no way of mere senti-
mental reverie, but with a strong ardour of imagination,
The French Revolution a7id Liter atiwe. 23
the glories of former ages live again in the verse of Byron,
and connect themselves with the life of his own day.
The monuments of old renown, the memorials of patriot,
of warrior, of poet, — Dante, " the starry Galileo,"
Ariosto, Rousseau, Voltaire, the castles of the Rhine, the
cathedrals of Italy, the Apollo, the Laocoon, are none of
them forgotten or disregarded. The sated voluptuary
displays a vigorous delight in the presence or the
recollection of each of these. Byron's pleasure in nature,
in art, in human character, in the memorials of history,
has indeed nothing in it subtle or exquisite ; but he sees
the large features of things, reads off their obvious
significance, and receives from them an ample though
not an exquisite emotion. There is in " Childe Harold"
a historical sense, not scientific, and applying itself only
to an obtrusive class of facts, yet real and vital ; and
while the poem deals so much with the past, it is in
spirit essentially modern.
If Childe Harold devours all the material of enjoyment
which nature and society, the present and the past,
afford, still his heart remains craving and unsatisfied.
Obermann had withdrawn from the world, unable to
sustain its tumults and agitations. Rene' had spent his
powers in a waste of imagination, in desire apart from
action, in the luxury of self-observing tender emotion,
Childe Harold flings himself on life, and when he falls
back defeated of joy, gathers up his force, wave-like, to
fling himself upon life again. The ethical ideal of the
eighteenth century had represented as the most precious
elements of human character a wise temperance, moder-
ated desires, a cheerful resignation, a tolerant and pliant
24 The French Revolution and Literature.
temper, good sense ; for one who set before him such an
ideal- no great disenchantment or disillusion was possible.
" Never elated while one man's oppress'd
Never dejected while another's bless'd ; "
such is the equable frame of mind that Pope commends.
And when the ardour of religious desire seizes upon us
what, according to Johnson, should be our prayer ?
" Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd."
" Je sens en moi l'innni," exclaimed Napoleon, maker
of our century's epics in the world of action, himself so
great, so petty, the conqueror of the Pyramids, the
captive of St. Helena. "Je sens en moi l'infini,"
exclaimed also Byron, and this infinite of egoism left
him in the end like Napoleon, defeated and defrauded,
narrowed into the bounds of a solitary, small, and sterile
island in the great ocean of human existence — or would
have left him so, had not Greece summoned him and
Missolonghi set him free.
Byron has been spoken of as the representative poet
of revolution, and the fact that in his hands English
poetry became for the first time European poetry, —
interesting in Weimar, in Florence, in Paris, hardly less
than in London, — is evidence that Byron possesses more
+ -han a national significance. The positive dogmas, how-
ever, of the French Revolution occupy a small place in
Byron's poetry. In its political results the Revolution
seemed to him a huge failure ; yet it impressed hir
imagination as so w r onderful a phenomenon, a manifesta-
The French Revolution and Literature. 25
tion of popular power so striking and so new, that all
promises for the future became through it credible.
Only ruins indeed remained, ruins wherewith to build
anew dungeons and thrones ; yet such cannot be the
order of things for ever :
" But this will not endure nor be endured !
Mankind have felt their strength, and made it felt."
And so Byron at once believed and doubted the gospel
jof Revolution. What he absolutely disbelieved was the
gospel of the Holy Alliance. He profoundly expressed
the feeling of the moral void, and the failure of all
attempts to fill that void by the infinite of egoism, by
pleasure, by passion, by the ambition of the imagination ;
and he illustrated through all changes of circumstances
and temper, one thing constantly — a disdain of checks,
a force of reckless individualism, which formed part of
the revolutionary spirit. This it is which gives unity to
the mixed and otherwise incoherent elements of which
Byron was compounded. An English noble, proud of his
rank, yet an enemy to caste ; a fighter in the ranks of
the children of light, yet not without a strong touch of
the Philistine in him ; corrupted by the evil days of the
Regency and hating their corruption ; a scoffer at
orthodoxy, yet never delivered from a half-faith in the
popular theology of England ; a leader of the Romantic
movement, yet a worshipper of the poetry of Pope ; mean
and generous, posing himself for admiration, yet possess-
ing at bottom a sincerity of his own ; an Apollo placed
upon the limping limb of a Vulcan.
Care for his own moral being was not at any time
that which could have given direction and coherence to
26 The French Revolution and Literature.
the nature of Byron ; had he been fortunate enough to
come under the influence of some public or national
cause, which would have engaged his deepest feelings,
aroused his imagination, and given scope for the deploy-
ing of the forces of his will, then perhaps, no power of our
century would have been comparable to Byron. But he
found himself among spectral faiths, and the ghosts of
heroic causes, while the coarse energies and vulgar enjoy-
ments of the jeunesse doree, the mohawks of the Regency,
were at least real and living. And so his nature suf-
fered, not indeed entire disintegration and death, but
inward division; his nobler self protested and uttered
defiance, his baser self answered with ironical laughter;
at length in "Don Juan," the mocking voices envelop
and almost reduce to silence the voice of the better
spirit ; then came the final protest and defiance of his
higher nature : —
" The sword, the banner, and the field,
Glory and Greece, around we see !
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free ; "
and then, the divine freedom of death. The fact that
much of Byron's work was wrought from vulgar materials
made it the more readily accepted in his own day. If
jarring forces strove in Byron, they strove also in the
world around him. One thing he constantly expresses —
the individualism of the earlier Revolutionary epoch, and
the emptiness and sterility of the life which is merely
individual and not social. *' r
* See, in Life and Writings of Mazzini, vol. vi., an essay on " Byron
and Goethe," admirable in its treatment of Byron, and presenting with
great earnestness a one-sided view of Goethe.
The French Revolution and Literature. 27
Mr Matthew Arnold, who recognizes the great pro-
ductive power of Byron, inquires why the brilliant
poetical movement of Byron's time did not sustain
itself, and bore so little fruit ; and his answer is, because
it was not nourished by the best ideas ; it did not know
enough ; no great critical movement lay behind it. Mr
Arnold's view may be right, and yet it is possible to
inquire too curiously into these things ; the work of
Byron could perhaps only be done in Byron's way. " I
very much doubt," said Goethe's famulus, Eckermann,
"whether a decided gain for pure human culture is to
be derived from Byron's writings." Goethe replied, as
Faust might have done to Wagner, " There I must con-
tradict you ; the audacity and grandeur of Byron must
certainly tend towards culture. We should take care
not to be always looking for it in the decidedly pure and
moral." Nor, it may be added, in the decidedly
intellectual and scientific. " Everything that is great,"
went on Goethe, " promotes cultivation as soon as we are
aware of it." Byron did much to free, arouse, dilate the
emotional life of the nineteenth centurv. This has been
his chief work, and it is doubtful whether the work would
have been accomplished more effectively had Byron
emerged from a matrix of philosophy and criticism.
The Revolution, as it realized itself in France from
1789 to 1799, was in fact a series of revolutions. The
Constituent, the Legislative, the Convention, the
Directory, had each its season ; Girondins, Dantonists,
Robespierre and Saint-Just, the Thermidoriens, followed
one another like fierce waves, revolution rolling in upon
revolution. " In studying that portion of the European
28 The French Revolution and Literature.
movement," writes Mr John Morley, " which burst forth
into flame in France between the fall of the Bastille and
those fatal days of Vende'miaire, Fructidor, Flore'al,
Brumaire, in which the explosion came convulsively to
its end, we seem to see a microcosm of the Byronic epos.
The succession of moods is identical. Overthrow, rage,
material energy, crime, profound melancholy, half-cynical
dejection. The Revolution was the battle of will against
the social forces of a dozen centuries." It may be that,
in accordance with this view, which has a completeness
and definiteness attractive to the mind of a theoretic
literary critic, Byron is the truest representative in our
literature of the Revolution as a realized historical series
/of events. Certainly the rer^ejenta^e^of jihe Rev &lu-
Ition in its pure ideal is not Byron but Shelley. No
writer can have fewer affinities to the eighteenth century
than Shelley, considered as an artist. Byron may have
had some remote kinship with the classical school ; his
admiration for Pope may have been something more than
a protest of his good sense against his passion and his
pride, something more than an admission that he dis-
trusted his own craving heart, felt weary of the pain of
a spirit divided between enthusiasm and irony, and
looked at times longingly towards the via "media of
moderated and justified desires, unambitious reason,
and tranquil benevolence — qualities which, if Pope did
not possess, he yet poetically recommends. Shelley
assuredly derives nothing as an artist from the eighteenth
century, except from such parts of it as run on and )
connect themselves with nineteenth century art — such, I
X for example, as Rousseau's feeling for nature, his senti-
(
The French Revolution and Literature. 29
mental ardour, and the romantic horrors of Mrs Rad-
cliffe. But the intellectual basis or background of
Shelley's earlier poetry belongs, on the political side
wholly, and in large part upon the metaphysical side,
to the Aufkldrung, the critical movement which pre-
ceded the Revolution.
Shelley came in a time of reaction ; but his imagina-
tive motives lay less in events than in ideas, and, unlike
Byron, he remained in his inner spirit wholly unaffected
for evil by the reaction. No Girondin in early Revolu-
tion days could possess a more unqualified faith in the
Revolution than did the young English poet in the days
of the Regency. He saw indeed an enormous antagon-
ism of evil set over against good ; but his white flame
of devotion, to what seemed to him the sacred cause,
was thereby only quickened and intensified. Whether
it be an indication of intellectual narrowness and weak-
ness, or rather of the martyr and saint-like strength, no
touch of that cynicism which made so large a part of
Byron's complex mode of feeling came to trouble the
simplicity, or divide the energy of Shelley's soul. De
Tocqueville wrote a chapter to show how the French
Revolution, disregarding territorial boundaries, and
\iewing man as man, proceeded alone among political
movements in the manner of religious revolutions, and
'extended itself by preaching and propagandism. This
aspect of the Revolution in especial is apparent in both
the writings of Shelley and his youthful apostleship,
particularly during his mission to Ireland. Perhaps one
may discover something more heroic in Byron's sacrifice
of self on behalf of a people from whom he expected no
30 The French Revolution and Literature,
miracle of virtue, and of patriots whom he half despised,
than in Shelley's preparedness for surrender for the
whole human race about to be suddenly enfranchised
and transfigured ; and it is true that there is an absence
of sanity and adult force in Shelley's revolutionary
propagandism ; but Byron's sacrifice was not unmingled
with motives of egoism, and the life he offered up
was one worn with excess, and weary through satiety.
There is an intellectual relationship between Shelley
and Godwin, closer and more important than their
subsequent family connexion through Shelley's second
marriage. Godwin, as Mr Leslie Stephen has noticed,
" more than any English thinker, resembles those French
theorists who represented the early revolutionary im-
pulse." " His opinions were rooted too deeply in abstract
speculations to be affected by any storms raging in the
region of concrete phenomena. . . . He remained a
Republican Abdiel throughout the long dark winter of
reaction." It may safely be anirmed_Jhat everyjeading
idea in S helley 's ea rlier w ritings, can be paralleled by
a doctrine taught in Godwin's " Political Justice." Both
Godwin and Shelley, in common with the century from
which sprang their beliefs, were deficje^t__ia_th^-his-
torical sense. " I am determined to apply myself,"
Sh^ney^writes, " to a study that is hateful and disgust-
ing to my very soul. ... I mean that record of
crimes and miseries, history." And again, in a letter to
Godwin, " I am unfortunately little skilled in English
history, and the interest which it excites in me is so
feeble, that I find it a duty to attain merely to that
general knowledge of it which is indispensable." And
The French Revolution and Literature. 31
again very beautifully and characteristically Shelley
writes to another correspondent, "Facts are not what
we want to know in poetry, in history, in the lives of
individual men, in satire, or panegyric. They are the
mere divisions, the arbitrary points on which we hang,
and to which we refer those delicate and evanescent
hues of mind, which language delights and instructs us
in precise proportion as it expresses." Byron declares
that from the moment he could read, his grand passion
was history, and there will be found in his Life by
Moore a remarkable extract from a memorandum book of
1807, in which Byron sets down a list of the historical
writers whose works he had perused ; the list occupies
more than two pages, and includes histories of England,
Scotland, Ireland, Rome, Greece, France, Spain, Portu-
gal, Turkey, Russia, Sweden, Prussia, Germany, Italy,
Hindostan, America."* "The greater part of these,"
Byron adds, "I perused before the age of fifteen."
Shelley was about to reform the world, but empirical
knowledge, experience, was not needed for the task ; the
gross stuff of society was to be penetrated by the purify-
ing flame of an idea, and all its grossness was to be
burnt away.
Godwin (again I quote from Mr Leslie Stephen) 1
"represents the tendency of the revolutionary school
towards the deification of the pure intellect ; r . .
'sound reasoning and truth, when adequately com-
municated, must alway be victorious over error ; sound
* The " List of Books read by Shelley and Mary in 1817 " (Shelley
Memorials, end of chap, vii.) supplies materials for an interesting
contrast.
32 The French Revolution and Literature,
reasoning and truth are capable of being so com-
municated ; truth is omnipotent ; the vices and moral
weaknesses of men are not invincible ; man is per-
fectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual
improvement." What is this but the Revolt of Islam
put into intellectual formulae ? In Shelley's poem,
indeed, written at a time when the Revolution seemed
to have temporarily failed, and when the forces of
reaction were strong, the power of error is more justly
estimated ; yet if evil should triumph, it can be but for
a season ; the moment must arrive, when before the
breath of some pure prophet or prophetess, all the piled -
up wrongs of the earth must go down and dissolve. In
the " Prometheus " ages must pass away before the
tyrant falls, and the deliverer is unbound ; but the
day of rejoicing is certain, even if it be far off, and
in the end it will come with sudden glory. " The
worst of criminals might be reformed by reasoning" —
such was Godwin's happy conviction. Shelley differs
only as a poet must differ from a philosopher — he
assigns a larger share in such possible reformation to
the emotions, and the action upon the heart of ideals of
justice and charity. " To hate a murderer is as un-
reasonable as to hate his weapon " — so thought Godwin ;
and Shelley poetizes the doctrine when Laon bids the
tyrant Othman go free. To account for the prevalence
of error, Godwin "sets up a dark power of imposture
which fights and has hitherto fought with singular
success, against the power of truth. . . . Kings and
priests represent the incarnation of evil." The Zeus by
whose order Prometheus is chained to the rock is this
The French Revolution ana Literature. 33
dark Power of imposture, he is also named the Anarch
Custom ; it is he who has authorized the superstitions
and the tyrannies of the world. " We can scarcely
hesitate," wrote Godwin, "to conclude universally that
law is an institution of the most pernicious tendency."
And with Shelley law is everywhere at odds with love,
and in a reign of love it must at last disappear. As to
the marriage bond, Godwin is merely uncertain whether
the future unions of the sexes will be by promiscuous
intercourse, or alliances terminable at the pleasure of
either party. * Shelley exhibits in his original " Laon
and Cythna," and his " Rosalind and Helen," the beauty
of free love, and the miseries and degrading slavery of
unions where no love exists or which are protracted
after love has ceased. A ll the illusions of th e Revolu-^ 1
tion, many of them generous illusions, — perfectibility,
disregard of tradition and inheritance, the contras
between a benevolent Nature and the selfishness
Society,*!* — are to be found in full vigour in Shelle
Also all that was admirable and noble, all that
was of a constructive character in the Revolution
is to be found — its enthusiasm of humanity, its passion
for justice, its recognition of a moral element in politics,\
its sentiment of the brotherhood of men. )
It was an unfortunate circumstance that the move-'
ment party in England, and England's poets of progress^ ,
remained separated by a great gulf. The questioning
spirit in English thought during the early part of the
* Leslie Stephen : English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol.
a. p. 275.
+ On this point Shelley in later years learned to correct his erroi.
C
n
4 The French Revolution and Literatui'e.
present century — Jeremy Bentham — was (perhaps not
excepting Hobbes) the hardest-headed of all questioniDg
spirits, and his followers cut ofT the right hand of
sensibility and put out the right eye of imagination, if
by any means they might enter into the heaven of
Utilitarianism, and have share in the greatest happiness
of the greatest number. Mr Mill described in his
Autobiography the spirit which animated the first
propagators of Philosophic Radicalism. On their banner
was inscribed a strange device — the population principle
of Malthus. In politics they were possessed by " an
almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two
things, representative government and complete freedom
of' discussion." Aristocratic rule was the object of their
sternest disapprobation ; " an established Church or
corporation of priests, as being by position the great
depravers of religion, and interested in opposing the
progress of the human mind," was, next after aristocracy,
the most detestable of things. " Some of us," Mr Mill
goes on, "for a time really hoped and aspired to be a
'school.' The French pi hilosc yokes of the eighteenth
century were the examples we sought to imitate."
Here were several particulars offering points of con-
nexion with such poetry as that of Shelley, and Mr Mill
was himself endowed with a fine feeling for literature.
But something was wanting. " My zeal," says Mr Mill,
" was, as yet, little else, at that period of my life, than
zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in
genuine benevolence or sympathy with mankind, though
these qualities held their due place in my ethical
standard. Nor was it connected with any high enthusi-
The French Revolution and Literature. 35
asm for ideal nobleness. Yet of this feeling I was
imaginatively very susceptible ; but there was at that
time an intermission of its natural aliment, poetical
culture, while there was a superabundance of the
discipline antagonistic to it, that of mere logic and
analysis." All poetry had been pronounced by Bentham
to be misrepresentation. Among the liberals of that
time, it was the spiritual liberals, Maurice and Sterling,
with others — disciples of Coleridge — who best appreci-
ated the uses of the imagination and the " understanding
heart." No one who has read Mr Mill's Autobiography >
can forget the remarkable chapter in which he describes
the spiritual dryness and dejection in which his habit of
analysis and his unqualified Benthamism for a time
resulted,, nor how, in large measure through the influence
of poetry — the poetry of Wordsworth, — he recovered his
sanity and his energy of will. Afterwards, while still
highly estimating Wordsworth's poetry, he came to
understand Shelley, and assigned to him an unique
place among English poets, as possessor of the artistic
temperament in its purest, typical form.
Th &J&H igcr m jopjxy of JjjiglajicLlir . ga ii rind e n d ed
withJByron and Shel ley^_While the Revolution of 1830
proved that the spirit of 1789 was still living and
acting on the Continent of Europe, while that move-
ment assisted in giving a new direction to the rising
Romantic school in France, and was hailed by Heine
with pyrotechnic display of delighted epigrams, England,
the weary Titan, was considering her corn laws and her
Reform Bill. In France, new government, new litera-
tures, new religions, new political Utopias, Saint-Simon,
36 The French Revolution arid Literature.
and " rehabilitation of the flesh " through socialism. In
Germany, the school of junge Deutschland, with its
literary Utopias, and rehabilitation of the flesh through
joyous art. In England, severed by her positive national
character from the movement on the Continent, quite a
different sustenance of the flesh interested men, — namely
sustenance by corn. On all sides, however, after the
reverie and vague idealizing of the early part of the
century, a more positive and practical tendency showed
itself. A new stadium in the advance of the revolu-
tionary idea commenced, and other influences, which had
been silently gathering strength, now^ for the first time,
came into vital relations with literature.
With many readers of poetry at the present day, the
names of Enoch Wray and Miles Gordon stir no fibre of
imaginative sensibility; yet they are names of poetic
worth. It has been a disadvantage to Ebenezer Elliott
as a poet — though he would, perhaps, himself have
esteemed it his chief honour as a man — that he should
be remembered as the Corn-Law Rhymer. At a time
when poets love before all else to regard themselves as
artists, and inscribe upon their quaint banner of dis-
coloured say or silk the words " Art for art," the poet
who uplifts a banner — big and boisterous — with the
motto in plain English letters " Bread for the worker "
must take his chance of being set down as unregenerate,
a banner-bearer of the host of the Philistines. Much
that Elliott wrote certainly lias no portion in the calm
eternity of art, is not enshrined in any temple of those
islands
" Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold."
The French Revolution and Literature. 37
Worthy in its kind, it belongs rather to that part of
literature which, having a temporary purpose, and
having accomplished that purpose, can resolvedly ac-
cept oblivion. It serves its generation, and falls on
sleep. Prose is perhaps a more appropriate vehicle than
verse for work of this occasional kind, and whereas
poetry which becomes rhetoric degrades from its true
function, the impassioned argument of a poet who
chooses prose as his means of expression has in it some-
thing of light shining through the veil from his face to
whom God speaks " as a man speak eth unto his friend."
It was through a wise instinct or a high resolve that
Milton remained silent as a poet while he was pouring
forth in rapid succession his terrible pamphlets in de-
fence of ecclesiastical, civil, and domestic liberty. There
is, indeed, a kind of art which is both for the moment
and for all time, but then the moment must be one
charged with some special, some infinite, significance.
And if a song is to be at all a sword, it must be of finer
temper than even the finest Sheffield cutlery ; the sword
must be a living thing, like the angelic sword of flame
which turned every way. We may congratulate our-
selves that corn-duties have ceased, and that the ten-
pound householder obtained his vote, but Peterloo, and
the Repeal, and the Reform Bill of 1832 are not among
the divine Ideas.
Pure artist, as we at the present time are inclined to
conceive the artist, Ebenezer Elliott never was. He
could at no time be insensible to the pressure of practi-
cal, material needs around him ; if he ever escaped into
the presence of perfect beauty, it was as the artisan
i
38 The French Revolution ci7id Literature.
takes his Sunday ramble, to restore him for the toil of
the laborious hours. He could be anything sooner
than what one of our living poets professes himself,
" the idle singer of an empty day." He would in his
best moment have been indifferent to those aromatic
stings and scents,
" Corrompus, riehes et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,"
that mount to our brain and make it giddy as we lean
over the exquisite little phials which recent French
poets have filled for our seduction with strange and
secret compounds. He would have failed to discern the
aesthetic necessity of some of our cherished curiosities of
style ; it may be cfoubted whether the incantation of the
most musical, most meaningless refrain would have
lulled to sleep his open-eyed sense of common fact ; he
would frankly have preferred for imaginative study a
vigorous tramp upon an English highway to the
slenderest-bodied mediaeval maiden, possessing the
tenderest mediaeval name, and seen in the subtlest of
side-lights. Yet there was some pith and substance in
Ebenezer Elliott ; and it might be a fair question of de-
bate with a modern disciple of the philosophy of Aris-
tippus whether there were not obtainable a moment of
excitement more exquisite from contemplating so re-
markable a figure as that of Elliott's Peasant Patriarch
than from self-abandonment to the glories of a tazza of
Gubbio, or to the grace of a cabinet by Chippendale.
It is, also, perhaps unfortunate for Elliott's fame in
the century of revolution that, as a poet dealing with
politics, his Radicalism was of an essentially English
The French Revolution and Literature. 39
type. He claimed for the people not an ideal Republic,
not Equality, not even Liberty as a new divinity for
universal worship, not anything supposed eternal or
infinite ; his demand was for something known, definite,
tangible, material — a cheap loaf of bread. Had he
exhaled his ardour in apostrophes to Freedom, and
Revolution, and Humanity, he might still quicken our
spirits with the wine of vague enthusiasm ; as it is, his
political poetry has only helped to fill the mouths of the
hungry with food. Yet English working men honoured
his English devotion to their cause, and, when they
raised his statue in their city, Landor cast as it were
in bronze a poem, medallion-like, which exhibits in a
group with the Elliott of Gibraltar and the Eliot who
prepared the Commonwealth, the third Elliott — also
glorious — who helped to abolish the tax on bread.
Readers of Mr Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism
will remember how the critic's scourge of small cords is
laid with a light and sure hand on Mr Roebuck's
shoulders as the reward for that vigorous statesman's talk
to the Sheffield cutlers about " our unrivalled happiness."
" I ask you," said Mr Roebuck, " whether the world over,
or in past history, there is anything like it ? Nothing.
I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last."
Writing at a date before the repeal of the Corn Laws,
it is assuredly not our unrivalled happiness which finds
reflection in the Sheffield singer's verse. Its spirit is
rather that of courageous sadness ; indignation made not
a few of the verses — indignation which is that of a
sweet, hearty nature hating to be perforce turned bitter.
The side of Elliott's genius which is most remote from
40 The French Revolution and Literature.
reality, which loved to be. romantic, was his less true
self, and in his romantic poems there is unquestionably
a note of spuriousness. In his passionate studies of real
life we find the real man — ardent, affectionate, earnest,
courageous, tender, sad, and conquering sadness by virtue
of inextinguishable hope.
When we have laid aside the two considerable
volumes which contain his poetical works, and ask our-
selves what remains with us, what shall we carry forward,
and not part with, the answer is, Some figures taken
from actual English life — figures of rare dignity or true
pathetic power, and with these the atmosphere, the
rugged earth, the voices of swift, wild streams, the fresh-
ness of fair, wild flowers, and all else that makes up
the external nature of Elliott's district in the West
Riding of Yorkshire. There is something to English
eyes dearer in the prosaic ploughmen and carters of
Bewick's woodcuts, or the ungainly little figures of
sailors and washerwomen in Turner's English landscapes,
than in the most romantic of Italian banditti. But the
chief personages of Elliott's best poems have claims upon
our regard of a higher kind — they are those figures of
exceptional grandeur or pathetic beauty which humble
life in English city and village now and then affords.
Enoch Wray will not be forgotten by one who has set
eyes upon him for a single time on high-way or hill-side
— the massive frame, still unbowed after its hundred
years, the sightless eyes, the wind-blown venerable hair,
the heart bearing its memories of grief and wrong. All
is plain heroic magnitude of actual life. No spiritual
imaginative light is effused around him, like that from
The French Revolution and Literature. 41
which, as from a background, stands out the solitary
figure of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer. Nor shall we
forget the youthful preacher or ranter, who chooses the
mountain-side for his pulpit, and has a better gospel, he
thinks, to preach than that of Methodism grown respect-
able and rich ; we love him, with his eager eye, his
wistful expression, his hectic cheek, and pleading hands,
as we love some pale sunbeam on a day of gloom, pre-
destined to be quickly swallowed by the darkness.
And around these figures we see the streets, the houses,
the hamlets, the veritable Yorkshire hedgerows, and
hills, and streams, the majestic barrenness of the York-
shire moors. The one spiritual presence which breathes
through universal nature in the poetry of Wordsworth we
( are not aware of in like manner or degree in the poetry
of Ebenezer Elliott. Nor have the objects of external
nature dear to him received that mould of shapely beauty
which water and vale in Wordsworth's lake country
possess. But the air is pure and free ; beautiful wild
things lie around us in a kind of harmonised confusion ;
we hear the singing of birds and the voices of rivers, and
everywhere are unluxurious, hardy, yet delicate flowers.
The silence or vital sounds of the open country bring
healing and refreshment to an ear that has been harassed
by the din of machinery ; the wide peaceful light is a
benediction to the eye that has smarted in blear haze of
the myriad-chimneyed city. We become familiar with
recurrent names of hill and stream, until the least
musical of them, with its sharp northern edge, acquires
a pleasantness like the keen flavour of some rough-rinded
fruit.
42 The French Revolution and Literature.
" Flowers peep, trees bud, boughs tremble, rivers run ;
The redwing saith it is a glorious morn.
Blue are thy Heavens, thou Highest ! and thy sun
Shines without cloud, all fire. How sweetly, borne
On wings of morning o'er the leafless thorn
The tiny wren's small twitter warbles near !
• •••••••
Five rivers, like the fingers of a hand,
Flung from black mountains mingle and are one
Where sweetest valleys quit the wild and grand,
And eldest forests, o'er the silvan Don,
Bid their immortal brother journey on,
A stately pilgrim, watch'd by all the hills-
Say, shall we wander where, through warriors' graves,
The infant Yewden, mountain-cradled, trills
Her Doric notes % Or where the Locksley rav«s
Of broil and battle, and the rocks and caves ,
Dream yet of ancient days 1 Or where the sky
Darkens o'er Rivilin, the clear and cold,
That throws his blue length like a snake from high 1
Or, where deep azure brightens into gold
O'er Sheaf, that mourns in Eden ? "
This poetry of external nature has not the rich and soft
feeling to which agricultural or pastoral life gives rise.
Elliott sings no half-humorous, half-tender elegy to a
Puir Mailie, like that in which the Scotch peasant
laments his pet yowe. He does not, like that tender-
souled lyrist of Revolution in France — Pierre Dupont —
confess the deep comradeship which binds his life to
" Les grands bceufs blancs marques de roux."
The wilderness, in Elliott's conception, belongs to God
and to the poet; the wide enclosures of land are the
property of the peer by day, and of the poacher by
night.
At the time when " The Village Patriarch " was
gaining the attention it deserved, English poetry had
The French Revolution and Liter attire. 43
touched low-water mark after the spring-tide of the
early part of the century. It was not Elliott's billowy
incurerion of song that foretol d * n P \x\rr\ <~>f the* t.irlp A
little ripple of poetry, edged with silver spray, went
quivering up the sand. Some few eyes noticed it, and
Triton out to seaward blew his triumphant conch.
Enoch Wray was stalwart and real. The Claribels, and
Adelines, and Sea Fairies of Mr Tennyson's volume of
1830 seem a faint impalpable troop of poetic creatures ;
yet it was they and their successors who were destined
to call back the singing-tide with insupportable advance
upon our shores. Man does not live by bread alone.
We are all conscious that we have received from Mr
Tennyson something which is real, substantia l, and
corresponde nt to our need s»_— He is not a poet of the
Revolution ; his part has been to assert that freedom ^
must be one with order, th a + highest liberty ^pp gists in —
obedience to law. The revolt against ancient wrongs
had accomplished part of its work ; now the temperate
wisdom of England was to qualify the passionate hopes
and energies which had been born in France ; duties
were to assert themselves by the side of rights ; the
li beral Conservatism of Mr Tennyson \yflg to pyhihit, 1 4
order united with progress ; th e radical conservatism o f *-
Mr Carlyle was alike to initiate and to restrain.
187:
THE TRANSCENDENTAL MOVEMENT AND
LITERATURE.
That some of the finest and most generous spirits of our
time should be driven into opposition, almost into isola-
tion, and should now, as it were in the desert, prophesy
against us who heed them not, is a significant, perhaps
an alarming fact. A minority which consists of an
elite is always a witness for some despised or neglected
truths. Some among our elder writers, who were indeed
spiritual masters, look with an estranged, sad gaze at
what we call our progress, our " triumphs of civilization;"
and where among our younger writers is there promise
of any spiritual master to take their place, any prophetic
soul ? Is the hardy and aspiring school of Positivist
thinkers to be succeeded by a pessimist school, and the
reverence which gathers around the name of Comte to
transfer itself to that of the great Buddhist of Frankfort ?
Is humanity to prove itself less capable of self-worship
than of self-abhorrence? Meanwhile a few persons may
look back to the days when spiritual faith and hope and
love were the air which young souls breathed, days when
a man would go to the seers to inquire of God, and when
God Himself seemed to be not far from every one of us.
The admirable working man, who on the first day of
each month hastens to expend his tenpence on the
The Transcendental Movement. 45
purchase of Mr Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, and meditates
until the appearance of the succeeding number upon its
melancholy vaticinations, must by this time be convinced
that he has fallen on evil days. T he democratic mov e-
ment, inaugu rated by the French Revolut ion, is the
object ofMrRuskin's bitterest hostility. From it have
been derived our loss of reverence" our loose morals, our
bad manners, our mammon -worship, our materialism, our
spirit of pushing self-interest. The modern scientific
movement appears to Mr Ruskin to be in great part a
ludicrous imposture, a dull kind of learned ignorance,
with which names take the place of things, diagrams the
place of vision, and death the place of life. More robust
spirits than Mr Ruskin will refuse to be thwarted or
turned aside by what is ugly and repulsive in some
aspects of our material civilization. They will refuse to
expect that the crude years of .an industrial epoch, in
which everything acts upon so vast a scale, should exhibit
the coherence, order, and grace of civilizations which were
small in scale, which themselves took loug to emerge
from barbarism, and which are happily remembered not
as they were in their totality, but through some highly
favoured types and examples that have survived the
oblivion which overtakes the chaff and draff of the time.
It is enough if we can see within its rough envelope the
living germ of future order.
Those who possess a moderated but steadfast con-
fidence in the beneficent tendencies of the laws of the
world, would not set forward on behalf of the present
age its select and illustrious persons ; they would not
set an Abraham Lincoln over against a Saint Louis,
46 The Transcendental Movement.
although the noble disinterestedness, the steadfastness 1
of aim, the practical good sense, the pliability and
tolerance in detail, the heroic achievement, of our
modern Yankee crusader,, might bear comparison with
the chivalric virtues (among which certainly practical
wisdom was not one) of the mediaeval soldier-saint.
Defenders of the present time would rather let the
stress of their argument lie on the fact that if ever our
democratic age be organized, the organization will be
not for a class but for the entire society — for workman
as well as capitalist, for peasant as well as proprietor, for
woman as well as man ; and such a complex organization
cannot be the product of one day, nor of one century.
We accept courageously the rudeness of our vast industrial
civilization. The results of that other movement also,
the scientific, which Mr Ruskin passionately reproaches
or regards with smiling disdain, we accept with gratitude.
And yet were these our sole sources of hope, to some of
us the burden of life would seem to be hardly worth
taking up. Accumulated materials,, whether materials
for food, fire, and clothing, or materials of knowledge to
feed the intellect, do not satisfy the soul. Are we tempted
to enter the fierce struggle for material success? Are we
tempted to forfeit our highest powers in the mere
collection and systematizing of knowledge ? Let us
pause ; if our utmost ambition were gratified, how barren
a failure would be such success ! Nay, even in duties,
in the items of a laborious morality, we may cease to
possess that life which is also light and incommunicable
peace. Surrounded with possessions of wealth, of state,
of splendour, or of culture, of erudition, of knowledge, or
The Transcendental Movement. 47
even of the dutiful works of a servant who is not a son,
the inmost self may be poor, shrunken, starved, miserable,
dead. What shall it profit a man though he gain the
whole world and lose his own soul ?
And what shall it profit an age, a generation of men,
if it lose its own soul % We accept joyfully the facts of
material progress. Tons of iron, tons of coal, corn and
wine, cotton and hemp, firkins of the best butter, barrels
of salted pork ; let these have their praises, and be
chanted in the hymns of our poets of democracy.
Knowledge about the brains of an ape, knowledge about
the coprolites of an extinct brute, the dust of stars, the
spawn of frogs, the vibrations of a nerve; to such
knowledge we cry hail, and give it joyous welcome.
Then, none the less, we ask, "But the soul — what of it?
What of the most divine portion of the life of a man, and
of a society of men V
The word transcendental may be used in both a
definite and a vague sense ;. in a definite sense as
opposed to the empirical way of thinking dominant
during the eighteenth century, alike in France and in
England. The empirical thinker derives all our ideas
from experience, some members of the school asserting
that it is through the senses alone that we obtain these
ideas. The transcendental thinker believes that the
mind contributes to its own stores ideas or forms of
thought not derived from experience. As to a Divine
Being, and man's relations with Him, the empirical
thinker may be a theist, but he will ordinarily require an
apparatus, a mechanism, to connect the Divine Spirit
with the spirit of man ; the transcendental thinker can
48 The Transcendental Movement.
with difficulty endure the notion of such a mechanism
or apparatus ; the natural and the supernatural seem to
him to touch, embrace, or interpenetrate one another ;
in the external world and in his own soul the Divine
Presence for ever haunts, startles, and waylays him. So
far, the meaning of the word transcendental is definite
enough. But a word, like a comet, has a tail as well as
a head, or at least a coma as well as a nucleus, and much
vague talk about the Infinite, the Immensities, the
Eternal Verities, the Eternal Silences, and what-not, is
properly a part of transcendentalism, that is, of its coma,
or its yet fainter and more extended tail. We are
bound to recognize this vague transcendentalism, even if
we cannot accurately define it. Much has justly been
said of fallacies which arise from not defining our words;
it has not, perhaps, been sufficiently noted how fallacies
arise from assuming that a formal definition of a word is
equipollent to the word considered as a winged thing and
acting with a vital power.
Now, — whether the fact please <us, or the reverse, —
the soul in the literature of our century, at least until
comparatively recent years, has been of the kind which
we have named transcendental : at first, a transcenden-
talism, serene or joyous, which was felt to be an enlarge-
ment and -deliverance of the spirit of man ; afterwards,
as the scientific movement assumed larger proportions,
and began to sap in upon conceptions believed to be at
the base of religion and morality, a transcendentalism
either militant, or wavering and self-distrustful. The
transcendental tendencies in nineteenth century literature
become apparent in connection with the imaginative
The Transcendental Movement. 49
feeling for external nature, and in connection with the
view taken of man, whether of man as an individual, or
the entire race of mankind and its history. Between
the sceculum rationalisticum of the eighteenth century,
and our own age, the sceculum realisticum, there lies an
intervening period in which logical and mathematical
methods of truth -discovery in the moral and social order
were discredited, and the methods of the natural sciences,
observation, and induction, were not yet vigorously
applied, a period when contemplation, serene or impas-
sioned, played a large part in the attempt to ascertain
truth, and a present Deity seemed to be manifested to
the gaze of imaginative faith in the life of the world
around us, in the most august and imperial faculties of
the human soul, and in the progress of the race. The
few masters of that period of thought were succeeded
by a generation of disciples who modified the original
teaching by new elements ; the generation of disciples
is now passing away, and though they may have left an
inheritance to the world, they are without immediate
heirs.
It does not follow from what has been said that there
is but one type, eternal, necessary, and immutable, of the
spiritual in man. There have been times when an
entirely human, and indeed a narrow Stoicism has been
the spontaneous expression of what was highest in human
nature. There have been times when the tender
humanities of Catholicism — these rather than its
imperious dogma — have best nourished the religious
affections. The historical fact remains, that during at
least the first half of our century, the spiritual life of
D
5<d The Transcendental Movement.
man embodied itself in transcendental thought, and
emotions in harmony with such thought.
And one cause of this is sufficiently obvious. The
eighteenth century neglected this side of truth so
persistently and almost wantonly, that a reaction became
inevitable. The sturdy good sense of our ancestors who
read Fielding is a possession we are half disposed to
envy them. Reflect on the opinion which Mr Tom
Jones would have formed of an admired modern person-
age, the Alastor of Shelley. How that vigorous and
healthy human animal would have held too poor for
scorn a youth nourished " by solemn vision and bright
silver dream," instead of by British beef and beer, and
who wandered on homeless stream and among mountain
solitudes through nonsense prepense, when for aught that
appears he might have been smoking his pipe of tobacco
at his inn, and making love to the comely chamber-
wench. As a part of the general temper of good sense,
great regard was had in the eighteenth century to
moderation, to restrained desires, to moral tranquillity.
The wild genius of a Shakspere was not more remote
from the spirit of the correct poets, than was the zeal of
a Catholic saint or the enthusiasm of a mystic from the
Christianity, purged of extravagance, which adorned the
sermons of a Seeker or a Sherlock. With this temper
fell in aptly the theology of the age. The awful
possibilities of election or of reprobation which haunted
Cromwell's death-bed, and filled Bunyan's life with
violences of joy and terror, were now set aside ; the
excited visions of the sectaries were at an end. If
} William Law communed with the Eternal One in
The Transcendental Movement. 5 1
solitude, he found his public in two female disciples.
The God worshipped at Whitehall was the moral governor
of the universe, benevolent but not excessively benevolent,
intelligent but not an abyss of unsearchable wisdom,
energetic but not interfering save in an entirely con-
stitutional manner in the affairs of His subjects. All
parties, deists and apologists, agreed that God existed ;
only it did not greatly matter to any one whether He
existed or not. A kind of Whig oligarchy consisting of
second causes and general laws could carry on the affairs
of State very effectively by themselves ; the awful divine
King, of Puritan theology, had been reduced to something
like the position of a Venetian doge.
With this conception of the relation of God to nature
the descriptive poetry of the time corresponds. Ex-
ternal nature is not a living Presence with which the
spirit of man communes : it is a collection of objects
which may be described in detail, and which are subject
to certain general laws. To Shelley a flower is a thing
of light and of love, bright with its yearning, pale with
its passion. To Wordsworth a flower is a living par-
taker of the common spiritual life and joy of being, a
joy which is at once calm and' ecstatic. To Thomson a
flower is an object which has a certain shape and colour ;
fair-handed Spring scatters them abroad —
" Yiolet darkly blue,
And polyanthus of unnumbered dyes ;
The vellow wall-flower stained with iron-brown,"
and as many others as the passage may require. When
Thomson would be poetically devout, the Author of
5 2 The Transce?idental Movement.
nature is discovered engaged in the elegant art of
manufacturing flowers :
" Soft roll your incense, herbs and fruits and flowers,
In mingled clouds to Him whose sun exalts,
Whose breath perfumes you, and whose pencil paints."
We are taught to " look through nature up to nature's
God."
Nor is the divine presence, which is out of and
above external nature, to be found in man. Mr Carlyle
begins his studies on Hero-worship with a lecture on
the Hero as Divinity ; the heroic in man — in whatever
aspect it may manifest itself — is always the worshipful,
the divine. " The true Shekinah is Man. . . . This
body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a
vesture for that Unnamed ? ' There is but one temple
in the Universe,' says the devout Novalis, ' and that is
the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high
form. Bending before man is a reverence done to this
Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we
lay our hand on a human body.' "* Here we are in full
fervour of transcendentalism. But the eighteenth
century recognized the wisdom of a benevolent Deity in
His creating man a fool, and permitting him to be happy
in his foolery — so skilfully does the Author of nature
adapt means to ends.
11 In Folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy ;
One prospect lost, another -still we gain,
And not a vanity is given in vain ;
Even mean Self-love becomes by force divine,
The scale to measure other's wants by thine ;
See ! and confess one comfort still must rise ;
'Tis this — though man's a fool yet God is wise."
* Lectures on Heroes, i.
The Transcendental Movement. 5 3
But out-topping the ordinary man — the average fool —
there are some enormous fools, monsters for whom God
cannot be held responsible ; these monsters, who cannot
recognize their true position and submit, are precisely
Mr Carlyle's heroes, " from Macedonia's madman to the
Swede." The English moralist of the second half of the
last century, with a genuine melancholy, far different
from the complacent optimism of Pope, has still the
same tale to tell : —
" In life's last scene what prodigies surprise, —
Tears of the brave, and follies of the wise !
From Marlb'rough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show."
But if the Divine was found by eighteenth-century
writers neither in the average man nor in the most
exalted members of the race — poets, prophets, philan-
thropists, lawgivers, rulers — neither did it become
manifest through collective humanity. In our age a
religious statesman writes his " God in History," ex-
pressly enriching his theistic doctrine with certain
elements commonly called pantheistic, and tracing the
continuously developing consciousness of God in the
history of races. With Hegel history is conceived as
the development of spirit, the realization of the idea.
In the last century, although a dawning conception of
the philosophy of history had appeared as early as Vico's
" Scienza Nuova," we must not look (save in a brief but
pregnant study by Turgot) for any clear conception ot
human progress, until we reach the decade preceding
and including the French Revolution ; then in rapid
succession were put forth theories of a philosophy of
54 The Transcendental Movement.
history by Lessing, by Kant, *and by Herder in Germany,
and in France by Condorcet. But a short time
previously the spiritual ruler of the age, Voltaire, had
offered, as if they constituted a philosophy, views of the
course of human affairs contemptibly trifling and super-
ficial. If God is to be found in history, we shall
assuredly look for him in vain in the history by Hume.
Though as a philosopher Hume studied causes and
effects of a subordinate kind which influence civilizations,
as a historian he cared chiefly for whatever either lent
itself readily to the purposes of the literary artist or
happened to countenance his own political prejudices.
The theocratic conception had played a vigorous and
disturbing part in politics in the country of David
Hume's birth, and it should now be dismissed from
history as an old Covenanter's superstition. His highly
agreeable piece of narrative is history written for an
English gentleman. The other great historian of that
age — Gibbon — was (as was Hume) a deist, but the
magnificent panorama of the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire unrolls before us as a mere spectacle,
with no breathing of a divine presence anywhere to be
felt, within man or above man ; it is a painting of still
life on a vast scale ; a city of the dead. We move
along a palace-court of more than Egyptian proportions ;
there are colossal figures to the right hand and the left ;
but the tenant, the regal soul of man, or the Spirit of
God dwelling in man, is not here. Afflicted and borne
down by the intolerable silence, and the lifelessness of
these pomps of humanity, we would fain have the spell
broken by some living voice, were its words in a dialect
The Transcendental Movement. 55
as old as that of the Hebrew singer ; " In Judah is God
known ; His name is great in Israel. In Salem also is
His tabernacle, and His dwelling-place in Zion."
From the deism of the eighteenth century, from its
mechanical philosophy, from its view of things which
severed the human and the divine, from its ethics of
good sense, two modes of escape were possible. It was
possible on the one hand to appeal to authority, to
point to some single sacred depository of supernatural
truth, to localize the divine in definite ecclesiastical
persons, places, and acts. " Oh ! holy Roman Church !
as long as the power of speech remains to me, I shall
employ it in celebrating thee. I bid thee hail !
immortal parent of science and of sanctity ! Salve,
Magna Parens!" So De Maistre begins the conclud-
ing section of his " Du Pape," gazing with awe and
admiration at the Church, sole pillar of fire in our night
of life, which guides us through the desert of this world.
And essentially the same escape from the doubts and
difficulties of their time was made by the leaders of the
Oxford Movement of 1830. "Yes," they said, "man
cannot live without a divine Presence, and a Real
Presence there is; take, eat, feed upon it, and live.
The great events of man's career on earth, his entrance to
the world, the dawn of conscious spiritual life, and wed-
lock, and death, shall be lifted out of the sphere ot
common existence, and shall be sanctified by religion.
Certain spots of earth shall be redeemed and made
sacred, certain objects shall be holy to the Lord. If no
longer, as in Paradise, a mist goes up to water the
garden of man's habitation, yet by certain channels and
5 ^ The Transcendental Movement,
aqueducts the living water shall be brought down to men
from the mountains of God."
To this effect Keble sang, and Newman preached
from the pulpit of St Mary's. Over external nature,
as represented in the " Christian Year," there is a dif-
fused, pallid light, but this light concentrates itself into
certain burning points and centres called sacraments,
and all the rest tends in to these. The artificial sym-
bolism which Keble read into external nature, thereby
as he conceived discovering its divine purpose, is evi-
dence of the comparative feebleness of his imaginative
feeling for nature ; such an artificial system of corres-
pondences would have been detected to be merely
fanciful, were it not that with Keble a pious fancy
actually stood in the place of poetical imagination. To
Newman the idea that " nature is a parable " had a
higher and more mystical significance ; for him the
material universe possessed no existence as such. From
the Alexandrian school he had derived a belief that the
economy of the visible world is carried on by the
ministration of angels. ''Every breath of air and ray
of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were,
the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God."*
But the spot where God himself is in a special sense
present is at the altar communicated in or with the
Eucharist. A new-born babe is not indeed, as Puritan-
ism had taught, a child of hell ; but it waits the
sprinkling of the sacred drops to become a member of
Christ and, in the most intimate sense, a child of God.
The Divine Being is ever present in the course of human
* See Apologia, chap. i. ; Sermons, vol. II. xxix., and vol. IV. xiii.
The Transcendental Movement. 5 7
affairs ; true, and most essentially so, because the Church
is ever present, that Church which is a body descended
from the Apostles through a line of duly consecrated
bishops. Does such an arrangement seem to the children
of the world exclusive ? " Most of the great appointments
of divine goodness are marked by the very character of
what men call exclusiveness." Does it appear formal
and artificial ? " Forms are the very food of faith/'*
Such was one way of escape from the eighteenth
century mode of thinking, the way of ecclesiasticism.
The other way of escape was the transcendental. It ^
was an appeal not to authority, but to an inner light, an
appeal from one faculty of man to a faculty which
claimed to be of higher validity, from the understanding
to the " reason," as Coleridge called it, to " imaginative
faith," as it was called by Wordsworth ; to the intuitions,
or spiritual instincts, as others preferred to say. What-
ever terms were chosen, a common result was arrived at
— that not by miracle, or special grace or supernatural
intervention, but in the natural order of things a divine
Presence was within us and around us, immanent in the
world, not specially manifesting itself through consecrated
places, consecrated persons, consecrated food, books, rites,
ceremonies, but breathing through the universal frame of
things, yet declaring itself in a more august style in the
spirit of man.*f*
* Sermons, vol. III. xiv.
f Here it would be natural to notice the course of German philosophi-
cal speculation from Fichte onwards, but, in order to bring the con-
sideration of the subject with reasonable limits, it has been found
necessary to set aside the history of German thought, and its relations,
with that of England.
58 The Transcendental Movement.
The idea of a society was present with De Maistre
and in the High Church movement, of a Church as
opposed in the one case to the individualism in religion
of the Evangelical party, and in the other to the pulver-
izing of society by the revolutionary idea. The Revolu-
tion had indeed uttered the great word " Fraternity,"
but as yet this fraternity was no more than a sentiment,
and did not attempt to realize itself in institutions.
With the idea of a Christian Society, came the recogni-
tion of the need of organized system, the need of forms,
of machinery. The transcendental thinkers in the early
part of the century had, on the contrary, come out of the
Revolution, and, although the Revolution is the culmin-
ating point in the history of certain eighteenth-century
ideas and passions, while the transcendental movement
opposes itself to much that is characteristic of the
eighteenth-century, it is none the less true that there
are deep affinities between the Revolution and transcen-
dentalism. De Tocqueville has set down as one note of
a democratic period " un degout presque invincible pour
le surnaturel," an almost invincible aversion to the super-
natural, and as an'other note of democracy, a passion for
pantheistic ideas. " The idea of unity in democratic
times is for ever present to the minds of men, until at
length all differences disappear in a transcendental unity
which permits of no division between God and the uni-
verse." Now transcendentalism, seeking the supernatural
everywhere, loses sight of it as such ; through a process
of levelling up it is overtaken by and enveloped in the
natural. Nevertheless nature is not conceived in the
mechanical fashion of the Auf 'kid rung, it is living and
The Transcendental Movement. 59
divine ; in other words, the transcendental movement
has its face turned in the direction of pantheism.
Further, the glorification, if not the divinization, of
humanity is common to the Revolution and to transcen-
dentalism ; glorification of man in the political and social
world, the world of action — this is inscribed on the
revolutionary banner ; apotheosis of man in the ideal,
the spiritual world — this is inscribed upon the banner of
transcendentalism. We find accordingly in our century
many conspicuous examples of the transcendental human-
itarian united in the same person with the enthusiast of
Revolution. Finally, among the points of affinity be-
tween the transcendental and the revolutionary move-
ment, must be noted the aspiring, self-dilating, passionate
character of both. By Rousseau a breach had been
made in the ethics of moderation proper to his century ;
over and through the dykes and dams of prudence and
self-restraint, a turbulent flood of passion foamed ;
having met the torrent of Revolution, this flood went
careering on, loaded now with wreck and ravage.
Measureless passion, measureless desire, and in place of
resignation, a measureless despair fill the imaginative
literature of the early part of our century. The spirit of
I man craved for something perfect, infinite, absolute.
Even Keats, whose life was associated with no great
external m vemeiit~~ut-htt-4imey^^^
sesses the aloofness of his own^Grecian urn from the
and tramplings of the -tjenlury, — even Keats
belongs to the movement connected with Rousseau and
the Revolution by his~passiott for some absolute perfection
— and with him it was the absolute oTHBeauty^nBy this.
60 The Ti'anscendental Movement.
and also by the immitigable hunger of human love which
preyed upon him for a while, and was the ally of con-
sumption, but which came too late to find adequate
expression in his art ; and from these two elements the
passion for beauty, and one passionate love, the whole
diminished life of Keats was framed. Now this craving
for something which shall satisfy the soul, something
absolute, perfect, infinite, is closely akin to the emotional
side of the transcendental movement. The new Gospel
of faith and hope of the century possessed something in
common with the new scepticism and despair, la maladie
du siecle ; the bite of the serpent was to be cured bv
the serpent's blood.
It will not appear a mere accident, then, that some of
the characteristics noted by De Tocqueville should show
themselves in Wordsworth and Coleridge, the transcen-
dental teachers of England, when taken in connection
with the fact that they had nourished their feelings in
ardent youth with the enthusiasm of the French demo-
cracy. Shelley, again, is nothing if he is not revolu-
tionary and at the same time transcendental. If in
Byron one side of the revolution displays itself with
power, that which is more materialistic and more per-
sonal, the assertion of unbounded egoism and the rights
of the individual, in Shelley appears the reverse side,
that which is more ideal, more religious, its tendency to
merge the personal life in a larger life which is imper-
sonal, whether the life of humanity or of external nature,
the pantheistic tendency as De Tocqueville named it.*
* And so while Byron asserts liberty often for its own sake, Shelley
ordinarily asserts liberty together with fraternity, or love. Godwin, in
The Transcendental Movement. 6 1
With a theoretic mind, up to a certain point, precociously
developed, though not mature, Shelley, in earlier as well
as later years, sought after a creed ; he could not steep
himself in mere sensation, in a luxury of odours, and
colours, and sounds ; and at first, not having had time
or faculty to develop out of experience and his deepest
thoughts and feelings a genuine faith, he accepted one
ready-made, lived in it and by it ; and this creed, — that
of the critical movement preceding the Revolution, —
lies behind the colour, melody, and interwoven imagery
of all his earlier verse, f
The ethics of self-interest with which Shelley came
in contact through the French philosophes had no
attraction for him ; but the science and metaphysics of
the Aufklarung imposed themselves upon his intellect
as if they were a discovery of new and sacred truth.
The Revolution, however, had not been self-consistent
in its metaphysics, nor was Shelley. The deism of
Robespierre had appeared as ridiculous and childish to
the materialists as it had appeared impious to the
Catholics. Shelley, belonging as he did partly to the
nineteenth century and to the transcendental movement,
could not be satisfied by a barren deism, the worship
of an Etre Supreme, out of and above nature ; bat when
he caught up the- materialism of the French atheistic
philosophy, he did not sufficiently calculate upon an
element in his own nature which, though opposed to
deism, was equally opposed to atheism. From first to
his spirit of pure individualism, takes Shelley to task for desiring " the
organization of a society whose institution shall serve as a bond to its
members." — See "William Godwin," by 0. Kegan Paul, vol. ii. p. 204.
62 The Transcendental Movement.
last Shelley moved spirit-like in a world which was
spiritual, and while strenuously denying the existence of
anything immaterial, he attains what his feelings and
imagination demanded by a system of levelling-up, by
endowing: matter with all the attributes of mind. It is
impossible to reduce to entire consistenc}' the statements
made by Shelley at the time when " Queen Mab " was
written. A creative God he constantly denies ; but he
will not deny the existence of a Spirit of the Universe ;
this Spirit, however, cannot be immaterial ; its action
is necessary, it is incapable of will and of moral
qualities, it is equally the author of evil and of good ;
we can stand in no relation to it, and hence reli-
gion is impossible. Yet because the principle of the
universe acts necessarily it acts righteously; all evil
is but apparent, and it becomes possible to love and to
adore."' 5 "
Shelley's faith was no dead accretion of dogma around
his intellect ; what he could not make his own fell
away ; what remained was a vital portion of his being,
and with his growth it underwent vital processes of
change. When Shelley wrote "Adonais" he had out-
grown the creed of " Queen Mab ; " his materialism had
given place to idealism ; he no longer had any hesitation
in attributing moral qualities to the Universal God ; he
was even prepared to admit the existence of an Evil
* Some additional light has been recently thrown upon the history
of Shelley's opinions by his "Refutation of Deism," which it was my
good fortune to recover in 1 875. The copy obtained by me (from Mr
Hookham) is now in the British Museum Library, and the little
treatise has been reprinted from this copy, in the edition of Shelley's
works published by Messrs Chatto & Windus-
The Transcendental Movement. 63
Spirit of the world, in order that he might save the
moral character of the Supreme Being.
Mr Browning, in his preface to the forged letters
ascribed to Shelley, ventures to conjecture that, had he
lived, Shelley would have come to accept the Christian
faith. It may safely be affirmed that only in some tran-
scendental sense, not in a historical sense, could Shelley
ever have conceived the existence of a " Son of God."
In his later years, Shelley distinguished between the doc-
trine of the founder of the Christian religion and the theo-
logy of historical Christianity. Shortly before his death
he wrote: "I agree with Moore that the doctrines of the
French and Material Philosophy are as false as they are
pernicious ; but still they are better than Christianity,
inasmuch as anarchy is better than despotism : for this
reason, that the former is for a season, and that the
latter is eternal." While remaining hostile to historical
Christianity, Shelley had come to look on J*esus as a pure
and impassioned prophet, who held a faith not very dif-
ferent from his own in its later development. Jesus con-
ceived the ruling Power of the universe as " mysteriously
and illimitably pervading the frame of things," "an over-
ruling Spirit of the collective energy of the moral and
material world." This Spirit Jesus called by the vener-
able name of God, nor did Shelley refuse to use the
same word. Whether anything analogous to what we
call Will can be attributed to this Power is a question
which Shelley declined to consider; the action of the
Power upon our spirits he conceived to be of the kind
which we somewhat vaguely term impersonal. How far
Shelley had travelled from the doctrine set forth in the
64 The Transcendental Movement.
notes to " Queen Mab," will appear from the following
passage of singular beauty which occurs in the unfinished
" Essay on Christianity " : —
" We live and move and think ; but we are not the creators of
our own origin and existence. "VVe are not the arbiters of every
motion of our own complicated nature ; we are not the masters of
our own imaginations and moods of mental being. There is a
Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which
some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our
silent chords at will. Our most imperial and stupendous qualities
— those on which the majesty and the power of humanity is erected
— are, relatively to the inferior portion of its mechanism, active and
imperial ; but they are the passive slaves of some higher and more
omnipotent Power. This Power is God ; aud those who have seen
God have, in the period of their purer and more perfect nature,
been harmonized by their own will to so exquisite a consentaneity
of power as to give forth divinest melody, when the breath of uni-
versal being sweeps over their frame."
This was the kind of faith which his own nature was,
in its moments of highest light and ardour, fitted to yield
to Shelley.
Coleridge in an early poem uses imagery similar to
that employed by Shelley in the passage which I have
quoted, the purpose of Coleridge being not to describe
the rare and exquisite phenomena of the life of the saint,
the poet, or the perfect lover, but to suggest a theory of
the genesis of consciousness and thought throughout the
entire universe: —
" And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweep,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each and God of all 1"
From any tendency to remove the ground of division
between God and man, or mind and the material world,
The Transcendental Movement 65
Coleridge delivered himself, and we know painfully, upon
the testimony of the now venerable sage of Chelsea, that
the philosopher of Highgate, when his articulation had
become more nasal than Mr Carlyle might have desired,
knew to distinguish "om-mject" from " sum-mject."
Yet there are secret points of contact between Coleridge's
early pantheistic heresy reproved by the " serious eye "
of his " pensive Sara" and his later doctrine of the
Reason. The Reason is that which is highest in each
individual man, yet no man can call it his own ; he does
not possess it, he partakes of it ; the Reason is the
present Deity in the soul. The primary truths of
theology and of morals are witnessed to by their own
light, which is the light of Reason ; it is in us, or we
are in it, but it is not ours, nor of us.
Wordsworth, if we are to believe the complaint of
Shelley, did not possess imagination in the highest sense
of that word. When things came within the belt of his
own nature they melted into him, but he could not dart
his contemplation from any point except that on which
he actually stood. Wordsworth approached and com-
muned with Nature — Shelley goes on to say — but he
dared not pluck away her closest veil and consummate a
perfect union. It is not difficult to put oneself at
Shelley's point of view when he wrote these verses of his
" Peter Bell," and it is true that Shelley was much more
than Wordsworth like one of the brotherhood of the
forces of nature, himself a kinsman of the wind and of
the fire. Shelley's total being transforms itself into a
single energy — now into the ecstatic clasping of the life
of nature, now into an ardour of hope for man, now into
E
/
V
66 The Transcendental Movement,
keenest joy, now into some exquisite agony, now into
love, now into horror or into hate. What gives to
Wordsworth his characteristic place among idealists is
that he was much more than an idealist ; underneath
the poet lay a north-country statesman ; and instead of
transforming his being, as did Shelley, into a single
energy, all diverse energies blended in W'ordsworth's
nature into a harmonious whole. The senses were
informed by the soul and became spiritual ; passion was
conjoined with reason and with conscience ; knowledge
was vivified by emotion ; a calm passivity was united
with a creative energy ; peace and excitation were
harmonized ; and over all brooded the imagination.
Wordsworth is never intense, for the very reason that he
is spiritually massive. The state which results from
such consentaneous action of diverse faculties is one not
of pure passion, not of /pure thought; it is one of
impassioned contemplation. m To those who are strangers
to this state of impassioned contemplation, Wordsworth's
poetry, or all that is highest in it, is as a sealed book.
But one who is in any true sense his disciple must yield
to Wordsworth, so long as he is a disciple, the deep
consent of his total being. Now what appearance will
the world present to senses which are informed with
spirit ? It will itself appear spiritual, and as the gazer
still contemplates what is around and within him, and
his tranquillity ascends into a calm ecstasy, he will become
conscious of all things and himself among them, as in a
state of vital interaction, God and man and nature
communicating with one another, playing into and
through one another :
B
The Transcendental Movement. 67
" And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns r
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A motion and a spirit r that impels-
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,.
And rolls through all things."
Coleridge and Wordsworth are alike commended, or
condemned, as having contributed to bring about the
Oxford High Church movement. There is no doubt
that Coleridge did help to summon to life things which
had been dead or sleeping, and which even now seem
to walk about wound hand and foot with grave-clothes,
and bound about the face with a napkin. And Words-
worth in his later years lost, as he expresses it,, courage,
the spring-like hope and confidence which enables a man
to advance joyously towards new discovery of truth. But
the poet of " Tintern Abbey " and the " Ode on Intima-
tions of Immortality" and the "Prelude" is Wordsworth
in his period of highest energy and imaginative light ;
the writer of the " Ecclesiastical Sonnets " is Wordsworth
declined into poetical ways of use and wont, when he
had acquired a habit of writing at will in his character-
istic manner, but without his characteristic inspiration.
He valued, moreover, very deeply all permanent feelings,
and he came to regard with reverent affection all objects
with which permanent feelings have associated themselves.
Then again the analytic processes of science, the worship
of useful knowledge, the pushing materialism, the utili-
tarian philosophy of our century repelled him, and in the
68 The Transcendental Movement.
Church he found faith in something spiritual, in God and
immortality. Keble admired and honoured the venerable
poet, and transfused into his " Christian Year" a certain
quantity of dilute Words worth ian sentiment, sanctified
to purposes of religious edification. One of the writers
of the Series of Lives of the Saints, originated by Dr
Newman, reprints the "Stanzas suggested in a Steamboat
off St. Bees' Head," with a comment on the affectionate
reverence of the poet for the Catholic past, which presents
an edifying contrast to the " half-irreverent sportiveness
of Mr Southey's pen." Nevertheless it remains true, that
the tendencies of Wordsworth as a master, when he was
indeed a master, are essentially adverse to those of
Anglo-Catholicism. The difference is that between the
natural and the manufactured, the reign of spiritual law
and the reign of ecclesiastical miracle. And the true
representatives of Wordsworth among the younger minds
of Oxford were precisely those who have contributed
nothing towards the Catholic movement ; but have
rather acted in opposition to it, — such young men
among others as Mr Shairp, Mr Matthew Arnold, and
A. H. Clough.
As to Coleridge's relations with the High Church
movement, it might have given pause to those who would
exhibit him as an undeveloped Anglo-Catholic if they had
remembered his enthusiastic admiration of Luther and of
Milton."" Dr Newman, when claiming Coleridge as a
* Clough, writing from Oxford, 1838, says : "It is difficult here even
to obtain assent to Milton's greatness as a poet. . . . Were it not for
the happy notion that a man's poetry is not at all affected by his
opinions, ... I fear the ' Paradise Lost ' would be utterly unsaleable,
except for waste paper, in the university."
The Transcendental Movement. 69
philosophical initiator of High Church opinions, admits
that he "indulged a liberty of speculation which no Chris-
tian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were
often heathen rather than Christian." Perhaps if the
matter were capable of being set at rest by authority, the
highest authority adducible would be that of one who de-
voted, it may be sacrificed, a mind of high and original
powers and of admirable culture to the study and elucida-
tion of the great thinker's writings — Coleridge's learned
daughter. "My own belief is," she wrote, "that although
an unripe High Church theology is all that some readers
have found or valued in my father's writings, it is by no
means what is there : and that he who thinks he has
gone a little way with Coleridge, and then proceeded
with Romanizing teachers further still, has never gone
with Coleridge at all."
The Transcendental and the Catholic movements had,
however, one important point in common — both were
antagonistic to the Puritan religion of England, which
laboured to effect an irreparable breach between the
invisible and the visible, the internal and the external,
between body and spirit. The sole ritual evolved from
the religious consciousness of the preceding dominant
party seems to have been the mysterious ceremony of
praying into one's beaver hat. To Wordsworth the
senses, themselves sacred, and hardly more to be named
senses than soul, are ministers to what is highest in man,
"subservient still to moral purposes, auxiliar to divine."
There was for him an unceasing ritual of sensible forms
appealing to the heart, the imagination, and the moral
will — a grand function was in perpetual progress while
70 The Transcendental Movement.
seed-time and harvest and 'summer and winter endure.
The High Church rector was not ill pleased to find that
a philosophical view of religion authorized the gratifica-
tion of an English gentleman's taste for mild aesthetic
pleasures. The designs of the elder Pugin — attenuated
in structure (perhaps symbolically) and successful in
decorative elements — began to replace those grim Anglo-
Grecian temples, so vividly described by Mr Eastlake in
his " Gothic Revival," where the beauty of holiness was
made visible through the pseudo-classic portico, the
"jury-boxes in which the faithful were impanelled, the
three-decker pulpit, and the patent warming-apparatus."
To deliberate over a mural diaper, to compare the patterns
for altar furniture, afforded a gentle stimulant in the
midst of parochial dulness. The taste for melodrama
and martyrdom was not at that early date developed.
To Coleridge a far more kindred spirit than that of
any High Churchman was Mr F. D. Maurice. We can
imagine the pain with which Mr Maurice would have
heard himself styled " transcendental, " but presently that
most sympathetic of adversaries would doubtless have
discovered that you were right, only in his sense, not
your own ; " transcendental," yes, because before all else
needing some realities, some abiding facts, and not
theories about facts ; " transcendental," then, because
above everything a realist. Mr Maurice's theology, as a
recent critic, the Rev. James Martineau, has observed, is
at once an effort to oppose the pantheistic tendency, and
is itself reached and touched by that tendency. How to
connect the human and the divine had been a question
since the transition from eighteenth century thought had
The Transcendental Movement. J i
been effected. We have seen what was the answer of
De Maistre,what was the answer of English ecclesiasticism.
Mr Maurice answered that there is a divine life in the
world, a kingdom of God in process of advancement, a
divine centre and head of humanity ; in the infinite,
divine life each one of us participates ; with the divine
head of our race each one of us is vitally connected ;
" all the higher human relations are but faint echoes of
relations already existing in an infinitely more perfect
form in the divine mind ; " the higher movements of
society, the spiritual tides of passion and of thought, the
cry in our century for freedom and for order, the search in
our century for certitude, for light, all these are portions
of that life of God in the world which manifests itself
most conspicuously in the incarnation and life of a Son
of Man who is also a Son of God. Mr Martineau
writes : — »
" It may seem paradoxical, yet it is hardly hazardous, to say that
the Maurice theology owes its power not less to its indulgence than
to its correction of the pantheistic tendency of the age. It answers .
the demand of every ideal philosophy and every poetic soul for an
indwelling Divine Presence, living and acting in all the beauty of
the world and the good of human hearts. Its 'Incarnation' is not,
as in other schemes, an historical prodigy, setting its period apart,
as an Annus Mirabilis, in vehement contrast with the darkness of
an otherwise unvisited world ; but is rather a revelation, by a
supreme instance, of the everlasting immanence of God, and His
consecrating union with our humanity. . . . The new theologians
translated Christianity out of time into eternity ; they read in the
life and death of Christ no scheme, no plot with astonishing
catastrophe ; but the symbol and sample of constant divine life
with men, and of human sonship to God, disclosing relations which
had for ever been and would for ever be ; only adding now the glad
surprise that the sigh for better life, the response of conscience to
high appeals, the inward sympathy with all righteousness, are no
72 The Transcendental Movement.
lonely visions, but the personal communion of the perfect with the
imperfect mind." *
Mr Maurice never erred, as a less practically devout
nature might have erred, by theorizing away the facts of
the inner life ; conscious of a conflict between right and
wrong within himself, God was for him not an imper-
sonal force but a Righteous Will to which his loyalty
was due, and from any pantheistic tendency to efface
the distinction between good and evil Mr Maurice was
wholly free. A special gift of Mr Maurice indeed lay
in his power of lifting up into consciousness, without
murdering or dissecting them, the things of the spiritual
life ; he saw them in the round, and contemplated
rather than analyzed them. We know what splendid
theories the men of trenchant intellect can frame in
defence of religion ! with what magnificent energy they
establish everything or nothing ! —
"And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain ;" —
with what surpassing force they convince nobody \ The
spiritual life is with them a problem in mechanics to be
illustrated by a diagram. Mr Maurice waves aside
theory, and gazes at the concrete objects, while in a
fashion of its own his intellect goes obscurely to work.
Hence in part his power, which with those who have
felt his influence has been of a prophetic kind. He
more than other men, we feel, was one whose hands
* Introductory Chapter by James Martineau to Tayler's Religious
Life of England, p. 9. This section of Mr Martineau's chapter, and an
admirable article in the Spectator, November 20, 1869, entitled "Mr
Maurice — Theologian or Humanist ? " present in brief spaces the most
faithful interpretations of Mr Maurice's teaching with which I am
acquainted.
The Transcendental Movement. 73
have handled the Word of life. We do not go to him
for clear views, but for living realities, and for a living
presence breathing upon us and delivering us from the
barren abstractions of our brains.
Coleridge had given an impulse in the direction
which I have named transcendental to the intellect of
his time ; Wordsworth, to the imagination and to the
contemplative habit of mind ; Shelley, to the imagina-
tion and the passions. Mr Carlyle plays with his
electrical battery upon the will. From about 1830
onwards, the practical tendencies of the sceculum
- realisticum on the one hand begin to affect the
transcendental movement, and the scientific movement
saps in upon it on the other. Transcendentalism, which
had been serenely philosophical in the writings of
Coleridge, or, if at times argumentative, calmly argu-
mentative, — transcendentalism, which had been serenely,
even if ecstatically, contemplative in the poetry of
Wordsworth, now becomes militant ; militant against a
low utilitarian activity in Mr Carlyle's prophesying,
militant against the conclusions and tendencies of modern
science in the poetry of Mr Browning. Yet while Mr
Carlyle opposes himself to a low utilitarianism, and to
the hard, self-interested, positive tendencies of our
century, he is himself distinguished by the homage which
he pays to action, to labour, to the accomplishment of
definite duties. The literature of unlimited passion, the
literature of despair of the early part of this century,
and part of the eighteenth century, the spirit born of
Rousseau's " Nouvelle Heloise," Wertherism, and Byron-
ism had spent itself and was exhausted ; it was so if
74 The Transcendental Movement.
not in France, at least in- England and in Germany.
The wail of egoism, proclaiming its own misery, and
incapable of announcing any way of deliverance from
such unprofitable despair, had been heard sufficiently
often. While on the one hand Mr Carlyle does battle,
with more than Quixotic zeal, against logic-mills, the
dismal science, the Gospel of Mammonism, the pig-
philosophy, at the same time he deals an indignant
blow at the egoism of la maladie du siecle. In Byron,
Mr Carlyle sees only a doleful self-contemplator, confess-
ing his private griefs in theatrical fashion, to whom we
should do well to reply with the good doctor whose
patient told him he had no appetite and could not eat —
" My dear fellow, it isn't of the slightest consequence. "
His own Teufelsdrockh has spiritual trial enough ; he
dwells in Meshec, which signifies "prolonging," in Kedar,
which signifies " blackness ; " but Teufelsdrockh would
grimly have held his peace were it not that he has some
deliverance to tell of, some light born from amid the
darkness.
It is not the intellect alone, or the imagination alone,
which can become sensible of the highest virtue in the
writings of Mr Carlyle. He is before all else a power
with reference to conduct. He too cannot live without
a divine presence. He finds in it the entire material
universe, " the living garment of God." Teufelsdrockh
among the Alps is first awakened from his stony sleep
at the " Centre of Indifference " by the glory of the
white mountains, the azure dome, the azure winds, the
black tempest marching in anger through the distance.
He finds the divine presence in the spirit of man, and in
The Transcendental Movement, 75
the heroic leaders of our race. But in duty, — in duty,
not in happiness, — is found God's most intimate presence
with the soul. " Let him who gropes painfully in dark-
ness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the
-dawn may ripen into day, lay this . . . precept well to
heart, Do the Duty which lies nearest to thee" That
this duty should not harden and shrivel into a mere
round of mechanical observances, man must look up and
admit into his heart the greatness and mystery that
surround him, the Immensities, the Infinities, the Silence,
the deep Eternity. Then once more he must return to
the definite and the practicable. Mr Carlyle is a mystic
in the service of what is nobly positive, and it is easy to
see how his transcendental worship of humanity, together
with his reverence for duty, might condense and mate-
rialize themselves for the needs of a generation adverse
to transcendental ways of thought, into the ethical
doctrines of Comte.
The mysterious awe with which Mr Carlyle regards
force, — " Force, force, everywhere force ; we ourselves a
mysterious force in the centre of that. . . . Surely to
the atheistic thinker, if such an one were possible, it
must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind of
force which envelopes us here,"-— this awed contemplation
of force, coalescing with Mr Carlyle's veneration for man
as the true Shekinah, visible revelation of God, leads
directly to his hero-worship. A concentration in a human
person of this force, which is divine, constitutes a hero,
and becomes the highest and most definite presentation
of whatever we had worshipped in the vague as immense,
eternal, and infinite. Fortunately and unfortunately,
7 6 The Transcendental Movement.
Mr Carlyle does not require the heroic force to be
invariably of a moral kind, — fortunately, for the poet
and artist might otherwise as such possess no claim to
his homage ; unfortunately, because where the question
of moralit} 7 ought to be raised, Mr Carlyle does not always
put the question. Mr Carlyle is so deeply impressed by
the fact that truthfulness, virtue, rectitude of a certain
kind, the faithful adaptation of means to ends, are needful
in order to bring anything to effect, that where ends are
successfully achieved, he assumes some of the virtuous
force of the world to have been present. With this falls
in his sense of the sacredness of fact ; to recognize fact,
to accept conditions, and thereby to conquer, — such is
the part of the hero who would be a victor. Add to all
this, the stoical temper, a sternness in Mr Carlyle's nature,
which finds expression in his scorn for mere happiness,
and we shall understand how his transcendentalism makes
us acquainted with strange heroes. To suppress a
Jamaica riot it will contribute if women be whipped
with piano-wire ; to perceive this sacred fact, to apply
the piano- wire faithfully and effectively, as in the sight
of all the Immensities and Eternities, to suppress the
riot — how heroic, how divine ! Behold, there is still
among us in these days of cant and shoddy, a king, a
can-ning, an able-man ; let us fall down before him and
adore in silence !
It is impossible even to glance at the remarkable
transcendental movement in America, which took up
and carried forward the banner at a time when in
England the cause was beginning to be a little dis-
credited by the extending action and influence of posi-
The Transcendental Movement. 77
tive science. But it is worth while to notice that with
the acknowledged leader of transcendentalism in the
land of democracy the highest examples of our humanity
are not kings, can-nings, able-men, to be obliged to obey
whom is our noblest privilege ; but they are, as Mr
Emerson names them, " representative men." " Our
climate," an American naturalist writes, " is more
heady . . . . than the English ; sharpens the wits, but
dries up the fluids and the viscera ; favours an irregular
nervous energy, but exhausts the animal spirits." The
transcendentalism of America seems to show traces of
the action of such a climate. Mr Emerson is a
transcendental ist whose nervous energy has been exalted,
I and whose viscera and animal spirits have been burnt
away. His short sentences scintillate and snap like
sparks from an electrical conductor, and each gives a
separate tingle to the nerves. He loves light better
than warmth, and lacks the strong humanity of Carlyle.
His heroes do not concentrate and contain the divine
force, they represent qualities ; therefore they do not
claim our worship or obedience ; we retain the indepen-
dence of our citizenship in the spiritual commonwealth.
Or we obey and worship, but then go onward, since it is
not permitted us to forfeit the indefeasible freedom of our
advance. The hero points to a region beyond himself,
"For a time our teachers serve us personally as meters
or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of
knowledge, and their figures touched the sky. Then we
drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits ; and
they yielded their place to other geniuses. But at last
we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall
7 8 The Transcendental Movement.
content ourselves with their social and delegated quality.
.... We never come at the true and best benefit of
any genius so long as we believe him an original force.
In the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause, he
begins to help us more as an effect. Then he appears as
an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self
becomes transparent with the light of the First Cause."*
The writings of one who came under the influence of
Mr Carlyle, and who was a friend of Emerson, may serve
here to illustrate the difficulties into which religious
sentiment, theistic and pantheistic, was brought by doubts
with reference to the basis of theology forced upon the
intellects of men. That which gives to the poetry of
Clough an interest almost unique is his susceptibility to
ideas, impressions, and emotions which are antagonistic
to one another, which he could not harmonize, yet none
of which he would deny. Shelley, when he wrote, was
always under the influence of a single intense feeling
urging him to song. Clough wrote almost always with
the consciousness of two or more conflicting feelings. If
he is in the mood for an ideal flight, you may be sure
the most prosaic of demons is at his elbow about to
remind him that feet and not wings are the locomotive
instruments of a human creature. When he is most
devout he becomes the object of the most vigorous
assaults of the tempter. Now in the friendliest spirit he
approaches science, as she utters her oracles, and in a
moment he is forced away to attend to the scarce-heard
whisper of some inward monitor who may be very God.
This susceptibility to various cross and counter influ-
* Heuresentative Men, i. : Uses of Great Men.
The Transcendental Movement. 79
ences, which must have caused some of the sorrow of
Clough's life as a man, is the source of the special virtue
of his work as a poet. He will suppress 110 part of
himself to the advantage of any other part. If he and
his perceptions of truth are not a harmonious whole, he
will not falsify things by forcing upon his nature a
factitious unity. Standing towards modern science in a
trustful and friendly attitude, he yet could not accept it
as a complete account of facts so long as certain inner
voices were audible, into accord with which scientific
doctrine had not been brought. A pupil of Dr Arnold,
he found some comfort in dealing with his doubts in the
manner recommended by Teufelsdrockh, Do the duty that
lies nearest to thee : but he remained aware that such a
method for the solution of doubts is personal, not
absolute. Clough's poetry may be said to be true, upon
the whole, to the transcendental lobe of his brain ; his
prose, had he continued to write prose, would probably
have given expression to his inquiring intellect, and to
the generous practical tendencies which impelled him in
the direction of the social world. There were times
when the Mary in Clough's heart tried energetically to
transform herself into a Martha, rose up, troubled her-
self about many things, and declared that it was well to
do so ; but always a moment came when she went back
to sit at the Master's feet, and chose the good part : —
" O let me love my love unto myself alone,
And know my knowledge to the world unknown ;
No witness to my vision call,
Beholding, unbeheld of all ;
And worship Thee, with Thee withdrawn apart,
Whoe'er, whate'er Thou art,
"Within the closest veil of mine own inmost heart."
So The Transcendental Movement.
Within Clough's nature contended the spiritual
instincts and intuitions, an intellect compelled to
sceptical doubts by the tendencies of his time, and a
will bent upon disinterested practical activity. The low
worldliness, cynicism, mammon-worship, ignoble prudence,
and paltering with conscience of our age were all apparent
to him, but could not touch and stain his soul. The
Evil Spirit of his Faust-like poem, " Dipsychus," is this
low worldliness, this ignoble prudence, this cynicism, the
demon of a sceculum realisticum, who draws down men
to hell.*
Two years after the appearance in Frasers Magazine
of " Sartor Resartus," another history of a soul became
the theme of a young poet's first important work. In
Mr Browning's " Paracelsus," a great aspirer after the
absolute — the absolute of knowledge — fails in his quest,
and yet does not wholly fail. He fails because he has
tried to compel what is infinite to enter into the limits
of this finite life ; he does not fail because from the low
room in which he lies dying he passes forth to follow the
fountains of light and of love up toward God Himself.
Two particulars in his work assign to Mr Browning his
place in the literary history of our century. First,
he attempts to re-establish a harmony between what
is infinite and what is finite in man's nature. In
the early years of the century, infinite passion, infinite
desire had found unsatisfying all the materials provided
for them by our earthly life, and a cry of despair had
* To illustrate what has been said of Clough, the reader may refer to
his review of Newman's "The Soul," his poems "The New Sinai,"
"Qui Laborat Orat," and "Dipsychus."
The Transcendental Movement. 8 1
Sfone up from earth. Mr Browning, throughout the
entire series of his writings, regards this world as a school
or gymnasium, and also a place of test and trial for other
lives to come. Therefore all the means of education in
our school are precious — knowledge, beauty, passion,
power — all are precious, not absolutely, but with refer-
ence to the higher existence for which they are to prepare
us. In proportion to the ardour with which we pursue
these, and finding them insufficient, pass through them
and beyond them, have we made them yield to us their
worthiest service. Hence infinite desire, infinite aspira-
tion, is the glory and virtue of our manhood ; and
through art, through science, through human love, we
ascend unsatisfied to God. If, on the other hand, we
rest in any attainment of knowledge, or love, or creation
of beauty by art, accepting it for its own sake and as final,
we have forfeited our high distinction as men, we have
become beasts which graze in the paddock and do not
look up. Thus Mr Browning not counselling moderation,
nor attempting to restrain the emotional ardour, the
dilated passion of the early nineteenth-century literature
of imagination, yet endeavours to convert this from a
source of disease and despair into an educational instru-
ment, a source of courage and hope, a pledge of futurity.
Worldliness, a low content, a base prudence, the supine
h ear t — these are the signs of fatal disaster to man's higher
nature ; to succeed perfectly on earth is to fail in heaven ;
to fail here, even as Paracelsus failed, is less piteous than
to prosper and be at ease as Blougram prospered, extin-
guishing the light that was in him.
Secondly, what determines Mr Browning's place in the
F
8 2 The Transcendental Movement.
history of our literature is that he represents militant
transcendentalism, the transcendental movement at odds
with the scientific. His acceptance of the Christian
revelation, say rather his acceptance of the man Christ
Jesus, lies at the very heart of Mr Browning's poetry ;
and in the mode of his accepting the Christ of history he
approaches close to the spirit of Mr Maurice's theology.
With an energy of intellect such as few poets have pos-
sessed he unites a spiritual ardour which if not associated
on the one hand with an eager and combative intellect,
on the other with strong human passions and affections,
might have made Mr Browning a religious mystic ; and
he sets his intellect to defend the suggestions or intui-
tions of the spirit. In his " Caliban upon Setebos " the
poet has, with singular and almost terrible force,
represented what must be the natural theology of one
who is merely an intellectual animal, devoid of spiritual
cravings, sensibilities, and checks. It is these which
discover to us not only the power of God but the love of
God everywhere around us, and which enable us to per-
ceive that there is a supreme instance or manifestation of
God's love, which is very Christ.
But what of the historical Jesus of Nazareth ? Is
He not disappearing from the world, criticized away and
dissolved into a Christ-myth ?
" We gazed our fill
With upturned faces on as real a Face
That, stooping from grave music and mild fire,
Took in our homage, made a visible place
Through many a depth of glory, gyre on gyre,
"For the dim human tribute. Was this true ?"
And is that divine face receding out of reach of our prayers
1
The Transcendental Movement. 83
and praise into the darkness, until at last we shall lose
it altogether ? Mr Browning's answer implies some such
creed as, if we were required to seek a label for it, we
should name " Christian Pantheism." He looks at the
spectacle of the world and life as k plays, ocean-like,
around each of us, and shows itself all alive and spiritual.
The fishermen of Galilee told of a love of God which
. eighteen hundred years ago became flesh and dwelt with
men ; and this becomes credible because here and now
we behold the miracle of an omnipresent and eternal
love of God : —
" Why, where's the need of Temple when the walls
O' the world are that 1 What use of swells and falls
From Levites' choir, priests' cries and trumpet calls ?
" That one face, far from vanish rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows !"
Since Mr Browning transcendentalism has fared ill in
English literature. Poetry has been for a time Tann-
hauser-like, in the cavern of Mount Horsel, where the air
is hot, and Dame Venus lies among shadows and heavy
scents. It has tried to satiate its desire of pleasure with
the play and colour of the flame of human passion, tending
nowhither, but rising and falling and making a little centre
of brightness and stir in the wide gloom and sadness of
the world. Some of our poets talk of " art for art," and
acquire dexterity in the handling of every implement of
the jeweller's craft ; only the jewels they cut and set are
so tiny ! Divorced from the spiritual world, and in the
midst of a material world given up to low aims of self-
interest and pushing industrialism, what sphere is left
84 The Transcendental Movement.
for poetry ? Those terrible men of Ashdod, who sing
hymns to Protoplasm, and kneel before the great God
Evolution, " upward man and downward fish," have
they, quitting themselves like men, taken the ark of
God ? If any child of the prophetic tribe be brought
forth, with slender infantile cry, must we not name him
Ichabod ? Or can it be that a much-perplexed Israelite
wandering at wheat-harvest in the way of Beth-Shemesh, ,
shall some morning hear the lowing of the kine, and
lift up his eyes, and see the ark return, and rejoice to
see it ?
Meanwhile for the present one great imaginative writer
represents at their highest the tendencies of our time,
and concentrating her vision upon this earth, and the life
of men, has seen in these good and evil, joy and anguish,
terrors and splendours, as wonderful as ever appeared to
any poet of transcendentalism. That the inductions of
science and the ethics of positivism transform but do not
destroy what is spiritual in man, is demonstrated by the
creations of "Romola" and "Daniel Deronda."
1877.
THE SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT AND
LITERATURE,
Any inquiry at the present day into the relations of
modern scientific thought with literature must in great
part be guided by hints, signs, and presages. The time
has not yet come when it may be possible to perceive in
complete outline the significance of science for the
imagination and the emotions of men, but that the
significance is large and deep we cannot doubt. Litera-
ture proper, indeed, the literature of power, as De
Quincey named it, in distinction from the literature of
knoivledge, may, from one point of view, be described as
essentially non-scientific, and even anti-scientific. To
ascertain and communicate facts is the object of science ;
to quicken our life into a higher consciousness through
■ the feelings is the function of art. But though knowing
and feeling are not identical, and a fact expressed in
terms of feeling affects us as other than the same fact
expressed in terms of knowing, yet our emotions rest on
and are controlled by our knowledge. Whatever modifies
our intellectual conceptions powerfully, in due time affects
art powerfully. "With its exquisite sensibilities, indiffer-
ent to nothing far off or near which can exalt a joy, or
render pain more keen or prolonged, art is aroused by
86 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
every discovery of new fact, every modification of old
theory, which in open or occult ways can enter into con-
nection with human emotion.
(If, then, our views of external nature, of man, his past
history, his possible future, — if our conceptions of God
and His relation to the universe are being profoundly
modified by science, it may be taken for certain that art
must in due time put itself in harmony with the altered
conceptions of the intellect. A great poet is great, and'
possesses a sway over the spirits of men, because he has
perceived vividly some of the chief facts of the world and
the main issues of life, and received powerful impressions
from these. He is, therefore, deeply concerned about
truth, and in his own fashion is a seeker for truth. When,
in an age of incoherent systems and dissolving faiths,
artists devote themselves, as they say, to art for art's sake,
and their ideal of beauty ceases to be the emanation or
irradiated form of justice, of charity, and of truth, it is
because in such a period no great art is possible, and art
works, as Comte has well said, only " to keep its own
high order of faculties from atrophy and oblivion :" —
" There tiny pleasures occupy the place
Of glories and of duties, as the feet
Of fabled fairies, when the sun goes down,
Trip o'er the grass where wrestlers strove by day."*
Persons who are exclusively intellectual, and have no
feeling for art, often seem to suppose that while science
delights in what is clear and definite, poetry and art
delight in what is vague and dim ; that these things, so
agreeable to a class of gentle lunatics, are a certain pre-
* Landor's lines, descriptive of the debasement of a land or time
which freedom does not ennoble.
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 87
served extract of moonshine and mist ; and it is some-
what ludicrous to take note of the generous and conde-
scending admissions in favour of a u refining " influence
of poetry which are ordinarily made by such hard-headed
persons. " I do not know what poetical is ; is it honest
in deed and word? is it a true thing?" So Audrey
questions ; and Touchstone answers with a twinkle ot
pleasure (being in luck to find such a chance oi
gracious fooling), " No truly, for the truest poetry is the
most feigning." However this may be, whether we
agree or not with Jeremy Bentham and Touchstone that
" all poetry is misrepresentation," it is certain that the
greatest poets love comprehensiveness, and definiteness
in their conceptions. The measureless value set by
every great artist upon execution favours this tendency.
Intense vision renders precise and definite whatever is
capable of becoming so, and leaves vague only that which
is vague in its very nature. " The great and golden rule
of art as well as of life," wrote William Blake, " is this
— that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding-
line, the more perfect the work of art ; and the less keen
and sharp the greater is the evidence of weak imitation,
plagiarism, and bungling. Great inventors in all ages
knew this. . . . Kaphael and Michael Angelo and
Albert Diirer are known by this, and this alone."
Apt illustrations of the artist's love of definite concep-
tions are afforded by the great epic of mediaeval Catholic-
ism, and by the great epic of the Puritan poet of
England. There is not a rood of Dante's wonderful
journey which we might not lay down as upon a map.
The deepest anguish, the most mystical ecstasy of love,
SS The Scientific Movement and Literature.
repose on a kind of geometry. Precisely in the centre
of the universe abides the earth ; precisely in the midst of
the hemisphere of land is placed Jerusalem. Hell
descends through its circles, with their rings and pits, to
that point, exactly below Jerusalem, where Lucifer
emeronno; from the ice grinds between his teeth the
traitors against Christ and against the Emperor. As the
precise antipodes to the iDhabitants of Jerusalem climb
from terrace to terrace the wayfarers upon the Purga-
torial mount. Precisely above the mount, beyond the
planetary heavens and the crystalline sphere, in the mid-
point of the Rose of the Blessed, is the centre of the
lake of the light of God ; and yet higher, circled by the
nine angelic orders, dwells God himself, the uncreated
and infinite. Everything is conceived with perfect
definiteness, and everything cosmical subserves the
theology and ethics of the poem. God is not in im-
mediate relation with our earth ; there is a stupendous
hierarchy through which the divine power is transmitted.
Seraphim draw God wards the cherubim, the cherubim
draw the thrones, and each angelic order imparts its
motion to the earth-encircling sphere which is corres-
pondent to its influence. Such a poem could not have
been written in an age when a divorce existed between
the reason and the imagination. It is a harmony of
philosophy, physics, and poetry. In it the mystical
ardour of St Bonaventura, the sobriety and precision of
St Thomas Aquinas, quicken, sustain, and regulate the
flight of the great poet's imagination.
Milton was less fortunate than Dante. We are
presented, in Milton's case, as his most recent editor
The Scientific Movement and Liter atitre. 89
notes, "with the interesting phenomenon of a mind
apparently uncertain to the last which of the two
systems, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican, was the true
one, or perhaps beginning to be persuaded of the higher
probability of the Copernican, but yet retaining the
Ptolemaic for poetical purposes." Two passages — one a
long passage, where the subject is discussed in detail by
Adam and the affable archangel — were deliberately in-
serted by Milton " to relieve his own mind on the sub-
ject, and by way of caution to the reader that the
scheme of the physical universe, actually adopted in the
construction of the poem, needed not to be taken as
more than a hypothesis for the imagination."* Milton's
serious concern about scientific truth, and Milton's de-
mand for imaginative distinctness and definiteness, are
alike apparent. The Copernican astronomy was already
possessing itself of the intellect of the time, but the
imagination was as yet too little familiar with it to
permit of Milton's accepting it as the foundation of his
poetical scheme of things. He, like Dante, needed a
strong framework for the wonder and beauty of his poem.
Infinite space, bounded for the convenience of our
imagination into a circle, is equally divided between
heaven and chaos. Satan and his angelic followers
rebel ; the Messiah rides against them in His chariot ;
heaven's crystal wall rolls in, and the rebel spirits are
driven down to that nether segment of chaos prepared
for them, which is hell. Forthwith advances from
heaven the Sen of God, entering the wild of chaos on
His creative errand. He marks with golden compasses
* "Milton's Poetical Works," edited by David Masson, vol. i. pp. 92, 93.
90 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
the bounds of the world or starry universe, which hangs
pendent
" in bigness like a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."
Over its dark outside sweep the blustering winds of chaos ;
within, wheels orb encircling orb, and in its midst the
centre of the starry universe, our little earth, is fixed.
In this scheme there is united an astronomical system,
now obsolete, with conceptions which the poet made use
of not as scientifically but as symbolically true.
These illustrations of the desire felt by great artists
for imaginative clearness and definiteness have led us in
the direction of one side of our more proper subject, and
we might naturally now go on to ask, How have the
alterations in our cosmical conceptions effected by science
manifested themselves in literature ? But a difficulty
suggests itself which it may be worth while to consider.
As regards external nature, the materials for the poet's
and artist's use are given by the senses, and no scientific
truth, no discovery of the intellect, can effect any altera-
tion in the appearance of things, in which lies the truth
for the senses. However the Copernican theory may
have been verified, still to our eyes each morning the
sun rises over the eastern hills, each evening our eyes
behold him sinking down the west. So it has been
from the first, so it must be to the end. No one of
course will question that the appearances of things as
presented by the senses — when once the senses are de-
veloped* — remain, if not absolutely yet for the most
* The growth of the sense of colour, within a period of which we
possess literary memorials, affords a striking example of the developing
sensibility of the eye.
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 91
part constant, and are unaffected by the rectification by
science of our mode of conceiving them. But from the
first the mere visible presentation was associated with
an ideal element. For the eye confers as well as receives,
and the vision of the world to a man and to a monkey
must differ, whether or not the structure of the crystal-
line lens and the optic nerve be identical in the two.
There is an ideal element, an invisible element which
unites itself to our perceptions, and while the element
which may be called the material one remains constant,
this ideal element is subject to continual variation and
development. If our unrectified senses give seeming
testimony to anything, it is to the fixity of the solid earth
beneath our feet, and to the motion of the sun by day,
and of stars by night, across the heavens. But the
knowledge that the earth's motionlessness is only appa-
rent leaves scope for the play of an ideal element derived
from the conception of its ceaseless revolution, its
stupendous whirl ; and the imagination by its unifying
power can bring together the two apparently antagon-
istic elements — the seeming testimony of the senses,
and its correction by the intellect — and can make both
subservient to the purposes of the heart.
Let us take illustrations, slight and in small compass,
yet sufficient to exemplify the process which has been
described. Mr Tennyson imagines a lover on the eve of
his marriage-day. It is a slow-waning evening of
summer. All nature seems to share in his calm pleni-
tude of joy. Yet the ultimate fruition is not attained;
still a short way forward lies the culmination. Joy is
like a wave which has one glassy ascent and blissful fall
92 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
to make before it is perfected. What if that wave were
suddenly frozen by some icy wind, and fixed in mockery
just short of its be-all and end-all ? The idea of advance,
of motion calm and sustained, is demanded by the
imagination, and this motion must be' common to the
individual human creature, and to the world of which
he is a part. And the whole world is in effect calmly
revolving into day : —
" Move eastward, happy earth, and leave
Yon orange sunset waning slow :
From fringes of the faded eve,
O happy planet, eastward go ;.
Till over thy dark shoulder glow
Thy silver sister- world, and rise
To glass herself in dewy eyes
That watch me from the glen below.
" Ah, hear me with thee, smoothly borne,
Dip forward imder starry light,
And move me to my marriage morn,
And round again to happy night."
One more example of the perfect use by the imagination,
for the service of the feelings, of a suggestion of science.
Again it is the conception of the revolving earth, with
its unceasing monotony of motion, which asserts a
power to exalt and vivify human passion. But now
instead of the mystery of life, and the calm of the
climbing wave of joy, we are in presence of the imperi-
ous suspension of death, the obstruction and sterility of
the grave. A spirit and a woman has become a clod.
She who had been a motion and a breeze is one with
the inert brute-matter of the globe, and as the earth
whirls everlastingly, she too is whirled by a blind and
passionless force : —
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 93
" A slumber did my spirit seal ;
I had no human fears ;
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
" No motion has she now, no force ;
She neither hears nor sees ;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course
"With rocks, and stones, and trees."
These are petty illustrations in comparison with the
extent of the subject, but they suffice to show that the
impression of the senses is capable of receiving modifica-
tions, or of being wholly replaced by an ideal conception.
To a child in a railway carriage the trees appear to move
rapidly past him ; gradually the illusion submits to the
correcting influence of ascertained fact ; and at last i u
becomes difficult to enter again, even though an effort
be made to do so, into the naive error of the eve.' /r
But, beside the modification or replacement of the
impressions of the senses by an ideal element, the
cosmical ideas of modern science have in themselves an
independent value for the imagination. Four particulars
of these may be mentioned as especially important in
their dealing with the imagination, which, when taken
together, have as enlarging and renewing a power as
probably any conception of things material can have
with the spirit of man. First, the vastness of the
universe, and of the agencies at work in it ; secondly,
the idea of law ; thirdly, the idea of ensemble ; last, the J
ultimate of known ultimates is force.
* Some considerations of interest closely related with the foregoing,
will be found in Oersted's "The Soul in Nature," under the headings,
"The Comprehension of Nature by Thought and Imagination," and
"The Relation between Natural Science and Poetry."
94 The Scientific Movement and Liter aticre.
The idea of mere physical vastness may appear at
first sight to be a very barren possession for the human
soul ; but in reality it is not barren. We are conscious
of a liberating and dilating emotion when we pass from
channels and narrow seas into the space and roll of the
Atlantic, or when we leave our suburban paddock, with its
neat walks and trim flower-beds, and wade in a sea of
heather upon the hills. Mr Mill, looking back upon his
visit in childhood to Ford Abbey in Devonshire, writes in
his Autobiography, " This sojourn was, I think, an im-
portant circumstance in my education. Nothing con-
tributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a
people than the large and free character of their habita-
tions." And assuredly, for one whose sanity of mind
is not impaired, his habitation among these revolving
worlds has a large and free character, and is
fitted to nourish elevation of sentiments. The
starry heaven, so deep and pure, beheld while the trivial
incidents and accidents of our earth revealed by the
daylight are absent, and the silence seems to expand
over a vast space — this must always have been an ob-
ject of awed contemplation. But a measure of the
distance traversed by the human mind may be ob-
tained by attempting once more really to submit
the imagination to the Ptolemaic system of astro-
nomy. Under Dante's planetary spheres we move
with some discomfort, we have flown in thought so
freely and so far. The universe as arranged by the
mediaeval poet is indeed skilfully contrived, but the
whole thing looks somewhat like an ingenious toy.
For vast massing of light and darkness "Paradise
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 95
Lost " can hardly be surpassed. While Milton's out-
ward eye was active, it was charmed by the details of
the sweet English landscape about Horton ; when the
drop serene had quenched his light, then the deep
distances of the Empyrean, of eternal Night, and of
Chaos opened before him. But it is for spirit that
Milton reserves all that is greatest in the ideas of force
and motion. He is still, in the main, mediaeval in his
conception of the material cosmos. It needed for
masters a Galileo, a Kepler, a Newton, to liberate and
sustain the imagination for such a flight, so pauseless,
so passionate, as that of the revolters against Deity, in
Byron's dramatic mystery, among the innumerable fair
revolving worlds : —
" O thou beautiful
And unimaginable ether ! and
Ye multiplying masses of increased
And still increasing lights ! what are ye 1 What
Is this blue wilderness of interminable
Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen
The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden ?
Is your course measured for ye ? Or do ye
Sweep on in your unbounded revelry
Through an aerial universe of endless
Expansion — at which my soul aches- to think —
Intoxicated with eternity ]
O God ! O Gods ! or whatsoe'er ye are !
How beautiful ye are ! how beautiful
Your works, or accidents ; or whatsoe'er
They may be ! Let me die as atoms die
(If that they die), or know ye in your might
And knowledge ! My thoughts are not in this hour
Unworthy what I see, though my dust is ;
Spirit, let me expire, or see them nearer !
Lucifer. Art thou not nearer 1 look back to thine earth !
Cain. Where is it ] I see nothing save a mass
Of most innumerable lights.
g6 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
Lucifer. Look there !
Cain. I cannot see it.
Lucifer. Yet it sparkles still.
Cain. That ! — yonder !
Lucifer. Yea.
Cain. And wilt thou tell me so ?
Why, I have seen the fire-flies and fire-worms
Sprinkle the dusky groves and the green banks
In the dim twilight, brighter than yon world
Which bears them."
The displacement of the earth from the centre of the
universe, and its being launched into space as one of the
least important of its brother wanderers around the sun,
was followed by consequences for theology and morals
as well as for poetry. The Church was right in her
presentiment of a reformation, as alarming as that of
Luther, about to be effected by science. The infallible
authority of the Holy See was to be encountered by the
infallible authority of the astronomer and his telescope ;
a new order of prophets, suitable to the West as the
old prophets had been to the East, was about to arise,
prophets who would speak what was given to them by
observation and valid inference. And they declared —
and men of the Renaissance listened gladly — that the
legend was false which represented our earth as the
centre of the spheres, and as the criminal who had de-
stroyed the harmony of the worlds. The earth had
heretofore possessed a supremacy over the stars which
were set in heaven above her for signs and for seasons,
but that supremacy had become one of misery and of
shame; the terrestrial was corruptible; the celestial was
incorruptible ; a day was not far distant when the doom
brought upon creation by the great traitor would come
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 97
upon it. Now it was found that the earth was no
leader of the starry choir who had marred the music,
but was indeed a singer in the glorious chant of energy
and life ; the heaven and the earth were fraternally
united ; terrestrial and celestial alike were subject to
change ; the whole universe was ever in process of
becoming*
"The study of astrology," Mr Lecky has said, "may
perhaps be regarded as one of the last struggles of human
egotism against the depressing sense of insignificance
which the immensity of the universe must produce. And
certainly," he goes on, " it would be difficult to conceive
any conception more calculated to exalt the dignity of
man than one which represents the career of each indi-
vidual as linked with the march of worlds, the focus
towards which the most sublime of created things con-
tinually converge." It may be questioned whether
man's dignity is not more exalted by conceiving him
as part — a real though so small a part — of a great
Cosmos, infinitely greater than he, than by placing him
as king upon the throne of creation. For all creation
dwarfs itself and becomes grotesque, as happens in the
systems of astrology, to obey and flatter such a mon-
arch. He who is born under Mars will be "Good to be
a barboure and a blode letter, and to draw tethe." In
the temple of the god in Chaucer's Knighte's Tale, the
poet sees
" The sowe freten the child right in the cradel ;
The cook i-skalded, for al his longe ladel."
* See an interesting chapter on " L'Eglise Romaine et la Science,"
in Edgar Quinet's " L'TJltramontisme. "
G
98 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
If man be made the measure of the universe, the uni-
verse becomes a parish in which all the occupants are
interested in each petty scandal. Who would not
choose to be citizen of a nobly-ordered commonwealth
rather than to be lord of a petty clan ?
Add to the conception of the vastness of the universe
'the idea of the unchanging uniformities, the regularity
of sequence, the same consequents for ever following the
same antecedents, the universal presence of law.
Endless variety, infinite complexity, yet through all an
order. To understand what appearance the world would
present to the imagination of a people who gave law as
small a place, and irregularity as large a place, as
possible in their poetical conceptions of the universe we
have but to turn to the " Arabian Nights." The God of
Islam was wholly out of and above the world, and a belief
in destiny was strangely united with the supposition of
caprice, marvel, and surprise in nature. The presence
of law is to be found in the " Arabian Nights " only in
the perfect uniformity with which Shahrazad takes up
her tale of marvel each night, and each night breaks it
off in the midst. Whether a date-stone will produce a
date, or will summon up a gigantic 'Efreet, whether a
fish upon the frying-pan will submit to be fried, or will
lift his head from the pan and address his cook, is
entirely beyond the possibility of prediction. Nature is
a kind of Alnambra, " a brilliant dream, a caprice of the
genii, who have made their sport with the network
of stone," with the fantastic arabesques, the fringes, the
flying lines.
Neither variety without unity, nor unity without
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 99
variety, can content the imagination which is at
one with the reason. The sole poet of our Western ]/
civilization who possessed a true synthetic genius in
science, together with the artistic genius in its highest
form — Goethe — represents in a well-known passage the
Spirit of the Earth plying with ceaseless energy, with
infinite complexity of action, yet to one harmonious
result, the shuttles which we call causes, to weave the
web of what we call effects ; this is the true vision of the
world to modern eyes : —
" In life's full flood, and in action's storm,
Up and down I wave ;
To and fro I sweep !
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal deep,
A tissue flowing,
A life all glowing,
So I weave at the rattling loom of the years
The garment of Life which the Godhead wears."
This conception of a reign of law, amid which and under
which we live, affects the emotions in various ways : at
times it may cause despondency, but again it will correct
this despondency and sustain the heart ; now the tragical
aspect will impress us of human will and passion
contending with the great avay/.n of the order of things,
and again we shall more and more find occasion for joy
and triumph in the co-operancy of the energies of
humanity with those of their giant kindred, light, and
motion, and heat, and electricity, and chemical affinity.
Nor is this all : higher than the physical, we recognise
a moral order to which we belong, the recognition of
which cannot but produce in any mind that dwells upop
ioo The Scientific Movement and Literature.
it an emotion which would be intense if it were not so
massive, and of the nature of mysticism were it not in
the highest degree inspired by reason.
But not only is nature everywhere constant, uniform,
orderly in its operations ; all its parts constitute a
whole, an ensemble. Nothing is added : nothing can
be lost. Our earth is no alien planet wandering night-
wards to a destruction reserved for it alone. We look
forth. " The moon approaches the earth by the same
Jaw that a stone falls to the ground. The spectrum of
the sunbeam reveals the existence in the sun of the same
metals and gases that we know on earth ; nay, the
distant fixed stars, the cloudy nebulae, and the fleecy
comet show the same. We watch the double stars, and
find them circling round each other by the same law
which regulates our solar planets. We are led
irresistibly to conclude that the same consensus which
we feel on earth reigns beyond the earth. . . .
Everywhere throughout the universe — thus runs the
speculation of science — organic or inorganic, lifeless or
living, vegetable or animal, intellectual or moral, on
earth or in the unknown and unimaginable life in the
glittering worlds we gaze at with awe and delight, there
is a consensus of action, an agreement, a oneness.""""
And what is the poet's confession ? That the life of the
least blossom in the most barren crevice is a portion of
the great totality of being, that its roots are intertangled
with the roots of humanity, that to give a full account
of it would require a complete science of man, and a
complete theology : —
* A. J. Ellis : Speculation, a Discourse, p. 40.
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 101
" Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies ; —
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
But perhaps no poetry expresses the cosmical feeling for
nature, incarnated by a myth of the imagination in the
language of human passion, more wonderfully than the
lyric dialogue which leads on to its close the last act of
Shelley's " Prometheus Unbound." The poet does not
here gaze with awe at the mystery of life in a tiny
blossom, although that too opens into the infinite ; it is
the great lovers, the earth and his paramour the moon,
who celebrate their joy. The Titan has been at last
delivered from the chain and the winged hounds of
Jupiter. The benefactor of mankind is free, and the
day of the doom and death of tyranny is arrived. But
it is not humanity alone which shall rejoice : the life of
nature and the passion of man embrace with a genial
vehemence : —
" The Earth. I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points unto the heavens— dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep :
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep,
" The Moon. As, in the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull ;
So, when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
Covered ; of thy love, Orb most beautiful,
Full, oh ! too full !"
102 The Scientific Movement and Literature,
Such poetry as this is indeed what Wordsworth declared
true poetry to be — the breath and finer spirit of all
knowledge, the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science.*
All that can thus be gained by the imagination from
true science, the imagination may appropriate and vivify
for the heart of man, free from the fear that matter is
about to encroach upon us on every quarter and engulf
the soul. What is matter ? and what is spirit ? are
questions which are alike unanswerable. Motion and
thought, however they may be related as two sides or
aspects of a single fact, must for ever remain incapable
of identification with one another. When we have
reduced to the simplest elements our conceptions of
matter and of motion, we are at last brought back to
force, the ultimate datum of consciousness ; " And thus
the force by which we ourselves produce changes, and
which serves to symbolize the cause of changes, in
general, is the final disclosure of analysis." The ex-
clamation of Teufelsdrockh in his moment of mystic
elevation, " Force, force, everywhere force ; we our-
selves a mysterious force in the centre of that," is but an
anticipation of the last result of scientific thought. And
when Teufelsdrockh in scorn of the pride of intellect which
would banish mystery from the world and worship from
the soul of man — when Teufelsdrockh declares, "The man
who cannot wonder (and worship), were he President of
innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole
* Preface to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads." For a stu-
pendous example of the use made by poetry of the cosmical feeling for
nature, see in Victor Hugo's new series of "La L6geikde des Si^cles,"
the concluding poem, entitled "Abime."
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 103
Me'canique Celeste' and 'Hegel's Philosophy/ and the
epitome of all laboratories and observatories with their
results, in his single head, is but a pair of spectacles behind
which there is no eye. Let those who have eyes look
through him, then he may be useful ; " what is this but
an assertion, justified by the most careful analysis, that
the highest truth of science and the highest truth of reli-
gion are one, and are both found in the confession of an
inscrutable Power manifested to us through all external
phenomena, and through our own intellect, affections,
conscience, and will ?
Such passages as have been quoted from Byron and
Goethe and Shelley make clear to us what kind of
scientific inquiry and scientific result is fruitful for the
feelings and imaginations of men. Not the details of
the specialist, but large vues d 'ensemble. The former
may help to produce such elaborated pseudo-poetry as
part of Fletcher's " Purple Island " or Darwin's " Botanic
Garden," in which the analytic intellect tricks itself out
with spangles of supposed poetical imagery and diction,
looking in the end as grotesque as a skeleton bedizened
for a ball-room. But the large vues $ ensemble arouse
and free, and pass rapidly from the intellect to the^
emotions, the moral nature, and the imagination.
If the bounds of space have receded, and our place
has been assigned to us in the great commonwealth of
which we are members, the bounds of time have receded
also ; we have found our deep bond of relationship with
all the past, and a vista for hopes, sober but well-
assured, has been opened in the future. To trace one's
ancestry to Adam is to confess oneself a parvenu ; our
104 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
cousin the gorilla has a longer family tree to boast. Six
thousand years ! — why, a fox could hardly trim his tail
and become a dog in so brief a period. We are like
voyagers upon a stream of which we had read accurate
accounts in our geographies; it rose, we were told, a
short way above the last river bend ; it is abruptly
stopped just beyond the approaching bluff. But now
we ascertain that the waters have come from some
mysterious source among strange mountains a thousand
leagues away, and we are well assured that they will
descend a thousand miles before they hear the voice of
that mysterious sea in which they must be lost. Shall
we, upon the breast of the waters, not feel a solemn awe,
a solemn hope, when we meditate on the mighty past
and muse of the great future ? Shall we not bend our
ear to catch among the ripples each whisper of the
former things ? Shall we not gaze forward with wistful
eyes to see the wonders of the widening shores ? And
do we not feel with quickening consciousness from hour
to hour the stronger flow and weightier mass of the
descending torrent ?
The vaster geological periods have made the period of
human existence on the globe — vast as that is — seem of
short duration. What is remote becomes near. We do
not now waste our hearts in regret for an imaginary
age of gold ; we find a genuine pathos in the hard, rude
lives, the narrow bounds of knowledge, the primitive
desires, the undeveloped awes and fears and shames, of
our remote ancestors who, by their aspiring effort, shaped
for us our fortunes. We almost join hands with them
across the centuries. The ripples have hardly yet left
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 105
the lake where some dweller upon piles dropped by
chance his stone hatchet. The fire in the troglodyte's
cave is not quite extinct. We hear the hiss in the
milk -pail of some Aryan daughter, who may perhaps
have had a curious likeness to our grandmother by
Gainsborough. We still repeat the words of that per-
plexed progenitor who learned in dreams that his dead
chieftain was not all extinct, nor have we yet satisfac-
torily solved his puzzle. When we sit in summer, in
a glare that bewilders the brain, beside the bathing-
machines, and watch the children in knickerbockers
and tunics engaged with their primitive architecture,
which the next tide will wash away, we fall into a
half-dream, and wake in alarm lest a horde of lean and
fierce-eyed men and women may suddenly rush shore-
wards for their gorge of shell-fish, and in their orgasm
of hunger may but too gladly lick up and swallow our
babies ! Forlorn and much-tried progenitors, wild
human scarecrows on our bleak northern shores, we are
no undutiful sons ; we acknowledge our kinship ; in
your craving for an unattainable oyster, we recognize
our own passion for the ideal ; and in your torpid sullen-
ness, when only shells were found, our own keener
Welt-Schmerz and philosophies of despair !
In the history of the past of our globe, and the
remote history of the human race, what are the chief
inspiring-4d^as-ibr-literature ? One, which is perhaps
the most important idea of the scientific movement,
receives here a striking illustration — the idea of the
relative as opposed to the absolute ; secondly, we may
note the idea of heredity ; thirdly, the idea of human
io6 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
progress, itself subordinate to the more comprehensive
doctrine of evolution.
The general conclusion that all human knowledge is
relative may be deduced from the very nature of our
intelligence. But beside the analytic proof that our
cognitions never can be absolute, there is the subordinate
historical evidence that as a fact they never have been
such. Now, more than at any former time, we are
impressed with a sense that the thought, the feeling,
and the action of each period of history becomes intel-
ligible only through a special reference to that period.
Hence it is our primary object with regard to the past,
not to oppose, not to defend, but to understand. Hence
we shall look upon any factitious attempt to revive and
restore the past as necessarily impotent, and of transi-
tory significance. Hence we shall abstain from setting
up absolute standards, and from pronouncing things good
or evil in proportion as they approach or fall short of
such standards. A new school of historians, a new
school of critics, have applied in many and various
directions this idea of historical relativity. Nor has it
failed to exert an influence upon recent poetry. It
has been remarked that the contempt for the past,
characteristic of many eighteenth century thinkers, was
a necessary stage in the progress of thought. When
the breach with authority had taken place, it was at
first natural that men should maintain their position of
superiority by a vigorous denial of the claims of their
predecessors. " Whatever was old was absurd, and
• Gothic/ an epithet applied to all mediaeval art,
philosophy, or social order, became a simple term of
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 107
contempt. Though the sentiment may strike us as
narrow-minded, it at least implied a distinct recognition
of a difference between past and present. In simpler
times, people imagined their forefathers to be made in
their own likeness, and naively transferred the customs
of chivalry to the classical or Hebrew histories. To
realize the fact that the eighteenth century differed
materially from the eighth, was a necessary step towards
the modern theory of progressive development."* The
spirit of antiquarian research revived in the second half
of the last century. Uniting with the historical spirit
and a masculine force of imagination, it produced the
romanticism of Scott. Uniting with the sentimental
movement in Germany, it produced the romanticism of
Tieck, Novalis, and Fouque. From contempt for the
Middle Ages, men passed into an exaggerated, fantastic
devotion to whatever was, or was supposed to be,
mediaeval. Now, at length, we would approach the past
neither as iconoclasts nor idolaters, but as scientific
observers ; we are not eager to applaud or revile before
we understand ; we do not for a moment desext our own
place in our own century, but we have trained our
imagination to employ itself in the service of history.
Among critics of literature and art, M. Taine, wlik^^t
himself possessing a delicate and flexible intelligence,
1 has come prominently forward as the exponent of the
, aesthetics of the relative, in opposition to absolute
systems of aesthetics, which absolve or condemn in
accordance with standards conceived as invariable for
* Leslie Stephen. "English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,"
vol. ii. p. 445.
108 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
all places and all times. Since the appearance of
M. Taine's lectures on art, we have begun to suffer from
a kind of critical cant drawn from science, and replacing
the critical cant drawn from transcendental philosophy.
If we are not so largely afflicted by the Ideal, the
Beautiful, the Sublime, we could be content, perhaps, to
hear a little less about the " organism " and its " environ-
ment." It is not sufficiently remembered that if we
cannot attain to absolute standards of beauty, yet we
can approximate to a standard in harmony with what,
in every race and clime in which man has attained
his normal development, has been highest in man.
M. Taine, indeed, himself essayed to establish a scientific
theory of the ideal, and happily forgot his early imparti-
ality. We may, by a generous effort of imaginative
sympathy, come to appreciate the feelings which would
rise in the bosom of a South African upon sight of the
Hottentot Venus ; but we must return to the abiding
conviction that the Venus of Melos is in truer accord
with the sense of beauty in man, although, upon testing
our opinion by count of heads, we were to appear in a
minority of one.
In harmony with this feeling for the historically relative,
and also with the idea of progress, allowing as it does a
right in its own place to each portion of the past, a
poetry has appeared which, while remaining truly poetry,
partakes of the critical, we might almost say the scientific,
spirit with reference to past developments of the race,
remote civilizations, and extinct religious faiths. The
romantic poetry, to which things mediaeval were so inter-
esting, has thus been taken in and enclosed by a poetry
7
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 109
which thinks nothing alien that is human, and interests
itself in every age and every land, constituting thus a
kind of imaginative criticism of religions, races, and
civilizations. This direction in contemporary art is
represented by the poet, excepting Victor Hugo, of
highest distinction in France — Leconte de Lisle. His
poetry, for the most part strictly objective, is not simply
and frankly objective like the poetry of Scott, but rather
sets itself down before some chosen object to make a
complete imaginative study of it. Such poetry as this
is not indicative of a retreat or recoil from our own time,
as was the poetry of sentimental medievalism ; it is ani-
mated by an essentially modern motive.
The idea of transmission or heredity, over and above
its purely scientific significance, has a significance in
connection with morals which is of greater importance
than any immediate value it has for the imagination.
And yet this idea has been made a leading motive in a
dramatic poem by a living writer, who unites the passion
of a seeker for truth with the creative genius of a great
artist. The central thought of "The Spanish Gypsy"
has been so faithfully expressed by Mr R. H. Hutton, in
his admirable criticism of George Eliot, that we need
not go beyond his words : —
"If I may venture to interpret so great a writer's thought, I
should say that ' The Spanish Gypsy ' is written to illustrate not
merely doubly and trebly, but from four or five distinct points of
view, how the inheritance of the definite streams of impulse and
tradition stored up in whtit we call race often puts a tragic veto
upon any attempt of spontaneous individual emotion or volition to
ignore or defy their control, and to emancipate itself from the
tyranny of their disputable and apparently cruel rule. You can
see the influence of the recent Darwinian doctrines, °o far as they
1 10 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
are applicable at all to moral characteristics and causes, in almost
every page of the poem. How the threads of hereditary capacity
and hereditary sentiment control, as with invisible cords, the orbits
of even the most powerful characters, how the fracture of those
threads, so far as it can be accomplished by mere will may have even
a greater effect in wrecking character than moral degeneracy would
itself produce ; how the man who trusts and uses the hereditary
forces which natural descent has bestowed upon him becomes a
might and a centre in the world, while the man, perhaps intrinsi-
cally the nobler, who dissipates his strength by trying to swim
against the stream of his past is neutralized and paralyzed by the
vain effort ; again, how a divided past, a past not really homogene-
ous, may weaken this kind of power, instead of strengthening it by
the command of a larger experience — all this George Eliot's poem
paints with a tragical force that answers to Aristotle's definition of
tragedy, that which ' purines ' by pity and by fear." *
But if the stream of tendency descends to us with
imperious force from remote regions, it advances broad-
ening into the future. The idea of human progress has
been so generative an idea in science, in historical litera-
ture, in politics, in poetry, that to indicate its leading
developments would need very ample space. It is true
that we anticipate a time when this earth will roll blind
and cold around the sun, and all life upon our globe will
be extinct. And the thought can hardly be other than
a mournful one, calling for some stoical courage, to those
persons whose creed it is that we are without warrant for
believing that anything higher than humanity exists.
If it were ascertained that a century hence the British
nation would be utterly destroyed by calamitous over-
throw, we might still resolve to help our nation to live
nobly and perish heroically ; but the enthusiasm would
* "Essays," vol. ii. pp. 34S, 349. The idea of heredity has been made
a motive in art, with closer reference to physiology, by the American
poet and novelist, Dr 0. W. Holmes.
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 1 1 1
be stern rather than joyous. Tn the face of death, joy
may remain for the individual through sympathy with
the advance of his fellows, and in the thought that his
deeds will live when he is himself resolved into nothing-
ness. But how if the advance of humanity lead only to
a dark pit of annihilation, and for humanity itself anni-
hilation be attended by oblivion, and not even a sub-
jective immortality be possible ? Is it a matter for re-
joicing that every day brings us nearer to this, the goal
of progress ? Just when all has been attained, all is to
be forfeited. We can train our tempers, if need be, to
accept these things with equanimity; but can we cele-
brate with praise and joy this approaching consummation ?
Humanity flung into the grave, with no spices, no tender
hands of mourners, no tears of loving remembrance, no
friend nor even a foe, and never an Easter morning !
Is such a vision of the future so incomparable a sub-
stitute for the tender myths of the past ?
The idea of human progress — itself subordinate to the
conception of evolution — is the only one of scientific
ideas of comparatively recent date which has been long
enough in the air to become a portion of the life of
societies, and hence it alone has become a great inspiring
force with literature. To trace the sources and the early
movements of a philosophy of history, to follow its sub-
sequent career from Bossuet to Buckle, would be an
enterprise full of interest and of utility ; and as far as
France and England are concerned, this has been ably
accomplished by Professor Flint. The popular imagina-
tion was scarcely affected by the idea of progress until 7
toward the close of the eighteenth century, when a new .
H2 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
millennium seemed to be inaugurated by the French
Revolution. In English poetry it did not manifest itself
powerfully until it became the inspiration of the writings
of Shelley. And in Shelley's poetry the idea of progress
appears as a glorious apparition rather than as a sub-
stantial reality ; it appears like the witch in " Manfred ,!
beneath the sun-bow of the torrent, and here the torrent
is the French Revolution. For the idea of progress with
Shelley was the revolutionary, not the scientific idea.
Among the chief democratic writers of Europe — with
Victor Hugo, George Sand, Lamennais, Quinet, Michelet,
Mazzini, and others — the idea has had something of the
force of a new religion. And in some, at least, of these
writers the passionate aspect of the revolutionary con-
ception of progress associates itself with the sustaining
and controlling power of the scientific idea.
By Shelley and the revolutionary spirits a breach is
made with the past — the world is to start afresh from
1789, or some other Year One ; before that date appear
the monstrous forms of tyrannies and superstitions which
"tare each other in their slime ;" then of a sudden were
born light and love, freedom and truth : —
" This is the day which down the void abysm,
At the Earth-born's spell, yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And conquest is dragged captive through the deep,
Love from its awful throne of patient powder
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony springs,
And folds over the world its dealing wings."
Such is the revolutionary idea of progress. In English
poetry the scientific idea hardly appears earlier than in
The Scientific Movement and Literature. l 13
Mr Tennyson's writings, and certainly nowhere in English
poetry does it obtain a more faithful and impressive
rendering. Mr Tennyson has none of the passion which
makes the political enthusiast, none of the winged
spiritual ardour which is proper to the poet of transcen-
dentalism. But his poetry exhibits a well-balanced
moral nature, strong human affections, and, added to
these, such imaginative sympathy as a poet who is
not himself capable of scientific thought may have with
science, a delight in all that is nobly ordered, and a
profound reverence for law. When dark fears assail him,
and it is science that inspires and urges on such fears,
Mr. Tennyson does not confront them, as Mr. Browning
might, armed with the sword of the Spirit and the
shield of faith, which that militant transcendental poet
knows so well to put to use. Mr Tennyson flies for
refuge to the citadel of the heart : —
o
" A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And, like a man in wrath, the heart
Stood up, and answered, ' I have felt.' "
And as Mr Tennyson does not oppose to the sad induc-
tions of the understanding some assertion of truth
transcendental, so in his hopes for the future he is not
carried away by the divine fiavia of the worshippers of
Revolution.
The idea of progress, which occupies so large a place
in Mr Tennyson's poetry, is more than non-revolutionary; I
it is even anti-revolutionary. His imagination dwells
with a broad and tranquil pleasure upon whatever is
justified by the intellect and the conscience, and con-
tinuously energetic within determined bounds. If
H
I
1 14 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
Mr Browning had written an epic of Arthur, we can hardly
doubt that he would have found a centre for his poem in
the Grail, which would never have been attained, no'
even by Galahad, but the very failure to attain which
would have stimulated renewed effort and aspiration,
and thus have proved the truest success. The quest for
something perfect, divine, unattainable, or if attainable
then unsatisfying, secures, in Mr Browning's view, the
highest gain which this life can yield to man. Mr
Tennyson brings into prominence the circumstance —
found in his mediaeval sources — that it is the rashly
undertaken quest of the Grail that " unsolders the
noblest fellowship of knights," and brings in the flood of
disaster. Dutiful activity in the sphere of the practical
appears to Mr Tennyson so much more needed by the
world than to seek oversoon for a mystical vision ot
things divine. No true reformation was ever sudden;
let us innovate like nature and like time. Men may
rise to higher things, not on wings, but on " Stepping-
stones of their dead selves." It is " from precedent to
precedent" that freedom "slowly broadens down," not
by extravagant outbursts of " the red fool-fury of the
Seine." The growth of individual character, the growth
of national well-being, the development of the entire
human race from animality and primitive barbarism —
each of these, if it be sound, cannot but be slow and
gradual. It is our part to co-operate with the general
progressive tendency of the race : —
" Arise and fly
The reeling faun, the sensual feast :
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
The Scientific Movement and L iterature. 115
•
Great sorrows, like the storms which blew upon our
globe while in process of cooling, are a portion of the
divine order, and fulfil their part in the gradual course
of our development ; such is the truth found, through
pain and through endurance, in the " In Memoriam."
Jjet science grow from more to more ; let political or-
ganizations be carefully amended and improved ; let man
advance in self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, and
so from decade to decade, from century to century, will
draw nearer that " One far-off divine event to which the
whole creation moves."
With faith in the future equal to that of Mr Tennyson,
and a more loving attachment to the past, founded in
part upon those tender, pathetic ties which make im-
perfection dear, George Eliot, in her conception of human
progress, is also anti-revolutionary. We advance from
out of the past, but we bear with us a precious heritage.
To suppose, as Shelley supposed, that we can move in-
this world by the light of reason alone, is a delusion of
the Revolution in its passionate scorn of foregone ages ;
we need the staff of tradition as well as the lamp of
reason. What is our faith in the future but
" the rushing and expanding stream
Of thought, of feeling fed by all the past ? ; '
What is our finest hope but finest memory ? The con-
servative instincts of George Eliot as an artist have been
nourished by the scientific doctrine with reference to the
transmission of an inheritance accumulating through the
generations of mankind. And for the very reason that
she so profoundly reverences the past, she is inspired
with a great presentiment of the future : —
1 1 6 The Scientific Movement and Literature.
" Presentiment of better things on earth
Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls
To admiration, self -renouncing love,
Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one :
Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night
We hear the roll and dash of waves that break
Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,
Which rises to the level of the cliff,
Because the wide Atlantic rolls behind
Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs."
A Parisian coterie of literary artists, whose art possessed
no social feeling, and who took for their drapeau the
words, " L'art pour Tart," found progress a piece of the
boredom of bourgeois enthusiasm. It was natural, for
in themselves there was nothing to create tbe presenti-
ment of a future of glories and of duties. A silk-
worm enclosed in the delicate cocoon it has spun is
insensible to the winds of change, and probably has no
very vivid anticipation of the little nutter of potential
wings.
Mr Tennyson's words, "move upward, working out
the beast," suggest the inquiry whether the scientific
movement has modified, or is now modifying, our moral
conceptions. If it be so, the altered point of view must
be discoverable through the work of great artists, for
there are few great artists who are not indirectly great
ethical teachers, or, if not teachers, inspirers. And it is
obvious that scientific habits of thought must dispose
men to seek for a natural rather than a miraculous or
traditional foundation for morality, to seek for natural
rather than arbitrary standards of right and wrong, and
to dwell chiefly on the natural sanctions attached to
well-doing and evil-doing. The ancient law-givers
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 1 1 7
received their authority and their code by special
interposition, near secret stream, or on open mountain-
top. We look for ours in the heart of man, and through
the observation of social phenomena. Not less, but
more than Dante, we know for certain that there are a
Heaven and a Hell — a heaven in the presence of light
and blessing when a good deed has been done ; a hell in
the debasement of self, in the dark heart able no longer
vivre an, grand jour, in the consciousness of treason
against our fellows, in the sense that we have lowered
the nobler tradition of humanity, in the knowledge that
consequence pursues consequence with a deadly efficiency
far beyond our power of restraining, or even reaching
them. The assurance that we live under a reign of
natural law enforces upon us with a solemn joy and an
abiding fear the truth that what a man soweth, that
shall he also reap ; and if he sow for others (and who
does not ?), others must reap of his sowing, tares of tares,
and wheat of wheat.
A recent critic concludes his studies of the Greek poets
with a remarkable chapter which is an expansion of the
thought that the true formula for the conduct of life in
our modern world is no other than the old formula of
Greek philosophy £5$v xara <pv<nv } to live according to
nature. The words might be accepted as our rule, if
" nature ' be understood to include the action of the
higher part of our humanity in controlling or modifying
the lower and grosser part. This does not imply any
acceptance of the ascetic theory of self-mortification, it
is a part of the scientific doctrine of self- development,
since we must recognize as one element in natural
1 1 8 The Scientific Movement and Literature,
self-development the moving upward of which Mr
Tennyson speaks : —
" Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die."
The ethics of self-development rightly interpreted must,
under the influence of science, for ever replace the false
ethics of self-mortification. A sane and vigorous human
body, rich in the qualities which attract, and strongly
feeling the attractions of the earth, and of human
creatures upon the earth, will seem more sacred to us
than the most attenuated limbs of the martyrs of early
Christian art. Among our human instincts, passions,
affections, — the aesthetic sensibilities, the intellect,
the conscience, the religious emotions, an order
and hierarchy are indeed indispensable ; but not
one citizen in our little state of man shall be dis-
franchised or dishonoured. So shall men see (when
fatherhood and motherhood have been duly considered
beforehand) youth ardent, aspiring, joyous, free ; man-
hood, powerful, hardy, patient, vigilant, courageous ; and
an old age of majesty and beauty. Nor will death,
which has been in our globe ever since life was in it,
appear the seal of human shame and sin, but the com-
pletion of a fulfilled course, the rest at the goal, perhaps
the starting-point of a new career. *
All this has reference, however, to the ideal of the
* What has been said above is said, in better words in many passages
of Whitman's writings. See " Democratic Vistas," p. 41 ; " Two
Rivulets," p. 7. To spiritualize the democracy by asserting the powei
of a religion in harmony with modern science, has been the chief
tendency of Whitman's later writings.
. The Scientific 'Movement and Literature. 1 1 9
individual as pointed to by science, but science
declares further and declares with ever-increasing
emphasis, that duty is social. The law, under
which we live, does not consist, as regards our
luties to our neighbour, merely or chiefly of nega-
tions. " Thou shalt not," since the great Teacher of the
mount interpreted the law, has given place to " Thou
shalt " — shalt actively strengthen, sustain, co-operate.
The ideal of co-operation has been well defined as " The
voluntary, conscious participation of each intelligent,
separate element of society in preparing, maintaining,
and increasing the general well-being, material, intel-
lectual, and emotional." Self-surrender is therefore at
times sternly enjoined, and if the egoistic desires are
brought into conflict with social duties, the individual
life and joy within us, at whatever cost of personal suf-
fering, must be sacrificed to the just claims of our
fellows. But what has the idea of duty to do with litera-
ture — what especially has it to do with the literature of the
imagination ? Little indeed, if such literature be no more
than a supply to the senses of delicate colours and per-
fumes ; much, if such literature address itself, as all
great literature does, to the total nature of man. And
what in effect is this statement, justified by science, of
the nature of duty, but a rendering into abstract formulae
of the th robbings of the heart which lives at the centre
of such creations as " Romola," " Armgart," and
" Middlemarch % "
It is not possible here to consider how the modification
by science of our conception, not of the world only, nor
of man, but of the Supreme Power, must express itself,
1 20 The Scientific Movement and Literature,
if it have not already expressed itself, in literature.
That Power is no remote or capricious ruler ; absolutely
inscrutable, the Father of our spirits is yet manifested
in the totality of things, and most highly manifested to
such beings as ourselves in the divinest representatives
of our race. Recognizing all our notions of this in-
scrutable Power as but symbolic, we may for purposes
of edification accept an anthropomorphic conception, and
yield to all that, in sincerity, and imposing no delusion
upon ourselves, such an anthropomorphic conception may
suggest, provided always that we keep it, in accordance
with its purpose of edification, at the topmost level upon
which our moral and spiritual nature can sustain an
ideal, and bear in mind that it has no absolute validity.
Nor will it be without an enlarging and liberating power
with our spirit from time to time, when circumstances
make it natural to do so, if we part with, dismiss or
abolish the symbolic conception suggested by man, in
favour of one which the life and beauty of this earth of
ours, or of the sublime cosmos of which it is a member,
may suggest to the devout imagination. Thus by all
that can be seen, and known, and loved, the religious
spirit will be fed, and around and beyond what is
knowable will abide an encircling mystery, by virtue of
which the universe becomes something more than a
workshop, a gymnasium, or a banquet-chamber, by
virtue of which it becomes even an oracle and a shrine.
Out of that darkness has proceeded our light ; and in
proportion as our hearts are filled with that light, shall
we possess wisdom and courage to draw high auguries
of hope and fear from the mystery - which lies around
The Scientific Movement and Literature. 121
our life, and to wait resolvedly for whatever new shining
of the day-spring, or whatever calm silence of night,
the future years may yield. It is possible already to
perceive in literature the influence of such religious
conceptions as have been here suggested.
1877.
THE PROSE WORKS OF WORDSWORTH.
The Prose Works of Wordsworth form a gift for which
all who have ever truly listened to Wordsworth, and
learned from him, will be grateful with no common grati-
tude. To some men now in middle life the poetry of
Wordsworth in its influence upon their early years has
been somewhat like a lofty mountain,
" An eminence, of these our hills
The last that parle) T s with the setting sun,"
which rose as chief presence and power near the home
of their boyhood, which was the resort of their solitary
walks, which kindled their most ardent thoughts, which
consecrated their highest resolves, which created moods
of limitless aspiration, which strengthened and subdued,
from which came forth clear yet mysterious echoes,
against whose front the glories of dawns that were
sacred had been manifested, and on whose edges stars,
like kindling watchfires, had paused at night for a
moment in their course. Not less than this Words-
worth's poetry was to them, as they can remember now.
But for such men the Wanderj 'alive, the years of travel,
needful and inevitable, came ; they went hither and
thither; they took gifts from this one and from that ; they
saw strange ways and strange faces of men ; they parted,
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 12*
o
it may be, too cheaply with old things that had been
dear ; they looked, or seemed to look, at truth askance
and strangely. And now if they are drawn back once
more into the haunts of early years, they return not
without dread and foreboding and tender remorse ;
to pass the barriers and re-enter the solitude seems as
though it needed preparatory discipline and penance and
absolution ; having entered it, however, the conscious-
ness of one's own personality and its altering state
ceases ; the fact which fills the mind is the permanence
of that lofty, untroubled presence ; " there it is," we
say, " the same as ever," the same, though to us, who
have ranged, it cannot continue quite the same, but
seems now a little more abrupt and rigid in its outlines,
and, it may be, seems a narrow tract of elevation in con-
trast with the broad bosom of common earth, the
world of pasture-land and city and sea which we have
traversed, and which we shall not henceforth forsake.
The contents of the three volumes of Wordsworth's
Prose Works, miscellaneous as they are, fall into cer-
tain principal groups ; first, the political writings, which
represent three periods in the growth of Wordsworth's
mind, that of his ardent, youthful republicanism (repre- ^
sented by the Apology for the French Revolution), that
of the patriotic enthusiasm of his manhood (represented
by his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra,) and
lastly, that of his uncourageous elder years. * Certain
essays and letters upon education, together with a deep-
* " Years have deprived me of courage, in the sense the word bears
when applied by Chaucer to the animation of birds in spring time. "— «
"Prose Works" vol. iii. p. 317.
124 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
though ted letter of Advice to the Young, reprinted from
the Friend, lie nearest to the political writings, having
indirect bearings upon politics, but being immediately,
and in the first instance, ethical. The group entitled by-
Mr Grosart " ^Esthetical and Literary " comprises the
Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, notable for its fine
charity, and at the same time strength of moral judg-
ment, the Essays upon Epitaphs, admirable pieces of
philosophical criticism, and the several essays and pre-
faces which accompanied the editions of Wordsworth's
poems. Hard by these is rightly placed Wordsworth's
Guide through the District of the Lakes ; this, besides
being a singularly perfect piece of topographical descrip-
tion, is of unique interest as exhibiting Wordsworth's
mind, in reference to external nature, at work not in the
imaginative, but in the analytic manner. The letters
on the Kendal and Windermere Railway belong to the
same group of writings. In the third volume appear
the notes to the poems, collected from many editions,
and the whole of the precious and delightful memoranda,
having reference chiefly to the occasions on which
Wordsworth's poems were conceived or written, dictated
by the poet to Miss Fenwick, and known to Wordsworth
students as the I. F. MSS. Letters and extracts of
letters follow, and the volume closes with various
personal reminiscences of Wordsworth, among which
must be distinguished for its deep sympathy with the
character and genius of the poet, and the interest of its
details, the notice contributed by a living poet, kindred in
spirit to Wordsworth, Mr Aubrey de Vere. In the present
study it will be possible only to gather up the sugges-
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 125
tions which arise from one division of these various
writings, the political division.
When a poet on great occasions, and with a powerful
motive, expresses himself in prose, it may be anticipated
that his work will possess certain precious and peculiar
qualities. While working in the foreign material, he
does not divest himself of his fineness of nerve, of his
emotional ardour and susceptibility, nor can he disregard
the sustenance through beauty, of his imagination ; but
the play of his faculties takes place under new condi-
tions. The imagination, used as an instrument for the
discovery of truth, will pierce through the accidental
circumstances of the hour and the place in its effort to
deliver from the incidents of time the divine reality
which they conceal ; occasional and local events will be
looked on as of chief significance in reference to what is
abiding and universal ; and the poet's loyalty to certain
ideals will probably take the form of a strenuous
confidence in the future of nations or of mankind.
Thus, if he essays to write a political pamphlet, it is
probable that the pamphlet will come forth a prophecy.
No prose writer knows better than the poet (writing in
Milton's expressive words, " with his left hand "), the
limits to which he has subjected himself; yet he cannot
quite subdue the desire to push back the limits, and
assert the full privileges of his nature. No poet,
indeed, as far as I am aware, has written in that hybrid
species, which is the form of ostentation dear to the
vulgarly ambitious, unimaginative mind, and which calls
itself prose-poetry. The poet who writes in prose has
made a surrender, and is conscious of self-denial and a
126 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
loss of power ; but, to compensate this, some of the force
and intensity which comes through sacrifice for a
sufficient cause may add itself to his mood and to its
outcome. There will be in such writing a quiver as of
wings that have often winnowed the air ; and mastering
this, there will be a poise, a steadfast advance, and in
the high places of contemplation or of joy a strong
yet tranquil flight, a continued equilibration of passion
and of thought.
Mr Mill in a celebrated essay, with the object of
illustrating by typical examples the true nature of poetry,
contrasted the poetry of Wordsworth with that of
Shelley. The latter was described as the offspring of a
nature essentially poetical, vivid emotion uttering itself
directly in song, while the former, Wordsworth's poetry,
was set down as the resultant of culture, and of a
deliberate effort of the will, its primary factor being a
thought, around which, at the command of the writer,
or according to a habit which he had acquired, were
grouped appropriate feelings and images. Any one who
has been deeply penetrated by Wordsworth's poetry
must perceive in a way which leaves no room for vague
statement, that while Mr Mill received its influence up
to a certain point, he yet remained outside the sphere
of Wordsworth's essential power; and perhaps no piece
of criticism, seeming to outsiders to possess so consider-
able a portion of truth, could be more entirely alien to
the consciousness of those who have adequately felt the
power of Wordsworth's poetry than that of Mr Mill.
Each writer of high and peculiar genius, whose genius
notwithstanding fails to be world-wide, or universal as
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 127
the sun, may be said to exercise over his readers an
election of grace — one is taken and another left ; and
that a person who has been thus elected, should speak
with decision about the Master, implies no arrogance.
As a man asserts confidently what has been clearly
shown by the report of the senses, so one who has been
admitted to the presence of a writer of such high and
peculiar genius as Wordsworth, knows and declares that
the fact is so, and not otherwise. There will be no
dissent among those who have approached nearest to
Wordsworth, when it is said that a most essential
characteristic of Wordsworth's writing, when he wrote in
his most characteristic manner, is precisely the reverse
of what Mr Mill stated it to be.
In the poems of Wordsworth, which are the most dis-
tinctively Wordsworthian, there is an entire consentaneity
of thought and feeling ; no critical analysis can separate
or distinguish the two, nor can we say with accuracy that
either has preceded and initiated the movement of the
other; thought lives in feeling, feeling lives in thought; in
their dual unity neither " is afore or after other," neither
" is greater or less than another." If ever, indeed, there
appears a tendency to severance of these two elements of
Wordsworth's poetry (it being assumed that Wordsworth
is writing at his best), this occurs in those occasional
trances of thought and mountings of the mind, when all
intellection and all operancy of will seem to be suspended,
and the whole being of the man to be transformed and
transfused into silent rapture : —
" In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God
Thought was not, in enjoyment it expired."
1 28 The Prose Works of Wordsivorth.
And yet in such an hour thought rather lay hidden in
" the lisrht of thought " than had ceased to be. The
forces of Wordsworth's nature, like the forces of the
physical universe, were correlated by a marvellous law,
according to which one could pass and be transformed
into another, what was at this moment a sensuous affec-
tion becoming forthwith a spiritual presence, what was
contemplation appearing presently as passion, or what was
now a state of passive, brooding receptivity transforming
itself into the rapturous advance, and controlling mastery
of the imagination. " The excellence of writing, whether
in prose or verse," Wordsworth has said, "consists in
the conjunction of Reason and Passion/' And as this
may be noted as the excellence of Wordsworth's own
poetry, the conjunction being no result of an act of the
will, or of mere habit, but vital, primitive, immediate,
and necessary — so it must be set down as the first dis-
tinguishing quality of whatever is highest and noblest in
these his writings in prose.
The earliest in date of the more important prose
writings of Wordsworth is an Apology for the French
Revolution. Bishop Watson, who had been a con-
spicuous English sympathizer with the great move-
ment in France during its earlier stages, deserted of a
sudden the cause which to Wordsworth at that time
appeared the cause of freedom and of the human race.
An appendix to a sermon of the Bishop — a sermon that
bore an odious title — had signalised his change of faith
by an attack upon the principles and the conduct of the
Revolution. Wordsworth's pamphlet is a reply to this
appendix. In dexterous use of his weapons the Bishop
-!
The Prose Woi'ks of Woi'dsworth. 129
is the more practised combatant ; Wordsworth's style
suffers in some degree from a sense of the conventional
dignity of the political pamphlet as employed in the
eighteenth century, A young writer can hardly afford
to be quite direct and free in his movements, lest he
should be violent and awkward. "Alluding to our
natural existence, Addison, in a sublime allegory well
known to your lordship, has represented us as crossing
an immense bridge, from whose surface from a variety
of causes we disappear one after another, and are seen
no more." This simile of the opening paragraph, formed
from the Vision of Mirza, with its appalling image of the
Bishop of Llandaff falling " through one of the numerous
trap-doors, into the tide of contempt, to be swept away
into the ocean of oblivion," belongs to the manner of
majestic scorn or indignation of the political letter- writer
of the period. It is more important to observe that in
all higher and stronger qualities of mind the advantage
lies with Wordsworth. And very remarkable from a
biographical point of view it is to ascertain, as we do
from this pamphlet, that not only was Wordsworth's
whole emotional nature aroused and quickened by the
beauty of promise which the world in that hour of
universal dawn seemed to wear, but that his intellect
had so clearly comprehended and adopted with con-
viction so decided the principles of Kepublican govern-
ment.
Wordsworth had reached the age of twenty-three.
His character, naturally simple, stern, and ardent, had
received at first no shock of either fear or joy from the
events in France ; they seemed only natural and right.
I
130 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
But when he entered into actual contact with the soil
and people, he could not but become aware of the mar-
vellous change and progress. On the eve of the day on
which the king pledged his faith to the new constitution,
Wordsworth saw with his own eyes the joy upon the
faces of all men. "A homeless sound of joy was in
the sky ; " and to such primitive, unshaped sounds,
; whether from trees and mountain torrents, or the waves
of the sea, or the tumultuous movement of the people,
Wordsworth's imagination responded with peculiar energy.
France was standing " on the top of golden hours ; ' ; in
Paris the English wanderer had gathered from among
the rubbish of the Bastille a fragment to be cherished
as a relic ; upon the banks of the Loire he had discussed
with Beaupuis the end and wisest forms of civil govern-
ment ; he had listened to the speeches of the Girondins
in the National Assembly. And now that his republican
faith might seem to be tried and tested, perhaps some-
what strained, by the September massacres and the
execution of Louis XVI., he still retains unshaken faith
in France and in the Republic.
Until his twenty-second year external nature had
possessed all Wordsworth's deeper sympathies, and
been the inspirer of his most intimate hopes, and
joys, and fears. This, therefore, was the season of
the first love-making of his soul with human society.
The easy-going sociability of his laxer hours at Cam-
bridge had been felt to be a carelessness towards
that higher self within him, which when he was
alone asserted its authority and condemned his casual
measures. But now for Wordsworth to unite himself
I V
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 131
with mankind was to widen the life and reinforce the
energies of that higher self. He could not quickly or
without a struggle renounce the new existence which
had opened for him. Acts of violence had been per-
petrated ; but " a time of revolution," Wordsworth
pleaded, " is not the season of true Liberty." " Alas,"
he goes on, " the obstinacy and perversion of man is
such that Liberty is too often obliged to borrow the very
arms of despotism to overthrow him, and in order to
reign in peace must establish herself by violence. She
deplores such stern necessity, but the safety of the
people, her supreme law, is her consolation." A certain
sternness and hardness in Wordsworth's temperament, his
youthful happiness, and his freedom from tender, per-
sonal bonds, enabled him to look, without shrinking,
upon some severe measures enforced by the leaders of
the Revolution. Such tenderness as sheds tears over
the fallen body of a king seemed to Wordsworth a
specious sensibility. His sorrow was yielded to the
violated majesty of public order; he lamented "that
any combination of circumstances should have rendered
it necessary or advisable to veil for a moment the statues
of the laws, and that by such emergency the cause of
twenty-five millions of people, I may say of the whole
human race, should have been so materially injured.
Any other sorrow for the death of Louis is irrational
and weak." This is a young man's somewhat haughty
devotion to a cause, untempered and uninformed as yet
by concrete human sympathies, or the " humble cares
and delicate fears " which come with adult life.
In this pamphlet Wordsworth's republican faith is
132 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
distinctly formulated. A republic is the least oppressive
form of government, because, as far as is possible, the
governors and the governed become one. The property
qualification of voters must be set aside ; the mechanic
and the peasant may claim their right to a share in the
national legislation ; the suffrage must be universal. It
is indeed necessary to delegate power to representatives
of the people ; but by shortening the duration of the
trust, and disqualifying the legislator for continuous re-
election during a series of years, safe-guards against the
abuse of this delegated authority may be provided.
Arbitrary distinctions between man and man are to be
abolished ; hereditary nobility must cease, and with it
those titles which are a standing insult to the dignity
of plain manhood. Laws should be enacted rather in
favour of the poor man than of the rich. The privileges
"Of primogeniture must be abolished. And then upon
the grounds of expediency, and of justice, and through
force of arguments drawn from the nature of man,
Wordsworth pleads against monarchy, and the aristo-
cratical institutions which form its support. The Bis-
hop of Llandaff had found it hard to understand what
is meant by the equality of man in a state of civil
society ; Wordsworth directs his lordship for an explanation
to one of the articles of the Rights of Man. " Equality,
without which liberty cannot exist, is to be met with in
perfection in that State in which no distinctions are to
be admitted but such as have evidently for their object
the general good."
There is a young man's bold and virtuous energy
in the arguments of Wordsworth, if there be little of
The Prose Works of Wordsworth, 1 3
->
the deep moral pregnancy of his later writings. The
chief interest of the pamphlet lies in its relation to
the history of Wordsworth's mind. A.nd it must be
noted as assigning its true place to this piece of political
reasoning, that the fact that Wordsworth was able to
put forward his faith as a series of credenda, and was
ready to give an argumentative reason for the hope that
was in him, is evidence that at this time the most
joyous period of Wordsworth's revolutionary fervour was
already past. So long as the facts of the French
Revolution were their own justification, so long as the
movement manifested its sacred origin by a self-evidenc-
ing light, Wordsworth's faith was a joyous confusion of
thought and emotion, a confluence of the mere gladness
of living, the hope of youth, instincts and feelings which
had existed since his childhood, and the readily accepted
theories of the day. But when the facts of the Revo-
lution no longer corresponded with his wishes or his
hopes, Wordsworth threw himself, for temporary defence
against the threatening danger of disbelief and profound
disappointment, upon theory. As the real cause became
increasingly desperate — which in 1793 it was far from
having become — Wordsworth put upon his theory an
increasing stress and strain, until at length opinions
clung around his mind as if they were his life, " nay,
more, the very being of the immortal souL" In the
process of attempting to sustain his faith in the Revolution
by means which to one of his constitution of mind, were 1/
against nature, his inmost being underwent a disruption
and disintegration. The powers of his nature ceased to
act with a healthy co-operation ; until, finally, turning
T
4 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
upon the opinions which tyrannized over him to test
their validity by the intellect alone, " dragging all pre-
cepts, judgments, maxims, creeds, like culprits to the
bar," Wordsworth escaped from them mournfully, through
a period of perplexity and intellectual despair. In place
of truth he found only a conflict of indecisive reasonings.
The declaration by England of war against France
severed Wordsworth in feeling from the country of his
birth and of the traditions of his heart. The aggressive
action of the French Republic against Switzerland gave
definite form to his latently growing alienation from the
adopted country of his hopes, his theories, and his
imaginings. The political part of him became thus a
twofold exile ; his sympathies, which had been so strong
and glad, were thrown back upon himself, and turned
into bitterness and perplexity. With Wordsworth
political faith and ardour could not flourish apart from a
soil in which to take root, and shoot upward and strike
downward ; his passion was not for ideas in themselves,
but for ideas as part of the finer breath and expression
of a nation's life. Though abundant in power of wing,
and free in aerial singleness, like the skylark of his own
poem, Wordsworth's faith needed a habitation upon the
green, substantial earth ; it could not live in perpetual
flight, as Shelley's faith lived, a bird of paradise that
feeds upon the colours of the sunset and sunrise, and if it
sleeps at all, sleeps upon the smooth night-wind. It is
easy for us at the present day, to whom the events of that
passionate period come calmed and quelled, bounded in
space and controlled by adjacent events, it is easy for us
to declare that Wordsworth's loyalty to the ideas of his
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 135
you tli should have survived the test ; it is easy for us to see
that at no moment in the history of the French Revolu-
tion had the vast spiritual agents which brought it into
being spent their force, or converted that force into a
desperate rage of destruction ; it is easy for us to discover
that before the principles of the Revolution lay a long
career. But precisely because the moral nature of
Wordsworth, and of others along with him, was com-
pletely roused, and was sensitive in proportion to its
vital energy, the shock of events was felt severely, and
the pain of frustration and disappointment became a
blinding pain. The failure of the Revolution was felt
like the defection and dishonour of a friend, and when
all was quieted by iron bonds of military rule, it struck
with cold finality upon young hearts as though it were
a death.
From the first there was a point at which Wordsworth's
adhesion to the French historical movement failed or
was imperfect, though of this fact and its import Words-
worth himself was at first probably not aware ; sooner or
later the flaw must have become a rift and gaped.
Wordsworth's sympathy with the national passion of joy
and hope in France was spontaneous and involuntary ;
but with the long intellectual movement which preceded
the upheaval of society, and with the methods of thought
pursued with enthusiasm in the eighteenth century, the
mind of Wordsworth could at no period have been in
harmony. During upwards of eighty years which have
elapsed since 1789 the principles of the Revolution have
approximated, touched, or united themselves to many
various schools of thought, from that of a Christian
136 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
democracy to that of Atheistic communism. But
originally to have entered into a very close and complete
relation to the movement, it would have been necessary
to have come up with it out of the centre of the
eighteenth century illumination or Auflcldrung. Looked
at from a comprehensive point of vision, the Convention
appears but an incident in that great progressive move-
ment, that flinging-forward, wavelike, of the human
mind, of which the Encyclopaedia is another incident.
But how much of the Encyclopaedia ever came home to
the genius of the great transcendental poet of England,
or was assimilated by it ? Neither a dry, mechanical
deism, nor a tender, sentimental deism was the theo-
logical conception towards which Wordsworth's religious
feeling could naturally incline him ; and Reason, even if
Wordsworth had lost all faith in a " Wisdom and Spirit
of the universe," would never have been the abstraction
from the nature of man, to which he would have chosen
to yield his homage.
With Rousseau it might be supposed that the mind
of the English poet would find something in common ;
but the sentimental return to nature of Rousseau,
his self-conscious simplicity, and his singular com-
bination of brooding sensuality with a recoil from the
enervating effects of luxury, differed as much as possible
from the temper and genius :f Wordsworth, on one side
simple, hard-grained, veracious as that of a Westmoreland
dalesman, on the other capable of entrance into a plane
of idealizing thought and imagination, where for Rousseau
to breathe would have been death. From the aesthetic
point of view, the alleged return to nature of the
The Prose Works of Wordsworth, 137
revolutionary epoch did not show well ; of what mingled
elements it really consisted will appear from the paintings
of David, and from the affectation of Roman manners in
public life upon conspicuous occasions. The eighteenth
century, speaking broadly, had pursued truth by methods
of the intellect alone, apart from the suggestions of man's
instincts, emotions, and imagination. By-and-by these
last had leaped into life aggressively, and caught up as
weapons of their warfare the conclusions which the
intellect had forged. With the passionate, instinctive
side of the great movement Wordsworth was sufficiently
at one ; but when the revolutionary passions and instincts,
as yet untrained, and therefore violent and crude, were
seduced from their true objects, when an apostolic mission
to the nations announcing enfranchisement was exchanged
for a war of vulgar conquest, then those who would retain
their faith in the Revolution were driven back, and
among them Wordsworth was driven back, to the ab-
stractions of the revolutionary creed. Wordsworth, with
the logical faculty alone, and pursuing the eighteenth-
century method of truth-discovery — that of the pure
intellect — endeavoured to verify his republican theories.
The result with Wordsworth was that all truth for a time
disappeared ; certitude with respect to any and every
class of beliefs became for a time unattainable.**
Two chief streams of intellectual and moral tendency
* The following reference, in the Apology for the French Eevolution,
to Priestley deserves to he quoted :— " At this time have we not daily
the strongest proofs of the success with which, in what you call the
best of all monarchical governments, the popular mind may be de-
bauched ? Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment, do you
think that the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the
house of the philosophic Priestley 2 "
138 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
are distinguishable in the period subsequent to the
Revolution, — the period during which Wordsworth
attained the full possession of his powers, and thence
onward to our own days. One of these has endeavoured
to sustain and develop the most beneficent influences of
the eighteenth century ; to it belong at the present hour
modern science — including the science of political
economy — and modern democracy. The other should
have aimed at supplementing and enriching the best gifts
of the preceding epoch with new methods, feelings, and
ideas in accord with the changed condition of the human
mind. Unfortunately for the cause of tranquil and en-
larged human culture, the two movements, which ought to
have been auxiliaries, and the men representing each, who
ought to have been allies, appeared as rival and conflict-
ing forces, each claiming supremacy over the individual
mind and over the progress of human society. Hence
have arisen on either side excesses and extravagances :
on the one side Catholic reactions, a profound suspicion
of modern science, systems of spurious metaphysics
resorted to as an escape from the pressure of facts, in
art an emasculated medievalism ; on the other, a
materialistic temper hard and pushing, an unimaginative
and unsympathetic school in politics, the dreary science
drearily pursued, a profound suspicion of religion, and
intolerance of religious ideas. It would have needed a
greater mind than that of either Bentham or of Cole-
ridge to effect a reconciliation, which should not be a
compromise, between the two movements of the age.
As things were, it was needful to choose a side. The
appropriate work of Wordsworth, and of his companion
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 139
who worked more in the sphere of pure thought, was
rather to supplement the deficiencies and correct the
errors of the eighteenth century than to carry on and
develop its most precious influences. But, in assuming
their appropriate places as teachers, Coleridge and
Wordsworth were at the same time condemned to an
attitude of hostility with reference to one entire side of
the culture and the progressive thought of their time.
Receiving as we do from Wordsworth such a gift of hio-h
poetry, such an overflow of impassioned contemplation of
the universe, we know not how we should regret that he
entered so absolutely and so serenely into his own vision
of truth. Had his certitude in beliefs transcendental
been disturbed by doubts and questionings, he could not
have displayed a skill of fence and thrust, nor have
enjoyed the militant exercise, as in our own day Mr
Browning does, who, if he would build the walls of.our^
spiritual city, builds ever with one hand working in the
work, and the other hand holding a weapon. Could we
conceive the mind of Wordsworth producing poetry at
all in a state of divided intellect and feeling, — for as a
fact that rift would have made Wordsworth's music
mute, — we are compelled to imagine the .outcome of hi s
jnind as resembling the poetry of Clough, though
possessing an ampler body of thought and feeling than
Clough's, — a kind of self-revelation, not without curious
interest or even peculiar uses in a distracted period,
when the head and heart pay separate allegiance to rival
authorities, but incapable of becoming in a high degree
a power with individual minds, or the prophecy to a
nation.
1 40 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
We cannot, therefore, regret, for the sake of Words-
worth himself and of his poetry, that his trust in his
own faculties and their mode of operation was com- \j
plete; for us, too, it is well that such high, serene,
and yet impassioned faith as Wordsworth's should have
found its adequate record in song ; there are times
when we are moved to place reliance in it upon the
credit of our past selves, as in an intuition, which was
once our own during a season of clear and solemn vision,
and which cannot be ours again. But it is also true that
Wordsworth's "imaginative faith" (such a name he
himself bestows upon it) fails to come into direct contact
with the intellect of the present time, and moves us by
its prophet-like enouncement of truth transcendental less
than such emotional controversy as Mr Browning's moves
us. Unless we could carry on the conduct of our mental
powers upon Wordsworth's method, we could not hold
in living and immediate possession Wordsworth's con-
clusions ; and the weight and pressure of scientific
methods of thought at the present time render the
conduct of the intellect in Wordsworth's manner possible
only by miracle of grace, or by peculiar conformation of
mind, or through a virginal seclusion of soul.
In the literature of England, and in the darkest hour
of reaction, the Revolution found a banner-bearer, an
embodied genius half formed from the spirit of swift,
wild, and beautiful things in nature, and half from the
keenest joys and anguish of humanity ; one made to be
a saint and a martyr of revolution, the delicate victim
thiown to the lions of authorised opinion ; a poet framed
for intensities of faith, of charity, and of hope ; for
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 141
illuminated heights of rapture and of song. But Shelley,
who, by virtue of his swift-weaving imagination, his
artistic impulses, and the incantation of his verse,
belongs to the nineteenth century, was by virtue of the
intellectual background and basis of his poetry a child
of the eighteenth century, a true volunteer against old
tyrannies in the wars of enfranchisement of the Republic.
In order that he should be a revolter it was not needful
to Shelley that the Revolution should promise an
immediate success. The abstractions created by the
intellect and the passions of that age were to him the
only realities, and he believed that their history would
be long. Living as he did in the idea, concrete facts
appeared to him but as shadows, ever varying and
shifting, thrown from accidental objects which intervened
between the world of men and the high, white light of
the eternal world. For such poetry, which nourished
itself upon abstractions, and existed independently of
the accidents of the time, a career, even in a season of
reaction, was open. Laon and Cythna may stand bound
amid the flames; but in due time the martyrs will
reach that radiant isle sanctified by the Temple of the
Spirit. For countless ages Prometheus may hang nailed
to the mountain-wall ; but the day will dawn of his
deliverance, when the whole sphere of earth must break
into blossom and into song. For Shelley, whether
France were enslaved or free, liberty remained. But
such political passion as Wordsworth's united itself with
an actual cause. It was roused by the presence of the
elements of noble national life, not somewhere apart in
the air, not in some remote political primum mobile.
■X
142 'The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
but in the veritable life of a nation. For such poetry
of revolution after the regime of the Directory and the
18th Brumaire the career was closed.
Yet some fruits of his early republican faith remained
with Wordsworth ; and — what is more important — that
in his own nature which at first made him a sympathizer
with the Revolution, remained. When, after the time
of trial, of intellectual perplexity, and moral confusion,
there came by degrees light and calm, spiritual restora-
tion and strength, it was not an altogether new self that
Wordsworth found, but his former self changed from
youth to manhood, as men have been changed by a bed
of sickness from which they have arisen. At this period,
as we find recorded m the '* Prelude," the influence of
his sister was peculiarly precious and sanative ; but this
influence of Wordsworth's sister was less like that of one
active human spirit upon another than that of the
tender, tranquillising, and yet ardent breathing of the
life of external nature : —
" Thy breath,
Dear sister ! was a kind of gentler spring
That went before my footsteps."
She did not so much compel him to new lines of thought
or habits of feeling, as restore him by an atmosphere of
loving wisdom to his wiser and more gracious self. It
is a remarkable and characteristic fact that Wordsworth,
in the poetical autobiography which he has left with us,
attributes no influence of primary importance upon the
growth of his mind to any soul, whether kindred or an-
tagonist, of man or woman. The sympathy and the
intellectual action of Coleridge helped to foster and
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 143
advance "Wordsworth's instinctive tendencies of thought ;
but Coleridge did not contribute any dominant idea to
Wordsworth's mind, nor move him apart or sideways
from the track along which he was progressing. Words-
worth was never driven out of any position by force of
argument, nor attracted into a new position by com-
pelling sympathy with another mind. For Mary
Hutchinson his love was a deep, tender, and enduring
feeling ; but it was not that kind of passion which
lifts a man into a new and strange world of winged
light, and swift winds of joy in rapturous self-abandon-
ment. She was to him like a calm recess among the
woods, sheltered from tempest and extremities of heat,
with its refreshments of living water, and its little soli-
tude, of greenest herbage.
Obstacles were removed from Wordsworth's way by
other hands, flowers were planted in its rugged and
bare spots ; but he was not diverted from his path, or
guided to points of vision which lay to the left or
right. His sister led Wordsworth back to nature,
and softened down the over-sternness of his earlier
temper. In her sensitiveness he seemed to discern a
finer kind of justice to which he had been blind, and
thus he came to distrust, perhaps overmuch, the bold
judgments which he had but lately passed upon events.
Few things are more difficult than to receive an accession,
even a slight accession, to a man's powers of moral
discernment, without at the same time acquiring a
suspicion of his past self either in kind or degree not
wholly warranted by fact. With Wordsworth's aspiring
force now co-existed a certain loving humbleness, meek-
144 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
ness, or docility of senses, affections, and intellect. He
was less sanguine than formerly ; he cared less for
theories of human progress, and less for the abstraction
"man." Growing into a habit of estimating things
somewhat like that of Burke, it seemed to Wordsworth
now that there was a certain effeminacy in levelling
down the truth to general notions, and so avoiding the
difficulties and rough edges of truth, which are felt when
we deal, not with abstractions, but with concrete details.
Such modifications of moral and intellectual temper
had taken place, but Wordsworth's veneration for the
stuff of common human nature, his democratic sense of
the dignity of manhood, was not lost. What is most
precious in our common human nature seemed to him
to be whatever is most simple, primitive, and permanent.
This he found among the hardy peasantry of his own
North-Country district. And if "man' was less to
Wordsworth than formerly, individual men and women
became infinitely more. With his democratic feeling
for what is best in human nature, corresponded his
feeling for language considered as the instrument of his
art. What is best in language, it seemed to Words-
worth, are those simple, strong, and living forms of
speech, in which the permanent and primitive feelings
of men utter themselves. Wordsworth's theory of poetic
diction was perhaps not enounced with perfect clear-
ness, and has certainly been gravely misunderstood,
It was not the language of the peasant, as such, any
more than the language of the courtier or the philo-
sopher, as such, which seemed admirable to him ; it was
the permanent and passionate speech of man, wherever
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 145
to be found, which he sought after ; and in the speech
of simple men Wordsworth believed that there was more
of such stuff to retain, and less matter to be rejected as
belonging to merely local or occasional uses, than in the
speech of over-cultivated, artificial refinement. How-
ever Wordsworth may have failed to convey his precise
meaning in his celebrated prose prefaces, it cannot truly
be asserted that his practice and his theory were not in
agreement. To us of the present day there are few
characteristics of Wordsworth's poetry more refresh-
ing, when we turn to it from contemporary writings,
which represent, in dramatic fashion, characters and
incidents of humble life, than its entire freedom from
condescension. It neither studies the persons nor re-
peats the phrases of shepherd, of cottage matron, of
peasant-patriarch, of village schoolmaster with an air of
sentimental or of humorous superiority. Michael and
Matthew, Ruth and Margaret, the Leech-gatherer and
the Pedlar, are figures as great or graceful as those of
Dion or Laodamia. Around the body of the Highland
girl is effused a light which makes her, while so real and
human, radiant as a spiritual vision ; into the voice of
the solitary Reaper gathers all the thrilling power of
nature in her furthest and clearest solitudes, — a power
which penetrates and persists, — with all the stored-up
tradition of human sorrow that is deep and dim, and
of human strife that is unavailing.*
* It is worth noting that the personages of many of Wordsworth's
poems are not literal portraits, but ideal studies from several in-
dividuals. Wordsworth says of Matthew, " Like the wanderer in the
' Excursion,' this schoolmaster was made up of several, both of his
class, and men of other occupations."
K
146 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
" I should think," Wordsworth wrote to a friend in
the year 1821, "that I had lived to little purpose, if
my notions on the subject of government had undergone
no modification : my youth must, in that case, have
been without enthusiasm, and my manhood endued with
small capability of profiting by reflection. If I were
addressing those who have dealt so liberally with the
words renegade, apostate, &c, I should retort the charge
upon them, and say, You have been deluded by places
and persons, while I have stuck to prmeiples. I
abandoned France and her rulers when they abandoned
the struggle for liberty, gave themselves up to tyranny,
and endeavoured to enslave the world." "' f This is not a
mere piece of logical fence, but in large measure a faith-
ful statement of what actually occurred. Wordsworth's
sympathies attached themselves, not to words or abstract
notions, but to an actual cause. When once again his
gaze was passionately turned upon public events, England
stood alone, defending from mortal assault the very life
of virtue in mankind. The war, which at its commence-
ment had made Wordsworth an alien in heart from the
country of his birth, now bound him to that country
which seemed to be the one land in which a passionate
sense of justice still survived. Wordsworth poured his
adult strength, in comparison with which his youthful
enthusiasm seems a shallow excitement, into this channel.
Indignation and pity, a lofty sense of right, deep sym-
pathy with the spiritual life of suffering nations, a
consciousness of his own maturity, and larger force of
intellect and of feeling — all these conjoined to lift the
* Prose Works, vol. iii. pp. 2G8, 2G9.
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 147
whole being of the poet into a nobler mood than it had
yet attained.
From 1802 to 1815 the shocks of great events
followed one another rapidly, and kept a-glow Words-
worth's heart and imagination. In the summer of
1802, upon a July morning, before London was awake,
Wordsworth left the great city, and from the roof
of the Dover coach looked at the gliding river and
the sleeping houses as he passed on his way to the
Continent. During the brief peace he had an op-
portunity of contrasting the condition of France under
the Consulate, when Calais looked sombre upon Buona-
parte's birthday, with her state in the prouder season of
his youth, when the very " senselessness of joy " was
sublime. The calm which followed the Peace of Amiens
was the thunderous calm that goes before a storm. In
the autumn months the strength of Wordsworth's soul
lay couchant and brooding ; his spirit was gathering up
its forces ; when his eye turned outward, he saw little at
that moment in which to rejoice ; the pettiness of life,
alike though not equally in England and in France, the
absence of high aims, heroic manners, and far-reaching
ideas, oppressed him. Yet he did not really despond ;
within him lay a forefeeling of the great destiny which
was due to his nation. He sank inwards from thought
to thought, with no sadness in the nerves, no disposition
to tears, no unconquerable sighs, yet with a melancholy
in the soul, a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve.*
* T apply to Wordsworth at this time words which he used in
another connection. "Advice to the Young," Prose Works, vol. i. pp,
319, 320.
1 48 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
The declaration of war, and the threatened invasion of
1803, roused him to a spirit of more active patriotism: —
" No parleying now ! in Britain is one breath."
Three years later the conquest of North Germany,
that deadly blow which left England to maintain the
struggle almost or altogether single-handed, only exalted
Wordsworth's spirit of resolution : —
" 'Tis well ! from this day forward we shall know
That in ourselves our safety must be sought."
In 1808 the treacherous policy of Napoleon consum-
mated itself when Ferdinand was forced to resign the
crown of Spain, and the French troops entered Madrid to
proclaim Joseph Buonaparte a king. Until this moment
the dominant motive that sustained the war was a stern
sense of duty ; the highest and best state of moral
feeling to which the most noble-minded among English-
men could attain — except in rare moments of exaltation
— was " a deliberate and preparatory fortitude, a sedate
and stern melancholv, which had no sunshine, and was
exhilarated only by the lightnings of indignation." But
the rising of the Spaniards as a people seemed of a
sudden to change the entire face of things. Out of the
depth of disappointment and the sense of frustration
which followed, Wordsworth thus, in memorable words,
describes the change which was effected : —
" But from the moment of the rising of the people of the Pyrenean
peninsula, there was a mighty change ; we were instantaneously
animated ; and, from that moment, the contest assumed the dignity,
which it is not in the power of anything but hope to bestow ; and
if I may dare to transfer language, prompted by a revelation of the
state of being that admits not of decay or change, to the concerns
and interests of our transitory planet, from that moment * this
The Prose Works of Wordswortk. 1 49
corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.'
This sudden elevation was on no account more welcome, was by
nothing more endeared than by the returning sense which accom-
panied it of inward liberty and choice, which gratified our moral
yearnings, inasmuch as it would give henceforward to our actions as
a people, an origination and direction unquestionably moral — as it
was free — as it was manifestly in sympathy with the species — as it
admitted therefore of fluctuations of generous feeling — of appro-
bation and of complacency. We were intellectualized also in
proportion ; we looked backward upon the records of the human
race with pride, and instead of being afraid, we delighted to look
forward into futurity. It was imagined that this new-born spirit
of resistance, rising from the most sacred feelings of the human
heart, would diffuse itself through many countries ; and not merely
for the distant future, but for the present, hopes were entertained
as bold as they were disinterested and generous."
The pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra is Words-
worth's loftiest, most passionate, most prophet-like ut-
terance as a prose- writer. Although an occasional piece,
its interest and importance are of an enduring kind. It
may be classed in the small group of writings dealing
with occasional incidents and events in their relation
to what is everlasting and universal, at the head of
which stands Milton's prophetic pamphlet, the sublime
" Areopagitica." Wordsworth's " Convention of Cintra"
takes a place in this group not far below the speech of
Milton ; and Wordsworth's pamphlet is depressed to that
position chiefly because, in its discussion of the details
of the French surrender, is retained a larger quantity of
the perishable matter of history. Considering the event
from a military point of view, we can hardly be war-
ranted in doubting that the decision in favour of the
Convention, confirmed and justified as it is by the great
military historian of the Peninsular War, was a sound
and prudent decision. Wordsworth, however, wrote
150 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
neither as a soldier nor as a mere politician, but with
"the antipathies and sympathies, the loves and hatreds
of a citizen — of a human being." The military profes-
sion cultivates an almost exclusive attention to the
external, the material and mechanical side of public
events, and a disregard of moral interests, a faintness of
sympathy with the best feelings, a dimness of apprehen-
sion of the chief truths relating to the happiness and
dignity of man in society. The practical statesman,
skilled in seeing into the motives and managing the
selfish passions of his followers, acquires " a promptness
in looking through the most superficial part of the
characters of those men, and this he mistakes for a
knowledge of human kind." Of the wisdom which
includes a recognition of the deeper emotions, the
instincts and ardours of a people, the energy to dare and
to achieve — at times almost miraculously brought into
being — the delicacy of moral honour — in a word, of all
that is, as it were, the higher function of the living
body of society — men of routine, who manage the
machine of the State, are either unaware or contemptu-
ously sceptical.
Wordsworth's school of political wisdom did not lie
amid a host of petty and conflicting self-interests, nor
among factions which force men astray against their
will : —
" Not there ; but in dark wood, and rocky cave.
And hollow vale which foaming torrents fill
With omnipresent murmur as they rave
Down their steep beds, that never will be still."
Among such enduring, free, and passionate presences of
nature there were seclusion and a refuge from motives
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 1 5 1
of petty expediency, and arguments of formal, profes-
sional pedantry. Here Wordsworth could look into the
life of things ; here he could submit himself to the vast
impalpable motives of justice, and of the deep fraternity
of nations ; he could pursue those trains of reasoning
which originate from, and are addressed to, the universal
spirit of man. His purpose was not merely, with the
energy of a widely-ranging intellect, to use truth as a
powerful tool in the hand, but " to infuse truth as a
vital fluid in the heart." It was not knowledge merely
which he wished to convey; but knowledge animated
by the breath and life of appropriate feeling ; it was not
wisdom alone as a possession, but wisdom as a power.
Whether men would listen to him or not, did not in the
first instance concern Wordsworth. When the singing-
robe or the prophetic mantle is on, a man does not peer
about anxiously for auditors. The writer felt that he
had a work to do, and he was straitened until that work
should be accomplished ; he uttered his prophecy as the
night wind sings to men who sleep or revel, or toil at the
ledger, and do not hear ; only one and another wakeful
and apprehensive may attend to the dirge or the
promise as it passes by ; he that hath ears to hear, let
him hear.
Wordsworth's style in this pamphlet is singularly .
living and organic. With the mechanism of sentence-
constructing he did not ever trouble himself to make
acquaintance, although he had a full sense of the
importance of right workmanship in verse. Each
sentence here lives and grows before the reader ; its
development is like a vital process of nature, and the
1 5 2 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
force from which it originates not is speedily expended.
' Language," Wordsworth has said elsewhere, "if it do
not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power
of gravitation, or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit
unremittingly and noiselessly at work, to subvert, to lay
waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve." Here the thought
and feeling are not crystal-like with sharp, clear edges ;
leather they saturate the language which sustains them
as a solvent, and which conveys them to us in such a
way that they at once enter into the vital action of the
mind. Passages of close inquiry into facts occur, but
these are the least permanently interesting portions of
the pamphlet. At times the progress of ideas seems to
be slow, and the passion studiously deliberate ; but the
sweep of mind is wide and comprehensive, and the
motion seems slow partly because it is high up, and
uninterrupted by the recurring incidents which mark and
measure the advance of thought or feeling upon a lower
level ; justice and indignation, sorrow and hope, bear
the thought which soars through large spaces of the sky ;
the motion, when it seems least rapid, is like that of a
broad-winged bird which sails far aloft, and only at long
intervals utters a cry.
It is not necessary to retrace the arguments by which
Wordsworth attempts to justify the popular indignation
against the Convention and its authors. Whether a
defeated French army should have been permitted to
depart to France with its arms, its baggage, and its
plunder, or not, is a question which we can be content
to leave unanswered. What loses none of its import-
ance and power is the noble conception of national well-
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 153
being "which this pamphlet displays, its comprehension of
the spiritual life of a people, its recognition of the
superior might of moral over material forces, its lofty
and masculine devotion to justice, its sympathy, deep,
tender, and impassioned, with the varying moods of
hope, resolution, fortitude, rage, despair, of an afflicted
land. One or two passages may be selected from the
pamphlet, but the whole has an organic unity, and any
passage severed from the rest, and thrust forward as a
specimen, seems in a measure denaturalised, and deprived
of its vital function.
Riddance of the French not the object of the war. — " From these
impulses, then, our brethren of the Peninsula had risen ; they
could have risen from no other. By these energies, and by such
- others as (under judicious encouragement) would naturally grow
out of and unite with these, the multitudes, who have risen, stand ;
and if they desert them, must fall. Riddance, mere riddance —
safety, mere safety, are objects far too denned, too inert and passive
in their own nature to have ability either to rouse or to sustain.
They win not the mind by any attraction of grandeur or sublime
delight, either in effort or in endurance ; for the mind gains con-
sciousness of its strength to undergo only by exercise among
materials which admit the impression of its power ; which grow
under it, which bend under it, which resist, which change under
its influence, which alter either through its might or in its presence,
by it or before it. These, during times of tranquillity, are the
objects with which, in the studious walks of sequestered life, genius
most loves to hold intercourse ; by which it is reared and sup-
ported ; these are the qualities in action and in object, in image, in
thought, and in feeling, from communion with which proceeds
originally all that is creative in art or science, and all that is
magnanimous in virtue. Despair thinks of safety, and hath no
purpose ; fear thinks of safety, despondency looks the same way ;
but these passions are far too selfish, and therefore too blind, to
reach the thing at which they aim, even when there is in them
sufficient dignity to have an aim. All courage is a projection from
ourselves ; however shortlived, it is a motion of hope. But these
thoughts bind too closely to the present and to the past, that is, to
154 1h e Prose Works of Wordsworth.
the self which, is or has been. Whereas the vigour of the human
soul is from without and from futurity, in breaking down limit,
and losing and forgetting herself in the sensation and image of
Country and of the human race ; and when she returns and is
most restricted and confined, her dignity consists in the con-
templation of a better and more exalted being, which, though
proceeding from herself, she loves and is devoted to as to another."
■ ••••• ••
Vox Populi. — " For, when the people speaks loudly, it is from
being strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon ; and
he, who cannot discover the true spirit from the false, hath no ear
for profitable communion. But in all that regarded the destinies
of Spain, and her own as connected with them, the voice of
Britain had the unquestionable sound of inspiration. If the gentle
passions of pity, love, and gratitude be porches of the temple ; if
the sentiments of admiration and rivalry be pillars upon which the
structure is sustained ; if lastly, hatred and anger and vengeance,
be steps, which, by a mystery of nature, lead to the House of
Sanctity ; then it was manifest to what power the edifice was con-
secrated ; and that the voice within was of holiness and truth."
• •••••••
Arts of Peace under a Despotism. — " Now commerce, manu-
factures, agriculture, and all the peaceful arts, are of the nature of
virtues or intellectual powers : they cannot be given ; they cannot
be stuck in here and there ; they must spring up ; they must grow
of themselves ; they may be encouraged ; they thrive better with
encouragement and delight in it ; but the obligation must have
bounds nicely defined ; for they are delicate, proud, and indepen-
dent. But a tyrant has no joy in anything which is endued with
such excellence ; he sickens at the sight of it ; he turns away from
it as an insult to his own attributes."
Wordsworth's political writings, subsequent to the
year 1815, are of ioferior interest. A part of their
effect is that of enabling us to stand away from Words-
worth, clear of his shadow, that we may receive his
influence at an independent point of vision of our own.
After the peace and the restoration of Louis XVIII.,
came the dreary age of politics, the time of the Holy
Alliance and the Regency. Wordsworth's nature, which
The Prose Works of Wordsworth. 155
had been kept fervent by the impression of great events
during the war with France, now inevitably in a certain
measure cooled, and hardened as it cooled. It has been
shown that his position as teacher of new spiritual
truths condemned him to hostility towards the ideas
inherited from the eighteenth century, among which
may be found the chief factors of modern politics, as far
as modern politics are other than stationary or retrogres-
sive. Wordsworth's patriotic enthusiasm on behalf of
England, and the English nation and polity, as soon as
the ardour kindled and kept alive by the struggle with
France had died out, left behind it in his nature a
certain deposit of the grey ash of English conservatism.
And a plea in favour of Wordsworth's conservatism, as
that of a maintainer of things spiritual against the
grosser interests of life, may be urged if we consider
some of the hard and coarse aspects of the Whiggism of
his time, if we reflect upon the exaggerated estimates
formed of salvation by " useful knowledge," the pushing
upward by strength and shift of the middle class for
ascendancy, the apparent substitution in politics of
interests in place of ideas, the general devotion to
material comfort, the pride in mechanic arts, the hard
and shallow criticism of literature uttered by the chief
organ of Whiggism.
We have conspicuous instances in our own day of
chivalrous and ardent natures, which, being bewildered
by the yet unorganized civilisation of a democratic
period, for want of the patience of faith and hope,
the enduringness of nerve needed for sane and con-
tinuous action, fling themselves into a worship of the
156 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
Past, a worship blind to its vaster selfishness ana
materialisms, or waste their chivalry in schemes for the
sudden attainment of a miniature Utopia. Such was
not Wordsworth's case. It needs less of insight and
imaginative ardour to discover the elements of noble
spiritual life in the democracy than in the bourgeoisie.
Henry Crabb Robinson has recorded that he once heard
Wordsworth say, half in joke, half in earnest, " I have
no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal
of the Chartist in me." This is literally true. Words-
worth could at no time have become a Whig politician,
whose creed must be written in useful prose, not in
harmonious song ; but had the period of Wordsworth's
youth, when a spring-like courage and animation flooded
his being, fallen in with the days of the Chartist move-
ment, one can hardly doubt that he would have con-
ceived it to be his special mission to organize the
aspirations of the working classes around great ideas,
and thus to spiritualise the democracy.
The descent from the pamphlet on the Conven-
tion of Cintra, to the Two Addresses to the Free-
holders of Westmoreland (1818), is steep and sudden.
The addresses were written to oppose the candidature
of Brougham, and aid in securing the return to
Parliament of a member of the House of Lowther.
The long years of hostility to France and loyalty to
England have manifestly told upon Wordsworth, and
it would require a recession into very broad and abstract
doctrines indeed to discover that his principles are now
the same with those which he held in 1793. His
sympathy with the earlier stages of the French Revolu-
The Prose Works of Wordsworth, 157
tion, which survived until at least the date of the
"Cintra" pamphlet, has now ceased to exist; his con-
demnation of the war of England against the Republic,
also distinctly declared in 1808, has now changed into
approval. The constitution which Bishop Watson has
been reproved for admiring overmuch is now " the happy
and glorious Constitution, in Church and State, which
we have inherited from our Ancestors." The ideal to
which his imagination renders tribute is not now the
fierce and fair Republic, but " our inestimable Church
Establishment." In 1793 Wordsworth wrote, "If you
should lament the sad reverse by which the hero of the
Necklace has been divested of about 1,300,000 livres
of annual revenue, you may find some consolation, that
a part of this prodigious mass of riches has gone to pre-
serve from famine some thousands of cure's, who were
pining in villages unobserved by Courts." In 1818 he
wrote, "Places, Pensions, and formidable things, if you
like ! but far better these, with our King and Constitu-
tion, with our quiet firesides and flourishing fields, than
proscription and confiscation without them !" Words-
worth had indeed lost courage, as he confesses, when, in
the prospect of each possible change, visions of proscrip-
tion and confiscations rose before him.
The axioms of faith, of hope, of sacred daring, had
been set forth in his earlier writings, and formed the
points of departure in his trains of impassioned reason-
ing ; now their place is taken by axioms of prudence, of
caution, of distrust. In Wordsworth's new creed there
was much that was noble, for, like Burke, he was always
an extraordinary, not an ordinary Conservative in
1 5 8 The Prose Works of Wordsworth.
politics ; but one thing that creed necessarily wanted —
the power of impulsion, the power of initiating and
supporting a steadfast and generous advance. And,
as might be anticipated, from this period onward a
decline is observable also in the poetry of Wordsworth.
He entered into no novel states of feeling ; he was
•not precisely exhausting an earlier accumulation of
power, but he was with feebler energy and insight
repeating processes which had at one time been so
admirably productive. According to the Wordsworthian
method in poetry, a certain emanation, partly given by
the object, partly by the poet's mind, a tertium quid
which is neither mind nor object, but an aspect or
an influence partaking of both, becomes the subject of
song. Wordsworth had now acquired a power of apply-
ing this method at will to any topic, and the application
of this contemplative method had grown into a habit,
only at irregular times inspired by new and vivid
emotion, or fed by a fresh, quick outwelling of thought.
Thus one is compelled to state the main fact. But it is also
true that in Wordsworth's poetry his earlier self, though
encumbered by the growth of his later personality, was
not extinct. To oue who does not wholly fail in
sympathy with Wordsworth's genius, while the fading of
spiritual light from his poetry is manifest, a mild and
equable splendour remains as in the western sky at sun-
set ; places still alive and instinct with intense glory
may be discerned, and there are mysterious flushings
and bristfitenin^s at times ; therefore we are unable to
withdraw our eyes, though momently we may note how
quiescence comes, and the repose which will be long.
1875.
WALTER SAY AGE LANDOR.
There are two_ kinds of writtg nliyes of men which
deserve to remain amongst us as enduring and faithful
monuments. There is the rare and fortunate work of
genius ; this in its origin is related to imagination and"
creative power as closely as to judgment and observation ;
we can hardly pronounce whether it be the child of
Memory, or of her daughters, the Muses, for it is at once
a perfect work of art and an infallible piece of history.
It portrays the man i n few lines or many, but in clines
each one_m3ispESsSEle__axj^__ea^ characteristic ; it may
seem to tell little, yet in fact it tells all ; from such a
biographer no secrets are withhold en, nor does he need
many diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends ; he
knows as much about the man he undertakes to speak
of as Shakspere knew about Hamlet, or Titian about his
magnificoes — that is, everything. Mr Carlyle's Life of
Sterling was perhaps the last volume placed on the
narrow shelf containing the biographies in all languages
which belong to this class.
But there is also what we could ill lose, the work of
knowledge, and labour, and patience, and zeal, and
studious discrimination, and enforced impartiality. Jn
such a portrait the lines must be many, and the more
numerous they are (provided that they are not entirely
1 60 Walter Savage Landor.
insignificant), the better the portrait grows : but some
characteristic lines may come in by chance, and even in
the end we can scarcely be quite sure that some are not
forgotten. As we read the book we gradually form such
an acquaintance with the man as we should were we
introduced to his familiar circle in real life, seeing him
in various circumstances, in various attitudes, in various
moods of mind ; distracted and perhaps misled by some
things that are accidental and superficial, and little re-
lated to character, but discovering much that is per-
manent and structural, until at last we speak of the man
as an old acquaintance, and declare that we know him
well. It is true it may happen that we never know him
perfectly.
T o this seco nd— class of Biogra phiesJ aeln riffs t h e life
whic h we poss ess of Landor. The information supplied
by Forster's work is full, precise, and trustworthy ; great
pains were taken to make the presentation of character
complete ; there is no approach to tampering with facts
through an unwise zeal of friendship ; the biographer,
allowance being made for some necessary reserves, before
all else endeavoured to be truthful, and because entirely
just, he felt that in treating of such a man as Landor
generosity is a part of justice. At the same time it
must be confessed that the work to which we must turn
for information about the events of Landor's life is far
from being one of the rare and fortunate works of
genius.
The character of Landor is one which, in consequence
of the prominent and disproportioned development of
some o.*" its elements, appears from a distance and at first
Walter Savage La7idor. 161
sight simple and easy to comprehend, but which as we
approach it and contemplate it for a longer time grows
in complexity, growing, also, not a little in interest.
The first thing we are tempted to say of him (and with
some explanatory clauses added, we say it to the last) is,
that he was emphatically an uncivilized man. If, as
Hobbes believed, the state of nature is a state of warfare,
then Landor all his life through was not far from the per-
fect state of nature. Certainly, whatever we may think
of the theory of Hobbes, we cannot doubt that it is the
work of every part of our organised social and politi-
cal life to give lessons — lessons often enforced with a
bitter rod — to the passions and will of the individual,
and to reclaim them from disorders into which they may
happen to run. The child quickly discovers that cries,
kicks, and plunges (at least under certain circumstances)
are opposed by laws which declare them treasonable to
society — laws enforced by formidable sanctions — and in
due time he ceases to plunge, and kick, and cry. A
similar training goes on through later years until from
the brute will a beautiful and intelligent force is
fashioned. But Landor's will, impelled as it often was
by generous instincts and high passions, was yet unculti-
vated, unreclaimed, and, indeed, irreclaimable. Any one
who upon the model of Burton's book on Melancholy
should undertake to write the Anatomy of Irascibility,
would find illustrations of quarrels in almost every
relation of human life in the biography of Landor.
It is surely a paradox deserving to be signalised, that
a supreme artist — one, therefore, bound to the habitual
service of Joy — should at the same time be an insensate
L
1 62 Walter Savage Landor.
waster and destroyer of the happiness of men — his own
happiness and that of others. But the cruel lot of such
a man as Landor in our modern time is that society
proves too strong for him, contracts within narrow bounds
the sphere of his turbulent impetuosity, and commonly
introduces some formal or vulgar elements into his action
— attorneys' letters, legal delays, considerations of shil-
lings and pence, and such like, which spoil its splendour
even for his own imagination. If Hyperion, or any most
beautiful Titan, were to pick a quarrel with some of the
petty human race in Fleet Street or Cheapside, the
metropolitan police would in the end get him on the
ground, and he would present a sorry appearance on his
way to Bridewell, with grim disfigured feature, between
Policeman A and Policeman X. And such is the ap-
pearance which Landor too often presents. In every
instance where the effects of his violent temper extended
beyond the domestic circle, the world proved too strong
for him — the crowd of little people closed around the
one Titanic man, and threw him ; rage and mortification
followed, and lesson after lesson of experience was wasted
upon his intractable will. These contests, which em-
bittered so many days of youth, manhood, and old age,
were for the most part quite unheroic, and borrow any
interest they possess from the disproportioned amount of
passion and energy which Landor threw into them ; they
resulted in suffering to himself which was sheer torture,
incapable of transmutation into virtue or into song.
When De Quincey, moving in his dim, rich border-land
between rhetoric and poetry, speaks with reference to
Landor of " the fiery radiations of a human spirit, built
Walter Savage Landor. 163
by nature to animate a leader in storms, a martyr, a
national reformer, an arch-rebel, as circumstances might
dictate," he seizes finely on the possibilities of greatness
which lay in nearly all Landor's outbreaks of temper
both in his books and in his life ; but too often the
" fiery radiations " in his life had much of their bright-
ness, and all their beauty, blurred by their transit
through a gross medium of circumstances.
An acute observer, Miss Martineau, expressed her
opinion that the contempt and bitterness of spirit by
which Landor was best known to the multitude, were
qualities of style rather than of soul — meaning by this,
not literary style only, but style of expression by life
and act as well as by the pen. But in life as in art, is
not style the true rendering of soul into form, and related
to the mind of the man, as it is to that of the artist, in
other and far closer ways than is the brute matter which
he fashions with his hands ? Style is definable as the
outcome of the habitual formative tendencies, and these
in a great creative nature are always very numerous.
The truth which underlies Miss Martineau's remark
seems to be that contempt and bitterness, as far as they
are the characteristics of Landor's deeds and words, are
the products of many causes, and that, as primitive or
isolated characteristics of soul, they had no place in him.
There was nothing malignant — no sharp corrosiveness,
no flavour of acrid weeds, and no heavy, poisonous sweet-
ness in the fountains of Landor's thought and passions ;
but the waters were impetuous, and when they seemed
to sleep in happiest quiet, ran swiftly, ready to fling
themselves over rock or precipice, should such be near ;
1 64 Walter Savage Landor.
they never could follow the channels prepared for less
wilful streams to irrigate the pasture-lands and turn the
mill-wheels of complacent men, and their wayward
bounty was sudden, splendid, and profuse.
The strifes in which so much of Landor's life took
form, were then the result of no definite pernicious ten-
dencies of his nature, but of many qualities of soul, of
which none were malignant, and some were altogether
noble. Altogether noble was the constitutional sensi-
tiveness of his passions, though it would have been a gain
if he could have learnt to protect himself at times
against the consequences of this sensitiveness. Noble
too in its capacity for high uses, if inevitably subject to
frequent abuse, was the amplifying power by which a
hint of love or of insult assumed gigantic proportions in
his imagination —
" Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive,"
and often this amplifying power fulfils the function of
that wiser insight which discovers below the poor
appearances of things their hidden greatness, beauty, and
terror. There was something excellent also in the
susceptibility of Landor's nature to the potency of a
single idea or emotion paramount for the time. We
read in a letter written to his sister when he was over
fifty years of age, " Arnold [Landor's son] had had a
fever a few days before [I left Florence], and I would
not go until his physician told me he was convalescent.
Not receiving any letter at Naples, I was almost mad,
for I fancied his illness had returned. I hesitated
between drowning myself and going post back." No
Walter Sa vage L andor. 165
one whose smile is not a wrinkle of the face, signifying
emptiness of soul, will smile at this, for he will know
that susceptibility to such frenzy of love and anxiety, co-
existing with high intellectual powers, belongs only to
natures greatly endowed with rich and dangerous
faculties.
These various attributes of mind, it will be perceived,
left Landor a prey to circumstances. If the occasion
of his burst of passion was something luckily seen in
a glance of second thoughts to be trivial or unrelated
to his pride, his affections, or his strenuous sense of
justice, he would lead the merriment against himself
by that long loud laugh which his friends so well re-
member, " hardly less," says Forster, " than leonine,
higher and higher would peal go after peal, in continu-
ous and increasing volleys until regions of sound were
reached very far beyond ordinary human lungs." But
often his pride came to give permanence to the results of
his sensitiveness. Then a warfare was entered upon, in
which Landor lavished a stately scorn upon his opponent,
and underwent his predestined defeat. Add to these
sources of trouble the absolute submergence of his judg-
ment when his passions were in storm. He had then
, abundant justice of the heart, and in fact very often had
the balance of right upon his side, but of justice of the
intellect he had none. With a feminine eagerness for
extremes he arrayed angels of light upon one side of the
cause in which he was engaged — his own or his friends'
side — against fiends of darkness on the other, and
masculine pride fortified his understanding against any
chance incursion of common sense.
1 66 Walter Savage Landor,
The truth is, Landor was born three centuries too late.
He ought to have been a man of the Italian Renaissance
— a contemporary of Cellini, whom in some points he
strikingly resembles. Landor, indeed, in other particulars
was notably and nobly unlike Cellini. He had no
jealousy of rival artists ; there was nothing savage in his
temperament ; antiquity was nursing mother of his
intellect as well as of his imagination, and therefore his
intellect was free from the taint of superstition which
Catholicism carried into Cellini's blood, and his imagina-
tion itself was controlled to truer grace and beauty. On
the other hand, Cellini's nature, reared in a ruder moral
climate, was more robust in action and in suffering than
Landor's ; he had the privilege of possessing a mode for
the relief of overcharged feelings — easy, sudden, and
faultless — in the dagger and the sword ; and his life was
rich in varied and splendid circumstance both of pleasure
and of pain. But Landor and Cellini resembled one
another in the sensitiveness of their emotions ; in the
sudden possession of their whole being by a predominant
feeling or thought; in their boundless self-confidence,
and readiness to give that self-confidence expression ; in
the energy, passion, and extreme desire with which they
worked as artists ; and, while accomplishing small works
of art perfectly, both had daring to achieve things great
and faulty. A medal or vase of Cellini's is not more
fairly designed and more truly wrought than a " Hel-
lenic" by Landor, and over against the " Perseus " we set
" Count Julian."
But Landor is distinguished from Cellini, and such
men as surrounded Cellini, especially by the gracious
Walter Savage Landor. 167
sweetness of his disposition and manners when causes of
irritation, real and imaginary, were absent. A marked
peculiarity of his genius, was the union with its strength
of a most uncommon gentleness, and in the personal
ways of the man this was equally manifest. Leigh Hunt,
after having seen Landor in Italy, " endeavoured to convey
the impression produced by so much vehemence of nature,
joined to such extraordinary delicacy of imagination, by
likening him to a stormy mountain pine that should pro-
duce lilies." " I never saw anything but the greatest
gentleness and courtesy in him," records Mr Kirkup,
" especially to women. He was chivalresque of the old
school." Emerson had inferred from Landor's books, or
magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean
wrath — an untamable petulance. He found him " noble
and courteous," " the most patient and gentle of hosts."
In extreme old age, and with much in the recent past to
make his temper bitter or morose, he visited at Siena the
American sculptor, Mr Story ; " Landor," wrote Mr
Browning, who, by the generous and prompt service
rendered about this time to the distressed old man, has
added much to the debt all Englishmen owe him,
" Landor has to-day completed a three weeks' stay with
the Storys. They declare most emphatically that a more
considerate, gentle, easily satisfied guest never entered
their house. They declare his visit has been an unalloyed
delight to them."
It has seemed worth while to adduce testimony,
proving (what those who knew him personally do not re-
quire to have proved) that, ordinarily, Landor was other
than he seemed when an access of indignation or scorn
1 68 Walter Savage Landor.
possessed his heart and brain. This gentler side of his
character shows itself in many little things which signify
imuch — his love of flowers, and birds, and dumb creatures
of every kind, and of children, who all loved him. " My
heart is tender. I am fond of children, and of talking
childishly. I hate to travel even two stages. Never
without a pang do I leave the house where I was born.
Even a short stay attaches me to any place." And in
reply to " Arnold's first letter," found treasured among
the old man's papers after his death, — a letter hoping after
the manner of little boys in round hand that his dearest
papa is quite well, sending ten thousand kisses, and wishing
him to come back again w r ith all his heart, — the father's
letter closes with the following : " Tell my sweet Julia
that, if I see twenty little girls, I will not romp with any
of them before I romp with her ; and kiss your two dear
brothers for me. You must always love them as much
as I love you, and you must teach them how to be good
boys, which I cannot do as well as you can. God pre-
serve and bless you, my own Arnold. My heart beats
as if it w r ould fly to you, my own fierce creature. We
shall very soon meet."
Birds and flowers were a dear delight to him ; but at
first (for afterwards, in his Italian garden, it was other-
wise) he seems to have loved them, not with that
individualising affection to which each flower and haunt
of flowers is known and cherished, and with which there
are preferences, peculiar regards, and chosen types, as
it were, of floral character ; rather, he surveyed as an
aristocrat in the world of ideas and of beauty this
humble democracy of the fields in the mass and multi-
Walter Savage Landor. 169
tude — loving them as a prince might love his people,
yet recognising in them what is recognisable also
in the people, something of divine. The following,
written from his recently-purchased property in Wales to
Southey, will not consent to remain unquoted, and its
close is surely worthy of a place in that beautiful
Imaginary Conversation (Landor's favourite of all the
conversations) between Epicurus and his fair disciples :
" I have made a discovery, which is that there are both
nightingales and glow-worms in my valley. I would
give two or three thousand pounds less for a place that
was without them. I hardly know one flower from
another, but it appears to me that here is an infinite
variety. The ground is of so various a nature and of
such different elevations that this might be expected. I
love these beautiful and peaceful tribes, and wish I was
better acquainted with them. They always meet one in
the same place, at the same season ; and years have no
more effect on their placid countenances than on so
many of the most favoured gods." This advocate of
tyrannicide, this fire-eater, who could hardly be restrained
from sending a challenge to Lord John Russell on the
occasion of some fancied slight to a possible kinsman of
three centuries since, this exile of Rugby, and Oxford,
and England, records at the age of fifty-five that he had
never in his life taken a bird's nest, though he had found
many, and trembles lest any gluttonous Italian should
deprive him of his cuckoo. He had more sympathy with
St. Francis, who called birds and quadrupeds his brothers
and sisters, than with lovers of field sports. "It is hard
to take away what we cannot give ; and life is a pleasant
1 70 Walter Savage Landor.
thing, at least to birds. No doubt the young ones say-
tender things one to another, and even the old ones do
not dream of death."
This union of gentleness with impetuosity, vehemence,
and explosive wrath, was only one of the many paradoxes
in the character of Landor. Some of these indeed are
very superficial paradoxes. Thus when Landor, again
and again, with laboured variety of image and epithet,
) expressed his contempt of the public distributors of
literary praise and his indifference to their awards, we
are well aware that real indifference and contempt do
I not so earnestly concern themselves to prove their own
(existence. We know that the opinions of his critics did
(interest his feelings, if not his intellect, and that no
more than truth was acknowledged when he wrote to
pouthey, " I confess to you if even foolish men had read
' Gebir ' I should have continued to write poetr}^ There
is something of summer in the hum of insects." Less
on the surface, but still easy to understand, was the co-
existence in Landor of unbounded self-confidence, an-
nounced to his critics in absurd challenges to write
anything as good as his worst dialogues or poems, and a
I kind of bashful self-distrust. It was not distrust of his
I merits, but of his power of making men perceive and
Wknowledge them. At Rugby and Oxford, where, if
wilful, he was studious and an excellent Latin scholar,
he entered into no competition with his fellows. When
he had completed some important work, for which he
felt assured of immortality, he would transfer it with a
nervous bashfulness to a friend to bring before the
public. " No author, living or dead," he said, " kept
Walter Savage Landor. 171
himself so deeply in the shade through every season of
life ;" and in a certain sense there was truth in this.
Paradoxical, too, was the union of extreme sensibility
and a faculty for ingenious self-torment with the power
of resolutely turning away from pain, or eluding it when
it was in pursuit of him. After periods of distressing
excitement in real life he filled up the tempestuous
vacancy of the soul with occupations of the inner life
and duties to the children of his imagination ; from
harsh experience he turned to Art, and found her
"a solitude, a refuge, a delight." Times when other
men would be incapacitated by tremulous hand or
throbbing brow for pure and free imagining and delicate
manipulation, were precisely the productive periods with
Landor. Not that he transmuted his dross of life into
gold of art, or taught in song what he had learnt in
suffering ; rather, he would listen to no lessons of suffer-
ing, but escaped from them into the arms of joy.
Among these apparent inconsistencies of Landor's char-
acter that one is especially noteworthy which is indicated
by the presence of so much disorder and disproportion in
his conduct of life (if conduct it can be called), and in
the opinions and sentiments expressed in not a little of
what he wrote, a nd the presence of so much order, pro-
po rtion, and harmony in the form o^ his_artistic products "
— so much austere strength in some, so much beauty m
others, whic h would be recognised as severe if it we re
nots o absolutely beautifu l. And to add one other
paradox — notwithstanding all the unhappy contests in
which he was engaged, and his confession (far from the
truth of the case) that his temper was the worst beyond
172 Walter Savage Landor.
comparison that ever man was cursed with, there can be
little doubt he believed himself a man of peace, con-
sidered that warfare had always been forced upon him
by outrages to himself or to others, which he was bound
to repel, and applied with sincerity to himself his noble
quatrain which serves as motto to " Last Fruits off an
Old Tree : "—
" 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."
Landor's periods of productive energy being identical
with periods of painful pressure of events in actual life
from which he sought relief, it was natural that he
should surrender himself unconditionally to the pleasurable
excitement of his imagination. This, however, was but
the least cause of the complete possession in which the
creatures of his brain held him, while they were yet
unabandoned to the world, and had no other lover than
himself on whom to bestow their sweetness and
their strength. In his passionate power of imaginative
vision, which at once embraced the whole and its
details, in the unrestrained sensibility excited by
these children of his dreams, and his pride — a dis-
interested pride — in their beauty and grace and vigour
Landor strikingly resembled some of the great men of the
Renaissance. The ardour with which he worked carried
him rapidly over difficulties. His earliest poems
reiterate the music of Pope ; the couplets are upborne
on wings which move in regular and even libration,
as if by clockwork. But in a surprisingly short time he
Walter Savage Landor. 1 73
had delivered himself from the influence of Pope,
received the teaching of the Greek tragic poets, dis-
covered and admired in Pindar his " proud complacency
and scornful strength," studied profoundly under Milton
the secrets of poetical counterpoint, and formed a style
of his own, thoroughly original, and distinguished by its
restr ained power and vi gorous purity. Thus in his
twentieth year " Gebir ' ; was written. It is only
ardour that achieves such rapid conquests.
Once engaged by a subject, he wrote with speed. In
forty hours a thousand lines of " Count Julian" were pro-
duced, and Southey observed truly that Landor's manner
involved so much thought (excess of meaning being ks
fault), that the same number of lines must have cost thrice
as much expense of passion and of the reasoning faculty
to him as they would to Southey himself. " Andrea of
Hungary " was conceived, planned, and executed in
thirteen days ; it was followed in a fortnight by
" Giovanna of Naples," and this was the work of a man
over sixty years of age. " The worst of it is," he
writes, " in anything dramatic, such is the rapidity of
passion, the words escape before they can be taken down.
If you lose one, you lose the tone of the person, and
never can recover it. Desperation ! And the act is
gone too." After long walks, during which he brought
before himself the various characters of his greatest
drama, the very tones of their voices, their forms and
complexions and steps, he would write for four or five
hours. " In the daytime I laboured, and at night un-
burdened my soul, shedding many tears." " I shed a
great many tears as often as I attempted the ' Tiberius '"
1 74 Walter Savage Landor.
(one of the " Imaginary Conversations ") ; and of the
same Dialogue he writes : — " It is here, among the rocks
of the torrent Emo, that I found my Vipsania on the
5th of October. The hand that conducted her to Tiberius
felt itself as strong almost as that which led Alcestis to
her husband. It has, however, so shaken me at last
that the least thing affects me violently, my ear
particularly. "
How his friend Southey could write two poems at a
time was inconceivable to Landor ; he himself was unable
to divide his passions and affections. " When I write a
poem, my heart and all my feelings are upon it. I never
commit adultery with another, and high poems will not
admit flirtation." With some of his characters he had
lived for two or three years before he published the poem
which contained them. " Count Julian " was left off
twice because the Count and his daughter each had said
things which other personages might say. The visible
result in the case of Landor 's work, moreover, represents
very inadequately the cost of production. Of what was
actually written in many cases, the published poem is
hardly more than half. " What loads I carted off from
' Gebir,'" he exclaimed, "in order to give it proportion,
yet nearly all would have liked it better with incorrect-
ness ;" and of "Andrea of Hungary " he wrote, " I have
weeded out and weeded out, and have rejected as much
as would furnish any friend for another piece — as good
as this."
Having brought his work to its close with unusual
rapidity, which alone with Landor ensured excellence,
he was then fated to undergo in its keenest form the
Walter Savage Landor. 1 75
happy persecution of words and phrases, paragraphs and
lines which demanded correction. A few lines apparently
unimportant in " Count Julian " it cost him a day each on
an average to alter. " All bad poets/' Landor has said,
" admire all that they write. A true one never suspects a*
passage of his own to be imperfect without cause. His sus- \
picions are of the nature of conscience." A few touches,
suggested by some casual observations in a letter from
Sou they, were introduced as an after-thought into the noble
dialogue between the Ciceros: "I should have passed many
sleepless nights," wrote Landor, " at the faultiness of my
work if I had omitted them." Sleepless nights, when
engaged late in life with the republication of a volume
of Latin poems and inscriptions, he did actually pass,
tortured by a Satanic suggestion (unquestionably it came
from the father of lies) that he had been guilty of a false
quantity in treating as short the first vowel of the word
flagrans ; one night had gone by in the exciting hopes
and disappointments of various emendations; on the
second night he lay again with open eyes until as the
clock struck four he sprang out of bed repeating a line
of Virgil's first " Georgic," which, with its final " ille
flagranti," brought the much-desired relief: there and
then in the winter morning (Landor at this time was
upwards of seventy) he hurried to write a communication
of his satisfactory solution of the difficulty to Forster,
who was seeing the volume through the press. " He
might as well have waited till daybreak," continues the
biographer, " for he gained nothing by so sacrificing rest ;
but it was his old impetuous way."
It remains to be added, with respect to the manner in
1 7 6 Walter Savage Landor.
which Landor's works were produced, that, like Words-
worth's, much of his poetry came into being in the open air,
though, unlike Wordsworth, Landor could not remember
his own verses, and found it necessary to transcribe them
from his brain at once. So also he was accustomed to as-
semble and arrange the thoughts and sentences of his prose
Dialogues, uttering them aloud, while wandering amongst
the hills at Fiesole. There is reason to believe that this
method of open-air creation is favourable to the sound-
ness and ripeness of form in the structure alike of prose
and verse. Sentences which, threatening to come to
the birth, are delivered with the easy maieutic aids of
pen and paper are too often seven-months' children
which no after nursing or doctoring can make other than
puny and frail. A thought or period of verse or prose
which as yet has not acquired the self-resumed sharpness
of individuality given by external existence, is subject
to the brooding power of mind, and secretly grows and
is enriched in ways we know not of. What has gone
before, held by strong retention in the plastic imagina-
tion, draws towards it what comes after, and a true
community of sentences or verses (far removed from the
formal pen-and-ink junctions and transitions which
affect chiefly the eye or the surface of the tympanum) is
naturally brought about.
Of Landor's works there is an obvious first thing
to say, namely, that they belong to that class of writ-
ings which are not popular, and hardly can become
so, while at the same time they captivate or compel to
admiration many of the highest minds : the people reject
them, but an aristocracy of genius and o f intel ligence
Walter Savage Landor. 1 77
record suffra ges in their favo ur. Landor certainly, in
the world of letters as in the world of politics, was with
deliberate purpose no democrat. He detested the most
democratical nation of Europe — the French. He detested
the democracy of America. His ideal of government
closely resembled that of the man, whom perhaps of all
others he reverenced most profoundly — Milton ; it was
a republic, but a republic ruled by an oligarchy compris-
iij^the jiighest wisdom , virtue, and genius of the nation.
Passionately Landor desired liberty for the peoples ;
sacred wrath seized him at the sight of their oppressors
and betrayers ; in religion all his sympathies went with
the movements which were essentially popular ; the
gentle and virtuous Wesley, 45 " and the temperance
preacher, Father Mathew, seemed to him like the
earlier apostles re-arisen, working marvels in the hearts
of multitudes. But the liberty he desired was a
strenuous enforcement of the highest powers and means
of society to the highest ends, no indulged wallowing-in-
the-mire of a loose, unwieldy, and bewildered democracy.
He loved the people and sympathised with every bright
enthusiastic aspiration towards freedom. Garibaldi,
Mazzini, Kossuth were amongst his heroes ; but it can
hardly be doubted that, dominated by his antique
political ideal, he really failed to comprehend or live in
harmony with the tendencies of the modern world.
Landor loved the people, but for the most part he loved
them as he did the peaceful tribes of flowers, as one
inevitably above them, who yet found something infinitely
* So conceived by Landor ; described by Mr Leslie Stephen as " a
human game-cock."
M
i j 8 Walter Savage Land or.
attaching and pathetic in the simplicity of their wiser
joys, and in the sacredness of their human sorrows.
Opas, Metropolitan of Seville, pleads with Count Julian
against his resolution to bring the miseries of war upon
his country : —
" If only warlike spirits were evoked
By the war-demon, I would not complain,
Or dissolute and discontented men ;
But wherefore hurry down into the square
The neighbourly, saluting, warm-clad race, .
Who would not injure us, and cannot serve ;
Who, from their short and measured slumber risen,
In the faint sunshine of their balconies,
With a half -legend of a martyrdom
And some weak wine and withered grapes before them,
Note by their foot the wheel of melody
That catches and rolls on the Sabbath dance.
To drag the steady prop from failing age,
Break the young stem that fondness twines around,
Widen the solitude of lonely sighs,
And scatter to the broad bleak wastes of day
The ruins and the phantoms that replied,
Ne'er be it thine."
Landor, then, if he belonged to the republic of
letters, never, as has been said, wished that republic to
become a democracy. If the number of those who
know his works as they ought to be known might
easily be counted, and if few know anything of his noble
dramatic trilogy, still Landor cannot be accounted
unfortunate in his readers. Shelley, from his college
days to the close of his life, was a passionate admirer of
" Gebir," and at times was possessed by it in a way
from which there was no rescue or escape. Wordsworth
confessed that Landor was the poet who had written
verses "of which he would rather have been the authoi,
Walter Savage Landor. 1 79
tli an of any produced in our time." Lamb (Crabb
Robinson relates) was always turning to "Gebir" for
things that haunted him, and declared that only two
men could have been author of the " Examination of
Shakspeare," — he who wrote it, and the man it was
written on. Julius Hare stated of the Collected Works
that they seemed to him to contain more and more
various beauty than any collection of the writings of any
English author since Shakspeare. Of the "Pentameron"
Mrs Browning said that, if it were not for the necessity
of getting through a book, some of the pages are too
delicious to turn over ; and of " Pericles and Aspasia,"
that, if he had written only this, it would have shown
him to be " of all living writers the most unconventional
in thought and word, the most classical because the
freest from mere classicalism, the most Greek because
}3re-eminently and purely English." Mr Carlyle, speak-
ing of a Dialogue which appeared in Frasers Magazine
in Landor's eighty-first year, asks characteristically, "Do
you think the grand old Pagan wrote that piece just now?
The sound of it is like the ring of Roman swords on the
helmets of barbarians. An unsubduable old Roman ! '
• The " Imaginary Conversations " were for twenty years
the companion of Emerson, and when he visited Europe,
hoping to see the faces of three or four writers, one of
the three or four was its author. It will not perhaps
seem much to men of this generation, though Landor
highly esteemed the honour, that to him Southey
dedicated his " Kehama," and James his " Attila : ' two
other dedications will now be supposed to have conferred
a higher distinction, — that in which the author of
1 80 Walter Savage Landor,
" Luria " inscribed to him his noblest drama, and that
which Mr Swinburne prefixed to " Atalanta in Calydon;"
nor may we forget the further homage the }^oung singer
of England paid to the venerable man not long before
his death : —
" I came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before ;
The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore.
I found him whom I shall not find
'Till all grief end,
In holiest age our mightiest mind,
Father and friend."
With such readers Landor might well be content, and
he did not expect to be read by a multitude. "I have
no reason to complain, and never did. I found my
company in a hot-house warmed with steam, and con-
ducted them to my dining-room through a cold corridor,
with nothing but a few old statues in it from one end
to the other, and they could not read the Greek names
on the plinth, which made them hate the features above
it." This is admirable, but it only approaches, and does
not accurately put the finger on the causes of Landor's
want of popularity. It was not merely or chiefly because
the substance or subject of so much of what he wrote
was classical that the people would not read his writings ;
it was rather because he was essentially classical in his
feeling with respect to form, and also because he was
essentially classical in the sphere through which his
thoughts and feelings expatiated, and in the limitations
of his mind.
Landor himself might have objected to being styled
Walter Savage Landor. 1 8 1
classical; he disliked these divisions of poets into schools,
and held that there is only one school, the universe, and
one only school-mistress, Nature. And truly, after fifty
years' ringing of changes on the words " classical " and
" romantic," criticism begins to find their reiterated
tinkle somewhat of a sleep-compelling sound. Yet the
distinction is an obviously just and important one.
Nature is indeed the teacher of all true poets, but, like
a wise teacher, she does not put all scholars through the
same course of study, and her instruction accordingly in
different scholars bears different, yet in each case
appropriate fruits ; in some, exuberance, variety, splendour,
self-surrender to powerful but confused masses of thought
and feeling, with small care to define or comprehend
them ; in others, order, proportion, correct perception,
resulting from careful practice, regular and logical pro-
gression of ideas and feelings, that succeed one another
in a clearly intelligible train. The strength of our great
English authors has seldom resided in order, proportion,
correct perception, according to which all the parts of a
complex whole are seen in due subordination one to the
other. The House of Fame to which the eagle bore our
English Geffray, was a piece of poetical architecture
thoroughly Gothic in design. The Fairyland in which
our Spenser lived was an universe where everything
incongruous in the actual world resided side by side, in
perfect romantic, not classical, harmony — knights and
satyrs, nymphs and nuns, Renaissance sensuousness and
Christian saintliness, Aristotelian virtues and evangelical
graces, Dame Ccelia and Dame Venus, and its ever-
expanding, luminous, and sweet horizons are far removed
i §2 Walter Savage Landor.
£>
from the clearly-defined and shapely outlines of an Attic
landscape. Our Elizabethan dramatists, thoroughly Eng-
lish as they are, in a pre-eminent degree are unclassical,
and even anti-classical ; and the attempts made at
various times to bend our literature to classicism were
not of native origin, and may certainly be pronounced
failures.
Landor, on the other hand, with respect to artistic form,
was essentially Greek. The feeling for order, proportion,
harmony, simplicity, was with him paramount. He never
phrygianized (to borrow his own word) an obvious and
natural thought with " such biting and hot curling-irons
that it rolls itself up impenetrably." He never allowed
a great idea or beautiful image, or felicitous expression
to appear in his writings until he had found a place for
it ; hence his good things when presented in the way of
extracts, seem wronged and insulted, as if the old statues
one meets in wandering about some nobly-ordered garden
were all brought together and stationed in rank and file
upon the terrace. When Landor wanted to say a clever
thing, he knew what to do with it, and wrote an epigram;
in his more serious writings he never does say clever
things ; he felt that it is "as intolerable to keep reading
over perpetual sharpnesses as to keep walking over them."
And when he is elevated he is not so in a way to take
away one's breath ; he conducts one to his altitude of
passion, or mount of speculation along much lower ground,
and by a gradual ascent ; otherwise for him no height is
attainable. He is never blown away with ruffled wings
in a wind of desire ; his alacrity is a calm alacrity, like
the descending or ascending movement of Mercury on a
Walter Savage Landor. 183
divine errand. M oderation and composur e (of course
form alone is here spoken of) ar e never los t. " Whoever
has the power of creating," says Boccaccio, in the
" Pentameron," " has likewise the inferior power of
seeping his creation in order. The best poets are the
most impressive, because their steps are regular, for
without regularity there is neither strength nor state."
Id humour there seems to be naturally and almost
necessarily some disturbance of balance and some shifting
refraction of objects in the rippled waters of laughter.
But Landor's humour at its best, when truest to his
genius, appears a gayer part of the perfect order of
things ; he shows himself at times as great a master as
Addison of concinnity in the playful. It would not be
easy to find anything in the " Sir Koger de Coverley ' !
papers more gracefully humorous than the narrative of
Messer Francesco Petrarca's ride to hear mass on the
Lord's day in the parish church at Certaldo. It is so
graceful, because it is severe with no appearance of
severity.
T his pa ssion for ordp^ proportio n, beauty of form.
natural ly influenced deeply Landor's critical judg ments.
S penser never was a fa v ourite with him (" me he mostly
sent to bed "), but in the case of Spenser, his classical
spirit was offended less by the poet's indifference to unity
and shapeliness, than by the allegory , a species of art in
which the idea and the form, the soul and the body
stand over one against the other, and_ _do not exist in
vital union and interpenetration, a species_ofVart fostered
from the_earliest__times by Christianity, and which had
few attractions for Landor. In the highest Greek art
1 84 . Walter Savage Landor.
form and idea exist in absolute and inseparable identity.
The Elizabethan dramatists were placed absolutely
without the range of Landor's enjoying faculty by
their disregard of proportion and order, by their
"vast exaggeration and insane display." Webster, Ford,
Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Chapman,
and the rest, are " the mushrooms that sprang up in a
ring under the great oak of Arden" — certainly good-
sized mushrooms, of the height of ordinary oaks, or
thereabouts.* And the head of Wordsworth's artistic
offending lay for Landor in his supposed want of vigilant
superintendence of form, in the unsuccinct zone of his
Muse, in the " determination to hold you in one spot
until you have heard him through, the reluctance that
anything should be lost." This vice lay in the constitu-
tion of Wordsworth, according to his critic, and was un-
alterable. What Landor has thus charged against
Wordsworth is indeed partially true, and it is also true
that the vice lay in his constitution ; but, in as far as it
did, it lies — or at least the tendency towards it — in the
* There is so much of Landor, and so much that is just in his criti-
cism of the Elizabethan drama, put into the mouth of Southey address-
ing Porson, that it may stand here in a note:— "I find the over-
crammed curiosity shop, with its incommodious appendages, some
grotesquely rich, all disorderly and disconnected. Eather would I
find, as you would, the well-proportioned hall, with its pillars of right
dimensions, at right distances ; with its figures some in high relief and
some in lower ; with its statues and its busts of glorious men and
women, whom I recognise at first sight ; and its tables of the rarest
marbles, and richest gems, inlaid in glowing porphyry, and supported
by imperishable bronze. Without a pure simplicity of design, without
a just subordination of characters, without a select choice of such
personages as either have interested us or must by the power of associ-
ation without appropriate ornaments laid on solid materials, no
admirable poetry of the first order can exist."
Walter Savage Landor. 185
constitution of every poet who is also and primarily a
prophet, every poet who has to deliver a message to his
age. Milton himself in his zeal to justify the ways of
God to man, has not left his work in this respect
absolutely without reproach.
And here we come upon what must for ever fix the
place of Landor, on the whole (in some particular
qualities of workmanship he is unsurpassed and unsur-
passable), far below that of his contemporaries, Words-
worth and Shelley, and very far below that of Goethe,
whom on a quite inadequate acquaintance Landor and
Wordsworth alike rejected. Apart from his political
creed, which was that of Plutarch's men, as remote from
that of the democratic nations of the present century as
Athens is from New York, or Walt Whitman's Chants
from the tragedies of Sophocles, yet which contained
truths of much importance for his own da}?- — apart from
this Landor had no great authentic word of the Lord to
utter. He did not understand the most striking
characteristics of his age ; he did not comprehend its
hopes, nor carry its sorrows ; he could, therefore, bring
no healing promise or threatening — no " Comfort ye,"
and no " Woe unto you." He had many great thoughts,
and many ardent passions, but the thoughts were not of
first-rate importance with reference to his time, the
passions were sometimes out of place, and often, instead
of clearing and strengthening his intellectual eyes (as
passion clears and strengthens the eyes of the prophetic
spirits) they drew a film across them which dimmed and
distorted. He neither, like Homer, and Dante, and
Shakspere, resumed in himself a whole civilization, a
1 86 Walter Savage Landor.
whole epoch in the history of the human mind and
human life ; nor did he, as pre-eminently Goethe did,
and, with less accuracy and fulness, Wordsworth and
Shelley did each in his own way, receive divine oracles
to deliver to the men of his time.
The French nation, with a true instinct, has associated
much of the higher life of our new world with the year
1789. Then the critical and constructive philosophy of
the eighteenth century (for it was both critical and con-
structive'"") had overshadowed society and begotten the
genius of revolution, and the political ardours and aspira-
tions had gathered force to declare themselves. In the
critical philosophy upon its positive and negative sides,
often disguised in the form of reactions, and operating in
the creation of systems antagonistic to itself, yet still the
critical philosophy- — in this existing in living union with
the passions, hopes, fears and immense fatigues, produced
by the French Revolution, lies a chief part of the history
of literature for the first thirty years of the nineteenth
century. Goethe, notwithstanding the Olympian calm-
ness with which he viewed political and military move-
ments apart from the culture they might create or destroy,
was a child of the critical and constructive philosophy
strangely uniting itself with a vague pantheism, and of
the emotional ardour, part of which flowed through
Rousseau onward to the French Revolution. " Faust "
(not what English readers call " Faust," that is, its first
and unintelligible half, but the whole poem) is more
* And eminently spiritual in its faith that ideas and moral feelings
were stronger than material forces, and that thought, justice, and
charity would revolutionize the world.
Walter Savage Landor. 187
nearly than anything else of the time the deliverance in
words of
" The soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come."
And it is singular how closely the concluding scenes
of the poem resemble in their ethical significance what
Comte laboured to express in another way. Faust
engaged in his draining operations, which led to such
splendid results, and, having wholly forsaken metaphysics,
is a Comtist of the master's first period. His philanthropy
and utilitarianism are, however, still of a somewhat hard
type ; he grasps the good of the majority with too slight
a concern for the individual — witness the burning of the
obnoxious cottage ; he is not quite delivered from
Mephistopheles ; he is deficient in love. Faust ascend-
ing to the celestials, subject to ever more and more sacred
influences of love, finding in his pardoned and accepted
Margaret a more human and more divine Beatrice, and
aspiring eternally to the heart of the Eivig-Weibliche, is
a Comtist of the master's second period, and, of course,
an excellent Catholic.
Wordsworth and Shelley, as well as Goethe, have
intimate relations in one way or another with both the
preceding philosophical movement and the French
Revolution. They also understood and were possessed
by the tendencies of their time ; however, to a shallow
observer the reverse may appear true of Wordsworth ;
they had something of the first, or, at least, of the
second importance to tell their age about itself. But
Landor never partially understood either the critical
philosophy or the French Revolution. His supreme
1 88 Walter Savage Lando7\
Hellenism rendered that impossible. Goethe has, how
often ! been styled the great Pagan. He never was
Pagan, any more than Faust was when wedded to
Helena, and hence his most classical production,
" Iphigenie," is by no means so much in the antique
spirit as some people suppose ; and, indeed, as Schiller
proved, and Goethe himself acknowledged, is romantic
through the predominance of sentiment. But Landor,
with a true perception and sound judgment, finding late
in life in one of his " Hellenics " a trace of romantic
sentiment, struck out the lines. He, indeed, was what
Mr Carlyle named him, " a grand old Pagan," though he
was, as every one must be with eighteen centuries of
Christian life behind him, much more than a Pagan.
But Pagan enough he was to find the atmosphere of
Faust's study not capable of being breathed, and no one
who cannot remain awhile in that study is a man of the
present century. The following sentences, from Landor's
letter to Emerson, are decisive on this point : " Neither
in my youthful days, nor in any other, have I thrown
upon the world such trash as ' Werter ' and - Wilhelm
Meister ' nor flavoured my poetry with the corrugated
spicery of metaphysics. . . Fifty pages of Shelley contain
more of pure poetry than a hundred of Goethe, who silent
the better part of his time in contriving a puzzle, and
in spinning out a yarn for a labyrinth." For one
and the same reason Landor was incapable of doing
justice to Plato, Goethe, Wordsworth, and, in part, Dante.
These men could move in a world of ideas and feelings
to which he could find no entrance, and he even declared
with assurance that no entrance existed.
Walter Savage Landor. 189
It remains to observe, in connection with this subject,
that Landor, w hen he wrote dramatic poetry, in som e
remarkable particulars ceased to be classical. Form,
order, proportion are of course inevitably observed. But
in his dramas it is not jhhg _trea .tmrnit . jjfjmaction which
he undertakes, but the display and development__of a
character^- And his female characters are as originally
conceived and as exquisitely delineated as his men.
Here indeed is one of Landor's strongest claims upon our
admiration, and one which could hardly fail to obtain
general recognition if other causes, sufficiently dwelt
upon already, did not deter readers from entering upon
his works. How few hands since Shakespeare could
have drawn so difficult and delicate a portrait as that
of Giovanna ! And a whole choir of gracious forms
haunts our imaginations after we have closed the
" Imaginary Conversations." Certainly — Electra, Anti-
gone, and Alcestis notwithstanding — the delineation of
female character of all types, and under every circum-
stance, has been one of the high peculiar glories of the
Christian drama.
More has here been said of Landor's poetical than of
his prose works, because inadequate as the general
appreciation is of both, the disproportion between their
merits and the favour they commonly receive is greater
in the case of those than of these. A reader entirely
unacquainted with Landor's writings, and prepared
by appropriate culture for enjoying pure classical work-
manship, might well begin with the "Hellenics." The
dramas may at any time be read. " Gebir ' should be
reserved till late ; it keeps the inner eyes too intensely
1 90 Walter Savage Landor.
and too constantly on the strain ; its severity is not
concealed, but over-apparent ; its constricted style pro-
duces occasional obscurity. Nothing quite comparable
to the " Hellenics ' has been produced in recent times,
unless they be some poems of Andre* Chenier. Chenier
is the more lyrical, and although he imitated directly
from classical authors (being yet thoroughly original),
and Landor did not, is in some respects the more
modern of the two ; and accordingly the French singer
is a near kinsman of the romantic poets of 1830, and
bequeathed to them a rich legacy. Chenier is thoroughly
French as well as thoroughly Greek. There is more of
radiancy, more of the sense of pleasure, more of youth
and freshness in him than in Landor ; the spring is in
his verses, and their sadness is the tender sadness of an
April evening. The form is perfect with both. There
is more self-restraint with Landor ; more seeming happy
facility witn~Chenier7~ The " Hellenics '' are like the
designs upon Greek urns ; The " Poe'sies Antiques " like
paintings upon Pompeian walls, but nobler. But as
Chenier's sweet, sad, diminished life is seen like a
narrow ripple beside the resounding and strong wave of
Landor's life, so its accomplishment seems little beside
the great verse and prose of Landor. Only what Chenier
did was all faultless — Landor's works have abundant
faults in the matter of them, which, however, we shall
not care to remember against a writer, who, more than
any Englishman, " wrote as others wrote on Sunium's
height. "
1869.
MR TENNYSON AND MR BROWNING.
A COMPARATIVE STUDY,
I.
J Among the Literary Portraits of Sainte-Beuve are two
placed side by side, and distinguished by more than a
common portion of that critical artist's pureness of
colour, and graceful animation of outline. The portraits
are those of Mathurin Regnier and Andre* Chenier.
They are brought together, not to suggest a series of
skilful antitheses, not to form the subject of a parallel of
the academic kind, but because the comparison rests on
an essentially logical basis, the two poets being admirable
types of tw r o poetical spirits, or systems of thought and
feeling, the one of which, as soon as it is thoroughly
possessed, demands the other and forms its complement.
For a similar reason, two names may be brought
together, which it is our good fortune to meet with oft
and almost inevitably side by side at the present day — the
ies of Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. As Regnier
and Chenier, separated by a long interval of time, stood
"■: against one another, according to the view taken
by their critic, the types of two poetical spirits or ten-
dencies, so in some important respects do our own con-
temporary poets. Each presents a type of character
192 Mr Tennyson ana ting.
jVvhich is the counterpart of the other. Each reminds
us of truths, which, if we listened to the other alone,
we should be not indisposed to forg
Criticism commonly occupies itself, when surveying an
artist's works, with a study of his special powers, instincts
and aptitudes ; or a study of the subjects, towards which,
by blind attraction or deliberate choice, he turns': or a
study of that fine effluence of the whole artistic nature
which can hardly be analysed and which we term style.
The method pursued by Sainte-Beuve in his comparative
study of Mathurin Regnier and Andre 7 Che'nier is some-
what different from each and all of these. / " Taking,
successively the four or five elementary themes of all
poetry — God, nature, genius, art, love, human life — let
us see how they revealed themselves to the two men v
arc now considering, and under what aspects they
endeavoured to reproduce them." Such was the method
of Sainte-Beuve ; fre did not simply record personal in
pressions of delight ; he did not attempt to express in
terms, of the intellect those characteristics of form which
use to incarnate themselves in so pure a work of
thought as the language of criticism ;cJiis method sur-
prised and laid hold, of certain portions of the arti
work -which escape the other methods./ It is that which
I purpose to adopt in the following study ; but before
attempting to apply it, an explanation is necessary
We are about to enquire into what we may i the
philosophy of a poet, we are about to consider the poet-
as a thinker ; bv it be observed, as a thinker who ;
is before all else an artist. >w the conclusions of all
men on those subjects which chiefly occup; bist — I
-^T
Mr Tennyson and Air Browning. 193
on God, and nature, and our relations to them, on
human character and life and the struggle of will with
circumstances, are the outcome of much beside pure
logic. (The very materials of thought which this or that
man possesses on such subjects are dependent, in a
great degree, on his moral temperament and emotional
tendencies. And the processes by which these materials
are dealt with, and shaped, and turned out by the in-
tellect, depend in no less a measure on the character
of the individual, and his habitual currents of feeling.
t is true of every man that his nature is a living or-
ganism, each function of which is affected by all the
others. But this is true in a special degree of the artist.
The conclusions of the speculative intellect hardly become
available for artistic purposes till they have ceased to
be conclusions, till they have dropped out of the intel-
lect into the moral nature, and there become vital and
obscure. For obscure all great art is, — not with the
perplexity of subtle speculation, but with the mystery
of vital movement. How complex soever the character
of some dramatis persona, for instance, may be, if it
has been elaborated in the intellect, another intellect can
I make it out. How simple soever it be, if the writer has
made it his own by a complete sympathy, it is real and
therefore inexhaustibly full of meaning. It seems very
easy to understand Shakspere's "Miranda" or Goethe's
" Clarchen," they appear quite simple conceptions ; yet
we never entirely comprehend them, any more than we
do the simplest real human being, and so we return
to them again and again ever finding something new.
They are as clear as the sea, which tempts us to look down
N
194 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
and down into its unresisting depths, but like the sea
t hey l ive and move, and their pure abysses baffle the eye.
Hence it is that the artistic product, — th e wor k'_of
art,.: — is far richer than any intellectual gift the artist
or even the philosopher can offer. It rests not so much
on any view of life (all views of life are unfortunately
one-sided) as on* a profound sympathy with life in cer-
tain individual forms ; and in proportion as the whole
nature of the artist is lost in his work, — his perceptive
powers, his sensuous impulses, his reason, his imagination,
his emotions, his .will, — the conscious activity and un-
conscious energy interpenetrating one another — his
work cj forth full, not of speculation, but what is
so much better, of life, the open secret of art. J
<^Are w r e then justified in speaking of the philosophy
of a poet ? Yes, certainly. ^ In the first place the poet
is a seeker for truth, though not of the speculative
kind. He has his own vision of life ; but we shall
discover this in his work not in views and opinions, so
much as in the forms and colours and movement of
life itself. Into " Faust ' entered the quintessence of
fifty years' experience and meditation of the most wide-
ranging modern mind ; " Wilhelm Meister ' is fuller of
profound suggestion than most of the treatises on ethics,
but the suggestion is of that unbroken, that deep and
pregnant kind, which real action and suffering whisper
to him who has ears to hear. Again, it is a strange
mistake to regard the philosopher as a mere intellectual
machine for the manufacture of systems. In the deep
region of active and moral tendencies lie the profoundest
differences between the masters of the schools. Here
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 195
we have a right to compare speculative and artistic
natures, and to separate the two into corresponding
groups. There is a Zeno hidden behind one poet, there
is an Epicurus hidden behind another; one artist is born
an 0}3timist, another is born a pessimist ; one cried as
a baby for the moon, and all of life darkened because it
was unattainable ; another needed nothing for his happi-
ness but the rudiments of an idealistic philosophy con-
tained in his own infantile crowings.
II.
[Let us start in our study, — a partial study made
from a single point of view, — with what may be an
assumption for the present, but an assumption which
will lead to its own verification/ Let us start by
saying that Mr Tennyson has a strong sense of the
dignity and efficiency of law, — of law understood in its
widest meaning. Energy nobly controlled, an ordered
activity delight his imagination. Violence, extravagance,
immoderate force, the swerving from appointed ends,
revolt, — these are with Mr Tennyson the supreme
manifestations of evil.
Under what aspect is the relation of the world
and man to God represented in the poems of Mr
Tennyson ? Surely, — it will be said, — one who feels
so strongly the presence of law in the physical world, and
who recognises so fully the struggle in the moral nature
of man between impulse and duty, assigning to con-
science a paramount authority, has the materials from
which arises naturally a vivid feeling of what is called
the personal relation of God to his creatures. A little
196 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. .
reflection will show that this is not so. It is quite
possible to admit in one's thoughts and feelings the
existence of a physical order of the material world,
[and a moral order of the spiritual world, and yet to
enter slightly into those intimate relations of the affections
with a Divine Being which present him in the tenderest
way as a Father, — as a highest Friend. Fichte, .the
sublime idealist, was withheld from seeing God by no
obtruding veil of a material universe. Fichte, if any man
ever did, recognised the moral order of the world. But
Fichte — living indeed the blessed life in God, — yet anni-
hilated for thought his own personality and that of God,
in the infinity of this moral order. No : it is not law
but will that reveals will ; it is not our strength but our
weakness that cries out for the invisible Helper and
Divine Comrade ; it is not our obedience but our
aspiration, our joy, our anguish ; it is the passion of
self-surrender, the grief that makes desolate, the solitary
rapture which demands a partaker of its excess, the high
delight which must save itself from as deep dejection by
a passing over into gratitude.
Accordingly, although we find the idea of God
entering largely into the poems of Mr Tennyson, there
is little recognition of special contact of the soul with
the Divine Being in any supernatural ways of quiet or
of ecstasy. There is, on the contrary, a disposition to rest
in the orderly manifestation of God, as the supreme
Law-giver, and even to identif} 7- him with his presenta-
tion of himself, in the physical and moral order of the
universe. And if this precludes all spiritual rapture,
that " glorious folly, that heavenly madness, wherein
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 197
true wisdom is acquired," * it preserves the mind from
despair or any deep dejection ; unless, indeed, the faith
in this order itself give way, when in the universal
chaos, no will capable of bringing restoration being
present, a confusion of mind, a moral obscurity greater
than any other, must arise.
Wordsworth in some of his solitary trances of thought
really entered into the frame of mind which the mystic
know s as union or as ecstacy, when thought expires in \
enjoyment, when the mind is blessedness and love, when :
" the waters of grace have risen up to the neck of the
soul, so that it can neither advance nor retreat." With
Mr Tennyson the mystic is always the visionary, who
suffers from an over-excitable fancy. The nobler aspects
of the mystical religious spirit, are unrepresented in his
poetry. St Simeon upon his pillar is chiefly of interest,
as affording an opportunity for studying the phenomena
of morbid theopathetic emotion. We find nowhere among
the persons of his imagination a Teresa, uniting as she
did in so eminent a degree an administrative genius, a
genius for action with the genius of exalted piety. The
feeble Confessor beholds visions ; but Harold strikes
ringing blows upon the helms of his country's enemies.
Harold is no virgin, no confessor, no seer, no saint, but
a loyal, plain, strong-thewed, truth-loving son of England,
who can cherish a woman, and rule a people, and
mightily wield a battle-axe. In the Idylls when the
Grail passes before the assembled knights, where is the
king \ He is absent, actively resisting evil, harrying the
bandits' den ; and as he returns, it is with alarm that
* S. Teresa, Life, ch. xvi.
198 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
he perceives the ominous tokens left by the sacred
thing : —
" Lo there ! the roofs
Of our great hall are rolled in thunder smoke !
Pray heaven, they be not smitten by the bolt."
The Grail is a sign to maim the great order which
Arthur has reared. The mystical glories which the
knights pursue are " wandering fires." If Galahad
beheld the vision, it was because Galahad was already
unmeet for earth, worthy to be a king, not in this sad
yet noble city of men, but in some far-off spiritual city.
" And spake I not too truly, O my knights %
Was I too dark a prophet when I said
To those who went upon the Holy Quest,
That most of them would follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire % — lost to me and gone,
And left me gazing at a barren board,
And a lean Order — scarce return'd a tithe —
And out of those to whom the vision came
My greatest hardly will believe he saw ;
Another hath beheld it afar off,
And leaving human wrongs to right themselves,
Cares but to pass into the silent life.
And one hath had the vision face to face,
And now his chair desires him here in vain,
However they may crown him otherwhere."
The Round Table is dissolved, the work of Arthur is
brought to an end, because two passions have overthrown
the order of the realm, which it has been the task of the
loyal, steadfast and wise king to create, — first, the sensual
passion of Lancelot and Guinevere ; secondly, the spiritual
passion hardly less fatal, which leaped forth when the
disastrous quest was avowed. Only that above all
order of human institution, a higher order abides, we
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 1 99
might well suppose that chaos must come again ; but it
is not so : —
" The old order change th giving place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways."
Thus, as has been already remarked, Mr Tennyson's
sense of a beneficent un foldin g in our life of a divine
purpose, lifts him through and over the common dejec-
tions of men. With his own friend, it is as with his
ideal king ; he will not mourn for any overmuch. The
fame which he predicted to his friend is quenched by an
early death ; but he will not despair : —
" The fame is quench'd that I foresaw,
The head hath missed an earthly wreath ;
I curse not nature, no, nor death ;
For nothing is that errs from law."
Even the thought of the foul corruption of the grave
becomes supportable, when it is conceived as a part of
the change which permits the spirit to have its portion in
the self-evolving process of the higher life : —
" Eternal process moving on,
From state to state the spirit walks ;
And these are but the shatter'd stalks,
Or ruin'd chrysalis of one."
It is only when the doubt of a beneficent order of the
world cannot be put away — it is only when nature (as
discovered by the investigations of geology), seems ruth-
less alike to the individual and the species, "red in
tooth and claw with raving," it is only then that the
voice of the mourner grows wild, and it appears to him
that his grief has lost its sanctity and wrongs the quiet |
of the dead.
Mr Tennyson finds law present throughout all nature,
200 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
but there is no part of nature in which he dwells with
so much satisfaction upon its presence as in human
society. No one so largely as Mr Tennyson, has repre-
sented in art the new thoughts and feelings, which form
the impassioned side of the modern conception of
progress. His imagination is for ever haunted by " the
vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be."
But the hopes and aspirations of Mr Tennyson are not
those of the radical or movement character. He is in
all his poems conservative as well as liberal. It may
be worth while to illustrate the feeling of Shelley, in
contrast with that of Mr Tennyson, with reference to
this idea of progress. In the year 1819 Shelley
believed that England had touched almost the lowest
point of social and political degradation :
" An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,- : —
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, —
A people starv'd and stabb'd in the untilled field, —
An army which liberticide and prey
Make as a two-edged sword to all who wield, —
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay, —
Religion Christless, Godless, — a book sealed,
A Senate — time's worst statute unrepealed." —
Such laws, such rulers, such a people Shelley found in
his England of half a century since. Did he therefore
despair, or if he hoped was the object of his hope some
better life of man in some distant future ? No : all
these things
" Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day."
Mr Tennyson a?id Mr Browning. 201
The regeneration of society, as conceived by Shelley,
was to appear suddenly, splendidly shining with the fresh-
ness and glory of a dream ; as the result of some bright,
brief national struggle ; as the consequence of the appari-
tion of some pure being, at once a poet and a prophet,
before whose voice huge tyrannies and cruel hypocrisies
must needs go down, as piled-up clouds go down ruined
and rent before a swift, pure wind ; in some way or
another which involves a catastrophe, rather than accord-
ing to the constantly operating processes of nature.
Now Mr Tennyson's conception of progress, which he
has drawn from his moral and intellectual environment,
and which accords with his own moral temper, is widely
different. No idea perhaps occupies a place in his 1
I poems so central as that of the progress of the race.
This it is which lifts out of his idle dejection and selfish
dreaming the speaker in "Locksley Hall ;"
"Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us
range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of
change."
This it is which suggests an apology for the fantasies of
" The Day-Dream. " This it is which arms the tempted
with a weapon of defence, and the tempter with a
deadlier weapon of attack in " The Two Voices." This
it is of which Leonard writes, and at which old James
girds in " The Golden Year." This it is which gives a
broad basis of meditative thought to the Idyll that tells
of the passing of Arthur, and renders it something more
than a glorious fable. This it is which is the sweetness
of " The Poet's Song," making the wild swan pause, and
202 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
the lark drop from heaven to earth. This it is which
forms the closing prophecy of " The Princess," the full
confession of the poet's faith. This it is which is heard
in the final chords of the " In Memoriam," changing the
music from a minor to a major key. And the same
doctrine is taught from the opposite side in " The Vision
of Sin/' in which the most grievous disaster which
comes upon the base and sensual heart is represented as
hopelessness with reference to the purpose and the
progress of the life of man :
" Fill the can and fill the cup,
All the windy ways of men
Are but dust that rises up
And is lightly laid again."*
But in all these poems throughout which the idea of
progress is so variously expressed, and brought into
relation with moods of mind so diverse, the progress of
mankind is uniformly represented as the evolution and j
self-realisation of a law ; it is represented as taking
place gradually and slowly, and its consummation is!
placed in a remote future. We " hear the roll of the
ages ;" the " increasing purpose " runs through centuries ;
it is " with the process of the suns ' that the thoughts
of men are widened. It is when our sleep should have
been prolonged through many decades and quinquenniads
that we might wake to reap the flower and quintessence
of change :
" For we are Ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times."
* So in the " In Memoriam " when the " light is low " and the heart
is sick, Time appears not as a wise master-builder, but as a " maniac,
scattering dust."
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning, 203
It is because millenniums will not bring the advance of
knowledge near its term that the tempted soul in " The
Two Voices " feels how wretched a thing it must be to
watch the increase of intellectual light during the poor
thirty or forty years of a life-time. It is " in long
years " that the sexes shall attain to the fulness of their
mighty growth, until at last, man and woman
" Upon the skirts of Time
Sit side by side, full-summ'd in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Then comes the statelier Eden back to man :
Then reign the world's great bridals, chaste and calm ;
Then springs the crowning race of humankind.
May these things be !"
And the highest augury telling of this " crowning race "
is drawn from those who already having moved upward
through the lower phases of being become precursors
and pledges of the gracious children of the future :
" For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit ;
u Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,
" That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
The great hall which Merlin built for Arthur, is girded
by four zones of symbolic sculpture ; in the lowest zone,
beasts are slaying men ; in the second, men are slaying
beasts ;
204 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
" And on the third are warriors, perfect men,
And on the fourth are men with growing wings."
To work out the beast is the effort of long ages ; to
attain to be " a perfect man " is for those who shall follow
us afar off; to soar with wings is for the crowning race
of the remotest future.
\Apart from the growth of the individual^ that golden
a^e to which the poet looks forward, the coming of
which he sees shine in the distance, is characterized, as
he imagines it, chiefly by a great development of know-
ledge, especially of scientific knowledge ; this first ; and,
secondly, by the universal presence of political order
and freedom, national arid international, secured by a
vast and glorious federation. It is quite of a piece
with Mr Tennyson's feeling for law, that his imagination
should be much impressed by the successes of science,
and that its promises should correspond with his hopes.
The crowning race will be a company
" Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge ; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
Is Nature like an open book."
Were we to sleep the hundred years, our joy would be
to wake
" On science grown to more,
On secrets of the brain, the stars ''
It is the promises and achievements of science which
restore sanity to the distraught lover of " Locksley Hall."
In " The Princess " the sport half-science of galvanic I
batteries, model steam-engines, clock-work steamers and 1
fire-balloons, suggest the thought of a future of adult j
knowledge :
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 205
u This fine old world of ours is but a child
Yet in the go-cart. Patience ! Give it time
To learn its limbs : there is a hand that guides."
But Mr Tennyson's dream of the future is not more
haunted by visionary discoveries and revelations of
science than by the phantoms of great political
organizations. That will be a time
" When the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are
furl'd
In the Parliament of men, the Federation of the world."
A time in which
" Phantoms of other forms of rule,
New Majesties of mighty states "
will appear, made real at length ; a time in which the
years will bring to being
" The vast Eepublics that may grow,
The Federations and the Powers ;
Titanic forces taking birth."
These days and works of the crowning race are, how-
ever, far beyond our grasp ; and the knowledge of this,
with the faith that the progress of mankind is the ex-
pression of a slowly, self-revealing law, puts a check
upon certain of our hopes and strivings. He who is
possessed by this faith will look for no speedy regenera-
tion of men in the social or political sphere, and can
but imperfectly sympathise with those enthusiastic hearts
whose expectations, nourished by their ardours and de-
sires, are eager and would forestall futurity. Mr Tenny-
son's justness of mind in a measure forsakes him, when
he has to speak of political movements into which
passion in its uncalculating , form has entered as a main
c
206 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
motive power. Yet passion of this type is the right and
appropriate power for the uses of certain times ar.d
seasons. It is by ventures of faith in politics that
mountains are removed. The Tory member's elder son
estimates the political movements of France in an insular
spirit which, it may be surmised, has in it something of
Mr Tennyson's own feeling : —
" "Wliiff ! there comes a sudden heat,
The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab."
Yet to France more than to England the enslaved nations
have turned their faces when they have striven to rend
their bonds. It is hardly from Mr Tennyson that we
shall learn how a heroic failure may be worth as much
to the world as a distinguished success. It is another
poet who has written thus : —
" 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."
Mr Tennyson's ideal for every country is England, and
that is a blunder in politics :
u A laud of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent."
That is an admirable verse ; but it is nobler to make
than to follow precedents; and great emotions, passionate
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 207
thought, audacities of virtue quickly create a history and
tradition of precedents in the lives alike of individuals and
of nations. Mr Tennyson loves freedom, but she must
assume an English costume before he can recognize her ;
the freedom which he loves is
She is
" That sober freedom out of which there springs
Our loyal passion to our temperate kings."
" Freedom in her royal seat
Of England, not the schoolboy heat—
The blind hysterics of the Celt."
He cannot squander a well-balanced British sympathy
on hearts that love not wisely but too well : — ■
" Love thou thy land with love far brought
From out the storied Past, and used
Within the Present, but transfused
Through future time by power of thought."
What Mr Tennyson has written will indeed lead
persons of a certain type of character in their true direc-
tion ; for those of a different type it will for ever
remain futile and false. "Reason," Vauvenargues has
said, " deceives us more often than does nature." " If
passion advises more boldly than reflection, it is because
passion gives greater power to carry out its advice."
^To do great things, one must live as if one could never
die." England can celebrate a golden wedding with
Freedom, and gather children about her knees ; let there
be a full and deep rejoicing. But why forbid the more
unmeasured joy of the lover of Freedom who has dreamed
of her and has fought for her, and who now is glad
because he has once seen her, and may die for her ?
Mr Tennyson's political doctrine is in entire agree-
2o8 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
ment with his ideal of human character. As the ex-
emplar of all nations is that one in which highest wisdom
is united with complete self-government, so the ideal
man is he whose life is led to sovereign power by self-
knowledge resulting in self-control, and self-control grow-
ing perfect in self-reverenced The golden fruit which
Here prays for, promising power, which Aphrodite prays
for, promising pleasure, belongs of right to Pallas alone,
who promises no other sovereignty, no other joy than
those that come by the freedom of perfect service, —
" To live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear."
Mr Tennyson has had occasion to write two remark-
able poetical eloges — one on the late Prince Consort, the
other on the great Duke. In both, the characters are
drawn with fine discrimination, but in both, the crown-
ing virtue of the dead is declared to have been the
virtue of obedience, that of self-subjugation to the law of
duty. In both the same lesson is taught, that he who
toils along the upward path of painful right-doing
" Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled
Are close upon the shining table-lands
To which our God Himself is moon and sun."
Even Love " takes part against himself " to be at one
with Duty, who is " loved of Love." Through strenuous
self-mastery, through the strong holding of passion in its
leash, Enoch Arden attains the sad happiness of strong
heroic souls. But it is not only as fortitude and endur-
ance that Mr Tennyson conceives the virtue of noble
obedience ; it flames up into a chivalric ardour in the
passionate loyalty of the Six Hundred riders at Balaclava;
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 209
and Cranmer redeems his life from the dishonour of fear,
of faltering and of treason, by the last gallantry of a
soldierlike obedience to the death :
" He pass'd out smiling, and he walk'd upright ;
His eye was like a soldier's, whom the general
He looks to, and he leans on as his God,
Hath rated for some backwardness, and bidd'n him
Charge one against a thousand, and the man
Hurls his soil'd life against the pikes and dies."
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, the recogni-
tion of a divine order and of one's own place in that
order, faithful adhesion to the law of one's highest life,
— these are the elements from which is formed the ideal
human character. What is the central point in the
ethical import of the Arthurian story as told by Mr
Tennyson ? It is the assertion that the highest type of
manhood is set forth in the poet's ideal king, and that
the worthiest work of man is work such as his. And
what is Arthur ? The blameless monarch, who " rever-
enced his conscience as a king ; " unseduced from his
appointed path by the temptations of sense or the
wandering fires of religious mysticism ; throughout the
most passionate scene of the poem "sublime in self-
repression ": —
" I wanted warmth and colour, which I found
In Lancelot, — now I see thee what thou art,
Thou art the highest, and most human too,
Not Lancelot, not another."
Arthur's task has been to drive back the heathen, to
quell disorder and violence, to bind the wills of his
knights to righteousness in a perfect law of liberty. It
is true that Arthur's task is left half done. While he
o
210 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
rides forth to silence the riot of the Red Knight and his
ruffian band, in his own court are held those "lawless
jousts," and Tristram sings in the ears of that small, sad
cynic, Dagonet, his licentious song : —
" Free love — free field — we love but while we may."
And thus were it not that a divine order overrules our
efforts, our successes, and our failures, we must needs
believe that the realm is once more reeling back into the
beast.
[Disorder of thoughts, of feelings and of will is, with
Mr Tennyson, the evil of evils, the pain of pains. The
Princess would transcend, through the temptation of a
false ideal, her true sphere of womanhood ; even this
noblest form of disobedience to law entails loss and
sorrow ; she is happy only when she resumes her
worthier place through the wisdom of love. In " Lucre-
tius " the man who had so highly striven for light and
calm, for " the sober majesties of settled, sweet Epicurean
life," is swept by a fierce tempest in his blood back into
chaos ; there is but one way of deliverance, but one way
of entering again under the reign of law, — to surrender
his being once more to Nature, that she may anew dash
together the atoms which make him man, in order that
as flower, or beast, or fish, or bird, or man, they may
again move through her cycles ; and so Lucretius roughly
wooes the passionless bride, Tranquillity. And may we
not sum up the substance of Mr Tennyson's personal
confessions in "In Memoriam/' by saying that they
are the record of the growth through sorrow of the
firmer mind, which becomes one with law at length
\
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning, 2 1 1
apparent through the chaos of sorrow ; which counts
it crime " to mourn for any overmuch ; ' which turns
its burden into gain, and for which those truths that
never can be proved, and that had been lost in the first
wild shock of grief, are regained by " faith that comes of
self-control." ]
III.
Remaining at the same point of view we now turn to
a consideration of the works of Mr Browning. 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 imagination is compara-
tively unimpressed by the presence of law and its
operations.
If this be so, we might anticipate that Mr Browning's
interpretation of external nature would differ materially
from that of Mr Tennyson. And such is the case. It
is not the order and regularity in the processes of the *
natural world which chiefly delight Mr Browning's im-
agination, but the streaming forth of power and will V
and love from the whole face of the visible universe. \
His senses, indeed, considered as mere senses, are* pecu-
liarly lively and vigorous ; he sees a yellow primrose
with the utmost precision and vividness to be yellow,
and to be a primrose. His Englishman in Italy turns
from fruit to fruit feeding his eyes with colours, he hears
each sound of the hot garden as it were with clear-cut
outline, he finds delight in the mere grotesqueness of
2 1 2 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
the strange sea-creatures tumbled from the fisher's
basket ; —
" You touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
Of horns and of humps."
Those joys of vigorous youth, on the hills, in the
woods, which are little more than the satisfying of a
pure animal appetite, are celebrated by David as he
harps before the afflicted Saul : —
"Oh the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock, —
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, — the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool's living waters."
But Mr Browning's most characteristic feeling for
nature appears in his rendering of those aspects of
sky or earth or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn,
which seem to acquire some sudden and passionate
significance ; which seem to . be charged with some
spiritual secret eager for disclosure ; in his rendering
of those moments which betray the passion at the heart
of things, which thrill and tingle with prophetic fire.
When lightning searches for the guilty lovers, Ottima
and Sebald, like an angelic sword plunged into
the gloom, when the tender twilight, with its one
chrysolite star, grows aware, and the light and shade
make up a spell, and the forests by their mystery and
sound and silence mingle together two human lives for
ever, when the apparition of the moon-rainbow appears
gloriously after storm, and Christ is in his heaven, when
to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge
and in the grey of the hills at morning there dwells a
gathered intensity, — then nature rises from her sweet
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 2 1 3
ways of use and wont, and shows herself the Priestess,
the Pythoness, the Divinity which she is. Or rather,
through nature, the Spirit of God addresses itself to the
spirit of man.
If Mr Tennyson's thinking had any tendency in the
direction vaguely named pantheistic, it would be
towards identifying God with the order and wisdom of
the universe ; if Mr Browning's thinking had such a
tendency, it would be towards identifying Him with
the passion, so to speak, of nature. In the joy of
spring-time God awakens to intenser life : —
" The lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy ;
Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets ; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews
His ancient rapture ! "
A law of nature means nothing to Mr Browning if
it does not mean the immanence of power, and will, and
love. He can pass with ready sympathy into the
mystical feeling of the East, where in the unclouded
sky, in the torrent of noonday light God is so near
" He glows above
"With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours."
But the wisdom of a Western savant who in his
superior intellectuality replaces the will of God by the
blind force of nature seems to Mr Browning to be
science falsely so called, a new ignorance founded upon
knowledge,
" A lamp's death when, replete with oil, it chokes."
2 1 4 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
To this effect argues the prophet John in " A Death in the
Desert," anticipating with the deep prevision of a dying
man the doubts and questionings of modern days. And
in the third of those remarkable poems which form the
epilogue of the " Dramatis Personse," the whole world
rises in the speaker's imagination into one vast spiritual
temple, in which voices of singers, and swell of trumpets
and cries of priests are heard going up to God no less
truly than in the old Jewish worship, while the face of
Christ, instinct with divine will and love, becomes
apparent, as that of which all nature is a type or an
adumbration.
Mr Browning, like Mr Tennyson, is an optimist, but
the idea of a progress of mankind enters into his poems
in a comparatively slight degree. It is to be noted,
first, that whereas Mr Tennyson considers the chief
instruments of human progress to be a vast increase of
knowledge and of political organization, Mr Browning
makes that progress dependent on the production of
higher passions and aspirations, — hopes, and joys, and
sorrows ; and secondly that whereas Mr Tennyson finds
the evidence of the truth of the doctrine of progress
in the universal presence of a self-evolving law, Mr
Browning obtains his assurance of its truth from inward
presages and prophecies of the soul, from anticipations,
types and symbols of a higher greatness in store for
man, which even now reside within him, a creature ever
unsatisfied, ever yearning upward in thought, feeling and
endeavour :
" In man's self arise
August anticipations, symbols, types
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 215
Of a dim splendour ever on before
In that eternal circle run by life.
For men begin to pass their nature's bound,
And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant
Their proper joys and griefs ; they outgrow all
The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade
Before the unmeasured thirst for good : while peace
Rises within them ever more and more."
But Mr Browning thinks much less of the future of
the human race, and of a terrestrial golden age than of the
life and destiny of the individual, and of the heaven that
each man may attain ; and it is in his teaching with
reference to the growth of the individual and its appro-
priate means that we find the most characteristic part
of Mr Browning's way of thought. We have seen that
in Mr Tennyson's ideal of manhood the main elements
of character and conduct are found in obedience to
the law of conscience, adhesion to duty, self-knowledge,
self-control, self-reverence, clearness from the soil of
evil,
" Wearing the white flower of a blameless life."
And the chief instruments in the development of the
individual, according to this view, are those periods, or
occasions of life, protracted, it may be, through long
years of patient endurance and laborious toil, or, it
may be, coming in the sudden crises of events which
put the soul upon its trial, a trial consisting in the
temptation of passion, set over against the mandate of
conscience, in the inducements to self-indulgence, set
over against the duty of self-control. Now, the first
principle of Mr Browning's philosophy of life precludes
this ideal ; for it seems to him that the greatness and
2 1 6 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
glory of man lie not in submission to law, but in aspira-
tion to something higher than ourselves ; not in self-
repression, but in the passions which scorn the limits of
time and space, and in the bright endeavours towards
results that are unattainable on earth.* Such aspira-
tion is indeed itself the very law of our being; but
that it should not waste itself in wild and wandering
ways, there is needed above us, and above all the shows
of earth, above the beauty of nature, above human
desire, and art, and philosophies, one thing of which all
these are shadows, — that God who is supreme power and
wisdom, and love.
Man here on earth, according to the central and
controlling thought of Mr Browning, man here in a
state of preparation for other lives, and surrounded by
wondrous spiritual influences, is too great for the sphere
that contains him, while, at the same time, he can exist
only by submitting for the present to the conditions it
imposes ; never without fatal loss becoming content
with such submission, or regarding his present state as
perfect or final. Our nature here is unfinished, im-
perfect, but its glory, its peculiarity, that which makes
us men, — not God, and not brutes, — lies precisely in
this character of imperfection, giving scope as it does
for indefinite growth and progress —
" Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's and not the beasts' ; God is, they are,
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."
And it is by a succession of failures, stimulating higher
* Hence in part Mr Browning's enthusiastic admiration of Shelley, a
poet of a genius in many respects so remote from that of Mr Browning.
I
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 2 1 7
aspirations and endeavours, that we may reach at
last ■ -
" The ultimate angels' law
Indulging every instinct of the soul,
There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing."
One of two lives must be chosen by each of us — a
worldly or a spiritual life. The former begins and ends
in limited joys and griefs, hopes and fears ; it is con-
ditioned by time and space ; if accepted as in itself
sufficient it does not reveal God, but rather conceals
him ; it need not be sensual or devilish, but in being
merely earthly it is fatal to the true life of a human
soul. Success in this life of limitation is possible here
below, and even a distinguished success, when material,
aesthetic, and intellectual pleasures are organised for the
gratification of a prudent man, who knows how to enjoy
them temperately. The spiritual life, on the contrary,
begins and ends in hopes and fears, in joys and sorrows
which in their very nature are infinite ; to it earth and
all earthly things^are means, not ends; for it time is
of importance, because through time one enters into
eternity ; this higher life tends perpetually to God ; it
is heavenly and divine ; but on earth it may seem no
better than a succession of failures, — failures however,
which are in truth the highest glory of a human being.
Now a man may be guilty of either of two irretriev-
able errors ; seduced by temptations of sense, denying
the light that is in him, yielding to prudential motives,
or to supineness of heart or brain, or hand, he maj
renounce his spiritual, his infinite life and its concerns,
That is one error. Or he may try to force those con-
2 1 8 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
cerns, and corresponding states of thought, and feeling,
and endeavour into this finite life, — the life which is
but the starting point and not the goal. He may deny
his higher nature, which is ever yearning upward to God
through all noble forms of thought, emotion and action ;
he may weary of failure which (as generating a higher
tendency) is his peculiar glory; or else he may deny
the conditions of finite existence, and attempt to realise
in this life what must be the achievement of eternity.
Hence it is not obedience, it is not submission to the
law of duty, which points out to us our true path of life,
but rather infinite desire and endless aspiration. Mr
Browning's i deal of manhood in this world always
recognises the fact, that it is the ideal of a creature who
never can be perfected on earth, a creature whom other
and higher lives await in an endless hereafter. Between
the two extremes, alike destructive to our proper
existence, lies the middle course along which a man
should move. To deny heaven and the infinite life, —
that is one extreme. To deny earth and the finite life,
that is the other extreme. If we are content with the
limited and perishable joys and gifts, and faculties of
this world, we shall never see God,
Nor all that chivalry of His,
The soldier-saints, who, row on row,
Burn upward each to his point of bliss—
Since, the end of life being manifest,
He had burned his way thro' the world to this.
If, on the contrary, we aim at accomplishing under
all the restrictions of this life, what is the work of
eternity, if we desire absolute knowledge, or none,
Mr Tennysoji and Mr Browning. 219
infinite love or no love, a boundless exercise of our will,
the deploying of our total power, or no exercise of the
will, then we shall either destroy ourselves, we shall
dash ourselves to pieces against the walls of time and
space, or else seeing that our objects are unattainable,
we shall sink into a state of hopeless enervation. But
between these two extremes lies a mid-region in which
the life of man may appropriately find a place. He
must not rest content with earth and the gifts of earth ;
he must not aim at "thrusting in time eternity's con-
cern ;" but he must perpetually grasp at things attain-
able by his highest striving, and, having attained them,
find that they are unsatisfying, so that by an endless
series of aspirations and endeavours, which generate new
aspirations and new endeavours, he may be sent on to
God, and his manifested love, and his eternal heaven : —
" One great aim, like a guiding-star, above —
Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift
His manhood to the height that takes the prize ;
A prize not near — lest overlooking earth
He rashly spring to seize it — nor remote,
So that he rest upon his path content :
But day by day, while shimmering grows shine,
And the faint circlet prophesies the orb,
He sees so much as, just evolving these,
The stateliness, the wisdom, and the strength,
To due completion, will suffice this life,
And lead him at his grandest to the grave.'!*
These ideas lead us to the central point from which
we can perceive the peculiarity and origin of Mr
Browning's feeling with regard to external nature, art,
* («
Colombe's Birthday," Act iv. Compare the speech of Domizia,
beginning with the line, " How inexhaustibly the spirit grows," in the
fifth act of "Luria."
220 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
religion, love, beauty, knowledge. Around these ideas
we perceive, while we read through his works, one
poem after another falling into position, w T hile at the
same time each brings some special interest of its own.
Is it of external nature that Mr Browning speaks ?
The preciousness of all the glory of sky and earth lies
in its being the manifested power and love of God, to
which the heart springs as fire. In that Easter Dream
of the last judgment what is the doom of God upon the
condemned soul ? It is to take whatever the soul
desires, and since the lost man had loved the world —
the world with its beauty and wonder and delight — but
had never yearned upward to God who dwelt within
them, the decree is pronounced :
" Thon art shut
Out of the heaven of spirit ; glut
Thy sense upon the world."
And no condemnation, — it is shown, — could be more
awful ; for nature has betrayed and ruined us if we rest
in it ; betrayed and ruined us, unless it send us onward
unsatisfied to God.
And what are Mr, Browning's chief doctrines on the
subject of art ? Perhaps no poet has so fully interpreted
the workings of the artistic spirit as it finds expression
in poetry (from Aprile to Aristophanes,) sculpture
(Jules,) painting (Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi,
Pictor Ignotus) and music (Abt Vogler, A Toccata of
Galuppi, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha ;) and as we found it
quite in harmony with Mr Tennyson's feeling of the
dignity and potency of law that his imagination should
be impressed by the methods and results of science, so
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browjiing. 221
it is natural that Mr Browning with his feeling for thb
nobility of enthusiasms and passions should enter
profoundly into the nature of art, and the spiritual
strivings of the artist. Now Mr Browning emphasises
his teaching on the subject of art, perhaps unconsciously,
by the remarkable contrast between those poems which
represent the life and genius of the artist, and those
which represent the life and character of the connoisseur.
It is always in an unfavourable light that he depicts the
virtuoso or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied
aspirations such as those which make the artist's joy
and sorrow, rests in the visible products of art, and
looks up to nothing above or beyond them. In " The
Palace of Art " Mr. Tennyson has shown the despair and
isolation of a soul surrounded by all luxuries of beauty,
and living in and for them ; but in the end the soul is
redeemed and converted to the simple humanities of
earth. Mr. Browning has shown that such a sense of
isolation and such despair are by no means inevitable ;
there is a death in life which consists in tranquil satis-
faction, a calm pride in the soul's dwelling among the
world's gathered treasures of stateliness and beauty.
No creature loves the Duke whose last Duchess stands
painted by Fra Pandolf on the wall ; her smiling he
has stopped long since ; there she looks as if she were
alive ; the piece is a wonder ; and now he will come to
terms easily about the dowry of the new Duchess ; he is
indeed dead to love among dead things ; yet are the
dead things marvellous :
" Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."
222 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
So again the unbelieving and worldly spirit of the
dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St Praxed's, his
sense of the vanity of the world simply because the
world is passing out of his reach, the regretful memory
of the pleasures of his youth, the envious spite towards
Gandolf, who robbed him of the best position for a tomb,
and the dread lest his reputed sons should play him
false and fail to carry out his designs, are united with a
perfect appreciation of Renaissance art, and a luxurious
satisfaction, which even a death-bed cannot destroy, in
the splendour of voluptuous form and colour. The"
»
great lump of lapis lazuli,
" Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast,"
must poise between his sculptured knees ; the black
basalt must contrast with the bas-relief in bronze below ;
" Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Keady to twitch the Nymph's last garment off;"
the inscription must be " choice Latin, picked phrase,
Tully's every word." And so with no pang of remorse,
no horror of isolation, the Bishop dies.
Such poems expose the worldliness of the mere
connoisseur's and collector's feeling for art. The true
glory of art is that in its creation there arise desires and
aspirations never to be satisfied on earth, but generating
new desires and new aspirations, by which the spirit
of man mounts to God Himself. The artist (Mr
Browning loves to insist on this point) who can realise
in marble or in colour, or in music his ideal has thereby
missed the highest gain of art. In " Pippa Passes " the
regeneration of the young sculptor's work turns on his
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 223
finding that in the very perfection which he had attained
lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, " Andrea
del Sarto," has been devoted to the exposition of this
thought. Andrea is " the faultless painter ; " no line of
his drawing ever goes astray ; his hand expresses
adequately and accurately all that his mind conceives ;
but for this very reason, precisely because he is " the
faultless painter," his work lacks the highest qualities of
art :
" A man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a Heaven for? all is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art — the worse."
And in the youthful Raphael, whose technical execution
fell so far below his own, Andrea recognises the true
master :
" Yonder's a work, now, of that famous youth,
The Urbinate who died five years ago.
("lis copied, George Vasari sent it me.)
Well, I can fancy how he did it all,
Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see,
Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art — for it gives way ;
That arm is wrongly put, — and there again —
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines,
Its body, so to speak : its soul is right,
He means right — that, a child may understand,
Still, what an arm ! and I could alter it,
But all the play, the insight and the stretch —
Out of me ! out of me ! "
The true artist is ever sent through and beyond his
art unsatisfied to God, the fount of light and beauty.
Tears start in the eyes of Abt Vogler, who has been ex-
temporising on his musical instrument, as now in the
silence he is desolated by the fall of that beautiful
224 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
palace of sound which he had reared, and which is
for ever lost. There is for a while a sense of sadness
and vacancy and failure ; but the failure generates a
new movement of advance and ascension, and the soul
of the musician stretches upward hands of desire to
God:
u Therefore to whom turn I hut to Thee, the ineffable Name ?
Builder and maker Thou, of houses not made with hands !
What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same 1
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power
expands ?
There shall never be one lost good ! "What was, shall live as
before ;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more ;
On the earth, the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round.
" All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist ;
Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ;
Enough that He heard it ouce ; we shall hear it by-and-by."
And once more we find a full confession of Mr
Browning's creed with respect to art in the poem
entitled " Old Pictures in Florence." He sees the ghosts
of the early Christian masters, whose work has never
been duly appreciated, standing sadly by each moulder-
ing Italian Fresco ; and when an imagined interlocutor
enquires what is admirable in such work as this, the
poet answers that the glory of Christian art lies in its
rejecting a limited perfection, such as that of the art of
ancient Greece, the subject of which was finite, and the
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 225
lesson taught by which was submission, and in its dar-
ing to be incomplete, and faulty, faulty because its
subject was great with infinite fears and hopes, and
because it must needs teach man not to submit but to
aspire.
A large number of Mr Browning's poems have love
for their theme ; and here again we find the same
recurring thoughts. In Mr Tennyson's poems treating
of the trials, difficulties and dangers of the heart, the
temptation which is commonly represented as the most
formidable is the temptation to indulge passion at the \
expense of duty or in violation of the law of conscience.
In Mr Browning's poems the temptation almost invari-
ably is to sacrifice the passion which ennobles and
glorifies life either to prudential motives, or fear of public
opinion, or through a supine lethargy or slackness of the
spirit. As the enthusiasm of the artist carries him
through and beyond his art to God, so any intense passion,
an " outlaw of time and space," gives rise to an infinite
1
aspiring, which becomes the true pledge and the fitting
initiation of a never-ending movement of advance God-
ward through the infinite future.
Hence naturally the dramatis personal of many of Mr
Browning's poems fall into two groups — the group of
those whose souls are saved by love, and the group of
those whose souls are lost by some worldliness, or
cowardice, or faintness of heart. The old French
Academician, too prudent or self-restrained to yield to
the manifold promptings of nature and utter his love,
has ruined four lives, which for that sin have been con-
demned to be henceforth respectable and passionless: —
226 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
" You fool, for all
Your lore ! Who made things plain in vain ?
What was the sea for 1 What, the gray
Sad church, that solitary day,
Crosses and graves and swallows' call ?
Was there nought better than to enjoy ?
No feat, which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity, our due 1
No forcing earth teach Heaven's employ ?
No wise beginning, here and now,
What cannot grow complete (earth's feat)
And Heaven must finish, there and then 1 ?
No tasting earth's true food for men,
Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet '?
No grasping at love, gaining a share
O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
With death, so, sure of range above
The limits here 1 For us and love
Failure ; but, when God fails, despair."
So again in " Youth and Art " the same lesson is en-
forced. Boy-sculptor and girl-singer, afterwards to be
each successful in the world, the one to be wife of "a
rich old lord," the other to be " dubbed knight and an
R. A.," are too prudent to yield to the summons of love.
And therefore in the deepest sense each has failed : —
" Each life's unfulfilled you see ;
It hangs still patchy and scrappy ;
We have not sigh'd deep, laugh'd free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, — been happy."
So yet again in (< The Statue and the Bust " the Duke
and the lady will not break down the slight barrier that
separates their lives ; they postpone the infinite moment
of accomplishment, and therefore
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 227
11 Gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from their youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream."
What though the completion of their love had been a
crime ! It served none the less as the test of their lives ;
and therefore love was not their sin, but to have failed
in love, and thus, when the bridegroom passed to his joy,
to have remained without because the loin was ungirt
and the lamp unlit. And once more, — it is the same
failure in the trial of life which condemns to the shame
and hell of a low worldliness the evil one of " The Inn
Album." There was a time when he might have given
all for love, and have well lost the world ; but it was his
choice to gain the world and losing love, to lose his own
soul.
" Slowly, surely, creeps
Day by day o'er me the conviction — here
Was life's prize grasped at, gained, and then let go !
That with her — may be, for her — I had felt
Ice in me melt, grow steam, drive to effect
ADy or all the fancies sluggish here
I' the head that needs the hand she would not take
And I shall never lift now."
Over against the group of these lost souls who have
abjured or forfeited love, stands the group of those whom
love has glorified and saved, pure it may be with a
radiant spotlessness, or, it may be, soiled and stained
with griefs and shames and sins, but yet redeemed by
love. And thus Colombe of Ravestein, fair in her
innocence and radiant energy of heart, renouncing the
world, and entering into the joy of her love, stands side
by side with the sorrowful lady of " The Inn Album,"
who being defrauded of love, the true food of life,
228 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
will not stay her hunger with the swines' husks, but
will hunger on till God fulfil what man has failed to
accomplish :
" There is
Heaven, since there is Heaven's simulation — earth ;
I sit possessed in patience ; prison-roof
Shall break one day, and Heaven beam overhead."
The sins of one who, amid his sins, is yet true to a dis-
interested love are leniently regarded by Mr Browning;
the sin of worldliness, the sophistries of the coward-heart
are in his eyes unpardonable. In " Bifurcation " a noble
adhesion to duty accompanied with the hope that in the
end duty will itself open a way to love, that heaven
will "repair what wrong earth's journey did," is con-
trasted with an erring loyalty to love accompanied with
the hope that in the end love will become one with
duty. The poet does not venture to apportion praise and
blame between her who postponed love, and him who
postponed duty.
" Inscribe each tomb thus ; then, some sage acquaint
The simple — which holds sinner, which holds saint."
Those periods of life which appear most full of moral
purpose to Mr Tennyson, are periods of protracted self-
control, and those moments stand eminent in life in
which the spirit has struggled victoriously in the cause
of conscience against impulse and desire. With Mr
Browning the moments are most glorious in which the
obscure tendency of many years has been revealed by the
lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution that
changes the current of life has been taken in reliance
upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; and
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 229
those periods of our history are charged most fully with
moral purpose which take their direction from moments
such as these. We cannot always burn with the ecstasy,
we cannot always retain the vision. Our own languors
and lethargy spread a mist over the soul, or the world with
its prudential motives and sage provisoes, and chicane of
counsels of moderation, tempts us to distrust the voice
of every transcendent passion. But even in the hour of
faithlessness, if we can cling blindly to the facts revealed
in the vanished moment of inspiration we shall be
saved.
" Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows !
But not quite so sunk that moments,
Sure tho' seldom, are denied us,
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noon-days kindle,
"Whereby piled-up honours perish,
Whereby swoln ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse
Which for once had play unstifled
Seems the sole work of a life-time
That away the rest have trifled."
In such a moment the somewhat dull youth of " The Inn
Album " rises into the justiciary of the Highest ; in such
a moment Polyxena with her right woman's-manliness
discovers to Charles his regal duty, and infuses into her
weaker husband her own courage of heart : —
"'Twill be, I feel,
Only in moments that the duty's seen
As palpably as now — the months, the years
Of painful indistinctness are to come."
230 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
And rejoicing in the remembrance of a moment of high
emotion which determined the issues of a life, the speaker
of " By the Fireside " exclaims : —
" How the world is made for each of us !
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment's product thus,
When a soul declares itself — to wit,
By its fruit — the thing it does."
It is natural that Mr Browning should look to these
moments of passionate insight for the disclosures of our
highest duty, and should seek for its leadings less in the
objective arrangements of society, or the external
accidents of our lives, than in the inward promptings of
the heart.'" But love here, as every other high form of
ardour or enthusiasm, implies without and above us a
supreme Loving Will ; and hence it is not aimless or
fruitless even if on earth it seem to fail. Gifts prove
their use ; in the apparent failure and disappointment of
the lovino 1 heart, there is contained an ultimate success
everlasting desire, aspiration, endeavour, with a Love of
God always overhead. The true " love " is not included
* A comparison of the conservative with the movement poet in J. S.
Mill's essay on Alfred de Vigny is throughout in large measure applic-
able to the two poets considered in the present study. ' ' Of the virtues
and beauties of our common humanity [Mr Tennyson] views with most
affection those which have their natural growth under the shelter of
fixed habits and firmly settled opinions ; local and family attachments ;
. those emotions which can be invested with the character of duties ;
those of which the objects are, as it were, marked out by the arrange-
ments either of nature or of society, we ourselves exercising no choice :
TMr Browning] delights in painting the affections which choose their
own objects, especially the most powerful of these, passionate love, and
of that the more vehement oftener than the more graceful aspects ;
selects by preference its subtlest workings and its most unusual and
unconventional forms, and shows it at war with the forms and customs
of society."
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 231
"in a life," but the "life" is sustained and carried
endlessly forward " in a love."* Pompilia and Capon-
sacchi are not two defrauded souls ; the work of time
remains and grows throughout eternity : — ■
" O lover of my life, soldier-saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death !
Love will be helpful to me more and more
I' the coming course, the new path I must tread,
My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that !"
(Here, as in every instance, each of the poets insists on
the complementary portion of a great truth. Passion
may degrade itself to unworthy objects, or may warp the
operation of our higher powers by subtle encroachments.
If we love, let our love be like that of the blameless
Arthur, not like that of a Tristram or a Lancelot. But
on the other hand, self-control, self-superintendence, and
so-called obedience to duty may decline to a mere trade,
a gross and obvious mechanism, agreeable to the lethargy
of our nature because it protects us from the unexpected
summons of chivalrous emotion, and forbids the difficult
casuistry of the finer spirit of justice. The Duty before
whom flowers laugh, and through whom the most ancient
Heavens are fresh and strong, is a living Presence whose
countenance changes forever with quickening hopes and
fears, and whose limbs are instinct with the spirit of
freedom and of joy. 1
With regard to the political passion, again, Mr Brown-
ing is in contrast with Mr Tennyson. To co-operate I
with the slowly evolving tendency of human progress is, I
as conceived by Mr Tennyson, the highest duty of the/
* See the two contrasted poems, "Love in a Life," and " Life in a
Love."
232 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning,
leader of men. His ideal of a modern patriot is an
English gentleman who has a seat in Parliament and
carries a valuable amendment ; one especially who in
times of tumultuous change stands firm by the party of
order : —
" A soul on highest mission bent,
A potent voice of Parliament,
A pillar steadfast in the storm
Should licenced boldness gather force ;"
but one also who, when the fulness of the times has come,
may prove
" A lever to uplift the earth
And roll it in another course."
Mr Browning sympathises rather with the bright enthusi-
asm for freedom, which receives its promptings from the
everlasting ideals that haunt the soul of man more than
from the turn of external ea^ts. And so in the face of
all chances of failure Luigi sets out one spring night to
free his country fia^fh the tyrant, and to receive that gift
of the moraing star which God reserves for him who
overcometh and keepeth his works to the end. And if
failure follow, and earth is lost, at least Heaven remains ;
so the patriot knows whose place is not in his seat in
Parliament, but in the cart at the Shambles' Gate,
" Thus I entered, and thus I go !
In triumphs people have dropped down dead.
1 Paid by the World, — what dost thou owe
Me 1 ' God might question : now instead
Tis God shall repay ! I am safer so."
Here again each of the poets expresses one portion of a
truth. Without reverence for duty, of which freedom
is the essential condition, there is no genuine love of
I
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 233
freedom. That is Mr Tennyson's portion of the truth.
But passion for a righteous cause may reveal new ideals
of duty, and may confer power sufficient to advance
toward them. That is Mr Browning's portion of the
same truth.
K)nce more : Compare Mr Browning's manner of esti-
mating the worth <3f knowledge with that of Mr Tenny-
son. It is the widening of the horizon of ascertained
truth, each positive gain, each scientific discovery or me-
chanical invention which Mr Tennyson chiefly values ;
such knowledge being however subordinate to a higher
Wisdom, which tempers the audacities of the intellect
with influence from the loving traditions of the heart.
To Mr Browning the gleams of knowledge which we
possess are of chief value because they "sting with
hunger for full light." The goal of knowledge, as of
love, is God Himself. Its imost precious part is that
which is least positive — those momentary intuitions of
things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard.* The
needs of the highest part of our humanity cannot be
supplied by ascertained truth, in which we might rest
or which we might put to use for definite, limited ends ;
rather by ventures of faith, which test the courage of the
soul, we ascend from surmise to assurance, and so again
to higher surmise. And therefore the revelation of God
in Christ has left room for doubt and guess, because
growth is the law of man's nature and perfected know-
ledge would have stayed his growth :— "\
" Man knows partly but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
* See "Easter Day," xxvii., xxviii.
234 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid, he may grasp and use,
Finds progress."
And thus in " The Ring and the Book " the Pope antici-
pates that the mission of the age immediately after his
own, the mission of the sceculum rationalisticum may
be
" To shake
This torpor of assurance from our creed,
Reintroduce the doubt discarded."
But while the room left by the revelation of God for
ventures of faith is really room left for spiritual pro-
gress, Christianity, by its promise of a boundless life
beyond the grave is saved from the failure of heathenism,
which could not extinguish man's longings for a higher
than material or terrestrial perfection, but was unable to
utilise them, or to suggest how they could be transformed
from restlessness and self-conflict to a sustaining hope.
This is the sorrow of Cleon ; the life of man in this
world is inadequate to his soul's demands. Accordingly
the poetry of paganism is, for Mr Browning, the poetry of
sorrow ; the poetry of Christianity is that of joy attained
through all apparent sorrows. To Cleon the limitations
of life, the prospect of death, the approach of age, are all
sources of agony which were fruitless, but that it serves
to suggest a faint surmise of some future state " unlim-
ited in capability for joy." To the old Rabbi ben Ezra,
— partaker with Christians of the faith in immortality,
— age is an ecstasy and death a rapture : —
" Look not thou down but up !
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal,
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 235
The new wine's foaming flow,
The Master's lips a-glow !
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with
earth's wheel 1 "
I have illustrated Mr Browning's system of thought
chiefly from his shorter poems; but to the same central
ideas belong " Paracelsus," " Sordello," and " Easter
Day." In each we read " & soul's tragedy." Paracel-
sus aspires to absolute knowledge, the attainment of
which is forbidden by the conditions of our existence.
In the same poem a second phase of the same error,
that of refusing for the present to submit to the terms
of life, is represented in the Shelley-like poet, Aprile,
who would " love infinitely and be loved." Paracelsus
is the victim of an aspiring intellect ; Aprile, of the
temptations of a yearning, passionate heart. Mr
Browning attempted to complete our view of this side
of the subject by exhibiting the failure of an attempt to
manifest the infinite scope, and realise the infinite
energy of will, the inability of a great nature to deploy
all its magnificent resources, and to gain a full conscious-
ness of its own existence by the exercise of sway and
mastery, whether as politician or poet, over the mass of
men. And thus was written " Sordello," a companion
poem to " Paracelsus." The need of Sordello, above all
other needs, although it was but at the last he came to
perceive this, was of some Power above himself, some soul
above his soul, to which he should have yielded himself,
and which would have made Love a taskmaster over
him, constraining him to stoop to service however sub-
ject to the limitations of our manhood — his need was
indeed no other than that of a God in Christ.
236 Air Tennyson and Mr Browning.
But the same subject has another side, and this
Mr Browning has also been careful to present. It was the
error of Paracelsus and Aprile and Sordello to endeavour to
overleap the limitations of life, or to force within those
limits an infinity of knowledge, emotion or volition,
which they are unable to contain. It is no less fatal
an error to rest content within the bounds of our present
existence, accepting this as final, or to cease straining
beyond all earthly things to the highest wisdom, love,
beauty, goodness — in a word, to God. And this is the
side of the subject which is regarded in " Easter Day."
Why is the condemnation of the soul by God in that
Dream inevitable ? Because the speaker in the Dream
failed in the probation of life — accepted the finite
joys and aims of earth, each with some taint in it, as
sufficient and perfect, and never grasped at or yearned
towards the heavenly influences and joys that flitted
faint and rare above the earthly, but which were
taintless and therefore best.
With " The Ring and the Book " began a distinct
period in Mr Browning's career as poet. In the name
of that poem lay a piece of symbolic meaning ; to work
into the form of a ring the virgin gold, the artificer
needs to mingle alloy with the metal ; the ring once
made, a spirt of acid drives off the alloy in fume. So
in the story of the Roman murder-case the poet mingled
fancy or falsehood with truth — not for falsehood's sake,
but for the sake of truth. The characteristic of Mr
Browning's later poetry is that it is forever tasking
falsehood to yield up fact, forever (to employ imagery of
his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 23 7
with the feet in order that the head may rise higher
into pure air made for the spirit's breathing. Mr
Browning's genius unites an intellect which delights in
the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual
and emotional nature which reveals itself in swift and
simple solutions of those problems ; it unites an analytic
or discursive power supplied by the head with an in-
tuitive power furnished by the heart or soul. Now in
Mr Browning's earlier poems his strong spiritual ardours
and intuitions were the factors of his art which most
decisively made their presence felt ; impassioned truth
often flashed upon the reader through no intervening
and resisting medium. However the poet expended
his force of intellect in following the moral casuistry of
a Blougram, we felt where the truth lay. In " The
Ring and the Book," and in a far greater degree in some
more recent poems, while the supreme authority resides
in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart,
their momentary decisive work waits until a prolonged
casuistry has accomplished its utmost ; falsehood seems
almost more needful to the poet than truth.
And yet it is never actually so. Rather to the poet,
as truth-seeker, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek
truth only where it might easily be found : the strenuous
hunter will track it through all winding wa}^s of error.
The masculine characters in Mr Browning's poems are
ordinarily made the exponents of his intellectual
casuistry — a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes —
the female characters from Pippa and Polyxena to
Pompilia, and Balaustion are revealers to men of
divine truth, which with thera is either a celestial
238 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning.
i, f
grace, or a dictate of pure human passion. Eminent
moments of life have the same interest for the poet now
as formerly — moments when life, caught up out of the
ways of custom and low levels of prudence, takes its
guidance and inspiration from a sudden discovery of
truth through some high ardour of the heart ; therefore
it does not seem much to him to task his ingenuity
through almost all the pages of a lengthy book in
creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of
truth and falsehood, in order that a shining moment at
last may spring forward and do its work of severing
absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from
splendour. Thus Mr Browning came more and more to
throw himself into prolonged intellectual sympathy with
characters towards whom his moral sense stood in ardent
antagonism. We saw the errors of an idealist Aprile ;
they were easy to understand ; let us now hear all
that an Aristophanes, darkening the light that is in him,
may have to say in his own behalf. We saw how the
poetry of a Chiappino's life descended into ignoble prose.
Let us now hear the self-defence of the prosaic life of
action, a life of compromise and expediency, from the
lips of Hohenstiel-Schwangau. We saw the passionate
fidelity of love in a Colombe, in a Norbert. Let us now
hear all that a husband of Elvire can say to prove
that he may fitly be on the track of a fizgig like Fifine.
Mr Browning's courageous adhesion to truth never
deserts him ; only, like that of Hugues,
" His fugue broadens and thickens
Greatens and deepens and lengthens ; "
until we are tempted at times to ask like the bewildered
Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning. 239
organist, " But where is the music ?" And there are
one or two poems in which we wait in vain for any un-
stopping of the full-organ, any blare of the mode Pales-
trina. A strenuous acceptance of the world for the sake
of things higher than worldly is enjoined by the first
principles of Mr Browning's way of thinking ; the false-
hoods of life must therefore be accepted, understood, and
rtered for the sake of truth. His best gift to his age
■owever not intellectual casuistry. Better to us than
his teaching of truth by falsehood is his teaching of truth
truth. Though in his recent poems he may linger
long between " turf " and " towers," carefully studying
a, a moment usually comes of such terrible impassioned
truth-seeking as that which proved the sanity of Leonce-
anda. To approach the real world, to take it as it
is and for what it is, yet at the same time to penetrate
with sudden spiritual fire has been the aim of Mr
-_"i jwning's later poetry.*
* The earliest appearance in Mr Browning's poetry of what I have
spoken of as its central thought is in a passage of "Pauline" and in
the note in French appended to that passage.
186/.
GEORGE ELIOT.
When we have passed in review the works of that great
writer who calls herself George Eliot, and given for a
time our use of sight to her portraitures of men and
women, what form, as we move away, persists on the
field of vision, and remains the chief centre of interest
for the imagination ? The form not of Tito, or Maggie,
or Dinah, or Silas, but of one who, if not the real George
Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and
lives and speaks through them. Such a secoud self of
an author is perhaps more substantial than any mere
human personality encumbered with the accidents of
flesh and blood and daily living. It stands at some
distance from the primary self, ahd differs considerably
from its fellow. It presents its person to us with fewer
reserves ; it is independent of local and temporary
motives of speech or of silence ; it knows no man after
the flesh ; it is more than an individual ; it utters
secrets, but secrets which all men of all ages are to
catch ; while, behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable
historical self secure from impertinent observation and
criticism. With this second self of George Eliot it is,
aot with the actual historical person, that we have to do.
Aud when, having closed her books, we gaze outward
with the mind's eye, the spectacle we see is that most
impressive spectacle of a great nature, which has suffered
George Eliot. 241
and has 11 ow attained, which was perplexed and has now
grasped the clue — standing before us not without tokens
on lip and brow of the strife and the suffering, but
resolute, and henceforth possessed of something which
makes self-mastery possible. The strife is not ended,
the pain may still be resurgent ; but we perceive on
which side victory must lie.
This personal accent in the writings of George Eliot
does not interfere with their dramatic truthfulness ; it
adds to the power with which they grasp the heart and
conscience of the reader. We cannot say with confi-
dence of any one of her creations that it is a projection
of herself ; the lines of their movement are not deflected
by hidden powers of attraction or repulsion peculiar to
the mind of the author; most noteworthy is her im-
partiality towards the several creatures of her imagina-
tion ; she condemns but does not hate ; she is cold or '
indifferent to none ; each lives his own life, good or bad;
but the author is present in the midst of them, indicating,
interpreting ; and we discern in the moral laws, the
operation of which presides over the action of each story,
those abstractions from the common fund of truth which
the author has found most needful to her own deepest
life. We feel in reading these books that we are in the ,
presence of a soul, and a soul which has had a history^
At the same time the novels of George Eiiot are not
didactic treatises. They are primarily works of art, and
George Eliot herself is artist as much as she is teacher.
Many good things in particular passages of her writings
are detachable ; admirable sayings can be cleared from
their surroundings, and presented by themselves, knocked
Q
)\
242 George Eliot.
out clean as we knock out fossils from a piece of lime-
stone. But if we separate the moral soul of any com-
plete work of hers from its artistic medium, if we murder
to dissect, we lose far more than we gain. When a work
of art can be understood only by enjoying it, the art is
of a high kind. The best criticism of Shakspere is not
that which comes out of profound cogitation, but out of
immense enjoyment ; and the most valuable critic is the
critic who communicates sympathy by an exquisite record
of his own delights, not the critic who attempts to com-
municate thought.) In a less degree the same is true of
George Eliot. There is not a hard kernel of dogma
at the centre of her art, and around it a sheath or
envelope which we break and throw away ; the moral
significance coalesces with the narrative, and lives through
the characters.
In George Eliot's poems the workmanship is not less
sincere than that of her prose writings, and a token of
sincerity is that inasmuch as she laboured under a dis-
advantage, that disadvantage immediately shows itself.
These honest failures are immensely more precious than
any possible piece of splendid mendacity in art, which
might have gained a temporary success. The poems are
conspicuously inferior to the novels, and a striking indica-
tion that poetry is not George Eliot's element as artist is
this, that in her poems the idea and the matter do not
really interpenetrate ; the idea stands above the matter as
a master above a slave, and subdues the matter to its will.
The ideal motives of "The Spanish Gipsy," of " Jubal,"
of ' Armgart," can be stated in a concise form of words.
For the mystery of life there is substituted the complexity
George Eliot. 243
of a problem of moral dynamics, a calculable composition
of forces. And whh this the details of the poems are
necessarily in agreement. A large rhythm sustains the
verse, similar in nature to the movement of a calmly
musical period of prose ; but at best the music of the
lines is a measurable music ; under the verse there lies
no living heart of music, with curious pulsation, and
rhythm, which is a miracle of the blood. The carefully-
executed lyrics of Juan and Fedalma are written with an
accurate knowledge of what song is, and how it differs
from speech. The author was acquainted with the pre-
cise position of the vocal organs in singing ; the pity is
she could not sing. The little modelled verses are masks
taken from the dead faces of infantile lyrics that once
lived and breathed.
Having been brought into the presence of the nature
which has given us these books, the first thing which
strikes us is its completeness. No part of our humanity
seems to have been originally deficient or malformed.
While we read what she has written the blood circulates
through every part of our system. We are not held
suspended in a dream with brain asleep. The eye of
common observation is not blinded by an excess of
mystical glory ; the heart is made to throb with fervour ;
the conscience is aware of the awful issues of life and
death ; the lip is made facile to laughter. The genius
of this writer embraces us like the air on every side. If
some powerful shock have numbed for a while any one
of our nerves of sensation, she plays upon it with a stim-
ulating restorative flow. And in this fact of the com-
pleteness of her nature we receive a guarantee of the
244 George Eliot.
importance of any solution which George Eliot may have
wrought out for herself of the moral difficulties of life.
No part of the problem is likely to have been ignored.
From a partial nature we can expect only a partial
solution, and the formation of a sect. To be a modern
Pagan may be easy and eminently satisfactory to a
creature who has nothing within him which makes the
devotion of the Cross more than a spectacle of foolishness.
To annihilate the external world, and stand an unit of
volition in the presence of a majestic moral order, is
sufficient to a naked will, like Fichte, a central point of
soul which knows not imagination or memory, or the
sweet inspirations and confidences of the flesh and blood.
Such a nature as George Eliot's may indeed arrive at a
very partial solution of the problem of highest living, and
may record its answer in the phraseology of a sect ; but
the result will have been reached by some process dif-
ferent from the easy one of narrowing the terms in which
the problem has been stated.
In this nature, complete in all its parts, and with
every part strong, the granite-like foundation of the
whole is conscience, the moral perceptions and the moral
will. Abstract the ethical interest from " Romola," or from
" The Spanish Gypsy," and there is total collapse of
design, characters, incidents. Other story-tellers centre
our hopes and fears in the happiness or unhappiness of
their chief personages ; a wedding or a funeral brings
to an end at once our emotional disturbance and the
third volume of the novel. George Eliot is profoundly
moved by the spectacle of human joy and human
sorrow ; death to her is always tragic, but there is
George Eliot. 245
something more tragic than cessation of the breath, and
of the pulse ; there is the slow letting go of life and
the ultimate extinction of a soul ; to her the marriage
joys are dear, but there is something higher than the
highest happiness of lovers. " What greater thing,"
she muses, while Adam and Dinah stand with clasped
hands, and satisfied hearts, " what greater thing is there
for two human souls than to feel that they are joined
for life, to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest
on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in
all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable
memories at the moment of the last parting." She has
shown us one thing greater, — the obedience of man and
woman to a summons more authoritative than that
of any personal emotion . —
"We must walk
Apart unto the end. Our marriage rite
Is our resolve that we will each be true
To high allegiance, higher than our love.
When Tom and Maggie sink in the hurrying Floss there
is left an aching sense of abrupt incompleteness, of im-
perious suspension, of intolerable arrest ; and with this a
sense of the utter helplessness of our extremest longings.
The musician's hand has broken the movement in the
midst, and it can never be taken up again. This is cruel
to all our tender desires for joy. But there is some-
thing more dreadful. When the heavens break up over
the head of Silas Marner, when the lots declare him,
the innocent man, guilty in the midst of the congregation
of Lantern Yard ; when he goes out with despair in
l-v'o oonl with shaken trust in God and, man, to live for
246 George Eliot.
weary years a life of unsocial and godless isolation,
accumulating his hoard of yellow pieces, the tragedy is
deeper. When the beautiful Greek awakes from his
swoon beside the Arno to find no pleasant solitary lair,
but the vindictive eyes of Baldassare looking down at
him, and the eager knuckles at his throat, the real
piteousness and terror is not that a young man is about
to die, but that now the visible seal of finality is to be
set upon that death of the soul which had already taken
place.
In each tale of George Eliot's telling if the question
arise of the ruin or restoration of moral character,
every other interest becomes subordinate to this. The
nodes of the plot from which new developments
spring are often invisible spiritual events. It is a
crisis and we feel it to be such, when there falls
into Maggie's hands a copy of Be Imitatione Christi ;
the incident is fraught, we are at once aware,
with momentous consequences. " ' Father, I have not
been good to you ; but I will be, I will be,' said Esther,
laying her head on his knee/' Slight words, but words
which determine an epoch, because as they were
uttered, self-love was cast behind, and the little action
of laying her head upon her father's knee was endowed
with sacramental efficacy. The relations that human
beings can form with one another which are most inti-
mate, most full of fate, are with George Eliot not intel-
lectual or merely social relations, but essentially moral.
Eppie toddles in through the weaver's open door, and
does much more than console him for his lost treasure ;
she is to him the sunshine and spring breeze thawing
George Eliot. 247
the arrested stream of his affections, delivering him from
his state of unnatural isolation, and re-uniting him with
his fellow-men. Edgar Tryan brings happiness to Janet,
but it is by saving her soul. Felix Holt is much more
than a lover ; painfully divested of coats and neck-ties (not
an example, in this particular it may be hoped to all
proletarian Radicals), with his somewhat formulated
nobility, and his doctrinaire delight in exposition of
principles, he yet is a genuine moral nature, and
approaching Esther Lyon as a conscience approaches a
conscience, and with an almost rude insistency of moral
force, he becomes the discoverer to her of the heroisms
which lay concealed in her own dainty feminine nature.
To Romola her early love is as a morning cloud,
growing momently fainter and more distant ; the one
profound attachment which she forms is to her spiritual
father, the man " who had been for her an incarnation
of the highest motives," who had forced her to sub-
mit to the painful supremacy of conscience.
The conscience of George Eliot asserts itself so
strongly because there are in her nature other powers
strong also, and urging great claims upon the will. Her
senses are framed for rich and varied pleasure. The
avenues between the senses and the imagination are
traversed to and fro by swift and secret intelligencers.
There are blind motions in her blood, which respond to
vague influences, the moral nature of which may be
determined by a contingency ; there are deep incalculable
instincts, the heritage from past generations, which
suddenly declare themselves with an energy that had
not been surmised. There are zeals and ardours of the
248 George Eliot.
heart, eager demands and eager surrenders. There is
the grasping, permitted or restrained, of a richly endowed
nature after joy, — after joy from which to avert the
eyes for ever is bitter as the sundering of flesh and soul.
This nature, in which conscience must needs be stern, is a
nature of passionate sensibility. The pure gleaming of
gems, the perfect moulding of a woman's arm, the face
of youth that is like a flower, and its aureole of bright
hair, the strong voice of a singer that urges and con-
trols, the exquisite movement and excitement of the
dance, not one of these fails to find an answer in the
large joy-embracing nature of George Eliot. We recall
to mind Tito's presence in the dark library of Bardi,
" like a wreath of spring dropped suddenly in Romola's
young but wintry life ; " and the fascination exercised
over Adam by the sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-
eyed Hetty ; and Maggie borne along by the wave of
arrogant baritone music too strong for her ; and the
wonder and worship of Rufus Lyon in presence of that
miracle of grace, the Frenchwoman found by the road-
side ; and Fedalma circling to the booming and ringing
tambourine, under the flushed clouds and in midst of
the spectators of the Plac,a : —
Ardently modest, sensuously pure,
With young delight that wonders at itself,
And throbs as innocent as opening flowers,
Knowing not comment, soilless, beautiful.
* * * *
All gathering influences culminate,
And urge Fedalma. Earth and heaven seem one,
Life a glad trembling on the outer edge
Of unknown rapture.
This capacity for pure joy, this noble sensibility to
George Eliot. 249
beauty, are attributes, not of the lower characters of
George Eliot's creating, but of the worthiest. They are
felt by her to be derived from the strength of our nature,
not from its weakness. Adam Bede falls in love with a
woman who has nothing to recommend her but exquisite
curves of cheek and neck, the liquid depth of beseeching
eyes, the sweet childish pout of the lips, and he cleaves
to her with almost a humility of devotion. Does George
Eliot think meanly of her hero for a proceeding so un-
becoming a sensible man ? By no means. She perceives
that " beauty has an expression beyond and far above
the one woman's soul that it clothes ; as the words ot
genius have a wider meaning than the thought that
prompted them. It is more than a woman's love that
moves us in a woman's eyes — it seems to be a far-off
mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech
for itself there ; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm,
move us by something more than their prettiness — by
their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness
and peace.' The noblest nature sees the most of this
impersonal expression in beauty." Whence sometimes,
as in the case of Adam, tragic consequences.
A man or woman endowed with great susceptibility to
beauty, and prior to experience making large demands
upon the world for joy, runs the risk of terrible calamity.
Dissociated from the sympathetic emotions the im-
moderate love of beauty, as Baudelaire has well said,
"leads men to monstrous and unheard of disorders."
The appetite for joy consumes all that the earth can
afford, and remains fierce and insatiate. It is impossible
even to imagine such a calamity overtaking George
2^o George Eliot.
cb
Eliot, so numerous, and full of soundness and vigour are
the sympathies which bind her to her fellows. There
are certain artists who concentrate the light of an intense
intelligence and passionate sympathy upon their two or
three chief figures, which move in an oppressive glare of
consciousness, while towards the rest they show them-
selves almost indifferent. George Eliot's sympathy
spreads with a powerful and even flow in every direction.
Hetty, with her little butterfly soul, pleasure-loving but
not passionate, luxurious, vain, hard of heart, is viewed
with the sincerest and most intelligent sympathy. Tito
is condemned, decreed to death, but he is understood far
too truly to be an object of hatred. Tessa, the pretty
pigeon, — Hinda, who has little more soul than a squirrel,
are lovable after their kind ; and up from these through
the hierarchy of human characters tp Romola and Fedalma,
to Zarca and Savonarola, there is not one grade too low,
not one too high for love to reach. Poverty of nature
and the stains of sin cannot alienate the passionate
attachment of this heart to all that is human. " See,
Lord," prays Dinah in the prison, "I bring her, as they
of old brought the sick and helpless, and thou didst heal
them ; I bear her on my arms, and carry her before
thee." The long unnatural uses of a defeated life, which
distort the character and render it grotesque, cannot hide
from these eyes its possibilities of beauty. Mr Gilfil, the
caustic old gentleman with bucolic tastes and sparing
habits, many knots and ruggednesses appearing on him
like the rough bosses of a tree that has been marred, is
recognizable as the Maynard Gilfil " who had known all
the deep secrets of devoted love, had struggled through
George Eliot. 251
its days and nights of anguish, and trembled under its
unspeakable joys." And the saddest ordeal of love — to
witness the diminishing purity and splendour of a star-
like soul, the clouding-over of a heroic nature by a film
of dishonour — this too is endurable by the faithfulness of
the heart. The day of the great Dominican's death is
to the last a day of sacred commemoration to Romola;
all his errors, all his weaknesses are forgiven.
George Eliot's manifold sympathies create behind her
principal figures an ample background in which they find
play and find repose. An English landscape in the
manner of Constable, rich with rough, soft colour, and
infallible in local truth is first presented. Men, women,
children, animals are seen, busy about their several
concerns. The life of a whole neighbourhood grows up
before us ; and from this the principal figures never
altogether detach themselves. Thus a perspective is
produced ; the chief personages are not thrust up against
the eye; actions are seen passing into their effects;
reverberations of voices are heard strangely altering and
confused ; and the emotions of the spectator are at once
roused and tranquillized by the presence of a general life
surrounding the lives of individuals. Hetty disappears, but
the affairs of the Hall Farm still go on ; Savonarola falls,
but Florence remains. No more exquisite back-ground
group can be found in the literature of fiction than the
Poyser household, from the little sunny -haired Totty, and
her brothers as like their father as two small elephants
are like a great elephant, up to Martin Poyser the elder,
sitting in his arm-chair with hale, shrunken limbs, and
" the quiet outward glance of healthy old age," which
2^2
George Eliot.
" spies out pins on the floor, and watches the flickering
of the flame or the sungleams on the wall." The pathos
of their shame and sorrow deepens in the presence of
the unconsciousness of childhood, and the half-conscious-
ness of self-contented age.
But the sympathies cf George Eliot reach out from
the slow movement of the village, from the inharmonious
stir of the manufacturing town, from the Hall Farm, and
from the bar of the Rainbow Inn to the large interests of
collective humanity. The artistic enthusiasm of the
Renaissance period, the scientific curiosity of the present
century, the political life at Florence long since, the
political movements of England forty years ago, aud
religious life in manifold forms — Catholic, Anglican, and
Nonconforming, are none of them remote from her
imaginative grasp. Here the heart allies itself with a
vigorous intellect, the characteristics of which are its
need of clearness, of precision ; aod its habitual turn for
generalization. The '* unlimited right of private hazi-
ness," so dear to many minds, is a right which George
Eliot never claims on her own behalf. And in her mind
facts, especially moral facts, are for ever grouping them-
selves into laws ; the moral laws which her study of life
discovers to her being definite and certain as the facts
which they co-ordinate. The presence of a powerful
intellect observing, defining, and giving precision explains
in part the unfaltering insistance of the ethical purport of
these books. It bears down upon the conscience of the
reader with painful weight and tenacity.
The truths in presence of which we live, so long as the
imagination of George Eliot controls our own, are not sur-
1
George Eliot. 253
mises, not the conjectures of prudence, not guesses of the
soul peering into the darkness which lies around the known
world of human destiny, nor are they attained by generous
ventures of faith ; they are tyrannous facts from which
escape is impossible. Words which come pealing from
" a glimmering limit far withdrawn," words " in a tongue
no man can understand," do not greatly arouse the
curiosity of George Eliot. Other teachers would fain
lighten the burden of the mystery by showing us that
good comes out of evil. George Eliot prefers to urge,
with a force which we cannot resist, the plain and dread-
ful truth that evil comes out of evil — "whatsoever a K
man soweth that shall he also reap." No vista of a
future life, no array of supernatural powers stationed in
the heavens, and about to intervene in the affairs of men,
lead her gaze away from the stern, undeniable facts of
the actual world. " Our deeds are like children that are
born to us ; they live and act apart from our will. Nay,
children may be strangled, but deeds never : they have
an indestructible life both in and out of our conscious-
ness." Other teachers transfigure and transmute human
joys and sorrows, fears and hopes, loves and hatreds, with
light from a spiritual world : the sufferings of the
present time are made radiant with the coming of the
glory which shall be revealed in us : in George Eliot's
writings it is the common light of day that falls upon
our actions and our sufferings ; but each act, and each
sorrow 7 , is dignified and made important by the con-
sciousness of that larger life of which they form a part —
the life of our whole race, descending from the past,
progressing into the future, surrounding us at this
moment on every side.
254 George Eliot.
As was to be expected from the translator of Feuer-
bach's " Essence of Christianity," religion is approached
with an ardent tenderness. The psychology of the
religious consciousness had been accepted by Feuerbach
in its entirety ; but theological metaphysics were aban-
doned. For supernaturalism, naturalism was substituted ;
the phenomena remained the same, but the substance
was changed. A miracle not priestly but scientific was
effected — the bread and wine which feed the soul, and
which had been very God, became now very man, and
nothing more than man ; in the sacred acts and dogmas
of religion man presents to himself his own flesh and his
own blood, and feeds upon them. " God is an unutter-
able sigh, lying in the depths of the heart." The super-
natural basis of religion is denied ; a natural one
assumes its place; and the phenomena remain unchanged.
Such a doctrine adapts itself readily to the purpose of
the novelist. Absolute fidelity in representing the facts
of the religious consciousness is not only permitted, but
enjoined ; and every phase of religious faith and feeling
from the rudest to the most noble and the purest, becomes
precious to the lover of mankind. The Rev. Rufus
Lyon in the chapel of Malt-house Yard, Dinah Morris
on the Green of Hayslope, the Frate in the Duomo of
Florence, Mr Tryan who preached the Gospel at Milby,
and Dr Kenn who preached the Church at St Oggs —
one and all are dear to the affectionate student of religious
emotion.
Dolly Winthrop's feeling of religious truths " in her
inside," and the naive anthropomorphism of her Raveloe
theology, contain the essence of all religion, and differ
George Eliot. 255
from the sublimest devotion of saint or mystic not
by kind but by degree : — " Well, Master Marner, it's
niver too late to turn over a new leaf, and if you've
niver had no church, there's no telling the good it '11 do
you. For I feel so set up and comfortable as niver was,
when I've been and heard the prayers, and the singing to
the praise and glory o' God as Mr Macey gives out —
and Mr Crackenthorp saying good words, and more par-
tic'lar on Sacramen' Day ; and if a bit o' trouble comes, .
I feel I can put up wi' it, for I've looked for help i' the
right quarter, and gev myself up to Them as we must
all give ourselves up to at the last ; and if we'n done our
part, it isn't to be believed as Them as are above us 'ull
be worse nor we are, and come short o' Theirn." The
triumph of George Eliot's art is that her portraitures of
the religious nature, conspicuously that most noble one
of the female Methodist preacher, are never mere
artistic studies ; there is no touch of unsympathetic
intellectuality about them ; no touch of coldness. And
here, surely, there is more than a triumph of art. One
cannot but believe that a large religious experience lies
somewhere in the life of the writer herself, now, perhaps,
receiving a different interpretation from that which it
originally yielded ; but not thrown away as worthless,
nor turned from as ignoble.
George Eliot's humour allies itself with her intellect
on the one hand, and with her sympathies and moral
perceptions on the other. The grotesque in human
character is reclaimed from the province of the
humorous by her affections, when that is possible, and
is shown to be a pathetic form of beauty. The
I
George Eliot.
pale, brown-eyed weaver, gazing out from his cottage
door with blurred vision, or poring with miserly
devotion over his golden hoard, touches us, but does
not make us smile. The comedy of incident, the farcical,
lies outside her province ; once or twice, for reasons
that appear hardly adequate, the comedy of incident
was attempted, and the result was not successful. The
humour of George Eliot usually belongs to her entire
conception of a character, and cannot be separated from
it. Her humorous effects are secured by letting her
mind drop sympathetically into a level of lower intelli-
gence, or duller moral perception, and by the conscious
presence at the same time of the higher self. The
humorous impression exists only in the qualified organs
of perception which remain at the higher, the normal
point of view. What had been merely an undulation
of matter, when it touches the prepared surface of the
retina, breaks into light. By the fire of the " Rainbow
Inn," the butcher and the farrier, the parish clerk and
the deputy clerk puff their pipes with an air of severity,
" staring at one another as if a bet were depending on
the first man who winked," while the humbler beer-
drinkers " keep their eyelids down, and rub their hands
across their mouths as if the draughts of beer were a
funeral duty, attended with embarrassing sadness."
The slow talk about the red Durham is conducted with
a sense of grave responsibility on both sides. It is we
who are looking on unobserved who experience a rippling
over of our moral nature with manifold laughter ; it is
to our lips the smile rises — a smile which is expressive
not of any acute access of risibility, but of a voluminous
George Eliot. 257
enjoyment, a mass of mingled feeling, partly tender,
partly pathetic, partly humorous.
The dramatic appropriateness of the humorous utter-
ances of George Eliot's characters renders them un-
presentable by way of extract. Each is like the
expression of a face which cannot be detached from
the face itself. The unresentful complacency with
which Dolly "Winthrop speaks of the frailties of
masculine human creatures is part of the general
absence of severity and of high views with respect
to others which belongs to her character, and receives
illustration from her like complacent forbearance with
the natural infirmities of the pups. " They will
worry and gnaw — worry and gnaw they will, if it
was one's Sunday cap as hung anywhere so they could
drag it. They know no difference, God help 'em; it's
the pushing 0' the teeth as sets them on, that's what it
is." Contrast Dolly's indulgent allowances in men's
favour, tempered by undeniable experiences of their
scarcely excusable failings, with the keen and hostile
perceptions of Denner, Mrs Trail some's waiting-woman,
with mind as sharp as a needle, whose neat, clean-cut,
small personality is jarred by the rude power, and coarse,
incoherent manners of men. " It mayn't be good luck
to be a woman," Denner said, " but one begins with it
from a baby : one gets used to it. And I shouldn't
like to be a man — to cough so loud, and stand
straddling about on a wet day, and be so wasteful with
meat and drink. They're a coarse lot, I think." We
turn for a kindlier judgment to Dolly. " Eh, to be
sure," said Dolly, gently, (while instructing Silas in
R
258 George Eliot,
the mysteries of Eppie's wardrobe,) " I've seen men
as are wonderful handy wi' children. The men are
awk'ard and contrairy mostly, God help 'em ; but when
the drink's out of 'em, they aren't unsensible, though
they're bad for leeching and bandaging — so fiery and
unpatient."
j Complete in all its parts, and strong in all, the nature
of George Eliot is yet not one of those rare natures
which without effort are harmonious. There is no
impression made more decisively upon the reader of her
books than this. No books bear upon their faces more
unmistakably the pain of moral conflict, and the pain of
moral victory, only less bitter than that of defeat.
Great forces warring with one another ; a sorrowful, a
pathetic victory — that is what we discern. What is the
significance of it all ?j
The need of joy is only another expression for the
energy of individual life. To be greatly happy means
to live strong and free ; a large nature means an
abundant capacity for delight. To develop one's own
life freely, and to reinforce it with supplies drawn
from this side and from that, is the first requirement of
man. But what if this immense need of joy imperil the
life and happiness of others ? What if to satisfy my
eager appetite for enjoyment I must take from the little
store of my less fortunate neighbour ? The child knows
nothing of this scarcity in the world of the food of joy.
His demands for pleasure are precisely proportioned to
his desires. He discovers at first no occasion for self-
sacrifice. And there are some child-like souls to whom
the facts of life are for ever an offence, and the laws of
George Eliot. 259
life an unintelligible tyranny. The god of the world
is a jealous god, the " Urizen " of William Blake, who
would bind us with the curse and chain of duty. De-
light and obedience, man and woman, body and soul,
naturally one, are sundered by this evil god. But for
Urizen, the god of prohibition, our songs of experience
would be only songs of a larger and more joyous
innocence :• —
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair ;
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.
We start and look up at such a voice as this, the clear
voice of an immortal child singing in the midst of us
conquered and captive men. For the law lays upon all
but rare natures its heavy weight. Hence conflict in
adult spirits, the individual life, with its need of self-
development and of joy asserting vast claims which are
opposed by the social affections, by the conscience, and
the scientific intellect observing the facts of the world.
In some souls the conflict speedily terminates, the forces
are unequally arrayed against one another on this side
and on that. The social affections and the conscience
can make no stand against the egoistic desires, and are
crushed in a brief murderous encounter. Or, on the
other hand, the sense of personality is feeble, the desire
of self-surrender great, and the unity is easily and
happily attained of a pure, self-abandoning existence.
With George Eliot, when her conflict of life began, the
forces on each side were powerful, and there did not at
first appear a decisive preponderance of one over the
260 George Eliot.
other. A prolonged struggle, with varying fortunes, was
to be expected before any victory could be achieved.
The tragic aspect of life, as viewed by this great
writer, is derived from the Titanic strife of egoistic
desires with duties which the conscience confesses, and
those emotions which transcend the interests of the
individual. It seems to her no small or easy thing to
cast away self. Rather the casting self away is an agony
and a martyrdom. All the noblest characters she has
conceived, certainly all those characters in presenting
which a personal accent seems least doubtfully recognis-
able — the heroical feminine characters or those that
might have been heroical, characters of great sensi-
bility, great imaginative power, great fervour of feel-
ing — Maggie, Romola, Fedalma, Armgart — cling with
passionate attachment to the joy which must needs be
renounced. The dying to self is the dying of young
creatures full of the strength and the gladness of living.
The world is indeed cruel; to be happy is so sweet. If
the joy were ignoble it could be abandoned with less
anguish and remorse, but it is pure and high. Armgart,
in the moment of her supreme musical triumph, feels no
vulgar pleasure : —
At the last applause,
Seeming a roar of tropic winds that tossed
The handkerchiefs, and many coloured flowers,
Falling like shattered rainbows all around —
Think you, I felt myself a Prima Donna 1
No, but a happy spiritual star,
Such as old Dante saw, wrought in a rose
Of light in Paradise, whose only self
Was consciousness of glory wide-diffused ;
Music, life, power — I moving in the midst,
With a sublime necessity of good.
George Eliot. 261
<b
And the rapture of Fedalma in her dance is not less pure,
a blossoming of joy. Why should such flowers be torn
and cast away ?
The problem of life is somewhat simplified by a dis-
tinction which is more than once referred to in the
writings of George Eliot. " The old Catholics," said
Felix Holt, " are right, with their higher rule and their
lower. Some are called to subject themselves to a
harder discipline, and renounce things voluntarily which
are lawful for others. It is the old word, ' necessity is
laid upon me.'" While Fedalma is turning away for
ever from the man she loves, Hinda washes the shells
she has been gathering on the strand ; then leaps and
scampers back beside her queen. We do not ask Hinda
to take upon her the vow of renunciation. There is an
appropriateness in Tessa's growing fat with years, and
indulging in the amiable practice of a mid-day or after-
noon doze. Childlike glee, indolence, comfort, and con-
tent — let them retain these, because they can know
neither joy nor sorrow of a higher strain. And to hearts
that are sore with hidden wounds and unconquerable
sense of loss, the pathetic spectacle of their gladness and
their repose is assuaging.
But why must Armgart, why must Fedalma lose the
brightness of their exquisite joy? Because they may
attain to something nobler, something in truer keeping
with the world in which they move. They, and such as
they, must needs accept the higher rule, subjection 'to
which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love.
The world is sad, and each of them is a part of it ; and
being sad, the world needs sympathy more than it needs
262 George Eliot,
joy — joy which in its blindness is cruel. While Armgart
is engulfed by the splendour of her own felicity, limping
Walpurga moves unnoticed about her, the weary girl who
knows joy only by negatives, and Leo, the grey -haired
.musician, lives with sad composure about the graves of
his dead hopes and dead delights. While Fedalma
dances with free feet, Zarca and his band of chained
gipsies are approachiDg,
With savage melancholy in their eyes,
That star-like gleam from out black clouds of hair.*
Eomola would fain be delivered from the burden of
responsibility, from the cares and obligations of a dusty
life, where duties remain and the constraining motive of
love is gone, and she drifts away over the dark waters ;
she awakes to find the sorrow of the world still hemming
her in ; she cannot release herself from the obedience of
the higher rule.
The renunciant's vow is accepted by these great sonls,
but not without a sudden, cruel discovery of truth, or a
long discipline of pain. Armgart, who had been " a
happy, spiritual star," will now take humble work and
do it well, teach music and singing in some small town,
and so pass on Leo's gift of music " to others who can
use it for delight." She will bury her dead joy ; but it
is piteous to do so ; she is tender to it ; the dead joy is
flesh of her flesh ; she cannot fling it away or insult it
with the savage zeal of the vulgar ascetic : —
* Possibly the imaginative germ from which this scene, long after,
sprung up, may .be found in an incident referred to in ' ' Brother and
Sister," far.,—
" A gypsy once had startled me at play,
Blotting with her dark smile my sunny day."
George Eliot, 263
O, it is hard,
To take the little corpse and lay it low,
And say " None misses it but me."
Fedalma, choosing sublimer pain, is still the Fedalma of
the Placa grown great through sympathy and sorrow
and obedience ; not burying a dead joy, but slaying one
that lives —
Firm to slay her joy
That cut her heart with smiles beneath the knife,
Like a sweet babe foredoomed by prophecy.
And Romola, calmly happy and calmly sad in the sweet
evening of her life, is the Elomola whose heart blossomed
with the perfect flower of love in presence of a dark
beautiful face, and to the music of a murmuring voice
in the untroubled days of her youth.
From the Frate who commanded her to draw forth the
crucifix hidden in her bosom, Eomola learns the lesson of
the Cross which Maggie had learnt less clearly from the
voice out of the far-off middle ages. " The higher life
begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will
to bow before a Divine law. That seems hard to you.
It is the portal of wisdom, and freedom and blessedness.
And the symbol of it hangs before you. That wisdom is
the religion of the Cross. And you stand aloof from it :
you are a pagan ; you have been taught to say, ' I am
as the wise men who lived before the time when the Jew
of Nazareth was crucified/ .... What has your dead
wisdom done for you, my daughter ? It has left you
without a heart for the neighbours among whom you
dwell ; without care for the great work by which
Florence is to be regenerated and the world made holy :
264 George Eliot.
it has left you without a share in the Divine life which
quenches the sense of suffering Self in the ardours of an
ever-growing love." Romola's leading of Lillo with
gentle, yet firm, hand and sweet austerity into the
presence of these great truths indicates how needful she
had found them for the uses of life ; how patiently and
persistently she had acquired their lesson. "It is only
a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring
very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only
have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being
a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling
for the rest of the world as well as ourselves ; and this
sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it,
that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we
would choose before everything else, because our souls
see it is good."
The same doctrine of the necessity of self-renuncia-
tion, of the obligation laid upon men to accept some
other rule of conduct than the desire of pleasure, is en-
forced in the way of warning with terrible emphasis.
Tito Melema, Arthur Donnithorne, Godfrey Cass, Maggie
Tulliver, are in turn assailed by one and the same
temptation — to deny or put out of sight certain duties
to others, to gratify some demand for egoistic pleasure or
happiness, or to avoid some wholesome necessary pain.
Arthur, vain, affectionate, susceptible, owed no one a
grudge, and would have liked to see everyone about
him happy, and ready to acknowledge that a great
part of their happiness was due to the handsome young
landlord. Tito was clever and beautiful, kind and
gentle in his manners, without a thought of anything
George Eliot. 265
cruel or base. And Godfrey was full of easy good
Mature ; and Maggie of a wealth of eager love. But
in the linked necessity of evil each of these, beginning
with a soft yielding to egoistic desires, becomes capable
of deeds or of wishes that are base and cruel. " ' It's a
woman,' said Silas, speaking low and half-breathlessly,
just as Godfrey came up. ' She's dead, I think — dead
in the snow at the stone-pits, not far from my door/
Godfrey felt a great throb : there was one terror in his
mind at that moment — it was that the woman might
not be dead. That was an evil terror — an ugly inmate
to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's kindly dis-
position." Maggie has heard the voice of the great
mediaeval bearer of the Cross ; a higher rule than that
of self-pleasing lives in her innermost conscience, and
therefore she has strength at the last to renounce the
cruel pursuit of personal joy, and to accept a desert for
her feet henceforth to walk in, and bitter waters to
allay her thirst.
The scientific observation of man, and in particular
the study of the mutual relations of the individual and
society, come to reinforce the self-renouncing dictates of
the heart. To understand any individual apart from
the whole life of the race is impossible. We are the
heirs intellectual and moral of the past ; there is no
such thing as naked manhood ; the heart of each of us
wears livery which it cannot throw off. Oar very bodies
differ from those of primeval savages — differ, it may be,
from those of extinct apes only by the gradual gains of
successive generations of ancestors. Our instincts,
physical and mental, our habits of thought and feeling,
266 George Eliot.
the main tendency of our activity, these are assigned to
us by the common life which has preceded and which
surrounds our own. " There is no private life," writes
George Eliot in " Felix Holt," " which has not been
determined by a wider public life, from the time when
the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wander-
ings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of
a herd which had made the pastures bare."
If this be so, any attempt to render our individual
life independent of the general life of the past and pre-
sent, any attempt to erect a system of thought and con-
duct out of merely personal convictioDS and personal
desires must be a piece of slight, idealistic fatuity. The
worship of the Goddess of Reason and the constitution
of the year One, are the illusions of revolutionary ideal-
ism, and may fitly be transferred from this Old World
which has a history to the rising philosophers and
politicians of Cloudcuckoo-town. Not Reason alone, but
Reason and Tradition in harmonious action guide our
steps to the discovery of truth : —
We had not walked
But for Tradition ; we walk evermore
To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp.
Do we desire to be strong ? We shall be so upon one
condition — that we resolve to draw for strength upon the
common fund of thought and feeling and instinct stored up,
within us and without us, by the race. We enter upon
our heritage as soon as we consent to throw in our lot
with that of our fellow-men, those who have gone before
us, who are now around us, who follow after us,
continuing our lives and works. War waged against
George Eliot, 267
the powers by which we are encompassed leads to inev-
itable defeat ; our safety, our honour, our greatness lie
in an unconditional surrender.
Here we come upon one chief intention of " The
Spanish Gypsy." Zarca is strong, and never falters ;
Father Isidor is no less strong. The Gypsy chieftain
and the Catholic Prior has each accepted with undivided
will the law of his life, imposed upon each by the tradi-
tion of his nation and his creed. Fedalma attains
strength by becoming one with her father and her
father's tribe ; by bowing in entire submission to the
might of hereditary influences. But the Spanish Duke
would find in his personal needs and private passions
the principles by which to guide his action : he would
be a law to himself; he acknowledges no authority sup-
erior to his own desires ; he resolves to break with his
past, and to construct a new life for himself, which shall
have no relation to his duties as a Spaniard, a Christian,
and a man of ancient blood. Vain effort of an idealist
to create from the resources of his inner consciousness a
new time and new place other than the actual ! Don
Silva's nature is henceforth shattered into fragments :
he cannot really break with his past ; he cannot create
a new world in which to live ; his personality almost
disappears ; the gallant cavalier becomes the murderer
of his friend and of the father of his love ; a twofold
traitor."*
It will be readily seen how this way of thinking
* The absence of traditional attachments to the life of Florence
leaves Tito without one of the chief guarantees of political honour, and
so his facile ability turns easily to treacherous uses.
268 George Eliot.
abolishes rights, and substitutes duties in their place.
Of rights of man, or rights of woman, we never hear
speech from George Eliot. But we hear much of the
duties of each. The claim asserted by the individual
on behalf of this or that disappears, because the
individual surrenders his independence to collective
humanity, of which he is a part. And it is another
consequence of this way of thinking that the leadings of
duty are most often looked for, not within, in the
promptings of the heart, but without, in the relations of
external life, which connect us with our fellow-men.
Our great English novelist does not preach as her
favourite doctrine the indefeasible right of love to gratify
itself at the expense of law ; with the correlative right,
equally indefeasible, to cast away the marriage bond as
soon as it has become a painful incumbrance. She
regards the formal contract, even when its spirit has
long since died, as sacred and of binding force. Why ?
Because it is a formal contract. " The light abandonment
of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had
ceased to be pleasant, would be the uprooting of social
and personal virtue." Law is sacred. Rebellion, it is
true, may be sacred also. There are moments of life
" when the soul must dare to act upon its own warrant,
not only without external law to appeal to, but in the
face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings
— lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been
false." These moments, however, are of rare occurrence,
and arise only in extreme necessity. When Maggie and
Stephen Guest are together and alone in the Mudport
Inn, and Maggie has announced her determination to
George Eliot. 269
accompany him no farther, Stephen pleads: — "'We have
proved that it was impossible to keep our resolutions.
We have proved that the feeling which draws us to each
other is too strong to be overcome : that natural law
surmounts every other ; we can't help what it clashes
with/ ' It is not so, Stephen. I'm quite sure that is
wrong. I have tried to think it again and again ; but
I see, if we judged in that way, there would be a warrant
for all treachery and cruelty. We should justify break-
ing the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on
earth. If the past is not to bind us where can duty lie ?
We should have no law but the inclination of the
moment.' Maggie returns to St. Oggs : Fedalma and
Don Silva part : Romola goes back to her husband's
house. We can imagine how unintelligible such moral
situations, and such moral solutions, would have appeared
to the great female novelist of France. The Saint Clotilda
of Positivism had partly written a large work intended
to refute the attacks upon marriage contained in the
writings of George Sand, " to whom," adds her worship-
ping colleague, "she was intellectually no less than
morally superior." Perhaps we may more composedly
take on - trust the excellence of Madame Clotilde de
Vaux's refutation, inasmuch as the same object has
been indirectly accomplished by the great female
novelist of England, who for her own part has not been
insensible to anything that was precious in the influence
of Comte.
" If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie ?"
As the life of the race lying behind our individual life
points out the direction in which alone it can move with
2 yo George Eliot.
dignity and strength, so our own past months and years
lying behind the present hour and minute deliver over
to these a heritage and a tradition which it is their
wisdom joyfully to accej)t when that is possible. There
are moments, indeed, which are the beginning of a new
life ; when, under a greater influence than that of the
irreversible Past, the current of our life takes an un-
expected course ; when a single act transforms the whole
aspect of the world in which we move ; when contact
with a higher nature than our own suddenly discovers to
us some heroic quality of our heart of the existence of
which we had not been aware. Such is the virtue of
confession of evil deeds or desires to a fellow-man ; it
restores us to an attitude of noble simplicity ; we are
rescued from the necessity of joining hands with our
baser self. But these moments of new birth do not
come by intention or choice. The ideal which we may
set before ourselves, and count upon making our own by
constancy and fidelity of heart, is that which Don Silva
imagines for himself : —
A Past that lives
On through an added Present, stretching still
In hope unchecked by shaming memories
To life's last breath.
If no natural piety binds our days together, let us die
quickly rather than die piecemeal by the slow paralyzing
touch of time.
All that helps to hold our past and present together
is therefore precious and sacred. It is well that our
affections should twine tenderly about all material
tokens and memorials of bygone days. Why should
George Eliot. 2 7 1
Tito keep his father's ring ? Why indulge a foolish
sentiment, a piece of mere superstition, about an in-
animate object? And so Tito sells the ring, and with
it closes the bargain by which he sells his soul. There
is, indeed, a noble pressing forward to things that are
before, and forgetting of things that are behind. George
Eliot is not attracted to represent a character in which
such an ardour is predominant, and the base forgetting
of things behind alarms and shocks her. We find it
hard to abstain from reading as autobiographical the
little group of eleven poems entitled " Brother and
Sister," while at the same time it is impossible to dis-
sociate them from some of the earlier scenes of " The
Mill on the Floss." These poems are heavy with the
tenderness of memory, filled with all the sweetness and
sadness of lost but unforgotten days, and overbowed with
the firmament of adult thought, and grief, and love : —
"The wide-arched bridge, the scented elder-flowers,
The wondrous watery rings that died too soon,
The echoes of the quarry, the still hours
With white robe sweeping-on the shadeless noon,
Were but my growing self, are part of me,
My present Past, my root of piety."
It is noted, as characteristic of Hetty's shallow nature,
that in her dream of the future, the brilliant future of
the Captain's wife, there mingles no thought of her second
parents, no thought of the children she had helped to tend,
of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of
her own childhood. " Hetty could have cast all her past
life behind her, and never cared to be reminded of it again.
I think she had no feeling at all towards the old house,
272
George Eliot.
and did not like the Jacob's ladder and the long row of
hollyhocks in the garden better than any other flowers —
perhaps not so well." Jubal, after his ardent pursuit of
sons" through the world, would return to Lamech's home,
" hoping to find the former things." Silas Marner would
see once more the town where he was born, and Lantern
Yard, where the lots had declared him guilty. But
Hetty is like a plant with hardly any roots ; " lay it
over your ornamental flower-pot and it blossoms none
the worse."
This is the life we mortals live. And beyond life lies
death. Noiv it is not hard to face it. We have already
given ourselves up to the large life of our race. We
have already died as individual men and women. And
we see how the short space of joy, of suffering, and of
activity allotted to each of us urges to helpful toil, and
makes impossible for us the " glad idlesse " of the im-
mortal denizen of earth. This is the thought of " Jubal."
When the great artist returns to his early home, he is
already virtually deceased — he has entered into subjec-
tive existence. Jubal the maker of the lyre is beaten
with the flutes of Jubal's worshippers. This is tragic.
His apotheosis and his martyrdom are one. George
Eliot is not insensible to the anguish of the sufferer.
But a strenuous and holy thought comes to make
his death harmonious as his life. He has given his
gift to men. He has enriched the world. He is incor-
porate in
A strong persistent life
Panting through generations as one breath,
And filling with its soul the blank of death.
1872.
GEORGE ELIOT.
II# « MIDDLEMARCH " AND " DANIEL DERONDA.
>>
\Great artists belong ordinarily to one of two chief
classes — the class of those whose virtue resides in
breadth of common human sympathy, or of those who,
excelling rather by height than breadth, attain to rare
altitudes of human thought or human passion. For the
one, the large table-land, with its wealth of various life,
its substantial possessions, its corn, its shadow-casting
trees, and lowing kine ; for the other, the mountain-
summit, its thrill, its prospect, its keen air, and its
inspiration. To the one we look for record, and sane
interpretation of the average experience of men ; to the
other, for discoveries and deliverances of the soul, for
the quickening into higher life of our finest spiritual
susceptibilities, and sometimes for the rescue of our best
self from the incredulity, inertia, and encumbrances
which gather about it in the ways of use and wont.
And Art is justified of all her children. From the first
half of our century we could ill lose Scott, who represents
in so distinguished a manner the class of artists who
excel by breadth ; we could ill lose Wordsworth or
Shelley, who in different ways belongs each as distinc-
tively to the other class. It will always be a question
with such persons as love to settle points of precedence,
s
2 74 George Eliot.
to which of these divisions of great creative natures the
higher honour is due ; and men will always decide the
question in opposite ways, according to their respective
types of character. The table-land may be an elevated
one, not without undulations of gentle rise and fall ; the
mountain-summit may be a narrow apex, bald and bleak,
unvisited by any feet save those of a few climbers whose
sanity may well be doubted ; but, on the other hand, it
may be a Delectable Mountain — ■" Mount Marvel " or
" Mount Clear " — on which the shepherds feed their
flocks, and to which for a brief season mortal pilgrims
graciously guided may repair.
However this point of precedence shall be decided,
what we may set down for certain is that those rare
artists who unite in themselves the excellences of both
classes — who are broad and who are also high — rank
above all others in the hierarchy of art. Of such
Shakspere may be considered the master and chief. No
mount of passion — not that of the Prometheus of
iEschylus or of Shelley — climbs to such a skyey emin-
ence as that on which the agony of Lear is accomplished ;
no more mysterious isolation of youthful sorrow for ever
allures and for ever baffles than that of Hamlet ; nor has
a speculative summit more serene or of wider vision been
attained bv foot of man than that of the great enchanter
of the " Tempest," who is Shakspere himself looking
down, detached and yet tender, upon the whole of human
experience. From Scott we obtain no Hamlet, no Pros-
pero. But the world of Shakspere's creation includes
with such figures as these a Henry V., a Benedick, a
Bottom the weaver, a Toby Belch, and types enough to
George Eliot. 275
populate a planet with varieties of common human
nature, from the courtier to the clown. /
Among artists who with Shakspere unite breadth of
sympathy with power of interpreting the rarer and more
intense experiences of the souls of men, George Eliot
must be placed. The former is the side of her person-
ality which belongs to prose, the latter is akin to poetry.
Scott, who was a poet in the first stage of his great
career, and wrote poetry admirable of its kind, naturally
and rightly fell into the easier pace of a prose-writer ;
and never attempting to use artificial wings, nor possess-
ing wings by nature, he went hither and thither over the
level surface of our earth, and left few things upon it
unvisited. It was evident that even while engaged
upon her incomparable prose works, George Eliot was
haunted by a desire for a more purely ideal and
impassioned order of creation ; but verse is not her true
medium of expression, and in " The Spanish Gypsy,"
while prosaic elements — such as the semi-humorous
passages — remain, which are not assimilated by the
work (all her rich prosaic powers thus counting for worse
than nothing), her imagination, cut off from the allies
which had been accustomed to reinforce it, falls at times
painfully under the domination of ideas and of the
intellect. There is an unrelieved intensity, a prolonged
stress, in the poem, which although it is essentially
moral, contracts the consciousness of the reaxler, until
his gaze seems narrowing " into one precipitous crevice."
In "Daniel Deronda," for the first time, the poetical
side of George Eliot's genius obtains adequate expression,
through the medium which is proper to her — that of
276 George Eliot.
prose — and in complete association with the non-poetical
elements of her nature. It is the ideal creation, happier
in conception and in tone, which " The Spanish Gypsy '
failed to be.
The demands which such a work makes upon the
reader are so large and so peculiar, that it is not a
matter of surprise that at first it should select an
audience, and speak fully to only a comparatively few.
George Eliot has prefixed to one of the chapters of her
novel the beautiful lines of Whitman : —
" Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice,
him or her I shall follow,
As the water follows the moon, silently,
with fluid steps anywhere around the globe."
There are those who hear the right voice and respond
to it ; but the majority of persons addressed by a new
and original work of art prefer Jheir own impatience to
its summons or challenge. " Receptiveness," George
Eliot has said, " is a rare ancT massive power like
fortitude." Before approaching certain great or beauti-
ful things — certain frescoes of Italian masters, certain
symphonies of German musicians — we need recollection,
and a dismissal from our consciousness of all that it
contains of hard, narrowing, vulgar and superficial. We
do well to hold our own personality and its force of
reaction somewhat in abeyance, by this means to secure
a clear space for the new experiences ; we do well to
acquire a strenuous submission, and overmaster not only
the impatience of vanity and restless egoism, but for the
time even the play of intellectual vivacity. It will not
seem strange to some readers of our great living novelist
George Eliot, 277
to speak of the duty of making access to her work in
some such spirit as this. Merely to recognize the
veracity, the faithfulness to fact, of George Eliot's last
novel, implies that one has had strength of wing to
move with some ease and for some time in a plane of
feeling which, though real, and perhaps of all things
most real, is above and at times out of sight of our
every-day tempers and moods of mind. To start aside
from the creator's idea, and to fortify oneself by some
commonplace of vulgar cynicism, is not difficult ; it is
less easy to listen, to receive, to keep, and to depart
pondering things in one's heart ; but this latter coarse
brings with it compensations^
Beside the clever critics some readers of " Daniel
Deronda" ought perhaps to put on record their experi-
ence, and confess what have been the dealings of this
book with their spirits. Those who have heard in it
"the right voice," which one follows "as the water
follows the moon, silently," will have been conscious of
a quickening and exaltation of their entire spiritual
life. The moral atmosphere they breathed became
charged with a finer and more vivifying element ;
the face of the world seemed to glow for them with a
richer tint, " a more vivid gravity of expression ;" moods
of ennui or rebellion appeared more futile and un-
worthy than formerly; it became natural to believe
high things of man ; and a certain difficulty and peril
attended the necessary return to duller or at least humbler
tempers of heart (as it is difficult to pass from a sonata
of Beethoven to the common household sounds), until
these too were touched and received a consecration. The
2 j& George Eliot.
book has done something to prevent our highest
moments from making our every-day experience seem
vulgar and incoherent, and something to prevent our
every-day experience from making our highest moments
seem spectral and unreal.
To discover the central motive of " Daniel Deronda '
it should be studied in connection with its immediate
predecessor, " Middlemarch." In externals the contrast
is striking. In " Middlemarch " the prosaic or realistic
element occupies a much larger place ; a great pro-
portion of the book is only not a satire because with the
word satire we are accustomed to associate the idea of
exaggeration and malicious purpose. The chief figures
— Lydgate, Dorothea — are enveloped by a swarm of
subordinate characters, each admirably real, and to
whom we are compelled to give away a share of our
interest, a share of our admiration or our detestation.
In " Daniel Deronda " the poetical or ideal element as
decidedly preponderates. We should feel the needle-
pricks of Mrs Cadwallader's epigrams an irritating im-
pertinence. Our emotions are strung too tensely to
permit us to yield an amused tolerance to the fine
dispersion of idea in Mr Brooke's discourse. In place
of a background of ugliness, — the Middlemarch streets,
the hospital, the billiard -room, the death-chamber of
Peter Featherstone, his funeral procession attended by
Christian carnivora, — we have backgrounds of beauty,
the grassy court of the abbey enclosed b} r a Gothic
cloister, its July sunshine, and blown roses ; Cardell
Chase, and the changing scenery of the forest from
roofed grove to open glade ; evening on the Thames at
George Eliot. 279
Richmond with the lengthening shadows and the mel-
lowing light, its darkening masses of tree and building
between the double glow of the sky and the river ; the
Turneresque splendour of sunset in a great city, while the
lit, expectant face is gazing from Blackfria.rs Bridge, west-
ward, where the grey day is dying gloriously ; the Mediter-
ranean, its shores "gemlike with purple shadows, a sea
where one may float between blue and blue in an open-
e} T ed dream that the world has done with sorrow.''
These differences in externals correspond with the
essential inward difference between the two works, —
the one, " Middlemarch," is critical, while its successor
aims at bem«; in a certain sense constructive. Readers
of " Middlemarch " will remember that the story is pre-
ceded by a prelude which sets forth its principal theme.
Dorothea Brooke is a Saint Theresa, with a passionate
ideal nature which demands an epic life ; but she is
born out of due season into this period of faiths which
are disintegrating and of social forces which are still
unorganized. " Many Theresas have been born who
found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a
constant unfolding of far-resonant action ; perhaps only
a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual
grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.
. . . With dim lights and tangled circumstances they
tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agree-
ment ; but after all, to common eyes their struggles
seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness ; for these
* The poetry of dawn and sunset in a great city have now their
classical passages in literature, Wordsworth's noble sonnet on West-
minster Bridge for one, and George Eliot's record of the vision of
glory seen by Mordecai from Blackfriars for the other.
280 George Eliot.
later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social
faith and order which could perform the function of
knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour
alternated between a vague ideal and the common
yearning of womanhood ; so that the one was disapproved
as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse."
And thus Dorothea, with a heart large enough for the
Virgin Mary, with a nature ardent, theoretic, and in-
tellectually consequent, her mind yearning after "some
lofty conception of the world which might frankly include
the parish of Tipton and her own conduct there," —
Dorothea finds no epic life, but a life of mistakes.
From the social world which hemmed her round,
seeming a walled-in maze of small paths that led
nowhither, she dreams for a little while that she is
about to make escape into a world of large ideas im-
pelling to far-resonant action. She is to sit at the feet
of a master and prophet, who by a binding doctrine
shall compel her own small life and faith into strict
connection with the vast and amazing past, and occupy
that life with action at once rational and ardent.
Her prophet, with his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum,
is a pedant bringing to the great spectacle of
life nothing but a small, hungry, shivering self, whose
consciousness is never rapturously transformed into the
vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the
energy of an action, who is always scholarly and unin-
spired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.
" c She says he has a great soul. A great bladder for
dried peas to rattle in,' said Mrs Cadwallader." No
consequent doctrine of human life is discoverable hv
George Eliot. 281
Dorothea, no satisfying action is possible for her, but
she stays her soul with the trust of noble natures, " that
by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't
quite know what it is and cannot do what we would,
we are part of the divine power against evil — widening
the skirts of light and making the struggle with dark-
ness narrower." From her failure which is pain
Dorothea only passes to her failure which is happiness.
From her vague ideal she lapses into the common
yearning of womanhood, the need to bless one being
with all good, and to receive the love of one heart.
" Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke
the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great
name on earth." Saint Theresa becomes the wife of
Will Ladislaw.
But the central theme receives a second illustration in
rt Middlemarch," much as the pervading sentiment of
" King Lear " is developed through the stories alike of
Lear and of Gloucester. Lydgate, who has received a
true vocation, whose intellectual passion predestines him
to far-resonant action in the world of scientific research.
Lydgate, against whom the temptations of the flesh and
the devil would have been idle, is subdued by that third
enemy of man, the world, incarnated in the form of a
creature with feminine voice, swan-like neck, perfectly
turned shoulders, exquisite curves of lip and eyelid, and,
hidden behind these, the hardness of a little sordid soul.
George Eliot, with a hand tender and yet unfaltering, has
traced the dull decay of ardour in a spirit framed for the
pursuit of great ends, the lapse of slackening resolution,
the creeping paralysis which seized upon an enthusiasm
282 George Eliot.
out of adjustment to one constant portion of the victim s
life. " Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in
literature by general discontent with the universe as a
trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen
by mistake ; but the sense of a stupendous self and an
insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's
discontent was much harder to bear ; it was the sense
that there was a grand existence in thought and effective
action lying around him, while his self was being
narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears,
and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such
fears." The London physician who has gained an
excellent practice, and written a Treatise on Gout, is a
murdered man, and Rosamond is indeed "his basil
plant," which flourishes wonderfully on the murdered
man's brains.
Thus " Middlemarch " closes, with neither heroic joy
nor noble tragic pain. The heart-beats and sobs after
an unattained goodness of a Saint Theresa, foundress of
nothing, "tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances
instead of centering in some long -recognizable deed."
The intellectual passion which might have produced a
Bichat has for nett resultant a heavy insurance, and a
treatise upon that disease which owns a good deal of
wealth on its side. Heart and brain prove alike failures.
If anything promises success in the history unfolded by
the chronicler of " Middlemarch," it is the hand of the
good workman, Caleb Garth. Here is something which,
even in an epoch of incoherent ideas and chaotic social
forces, can yet accomplish something. Faust, despairing
of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some
George Eliot. 283
acres from the sea. The religion of conscientious work
is somewhat higher at least than the religion of Bulstrode,
which serves but to spin a spider-web of falsehood over
the foul recesses of conscience. Caleb " had never re-
garded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and
would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were pro-
posed to him;" but his virtual divinities were " good
practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful comple-
tion of undertakings ; his prince of darkness was a slack
workman."
This is well, but it is not enough for our needs.
Elsewhere George Eliot has pictured a finer Caleb Garth
— the maker of violins, Stradivarius : —
" That plain white-aproned man who stood at work
Patient and accurate full fourscore years."
Violins are good ; but how if there be no great music in
man's soul to pub the violin to use ? If no Bach be
possible, the final cause of our Stradivarius becomes
obscure. Assuredly the critical study of our nineteenth
century which is presented in " Middlemarch ' tests
the virtue and faithfulness of the heart : were we not
resolved to resist even inevitable evil, and help to will
our own better future and the better future of the
world, it were easy to despair. The noble sadness of
Romola, the calm of a high renunciation, sustains and
enlarges the heart like the clear-obscure after a solemn
sunset ; the contemplation of Fedalma's agony of love
and devoted loyalty produces " a sort of regenerating
shudder "through the frame. But the failure of Lydgate
impoverishes the spirit as the failure of light at morning
does. And the happiness of Dorothea only serves to
284 George Elliot.
protect us from that danger, to which so few of us are
subject, the danger of striving " to wind ourselves too
high for sinful man beneath the sky." It calls for a
gentleness and condescension of the heart, and a mild
resignation of our more ardent hopes.
But " Middlemarch " is not the final word of our great
imaginative teacher. Whether consciously so designed
or not, " Daniel Deronda " comes to us as a counterpoise
or a correlative of the work which immediately preceded
it. There we saw how two natures framed for large dis-
interested services to humanity can be narrowed — the
one into the round of the duteous sweet observances of
domestic life — the other into the servitude,
" Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,"
which the world imposes upon those who accept its base
terms and degrading compensations. Here we are shown
how two natures can be ennobled and enlarged : the one
rescued through anguish and remorse, and by the grace,
human if also divine, which the soul of man has power
to bestow upon the soul of man, from self-centered
insolence of youth, the crude egoism of a spoiled child ;
and rendered up, first a crushed penitent to sorrow, then
weak as a new-yeaned lamb to the simplicity of a
mother's love, and at last plunged into a purgatory of
fire, consuming and quickening and seven times heated,
until the precious soul is released from bond and for-
feiture, and reclaimed for places consecrated by love and
duty : the other, a nature of finer mould and temper
than that of Lydgate, with none of the spots of common-
ness in it which produced a disintegrating effect on
George Eliot, 285
Lydgate's action, but exposed through its very plenteous-
riess and flexibility of sympathy to peculiar dangers — the
danger of neutrality in the struggle between common
things and high which fills the world, the danger of
wandering energy and wasted ardours ; and from these
dangers Deronda is delivered, he is incorporated into a
great ideal life, made one with his nation and race, and
there is confided to him the heritage of duty bound with
love which was his forefathers', and of which it had been
sought to deprive him.
Such are the spiritual histories of Gwendolen Harleth
and of Daniel Deronda, told in the briefest summary.
When we speak of " Middlemarch " as more realistic, and
the later novel as more ideal, it is not meant that the
one is true to the facts of life and the other untrue ; it
is rather meant that in the one the facts are taken more
in the gross, and in the other there is a passionate
selection of those facts that are representative of the
highest (and also of the lowest) things. The Dresden
Madonna, with awed rapture, a sacred joy and terror in
her eyes, bearing the divine Child, is not less true to
the essential facts of womanhood than is a plain grand-
mother of Gerard Dow shredding carrots into her pot.
That some clever critics should find the hero of George
Eliot's last novel detestable is easily understood ; that
some should find him incredible proves no more than
that clever critics in walking from their lodgings to their
club, and from their club to their lodgings, have not
exhausted the geography of the habitable globe. If
" knowledge of the world " consist chiefly in a power of
estimating the average force of men's vulgar or selfish
286 George Eliot
appetites, instincts, and interests, it must be admitted
that in such knowledge the author of " Middlemarch "
and of " Felix Holt ' 5 is not deficient ; but there is
another knowledge of the world which she also possesses,
a knowledge which does not exclude from recognition the
martyr, the hero, and the saint.
Daniel Deronda, however, as we meet him in the
novel, has not attained to be any of these : with all the
endowments needed for an eminent benefactor of men,
we yet perceive how he might have failed of his true
direction and function. To some readers he has seemed
no thin shadow, no pallid projection from the author's
imagination, but a veritable creature of flesh and blood,
and his trials and dangers have seemed most real and
worthy of the closest scrutiny. Here and there, if we
have but eyes framed for moral discovery, we may still
discern some well-begotten son or daughter of whom the
father or mother declares with a little quiver of loving
pride in the voice, " He has never given me an hour's
trouble since he was born," one who in the venerable
Christian words has been " filled with the Holy Ghost
from his mother's womb." The speciality of Deronda
among the dramatis personce of George Eliot's art is
that a pure sympathetic nature is with him innate ; his
freedom from egoism is a possession which has come to
him without a struggle. Maggie Tulliver is tempted
with a fierce temptation to sacrifice the happiness of
another to her own. It is through an agony that
Fedalma becomes able to slay the life within her of
personal joy. Even Dorothea has a great discovery of
the heart to make ; she had early emerged from the
George Eliot. 287
moral stupidity of taking the world " as an udder to
feed her supreme self; yet it had been easier to her to
imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon,
and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom,
than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer
reflection but feeling . . . that he had an equivalent
centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always
fall with a certain difference."
Deronda even in childhood is sensible of the ex-
istence of independent centres of self outside himself,
and can transfer his own consciousness into theirs.
He is thus predestined to be a saviour and redeemer.
And however incredulous persons of culture, with ex-
tensive knowledge of t^ie world, may be as to the
existence of this type among men, the heart of hu-
manity in all ages, alike in the mystic East and the
scientific West, has clung to belief in its existence as to
the most precious of man's spiritual possessions. From
the very fact that such persons are free from an absorbing
egoism it becomes difficult to determine the precise
outline of their personality. We can more easily
describe the character of Mohammed than that of
Jesus, if for no other reason than that the one had
a pride and lust of power and personal pleasure of
which we find no trace in the other. When a man
diffuses himself, as the sun diffuses warmth and light,
the force which communicates itself so generously seems
to be alienated from its original owner. A Grandcourt
whose nature is one main trunk of barren egoism from
which all the branches of fresh desire have withered off,
is recognized forthwith to be human. But Deronda,
288 George Eliot.
»
sensitive at every point with life which flows into him
and throughout him, and streams forth from him in
beneficent energy, — Deronda is a pallid shadow rather
than a man ! *
For, in truth, unless the absence of egoistic greed
render him an illusion, we must allow to Deronda the
possession of a rich and powerful vitality. We meet
him first as a boy, not pining for want of the food
of joy, but finding life very delightful in the woods and
fields around the old memorial Abbey, his face one of
those which, when it meets your own, makes you be-
lieve that human creatures have done nobly in times
past, and might do more nobly in times to come ; his
voice, — for he has inherited the gift of song, — one of
those thrilling boy- voices which seem to bring an idyllic
heaven and earth before our eyes ; his disposition so
sane and sound that in it every-day scenes and habits
do not beget rebellion or ennui, but delight, affection,
aptitudes. We see him upon the July day among the
roses — when the doubt as to his parentage struck con-
fusion into his being — stung by a sudden pain so
intense that suffering may be said to have taken the quality
of action. To be loosened from the roots of loyalty and
of affection on which he had grown, and to be thrown
abroad upon his individual powers and rights, was a
change so cruel ! We watch him while the sense of
resentment against Sir Hugo struggles with his inborn
lovingness, nor can we rest at ease until we see that
* In the following paragraph and elsewhere, when bringing together
many scattered phrases and sentences from George Eliot's novel, I
have not thought it desirable to enclose these numerous broken sen-
tences within marks of quotation.
George Eliot. 289
he assumes no attitude of hard, proud antagonism, but
has acquired that temper which reconciles criticism with
tenderness ; we trace the idea of tolerance towards error
doing its work as his mind ripens ; we perceive how
his inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship with
all who suffer, and makes his imagination tender and active
on behalf of others ; and then when there springs up
in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge, how
this coalesces with his sympathies, so that a speculative
tendency runs along with his sensitiveness to hum an sorrow,
and his precocity as a boy consists in the interest which
possesses him in knowing how human miseries are wrought.
He is becoming fitted at once to extend help with every
imaginable delicacy of feeling to individual man or
woman, and to submit himself to the wider claims of a
great national cause. He is impassioned by ideas, and
these ideas are not dried specimens to be tabulated and
exhibited in a glass case, like the ideas which interested
the learned author of the " Key to all Mythologies," —
they are living powers which feed motive and opinion.
Arrived at manhood he is man in the plenitude of power
— there is a calm intensity of life and richness of tint
in his face ; it is beautiful with youthful health, and
the forcible masculine gravity of its repose ; the idyllic
boy-voice has changed into one rich as the deep notes
of a violoncello ; his hands, long, flexible, and firmly-
grasping, are such as Titian has painted when he wanted
to show the combination of refinement with force. And
in what present themselves as the more passive elements of
his nature we still recognize strength and not weakness,
— in his sensibility to checks arising from the multitude
T
290 George Eliot.
and comprehensiveness of his spiritual needs, in his
massive receptiveness, in the clinging conservatism of
his affections. " But Deronda is described, he does not
act ? " His college friend is successful, however, and Mirah
is rescued, and Gwendolen restored and renewed, and the
existence of Mordecai is prolonged beyond his death in
a life of faithful and devoted effort. This is the action
of the sun, and half of it transmutes itself into other
forms of energy than the original heat and light.
Enfolded within this large attainment of the youthful
manhood of Deronda there lie, however, larger potential
powers, and there is yet possible a great spiritual success,
or a lamentable spiritual failure, — a waste of the precious
seed as much to be deplored as the waste in Lydgate's
case. Which fate is decreed for him by the environing
forces of the world and his own inward virtue ? Deronda's
probation, full as it is of real spiritual peril, is not the
probation of the average man. Is it therefore, imaginary
or of trivial interest ? A master of moderation in
thought, feeling, and speech, writing at a time when
" enthusiasm of humanity " was in no degree a popular
creed or a popular cant, — the time of Swift and his
Houyhnhnms, — described thus a class of persons whose
dangers and trials seemed to him very grave and real : —
" For as the chief temptations of the generality of the
world are the ordinary motives to injustice or unrestrained
pleasure, or to live in the neglect of religion, from that
frame of mind which renders many persons almost with-
out feeling as to anything distant, or which is not the
object of their senses ; so there are other persons without
this shallowness of temper, persons of a deeper sense as
George Eliot. 291
to what is invisible and future, who not only see, but
have a general, practical feeliug that what is to come
will be present, and that things are not less real for
their not being objects of sense ; and who from their
natural constitution of body and of temper, and from
their external condition, may have small temptations to
behave ill, small difficulty in behaving well, in the
common course of life." And Butler goes on to
notice the peculiar probation of this class of persons.
Deronda stands away from the generality of the world,
whose chief temptations " are the ordinary motives
to injustice or unrestrained pleasure," and in a passage
of marvellous subtlety, pregnancy, and truth, George
Eliot has depicted the special dangers to which his
nature is exposed : — -
" It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had
often made him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had con-
tributed to an apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early-
wakened sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a many-
sided sjonpathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course
of action : so soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in
thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the
memorable story — with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his
flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagination had so wrought
itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to
others, that a strong partisanship, unless it were against an im-
mediate oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His
plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current
with that reflective analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy.
Few men w T ere able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he ;
yet he hated vices mildly, being used to think of them less in the
abstract than as part of mixed human natures having an individual
history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with under-
standing and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly
democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his
affections and imagination, intensely conservative ; voracious of
292 George Eliot,
speculations on government and religion, yet loth to part with
long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories
and sentiments that no argument could lay dead. We fall on the
leaning side ; and Deronda suspected himself of loving too well the
losing causes of the world. Martyrdom changes sides, and he was
in danger of changing with it, having a strong repugnance to taking
up that clue of success which the order of the world often forces
upon us, and makes it treason against the common weal to reject.
And yet his fear of falling into an unreasoning, narrow hatred, made
a check for him ; he apologized for the heirs of privilege ; he shrank
with dislike from the loser's bitterness and the denunciatory tone of
the unaccepted innovator. A too reflective and diffusive sympathy
was in danger of paralyzing in him that indignation against wrong
and that selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral
force ; and in the last few years of confirmed manhood he had
become so keenly aware of this, that what he most longed for was
either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge
him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering
energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge — he had no ambition
for practice — unless they could both be gathered up into one current
with his emotions ; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place
of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe
into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything,
but everything else about everything — as if we should be ignorant
of nothing concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself, for
which one had no nostril. But how and whence was the needed
event to come 1 — the influence that would justify partiality, and
make him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself —
an organic part of social life, instead of roaming it like a yearning
disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without
fixed local habitation to render fellowship real 1 "
Thus Deronda has fallen into a meditative numbness,
and is gliding farther and farther from that life of practi-
cally energetic sentiment which he would have proclaimed
to be for himself the only life worth living. An entire
class of persons must find this searching and exquisite
study the analysis of their own private sorrow and trial,
and will appropriate each sentence as a warning, a check,
and a substantial instrument of help.
George Eliot. 293
But Deronda is not to be one of the lost souls ; the
will, which made strong his grandfather Charisi, is now
to be evoked from the grandchild by a motive to which
alike his intellect and affections will lend force. And at
this point it may be worth while to notice two counter-
objections which are alleged against George Eliot's work.
To some readers the whole story of Mordecai and of his
relation to Deronda appears fantastic and unreal — a
piece of workmanship all made out of the carver's brain,
or something less solid and substantial than this — a
mere luminous vapour, or a phantom of the mind, which
science cannot justify or even recognize. On the other
hand, able critics lament over the growth, in George
Eliot's writings, of scientific habits of thought and
expression, and in a style of warning " easy and freea,"
which seems to combine the authorities of "godamoighty"
and " parson," bid this great thinker and artist expect
the extinction of her genius. She has actually employed
in a work of fiction such words as " dynamic " and
" natural selection," at which the critic pricks up his
delicate ears and shies. If the thorough-bred critic
could only be led close up to " dynamic," he would find
that "dynamic" will not bite. A protest of common sense
is really called for against the affectation which professes
to find obscurity in words because they are trisyllabic or
because they carry with them scientific associations.
Language, the instrument of literary art, is an instrument
of ever-extending range, and the truest pedantry, in an
age when the air is saturated with scientific thought,
would be to reject those accessions to language which are
the special gain of the time. Insensibility to the contem-
294 George Eliot.
porary movement in science is itself essentially unliterary,
for literature with its far-reaching sensibilities should be
touched, thrilled, and quickened by every vital influence
of the period ; and indeed it is not alone the intellect
which recognizes the accuracy and effectiveness of such
scientific illustration as George Eliot occasionally employs;
the cultured imagination is affected by it, as the imagi-
nation of the men of Spenser's time was affected by his
use of the neo-classical mythology of the Renaissance.
But there is graver reason which justifies an artist of
the present day in drawing near to science, and receiving
all it has to bestow of ascertained truth and enlightened
impulse. The normal action of the reason upon the
imagination has been happily described by Comte, —
" Elle la stimule en la reglant." This expresses with
accuracy the relation of these faculties in the nature of
our English novelist,- — reason is to her imagination both
law and impulse. And therefore her art is not a mere
luxury for the senses, not a mere aesthetic delicacy or
dainty. It has chosen for its part to be founded in
truth, to nourish the affections, to quicken the con-
science, to reinforce and purify the will. In her art the
artist lives,
" Breathing as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man."
Art dissociated from the reason and the conscience
becomes before long a finely distilled poison ; while
considered merely as art it has thus declined — in how-
ever exquisite little phials it may be presented — from its
chief functions. It no longer sways or controls our
being ; it painfully seeks to titillate a special sense. An
George Eliot. 295
indifference arises as to what is called the substance or
" content " of works of art, and the form is spoken of as
if that had a separate and independent existence. There
follows, as Comte has again observed, " the inevitable
triumph of mediocrities ; " executive or technical skill, of
the kind which commands admiration in a period devoid
of noble motive and large ideas, being attainable by
persons of mere talent. The artificial refinements of a
coterie are held to constitute the beautiful in art, and
these can be endlessly repeated. " A deplorable aptitude
in expressing what they neither believe nor feel," con-
tinues the great thinker whose words have just been
quoted, "gains in the present day an ephemeral ascend-
ancy for talents as incapable of an aesthetic creation as
of a scientific conception." And George Eliot has herself
alluded in a passing way to the presence of the same
vice in our contemporary literature : " Rex's love had
been of that sudden, penetrating, clinging sort which the
ancients knew and sung, and in singing made a fashion
of talk for many moderns whose experience has been by
no means of a fiery daemonic character."
The largeness and veracity of George Eliot's own art
proceed from the same qualities which make truth-seek-
ing a passion of her nature ; and a truth-seeker at the
present day will do ill to turn a deaf ear to the teachings
of science. As little as Dante need George Eliot fear to
enter into possession of the fullest body of fact which the
age can deliver to her ; nay, it is essential to the highest
characteristics of her art that she should not isolate her-
self from the chief intellectual movement of her time.
If in the objection which has been brought against her
296 George Eliot,
recent style there be any portion of truth, it will be found
in the circumstance that an occasional sentence becomes
laboured, and perhaps overloaded in her effort to charge
it fully and accurately with its freight of meaning. The
manner of few great artists — if any — becomes simpler as
they advance in their career, that is, as their ideas
multiply, as their emotions receive more numerous
affluents from the other parts of their being, and as the
vital play of their faculties with one another becomes
swifter and more intricate. The later sonatas of Beet-
hoven still perplex facile and superficial musicians. The
later landscapes of Turner bewilder and amaze the
profane. The difference between the languid and limpid
fluency of the style of " The Two Gentlemen of Verona"
and the style of Shakspere's later plays, so compressed,
so complex, so live with breeding imagery, is great.
Something is lost but more has been gained. When the
sustained largo of the sentences of " Daniel Deronda " is
felt after the crude epigrammatic smartnesses of much of
the writing in " Scenes of Clerical Life " we perceive as
great a difference and as decided a preponderance of gain
over loss.
But what renders singular the warning addressed to
George Eliot that her work is undergoing a " scientific
depravation ' : is that the whole of her last book is a
homage to the emotions rather than to the intellect of
man. _ Her feeling finds expression not only in occasional
gnomic utterances in which sentiments are declared to
be the best part of the world's wealth, and love is spoken
of as deeper than reason, and the intellect is pronounced
incapable of ascertaining the validity of claims which
George Eliot, 297
rest upon loving instincts of the heart, or else are base-
less. The entire work possesses an impassioned aspect,
an air of spiritual prescience, far more than the exactitude
of science. The main forces which operate in it are
sympathies, aspirations, ardours ; and ideas chiefly as
associated with these. From his meditative numbness
Deronda is roused, his diffused mass of feeling is rendered
definite, and is impelled in a given direction, his days
become an ordered sequence bound together by love and
duty, his life is made one with the life of humanity.
How is this change brought about ? And how is that
other change effected by which Gwendolen is checked in
her career of victorious self-pleasing, is delivered from
her habits of a spoiled child, and is made — she also — a
portion of the better life of man % Does Deronda take
counsel with a Lydgate, and learn by the microscope the
secrets of moral energy and resolved submission to
spiritual motive ? Or does some theory of ethics make
the moral world new for him \ Neither of these. It is
the discovery of his parentage and his people which
creates claims to which his heart consents with joy, and
Deronda's life takes its new direction not from the
inductions of a savant of the West, but from the inspira-
tion of a Hebrew prophet, with whom the inferences of
what Coleridge would have named the prudential under-
standing are wholly overshadowed by the faith of what
he would have named the imaginative reason.
Is then the objection warranted that the part assigned
to Mordecai and his influence upon Deronda are a
fantastic unreality which offends against our saner
judgment ? Is such a person as Mordecai incredible ?
2gS George Eliot.
And again, is the idea which the consumptive Jew
breathes into Deronda only the hectic fever-dream of a
visionary, or has it substance and validity for the
imagination of the reader ? And why all this concern
about Jews — the stiff-necked race ? Quid ergo amplius
Judseo est ? aut quae utilitas circumcisionis ?
It might be said, in answer to some of these questions,
that as a fact Mordecai is an ideal study from a veritable
Jew, Colin or Kohn, one of the club of students who met
some forty years since at Ked Lion Square, Holborn,*
and that recently a scheme for the redemption of
Palestine for Israel was actually in contemplation among
members of the Jewish race.*)" But to criticize "Daniel
Deronda " from the literal, prosaic point of view, would
be as much a critical stupidity as to undertake the de-
fence of Shakspere's " King Lear ' from the charge of
historical improbability. It is enough if the idealization
is worked out upon lines which have a starting-point and
a direction that can be justified to the intellect, and if
the imagination consents to yield credence to ideal truth.
The century which has contained an actual Mazzini, an
actual Lamennais, can surely credit the existence of an
imagined Mordecai. Or is the lament of Mr Mill,
uttered in 1838, still true of a younger generation:
" Nowadays nature and probability are thought to be
violated if there be shown to the reader, in the person-
ages with whom he is called upon to sympathize,
* See Mr M'Alister's letter to the Academy, July 29, 1876, with its
interesting quotations from Mr G. H. Lewes's article in the Fort-
nightly Bevieiv, April 1, 1866.
t See also "George Eliot and Judaism," by Prof. Kaufmann, of the
Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth, pp. 13-20, and pp. 66-70.
George Eliot. 299
characters on a larger scale than himself, or than the
persons he is accustomed to meet at a dinner or a
quadrille party?" We owe to the author of "Daniel
Deronda " the gratitude due to one who enriches human
life for her discovery in Ram's bookshop, and among the
kindly-hearted mercenary Cohens, of a prophet of the
Exile. To feel that intense spiritual forces lie concealed
under the heaped debris of follies, and fashions, and
worldliness which accumulates around us, makes our
existence one of more awed responsibility, and of quicker
hopes and fears. There are powers in our midst of
which we are not aware : the electric charge of the
spirit may play upon us at any moment, we know not
from what point ; material interests and machinery are
not yet, and never will be, supreme ; still from the spine
of man to the spirit of man flow forth the issues of life
and death. " This consumptive Jewish workman in
threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering him-
self to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching
more consequences to them than the Flemings to the
ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places, had
the chief elements of human greatness : a mind con-
sciously, energetically moving with the larger march of
human destinies, but not the less full of conscience and
tender heart for the footsteps that tread near and need a
leaning-place ; capable of conceiving and choosing a life's
task with far-off issues, yet capable of the unapplauded
heroism which turns off the road of achievement at the
call of the nearer duty whose effect lies within the
beatings of the hearts that are close to us, as the hunger
of the unfledged bird to the breast of its parent."
300 George Eliot,
To understand aright the Jewish idea of Mordecai we
should approach it through the wider human idea of
George Eliot. It might indeed be contended that at a
period when on the continent of Europe the idea of
nationality — unity of Italy, pan-Teutonism, pan -Slavism
— has played and is playing so important a part, there
were a historical justification and a historical propriety
in its employment as a poetical motive in a work of art.
If the political imagination of the English nation is
seldom assailed by great principles or ideas, their force
upon the history of the world has not therefore been
small ; lives have been spent for them, and blood has
been gladly offered up. Probably none but English
readers in our day would refuse to accept as deserving of
imaginative credence such an idea as that which inspires
Mordecai. That an ancient people, who under every
battering shock of doom have preserved their faith and
their traditions, should resume their place in the com-
munity of nations, could be hardly more wonderful than
that they exist at all. A French philosopher conceived a
polity of Western nations, with France as the presiding
power ; there is a grandeur (and grandeur is a quality of
thought by no means necessarily implying something
unreal or theatrical) in the conception of a future which
shall include an organization of the East as well as of the
West, and which places at the head of Eastern civiliza-
tion the greatest and most spiritual of Shemitic races.
But the central conception of " Daniel Deronda " is
religious, and not political : religious, not in the sense
which implies faith in a personal providence superintend-
ing the lives of men, or faith in the intervention of the
George Eliot. 301
miraculous and the supernatural, or faith in a life for
each man and woman beyond the grave in other worlds
than ours. No miraculous apparition of a Holy Grail
in the mediseval romance is bright with more mysterious
glory, and solemn with more transcendent awe, than the
meeting of the Jewish workman and Deronda in the
splendour of sunset, and in the gloom of the little second-
hand bookshop, while the soul of one transfuses itself into
the soul of the other. But the miracles are wrought by
the spirit of man ; human life itself is shown to be sacred,
a temple with its shrines for devout humility and
aspiration, its arches and vaults for praise, its altar for
highest sacrifice. " The refuge you are needing from
personal trouble," declares Deronda to Gwendolen, "is
the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm
for something more than our own appetites and vanities."
The religious conception of " Daniel Deronda," as of the
other writings of George Eliot, is that of a life of man-
kind over, above, and around the life of the individual
man or woman, and to which the individual owes his
loyalty and devotion, the passion of his heart, and the
utmost labour of his hand, " Thou hast beset me be-
hind and before, and laid thine hand upon me
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect.
How precious are thy thoughts unto me ! how great is
the sum of them ! " Of this religion — a religion by
which a man's life may become a noble self-surrender
whether it contain but a portion of truth or contain the
whole — Mordecai is a prophet, and Deronda is a chosen
and anointed priest. The Judaic element comes second
in the book — the human element first.
302 Geo)'ge Eliot.
To any one who had attended to the leading motives,
the centres around which the emotions organize them-
selves, in the preceding writings of George Eliot, the
ideas of Mordecai, and their constraining power with
Deroncla, cannot have appeared strange and novel. The
higher, the religious life is that which transcends self, and
which is lived in submission to the duties imposed upon
us by the past, and the claims of those who surround us
in the present, and of those who shall succeed us in time
to come. To be the centre of a living multitude, the
heart of their hearts, the brain from which thoughts, as
waves, pass through them — this is the best and purest
joy which a human creature can know. Of this kind is
the glory and rapture of the artist. Armgart, while she
sin sr s, feels herself
"A happy spiritual star
Such as old Dante saw, wrought in a rose
Of light in Paradise, whose only self
Was consciousness of glory wide-diffused ;
Music, life, power — I moving in the midst
With a sublime necessity of good."
Fedalma, when the ecstasy of the dance sways through
her, seems
" New-waked
To life in unison with a multitude
Feeling my soul upborne by all their souls,
Floating within their gladness ! Soon I lost
All sense of separateness : Fedalma died
As a star dies and melts into the light."
But in its very rapture there is a danger of egoism in
this joy ; and of such egoism of the artist we have a
conspicuous example in the rejection of the bonds of love,
the claims of a father and of a child, by Deronda's
Geo7'ge Eliot. 303
mother. As Don Silva, in " The Spanish Gypsy," for
the love of one maiden would fain renounce the inherit-
ance of honour and of duty which his past had imposed
upon Hm, so the daughter of the Jew, Charisi, would
escape from the will of her father, the traditions of her
race, the clinging arms of her babe, and would live a life
of freedom in her art alone. That which she resisted
proves — as it proved for Don Silva — too strong for her,
and in her hour of physical weakness the impersonal
forces she had fled from rise within her and rise around
her, the dread Erinnyes of her crime.
But there is another way than the artist's of becoming
the vital centre of a multitude. To be the incarnation
of their highest thought, and at the same time to be the
incarnation of their purest will — what nobler lot is pos-
sible to man ? The epic life, the national leadership, to
which — not, perhaps, without some touch of gross personal
ambition — Zarca aspired, and which Fedalma accepted as
the leader of a forlorn hope, this is decreed to Deronda,
free from all taint of personal ambition, and free from
the sorrow of anticipated failure. " I," said Mordecai,
answering the objections of Gideon, " I, too, claim to be
a rational Jew. But what is it to be rational — what is
it to feel the light of the divine reason growing stronger
within and without ? It is to see more and more of the
hidden .bonds that bind and consecrate change as a
dependent growth — yea, consecrate it with kinship ;
the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches
towards me the appealing arms of children." A
revolutionary writer of genius in this century of
revolution, who designed for his imagined hero an epic
-1
04 George Eliot.
life, would probably represent him as the banner-bearer
of some new ideas — liberty, progress, the principles of
1789 — and the youthful hero would exhale his enthus-
iasms .upon a barricade. It is characteristic of our
English novelist, who, through her imagination and
affections, is profoundly conservative, that with her the
epic life should be found in no breaking away from the
past, no revolt against tradition. Hope and faith are
with her the children of memory ; the future is the
offspring and heir of the past.
Daniel Deronda then is a Jew, because the Jewish race
is one rich with memories, possessed of far-reaching
traditions, a fit object for satisfying that strong historic
sympathy which is so deep a part of Deronda's nature ;
a race obstinately adherent to its ideas, with intense
national characteristics, and therefore fitted to give
definiteness and compression to whatever in Deronda
was vague or little strenuous ; a sad, despised, persecuted
race, and so much the more dear to one whose heart is
the heart of a saviour ; a race whose leaders and
prophets looked longingly for no personal immortality,
but lived through faith in the larger life to come of their
nation ; a race not without some claim to be what
Jehuda-ha-Levi asserted it to be, " the heart of man-
kind ; " a race, finally, which though scoffed at for its
separateness, implied in its confession of the Divine
Unity the ultimate unity of mankind. In the great
institution of Goethe's imagining in his " Wilhelm
Meister's Wanderjahre," where a complete religious
education is taught to children, the first or Ethnic
Religion is that the substance and spirit of which is to
George Eliot 305
be sought for not in a supernatural revelation or in philo-
sophy, but in the history of the world. " I observe,"
said Wilhelm, "you have done the Israelites the honour to
select their history as the groundwork of this delineation,
or, rather, you have made it the leading object there."
It is not merely in the picturesque and intense personali-
ties which the Hebrew people affords, that its attraction
for George Eliot's imagination has lain ; it is partly at least
because through Jewish persons and Jewish ideas, the
teachings of this Ethnic Religion may be well expressed.
To Deronda, the ideal of manhood in its fulness of
power and of beauty, the ideally perfect lot is assigned.
For others self-conquest had been an agony, the higher
rule had been a hard discipline, the life of renunciation
and of love had been one of strictly tested faithfulness,
or of quietude after tempest, a repose tender yet stern.
With Romola the quick heart -beats of personal joy are
for ever stilled ; no triumphant ecstasy is henceforth
possible for Armgart ; Fedalma's young delight has been
slain and offered up a sacrifice to the fidelity of her soul.
But " the very best of human possibilities " befalls
Deronda, " the blending of a complete personal love in
one current with a larger duty." While his hands are
striving to shape the future of a people he wears upon
his breast the precious talisman of Mirah's love. " The
velvet canopy never covered a more goodly bride and
bridegroom, to whom their people might more wiselv
wish offspring ; more truthful lips never touched the
sacramental marriage-wdne ; the marriage blessing never
gathered stronger promise of fulfilment than in the in-
tegrity of their mutual pledge."
u
306 George Eliot.
o
Over against Gwendolen, the petted child, with her
double nature, her layers of selfishness stifling the stray
seeds of possible good, her iridescent moods, her contend-
ing passion and fear of contrite pain, her high spirit an(
her sudden fits of inward dread, her lack of all religiouf
emotion, and of that piety which consists in tender,
clinging affection to home and childhood, and the objects
consecrated by our dead past ; over against Gwendolen
is set Mirah, beautiful in the singleness and purity of her
soul. The clever critics found Mirah as uninteresting as
they found Deronda unreal. She is indeed not a Mary
Stuart, nor a Phraxanor, and is no more interesting than
some delicate ivory-tinted blossom. The intensest pleasure
he had received in life, declared the dying Keats, was in
watching the growth of flowers : but Keats was a
poet. A perfect, harmonious, still, yet richly tinted life,
like the life of flow T ers, is that of Mirah ; whatever dead
substance comes in her way is either rejected or forced
to take some beautiful living form ;* " she had grown up
in her simplicity and truthfulness like a little flower-seed
that absorbs the chance confusion of its surroundings
into its own definite mould of beauty." From her force
of heart, from an unconquerable purity of vital power —
the crystal virtue, as Mr Ruskin has named it — follows
the result that her whole being possesses a flawless unity,
an exquisite symmetry, every atom being bright with
coherent energy. In the Psyche-mould of Mirah's frame
" there rested a fervid quality of emotion sometimes
rashly supposed to require the bulk of a Cleopatra ; her
* Paiskin's Ethics of the Dust, p 85, from which I here appropriate
a few expressions.
George Eliot. 307
impressions had the thoroughness and tenacity that give
to the first selection of passionate feeling the character
of a life-long faithfulness." Then, too, sorrow had been
a familiar guest with her, and in Daniel's love there lay
the joy of a blessed protectiveness. It is something less
than this that Mirah was an artist witnessed to by the
appalling Klesmer, who had reduced to despair Gwen-
dolen's amateurishness, and that in all practical matters
she manifests an unerring good sense. There is per-
petual music in the life of him who can feel the beating
of a heart so fervid and so gentle, who can bow tenderly
over so dear a head.
Contrasted with Deronda, who is the sympathetic
nature in its purest and highest energy, stands Grand -
court, who is the absolute of egoism. His life is the
dull, low life of some monstrous reptile, coloured like the
slime or dust in which he lies, seemingly torpid and
indifferent to all outside himself, yet at watch with
blinking eyes for every slightest motion of the one thing
which interests him, — his prey ; and owning a deadly
power of spring and cruel constriction such as the boa
can display. But there is nothing of the romantic villain
in his appearance ; he is only an English gentleman,
with faultless manners when he did not intend them to
be insolent, long narrow grey eyes, an extensive baldness
surrounded by a fringe of reddish blond hair, a slight
perpendicular whisker, a toneless aristocratic drawl,
certain ugly secrets in the past, a strong dislike to brutes
who use the wrong soap or have ill-formed nails, a
wide susceptibility to boredom, and a resolve to tolerate
no damned nonsense in a wife. Let the waves wash
308 George Eliot.
him down to keep company with things of the monstrous
world, and become a third with the ground-shark and
the poulpe.
Of Gwendolen and her spiritual history, although it
occupies the principal space in George Eliot's novel, little
has here been said, because this portion of the story
seems to have been acquiesced in with something like
common consent by the majority of readers. Men reap
what has been sown, but there are many sowers of good
and of evil in the field of the world, and it may happen
that we enter into the labour not always of the sowers of
tares, but sometimes also into that of the sowers of
good seed.* And so it happens with Gwendolen. The
new soul born within her through remorse and that
penitential sorrow from which she had not long since so
deliberately guarded herself, is sustained in its clinging
infantile weakness by hands of another which are
tender and strong. A living man, who is to her the
best, the most real, the most worshipful of all things
known, becomes her external conscience, while her inner
conscience is still able to do no more than open wonder-
ing eyes, half-dazzled by the light, after its long, dark,
and withering imprisonment in the airless cell of egoism.
Gwendolen, with her girlish inexperience, and her slight
girlish love of sway, would not be sacrificed to creatures
worth less than herself, but would play the game of life
with exceptional cleverness, and so conquer circumstance.
It is well that the gambling at life, where her gain must
be another's loss, goes against her. She had thought to
* Something to this effect George Eliot has somewhere written — in
" Middlemarch, " I believe — but I am unable to light upon the passage.
George Eliot, 309
conquer circumstance, and good and evil join to defeat
her ; Deronda, " like an awful-browed angel," fixes upon
her his gaze of condemnation, and Grandcourt benumbs
her in the icy constriction of his will.
Gwendolen has a fulness of nature which removes her
far from the Rosamond Vincy type of womanhood ; she
is not " one of the narrow-brained women who through
life regard all their selfish demands as rights, and every
claim upon themselves as an injury." It is possible for
her before she loves goodness for its own sake to love
goodness in a human form. This is well, though still
she remains to herself the centre of the world, and
Deronda exists not for his own sake, not for others, not
for the world, but only for her. At last the crisis
arrives ; " she feels the pressure of a vast mysterious
movement," she is being dislodged " from her supre
macy in her own world, and is getting a sense that
her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence
with which her own was revolving." Where is her
poise of crude egoism, where the fierceness of maiden-
hood which had flamed forth against Rex ? It is a
moment of supreme revelation of the heart, in which
shame and reserve shrivel in the white flame of life.
The fountains of the great deep are broken up : " Gwen-
dolen looked before her with dilated eyes, as at some-
thing lying in front of her, till she stretched her arms
out straight, and cried with a smothered voice, ' I said I
should be forsaken. I have been a cruel woman. And
I am forsaken.' " But forsaken she is not. Draw the
veil over the rest, for a gaze profanes what is sacred
between the soul of a renunciant and a redeemer.
3 1 o George Eliot.
"Daniel Deronda" closes in the presence of death;
" Middlemarch " with promises of happy living ; yet
" Middlemarch " leaves the heart as though in the grey-
ness of a sweet August twilight, when we accept the
subdued colours, and the dearness of the tranquil hour.
Death, as we witness it in the concluding chapter of
" Daniel Deronda," is solemn and beautiful as a sunset,
but we see the stars come forth, and are aware that the
world is revolving into a nobler dawn.
1877.
LAMENNAIS.
I.
Amongst the leaders of the Catholic reaction of the
present century, Lamennais stands in an exceptional
position, as one who possessed sympathies too wide for his
cause, and by them was carried into opposition to his party,
his dearest friends, and his former self. It is peculiarly
difficult to do justice to such an intellectual life as his in
a short sketch like the following, since there is not one
system of thought to be dealt with, but several systems,
each distinct from the other, elaborate, and fully con-
ceived. A skilful hand might, no doubt manipulate these
so as to construct a kind of unity out of the ultimate
principles of all ; but in reality, while Lamennais's changes
of opinion are easy to account for, and by an observer of
clear insight might even, in great degree, have been pre-
dicted, a genuine unity is to be sought for rather in the
moral character of the man than in any of his intellectual-
beliefs. There it is that we discover the actual centre
of all he thought and felt and did.
Much that is true may be conveyed by saying that Lamen-
nais possessed, in a high degree, the "prophetic character.
What was the Hebrew prophet as we find him represented
to us in the books of the Kings and Chronicles, -and
self-revealed in the writings of the prophets themselves ?
Primarily, a " man of God " — a man elevated by his mass
3 1 2 Lamennais.
of character and fervour of moral feelings above the common
level of the race. Yet at the same time, in the deepest
sense, a social man — not social, indeed, in the vulgar
meaning of the word — no lover of salutations in the
street or greetings in the market-place — but in all his
solitudes, upon the mountain and in the desert, and in
kings' palaces, and in the solitudes of thought or of
vision, impassioned by the highest interests of society.
A man of the people, therefore, as well as a man of
God. Eagerly watching the movements of society, with
small critical discernment and little play of intelligence,
but with much fierce insight ; crying aloud against its sins,
and crying aloud against the sins of its oppressors and
blind guides ; indignant, disdainful, pitiful, exultant,
forlorn for its sake ; haughty and humble because alone
with God ; hating nothing so much as moderation and
worldly compromises ; with his mouth full of blessing
and of curses, the same spring sending forth sweet water
and bitter ; and with his soul ever possessed by a vision
of a shining future to be realised through unknown in-
struments, but, as a sure moral instinct testified, not
without confusion and garments rolled in blood. Such
a prophet was Lamennais.
But, if a prophet, he was yet a prophet in our logical
western world, and Bacon and Descartes had lived before
him. Paris, with its scientific methods and practised
intellects, differed a good deal from Jerusalem, and a
simple "Thus saith the Lord" would have been received
with a peculiar expression of the lips and eyes by the
children of Voltaire not to be found upon the faces of
the children of Abraham. Notwithstanding this, a
Lamennais. 3 1 3
o
" Thus saith the Lord " is often on the lips of Lamennais.
He however attempts, again and again, to give his per-
ceptions of truth a logical basis. For the last twenty
years of his life he paid homage always more and more to
the scientific movement. But the system of Lamennais,
as developed in his " Esquisse d'une Philosophic," is less a
philosophy than a vast philosophical epopee, such as we
might imagine to have been chanted ages ago in some
Indian grove ; and, while doing homage to the scientific
movement, Lamennais certainly possessed little of the
scientific intellect. " Un esprit si absolu," M. Renan
well says, " ne pouvait etre curieux."
There is another side of the character of Lamennai3
very different from that which has been brought under
notice, but not inconsistent with it. In the austere
solitudes of mountains, and in rocky angles drenched by
the spray of water-falls, we are surprised by beautiful
and tender flowers. But the surprise in such cases is
without just cause. An atmosphere of purity is favour-
able to all delicate growths. It is not hard to picture
to one's self the wild, Bedouin-like Elijah repeating
rhymes to a child of Jezebel upon his knee. Certainly
Lamennais (who had something of Elijah in him)
possessed a nature the boldness and elevation of which
were not unfavourable to gentleness and tender feeling.
He was, in a remarkable degree, sensitive to the beauty
of the external world, and of art. His immense need of
repose — such a need as is proper to great natures —
sought satisfaction in the Breton woods for days and
weeks, and in the society of persons whose simplicity
of character invincibly attracted him. His conversation
>■»
14 Lamennais.
was often full of play, and so are many of Lis letters,
though it must be acknowledged the play sometimes
becomes laborious. His poetical writings (if we may so
style such compositions as "Les Paroles d'un Croyant"
and " Une Voix de Prison ") pass in swift transitions
from scenes of horror, conclaves of deceitful and tyranni-
cal kings, tortures, and gloom, and blood, martyrdoms
and terrible victories, denunciations and prophetic wrath,
to gracious presences of childhood and womanhood,
interiors of cottage life, whispers as of quiet seas,
radiance as of summer dawns, and comfortable words of
hope and love.
II.
Felicite Robert de la Mennais, the fourth of six
children, was born at Saint Malo, in Brittany, on the
19th of June, 1782. M. Pierre-Louis Robert, his
father, a merchant and shipowner of Saint Malo, for
important services rendered to the Government, and for
acts of munificence to the poor in times of scarcity, was
ennobled by Louis XVI. a few years after the birth of
Felicite, and took his title from a small estate called La
Mennais. The Robert family was characteristically
Breton, determined, energetic, attached to the past, apt
to extreme views and feelings. Through his mother's
family, some Irish blood entered into Fe'li's veins. Of
his childhood we are told little, but enough to make us
understand that much physical delicacy, and an excitable
nervous temperament, made it irritable, capricious, and
rebellious against restraint. We read of his being tied
to the school-bench to be kept quiet, and he would
Lamennais. 315
himself tell how one day, in a boat secretly seized, he
pushed off from shore, and with what feelings he gave
defiance to the sea. Nor was it only the spell of animal
gladness which nature laid upon the child. At eight
years old, gazing upon a stormy waste of waters, "he
thought he beheld the infinite and felt God," and said to
himself of those beside him, with a sense of pride which
afterwards shocked him in one so young, " They are look-
ing at what I am looking, but they do not see what I see."
There is much of the future man in these anecdotes, and
when we add the picture of the boy lace-making in an
upper room at home, or tending lovingly his flowers, we
have already his life in miniature.
. While Lamennais was still a child, the thunder-clouds
of the Revolution burst. A pious Breton family, cling-
ing to an ancient cause with the provincial tenacity, and
attached to the Crown by recent favours, could not but
be deeply sensible of the changed circumstances. La-
mennais would often, in after years, tell with undi-
minished emotion how at times a proscribed priest stole,
disguised and under cover of darkness, to his father's
house ; how in a garret, with two candles flaring upon
a table which served as altar, the family would assemble,
while a servant kept watch without ; how mass would
be said, little Jean de la Mennais, the elder brother,
assisting, and the blessing be given to the old people
and the children ; and how the priest would depart
before the dawn. In 1796, in the time of the
Directory Government, a visit was paid to Paris, and
the young royalist, with the pride of authorship at
fourteen vears of asre, saw articles of his own appear in
3 1 6 Lamennais.
some obscure and forgotten journal. It is evident from
this that he had not spent all his time in giving trouble
to his schoolmasters. Early, indeed, his energy had
turned itself upon books, and, when left in the solitude
of La Chenaie, the charm of which was so often to sub-
due the discords of his life, to the somewhat lax guidance
of his uncle, he devoured, and, what is more, digested
into piles of manuscript, a large library, and before long
was familiar with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, Ger-
man, Italian, and Spanish.
This uncle, familiarly known as Tonton, was an
eclectic in literature, and could attire in French garb
with equal pleasure the Book of Job and the Odes of
Horace ; and if he was no friend of the eighteenth-
century philosophers, he yet did not lock them up from
his pupil ; so that with ecclesiastical historians, Church
fathers, and orthodox divines, Felicite made the ac-
quaintance of the fathers of the Revolution and the
divines of the synagogue of Satan. One day the sha-
dow of scepticism passed across his mind, and seemed
to pass idly, like the ineffectual shadow of a cloud.
His was a soul which in childhood, if not carried away
by violent influences in a contrary direction, could not
but be devout, and we read of his making pilgrimages
to the neighbouring chapels to worship in secret the
Holy Sacrament. But at a later period the doubts
returned, and he fell into a way of worldly indifference
to the affairs of religion, so that his first communion
was long delayed. In those days he gave himself up
with characteristic ardour to exercises not of the religi-
ous kind, becoming a hard rider, fencing for whole da} T s,
Lamennais. 3 1 7
and swimming till utterly exhausted. We can believe
that his will may have rejoiced in proving its mastery
over the frail and sensitive body in which it was
lodged. But the religious spirit, if it slept lightly for a
while, before long awoke to vigorous life. In 1807
appeared a translation by Lamennais of the little ascetic
treatise of Louis de Blois, " Speculum Monachorum "
(" Guide Spirituel " the translator named it), with a
preface breathing a spirit of the tenderest piety, and in
the following year his first original production, "Re-
flexions sur l'fitat de l'figlise."
Already the conflicts of his life had begun. Notwith-
standing some eulogistic phrases applied to the Emperor,
the " Reflexions " was seized by the police, the relations
of Napoleon with the Church at that period being
delicate and sensitive to criticism. The Restoration
came, and Lamennais, free to publish his animadversions,
did not let slip the opportunity. Already we perceive
the passionate limitation of view, and the absoluteness
of expression which characterise the author of the
" Essai sur l'lndifference " and " Le Livre du Peuple ; ' !
nor these alone, but also the facility with which he
could reverse past judgments, and escape with a high
disregard of external consistency from the control of a
former self. In 1808 Napoleon was " l'homme de
genie qui a refonde en France la monarchie et la
religion." In 1814 (the Imperial University had
especially excited the anger of Lamennais,) " To study
the genius of Bonaparte in the institutions which he
formed, is to sound the black depths of crime, and to
seek for the measure of human perversity." One and
3 18 Lamennais.
the same system of eloquent hatred applied to objects
the most diverse — such was Lamennais, says M. Renan.
There is as much truth in this as will float an epigram,
that is, a good piece of a truth. In such an opulence
of passion Lamennais had no need to hoard his wrath,
and at no time did objects fail him on which to wreak
his indignation. At this period, Napoleon divided the
anathemas with the reformers of the sixteenth and the
philosophers of the eighteenth centuries. But Napoleon
had still a hundred days to reign. Before many of
them passed away, the prophet had fled to the wilder-
ness, or unfiguratively, Lamennais, under the name of
Patrick Robertson (son of " Robert "), had withdrawn
for safety to Guernsey, and proceeded thence to England.
Protestantism was always from first to last repulsive to
Lamennais. The doctrine seemed to him an attempted
via media between Catholicism and Deism, untenable
by a logical mind, and its spirit of individualism in both
intellect and feeling shocked him beyond measure ; and
not unnaturally, since his most ardent desire was for a
true society, an organisation of beliefs, emotions, and
activities, upon the basis of our common humanity. A
thinker relying on his private judgment, or a sinner
devoted to saving his particular soul, seemed to Lamennais
no better than an intellectual or religious troglodyte.
In England, accordingly, the Catholicism of Lamennais
took yet a deeper tone. He was, moreover, brought
into relation with a person who obtained singular
influence over his mind, apparently by the mere virtue
which went out of him as a very pious and a very happy
man. This was the Abbe Carron, dispenser to the
Lamennais. 319
exiled in England of the charity of the Bourbon princes.
Lamennais was poor, feeble in health, and burdened with
the melancholy of one whose eye is fixed on great ideals.
The Abbe assisted him to procure employment as a
teacher, sustained him with kindly sympathy, and tried
to smile him into a cheerful Christian spirit. It was
through his advice that Felicite decided to give himself
to the Church. With reluctant movements of mind,
oppressed by sadness, but yielding to a solemn and
insuperable duty, he was made a priest.
This visit to England was the occasion of a curious
episode in the life of Lamennais, to which he seems to
have avoided reference in after years. At Kensington he
made the acquaintance of a young Englishman, Henry
Moorman, and the acquaintance soon ripened on Lamen-
nais's side into an almost idolatrous friendship. Henry
Moorman, we can perceive, was of a gentle, timid,
appreciative, but not creative nature. His deficiency of
self-dependence may have bound Lamennais to him, as
some masculine spirits love to bestow themselves and
their strength upon those of another sex who are weakest,
because on them they can bestow so much. Besides
which, the ardent and energetic nature, conscious of its
own crudeness and disorder, is apt to imagine a perfection
and integrity in feebler characters which they by no
means actually possess. Moorman's mother and step-
father were opposed to an intimacy which might endanger
the Protestant faith of their son, and when Lamennais,
on his return to France, despatched letter after letter
to his friend, they were intercepted. The correspondence
was thenceforth carried on in secret, and Henry Moorman,
320 Lamennais.
now won over to Catholicism, after much hesitation and
asking of advice, decided to escape from his home to
France. The escape was effected. Much was predicted
for him by his French friends ; " the sweet, the in-
teresting Henry " was on his return to be an apostle and
martyr at the least ; but his relations found means to
persuade him to a different view of his vocation, and the
prospective apostle subsided — so coldly ironical is fate —
into a steady chemist's apprentice. Still letters continued
to be written, although Moorman failed to obtain
Lamennais's consent to a prettily-devised ruse de guerre,
according to which a venerable debauchee of the " Anti-
Gallican " Coffee-house, who would take a disinterested
pleasure in assisting any one to a breach of the seventh
commandment, was to receive the letters from France,
and transmit them to the young chemist, on the under-
standing that they came from some girl whom Moorman
might be supposed to have met in Paris. Lamennais,
we conjecture, wrote indignantly, for his friend in reply
becomes abjectly apologetic. This friendship, in which
Lamennais gave everything, and got nothing, was ter-
minated by the death of his young convert in the year
1818. The grief of the survivor was deep and lasting.
III.
In April, 1817, in a letter to his brother-in-law,
Lamennais mentions " a work on which I have been
eno-a^ed during the last twelve months." This work
soon after appeared in public ; it was the first volume of
the " Essai sur l'lndifference." The enthusiasm which
it excited is something rare in the annals of theological
Lamennais. 321
literature ; a great author had arisen in France, a
" modern Bossuet," a leader of Catholic thought, one
who, if any single man could do so, would turn back the
tide of liberalism and secularism. This first was followed
. in two years by a second volume, and in 1822-23
appeared a third and fourth. Lamennais at this period
was the man of highest mark in the ranks of the French
priesthood.
What is this famous " Essai sur l'lndifference en
matiere de Religion," and how does it present itself to
us now when nearly half a century has elapsed from the
date of its first appearance ? The name of the book
implies the motive from which it proceeded. Looking
out on the world with prophet-like eyes, Lamennais saw,
or thought he saw, a society dying morally, growing every
day more insensible to pleasure and pain in right and
wrong doing, every day more apathetic to truth or false-
hood of any kind which lies out of the cognizance of the
senses, voluptuously self-indulgent, and becoming cruel
after its voluptuousness, with a cruelty like that of Rome
under the Emperors. That this society should be re-
J stored to health, activity, and joy was Lamennais's most
deep desire. The disease was a moral and spiritual
atrophy ; remedy there could be none except religion.
The disease was one which affected the whole constitution
of society ; it was right, therefore, that religion should
be presented less as that by which the individual might
save his own wretched soul, than as that by which the
dying soul of society was to be saved. But how was it
possible to make an impression on the dull mass of
worldliness, the gross (ppom^a aapxog of society ? It would
X
322 * Lamennais,
have been hardly possible had not the prevailing in-
difference to religion erected itself into a doctrine,
different portions of which were delivered with precision
and emphasis by several schools of modern thought.
There was the atheistical school, which treated religion
as a mere matter of political convenience ; there was the
school of deists, including the greatest names of the
eighteenth century, which held as doubtful the truth of
all positive religions, believed that each man should
follow that in which he was born, and recognised only
natural religion as incontestably true ; and there was the
school of heretics, which admitted a revealed religion,
but maintained that the truths it taught might be
rejected with the exception of some arbitrarily-selected
doctrines styled fundamental. The first denied God, the
second denied Christ, the third denied the Holy Ghost
speaking through the Church. The first volume of the
Essay is an apology for religion considered chiefly as the
basis of society, against these three forms of systematised
indifference, although indeed apology is hardly the right
word, for Lamennais was a combatant who preferred
attack to defence, and here he tries to force the lines of
the enemy rather than to maintain his own.
But how was religion to be incarnated in the world, so
that the desired reorganisation of society might be brought
about ? The answer of Lamennais was the same as that
of De Maistre, De Bonald, and the other leaders of the
Catholic reaction : " By the obedience of the world to
the Church. The Pope is the keystone of society ;
without the Pope, no Church ; without the Church, no
Christianity ; without Christian! ty, no religion ; without
Lamennais. 323
religion, no society." Ultramontanism in its strictest
form was the creed of Lamennais. If there were voices
(beside those of the liberals, whom it was not meant to
please) that did not join in the chorus of lauds which
greeted this first volume of the " Essai," the reason for
their silence lay here. In his earliest work, that of 1808,
Lamennais had adopted a Warburtonian theory of Church
and State, regarding the spiritual and temporal as inde-
pendent powers, allied upon certain terms advantageous
to both. But such a theory had nothing to oppose to
the logic of a growing Catholic spirit, or to the logic of
events under the governments of Napoleon and the
Restoration. In such alliances the children of this
world had driven hard bargains in recent times with the
children of light. The superb self-assertion of the
children of light reacted against the pretensions of the
secular powers. If there is to be an impevium in
imperio, it must not be the State, said they, which shall
include the Church. Lamennais had only found the
true doctrine of Rome, though it may have been a few
centuries out of date, when he declared in favour of the
universal sovereignty of the successor of Peter, and
represented the authority of kings established by divine
right as but " the secular arm," subject by right no less
divine to the Sovereign Pontiff at Rome. He found the
French Church hampered upon right and left by its
connection with the State, and enfeebled by the servile
doctrine of Gallicanism, pleasant to the pride of the
episcopacy, but almost making a schismatic national
Church of that which should be a willing member of the
one body of which Christ is the head. "Let as sever
324 L antenna is.
o
{
I
the bonds which bind the Church to the State," he
cried ; " let it become once more a vigorous organisation,
subject to a single will directed by God, and the Church
will rise up strong enough to renew the face of society,
to breathe life into the cold corpse of the world."
The first volume of the " Essai," Avhich was received,
if we disregard the silence of the Liberals and a section
of the clergy, with unqualified applause, is in reality the
least important portion of the work. Its style is
characteristically that of its author, but, as far as its
contents go, they might belong for the most part to
another man. The fundamental and peculiar principle
of Lamennais's philosophy finds its development and
application in the subsequent volumes. Indifference to
the doctrines of religion would indeed be reasonable
could it be proved that religious truth lay without the
province of human knowledge. The apologist of theology
proceeds to show that such truth is ascertainable, and
can be tested by an infallible criterion.
Lamennais, though by the perverseness of criticism, he
has been called a solitary and a misanthrope, breathed,
as has been already seen, in every breath the life of his
fellowmen. Every nerve of his body was a conductor of
the electrical force of his own heart and brain outwards,
and inwards of the currents of the earth. The insulation
of a human being from his fellows was in his eyes in the
truest sense death, and is complete in the coffin. Our
physical nature owes its existence and preservation to
society ; neither physical life nor the propagation of life
is possible for the solitary individual. Our emotional
nature lives by love and self-surrender : if these die, it
Lamennais. 325
is dead. What of our intellectual nature — shall it alone
live and flourish apart from society, in solitary observa-
tion, self-consciousness, and reasoning ? All that could
make itself audible in Lamennais rose and answered,
"No." Philosophy, under the guidance of Descartes,
had for some centuries been leading men in the ways of
death. The bitter root of all modern atheism and heresy
lay in that innocent-looking Ego* cogito, ergo sum. It
was the doctrine of individualism, of belief in one's self,
of error, pride, misery. Lamennais undertakes to prove
that man, as an individual, can know, that is, can be
certain of nothing, and that the senses, inward conscious-
ness, and reasoning are alike unable to furnish him with
a criterion of truth.
Now all philosophy, all thought must start from some-
thing indemonstrable. Some primary, inexplicable fact
must be the ultimate basis of all reasoning. We can-
not by an infinite regress discover demonstrations of
demonstrations. The Ego cogito, ergo sum of Descartes
assumed as an indemonstrable fact the veracity of his
own faculties. Such an assumption he was not warranted
in making ; the faculties of the individual are not
necessarily veracious, much less infallible. A Bedlam
king is no less assured of his regality than the King of
France ; it is the common testimony of those around us
which alone can prove to any one of us that he is not
insane. Descartes then did not perceive the actual first
fact of the human mind, and yet it is most obvious.
* The "ego," commonly omitted, was not omitted by Descartes.
This fact I have seen noted in a manuscript letter of a singularly
accurate writer, the late Sir W. Eowan Hamilton.
326 • Lamennais.
Not " I believe in myself," but " I believe in the human
race " — submission to authority the infallibility of which
is admitted without proofs — that is the fact which is
indeed primary, and from which all else proceeds. Do
you ask, What guarantee, what proof have I of the
infallibility of the race ? I reply, The infallibility can-
not in the nature of things be guaranteed or proved, but
as a fact it is admitted without proof. Were I to
attempt to prove it, I should fall into the absurdity of
reaccepting my individual reason as the starting-point of
philosophy after I had already rejected it. But if the
objector adds, " I have not this assurance of the infalli-
bility of the common reason of the race," Lamennais is
compelled to answer, " Then you are a knave or a fool."
This common reason of the race is resorted to by
Lamennais " not merely as a Catholic criterion, or a
source of elementary truths, but as a magazine of ready-
fabricated dogmas." * All the articles of the Christian
creed are borne witness to, and have been, more or less
obscurely, since the beginning of the world, by this
common reason. There is but one true religion, that
which has existed from the days of Adam to our own ;
through Moses and in Jesus Christ no new religion was
revealed, but the old was preserved, hedged in, explained,
developed. All so-called false religions are corruptions
of the true, which have fallen out of the line of develop-
ment. But how do we distinguish the true and pure
* Sir W. Hamilton (Reid's Works, ed. Ham. p. 771). Hamilton
identifies the doctrine of Lamennais with that of Heraclitus, but
erroneously I believe. "The Common" of Heraclitus was derived
through the senses. See Lewes's "Hist, of Philosophy."
Latnennais. 327
religion from its corrupt forms ? Not by comparing
creed with creed ; there is no need of that ; we have
but to observe the testimony of mankind, the witness of
the common reason. The true religion is that which
rests upon the greatest visible authority. This note of
the true religion is possessed by Christianity, while of
the several societies of Christians none can for a moment
exhibit a consensus of authority comparable with that of
the Catholic Church. The voice of the Catholic Church
therefore is the voice of humanity, and all its utterances
as such are infallibly true.
IV.
This was just such a book as would try the spirits of
men, and create division of parties, clear-cut, and in-
superable. There was much in it to attract the younger
and bolder part of the clergy, secretly prepared by the
working of the new Catholic tendency to break with
Gallican traditions. There was much also to make the
nervous ears of orthodoxy prick up. An attack upon
the time-honoured philosophy of Descartes, taught in all
the schools, was hardly less than heresy. The theory of
a common reason and its infallibility was believed to be
(as Lacordaire afterwards, when he had withdrawn from
his great master, endeavoured to show) essentially anti-
supernatural, appearing as it did to contain an implicit
denial of the necessity of revelation. And at the same
time the idea of the development of religion — religion
itself being but the highest reason of the race — brought
with it a question, which an atmosphere impregnated by
modern thought was likely soon to ripen into a hope, and
328 Lamennais.
an assurance. Has this development reached its term ?
Is the reason of the race exhausted ? Shall all that is
obscure in theology never be illuminated, all that is un-
developed in Christian ethics never be made complete ?
There were men who looked for a fresh development of
human reason, men on whose lips was the new word
"progress/' to whom industry seemed pregnant with a
new morality, and science with an UDborn faith. But
these w T ere the liberal philosophers.
On the publication of the second volume of the
" Essai " Lamennais became a suspected man. A tem-
pest was gathering against him, and ere long it burst.
Even the excellent Abbe' Carron was alarmed for his son,
and addressed to him a letter filled with kind warning
and advice, to which Lammenais replied with unaffected
thanks and love. "My principles," he says, " are but
the development of the great Catholic maxim, Quod
semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus." To strengthen
his position by a fresh discussion of the disputed points,
and to appeal to Rome, such were the two modes of
defence open to Lamennais, and he adopted both. A
favourable response was received from Rome, yet one
hardly decisive enough to satisfy the absolute spirit it
was intended to soothe, and Lamennais, after some delay,
determined to present himself personally before the Holy
Father, to testify his submission, and procure, if pos-
sible, an open acknowledgment of his orthodoxy.
In the spring of the year 1824 Lamennais set out
for Rome. He delayed some time at Geneva, where the
weather was bad, and the odour of Protestantism highly
offensive. " I should a hundred times rather live
Lamennais. . 329
among Turks than in the midst of this abominable
population. The rest of Switzerland is hardly better,
and I doubt whether there is anywhere in the world a
more tiresome country. As to natural curiosities, moun-
tains, valleys, lakes, streams, water-falls, these are soon
seen." Thus, with characteristic capacity for injustice,
could Lamennais relieve his feelings against the Protes-
tant mountains and lakes ; at another time he viewed
them with different eyes. The Countess de Maistre
received the traveller at Turin. At Rome a triumph
awaited him. A new Pope — Leo XII. — had just
been elected, and notwithstanding extreme feebleness of
health, he exerted himself to welcome with distinguished
honour the French champion of the Papacy. He was
pressed to occupy an apartment in the Vatican ; a
cardinal's hat, it was said, w r as offered to him ; but
Lamennais declined all favours except a dispensation
relieving him from the recital of the daily breviary,
" convinced doubtless," says a biographer, " that for him
action was more virtuous than meditation or prayer."
The Holy Father would gladly have retained him at
Rome, but Lamennais felt that his work lay before him
in his native country, and as farewell was said, the Pope
encouraged him to carry on the warfare he had begun.
Lamennais was gone, but a portrait of him long hung
upon the wall of Leo's private sitting-room, its only
ornament beside a picture of the Virgin.*
* A letter has been published which professes to be written by-
Cardinal Bernetti, and which, if authentic, would convict the Pope of
hypocrisy in all these marks of favour. "From the time we received
and conversed with him," Leo is represented as saying, " we have been
struck with terror. From that day we had incessantly before our eyes
330 Lamennais.
After the imperial city like a superb mistress
had tempted the soul of Lamennais, his cherishing
Breton woods reclaimed him as their own. It seemed
inevitable to him that he should be great and conspicu-
ous ; his heart longed for peace, repose, and obscurity,
the sweet activity and sweet patience of nature. The
house of La Chenaie stands in the midst of woods, upon
the border of the forest of Coetquen. Waste lands,
where at that time grew only furze and heather, fields
half-cultivated, a pond shut in by rocks, and the deep
waters of which reflected trailing branches of ivy and
the foliage of immemorial oaks, gave to the place "a
calm and somewhat sad appearance." Here passed away
many weeks and months of the life of Lamennais. Not
in self-contemplation, or solitary thought, or Words-
worthian communion with the " wisdom and spirit of
the universe." External nature to Lamennais was a
mother, not a bride, and he gave her his weakness, not
his strength ; the true bride of his soul was humanity.
A flood of light has been poured upon the history of
his mind by the publication of his letters, and in them
we perceive with how intense a gaze he watched from
his solitude every movement of society and of the politi-
cal world. The prophet was in the wilderness, but he
bore in his heart the cause of his people, its sorrows and
its wrongs. He was sensitive to the changes in the
political atmosphere ; he noted each fact of importance.
With the prophetic instinct he pierced through the ac-
cidental surrounding of events to their moral import,
his face as of one damned {sa face de damne). . . Yes, this priest
has the face of one damned. There is heresiarch upon his forehead.'
Lantennazs. 331
brooded upon that, and created a vision of the future
out of its undeveloped causes. Evil and good were
everywhere at strife before him ; he clung to the good,
whatever name it bore, had faith in its ultimate victory,
and knew that the victory could not be without blood.
By no violent convulsions of soul, but simply by passion-
ate inspection of the course of things, and by observing
the sides upon which the powers of the earth ranged
themselves, the thinker of 1820, intolerant, monarchical,
hostile to liberal politics, devoid of sympathy with the
scientific movement, was transformed into the thinker of
1830, still indeed intolerant, but as for the rest, the
reverse of his former self. So far we find no
inconsistency in the man, though his judgment of parties
may change. Is it inconsistent to lose faith in a friend
when he has for the twentieth time proved himself other
than he professed himself to be ? Is it inconsistent to
receive as an ally one who under a different banner is
fighting for the same cause with yourself ? The cause
for which Lamennais fought was never the monarchy,
it was never even the Papacy for its own sake. It was
the regeneration and reorganisation of society. It was
not an idea, it was something to be done ; and if kings
and governments, and the Pope as a temporal sovereign,
were false to their trust, why let them go ; perhaps the
people would be true to theirs.
Such is the account which his correspondence enables
us to give of Lamennais's conversion to the democratic
cause. At no time was he greatly attached to the Re-
storation dynasty. The royal Government in secular
matters was blind, impotent, and despotic. The Church
332 Lamennais.
remained in the legalised servitude to which Napoleon
had reduced it. The bishops acquiesced with unabashed
servility, and the clergy appearing as the allies of de-
spotism, all who cared for freedom were becoming
estranged from the Church and from religion. There
was on the one side a throne supported by bayonets, a
force merely material, guided by a policy of interests,
devoid of thought and faith ; it had even forgotten that
bayonets are wielded by human hands. On the other
side was a growing spirit of anarchy, an ill-suppressed
mass of violence and hatred. The Royalists were worM-
lings, the Radicals were atheists ; the problem which
both were trying to solve was " How to constitute a
society without God." At the same time God seemed
to have withdrawn himself from the essential point of
contact through which he animated the world ; the light
which ought to guide men was darkness, the hand which
ou«ht to save was too cowardly or too weak to stir.
Rome, which ought to have been a rallying word, was a
word which Lamennais was ashamed to utter. Rome
was prudent, and had a profound respect for bayonets,
whether French, Austrian, Russian, or British. Freedom
and religion, the cause of humanity, were being done to
death, and Peter warmed himself, and said, "I know
not the man."
Yet Christ had said, " Upon this rock I will build
my Church," and if the Church, then necessarily the
world also. The Church was the one thing which
seemed still worth fighting for ; the Church, if it were
but true to itself, could still save society, and after the
overthrow of the existing state of things, which now
Lamennais. 333
might be clearly foreseen, the Church perfectly free, and
taking the lead in thought, might recreate the world.
Was it possible that religion was about to receive a new
development, the most important since the days of
Christ ? Many things seemed to favour such a con-
jecture. The greater the need of a putting forth of
divine power, the greater would be the manifestation of
God. " What thou doest, do quickly," Lamennais
muttered to the kings and cabinets of Europe. The
Ordonnances of June, 1828, seemed to fill up the
measure of their iniquity. At that time Lamennais
gave the Government of France two years to live, and
we know whether or not his prophecy was fulfilled.
After the coming storm, was it possible that men might
see a new heaven and a new earth ?
Gradually, too, as Lamennais kept gazing at the
movements of society, he thought he discerned a party
which was influenced by something higher than material
interests, which had some sense of the sacredness of
political action. It was the party of " honest Liberals."
These were not mere phantasmal statesmen, having no
existence in the world of reality ; they possessed some
spiritual significance. The Revolution, therefore, because
it had some spiritual force, would conquer the Govern-
ments of Europe, but religion, with its indestructible
beliefs, would conquer the Revolution. That this con-
quest should be effected, however, the Church must be
prepared to break with the Governments and recognise
! the cause of the peoples as her own. To liberalise the
Church, to catholicise Liberalism, such were now the
ends for which Lamennais drew every breath — ends
334 Lamennais.
which were themselves but means to the one great
object of his life, the reorganisation of society.
These years between Lamennais's first journey to Home
and the Revolution of 1830 were not passed altogether
at La Chenaie. In the spring of 1 8 2 6 he is in Paris,
accepting the consequences of a publication entitled
" De la Religion consideree dans ses rapports avec l'ordre
politique et civil." Judicial proceedings were taken
against him ; he w T as accused of " effacing the limits of
the temporal and spiritual powers, and of recognising in
the Sovereign Pontiff the right of deposing kings and of
releasing subjects from their oath of fidelity." Lamen-
nais was defended by his friend Berry er, and at the
close of his advocate's address the accused rose and
uttered himself a few words expressing his devotion to
the head of the Church : — " His faith is my faith, his
doctrine is my doctrine, and to my latest breath I will
continue to profess and to defend it." Judgment was
given against Lamennais, but in the most lenient terms,
and a nominal fine was imposed.
That summer his feeble health entirely gave way.
Greatly exhausted, and subject to spasms and frequent
fainting-fits, he was ordered by his physicians to the baths
of Saint Sauveur in the Pyrenees. One friend, the Abbe'
de Salinis, accompanied him. The journey he describes
as a kind of constant agony: at some leagues past Mont-
auban they were obliged to lift him from the carriage, and
lay him on a bed in a farmhouse. The Church seemed
about to lose her champion. But at Saint Sauveur his
health in some degree returned. Here it was that he
was first seen by a little sick boy for whom Lamennais's
Lamennais. 335
regard afterwards ripened into a friendship terminated
only by death. The boy was fimile Forgues, to whom,
nearly thirty years after, Lamennais intrusted the publi-
cation of his letters and posthumous works. He had
heard the name of the great priest, and imagined him
like one of the majestic saints of a cathedral window, with
the keys, the book, or the symbolic sword, in gorgeous
drapery, with flowing beard and gesture of inspira-
tion. He found in a little dimly-lighted room a small,
lean, sorry-looking man, seated in a great straw arm-chair,
his head sunk upon his chest. Thus the acquaintance
began. The two abbes made the child a companion in
their walks, which were never very long. Sometimes
the Abbe de Salinis would leave them, and then, seated
on the grass, Lamennais would draw from his pocket
his Latin " Imitation/' and make the boy translate,
interrupting him with commentaries perhaps not quite
within his comprehension. Or the friend would return,
and all three would descend slowly to the banks of the
Gave to compete in stone -throwing, for success in which
Lamennais would prove a marked incapacity.*
* The following from George Sand will serve to make the bodily-
presence of Lamennais more visible. " His [Everard's] head, at once
that of a hero and a saint, appears to me in my dreams by the side of
the austere and terrible face of the great La Mennais. In the last the
brow is an unbroken wall, a brass tablet, — the seal of indomitable
vigour, and furrowed like Everard's between the eyebrows with those
perpendicular wrinkles which belong exclusively, says Lavater, to those
of high capacity who think justly and nobly. The stiff and rigid incli-
nation of the profile, the angular narrowness of the visage, doubtless
agree with the inflexible probity, the hermit-like austerity, and the
incessant toil of thoughts ardent and vast as heaven. But the smile
which comes suddenly to humanise this countenance changes my terror
into confidence, my respect into adoration." — (" Letters of a Traveller."
Letter vii. To Franz Liszt.)
336 Lamennais.
The visit to Saint Sauveur was of brief duration.
Again in the same year, in December, we find Lamennais
in Paris ; and learn that he was concerned in the ill-
advised proceeding of which M. Littre has given us the
details — the religious ceremony of marriage into which
Comte, then in a state of mental alienation, was indecently
hurried. Next year there is a gap in the correspon-
dence ; Lamennais is face to face with death, and calm
and happy. But death which hovered near so often was
not yet to touch him, and he came back to the warfare
of his life sadly and resolutely. " Dieu l'a fait soldat,"
said his brother Jean, and the hardest battles were yet
to fight. Meanwhile, strugolingr against feeble health,
and against poverty at times so absolute that he was
unable to keep a servant, he laboured unceasingly for
Catholicism and liberty. He wrote much ; disciples
gathered round him ; in the Memorial Catholique his
party found a literary organ ; he inspired from a distance
the "Association for the Defence of the Catholic Religion,"
which was virtually a club prepared to start forward and
take the initiative in politics when the days of organisation
had come ; and at La Chenaie and in its neighbourhood
Lamennais and his brother prepared a small contingent
of young men for the Catholic cause, elite volunteers,
who should lead in the campaigns of the future.
v.
The events of July, IS 30, which Lamennais had long
anticipated, seemed to clear the way for a forward
movement of his party. Only half of what society
needed was accomplished by the Revolution ; its
Lamennais. 337
character was negative ; it secured freedom, but intro-
duced no principle of order. The true principle of
order lay essentially in religion ; religion and the
Revolution, order and freedom, a catholicised liberalism
— such were the watchwords of the party which found
its centre in the person of Lamennais. Not many weeks
after the days of July the Avenir newspaper was started,
under the conduct of Lamenuais, Lacordaire, Montalem-
bert and two or three other distinguished neo-Catholic
leaders. Its motto — the words "God and Liberty"—
indicates the point of view from which it regarded the
questions of the day. The principles advocated were the
rendering into politics of its spirit of Catholic Liberalism :
— absolute submission to the Holy Father in things
spiritual, the complete separation of Church and State,
together with the renunciation by the clergy of the
budget of worship, liberty of conscience, liberty of the
press, freedom in education, the right of association, the
right of popular election.
It was not long until the editors discovered that
the Government of Louis Philippe inherited the tra-
ditions of the Government of Charles X., especially in
matters relating to Church and State, and that a change
of masters was not necessarily a change of minds.
The bishops presented to the Holy See were the crea-
tures of the Government ; the University was allowed,
in direct opposition to the new Charter, to retain a
monopoly of education, in order that the clergy might
possess as little direct influence as possible over the
youth of the country ; secular instruction free of
expense was given to the poor, in order that superstition
Y
n8 Lame/mats.
oo
— that is, the Catholic religion — might be destroyed ;
the ceremony of public worship was interfered with by
legislative enactments. The Avenir struggled against
overwhelming odds ; the Government, the Gallicar
clergy, the Bourbons were united against it ; yet it£
influence was considerable, especially amongst the younger
members of the priesthood. A compact party, with
defmiteness of position, the audacity of enthusiasm, and
high intellectual prowess, may be a formidable power in
times of general indecision, faithlessness, and want of
heart. Together with the journal was established the
" Agence ge'ne'rale pour la defense de la liberte
religieuse," a council of nine, Lamennais being president,
with associated annual subscribers. The Avenir spoke ;
the " Agence " acted. It presented petitions to the
Chamber of Deputies ; it resisted infringements of the
rights of the clergy by legal proceedings carried, when
necessary, into the highest courts ; it supj)orted schools
against the oppression of the Government officials ; it
made experiments to determine the boundaries of the
law ; it served as a bond between local associations
intended to advance the cause of religious freedom in
France.
Notwithstanding the zeal of the Avenir and the
"Agence' 1 for the Catholic religion, their enemies
succeeded in bringing into suspicion the orthodoxy of
Lamennais and his friends. Rumours that their
principles were disapproved at Rome, first sullen and
inarticulate, became by degrees loud and clear. There
could be no doubt that the spirit of the Avenir in
political matters was very far removed from that which
Lamennais. 339
presided over the councils of the Sovereign Pontiff. But
Lamennais had long since been forced by the logic of
events to distinguish between the temporal sovereign at
Rome and the spiritual head of the Church. If the Pope
encouraged heretical Russia to stifle in blood the aspira-
tions of Catholic Poland, it was the temporal sovereign
who did this, not the infallible priest ; Lamennais could
still raise his voice for freedom and Poland. And with
a naive faith, which would be incredible in a less simple
and absolute character, he believed that at Rome they
would distinguish between the opponent of the sovereign
and of the priest; that they would be just to the most
obedient son of the Church, if they- were not even grate-
ful to her most devoted champion.
Leo XII. was now dead. Gregory XVI. reigned in his
place. Thirteen months after its foundation the editors
resolved to suspend the publication of the Avenir, and
Lamennais announced the fact in the number of Novem-
ber 15, 1831. " If we retire for a moment, it is not
through weariness, still less through failing of heart ; it
is to go, as formerly did the soldiers of Israel, to consult
the Lord in Shiloh. Doubts have been thrown upon our
faith, and even our intentions, for in these times what is
not attacked ? We leave for a moment the battle-field to
fulfil another duty equally urgent. The traveller's staff
in our hand, we take our way towards the Eternal City,
and there, prostrated at the feet of the Pontiff whom Jesus
Christ has appointed to his disciples as a master and a
guide, we shall say, ' father, deign to cast down your
eyes upon some of the humblest of your children,
accused of being rebels against your infallible and
I
340 Lamennais.
sweet authority ; behold they are before you ; read
what is in their souls ; nothing which they would conceal
is there ; if one thought of theirs, but one, is other than
yours, they disavow, they abjure it ; you are the rule of
their doctrines ; never, never have they known another.
father, pronounce over them the word which gives life
because it gives light, and let your hand be stretched
forth to bless their obedience and their love.' Some
days after this announcement " three obscure Christians "
— Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert (then a
youth of twenty-one years) — set their faces towards the
capital of the Christian world.
Lamennais has related the incidents of this pilgrimage
to Rome in a book which, in some respects, must stand
apart from his other writings. When he spoke on be-
half of a struggling cause or an oppressed nation, the
thoughts were extreme and passionate, visions of horror
and of shame rose before the imagination, the language
was abrupt, and heaved like the breast of one over-excited,
labouring in vain to give relief to the violence of emotion.
But in the " Affaires de Rome " it is chiefly with himself
and his own wrongs that he is concerned, and therefore
the tone is moderate, the feeling healthful and changeful,
the style full of natural grace, picturesque, tender, ironical,
playful, grave by turns. The travellers left Paris towards
the close of the year 1831. At Lyons they found the
city in the hands of the insurrectionary workmen, and
Lamennais could not fail to be impressed deeply by the
order and gravity and noble respect for justice that
governed a populace which, from desperation, had
suddenly risen to absolute power. " Thanks be given
Lamennais, 341
to God," he wrote elsewhere, "who allowed us to
witness this illustrious justification of the true people, so
suspected, so calumniated. Never did a spectacle so
great and touching meet our eyes as that which this
immense city presented, fallen, after an heroic struggle,
into the hands of the mere workmen. As soon as they
were in possession, the most perfect order, the most
complete security reigned, together with the entirest
freedom. . . . Not a disorder, not a single offence
against property or person. . . . One might see these
men of toil, their poor workshop blouses on, with faces
hollow and worn, but calm, here musket on shoulder
preserving the public safety, there prostrated on the
pavement of a solitary church praying with confidence to
Him who suffered like them and for them." Such a
sight as this, if men would but consult the facts of
nineteenth century revolutionary movements, would not
be found unusual. With a heart overflowing with love
for the poor, despised, and suffering, sensible above all
else to the sublime in character, and himself wounded
and saddened, how could Lamennais feel other than
consecrated, by his presence at such a moment as this, to
the cause of the people ?
In feeble health, Lamennais, with his two companions,
proceeded on his journey. Italy, with its blue breadths
of sea, and various shore, and wealth of fertile valley,
and rich ravine, was too smiling and fair a land to possess
itself of his love : he thought with regret of his native
Armor ica, " its tempests, and granite rocks beaten by the
grass-green waves ; its reefs white with foam, its long,
deserted strands, where no sound meets the ear but the
34 2 Lamennais.
dull roar of the wave, the shrill cry of the wheeling gull,
and the voice of the sea-lark sad and sweet." At Rome
a very different reception awaited him from that which
he had been honoured with eight years before. A small
number of distinguished ecclesiastics did not fear to take
the pilgrims by the hand and welcome them. But for
the rest, their isolation was complete. Diplomatic notes
from Austria, Prussia, and Russia had preceded them, in
which the Pope was urged to pronounce against the
pernicious publicists who, in the name of religion, had
excited the peoples to revolt. With difficulty they
procured an audience with the Holy Father, and that
only on condition that no allusion should be made to the
business which brought them to Rome. Cardinal de
Rohan, their opponent, the bambino cardinal whom
Lamennais has sketched with so mischievous and sprightly
a pencil, was present as witness of their silence.
Week after week passed, and the ardent, uncompro-
mising, and fearless nature of Lamennais was first sur-
prised, then pained, and at last violently repelled by the
circuitous policy, the back-stair approaches, the worldli-
ness, chicanery, and dastardly spirit of the Roman court.
The old man who governed Christendom, ignorant alike
of the condition of the Church and of the world, was
surrounded by a body-guard of blind, imbecile, and
greedy retainers. Weary of Rome, yet still not hopeless
of obtaining a decision, Lamennais sought for repose and
restoration of heart amongst the small religions houses
in the country. We feel a relief and lightening of
spirit when we escape from the pages of his book which
disclose the corrupt life that crawled and crept in Rome,
Lamennais. 343
to those which mirror the peaceful and world-forgetting
days of the convent. Let one picture be looked at out
of several. " The Camaldolese occupy each a small
separate house, which contains several rooms. We
reached their dwelling-place towards evening, at the hour
of common prayer ; they seemed all of advanced age,
and of more than middle stature. Ranged on the two
sides of the nave, they remained, after the service was
ended, on their knees, motionless in profound meditation.
One might have said that already they had ceased to
belong to earth. Their bald heads drooped under other
thoughts and other cares : not a movement, not an out-
ward sign of life ; enveloped in their long white cloaks,
they looked like those statues which pray upon old
tombs."
At length, when there seemed no likelihood of judg-
ment, favourable or the reverse, being pronounced,
Lamennais, upon the advice of his Roman friends,
decided to accept the Pope's silence as equivalent to a
declaration that his opinions were not disapproved, to
leave Italy, and resume his suspended labours. On a
breathless and heavy evening in the month of July, his
carriage crept along the heights above the Tiber, and
while the fires of the setting sun shone upon the dome
of St. Peter, the last of Rome was seen. Montalembert
accompanied his friend ; they delayed to visit Florence
\nd Venice. At Munich they found Lacordaire; and
the most distinguished writers and artists of the city
received, at a public dinner, the three editors of the
Avenir. " Towards the end of the repast," as Lacordaire
has told, " some one came to M. de La Mennais and
344 Lamennais,
begged him to come out for a moment, and an envoy of
the Apostolic Nuncio presented to him a folded paper,
sealed with the Nuncio's seal. He opened it, and saw
that it contained an Encyclical Letter from Pope Gregory
XVI., dated August 15, 1832. A rapid glance at its
contents soon told him that it was on the subject of the
doctrines of the Avenir, and that it was unfavourable to
them. His decision was taken at once ; and without
examining the precise import of the Pontifical Brief,
he said to us in a low voice, as he left the room, c I
have just received an Encyclical of the Pope against
us ; we must not hesitate to submit.' Then returning
home, he at once drew up, in a few short but precise
lines, an act of submission, with which the Pope was
satisfied."
On their return to France, the editors announced that
their journal would appear no more, and that the
" Agence ' ; was dissolved. It was in many respects a
happy day for Lamennais, when he could return with
free conscience to a less troubled life. He had recently
lost all that he possessed through an unfortunate con-
nection with a Paris bookseller. Reduced to absolute
poverty, but easier in mind than he had been for many
a day, Lamennais withdrew to the privacy of La Chenaie,
where a few young and ingenuous scholars surrounded
him. One of these scholars since his death has risen
upon us like a lucid and pale star, which exercises no
sway over the lives of men, but attracts the love of some
— Maurice de Gue'rin. Both in his diary and letters
some interesting records may be found of the life in " the
little paradise of La Chenaie," and of the relations which
<
Lamennais. 345
existed between the master and his disciples.* These
were of the most tender and the most respectful kind.
It has been remarked with what unrestrained affection
the young members of the Avenir staff wrote to their chief.
The letters begin with the formula Mon pere, mon pere,
Men aime, and end with Votre tendre fils, voire enfant;
and the contents of the letters show that these were not
empty words, that the confidence of these friends was
absolute, their attachment almost boundless. So was it
also at La Chenaie. " I felt at first/' says Maurice de
Guerin, " in accosting M. Feli (so we call him familiarly),
that mysterious shiver which always runs through one on
the approach of divine things or great men ; but soon
this trembling changed into abandon and confidence. . .
M. Feli has, so to say, compelled me to forget his renown
by his fatherly gentleness, and the tender familiarity of
his intercourse. Here I am in his hands, body and soul,
hoping that this great artist may educe the statue from
the formless block." And elsewhere : " Commonly
enough M. Feli is believed to be a proud man, and
passionately proud. This opinion, which has turned
away from him many Catholics, is incredibly false. No
one in the world is more lost in humility and self-
renunciation." And once more : " In the evening, after
supper, we go into the drawing-room. He throws
himself into a huge sofa, an old piece of furniture in
threadbare crimson velvet. . . . It is the hour for con-
versation. Then, if you were to enter the room, you
would see low in a corner a little head, nothing but the
* See Journal, Letters, &c, pp 19, 38, 39, 170—172, 175, 176, 179,
193 — 195 (Quatrieme edition).
1
46 Lamennais.
head, the rest of the body being absorbed by the sofa,
its eyes a-gleam like carbuncles, and pivoting incessantly
on his neck ; you would hear a voice now grave, now
full of mockery, and sometimes long peals of shrill
laughter — c'est notre homme."
At this time Lamennais was occupied with the con-
ception and elaboration of a philosophy which should
resume all his views upon nature, man, and society, and
base them upon an idea of God. But in his life peace
was never to be of long duration. In May 1833,
appeared a Brief of the Pope, in which Lamennais was
spoken of as having failed to give the unequivocal
pledges of his submission which had been expected.
The demands now made upon him were an unqualified
adherence to the Encyclical, which had condemned
political freedom in some of its most essential forms, and
the promise of absolute obedience to Rome in temporal
affairs, as well as spiritual. It was at last clear to him
that he had mistaken the principles of Catholicism, that
no substantial union could be effected between the
Papacy and Liberalism, and that a choice must be made
between the cause of Pome and that of humanity. His
past faith, the foundations of which had been gradually
and inevitably weakened by the observations of the real
world, and the reaction of the natural human heart, now
at last sank under external pressure. As for his past
life, so far as it was bound up with Rome, he cared only
to leave it entirely behind him. A new life devoted to
the same object — the renewal of society — and employing
as its means a larger and nobler conception of Christianity
was now to begin. For peace' sake he signed the de-
Lamennais. 347
claration demanded by the Pope — a declaration which
for Lamennais meant nothing, because he signed it with
the reserve of his duties to his country and humanity,
which meant all. That such was the sense in which he
understood this act soon became apparent.
The letters written from La Chenaie towards the close of
the year 1832, and in the early part of 1833, are remark-
able for their imaginative fervour, and that intellectual
grasp and decisiveness which passion gives. This was the
time when Russia and Austria, with the approbation of
the Pope, were joyfully hastening the death-agony of
Polish nationality, and when the French Govern ment was
entering upon a period of violent reaction against the
principles of July. The Church and the kings seemed
leagued against Christ and the people. The heart of
the prophet of La Chenaie was stirred within him ;
wrath, indignation, hatred, contempt, love, grief, and
pity, and above all hope, growing brighter as the dark-
ness grew deeper, made him their own, and a series of
visions passed before him. These were written down in
words resembling those of the Hebrew prophets, at first
to be read only by a few, as they were not intended for
publication.* But now, increasing national calamities,
and the necessity of some act on his part which would
clearly define his position in the eyes of all, and interpret
rightly his submission to the Papal demands, left Lamen-
nais no choice but to declare openly his political creed,
" to cry aloud and spare not." An immense welcome
* Mickiewicz's "Book of the Polish People," which was translated
into French by M. de Montalembert, suggested the style which
Lamennais adopted in the " Paroles."
348 Lamennais.
greeted the " Paroles d'un Croyant." It was translated
into English, German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch,
Italian and other languages. A hundred thousand copies
were almost immediately sold. A lucky phrase of M. de
Vitrolles defines accurately the " Paroles : " — " C'est un
bonnet rouge plante sur une croix." But the cross was
not one which could be acknowledged as such in the
councils of the Vatican. A new Encyclical appeared,
dated July 1834, which is refreshing to read for the
vivacity of its language. There is now no apathy or
languor at Rome. The Holy Father is seized with
horror at this breach of faith, this prodigy of calumny, a,t
the blindness of the author, at the transports of his fury,
at his pernicious designs, at the fatal frenzy of his
imagination, at his impious abuse of God's Word, at
the propositions of the book, "Falsas, calumniosas,
temerarias, . . . impias, scandalosas, erroneas."
If anything was needed to complete the liberation of
Lamennais from the Church of Rome, this Encyclical
supplied it. Perhaps one thing was needed — a logical
means of escape from his own arguments of past times.
Heretofore his severance from Catholicism had been
effected by a scrutiny of the facts of the political world,
and the simple action of the moral sense. To destroy
on the earth the reign of force, and to substitute that of
justice and charity — in other words, to spiritualise
material power — such seemed to him the one thing
needed by society, and such also seemed the tendency of
Christianity. But Rome had deliberately taken the side
of force against justice and charity. So much he had
seen. Still there were the old arguments of the " Essai ,:
Lamennais. 349
■ — what of these ? At this moment appeared the
Encyclical, and fortunately it did not confine itself to de-
nouncing and reprobating the opinions of the "Paroles,"
but went on to condemn in strong terms the philosophy
of the Common Reason, which a few years before had
been the most orthodox of beliefs. Thus the Church
destroyed the philosophical basis upon which, as conceived
by Lamennais, it rested. And now appeared, what surely
ought to have been discovered before, that if the Common
Reason is the basis of the Church, its authority is an-
tecedent and superior to the authority of the Church,
and the Church has a judge on earth outside itself.
Here, too, the doctrine of the development of religion
came in powerfully to aid the liberation of Lamennais.
As at present conceived and organised, religion had
ceased to influence the world for good — it had rather set
itself against all that was most admirable in the in-
dividual and in society. Had not the time come for the
appearance and reign of a new conception of religion ?
VI.
It is the singular fate of Lamennais that in almost all
which has been written upon his life and works, much
attention is paid to that portion of them which he him-
self rejected and left behind ; little is said of the action
and thought upon which in his maturest years he would
have laM. his chief claim to remembrance among
men. The present study is no exception to this rule.
Having brought thus far our account o f the history of
Lamennais's m ind, we can only indicate briefly the direc-
tion in which he subsequently moved, and say that much
350 Lamennais.
remains necessarily untold. On political questions he
steadily adhered to the principles of democracy.* In
April 1835, he was invited by the members of the
committee for the defeDce of the accused who took part
in the abortive revolutionary movements at Paris and
Lyons, to co-operate with them, and he joyfully consented.
Five }^ears later he was himself a prisoner in Sainte
Pelagie, and there passed twelve months at the age of
sixty-one, condemned for the publication of a pamphlet
entitled " Le Pays et le Gouvernement," in which he had
violently inveighed against the pacific policy of Louis
Philippe, the fortifying of Paris, the system of preventive
arrests, and measures against the workmen which seemed
to him oppressive. In 1848 he appeared as a repre-
sentative in the Constituent Assembly, and was a
member of the Comite de Constitution, where he pre-
sented his colleagues with a scheme of social and politi-
cal organisation (Projet de Constitution), to which he
attached great importance, but which found little favour
with others. With the Constituent Assembly his pol-
itical career ends. Lamennais, it has been said, lost the
originality of his part amongst political actors when he
renounced the leadership of the party of Liberal Catholics.
The truth of this remark may well be questioned. What
was most peculiar and essential in his political creed re-
mained the same through every change — the opinion
that all real society, all society which contains a principle
of stability, must be founded upon a religious faith. To
spiritualise the democracy was to the last the object of
* It may here be noted that from the year 1834 he usually wrote his
name F. Lamennais, instead of the aristocratic de La Mennais.
Lamennais. 35 l
his most earnest endeavours, and "a spiritualised de-
mocracy " is not so remote a translation of the old watch-
word, a " Catholicised Liberalism."
During these years the religious opinions of Lamennais
underwent important changes. At first, after his depar-
ture from the Catholic Church, he looked forward, as we
have seen, to a new development of religion, but such a
development as would leave untouched the supernatural
facts of Christianity, or would at most render it possible to
conceive them in a nobler way. Looking, however, into
Christianity, and looking at the same time upon the face
of the world, and considering how far Christianity con-
tained elements which might effect the regeneration of
society, he found things beginning to take a new appear-
ance. Christianity, with the best intentions, seemed
powerless, and its voice was like the remote and
ineffectual voice of a shade. A spiritual society stood
over against a natural society, but the spiritual refused
to penetrate the natural, the Church remained separate
from the world. On searching deeper, the cause of this
became apparent. Emerging from Judaism, which had
made God everything, and made man and nature
nothing, or but the small dust of the balance, and
reacting against the dominant sensuality of the tirne,
Christianity had thrown itself into an excessive spiritual-
ism, out of nature and (under the influence of the idea
of the "Fall") even opposed to nature. Hence a false
conception of God, which put a gulf between the Creator
and the creation, and represented the former as some-
thing other than Infinite Being ; hence a false concep-
tion of religion as belonging to a supernatural order of
352 Lamennais.
facts, a fruitless attempt to establish man in a super-
natural condition, a condition out of nature, and even
opposed to it ; and hence also, as has been observed, a
mistaken theory of society.
Lamennais's own theory in its latest form is given in
the remarkable preface to his translation of Dante's
"Divine Comedy ;"* the reader will perceive how far it
is removed from that of Catholicism : —
" The spiritual power, although connected with the
temporal, which it ought to direct, does not from its
very nature admit of any organisation analogous to that
whose action is resumed by the temporal power ; just as
the mind, though connected with the body, cannot be
conceived under a mode of bodily organisation. What
it is in man it is likewise in society — something above
the senses — thought, reason finite and progressive,
subject to error, but always penetrating further into
the truth. In society, then, the spiritual power, foreign
to the organisation of the social body, or of the State,
apart from it, superior to it, is but intelligence, reason
free from every bond ; whence, by the unrestrained
communication of thoughts which modify one another,
arises a common thought, a common will, governing,
when once formed, all private thoughts and volitions ;
so that with no means of constraint, no political or civil
jurisdiction, the free, impersonal, incorporeal reason con-
stitutes the spiritual power in which resides the supreme
power of government."
* A translation of a great portion of this preface appeared as an
article in the Westminster Jteview, Oct. 1866, but this passage — the
most remarkable in the work — was omitted.
Lamennais.
O C f
OOO
\
While such thoughts as these were possessing them-
selves of the mind of Lamennais, the significance of the
scientific movement had been growing greater and
greater in his eyes ; but he believed that the tree of
science had its roots in the idea of God, that atheistic
science was doomed to perpetual sterility. Finite Being
is but infinite Being in a mode of limitation ; its laws,
therefore, can be no other than the laws of infinite Being,
modified in each creature according to the mode of limita-
tion which determines its peculiar nature. Thus, by a
process of levelling-up, Lamennais made the supernatural,
in the ordinary sense of the word, disappear. Miracles
became incredible, and, indeed, impossible to conceive.
" A new synthesis," wrote Lamennais in his book on the
"Past and Future of the People," "is in process of
formation which, uniting Christian spiritualism and
scientific naturalism, the Creator and the creation, and
the laws of both, will complete the ancient dogma, and
will constitute in this sense a new dogma, the character
of which will be the negation of a supernatural order of
things, of an order intermediate between God and his
work, and the determination of the properties of absolute
Being, without which the persons [of the Trinity], as
determined by Christianity, are but logical abstractions
deprived of true reality."
All that Lamennais meant by these last words will be
understood only by one who is acquainted with the chief
literary performance of the second half of his life, the
" Esquisse dune Philosophic" Of this remarkable piece
of transcendental science no account can here be given,
but attention may be directed to the chapters upon art
z
<5
54 Lamennais.
(whicli have been republished in a separate volume undei
the title " De l'Art et du Beau "), as containing brilliant
surveys of historical periods and national characteristics
of art.
We hasten to the end. In January, 1854, while
engaged upon his introduction to Dante, pleurisy seized
him, and on the 1 6th of the month he was obliged to
take to his bed. The illness at first made rapid progress.
It was rumoured in Paris that Lamennais was dying.
A few dear friends of the Liberal party were with him,
and while the sick man lingered in life week after week,
by them his house was defended from the attempts to
force an entrance made by those who longed for the
triumph of a death-bed recantation and submission at
the last moment to the Catholic Church. Strict orders
were given by Lamennais to admit no priest, whoever he
might be. During his illness his thoughts were concen-
trated, absorbed in the one thought of God, and, thanks
to those who rigorously fulfilled a duty which exposed
them to much invidious criticism, his dying hours, were
unvexed by controversial brawls. While the pale winter
sun was rising through the vapour of a February morning,
the 27th of the month, the great life ceased. To some
of those who stood by now for the first time the majesty
of Lamennais's face was fully visible, as the head, usually
drooped forward upon his chest, lay back upon the pillow.
" Never/' says M. Forgues, li did contour and lineaments
so energetically translate before my eyes an abstract idea
■ — that of victorious will."
Lamennais had wished that his body might lie in the
peaceful solitude of La Chenaie, but he determined, some
Lamennais, 355
weeks before his death (perhaps much earlier), that a
solemn confession of his faith should be made at the last
Instructions were left that he should be buried in the
midst of the poor at Pere La Chaise, and as the poor are
buried, that his body should not be presented at any
church, and that his death should be announced only to
his niece, and to MM. Beranger, De Vitrolles, Forgu.es,
and two other friends. " On February 29 th an immense
gathering of people was in motion from the Rue du
Grand Chantier to the cemetery of the East. The
silent crowd uncovered respectfully before the coffin
placed in the hearse of the poor. The police had made
a great demonstration of strength. Only eight of us
entered the graveyard, the others were dispersed. M.
Beranger joined us there; he walked with difficulty,
leaning on the arm of M. Jean Reynaud. He had been
recognised and saluted with warm greetings. The coffin
was lowered into one of those long and hideous trenches
in which they bury the people. When the earth was
filled in the grave-digger asked, 'Is a cross to be put up?'
M. Barbet answered, ' No.' M. de Lamennais had said,
' Put nothing over my grave. ' Not a word was pro-
nounced at the tomb."
The imperial police dispersing the people, and the
coffin of Lamennais disappearing underground — this is a
* "Essai Biographique sur M. F. de la Mennais," par A. Blaize, p.
180. I may refer the reader who is interested in Lamennais especially
to the correspondence edited by M. Forgues ; "CEuvres Incites"
(chiefly letters), publics par A. Blaize; "Affaires de Rome ; " "Dis-
cussions critiques," &c, in the "CEuvres posthumes," edited by M.
Forgues; the articles in M. Ste.-Beuve's "Portraits contemporains ;
M. Kenan's article in " Essais de Morale et de Critique ; " and the long
article signed E E n (E. Renan ?), in the " Biographie Universale "
356 Lamennais.
melodramatic tableau on which the curtain drops. The
piece, however, was not a melodrama, but a tragedy ; or
rather, no play of auy kind, but a severe reality which
may serve better than a tragedy to purify the soul by
terror and pity.
(Michaud) ; M. Jules Simon's review of the "Esquisse," in Revue des
deux Mondes, 1841 ; and M. Louis Binaud's articles on De Maistre and
Lamennais in the same review, Aug. 15, 1860, and Feb. 1, 1861.
Since this essay was written, I have ascertained from an unpublished
letter of Lamennais that his Irish Ancestor was named Eosse, and that
he settled at Saint Malo in the time of James II.
1863.
EDGAR QUINET.
There are some men who, more than whatever else they
may be, are part of the conscience of a nation. Their
gladness and strength imply the purity and energy of a
people's soul ; their mournfulness and auger are witnesses
to its moral declension or defeat. Its highest dreams
of justice are their thoughts ; in them its traditions of
virtue are summed up ; they are the guardians and
chief heirs of what has been bequeathed to a nation by
the most vivid moments in its past of fervour and of
light. When it betrays its own better nature, they
remain faithful, but isolated, and their voices are heard
in grieved protesting ; when it would finally quench the
spirit by a deliberate act of the will, these men become
its castaways, scattered abroad in exile.
Edgar Qumet was illustrious as poet, historian, politi-
cal writer, exponent of literatures and religions, and he
added to his titles of distinction that of theorist in
physical science. In so many characters did the man
appear ; but the man himself was first and chiefly part
of the conscience of France. Such was the permanent
basis which underlay all apparent changes in the nature
and direction of his activity ; this it was which gave unity
to the manifold labours of his life : and the singleness of
impression which his works, so various in their subjects,
leave with the reader, results from the felt presence of a
358 Edgar Quinet.
nature always at one with itself and with the moral order
of the w r orld, and always communicating to others a share
of its own wholesome warmth and pure light. And thus
in days of much doubt and distraction, of half views and
half beliefs, and the half action of studious compromise,
in days of hesitating advances, followed by hasty and
confused retreats, Edgar Quinet had the highest happi-
ness possible in such a time — not glad oneness with a
nation illuminated by just and clear ideas, animated by
noble passions, and advancing irresistibly to great ends,
for that was impossible in France of the present century,
but union at least with himself, constant progress in his
assigned path, and a spirit so attached to what is real and
abiding as to be secure from illusions and their loss.
" I have passed my days in hearing men speak of
their illusions, and I have never experienced a single
one No object on the earth has deceived me.
Each of them has proved itself precisely what it promised
to be. All, even the most paltry, have made good for
me what they announced. Flowers, odours, the spring
youth, the happy life in the land of one's birth, good
things desired and possessed, did they pledge them-
selves to be eternal ? . . . And it has been the same
with men. No friendship of those on which I counted
has failed me, and misfortune has given me some
which I had no right to expect. No one has de-
ceived me, no one betrayed me. I have found men
as constant to themselves as things Where is
deception, if I am precisely in the place to which I
always assigned myself ? Where is illusion, if all that I
feared has come to pass ? Where is the sting of death,
Edgar Quinet. 359
if I have so often felt it beforehand ? What I have
loved I have found each day more loveable. Each day
justice has appeared to me more holy, liberty more fair,
speech more sacred, art more real, reality more artistic,
poetry more true, truth more poetical, nature more
divine, and what is divine more natural." This confes-
sion, not the least remarkable of our time, and unlike
most others, was written after seven years of exile.
The brightness and serenity of the words are yet of an
autumnal kind. We feel the presence in them of a
breath like that which makes bare the trees, and sets a
limit to the pleasure of the year. We become aware
by the very tone of their cheerfulness of the working of
" kind, calm years exacting their accompt of pain,"
which mature the mind.
In any sketch of the life of Edgar Quinet there will
be inevitably a good deal of disproportion between its
fjarts. He himself related, with minute and affectionate
fidelity, the incidents of the first twenty years of his life,
and the charm which belongs to such a narrative tempts
one to linger too long among the idyllic scenes of his child-
hood, and the days, filled with loves and with learning, of
his youth. A record of some years of a much more recent
date is supplied by the " Memoires d'Exil " of Madame
Quinet, the enthusiastic partaker of her husband's political
ideas and accepter of their consequences. But the long
period intervening between 1823 and 1858, and again
the period of life in Switzerland from 18G0 to 1870,
can be sketched at best in outline, and even the outline
breaks here and there, and leaves a blank. It is not
here intended to attempt a complete survey of his career.
360 Edgar Quinet.
Fortunately many of Quinet's works, although containing
little that is directly personal, proceed obviously from
the circumstances of his position, and supply a kind of
undesigned autobiography.
Edgar Quinet was born February 17, 1803, at Bourg,
in Ain, that department of France which borders part of
the west of Switzerland. The household of which he
was a member was made up of strange contrasts and
resemblances, full of pleasant lights and shadows, with
much of what may be named moral picturesqueness.
The father, Jerome Quinet, a commissaire des guerres
under the Republic and during the first years of the
Empire, was an austere man, undemonstrative, some-
what exacting, impatient of contradiction, one who did
not receive or give caresses, and who kept his children
at a distance from him by his looks, and words, and
bearing. The gaze of his large, blue eyes imposed
restraint with sileiit authority. His mockery, the play
of an intellect unsympathetic by resolve and upon
principle, was freezing to a child, and the most dis-
tinct consciousness which his father's presence produced
in the boy was the assurance that he, Edgar, was
infallibly about to do something which would cause
displeasure. A just, upright, and humane man, of a
strong and penetrating intellect, passionately devoted to
the study of science, and much occupied about a great
work on the Magnetic and Atmospheric Variations of
the Globe, of which only the preface ever came to be
written and published. To a child such an austere
personality is at least an impressive spectacle, though its
meaning cannot be truly interpreted until later years.
Edgar Quinet. 361
Jerome Quinet was not much more than a spectacle to
the children, The education both of head and heart he
entrusted wholly to their mother. And in so doing he
acted wisely. Madame Quinet was a person of a rare
and admirable nature. From the eighteenth century
and French society of the old regime she inherited her
clear and lively intelligence, curious and intrepid in the
world of ideas, her instinctive elegance, her gaiety and
graceful archness. A Protestant education at Geneva
had strengthened her understanding and established her
principles ; and if, being born in a time when every one
did not find it essential to his particular happiness to
possess " the Infinite," she could not fully enter into the
new passion for reverie, melancholy, and despair, she
nevertheless gave away her heart in sacred enthusiasm
' to whatever in the world was great and honourable. Is
there any happiness or good fortune for a child compar-
able to the presence of such a woman ?
A third important figure in the household was Edgar's
paternal grandmother. In her 'rigidity of character she
resembled his father. Many of her early years had been
passed in a convent, and when she left it she brought
away with her an unlimited faith in severe discipline.
It was a domestic regulation instituted after her
marriage, that twice a week one of the gardes de ville
should pay a domiciliary visit to chastise the three
children ; if they had not been naughty the punishment
might be referred to the account of future crimes.
Jerome Quinet had run away from this disciplinarian
home, and enrolled himself among the volunteers of '92.
His Protestant bride did not please her mother-in-law,
362 Edgar Quinet.
j
and when the younger Madame Quinet called after the
wedding to pay her respects, and chanced to inquire the
subject of a picture of Christ which hung where it could
not be very clearly seen — " It is a God, madam, with
whom you are not acquainted," replied the inflexible
voice of the elder lady. Edgar's birth effected the
reconciliation which this severely orthodox speech had
rendered necessary. But the terrible grandmother was
vulnerable upon one side ; she had an exquisite sensibility
to beauty. No servant could hope for an engagement
under her, whose face did not possess at the least a
regular outline. She was eager in her interest about
paintings and engravings ; and the quintessence of beauty
in words, some pure and perfect chrysolite of speech,
would compel sudden and abundant tears. Goethe in
his old age declared that he had ceased to be able to
weep for the sorrows of men, but that in the presence of
anything supremely beautiful he could not maintain his
composure.
A little sister, younger than Edgar Quinet, something
feebler than himself, something to protect as well as love,
and an aunt (sister of Jerome Quinet), completed the
home circle. Their mother's strictness had produced
upon this aunt and upon her brother results precisely
opposite. With her it was a matter of conscience to
spoil all children, and her nephew in chief. She had
discovered that children are always good when they get
everything they ask for, and are allowed to do everything
they like. It was her ambition to be the boy's playfellow,
or rather plaything, and when, after having as ox in
harness ploughed her tyrant's little piece of land, she
Edgar Qiiiuet. 36
1
would come and inquire, "Do you love me ?" the answer
" People ought to love everybody/' made her entirely
happy, and was cherished by her as adorable.
In such an environment of various human influence,
the child grew. Out-of-doors there was another in-
fluence, constant, penetrative, and enveloping him on
every side. Quinet, in his first period of authorship,
a disciple of Herder, and at all times ascribing to the
surrounding external nature a preponderant share in the
determination of a people's highest thoughts and feelings,
himself experienced in sovereign degree the dominion of
these natural forces. From Bourg, the family moved to
a country property which had been for three centuries in
their hands. To the west of Certines spread extensive
forests of oak, and great ponds, over which the mists
would linger ; eastward the sun rose above the first range
of the Jura and the Alps, distant not a league ; between
the mountains and the forests spread a great plain,
cultivated in some places, but for the most part wilder-
ness, where nature had her way : " a horizon of peace,
eternal silence ; an air — that of the Maremma — full of
languor." Upon a rise of ground in the midst of this
ocean of grass, and broom, and brushwood, stood
the house of the Quinets, a very old house, hidden like
a nest in the centre of apple-trees and cherries, walnuts,
poplars, and acacias — one of the secretest spots in France.
The summer sun beat fiercely on the open plain ; after
harvest and the early autumn rains, the air was full of
a dull suspended poison, and annually came the fever,
which, with the children, was quickly recognised as a
presiding power or numen of the place. " The first time
364 Edgar Quinet.
I saw a butterfly trail upon the ground with quivering
wings, I cried aloud, believing it had the fever." There
was a charm of desolation around, which affected the
imagination more than could the well-to-do cornlands
and fat pasturage of a more favoured region. Nature
stood naked in her primitive poverty making her appeal :
nor could she fail to gain a power over the heart by her
mere importunity of woe, her beseeching sadness,
together with her curious refinement and beauty, which
showed through the beggars weeds. " They accuse me,"
writes Quinet, "of vagueness, of Germanism. Why do they
not also accuse places and things, uncertain sounds, the
boundless sweeps of land, the mists and clouds, those
veiled and wandering daughters of our subterranean
lakes ? These were my true accessories and accomplices.
It was much that I escaped without a sick and dizzy
brain."
The boy did not remain an altogether passive denizen
of this primitive nature ; he went forth with his father
to subdue the land. But the utilitarian prospects
of draining operations were too remote from his childish
faculty of vision to engage him with much ardour in the
work, and the oxen, with their patient resoluteness of toil,
seemed nearer to him than his father, the superior alike
of him and them. Much, however, was to pass into him,
and abide with him on spring mornings from his
mother's presence moving graciously among her flowers,
and hives, and blossomed fruit-trees. " I hear it day
after day repeated that natural religion cannot be a
livino - religion, that it leaves human nature without
support or stay. I at least may say that I have seen a
Edgar Quinet. 365
very real exception." From his mother, with no
dogmatic system of instruction, he somehow received the
idea of an Almighty Father, who always sees us and
watches over us. " To obtain wisdom it was necessary
to pray to him, and we prayed together, my mother and
I, wherever the occasion arose, in the fields, in the
woods, in the garden, in the orchard, but never at fixed
periods. . . . These prayers were conversations in the
presence of God, upon all that concerned us, her and me,
most nearly. It was our daily life each day laid bare
before the great eye-witness." The religion of his
mother remained to the end the religion of Edgar
Quinet.
Racine, as might be expected, was a favourite with
Madame Quinet, and upon his return from the fields, her
little son would recite Eliacin to her Athalie, whose
tirades she delivered with terrible seriousness. Rousseau
and Chateaubriand she disliked and feared ; the senti-
mentality of the one repelled her, and her luminous
good-sense could not away with the romantic theology of
the Genie du Christianisme. When the boy inquired
of his mother who was the cleverest person in the
world, she answered with no hesitation, " An old gentle-
man named M. de Voltaire." Him like the light she
loved, and mother and son studied him together. Here,
again, to her rightness of perception was due an early
impression which Edgar Quinet's subsequent studies and
meditations made permanent. It has constantly been
his endeavour to preserve unbroken the tradition of
French literature. His article, " Des Epopees Franchises
Inedites du XIP Siecle " (which originally appeared in
^66 Edgar Qirinet.
o
the year 1831, in L'Avenir, the journal conducted by
Lamennais), is acknowledged to have been that which
gave the first impulse to the movement of inquiry into
the trouvere poetry, which has since been prosecuted
with so much zeal and with results so precious. His
" Merlin," a modern epic of ideas in the same copious
style as the old epics of events, connects the literature
of the present with the poetry of the twelfth century.
But although belonging as a poet essentially to the
romantic school in its assertion of the new powers, and
rights, and immunities of art, and thus owning no
allegiance to the sovereignty of Boileau, the author of
" Ahasuerus " and "Merlin" never joined the romanticists
in their repudiation of the ancestral glory derived from
the age of Louis XIV. In that age he found revealed
" the very genius of France." The poetical faith and
practice of Racine, Corneille, Moliere, and Boileau
effected a revolution, which abolished the feudal and
ecclesiastical art of the middle ages long before the
revolution of 1789 came to complete the overthrow of
mediaeval institutions, political and social. He looked
upon the men of letters of the classical period, eminently
monarchical though they were, as fellow-labourers for
France with the men of the republic and with himself.
He held that the romantic school of the present century,
if indeed faithful to the past, was bound to be neither
mediaeval nor monarchical, but modern. And as Quinet
thus strove to save the tradition of French letters, so in
matters of thought it is his high distinction that, while
belonging entirely to the spiritualist rather than the
sensualist school, he never decried the eighteenth century,
Edgar Qtiinet. 367
nor failed to perceive, as so many failed, that our own
age is in the truest sense daughter of that which im-
mediately preceded it, that there has been development
indeed, but no breach of continuity. Profoundly opposed
to Voltaire in some of his most central articles of faith —
referring, for example, religions for their origin to the
total of man's nature turned in a certain direction,
whereas Voltaire referred them to its most superficial
and ignoble parts — he nevertheless always continued to
share his mother's high esteem of the " old gentleman
M. de Voltaire," honouring him as the defender of a
faith more catholic than that of Catholicism, more
Christian than that of any then existing Christian
church.
The name of Napoleon was never uttered by the
elders of the Quinet household. The ex-commissaire
des guerres, a man of the revolution, proud, possessed
of an unbounded faith in his own power of will, and yet
for long a very reed in the hand of the Emperor, could
not forgive him for his resistless exaction of obedience ;
" he detested him as a free soul might detest destiny,"
and he even grew to despise him. To his wife Napoleon
appeared as the miner of her country's liberties, and she
had further a special womanly grudge against him for
his banishment of Madame de Stael, whom she had
known in her youth, whose writings she much admired,
and whose exile she resented as a personal injury. But
it was impossible that the boy should not hear of
.Napoleon, and to hear was enough to fire his imagina-
tion, and transform him forthwith into a Bonapartist.
All he ever got by his Napoleon- worship was the honour
1
68 Edgar Quinet.
of being the one to furnish a tricolour cockade to the
leader of a body of soldiers, who had refused to follow
their officers against the fugitive from Elba. Perhaps a
boy's pride and joy in such a moment may be equivalent
to the sorrow of such nineteen years of banishment as
those which Quinet suffered at the hands of Napoleon's
nephew. His parents judiciously abstained from fanning
the flame of this childish enthusiasm by combating it ;
but they sought in every way to inspire him with an
ardent love of freedom. By degrees the cult of Napoleon
became less constant and less devout, the critical faculty
began to play upon the Napoleon legend ; liberty be-
came every day more clearly worthy of a man's supreme
devotion, and at last the image of Napoleon faded out of
sight, until after many years it reappeared first to the
imaginative vision, when the legend was accepted as the
subject of a national poem, and again to the scrutinising
gaze of the historian, when Quinet, moved on behalf of
the honour of Ney, and a resident in the neighbourhood
of the last scenes of the Emperor's public career, wrote
his admirable "Campaign of 1815."
Suddenly, through a moral crisis, and one act of
strenuous and continued self-control, the boy became a
man. Quinet confesses that he can no more assign a
date to his first love of woman than to his becoming
aware of the being of God. A train of enchanting forms
moved amidst his memories of childhood, until the
remotest figures fade into the dawn of infancy. Early
among them was that unapproachable rope-dancer, whom
he had seen performing perilous equestrian feats. Near
her appears an Iphigeneia, whom fate for a time compelled
Edgar Quinet. 369
to be one of the interpreters of Racine among a com-
pany of strolling players, not less inaccessible than the
danseuse, nor less an object of wonder and of worship.
Later came a schoolfellow's sister, the counterpart of
Raphael's belle Jardiniere, loved with a perfect love,
which for its period of two years needed no sustenance
but the consciousness of unimagined self-surrender. But
these passions, with no pain in them, were to give way
before a tyrannous desire which it was a matter of life or
death to yield to or subdue. In the neighbourhood of
the Quinets dwelt a family allied not remotely to a royal
house, but fallen into circumstances which were the
reverse of affluent. The head of the house was a young
man who had seen something of the world, but who found
his purest happiness in the solitary study, favoured by
this provincial retirement, of his favourite Greek authors.
His two sisters were aged respectively eighteen and
sixteen. " The younger was in features and in form of
correctest symmetry, with the beauty of an antique
statue, a profile altogether Roman, eyes that did not
move, but gleamed under heavy lashes ; a brow some-
what low, laden with hair black as ebony, the tresses of
which were coiled and knotted in sculpturesque masses ;
the head of an Agrippina, created for a diadem, large
rather than small ; the neck of a swan, a proud bearing,
her complexion sombre, and like that of a foreign person.
Her name, Roman like herself, signified beauty
She inspired me with a kind of terror, as if I had seen a
statue move." It soon appeared that there was little
moral resemblance between Edgar and this Roman beauty.
Nevertheless, as the statue of one of the fallen gods might
2 A
<1
70 Edgar Quinet.
have compelled to idolatry some Christian of the second
or third century, her mere beauty tyrannized over his
feelings. He perceived that he could never freely and
joyously bestow his love upon her ; he resolved that he
would deliver his soul. A long and obstinate struggle
ensued, and when he had achieved his freedom, he knew
that he was no longer a boy.
Towards the successful issue of this struggle, absence
at the College de Lyon, and solitude occupied with hours
of earnest study, rendered opportune assistance. There,
in a tiny closet, of which he was fortunate enough to
obtain sole possession, Quinet devoured every piece of
Latin literature and history upon which he could lay
hands. Tacitus and Gregory of Tours had an interest
for him superior to that of all other prose writers. " It
was not only on account of that which is ordinarily
sought for in Tacitus, the secret of a tyrant's soul. I
found in him something which touched me more nearly
— the recital of what I myself had witnessed — the
catastrophes and falls of empire. . . . The Hundred
Days reappeared in the rapid lives of Galba and of Otho."
In Gregory he saw again Attila, the Goths and Visigoths
whom he had seen before in the invasions of 1814 and
1815, and who had dared to set on fire a portion of the
buildings at Certines.
The call to authorship in Quinet's case, as in many
others, was heard at first somewhat faintly and uncer-
tainly ; but it was heard, and in due time faithfully
obeyed. He has described, in a remarkable passage of
his incomplete autobiography, the condition of letters in
France after the fall of the empire, and before the new
1
Edgar Quinet. 371
ways in literature and philosophy had been opened. On
every side, in poetry, in philosophy, there was a great
void. The spiritual world seemed to have grown sterile;
in reality there was a stirring underground of pushing
roots and buds, an obscure but abundant vegetation. "I
was then grievously distressed by my own impotence,
and, I may add, by the impotence of the time ; for
nowhere around me could I see a guide in whom I could
trust, nor even any companion in the path upon which I
feared and longed immediately to set forth. . . . My
own ailment and that of the time was the very reverse
of lassitude and satiety. It was rather a blind eagerness
for life, a feverish expectancy, a premature ambition
towards achievement, a kind of intoxication caused by
the new wine of half-conceived ideas, an ungovernable
thirst of the soul after the desert of the Empire. All
this, added to a consuming desire to produce, to create,
to do or make something in the midst of a world still
void. Those whom I have questioned concerning the
years of which I speak, have assured me that they
experienced something like this. Each believed himself,
as I did, to be alone."
Never was this sense of solitude more happily removed
than it was from the heart of Quinet ; not merely by
the general stir of intellectual life, which quickly made
itself heard, but by the commencement of a comradeship
with one whose beliefs were the same as his, who loved
and hated the same things, and who was pushing forward
with equal eagerness in the same direction. It was at
the house of Cousin that Edgar Quinet, at the age of
twenty-two, first made the acquaintance of Michelet.
-J
372 Edgar Qtrinet.
The friendship, altogether noble, which had its beginning
in 1825, never experienced interruption. It is a cir-
cumstance worth observing, that the entrance into the
literary world of each of these distinguished writers
should have taken place in the same year, and under
circumstances almost identical. Michelet appeared as
the translator of the Italian Vico, the thinker who first
attempted to rise from the crude theological dogma
which Bossuet and others had applied to universal
history, to something like a scientific treatment of the
subject. Quinet appeared as the translator of the Ger-
man Herder's ideas upon the philosophy of history. The
capital idea of Vico, that the conception of God is the
formative principle of society, and that the peculiarities
of that conception determine the peculiarities of civil
and political institutions, underlies much that Quinet has
written, and explains his often-expressed dissatisfaction
with all political revolutions which are not preceded by,
or accompanied with, revolutions in religion. In Herder,
" the Herodotus of universal history," as Quinet has
happily styled him, he found an interpretation, made in
the interests of philosophy, of his personal feeling
acquired at Certines with respect to the dominant influ-
ence of the phenomena of external nature — the milieu
in which man finds himself, and to which his conceptions
instinctively adapt themselves — in determining the forms
of thought, emotion, and imagination characteristic of
individuals and of races. Prolonged intimacy with
Herder's ways of thinking, such as the translation of a
large work necessarily implies, was doubtless not without
its effect in developing Quinet's natural tendency towards
Edgar Quinet. 373
comprehensive views of things, which, while keeping
under observation details, so that any one of them may
at will be interrogated, regard as primary object the
large totality, and value the part less for its own sake
than because it is a fragment of the whole. These larges
pensees $ ensemble not only preside over the most remark-
able of Quinet's prose works, but assign to his poems their
peculiar position in French literature of the present
century. There is much in them that might be described
as the philosophy of universal history rendered into the
forms of the imagination.
This sketch of the life of Quinet, which has had more
reference to the growth of his ideas than to the external
incidents of his career, has reached a point beyond that
at which his fragment of autobiography closes. From
the publication of the " Herder" onwards, his life is not
hidden ; it lies exposed in a score of volumes, which in
his case we name, with an application of the word more
precise than in most other cases, his works. For record
of events apart from these, let the following briefest note
suffice.
In 1827, the year in which his "Herder" appeared,
we find him at Heidelberg, in close connection with the
most celebrated men of the University, with Creuzer in
particular, whose interpretations of the symbolism of
ancient religions possessed for Quinet the deepest in-
terest. A tour in Greece undertaken shortly after, as
member of the scientific commission which accompanied
the French army, gave occasion to his " Grece Modern e
et ses Rapports avec l'Antiquite." This was the first
of an important portion of his writings, consisting of
374 Edgar Quinet.
works produced at distant periods, but all having the
common object of determining the true character of the
nationalities of Europe, and of arousing to quicker life
the consciences and wills of kindreds of men whom blood
and country had made one. Quinet's democracy is
never in conflict with his feeling of nationality. In her
vain striving after cosmopolitanism, first through her
Pagan Empire, and again through her Christian Papacy,
he recognised the secret of Italy's decrepitude. All his
hopes for her were centred in the rare and hurried throbs
and the sudden hectic flushes of national life which were
still at times discernible. The rights of man, he never
failed to perceive, were massed and consolidated in the
rights of nations. The years from 1830 to 1838 were
fully occupied with the production of a series of poems,
criticisms of literature, essays on the philosophy of re-
ligions and societies, and occasional political pamphlets.
In 1838, Quinet was a23pointed Professor of Foreign
Literatures of the Faculty of Letters at Lyons. Lectures
delivered in that city formed the material out of which
he afterwards constructed his " Genie des Religions."
Three years later, he was advanced to the chair of
Southern Literature in the College de France. His
friend Michelet and the Polish poet Mickiewicz were
among his colleagues. Free handling of Roman Catholic
dogmas and institutions, more especially in his course
of lectures upon Ultramontanism, and that entitled
" Christianity and the French Revolution," in which he
courageously demonstrated the irreconcileable opposition
between Catholicism and the principles upon which
modern society is founded, led to a struggle with the
;
Edgar Quinet. 375
authorities, terminating in Quinet's resignation ; and, on
the part of the students, in a demonstration in his favour
of the most enthusiastic kind.
These events took place under the government of
Louis-Philippe. Quinet never loved the ascendancy of
the Paris bourgeois, and the great god, Capital ; and
when 1848 arrived, he was one of the first, musket in
hand, to enter the Tuileries. Almost immediately after
the revolution he was restored to his professorship, and
was sent by his native department to the National
Assembly. During the sessions of the Constituent and
the Legislative bodies, he especially concerned himself
with the questions of religion and public education, and
that of the enfranchisement of Italy. In December,
v) 1851, Edgar Quinet became an exile. He bore away
with him to Brussels the manuscript of his drama Les
Esclaves, perhaps the most artistic of all his poetical
writings, and henceforth his days and nights were de-
voted to uninterrupted study. First in Belgium, and
afterwards in Switzerland, at Veytaux, hard by Chillon,
Quinet dwelt. His chief works, "La Revolution," "Mer-
lin," and " La Creation," are among the fruits of exile.
Watching with a gaze of unceasing concern the progress
of events in France, at length he saw the day of deliver-
ance come. Upon the downfall of the third Napoleon,
Quinet, with Hugo and others, hastened to Paris. During
the five months of the Prussian siege, he endeavoured to
breathe a spirit of enthusiasm into the defenders of his
country. Subsequently, as a member of the Assembly,
his energies were devoted to sustaining and directing
the Republic in her days of weakness, while in the region
-}76 Edgar Quinet,
o/
of thought he found a new German invasion to resist —
the pessimist philosophy of Schopenhauer and E. von
Hartmann. Quinet died in May 1875, and his funeral
had something of the character of a political demonstra-
tion. The monument which his admirers have decided
to erect to his memory is a complete national edition of
his writings, and two interesting volumes of letters ad-
dressed to his mother have already appeared.*
The first word of criticism which the poetical works of
Edgar Quinet suggest, — a really important word, although
to utter it does not imply profound critical insight, — is,
that they are very large. "Ahasuerus" would have sup-
plied a mediaeval guild with performances for many days.
" Merlin," with its twenty-four books, and nine hundred
pages, rivals in copiousness the trouvere romances. " I
feel lost in my work," said its author, speaking of this
poem, "like a bird in a cathedral." And the reader
also feels sometimes lost. Like the cathedral, to which
Quinet happily compares it, the romance possesses, no
doubt, a definite plan ; but as the feeble human creature,
with sense of diminished size, wanders from aisle to aisle,
and chapel to chapel, and sees overhead a world of clasp-
mo- columns and foliaged tracery, it strikes him as a plan
capable of indefinite extension. Everything centres
confessedly around the God-man created on the altar ;
but it does so rather to the eye of faith than of sense.
In the present century, — this sad, distracted age, which,
according to the theory, cannot possibly find musicallest
* For a more detailed account of the events related above in brief
summary, see "Edgar Quinet, sa Vie et son CEuvre," by M. Chassin.
The analyses, in the same volume, of Quinet's works are readable, and
entirely trustworthy.
Edgar Qumet. $77
utterance, but which, according to the facts, has had
more of genuine song in it than any other age known to
literary history, — that a poet should not have written
lyrical poetry is itself something distinguishing. And
certainly, it is a distinction which does not help to
popularity. We find it pleasant to be lured on by flying
song, which begins, and ceases, and begins again, into
the heart of a poet's world of fancy. He who bids us
gird up our loins for the serious undertaking of a lengthy
epic or drama upon simple faith in his promise of reward
asks a good deal. Quinet has written nothing which is
a song and no more. A certain lyrical gift he un-
doubtedly possesses ; passages of the "Prometheus" and
the " Merlin " decisively prove this. But on the whole,
his preoccupation with ideas is excessive. He does not
" Sing because he must,
And pipe but as the linnets sing."
He has a great company of thoughts, and requires
space to deploy them ; he has a view to present ; he is
not quite free from the bondage of a theory ; he generally
knows too well what he means ; one has an uncomfort-
able suspicion that one has to do with a doctrinaire poet.
Yet Quinet's instinct or deliberate judgment determined
rightly his choice and treatment of the subjects of poetry.
He has succeeded in occupying a province of his own.
As a lyrical poet he would have failed to make his voice
heard by a generation whose ears were filled with the
strong harmonious clamour of Hugo's chords, and the
charm, vague yet not without a power of sweet coercion,
of Lamartine's tender elegiac strain.
378 Edgar Quinet.
The ode and the elegy Quinet found already made
their own by these and other masters of verse. The
drama of action and conflicting individual human
character was also theirs. What remained ? The
modern epic and the drama, not of action but of ideas.
The romantic school had restored to French literature,
and renewed the tragedy and the ode ; the types of these
in the past they left to the past. " Cromwell " was far re-
moved from "Phedre;" the ode of Lamartine was not the
ode of Jean -Bap tiste Rousseau. Quinet conceived that,
in like manner, the epic should reappear in a new form.
It was sown a natural body, it should be raised a spiritual
body ; previously it had celebrated the achievements of a
hero or a people, and represented the civilisation of a
definite period ; now the human race itself must become
the hero, and its achievements in all time the epical
action. Such, it seemed to Quinet, must be the epic of
a democratic age. In a great democracy the aristocratic
ideal is replaced by one different, but not less truly an
ideal ; no single person is pre-eminently interesting or
important, and therefore no individual hero can be the
subject of a poem ; the entire nation, or humanity itself,
becomes the central figure, around which the forces of
the past and of the future group themselves as allies or
antagonists. Thus it is with Quinet's poems ; and in
this respect, and in the forward gaze into coming time,
which is discernible in them, they possess characteristics
of the art which is proper to a democracy. What we
miss in some of them is reality. They seem to proceed
less from a near and real fellowship with the people's
life, less from the democratic instincts and ardours, than
Edgar Quinet. 379
from certain philosophies of universal history, and certain
democratic views and theories. The singing robes of the
poet somehow show beneath them the lecture-gown of
the professor.
But how is this hero, the human race, to be poetically
represented ? By an imaginative type or symbol. In
" Ahasuerus," the familiar figure of the wandering Jew,
weary traveller throughout all lands, throughout all ages,
is seized on as an appropriate representative of mankind.
More than three thousand years have passed since the
trumpet sounded for judgment in the Valley of Jehosh-
aphat. The Eternal Father announces in heaven his
intention of creating a new earth, possessed by a race of
new beings, formed of better-tempered clay. The saints,
by virtue of their long experience of good and evil, are
to be appointed its guardians. But first, that they may
grow in knowledge and wisdom, they shall see played
before them, as a four-days' mystery, the whole story of
the old earth, which they once knew. This mystery,
which is performed by the seraphim, is the poem
"Ahasuerus." It is a vast design; all persons, and things,
and times, and places are at the poet's disposal, to be
made use of as he wills. It is, as M. Chassin has named
it, the epopee of Progress. The mystery is followed by
an epilogue. Christ, grown old, and doubting who or
what he is, lies down beneath the vault of heaven, about
to expire. "It is finished," is again uttered by his lips.
He is once more placed in the sepulchre ; and, as the
drama closes, Eternity abides alone. This epilogue,
which has been pronounced by some critics the last word
of despair, is precisely the contrary. Christ is indeed
8o Edgar Quinet.
in the tomb, but we are not left without a prophecy that
a morning will come of resurrection, when Christ shall
rise greater in stature by twenty cubits.
The same thought which is uttered in the last words
of "Ahasuerus" reappears in the "Prometheus," in more
ambiguous speech. The Titan is again humanity, but
humanity in its religious aspect. He who has created
and breathed life into a new race, who has possessed
himself of sacred fire, who is filled with an enthusiasm
of love, and who sees into the heart of future years,
is made captive by the unjust strong gods of circum-
stance. Chained to the rock, at first his resolution
is that of faith ; a faith in his own visions of things
to come, for has he not beheld the image of
another great One, crucified, not on Caucasus but
Calvary, before whom the gods of Olympus shall perish ?
But, as ages roll by, and he is forgotten of all men,
and still the chains are strict and the vultures cruel,
Prometheus sinks into a resolvedness of dull despair,
and neither sees the future, nor can remember the great-
ness of his past, nor anything of what he was. When
the times have been fulfilled, Michael and Raphael
appear to release the ancient saviour of mankind. The
Christ is come. The old gods appear before Prometheus,
and are dismissed, howling, into night. But the Titan —
is it weariness, or is it a questioning hope ? — even on
his wav to the presence of Jehovah is not as the arch-
angels are, all radiance and love ; he who has known
the former rulers of things, and has seen the heavens
unpeopled, cannot be entirely sure that the dynasty of
God and his Christ is the last.
Edgar Quinet. 381
One great figure, who shall be the utterer of the
author's thoughts and feelings, his beliefs and doubts, his
fears and hopes, stands central in each of his poems,
" Ahasuerus," "Prometheus," "Merlin." It will be sur-
mised that the hero of his last and largest poem is
other than the Merlin who was counsellor of Arthur
and the beguiled of Vivien. In the forefront of his
work Quinet announces that in this romance he has
attempted to open " new routes for the imagination,"
and that in no other work has he put so much of
himself. It could not be the bard and wizard of
the mediaeval tales whom he made the companion of
seven years. " Merlin," if in many parts the delight
of the reader, is certainly the despair of the critic.
It is a vast invention, allying itself to the whole world
of reality and of imagination. The variety is equal to
the vastness ; one looks back upon it as an old man looks
upon a busy and changeful lifetime. The symbolism is
of a Protean kind ; we lay hold of a snake or pard, and
sudden water glides from between our fingers. What is
Merlin ? The human soul, and that which is highest in
it, imaginative genius ; the world's enchanter and prophet ?
Yes, but he is also the genius of the French nation, and
moreover he is sometimes Edgar Quinet. What is signi-
fied by his imprisonment in the magic tower of Vivien ?
Many things which it were not wise to name too definitely,
and one thing for certain — the disappearance of the poet
in the great grave of exile, where yet he lived and wrought
his chief enchantments. " Do not exhaust your brain in
searching for riddles," advises the author ; but he flashes
his meaning in the reader's eyes, and withdraws it, and
382 Edgar Quinet.
flashes it again, in a way most certain to pique his
curiosity.
M. fimile Monte'gut assures us that " Merlin ' is
an essay towards " ideal history ; " the history, that is,
not of events as they actually were, but of the powers
and tendencies of which events have been only the
inadequate expression. This is no doubt true, but the
romance is also an ideal autobiography, written directly
out of personal experiences. It is certain, as Quinet has
said, that this work contains more of himself than any
other. " Merlin " is the legend of all his thoughts. In
the earlier poems he is grave ; he approaches his own
ideas with an air of exaltation and lofty responsibility ;
his utterance is elevated, and in the "Ahasuerus" we
feel that its monotony of measured prose is sometimes
disagreeably artificial. In " Merlin " the writer is grave
and playful by turns ; he approaches his ideas with an
air of familiarity ; the style is many-coloured — elevated
or easy, plain or fantastic, narrative, lyrical, descriptive,
as suits the occasion. And this familiarity with his
ideas, and the casting-off of too curious responsibility,
makes it possible for him to set before the reader not
only his assured convictions and carefully verified views
of things, but to play, as Goethe does in his second part
of " Faust," with every imagination of truth, every sur-
mise, and anticipation and half-hope or fear, every con-
ceit that may turn out a law, every dream which may-
be proved a prophecy, every faint reminiscence which
may be a fragment of history.
One of the immense designs of Quinet had been to
write an universal history of religious and social re-
Edgar Quinet. 3S3
volutions. It was not to be expected that such a design
could be accomplished as a continuous work ; but the
conception of it served to import a wider tendency,
and fuller significance than they would otherwise have
possessed, into many writings which treat of particular
periods and groups of events. " Le Genie des Religions,"
"Les Jesuites," "L'Ultramontanisme," "Le Christianisme
et la Revolution franchise," " Marnix de Sainte-Alde-
gonde," " Examen de la Vie de Je'sws," and, finally, his
great work, " La Revolution," may be considered frag-
ments of an unfinished whole.
One central thought controls and directs them all —
that the principles of civil society, and of religious
society, are not, as Montesquieu represents them, cor-
relative principles upon an equal and independent foot-
ing, and exercising upon each other no influence of a
constant and regular kind, but that, on the contrary, the
religious idea underlies and gives its peculiar character
to the political and social idea. Quinet, however, does
not fall into the error of accepting the creeds and the
churches as interpreters of the religious idea, in periods
when they failed to express the highest thoughts of man,
and the most ardent longings of his soul. He hopes
little for Europe of the present day, until there be
effected an absolute severance of Church from State ;
because religion — the noblest desires and best ideas of
men — has been driven from the Church to take refuge
in the world. Not " the holy Catholic Church, . . .
the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting,"
are the objects of our highest spiritual hopes, and matter
of our wisest thought, but rather justice as the rule and
n
84 Edgar QuineL
principle of all arrangements of society, and charity
to be incarnated in the real world — a materialising and
organisation of the sentiment of the brotherhood of men
As it is prophesied of the Christ in the epilogue to
" Ahasuerus," so in actual event, the Christ buried in the
tomb of the eighteenth century rose in 1789 greater by
twenty cubits. Shall we weep above the napkin and
linen clothes, or come forth and, rejoicing with fear,
watch the breaking of the Easter Day ?
Through all Quinet's studies upon religion, nothing is
more observable than his power of soft and sure penetration,
like that of serene light, through the letter to the spirit,
from the form to that which the form indeed signifies.
His own genuine spiritual nature has a natural affinity
with spiritual truth ; it seems as if he could go wrong
only by denying part of himself. For him the religions
of the past do not consist of idle mythologies and insig-
nificant ceremonial ; they are quick and moving thoughts
of men, and worshippings in spirit and in truth. He
arrives at his results less by an application to the past
of the modern intellect and erudition, than by seeking
within himself, and finding there the moral basis, still
present and not lifeless in each of us, of the ancient
faiths. This power of pressing gently and surely inward
to the heart of things spiritual, serves no less for the
discovery of evil than of good. Through bland faces of
fraud he sees the foul soul within, and its eager and
pitiless outlook ; through chanting of holiest creeds and
prayers he hears the wolfish cry of blind mouths for
human flesh and blood ; through the robes of the
doctor who teaches wisdom higher than that of this
Edgar Quinet. 385
world, he sees the fingers holding tight the key of
knowledge, which they have taken away that no man
may enter in. Quinet, it has been said, was part of the
conscience of a nation ; before him the outward shows of
things moral parted away on this side and on that, and
the living substance was laid bare.
" La Revolution " is Quinet's largest and, upon the
whole, his most valuable literary achievement. When a
boy, at the little town, Charolles, he had grown familiar
with the presence of a person who long continued some-
what of a mystery to his childish apprehension. It was
Baudot, a sometime member of the Convention, and one
of the Mountain party. He had been Saint-Just's com-
panion on his mission to the lines of Wissembourg, and
the happy discoverer of Hoche. He usually spent a
couple of hours each day at the house of the Quinets.
He never spoke of the Revolution ; but one day the
boy heard him utter strange words, which left a deep
impression — " Others have a fever of four-and -twenty
hours; mine, madam, lasted ten years." What could
this fever be ? When he inquired, they answered in a
hushed voice, "The Terror." In the year 1838, Quinet
sat by the deathbed of this venerable representative of the
Republic. He said that before he died he wished to
confide to Quinet the volume of his memoirs, in which
would be found a commentary on the acts and most
private thoughts of the several parties of the Convention.
" Grasping me by the arm, and gathering all his strength
into one last gaze, he said, ' Trust me, the first word
of our history has not yet been written. Saint- Just
and I fired the batteries at Wissembourg. We were
2 B
1 86 Edgar Gurnet.
^>
supposed to have deserved much by this. In fact we
did not deserve anything ; we knew perfectly that
bullets could do nothing against us.'" "Whereupon he
was silent, and Quinet took a last leave of him.
The history of the Revolution, long meditated, anc
embodying the results of ten years' active study of the
subject, did not appear until ]S6o. It is a history
which faces two ways ; on the one hand it is what may
be named, using the word in an honourable sense, a
doctrinaire history; that is, the product of ideas. On
the other, it is in the highest degree human, a history of
persons, in which a studious effort is made to restore the
real individuals to the places too long possessed by the
legendary figures of the Revolution. Quinet has shown
at all times a just sense of the importance in literature,
in art, in religion, of personal character. This in great
part it was which moved him to attempt a reply to the
theory first propounded by Yico, and to which at a later
time Wolf gave currency, respecting the authorship of the
Homeric poems, and it was this also which called forth
his " Examen of Strauss's Life of Jesus." We have now
got into the habit of speaking of the legend of Xapoleon.
There was also in France a legend of Robespierre, a
legend of Danton, a legend of the Girondins ; and these
legends escaped criticism by the ascription of all acts at
variance with the popular conceptions of their several
heroes to certain convenient abstractions, the Republic,
the Terror, the Democracy. It has been Quinet's en-
deavour to attribute to each person the actions for which
that person is himself responsible, to apply the scientiiic
spirit to the revolutionary hero-worships and super-
Edgar Quinet. 387
naturalisms, and to avoid taking for granted that, after
the manner of the personages of a stock -piece of classical
tragedy, the same individual must utter the same senti-
ments in the same style from the beginning of the great
drama to its closing scene.
Thus, by his inveterate truth-telling, the author of "La
ReVolution " contrived to offend and alienate not a few of
his admirers of the Liberal party. Indeed, the distin-
guishing characteristic of the book is this : it is the
endeavour of one who has faith in the principles of the
Revolution to show why the Revolution was a failure.
Nothing could be more valuable than such a piece of
searching self-criticism, and nothing was more certain to
be unintelligible to many men, " What ! " they ex-
claimed, " profess himself a man of the Revolution, and
destroy the solidarity of the movement ! Accept this
portion and reject that, as if the Revolution were not one
great whole, a single stupendous fact ? * Quinet per-
ceived that it was a combination of several facts, some of
them facts of a very unlucky kind for the Republic.
Another accusation of an extraordinary nature was made.
A work, one chief object of which was to point out the
causes which led to the break- down of the Revolutionary
movement, could hardly fail to consider the position in
which the men of 1789 and 1793 found themselves
with reference to religion. Quinet, with his established
conviction that a political revolution, if it is to be suc-
cessful, must, of necessity, be founded upon a religious
revolution, certainly could not avoid the consideration ot
this subject. He has discussed it with entire freedom
and candour in two books of his history. He had long
■/
388 Edgar Quinet.
since satisfied himself that no treaty of alliance can
appease the mortal antagonism which exists between
Catholicism and the principles of modern society. And
now he dared to say articulately that a system of policy
which is suicidal is self-condemned ; at the least, if
Liberalism be bound by a fine sense of honour to apply
the aspic of Tiber to its breast, Liberalism must die ;
the worm will do his kind.
So much Quinet maintained, and he ventured to add
that the logic of the Terror was unsound; it rejected the
necessary condition of success. The scaffolds of '93 were
sterile, because the men of '93 had not learned the secret
of their own system, which secret is this : — persecution
to be successful must be complete. If the barbarities of
the sixteenth century were to be restored, why reject the
advantages of the sixteenth century by proclaiming liberty
of worship ? If liberty of worship were to be allowed,
why return to barbarities ? The Revolution became
foster-mother of the counter-revolution. Robespierre
had no courage to be greatly intolerant. It was Yerg-
niaud who declared that the time for religious liberty was
passed.* Naturally, but not the less unfairly, a cry was
raised against Quinet that he had appeared as advocate
of persecution in the "name of freedom. This would have
been strange indeed. Quinet had worked out the pro-
blem of the Terror to a consistent result; but the result
was one which disproved the hypothesis from which it
was deduced. The only solution for our times of the
religious difficulty lies in the separation of Church and
* See the memorable words of Vergniaiul, quoted by Quinet, "La
Revolution," vol. ii. p. 92.
/
Edgar Quinet. 389
State. Three hundred years ago another solution would
have been possible, and if the men of the Republic re-
turned to the methods of three hundred years ago they
were bound to derive from those methods all advantages
which they afford.
A good while before his history of the Revolution had
approached completion, Quinet was projecting a new
undertaking of magnitude, and was already engaged in
collecting materials wherewith to carry it out. When in
the seventh year of his exile he moved from Belgium to
Switzerland he was for some time entirely cut off from
the world of men, and lived in absolute solitude. But
the mountains were with him. At first the presence of
the Higher Alps produced a kind of stupor ; the senses
were overwhelmed ; it seemed beyond the power of
human faculties to compass the vastness of those gigantic
heights. . But by degrees this first impression gave way
to one entirely different. The mind recovered its
independence and eoergy. Instead of expecting passively
the incursion of overmastering sensations, it went forth
to encounter the objects, and subdue, or at least come to
terms with them. In this case the mind was that of a
historian of men, and it soon appeared that mountains
also had their history, and were willing to be gracious to
one who would do them the justice of faithfully recording
t. Nothing could be more delightful to Quinet, nothing
jnore health -bearing to mind and body. Whereupon a
treaty of alliance, with engagements of mutual service,
was concluded between the Alps and their new denizen.
" La Creation," published in 1870, was the outcome of
this alliance.
3qo Edgar Quinet.
The verdict upon a scientific work must be left to men
of science. It may be surmised that there is much in
Quinet' s work which they will set down as hazardous
conjecture, or even illegitimate fancy. The lay under-
standing, without considering particular matters likely to
occasion dispute, has an uncomfortable suspicion that an
intellect trained in historical methods is hardly likely to
accomplish much in a field of observation and thought so
remote from its own as is that of the physical sciences.
But this is precisely what Quinet was most concerned to
deny, and that apart from all reference to himself, upon
the around of a general principle, which is the capital
idea of his treatise. Is not man also a part of nature ?
Does society exist and progress by caprice or by ascertain-
able laws ? Is not history political, social, religious, a
branch of natural history ? Why should not the methods
of inquiry in the study of the lichen, and the mollusc,
and the man be identical ? Why should not the laws
which govern the different provinces of nature, if more
complex in some instances than in others, contain
identical elements, and be capable of affording illumina-
tion one to the other ? Why should not history assimilate
the results of science, and science the results of history ?
In " Merlin," Quinet considered himself an initiator
attempting to open " new routes for the imagination." In
" La Creation " he attempted to open new routes for the
intellect. It seeks first to establish the possibility, and
then to ascertain some of the principles of a new science
founded upon the parallelism of the two kingdoms, of
nature and of man. The laws of society are used as
instruments for the discovery of corresponding laws of
Edgar Quinet. 391
5")
natural history, and vice versa. How far Quinet suc-5 ii_
ceeded, h©w far lie failed, cannot be determined here.
But one thing may be assuredly said, that he did
much to elucidate the indirect, but none the less im-
portant, relations of the scientific movement to con-
temporary modes of thought and feeling. Such indirect
relations are probably perceived more readily and more
clearly by a man of letters than by a man of science,
concerned as the latter is with the attainment of certain
definite truths, rather than with the effects which pro-
ceed from the coalescing of those truths with the general
mind of society. In the seventeenth century the men
of science may not have looked very far beyond the
establishment of the Copernican system of astronomy as
the result of Galileo's inquiries. Those who imprisoned
Galileo knew better how dangerous to old modes of
thought was his revolt against authority, and how old
ways of looking at things must give place to new, if the
earth were reinstated in the heavens from which it had
been exiled, raised to an equality with the skies in which
God lived, and made an equal, but no more than an
equal, with each of its company of brother-spheres.
The indirect results of Darwin's speculations upon our
views of morals and religion can hardly be less important
than the results of Galileo's inquiries two centuries
since. The intellect of Quinet was admirably constituted
or perceiving and comprehending these indirect tenden-
cies of science.
ON SOME FRENCH WRITERS OF VERSE..
1830-1877.
Th£ophile Gatjtter, writing about ten years ago, com-
pared the reader of contemporary French poetry to a
wanderer at spring-time in a wood : — " In the grass,
trodden by few feet, a slender path is discovered ; we
follow its first windings ; upon its edges, below the oaks
and half hidden under last autumn's withered leaves, we
divine by a dim perfume the presence of violets. From
among the branches, through which the wind moves with
a vague murmur, we hear the song of an invisible bird.
It flies at our approach to gain a remoter covert with
sudden stroke of wings. We pluck a few violets, and
muse on the song of the bird, and go forward. But
presently the little wood changes to a forest ; glades open,
carpeted with grass ; rivulets babble around mossy stones,
or lie in rocky basins into w r hich the deer gazes at his
mirrored form. The violets become less shy, and offer
themselves to the hand that gathers. Our tiny nosegay
grows to a sheaf with added lily of the valley, the wilding
rose, and all the tangled bloom of the woods. From
trees, shrubs, thickets, from the forest depths, rise a
thousand voices, which ring together — finches, redbreasts,
the titmouse, the thrush, the blackbird — while in hurried
notes, noisier than the rest some jays and magpies jargon,
On some French Writers of Verse. 39
■5
flinging down their dissonance in midst of the general
harmony." *
It must be confessed, however, that if the singing birds
are many, there are few of sovereign note, and that
rarely is any supreme song audible which makes for
itself a central space of silence. The contemporary poets
of France, setting apart Victor Hugo, are each like one
faculty or one fragment of a great poet. We feel how
absurd it would be to expect from any writer of their
kind a modern "Divine Comedy," a poem rendering into
imaginative form all science, all theology, the best con-
temporary tendencies of art, the most fervid political
passion, the most exalted human love, the clearest vision
of human life, the highest hopes and prophecies of the
future, and at the same time the completest culture and
guidance obtainable from the past. On the contrary,
each writer lives and sings by virtue of some peculiar
strength or grace, and runs the risk of becoming a
specialist in technique. The poets are ready to complain
that the public are indifferent to poetry (though such is
in fact far from being the case) ; some affect to despise
the people and to care only for the judgment of amateurs,
some acquire a genuine disdain of popularity, and each
one ends by writing for a coterie. The coterie consists
of a group of persons who, by exclusive attention to
certain qualities of a work of art, have come to admire
those qualities extravagantly ; the artist who labours for
them abandons the effort toward universality, accepts his
province, and where he has succeeded there he remains.
* " Rapport sur le Progres des Lettres. Publication faite sous les
uspices du Ministere de l'lnstruction Publique " (1868).
<5
O
94 On some French Writers of Verse.
He is tempted to become an imitator of himself, to
reproduce his special effects, to accentuate his peculi-
arities of style. One elects to found his fame upon
melody and colour, one upon his plastic quality, one
upon fidelity to the idea ; this writer excels in sonnets,
and that in triolets ; one is the poet of despair, and
another the poet of joy. In each there is something set,
something prepense, something of parti pris: it calls for
some manliness of character not on all occasions to pose
oneself in the admired attitude.
Victor Huso alone is a master artist — a master artist
with gigantic faults — in all departments. We are
sensible in every line of his that it has been uttered to
an audience of all France, and more than France. His
are the large effects, and spaces, and freedom ; and when
he poses himself it is not with a dainty attitudinising,
but with an extravagance of posture which expects to
justify itself to the sympathy of a vast and excited
crowd. His is the liberal hand which will not be curbed.
Fresco pleases him, nor are the most exquisite refinements
and delicate felicities unsuitable to the artist of large
designs. He works suspended in the dome with fiery
eagerness for the upgazing throng below, the sound of
whose voices and impatient footsteps reaches him only
in a confused murmur. His faults, as well as his ex-
cellences, correspond with his position as of one who is in
presence of a sympathising and credulous multitude ;
when he is not grand he is grandiose ; sometimes he
reminds us of Tintoretto, and sometimes of the Musee
Wiertz ; when he is not a true prophet he is a false one,
but still a prophet : —
On some French Writers of Verse. 395
Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant !
Theirs the Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance,
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat.
Victor Hugo has been and is an enfranchising power in
French poetry. After studying the fine mechanism of
those Parisian toys turned out of the workshops of cele-
brated verse-makers, we lift our eyes and see the great
Alexandrine of Victor Hugo surging and springing, alive
and ashine from crest to hollow, and our pride of petty
perfection is abated : we know ourselves to be encompassed
with the beauty and mystery of life.
No poet has appeared in France since 1830 who has
been able to exercise undisputed sway and bend to
his will the imaginations of all men. At that time
there was a truly national movement in literature,
a movement which brought into harmonious relation
qualities so various as the gracious refinement of Alfred
de Vigny and Hugo's strangeness of splendour, the vague
spiritual reverie of Lamartine and all that was sensuous
and all that was passionate in the heart of Musset. It
was an unlucky name which got attached to these writers
and their fellows — " the Romantic school." There had
been a Romantic school in Germany, which, unable as it
was to win the solid prizes of the world by wrestling for
them with the real forces of nature and of society, had
retreated to a fanciful realm where imaginary treasures
were abundant — treasures of spurious sentiment and
facile marvels of imagination. Some members of the
school had gained a pale aureole around poetic brows
by yielding themselves as sentimental-aesthetic converts
to the Church of Rome. They died and left no seed.
396 On some French Writers of Verse.
Heine, the last of the Romanticists, the first of the
moderns, adorned the crosses of their graves with wreaths
into which flowers of mocking significance were woven, and
strewed blossoms to their memory which held each for
honey in its cup a drop of corrosive irony. Thus the
German Romantic school was impotent, and its fate was
a little piteous. It was by a critical misnomer that the
French movement bore the same name. There was, it
is true, a certain predilection on the part of Hugo and
others for subjects taken from the Middle Ages; there
was at first no direct antagonism to the Catholic Church,
but rather the contrary, and the author of " Odes et
Ballades " delighted to celebrate the baptism of a duke
or the consecration of a king. But these traits were
superficial. The Romantic movement in its essence was
a return to nature and to reality.
In the great age of the Renaissance, in Italy, in Eng-
land, in Flanders, an unbounded interest was mani-
fested by the artists and by their public in classical
mythology ; but Michael Angelo and Titian, and the
English dramatists and Rubens, handled classical myth-
ology with entire freedom, so that in many respects no
art is less like that of Greece than the art of the Renais-
sance. In like manner the medievalism of the French
Romantic school was, in the main, not archaeological nor
sentimental, but modern, passionate, and vital. The
new demands upon art were made in the spirit of frank
self-pleasing. Verse, declared the Romantic leaders, was
no longer to be pronounced good or bad according to the
degree in which it conformed to certain rules that for-
mulated the pleasures of courtiers and persons of quality
On some French Writers of Verse. 397
whose skulls were filled with the dust of two centuries.
New desires have arisen, and it is right that they should
be gratified. Freedom of movement, large chromatic
effects, limitless variety of forms, novel and rich rhymes,
spaces, and colour, and animation delight us, and modern
verse must give us these. Self-contemplation is a
habit of our minds ; we love to utter to ourselves
our joys and griefs, our hopes and fears, our pieties
and sensualities, our aspirations and our declensions,
our loyalties and our treasons, our faiths and our
scepticisms, our heroisms and our weaknesses, our
illusions and our disillusionings ; the ode and the elegy
must expand to receive all these. Our imagination is
capable of audacities ; we as well as Shakspere's
generation can hurry in two hours from event to event
through the crowded incidents of a lifetime, can pass
from city to city and from land to land ; the drama
must recognise such a fact as this, and must modify
itself accordingly.
Such was the spirit of the Romantic movement, and
because, notwithstanding some feverishness and extrava-
gance and folly, it was upon the whole a sane and
vigorous spirit, the Romantic movement throve and bore
fruit. The subsequent lives of the foremost men of that
movement illustrate by undesigned coincidence its true
character. The plaintive lover of Elvire became the
standard-bearer — somewhat consciously chivalrous, it
may be — of the tricolour in 1S48, champion of what sup-
posed itself to be the advanced party of order in opposi-
tion to anarchy on the one hand and reaction on the other.
The royalist odes of Hugo ceased to be written, and
1
98 On some French Writers of Verse.
by a strange series of metamorphoses his poems became
the brief democratic epics of "La Legende des Siecles."
And Sainte-Beuve, ever the one same personality, yet
never in the same position for two successive years, the
sometime disciple of Lamennais in his neo-Catholic
period, and inoculated with fervour and elevation, after-
wards the genial sceptic with certain faiths of his own —
Sainte-Beuve preserved his identity by nothing so truly
as by his capacity for assuming Protean diversities of
form, and no day of his life passed without adding some-
thing to his store of erudition, something to the range
and flexibility of his sympathies, to the refinement of
his perception and the sureness of his tact and taste ; a
man framed for enjoyment, and for toil, to whom every
moment of life was a moment of growth. The leaders
of the French Romantic movement, after their period
of impulsive youth, were still vital and progressive; they
did not shrivel and harden ; they were not disem-
bowelled, and embalmed honourably, and swathed in
the mummy cloth.
" They all come from Chateaubriand," was Goethe's
remark to Eckermann with reference to Victor Hugo
and other French poets of 1827. They all resembled
Chateaubriand at least in this, that in a greater or less
degree all, like him, were sufferers from — or shall we
say enjoy ers of? — the characteristic melancholy of the
nineteenth century (la maladie du siecle), and all, like
him, w T ere prone to self-confession. When Hugo's chords
clashed with less impetuous sound, as when he sang his
Songs of Twilight, the undertone of sadness could be
distinguished. The soul of Lamartine wasted itself in
On some French Writers of Verse. 399
vague yearning for something which should be satisfying,
something beautiful but unattainable as the stars.
Musset cried because his wounds smarted, and because
he was frank and like a child. Sainte-Beuve studied his
ailment with curious interest, and tried all remedies in
turn. Each of these men was healed of his disease —
Lamartine by political activity and ambition, Victor
Hugo by his democratic faith and fervour, Musset by
death, Sainte-Beuve by indulgent time, by manifold
pleasures enriching his nature, and by the happy con-
sciousness of faculties ripening hour by hour.
The self-confession which was the poetical habit of
the Romantic poets in their earlier period was a result
of the expansive character of the movement, which in
this respect carried on the tradition handed down through
Chateaubriand from Rousseau. The greater part of the
poetry which was not strictly dramatic was personal.
The poet was himself the central object of his art ; he
caressed his own emotions, he nourished his reverie, he
lingered long in the company of his sorrows, he was
endlessly effusive. In the ode, the elegy, the sonnet, he
sang himself through all his varying moods. The excess
of this manner, the affectations it induced, and, after
the style had been much cultivated, the banality of
these poetic sorrows and aspirations, inevitably resulted
in a reaction. When the expansive movement had
reached its limit, a movement of concentration, not so
powerful but as real, commenced. Gautier, by his
natural disposition, was less effusive than the rest ; he
was less an emotional egotist, and this circumstance had
unquestionably a share in delaying his popularity as a
4-00 Ou some French Writers of Verse.
poet until the influence of Musset was on the wane. To
Gautier and to Baudelaire there appeared to be some-
thing feminine in Musset's sensibility and his eager
demand for sympathy. They discerned in what was
called the poetry of the heart a certain disorder, an
absence of superintendence, which are contrary to the
true spirit of art. Tt is the imagination, not the
emotions, which possesses plastic power. Full authority
had previously been given to passion, and it had been
represented as infallible ; now it was asserted that the
heart is a secondary and subordinate organ in the artist's
nature. " The heart," says Baudelaire, " contains
passion ; the heart contains devotion, crime ; the imagina-
tion alone contains poetry." " Sensibility of the heart
is not absolutely favourable to the work of a poet.
Extreme sensibility of heart may even be injurious to it.
Sensibility of the imagination is of another kind : it
knows to choose, to judge, to compare, to avoid this, to
seek that, rapidly, spontaneously."
Naturally, as a part of this movement of concentration,
an increased value was set upon the workmanship of
verse, and strict metrical forms — forms not of the old
classical types, but rich, varied, and subtle — began to
replace such nebulous luminosity as was diffused over
many of the pages of Lamartine.
Point de contraintes fausses !
Mais que pour marcher droit
Tu chausses,
Muse, un cothurne e^roit.
The pole opposite to Musset and the poetry of the
heart was reached by neither Gautier nor Baudelaire,
On so7?ie French Writers of Verse. 401
but has perhaps been touched by the one poet who in
recent years has been accepted by a circle of elite readers
as a master, and who is certainly the creator of a style
— Leconte de Lisle. In real life a spirituel irony
suffices to protect his heart ; in his verse, if once and
again a cry for escape from the turmoil of existence into
the irrevocable peace, the great night and silence of
death, forms itself upon his lips, for the most part they
are closed with stoical compression against all utterance
of personal feeling, while with an enforced calm he
proceeds to make his imaginative studies of thoughts
and things.
It is noted by Charles Baudelaire that upon the one
side Gautier continued the great school of melancholy
created by Chateaubriand, and upon the other side " he
introduced into poetry a new element, which may be
named 'consolation by means of the arts." From
Gautier's latest poetry the melancholy has almost dis-
appeared ; the genius of art has subdued the demon of
pain. Thus an escape was effected by him from la
maladie du siecle. Gautier's nature was indeed one
framed for a rich enjoyment of life, but such a nature is
not out of the reach of a nameless enervating sadness.
Gautier, however, possessed an amulet virtuous to repel
the invasion of despondency. If happiness is nowhere
else to be found, it is to be found unfailingly in the
presence, and still more in the creation, of beauty. Let
the world go its way, and the kings and the peoples
strive, and the priests and philosophers wrangle, at least
to make a perfect verse is to be out of time, master of
all change, and free of every creed. Though Gautier's
2 C
402 On some French Writers of Verse.
was a very positive imagination, there is something
almost of the mystic's passion in this devotion to art.
It includes the infinite and absolute of plastic perfection,
of flawless workmanship, which, if endlessly pursued
and never attained, leaves the heart as empty and
yearning as was that of Lamartine in his religious
musings. The combat with rebellious matter, the
struggle to impose upon its shapeless anarchy the pure
idea of the imagination, has the glory of a combat a
outrance. To pursue an outline and never wrong its
delicate, immortal beauty is a kind of religious service ;
to be the guardian of pure contour is to purchase to
oneself a good degree. In the contemplation of a curve,
as in the contemplation of a dogma, it is possible to find
oneself at the last led up to an altitwdo !
Still this devotion to beauty, to beauty alone, or if
not alone yet above all else, was a part of the movement
of concentration. It was a kind of hedonist asceticism.
A cloistered monk engaged in his round of devotions and
mortifications is not more remote from the ideal of sane
and complete manhood than was the cultured master of
the school of art for art, who could isolate himself from
the fears and hopes of his country in her hour of extreme
peril to fuse his enamels and cut his cameos. It is
certainly well, in a period from which great ideas and
large ardours are absent that the aesthetic faculty should
keep itself alive, even if not conscious of its highest
functions, by the pursuit of beauty out of all relation to
conscience, to religion, or the needs and aspirations of a
people. And unquestionably by limiting his range an
artist can more readily approach to a miniature perfection,
On some French Writers of Verse, 403
and can push certain qualities of his work to a higher
degree of development. But the century succeeding the
French Revolution, the century in which science rejoices
as a young man to run a race, is not an age of Byzantine
effeteness and sterility. Persons who do not receive an
exquisite thrill from curious beauty and flawless work-
manship have not a right to speak scornfully of these
things ; but it is possible for one who does receive such
exquisite excitement to refuse himself, for the sake of
better, larger, wiser things to come, some of these
moments of refined delight.
The shelves are crowded with perfumes ;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it, and like it ;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
An artist who should fling himself abroad uj3on the
great hopes and fears, the great strivings and sorrows,
the great deeds and thoughts, of our century, might
indeed suffer as an artist ; his work might come forth as
faulty as that of the early Christian painters, with other
and less engaging tokens of immaturity than their naive
innocence and childlike trustfulness ; but his work, like
" theirs, might prove a prophecy ; and if the name of art
were denied to it, such work might yet be a wind in our
lips, a light in our eyes, more precious for our needs than
anything which in our time can be brought to complete
and flawless form by the plastic imagination.
The counter-tendencies which a young poet meets in
Paris of the Revolution, which contains within it the
Paris of " art for art," are amusingly illustrated in a
recent prose confession of aesthetic faith by M. Raoul
404 On some French Writers of Verse.
Lafagette* The young poet arrived from the provinces
bearing letters of introduction to some great persons,
among others to Eugene Pelletan and Theophile Gautier.
On hearing of manuscript verses, the democratic deputy-
favoured his visitor with & resume of his views on human
progress, which reads like a chapter from the " Profession
de Foi du XIX e Siecle." " Why do you write in verse ?
No one cares for it now. It is little read, and not at all
sold. It is a hieratic form destined to disappear. In
the childhood of humanity verse had its raison d'etre. . .
The first songs are hymns, outbursts of terror or of
enthusiasm. . . . But in our age of sceptical maturity
and republican independence verse is a superannuated
form. We prefer prose, which, by virtue of its freedom
of movement, accords more truly with the instincts of
democracy." Whereupon followed a demonstration of
the same principles from the spectacle of external nature,
in which the crystal is type of the strophe, and "the
masterpiece which dominates this hierarchy" — woman
— with her undulating grace, is the analogue of prose.
M. Lafagette, enlightened but unconvinced, did not tear
up his manuscripts, but carried them a few days after-
wards, with a letter of introduction from George Sand, to
the house of Gautier.
The exquisite jeweller of the "Emaux et Camees" received the
young man with almost paternal kindness, but, when he had read
the two pieces of verse submitted to him by the neophyte, spoke as
follows : — " Your verses are forty years older than yourself. They
are too old, therefore — that is to say, too young. Poets sang in this
* "La Poesie : son Pass6, son Present, son Avenir" (1877). M.
Lafagette's introduction to Gautier and Gautier's daughter is also
described in verse in his " Chants d'un Montagnard."
On some French Writers of Verse, 405
manner in 1830. Nowadays we desire a more compressed, more
concrete, kind of poetry. Lamartine is a sublime bard, but his
vague effusions are no longer to our taste. Musset is a great poet,
but an exceedingly bad model. Read Hugo much, who is the true
master. Read Leconte de Lisle and Theodore de Banville." " And
Theophile Gautier V timidly murmured the visitor. " And me too
a little, if you please to do so," replied Gautier, smiling. " You see,"
he went on, " the arithmetic is in existence : we have not to invent
it ; we have only to learn it. One must learn to be at home in
fugue and counterpoint, and render one's talent supple and limber
by the gymnastic of words. Words have an individual and a
relative value. They should be chosen before being placed in
position. This word is a mere pebble, that a fine pearl or an
amethyst. Do you read the dictionary ? It is the most fruitful
and interesting of books. In art the handicraft is almost every-
thing. Inspiration — yes, inspiration is a very pretty thing, but a
little handle ; it is so universal. Every bourgeois is more or less
affected by a sunrise or sunset. He has a certain measure of
inspiration. The absolute distinction of the artist is not so much
his capacity to feel nature as his power of rendering it. This power
is a gift, but also a conquest. In genius there is as much of science
as of instinct. Your verses are full of imagination and of senti-
ment, but they are deficient in composition. You are a poet, and
must not abandon poetry. Only I advise you to make three or four
thousand verses, and, before you publish anything, burn them."
It is impossible to refuse a certain tribute of admira-
tion to a workman so loyal to his craft. One must needs
sympathise with the ascetic of beauty as well as with the
ascetic of holiness. Would it not be lamentable to see
the author of the "Imitation" losing himself in a bustling
philanthropy, or endeavouring, for the sake of wider
culture, to acquire connoisseurship in the fine arts ?
And should we not have had cause to grieve if Gautier
had taken to the politician's stump or the moralist's
chair % When a man possesses a rare faculty, we like to
see him jealously preserving it. It is good husbandry
for the world to let a poet make verses, and to let a
406 On some French Writers of Verse,
painter paint. There are indeed occasions — occasions
which are the test of highest human virtue — when the
precious vases of a cabinet might well be employed to
feed men and women in a charity soup-kitchen, when a
Begnault must offer his breast to the bullets side by side
with a piece of commonest mortal clay, when all differ-
ences between men are submerged in the flood of our
deep humanity : but such are not ordinary occasions. If
Gautier grows poetical only in presence of certain objects,
and poetry be his highest vocation, we applaud him for
resolutely refusing to look at other things, how interesting
soever to politician or philanthropist. But why did
Gautier grow poetical only in presence of a few selected
and comparatively trivial objects which he called beauti-
ful % The answer is, because Gautier was Gautier, and
not Dante nor Shakspere. His doctrine with reference
to art expresses the limitations of his nature. It is
pleasant to walk over the acre of the exquisite horti-
culturist, and useful to learn how perfect prize-plants
can be reared in their charming little pots. But yonder
are the mountains, the moors, the forest, the sea. That
will be an evil day for English poetry when to the
universality of nature and life and the great masters is
preferred the provinciality of a Parisian cenacle.
King Solomon, while trying all experiments of life,
gave his heart for a season to know madness and folly.
Such an experimenter in evil holds his permanent self in
reserve, and, whether he be worse or better, is not in the
same class with the vulgar libertine. " I said in mine
heart, ' Go to now ; I will prove thee with mirth ;
therefore enjoy pleasure :' and behold this also is vanity '
On some French Writers of 1'erse. 407
Such was the experiment made with his imagination by
Charles Baudelaire, and his confession was that of the
preacher, " This also is vanity." In him we have at
least the comfort of dealing with no quacksalver who
cries for sale some new antidote to the sorrow of the
century ; he acknowledges that he has found our disease
immedicable, only adding, whether for our grief or our
consolation, that the plague-spot is as old as the human
race itself, though now, in this age of accumulated
shames and poisonous fungus-growths above dead things,
it may drive deeper a more cancerous sting. Baudelaire
confesses failure, if not as frankly as Musset, yet with
more decision. The two poets — both tasters of the
fruit of the tree of evil — offer an impressive contrast.
Musset's wound bleeds ; the iron remains in Baudelaire's
flesh, and no blood flows, but his face betrays the agony.
Musset rebels against the cruelty of his fate ; Baudelaire
yields with stoical resignation, interrupted only by a
short, involuntary iron cry. In Musset the sensibilities
predominate ; in Baudelaire the intellect. Musset accepts
the chance enjoyment which lies in his way ; Baudelaire
(I speak of him only as seen in his art) chooses, discrimi-
nates, knows the artifices by which to heighten pleasure.
The former was satisfied for the time by transitory
gratifications, as a child's thirst in summer is quenched
by a drink, and his sorrow is only disappointment. But
Baudelaire, who never quite parts from a higher self
kept in reserve, is not for a moment satisfied with the
flowers or fruits of evil, and he is still haunted and
waylaid by the ideal beauty and calm which by contrast
become the sources of so much of his bitterness.
408 On some French Writers of Verse.
Baudelaire was in a distinguishing degree an intel-
lectual artist. Unelaborated passion, he held, was unfit
matter for poetry. The peculiar intensity — a masculine,
not a feminine, intensity — of his most characteristic
pieces was attained by the constringent force of the
intellect acting upon vividly imagined passion. He
looked with considerable scorn, as did Gautier, upon
writers who proclaim their inspiration, and who do not
precisely know whither their genius is about to take
them. " He blamed himself whenever he produced
anything other than what he had determined to make,
even though it were a powerful and original work." *
It would have baen evidence of a juster intellect if he had
recognised the truth from which proceeds the cant about
inspiration. There is in every great artist a stored -up,
inherited instinct underlying all that he consciously
performs, and which only works the less surely and the
less continuously when an attempt is made to turn the
full light of the intellect upon its hidden operations.
The greatest poets, painters, musicians, have known and
have directly or indirectly acknowledged this. To
Goethe it seemed to point to a weakness in Schiller that
he did not go to work with a certain unconsciousness, but
reflected on all he did. " Wilhelm Meister " the author
describes as " one of the most incalculable productions,"
adding, " I myself can scarcely be said to have the key
to it." " 'Faust' is quite incommensurable, and all at-
tempts to bring it nearer to the understanding are in
vain." " Idea [in ' Tasso '] ! " exclaimed Goethe ; " as if
I knew anything about it. I had the life of Tasso — J
* Tli. Gautier, no+ : ce prefixed to "Les Fleurs du Mai," p. 72.
On some French Writers of Verse. 409
had my own life. ... I can truly say of my production,
It is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." * Where
an unconscious energy unites itself in the artist with his
conscious activity, and these interpenetrate one another,
the work of art comes forth, as Schelling has stated it,
possessed of the highest clearness of the understanding,
together with that inscrutable reality by virtue of which
art-products resemble the works of nature.*)* The en-
larging, the enriching, the disciplining of his total
character is that which produces the main alterations in
a writer's style, down even to the arrangement of pauses
in his verse. Allowing for all that can by deliberate
effort be acquired in technical mastery, there is some-
thing which lies deeper than any conscious volition. In
the last resort "all beauty comes from beautiful blood
and a beautiful brain."
But Baudelaire loved with a peculiar and almost
diseased passion what in the strictest sense is not artistic,
but rather artificial, something which does not complete
nature, but is contrasted with and opposed to nature.
And he justified his preference for the artificial by a
theory. With the youth of the world great and simple
emotions have disappeared. Then was the dawn, then
the breeze whose wings had never flagged, then the
virginal horizons ; then generous hope, and spontaneous
faith, and piteous illusion, and natural affections, and the
* The quotations are from Goethe's "Conversations with Ecker-
mann."
f Schelling " On the Relation between the Plastic Art and Nature."
See also some interesting remarks on this subject in Hartmann, "Philo-
sophic des Unbewussten, " bk. vii., and Ruskin, "The Mystery of Life
and its Arts."
4io On some French Writers of Verse.
first thoughts that came, and frank self-utterance. But
now life is complex, refined, curious, subtle. A thousand
cross and counter influences shatter the primitive emo-
tions into multitudinous fragments. Let us accept the
facts of the world. "Literature," Gautier wrote, ex-
pounding the principles of his friend, " is like the day ;
it has a morning, a noon, an evening, and a night.
Without idly discussing whether the dawn should be
preferred to the twilight, one must paint during one's
own hour, whatever that happens to be, and with a palette
furnished with the colours needed to render the effects
proper to that hour. The coppery reds, the greenish
gold, the hues of turquoise melting into sapphire, all
the colours which burn and decompose, the clouds of
strange and monstrous forms, penetrated by jets of light,
and which seem the gigantic ruining of an aerial Babel
— do not these suggest as much poetry as the rosy
fingered dawn, which notwithstanding we do not mean
to despise ? "
This apology for the " style of decadence " is admirably
expressed, but, although the question may appear to
persons of refinement a little banale, we must venture
to ask, Is it true ? In this round world of ours a
sunset and a sunrise are for ever taking place at the
same hour. In the sunset of the old religions appeared
to such eyes as turned toward the springs of light that
mysterious glimmer over the hills of Judaea ; in the sun-
set of the empire, turbulent and rich with livid stains of
decay, appeared the fiery morning of the barbarian races ;
in the twilight of feudalism the light was widening for a
new age of industry, science, and democracy. A method
*v
On some French Writers of Verse. 4 1 1
by which it is possible to secure oneself against ever
witnessing a dawn is that of self-seclusion in a little
chamber illuminated by a single narrow window which
fronts the west — some closet
Long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and drooping arras hung.
There let quaint odours now allure and provoke, and now
lull the sense ; let the lute be delicately touched, and if
in the shadows the demon of ennui should lurk, let
forms of curious beauty be present to embarrass him in
his approaches. To be indifferent to science, to treat
politics as " an affair for National Guards," to detest the
vulgar feelings of the bourgeoisie, are habits of mind
very favourable for the discovery that the " style of
decadence" is the characteristically modern style. And
in truth so much of cheap zeal and noisy claptrap have
found their centre in the word "progress," so many
millenniums have been announced, so often has the cry
been heard " Christ is here ! " with the counter-cry
" Christ is there ! " that it is hardly strange that a writer
hating imposture, dreading delusions, and conscious of
singular gifts should sever himself from the popular
movement. Nor was it a luxurious quietism which
Baudelaire sought ; in all his work there is an active
intellectual element. It is this which gives his poems
that astringency which is grateful to a cultured palate.
They possess some of the concentration and the keenness
of logic, and, like a syllogism, compel assent. Dangerous
the floating perfume of these " Fleurs du Mai " may seem
at first, because its strangeness mounts to the brain and
makes the senses swim ; but presently we regain posses-
4 1 2 On some French Writers of Verse,
sion of ourselves, and do not lose it a second time ; we
examine with curious interest the exotic blooms, and
taste the peculiar bitter-sweetness of their dews, and
stroke the metallic veining of their leaves, and do
not die.
It must also be insisted upon that Baudelaire was no
devotee of horror, hideousness, and crime. These things
exercised indeed a cruel fascination over the Romantic
poet's imagination, but they were known as evil by
virtue of an ideal of beauty and goodness which never
deserted him. Baudelaire might deliberately send forth
his imagination upon an analytic study of evil, but his
intellect was not to be duped by sin. That which is
hideous and detestable in Baudelaire's poetry is the
offspring of a civilisation where the soil is fat and poisoned
with decay. It is perhaps well that a poetical study of
such things should be carried out with thoroughness, in
order that, the " style of decadence " having been pushed
to its extreme limit, men may estimate at the full value
what it has to offer to them. The misery and ugliness
of our modern life excited Baudelaire's curiosity, set his
imagination abnormally to work, and made him miser-
able. And he sought a restorative not in simple delights,
which seemed to him to belong to the youth of the world,
but in sought-out pleasures ; against the artificial he used
the artificial as a lenitive, and nature retreated farther
and farther into the distance.
Some of his English critics have spoken of Baudelaire
as if he were the most eminent member of the school of
form in French poetry. To the question, Does Charles
Baudelaire belong to the school of art for art ? M.
On some French Writers of Verse. 4 1 *
o
Lafagette answers, In no wise. The truth is that Baude-
laire's power of vision was not circumscribed by the
bounds of his own activity as an artist, and he perceived
truths which he did not find himself individually able to
put to use. While loyal in his devotion to form, and
accepting his place, he had a melancholy consciousness
that the movement to which he belonged, though perhaps
provisionally needful, was incomplete in its designs, and
if pushed to an extreme might prove dangerous — nay,
even fatal — to art. At times he writes in a way which
might even have contented Proudhon. " The puerile
utopia of the school of art for art, in excluding morality,
and often even passion, was necessarily sterile. It
placed itself in flagrant contravention of the genius of
humanity. In the name of higher principles, which
constitute the universal life of man, we are warranted in
declaring it guilty of heterodoxy." And elsewhere,
" Literature must rehabilitate its powers in a better
atmosphere. The time is not far distant when it will
be understood that all literature which refuses to advance
fraternally between science and philosophy is a homicidal
and a suicidal literature."
To associate poetry fraternally with the higher thought
of our own day has been part of the work of M. Leconte
de Lisle. The effort of criticism in our time has been
before all else to see things as they are, without partiality,
without obtrusion of personal liking or disliking, without
the impertinence of blame or of applause. To see things
as they are is the effort of Leconte de Lisle's poetry.
Critical curiosity gratifies itself by the accurate percep-
tion of facts, and of their relations one to another. In
4 1 4 On some French Writers of Verse.
like manner the imagination delights to comprehend after
its own fashion the chief attitudes which the spirit of
man has assumed in presence of external nature, of God,
of life and death, to enter into the faiths of past ages
and races while yet holding essentially aloof from them,
to distinguish the main features of former societies of
men, and to illuminate these without permitting our
passions to disturb their calm. Baudelaire happily
compared Leconte de Lisle to his distinguished con-
temporary Ernest Renan. " Notwithstanding the dif-
ference between their respective provinces, every person
of clear-sighted intelligence will feel that the comparison
is just. In the poet, as in the philosopher, I find the
same ardent yet impartial curiosity with reference to
religions, and the same spirit of universal love, not for
humanity in itself, but for the various forms in which
man in every age and clime has incarnated beauty and
truth. • Neither the one nor the other ever offends by
absurd impiety. To portray in beautiful verses, of a
luminous and tranquil kind, the different modes in which
man, up to the present time, has adored God, and
sought the beautiful, such has been the object . . .
which Leconte de Lisle has assigned to his poetry."
Such poetry, it will be perceived, has close affinities
with science, and yet it is in its essence the work of the
skilled imagination. It possesses the ardour and the
calm of science. One cannot look at the remarkable
portrait of the poet by Raj on without recognising the
aspiring intellect, the robust enthusiasm, the capacity for
sustained effort, of Leconte de Lisle. The lifted head,
with eyes which gaze steadfastly forward, might well be
On some French Writers of Verse. 4 \ 5
that of a sculptor contemplating the block in which he
sees the enthralled form of beauty whose deliverance he
is presently to effect.* The products of this enthusiasm
possess a marmoreal calm ; and it is the union of the
highest energy with a lofty tranquillity which distin-
guishes the method of this artist. To persons who
expect from poetry a shallow excitement, to persons
whose imagination has not yet been nourished by the in-
tellect, it is possible that Leconte de Lisle's chief poems
may seem masterpieces of the genre, ennuyant It calls
for some disengagement from self, and from the common
preoccupatious of our lives, to be able to transfer our
total being into a world of thoughts and things remote
and alien. The imaginative Pantheon of the average
reader contains the familiar figures of the gods of Greece
and Rome ; it is embarrassing when house-room and
welcome are required all at once for a throng of strangers
of appalling aspect and names gathered from India, from
Egypt, from Scandinavia, even from the Polynesian
islands, and still more embarrassing to find among the
antique gods certain well-known shapes arrived from
Palestine which seek admission on equal terms with the
rest. And it must be admitted that, after a trial of
one's powers of sustained receptiveness by Leconte de
Lisle, a trial which cannot be carried through without
some fortitude of the imagination, we turn with a peculiar
sense of relief to such lyrical sprightliness as that of
Theodore de Banville, and find no small recreation for
the eye in his mirthful antics upon the tight rope.
See also the portrait in words by Theodore de Banville, "Camdea
Parisiens," troisienie serie.
4 1 6 On some French Writers of Verse.
Yet Leconte de Lisle's poems are no mere works of
erudite archaeology. He too, although possessed of a
social faith, is, like Baudelaire, ill at ease in the present
time. At first upon making his acquaintance we say,
Here at least is a man who has escaped the sorrow of our
age, who has not known " the something that infects the
world ;" and we surmise that perhaps it is his Creole
blood, perhaps the unvitiated air of his native Isle of
Bourbon, which has left him sane and sound. But
presently we perceive that this is not so. The stoicism,
the impassiveness, the enforced serenity, the strict self-
suppression, the resolved impersonality of his writings
reveal the fact that he too has been a sufferer. These
constitute the regimen by which he would gain sanity
and strength. Are you unhappy ? Then utter no cry,
suppress the idle tear, forbear to turn the tender emotion
upon yourself, place yourself under the influence of things
beautiful, calm, and remote, resign your imagination in
absolute obedience to the object. And if, after practis-
ing such discipline, your unhappiness still survive, the
physician adds, Accept the inevitable. Is it so strange
and bitter to be defeated? Or does not every law of
nature fulfil its course indifferent to our joy or suffering?
Bear your sorrow as you would bear the shining of the
stars or the falling of the rain.
Thus, while Baudelaire studied with curious attention
the evils of his time, and tasked his imagination to render
an account of what was abnormal and diseased in the
world around him, Leconte de Lisle turns away to seek
for calm in the contemplation of nature in her virgin
grace or her teeming maternal forces, and of man in
On some French Writers of Verse. 4 1 7
states of society and under religious beliefs which possess
for us an imaginative and scientific interest rather than
the more pressing and painful interest of actuality. To
Greece he is attracted as to the immortal patron of
beauty ; to the primitive peoples of the North, because
among them he finds a massive force of passion and of
muscle which contrasts happily with the trivialities of
the boulevard ; to India, because her sages had learned
the secret that this turmoil of life is Maya (the divine
illusion), and that behind Maya lies the silence and calm
of " le divin Neant." We may prepare ourselves for a
fashion of pessimism among our small poets of culture
at an early date, and doubtless " le divin Neant " will
be celebrated by many self-complacent prophets of
despair. Leconte de Lisle is not a pessimist ; for the
race of men he sees a far-off light towards which it ad-
vances, and for his own part life is to be endured and
rendered as beautiful and grand as may be with noble
forms and the light of large ideas.
Among the poems of Leconte de Lisle his studies of
external nature take a high place. When he sets him-
self down before an object resolved to make it his own
by complete imaginative possession, he is not a mere
descriptive poet. The great animal painter is not he
who can most dexterously imitate wools and furs, but he
who can pluck out the heart of the mystery of each
form of animal life ; and a like remark holds true of the
painter of mountain or of sea. That which he seeks to dis-
cover is the ideal — that is to say, that part of the real
which is the most essential as distinguished from the
accidental, the permanent as distinguished from the
2 D
4i 8 On some French Writers of Verse.
temporary, the dominant as distinguished from the sub-
ordinate. He who by penetrative vision can discover the
ideal in each thing, or, in plain words, its essential
characteristics, may fearlessly go on to paint furs anc
wools to perfection. And such is the method of Lecontt
de Lisle. In his choice of subjects (for the poet chooses
rather than is chosen by them) he is attracted by the
beauty and the wonder of strange exotic things and
places. Two moments of the day in the tropics seem to
contain for his imagination the highest poetry of the
four-and-twenty hours — the dawn, with its solitude, its
freshness in the heavens, and lio-ht odours rising from the
earth, its tender stirring in the foliage and the flowers ;
and then mid-noon, with the torrent of light, the op-
pression of loaded heat, the moveless air, and the languor
of all living things. Life in the jungle at midday is
the subject of a remarkable study familiar to all readers
of Leconte de Lisle. The huge panther lies asleep, his
belly to the air, his claws dilating unconsciously, his
burning breath escaping as from a furnace, his rosy
tongue lolling; around him perfect silence, only the
gliding python advancing his head, and the cantharides
vibrating in the transparent air : — ■
Lui, baigne par la flamme et remuant la queue,
II dort tout un soleil sous l'inimensite bleue.
In contrast with this poem, and others of the torrid
atmosphere, we find all that is delicious in shadowy repose,
in dewy freshness, in the light singing of streams, in the
flowers of wan green places, present with us while we
read " La Fontaine aux Lianes " and " La Ravine Saint-
Gilles.''' " Le Mauchy " (" manchy," the palanquin of
On some French Writers of Verse. 419
the Isle Bourbon), so softly breathed upon by the sea-
wind and impregnated with exquisite odours of the East,
moves delicately forward like the rhythmical stepping of
the Hindoo bearers. But of higher imaginative power
than any of these is the short piece entitled " Le Sommeil
du Condor." No study of the poetry of animal life is of
more exciting strangeness and at the same time of more
mysterious solemnity than this. Beyond the ladder of
the precipitous Cordilleras, beyond the eagle-haunted
mists, the vast bird sits : —
L'envergure pendante et rouge par endroits,
Le vaste oiseau, tout plein d'une morne indolence,
Regard e l'Amerique et l'espace en silence,
Et le sombre soleil qui meurt dans ses yeux froida.
And night rolls from the east over the wild pampas, putting
to sleep Chili and the Pacific Sea and the divine horizon,
and rises with billowy shadows from peak to peak : —
Lui, comme un spectre, seul, au front du pic altier,
Baigne d'une lueur qui saigne sur la neige,
II attend cette mer sinistre qui l'assiege :
Elle arrive, deferle, et le couvre en entier.
Dans l'abtme sans fond la Croix australe allurae
Sur les cotes du ciel son phare constelle.
II rale de plaisir, il agite sa plume,
II erige son cou musculeux et pele ;
II s'enleve, en fouettant, l'apre neige des Andes ;
Dans un cri rauque il monte oil n'atteint pas le vent
Et, loin du globe noir, loin de l'astre vivant,
II dort dans fair glace, les ailes toutes grancles.*
None of the most characteristic poems of Leconte de
Lisle treat of social subjects which lie near to us in time
* "Le Sommeil du Condor," "Les Jungles," "Le Manchy," and
the noble poem of melancholy "Le Midi," are given in the fourth
volume of Crepet's Les Poetes fraiiqais, an excellent introduction to
modern French poetry as far as about fifteen years ago.
420 On some French Writers of Verse.
and place. His poetry selects as its organs certain of
his faculties, and rejects others. To express his political
creed he would require to formulate it in prose. Chris-
tian and mediaeval subjects are treated with the same
aloofness, the same hauteur, and the same sympathy of
intellect as those belonging to ancient Greece and Rome,
or to the " barbarian ' nations of Judea, of Egypt, of
pagan Europe. But under this impartiality as an artist
lie strenuous convictions both with respect to the regime
of feudalism and the dogma of the age of faith, and,
indeed, the impartiality at times impresses the reader
who compares the poems with the author's prose con-
fessions of belief as partaking somewhat of the nature of
an imperturbable artistic irony. The commoner, more
superficial irony is excluded from Leconte de Lisle's
work as an artist, but it is made ample use of in the
volume " Histoire populaire du Christianisme," a little
treatise which, professing to represent Christian history
as told by Christian historians, is certainly not dis-
tinguished by the judicial spirit or even by common
historical accuracy.
It is not to be wondered at that Leconte de Lisle should
be regarded as a master by younger poets who aspire to
be something more than mere singers of love and wine.
He represents intellect, he represents science in connection
with art ; he has more of mass than Gautier, more of
sanity, or at least serenity, than Baudelaire ; he is dis-
tinguished by a rare self-regulating energy of the
imagination; he owns a sovereign command over form,
a severity and breadth of poetical style whicn is not to
be found in the " £maux et Camees," nor even in the
On some French Writers of Verse. 42 1
" Fleurs du Mai." But it is true that his subjects of
predilection are too much subjects from the museum. He
is not a mere antiquary ; in his manner of aloofness and
of intellectual sympathy he is essentially modern, and
in the museum he remains a poet. Still we should like
to know of love which was other than that possessed by
a mummy ; we should like to know of a religion which
is not on show as a curiosity in a glass-case ; outside we
hear the throng in the streets of a great city, and wonder
what the lives of our fellow-men are like, and what they
signify to them ; we think of the fields in which we
ourselves were children, and which we did not study
curiously, but so tenderly loved.
Within the last ten or twelve years no star of the
second or third magnitude has quite succeeded in dis-
engaging itself from the nebulous brilliancy of poetical
reputations, which is made up by writers of a younger
generation than those alread}' glanced at in this essay.
M. CoppeVs poetry possesses elegance, but hardly in a high
sense beauty ; it possesses sentiment, but hardly passion ;
and its idyllic tenderness and refinement are those of the
Luxembourg gardens rather than of the j)lains and
hill-sides of the provinces. There is more promise of
distinction in M. Catulle Mendes ; but it cannot be said
that he has, even in his more recent poems, certainly
discovered his true direction. In the " Soirs moroses "
he is still, in a measure, a pupil of Baudelaire. In the
" Contes epiques " there is something of Leconte de Lisle
united with something — especially in the treatment of
the denouement of each story — which has been obtained
from Victor Hugo. In the earlier "Philomela'' are pieces
422 On some French Write? s of Verse,
which could hardly have been written had not Theodore
de Banville taught modern poets to unite lyrical impulse
with the most delicate technical manipulations, and others
which have, as it were, an odour acquired from lying
among the verses of Theophile Gautier. Two poems of
considerable length exhibit the highest attainment of the
talent of M. Catulle Mendes. "Hesperus" is the story of
a little old Jew of Frankfort-on-the-Main, a dwarf, per-
secuted by the children and living in misery, yet in his
ecstatic trances and visions the possessor of treasures of joy
and love. Brightness and gloom are brought together in
this poem with as magical and fascinating a power as in
some of Rembrandt's etchings ; the subject is one which
would have been treated with a passionate analysis by
Balzac. " Le Soleil de Minuit " is a dramatic poem, the
scene of which is laid among the ice-fields of the Polar
world. Its human creatures are conceived as untamed
animals possessed of fierce appetites and passions, not
restrained, and yet already a little modified by the fears
and superstitions which are the projections of the
primitive conscience of mankind. It must be said that
some of the impressiveness of the poem is gained by its
entire disregard — a disregard which one is expected to
accept as the artist's duty to his subject — of the reserves
of speech that are recognised as human in our developed
state of society, from which we have in some degree
worked out the original man-bear and woman-wolf.
M. Catulle Mendes belongs in the main to the school of
" art for art," but he combines qualities which had been
divided between its leaders, and he brings over to it some
of the strangeness and splendour of Victor Hugo.
On some French Writers of Verse. 42
i
Two other young poets illustrate the reaction against
the school of art for art, which might have been anticipated
as inevitable, and which has already become apparent.
In " Les Chansons joyeuses" Maurice Bouchor attempted
to lead back French poetry to the spirit of facile mirth,
the praise of youth and wine, of love and laughter. The
Parnassians were to be pelted from their thrones with
roses. His second volume — " Les Poemes de 1' Amour et
de la Mer " — is written in a more grave and tender spirit;
it is the lyrical confession of the sorrow of unfulfilled
love, and from love the poet at the last turns for consola-
tion to the fraternal comradeship of art. M. Lafagette
puts forth a more ambitious programme. It is his aim
to preserve all that has been attained for form and technical
mastery of verse by the school of the Parnassians, and to
employ this as an artist under influences proceeding from
the political convictions of an ardent republican and a
philosophical doctrine which it pleases him to term un
naturalisme rationcdiste. His earliest volume certainly
confirmed the judgment of Gautier that his verses were
deficient in composition, but M. Lafagette has diligently
improved the quality of his workmanship, and in " Les
Accalmies " he has for a season laid by his sword to take
in hand the chisel and the burin ; some of the sonnets
and triolets — dated in Revolutionary style, " Messidor,
an 83," " Floreal, an 82," might have been written
in some luxurious studio under the Second Empire.
Essentially, however, M. Lafagette's motto is found in
the words of Victor Hugo ; " De nos jours l'ecrivain
doit etre au besoin un combattant ; malheur au talent a
travers lequel on ne voit pas un conscience ! " One may
424 On some French Writers of Verse.
trust that, whether or not in our own country a tendency
exists to follow the leadership of the French masters of
form, in France their influence is about to be reduced
to just proportions. With M. Lafagette's devotion
to beauty and to art mingles a social purpose some-
what akin to that which appeared in the school of Saint-
Simon, and which served long since to inspire the writers
of "Young Germany." But, apart from the consideration
of the truth or falsehood of the faiths which lie at the
basis of the art of M. Lafagette, it is a significant fact
that writers who have been in the presence of the poetry
of " art for art n brought to the most exquisite degree of
refinement, should feel that this does not suffice, and
that art, severed from a social faith, becomes, sooner or
later, inevitably sterile.
Non, non, ton regne est clos, 6 race veule et vaine !
— Dans Tor pur nous savons bien sertir, comme toi,
Des joyaux ciseles ; mais une male foi
Nous anime, et le sang qui brCile notre veine
Nous voulons l'infuser a l'Art en desarroi.
Que la forme eclatante incarne la justice ;
Songe que l'Art n'est pas un but, mais un moyen,
Frere ! adore le Beau, car ce culte est paien,
Mais fixe-lui le Vrai pour eternel solstice ;
Aime, kais, souffre, vis, sois nomnie et citoyen.
What social doctrine shall inspire the poetry of the
future % It is not meant here to attempt an answer
to this question ; but one more French writer of verse
nay be named as illustrating the perplexities and hesi-
tations of our age. Sainte-Beuve observed of M. Sully
Prudhomme that he belonged to none of the schools of
contemporary poetry. « His was rather the noble
1
On some French Writers of Verse. 425
ambition of conciliating them, of deriving from them
and reuniting in himself what was good in each. With
much skill in the treatment of form, he was not indif-
ferent to the idea ; and among ideas, he did not adopt
any group to the exclusion of the rest." This rightly
defines the position of Sully Prudhomme. Like Leconte
de Lisle, he is intellectual, but, unlike that master, he is
tender ; his intellect is not severe and haughty, but
humane and sympathetic ; and the sympathy which he
gives is other than that which takes its origin from
scientific curiosity. He does not traverse the world of
ideas as an aristocrat who from his eminence of thought
surveys and studies many things, of which none can
succeed in mastering his reason or really gaining his
affections. Rather he yields to this influence, and yields
again to that, and is in danger of " losing himself in
countless adjustments." He has perceptions of truth on
one side and on the other, and can deny none of them.
There is something in the pantheistic way of thinking
which seems needful to his imaginative interpretation of
the facts of consciousness ;Uhere is something in theism
which corresponds with the cravings of his heart; yet
he cannot deny a lurking doubt that after all the agnostic
may be in the right. This is the burden which he bears,
a divided intellect, for ever adapting itself to what appear
to be diverse forms of truth. He is not angry with
modern science or modern industry; he would, if pos-
sible, conciliate the real with the ideal. He loves the
colour of Gautier's verse, the passion and vivid humanity
of Musset, and can value the abstractedness, the aspira-
tion, the Druidic nature-worship of Laprade ; he would
426 On some French Writers of Verse.
fain possess something of each ; and his manifold sym-
pathies leave him sad and restless.
Sully Prudhomme's unhappiness arises from the lack
of a cause, a creed, a church, a loyalty, a love, to which
he can devote his total being, knowing that such devo-
tion is the highest wisdom. He is a born eclectic, and
the only remedy he can apply to his malady is more
eclecticism. He may serve as a pathetic witness to the
truth that culture, as we too often conceive it nowadays,
may lead to an issue less fortunate than that of asceticism.
In Edgar Quinet's poetical romance " Merlin " the great
enchanter traverses a vast desert to visit the abbey of the
famous Prester John. The architecture of the abbey
struck Merlin with astonishment. It was a composite
style, formed of the pagoda, the Greek temple, the syna-
gogue, the mosque, the basilica, the cathedral, without
counting an almost innumerable number of marabouts,
minarets, Byzantine and Gothic chapels. When Prester
John appears, the magician beholds before him an august
old man, with a beard of snow descending to his waist.
"Upon his head he wore a turban enriched with a sapphire
cross. At his neck hung a golden crescent, and he sup-
ported himself upon a staff after the manner of a Brahman.
Three children followed him, who supported each upon
the breast an open book. The first was the collection of
the Yedas, the second was the Bible, the third the Koran.
At certain moments Prester John stopped and read a few
lines from one of the sacred volumes which always
remained open before him ; after which he continued
his walk, with eyes fixed upon the stars." Prester John
was Quinet's type of the eclectic philosopher, and he may
On some French Writers of Verse. 427
equally well represent the modern man of spurious
culture. Prester John's architecture is not a true con-
ciliation of styles, nor Prester John's faith of creeds.
M. Sully Prudhomme, however, if he has dwelt for a
while in the eclectic abbey, has not divided his heart
between ideals of beauty and realities of shame. He is
for ever returning to an aspiration after truth, after
beauty, after simplicity of life, and yet he has never
wandered far from these ; and part of his moral per-
plexity arises from suggestions and checks to which a
person of harder or narrower personality would have
been insensible. There is in him something of femi-
nine susceptibility and sensitiveness ; and that a man
should possess portion of a woman's tenderness is not
wholly ill.
1877.
THE POETRY OF VICTOR HUGO.*
The genius of Victor Hugo is wide and violent like a sea,
and one hesitates upon the brink before venturing to
plunge. But a timid approach — to dabble with the
feet, and duck the head, is to remain unacquainted with
this poet. A certain self-abandonment is called for,
and for a time the surrender of one's safe and deliberate
footing. When you are fairly borne away by some
moving mound of water, when you are tossed and buf-
feted and bewildered, when the foam flies over your
head, when you glide from dark hollow to shining
hillock of the sea, when your ears are filled with the
sound and your eyes with the splendour and terror of
ocean, then you begin to be aware of the sensation
which Victor Hugo communicates. But this is not the
whole. Presently your bewilderment increases. This
flood, is it a flood of water or a torrent of light ? — for
objects and forces are changing their aspect and direction.
Have you plunged downward, or soared up ? Are you
in ether or on the earth ? Have 3^011 been somehow
drawn into the immense envelopment of a planet's belt
or swift meteor ? "Where are the edges and limit of this
environing brightness and gloom ? Yet all the while a
sense of security remains, and of the near presence of
our green, substantial earth ; for songs of birds reach us,
* Victor Hugo's dramatic poetry is not considered in this essay.
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 429
and the chiming of the carillons of old cities, and the
cries of children at play. We drop from Saturn with
his moons and rings, and find ourselves by the fireside,
or stooping overa cradle.
But when we have rescued our imagination from the
obsession of Victor Hugo's genius, how are we compelled
to regard the writer and his work ? This vast and
vague luminosity, with its sound and splendour, its gloom
and terror, has it any inward unity ? has it airy deter-
mined course ? This cometary apparition, which throws
out such stupendous jets, where lies its nucleus ? and is
its orbit ascertainable ? What is Victor Hugo ? And
the answer is — He is the imagination of France in the
century of trouble which followed her great Revolution
— an imagination powerful, ambitious, disordered — a
light of the world, though a light as wild as that of
volcanic flames blown upon by storm ; and he is also the
better heart of France, tender and fierce, framed for
manifold joy and sorrow, rich in domestic feeling and
rich in patriotism, heroic yet not without a self-conscious-
ness of heroism, that eager, self-betraying, intemperate
heart, which alternates between a defiant wilfulness and
the tyranny of an idea or a passion. The history of
this imagination and of this heart is the history of
Victor Hugo.
Intellect, which in the highest poets co-operates with
the affections and the imagination, in Victor Hugo is
deficient. With him it is never energy of thought
which demands a passionate expression in art. Oi a
progressive process of thinking he seems incapable.
Such emotional logic as Mr Browning brings vigorously
4jO The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
into play, securing for the feelings as lie advances each
position which has been gained, is unknown to Victor
Hugo. He is the seer, the dreamer, the prophet ; not
the athletic thinker nor the patient inquirer for truth.
The eternal problems, which loom darkly before the
mind of man, are to be captured, he thinks, if at all, by
prompt assault. For the needs of faith he finds it more
important to reinforce the will than to illuminate the
intellect ; he is one of the violent who take the kingdom
of God by force. "■ Naked I will advance even to the
terrible tabernacle of the unknown, even to the threshold
of the shadow and the void, wide gulfs which the livid
pack of black lightnings guard ; even to the visionary
gates of the sacred heaven ; and if you bellow, thunders !
I will roar."*
The passion of spiritual doubt has given a tremulous
or a stern intensity to much of nineteenth-century poetry,
and has uttered itself as a cry, as a moan, as a wild
demand for pleasure, and also as a denial of personal joy,
and a strict cleaving of the heart to the high, sad strength
of duty. Many of Victor Hugo's verses are concerned
with this passion of spiritual doubt. But it is rather
the oscillation, the refluence and welter of the great
social and moral wave flung forward by the wind of
revolution which finds expression through his poetry,
than the trials of the individual soul. Moods of distress
and dejection beset him ; but he recovers himself. His
transit from doubt to certitude is made instantaneously,
and through no intervening region of probabilities. His
will asserts itself, or some magic phrase of the heart is
* Les Contemplations. "Ibo."
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 43 1
uttered, or lie yields gladly to the violence of some
external power, and the sceptic is transformed into the
prophet. There is no moment at which Victor Hugo
cannot exclaim some miraculous word — " Light," or
"Progress" or "Humanity," or " God," — and dissipate the
swarm of his shadowy assailants. Happy prisoner in the
castle of Giant Despair, he bears in his bosom the key of
enfranchisement ! Perhaps the poet of Romanticism was
even not without a certain aesthetic satisfaction in pre-
sence of the skulls which lay grinning in the giant's
courtyard.
Peal trial of the intellect, the sad, careful conduct
of the understanding through the loss of early faith to
the mature convictions or surmises of manhood — of
this, as far as can be discovered from his writings,
Victor Hugo knows simply nothing. He has never ex-
perienced the grasp of objective fact compelling and con-
trolling the intellect. St. Teresa ascertained that though
devils disappeared upon the sign of the cross being made,
they returned again ; but they were effectually banished
by a sufficient dashing of holy water. Victor Hugo repels
his spectres of the mind with no less success ; only the
holy water is not priestly, but democratic or pantheistic.
Victor Hugo's method of truth-discovery, as far as he
can be said to discover truth for himself, is the method
of simple apprehension, the method of gaze, of intuition;
and the point of gaze is determined by an act of choice,
or by some transient but for the time predominant mood
of feeling. If a new emotional need arise, the point of
view changes. Should we happen to be influenced by
identical motives we go along with him ; otherwise, we
432 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
stay where we were. He seems never to stand in tire
presence of an intellectual antagonist, while to suspect
the operations of his own mind would appear to him
treason against his genius. Consequently he convinces
only those who are already of his party. While we possess
the same faiths with Victor Hugo he reinforces and
enriches those faiths with his own splendid vitality. As
soon as we differ from him his voice becomes inarticulate
for us. He may fulminate against us ; reason with us
he will not and cannot.
In reality Victor Hugo's intellectual course has been
determined for him by the movements of society. All
his thinking has been done on his behalf by the Zeit-
Geist. For private store of belief he possesses a few wise
and great axioms which he applies in the exigencies of
life, and which have sufficed to give his career an ideal
and heroic character. But when in occasional and un-
happy moments he tries on his own account to go
beyond these axioms, and to be the constructor of a
theory or the framer of a creed, his imagination, working
in a sphere governed by laws with not one of which that
imagination is conversant, produces only monstrous
mythologies, abortions of religion, a huge and grotesque
palace of Unreason, a nightmare of the brain. Had
Victor Hugo been born in the early Christian period, it
is probable that he would have united a passionate
communism with the gigantic conceptions of a Gnostic
heresiarch. It pleases the poet to regard his works as if
each were a fragment of one great system of thought,
and in little prefaces which remind one of Napoleon's
addresses to his army, to prelude somewhat pompously
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 433
the victory about to be achieved in the world of specula-
tion. But if the truth must be told, though Victor
Hugo is ardently attached to certain ideas supplied to
him by the nineteenth-century Zeit-Geist, as far as his
private thinking is concerned, a fancy serves with him
for a thought and an antithesis for an argument. Truth
is in part an affair of literary style. The name of God
is indeed precious for the purposes of faith ; but it is
hardly less precious because it enriches the music of a
period or adds colour to a verse.
In the region of conscience and the moral will Victor
Hugo is essentially sound and sane ; although of course
the absence of large intellectual power is also the absence
of a seat of moral sensibility ; and the wave of moral
feeling loses that volume and resonance which the con-
tribution of the intellect confers. He reminds one of
that other heroic nature, essentially sane through his
apparent aberrations, the Italian soldier whose lyrical
life has been a song of Italy and of freedom. Victor
Hugo and Garibaldi are not responsible for the error, if
it be one, of having been born into a world in which
moral problems are complicated by the phenomena of
time and * space. The sun of Justice and the moon of
Charity rise and set in their eternal heaven s, and are
for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.
They are loyal to the idea ; for them there is no ex-
pediency possible, except the infinite expediency of
devotion to the idea. But precisely for this reason,
precisely because Victor Hugo is in the moral sphere
an idealist, all that he contributes for our use is an
elementary impulse, and beyond this nothing to the
2 E
434 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
illuminating or edification of the conscience. His ethics
are too simple, appropriate for a warfare between angels
of light and of darkness, but neither rich enough nor
delicate enough for the life of man with man. The
" kind calm years, exacting their accompt of pain," have
not yielded to him any great body of moral experience.
At the age of twenty an ideal of justice and an ideal of
charity shone before him as the guiding beacons of his
course ; and they shine before him no less brightly now.
That is much. But the art of navigation does not
consist wholly in a forward -gazing attitude, with eye
fixed upon the lights which beam across the waves.
There are trade winds from eternity ; but beside these
trade winds there are shifting flaws of time ; and it is
the meeting of these cross and counter blasts which tries
our skill and seamanship. He who would inform his
moral will, while he would purify and strengthen it, he
who would learn something not about justice and charity
merely, but about men and women and the difficult
conduct of the higher life, may well close his Victor
Hugo.
Victor Hugo's art contributes little to the formation
of the wise adult conscience ; but it would be- an error
to suppose that Victor Hugo has been insufficient
for the guidance of his own conscience either as an artist
or as a man. If he loses all the ethical nuances of the
individual life and of history, the broad facts of right and
wrono- impress him upon the whole in an authentic manner.
He recognizes the potential angel or devil in each man,
if he does not very clearly perceive the man himself, the
creature of accidents and phenomena. And the con-
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 435
sequence is that Victor Hugo fights upon the right side
in nearly every instance, though it is true that in some
he does his own side injury by his manner of fighting.
He sees the extremes vividly (though not without dis-
torting refractions from his own personality), and misses
what lies between. Hence the deficiency in his art of
subtlety, of mystery, of the complexity of life. Napoleon
the Little of the "Chatiments" is a lay-figure serviceable
for the purposes of a passionate rhetoric ; he is a bandit,
a nocturnal robber, an assassin, a hyena, a poor stage-
player, a Nero, a Cartouche ; he is everything except
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a human being with mingled
strength and weaknesses, mingled virtue and vice. It
is so much easier to paint a demon than a man ! The
pity is that the criminal is not really arrested by such art
as Victor Hugo's. Napoleon the Little could afford to
smile at Victor Hugo the Great. A veritable portrait of
the human creature, with his timidity and his audacity,
his faith in ideas, and his waiting upon events, his showy
official splendours and his personal attachment to simple
and homely things, the blood upon his hands, which had
no itching for blood, and the mask upon his face which
concealed what ? profound purposes or utter purposeless-
ness ? — a portrait of this man by a great artist would
have sufficed to put the imperial criminal under an arrest
for all time. The Napoleon of Victor Hugo's poems is
a monster, " a very shallow monster," " a very weak
monster," " a most perfidious and drunken monster."
At the other extreme, the extreme of heroism, self-
devotion, exaltation of human virtue, Victor Hugo's
method of portraiture equally fails. Very painfully in
436 The Poetry of Victor Hugo,
this direction the pseudo moral-sublime shows itself. A
sudden splendour of impulsive gallantry, — the gay sing-
ing of a Gavroche, the " Me voila !" of the boy who
returned to plant himself against the sad wall facing the
muzzles of the Versailles shooting party, — these are
rendered with perfect justness and beauty. Victor
Hugo is the Corneille of impulsive gallantry. But what
shall we say of the laboured beauty of a Gilliat's suicide ?
In the poet's hands deliberate heroism assumes an air
which even to his countrymen can hardly appear other
than theatrical. He seems inexperienced in the calm,
unostentatious conduct of the will through periods of
trial ; he has not discovered how simple and severe a
thing it is to do right with silent strength. Nearly every
collection of his poems is prefaced with a page of prose,
the purport of which is, " Observe how beautiful, how
interesting, an attitude my soul assumes in the following
volume." Victor Hugo's moral idealism has not enriched
or sobered itself through concrete human experience.
Were he to attempt a " Divine Comedy," there could be
no series of descending circles in his " Inferno ;" all
horrors would amass themselves in one wide gulf of
tyrants, and traitors, and hypocrites, and time-servers.
His Paradise would shape itself into no Rose of the
Blessed, with its ever intenser and more radiant petals of
joy, folded in more closely upon the light of God : all
holy Innocents, all holy Martyrs, all holy Virgins, all
poets and prophets, would taste one sivpreme and
indivisible bliss. And as to Pur^atorv — that sacred
mount between earth and lunar heaven made beautiful
and piteous with mourning and desire — Victor Hugo's
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 437
cosmogony does not include such a region of com-
promise^ _.
Yet a certain moderation of temper must also be noted
as characteristic of Victor Hugo. The ex-Legitimist did
not become suddenly and violently a hater of kings ; he
remained for a certain period a conciliator among con-
flicting parties ; the democratic poet grew tender to
think of the white head of the exiled Bourbon monarch.
And recently alike to Communists and to the French
nation his counsel has been in favour of mutual forbear-
ance, and against the barbarous system of reprisals. Let
us not blame, — he would say, — either party over-much.
For the crimes of the one party the Past is responsible, —
a Past of repression, of ignorance, of chaotic misery and
crime. For those of the other let us condemn not the
victors in that unequal struggle, but the blind frenzy of
victory. This moderation is a temper of the heart rather
than of the intellect. It is the outcome of the large
charity of the man, of his pity for human frailty, his
fellow-feeling with human sorrow. If his perception of
individual character is ordinarily not very exact, some com-
pensation for this lies in his abundant sympathy with that
common manhood and womanhood, which is more precious
than personal idiosyncracies and points of distinction.
As long as there exist babyhood and old age, fatherhood
and motherhood, toil by day and sleep by night, as long
as there are lovers in the woods, and labourers in the
fields, and mourners by the side of graves, so long will
Victor Hugo hold man and woman dear. And holding
man and woman dear by virtue of their common
humanity, his heart instructs him in a certain " swee*
43 8 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
reasonableness," and his hatred, his scorn, his desire for
vengeance, concentrate themselves upon those exceptional
beings, who by their crimes against men and nations, by
their apostacy or their treason, have seemed to him to
forfeit their title to the privileges of manhood.
Victor Hugo lives on the one hand in the presence of his
ideals, the objects of his wonder and his worship — Justice,
Charity, Beauty, Liberty, Progress, Humanity. Towards
these he rises on passionate wings in " the devout ecstacy,
the soaring flight." If these are wronged or profaned
while he, their worshipper, their priest, stands by — then
mourning and indignation and vengeance, then excom-
municating rites and fierce anathema. But, on the
other hand, over against these august abstractions are
the gracious, abiding realities which rule the heart of
man, age after age, with beneficent despotism — children,
who for Victor Hugo are something between the angel
and the linnet, — the father who has toiled for us, the
mother who has served and loved, the husband and the
wife, and once again children, the children who lie unfor-
gotten in their graves. And these two groups of powers,
the strong ideals and the tender human forms, illuminate
and glorify one another. Justice and Charity and Free-
dom are the deities who, ruling over a nation, bring peace
and security and joy to every cottage hearth ; therefore
they are the more divine. And no less through their
presence the child, the mother, become in a higher kind
beautiful and sacred. Over that woman with the baby
at her breast the eternal Mother of all is bending — the
nourisher whose breasts sustain the world : on that man
resisting some trivial cruelty, righting some ordinary
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 439
wrong, gazes approvingly the strong angelic Justiciary
whom watchers have seen wiping a blood-stained sword
among the clouds on the evening of a day when a
tyrant's head has fallen.
The development which it is possible to trace in the
mind of Victor Hugo has been no mechanical process of
construction, but growth of a vital kind. Viewed from
the side of the moral will his character has little history ;
his conscience consolidates itself, the original fibres grow
firmer, more massive, and more resilient, but there is no
putting forth of latent powers, no modification of organs
or functions under the influence of varying circumstances
and an altered moral climate. His intellectual history
has been controlled by the Zeit-Geist of this democratic
nineteenth century. He has stood at gaze in the midst
of the spectacle of nature, all vital and changing, in
presence of human society, alive and changing also, in
presence of God, the ever-changing God, who expands
and contracts from age to age and from year to year, who
approaches and recedes, rises and descends like the
shining clouds upon a mountain side. And gradually,
as he looks abroad, man and nature and God, which had
seemed to stand apart, flow into one another, coalesce,
and form one stupendous, natural-supernatural whole.
He looks abroad, and the space around him widens ; the
horizon changes. In place of the gilded ceilings of
Versailles he beholds unfathomable abysses of azure ; the
priest and altar expand, winds of heaven sweep away
the heavy fumes of incense, and it is God himself who
stands before the eyes of the nations elevating the host ;
the little skipping figures of princes and courtiers vanish,
44-0 The Poetry of Victo7' Hugo.
and there comes up higher and higher a broad tide —
the People — with its voice of threatening and of promise,
engulfing the petty eminences of the land where royal
palace and ducal castle stood ; the stars which had been
so long steadfast in the heaven set ; the ancient day and
night are rolled away ; a solemn dawn begins ; the sun
rises with unimaginable splendour and unimaginable
sound ; the cry of Liberty is shouted from margin to
margin of the hills. Standing at gaze in the midst,
with no purposes or plans for his future, Victor Hugo
simply allows the great spectacle to operate upon his
whole being, and to produce there whatever modifications
it is fitted to produce. New forces play through him
and pass out of him. If his eyes brighten, that is
because the sun has filled them with his splendour. If
his court costume happen to be blown away, it is the
north wind and the south who have been the thieves. If
wings expand, and quiver upon his shoulders, and he
soars, it is the Dawn who has required her singer. If
he be a traitor to his early faith, his accomplices and
abettors are the Heavens and the Earth : —
" You say l Where goest thou 1 ' I cannot tell,
And still go on. If but the way be straight,
It cannot be amiss : before me lies
Dawn and the day ; the night behind me ; that
Suffices me ; I break the bounds ; I see,
And nothing more ; believe, and nothing less ;
My future is not one of my concerns."*
But while the poet seemed to be passive, he was
unconsciously co-operating with the agencies which
surrounded him. In precisely such a medium lay the
* Les Contemplations. " Ecrit en 1846."
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 441
conditions which favoured the full development of the
poet's imagination, and flattered his ambition. In
a great monarchical period if Victor Hugo had not
perished as a foiled revolutionary, he would perhaps
have perished as a mere liver on the brilliant surface of
life, satiating his senses with the pomp and colour and
pageantry of the courts of kings. To have perfected a
literary style might have been the sum of his achieve-
ment. His true self could hardly have come into
existence. In presence of the great political and social
movement of the post-Revolution period, he dilates, he
energizes freely, and is joyous. This tide which rises can-
not terrify him, for he it is who can render its inarticulate
threats and aspirations into human speech. If the dawn
descend to illuminate him, he too is able to rise and
become one of the splendours of the dawn.
Ideas as they arrive elaborated through creeds, and
] theologies, and systems of philosophy, enter into no vital
relation with the mind of Victor Hugo. Ideas as he sees
them in action, a portion of the marvellous spectacle of
life, become at once for him sources of imaginative
excitement, and as such in the highest degree important.
But besides the large impersonal influences which have
been among the causes contributing to the growth of the
poet's mind, there have been numerous trains of private
joys and sorrows, which have brought to his imagination
and to his heart sustenance and stimulus. The urore of
life has been strenuous with him, and always on the
increase. Shock after shock of delight and of pain have
fallen upon him, and with each impact a wave of heat
has diffused itself until at length the whole nature of the
44 2 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
man has become one glowing, fiery mass. Love and
while yet in boyhood marriage with the woman he had
loved as a child, a struggle with poverty, victorious
leadership in a brilliant aggressive movement in art, a
splendid fame in early manhood, political celebrity added
to literary celebrity, the rapture of generous deeds, contact
with the most quickening contemporary minds, the birth
of children | the drowned body of his daughter and of
him whom she loved, exile, calumny, solitude, the fidelity
of friends, the presence of the tumultuous seas which
divided him from his country and from the often-visited
grave ; recently those twelve epic months of the Year
Terrible, Paris in her girdle of fire, and the pale flower-
like babv on his knee, the sudden loss of a son who
was a comrade, the popular vote, the insult of the
Assembly, the hootings and peltings of the Brussels mob,
the brilliant revival of his dramatic writings in Republican
Paris, — and in the beginning, the middle, and the end,
the delights of the woods and of the streets, — these in
rapid summary recall only a portion of the gladness and
sadness which have gone to make up this life — a life
that has already passed the limit assigned to men.
The career of Victor Hugo naturally divides itself into
three periods — first, that in which the poet was still un-
aware of his true self, or seeking that true self failed to
find it ; secondly, that presided over by the Hugoish
conception of beauty ; thirdly, that dominated by the
Hugoish conception of the sublime. " Les Orientales "
marks the limit of the first period ; the transition from
the second to the third, which begins to indicate itself
in " Les Rayons et les Ombres," is accomplished in " Les
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 443
Contemplations." The third period is not closed ; at the
present moment we have the promise from Victor Hugo
of important works in verse and prose. Possibly, any
hypothesis as to the orbit he describes is still premature.
In a divided household the boy Victor naturally
inclined towards the side of his mother, and from her he
inherited the monarchical tradition. From Chateau-
briand he learned to recognize the literary advantages
offered by neo-Catholicism, and under his influence the
Voltairean royalism of Victor Hugo's earlier years was
transformed into the Christian royalism which was to do
service for the writer of odes under the Restoration. The
boy ambitious of literary distinction, and furnished with
literary instincts and aptitudes, but as yet unprovided
with subjects for song from his own experience, must
look about in the world to find subjects. He needs
something to declaim against, and something to celebrate.
The Revolution satisfies one of these requirements, and
the monarchy the other. The vantage-ground of a
creed is now gained ; the dominant conception of his
poetry declares itself to him ; he is to be the singer of
the restored Christian monarchy. If history would only
supply themes, he is now prepared to take them up and
execute brilliant variations upon them. And history is
disposed to assist him. What more fortunate subject
can there be for a neo-Catholic royalist ode than the
birth of a Christian duke, unless it be the baptism of a
Christian duke, or the consecration of a Christian king ?
Happy age when dukes are born and baptized, and when
a philosophic poet of the age of twenty resolves to
" solemnize some of the principal memorials of our epoch
444 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
which may serve as lessons to future societies." 45- Happy
age when atheist and regicide hide their heads, when
the flood of Revolution has subsided, and the bow
appears in the clouds ! Highly favoured nation upon
whom the presence of a Bourbon confers prosperity and
peace, with all the Christian graces, and all the
theological virtues : —
" O, que la Royaute, peuples, est douce et belle ! "
In these odes the king is the terrestrial God ; and
God is the grand monarque who rules in the skies. If
not the very same, he is a descendant not far removed
from the aged and amiable God, something between a Pope
and an Emperor, of the mediseval period, seated upon a
throne, with a bird above his head, and his Son by his
side, a courtly archangel on his right hand, and on the
left a prophet, listening to harps, while Madame the
Mother of God stands by, hand on breast. He is the
God who was careful to punish the men of the Conven-
tion, and pulled down Napoleon from his high place ;
the God who chose Charles X. as the man after his own
heart. If to disbelieve in this author of nature and
moral governor of the universe be atheism, Victor Hugo
is at present an atheist .+
But the political and religious significance of these
early poems was in truth a secondary affair. To reform
the rhythm of French verse, to enrich its rhymes, to
give mobility to the cesura, to carry the sense beyond
the couplet, to substitute definite and picturesque words
in place of the fadeurs of classical mythology and vague
* Preface to the Odes, 1822.
t See "L'Amiee Terrible." "A l'eveque qui m'appelle A thee."
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 445
poetical periphrasis — these were matters awakening
keener interest than the restoration of a dynasty or the
vindicating of a creed. To denounce the Revolution
was well ; but how much higher and more divine to
bring together in brilliant consonance two unexpected
words ! Gustave Planch e, reviewing at a later period
this literary movement, and pronouncing in his magi-
sterial way that the movement was primarily one of style,
not of thought, recalls as a trivial circumstance, which
however serves to characterize the time, that the
ultimate word, the supreme term of literary art, was —
"la ciselure." The glow of Royalist fervour was some-
what of a painted fire ; the new literary sensations were
accompanied by thrills of pleasure which were genuine
and intense.
Before 1828, Victor Hugo's royalist fervour ha.d
certainly lost some of its efficiency for the purposes of
literature. The drama of "Cromwell" had been pub-
lished in the previous year ; and the poet was in open
revolt against the great monarchical period of French
art — the age of Racine. Either the births and baptisms
of dukes occurred less frequently than heretofore, or
Victor Hugo was less eager to celebrate them. But if
his early faith was falling piece by piece, no new faith
as yet came to replace the old, unless it were the artist's
faith of " art for art." Accordingly, Victor Hugo in the
forefront of bis next lyrical volume — " Les Orientales " —
proclaims in a high tone the independence of the poet
from the trammels of belief. Let no one question him
about the subjects of his singing, — if the manner be
faultless, that is all which can be required of him. He
44 6 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
will not now " endeavour to be useful/' lie will not
attempt " to solemnize some of the principal memorials
of our epoch which may serve as lessons to future
societies." Farewell to the safe anchorage of neo-
Catholicism ! ' Let the poet go where he pleases, and
do what he pleases : such is the law. Let him believe
in one God, or in many ; in Pluto or in Satan, ....
or in nothing ; .... let him go north or south, west
or east ; let him be ancient or modern . . . He is free."
What appropriateness was there in these Orientates in
the midst of the grave preoccupations of the public
mind ! To what does the Orient rhyme ? What con-
sonance has it with anything ? The author replies that
" he does not know ; the fancy took him ; and took him
in a ridiculous fashion enough, when, last summer, he
was going to see a sunset." There was another sunset
which Victor Hugo witnessed before long — the setting
in a stormy sky of the ancient monarchy of France.
Then, too, he thought of the East, and began that greater
series of Orientales, those songs of the sunrise of the
Republic, which still vibrate in the air. These last came
not through caprice, but of necessity, and the only
freedom which the poet has since claimed has been the
freedom of service to his ideas and of fidelity to his creed.
The poems, " Les Orientales," correspond with the
announcements of the preface. They are miracles of
colour and of sound. They shine and sparkle, and
gleam like fiery opals, sapphires, and rubies. They
startle the French muse, accustomed to the classic lyre
or pastoral pipe, with the sound of sackbut, psaltery,
dulcimer, and all kinds of music. Our eyes and ears are
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 447
filled with vivid sensation. Does it greatly matter that
they remain remote from our imaginative reason, our
understanding heart, our conscience ? The desires we
possess for splendour and harmony are gratified : why
should we demand anything further ? Victor Hugo,
still unprovided with sufficient subjects from his personal
experience, and finding the monarchical pageant grow
somewhat tarnished, had turned to Greece and Spain.
With Spain the recollections of his boyhood connected
him. Greece was a fashion of the period. The struggle
with the Turkish power had surrounded the names of
places and persons with associations which were effective
with the popular imagination. Lord Byron had put his
misanthropic hero into eastern costumes. The pro-
perties — jerreed, tophaike, ataghan, caftan, the jewel of
Giamschid, the throne of Eblis — took the taste of the
period. The plash of the sack which contains a guilty
wife in the still waters of the Bosphorus — the bearded
heads attached to the Seraglio walls, and left as food for
crows — these were thrilling sensations offered by eastern
poetry. ''Conscience," "imaginative reason," "under-
standing heart," what metaphysical jargon is this ?
Pedantry ! we need colour and harmony ; we demand a
nervous excitation. And in truth, Victor Hugo had
advanced a step, for he had lost a faith, and gained a
style.
The more ambitious efforts of the years immediately
following the publication of "Les Orientales " were in the
direction of the theatre, and to the same period belongs
the novel " Kotre-Dame de Paris," in which the medi-
evalism of the writer is no longer political, or religious, if
448 The Poetry of Victor Hugo,
it ever were such, but is purely sesthetical, supplying him
with the rich and picturesque background before which
his figures move. It was a fortunate circumstance for
his lyrical poetry that it ceased to be the chief instru-
ment of his ambition. Any deliberate attempt to sur-
pass " Les Orientales " would have overleaped itself, and
fallen on the other side. No pyrotechnic art could send
up fiery parachutes or showers of golden rain higher than
the last. But if instead of the fantastic blossoms of the
pyrotechnist he were to bring together true flowers of the
meadows, and leaves of the forest trees, the nosegay
might have a grace and sweetness of its own. " Les
Feuilles d'Automne" was published in the month of
November 1831, and Victor Hugo notes as curious the
contrast between the tranquillity of his verses and the
feverish agitation of the minds of men. " The author
feels in abandoning this useless book to the popular
wave, which bears away so many better things, a little
of the melancholy pleasure one experiences in flinging a
flower into a torrent and watching what becomes of it."
There is an autumn in early manhood out of which a
longer summer, or a spring of more rapturous joy, may
be born. One period of life has been accomplished ;
better things may come, but there must be an abandon-
ment of the old ; a certain radiance fades away ; it is a
season of recollection ; our eye has kept watch over the
mortality of man ; we know the " Soothing thoughts
that spring out of human suffering." It was at this
period that Wordsworth wrote his " Ode on the Intima-
tions of Immortality." It was at this period that Victor
Hugo wrote "Les Feuilles d'Automne." No other volume
The Poetry of Victor Httgo. 449
of his poetry is marked by the same grave and tender
self-possession ; there is sadness in it, but not the ecstasy
of grief; there is joy, but a wise and tempered joy.
The calm of " Les Rayons et les Ombres " may be more
profound ; it is at all events a different calm — that of
one who has the parting with youth well over, who has
gone forward with confidence, and discovered the laws of
the new order of existence and found them to be good.
In " Les Rayons et les Ombres " the horizon is wider and
the sky more blue ; nature knows the great secret, and
smiles. There is something pathetic in the calm of the
earlier volume ; something pathetic even in the shouts
and laughter of the children which ring through it,
though they ring clear and sweet as the bells upon the
mules of Castile and Aragon.
Victor Hugo, who heretofore had for the most part
been looking eagerly abroad for ambitious motives for
song, now in "Les Feuilles d'Automne" very quietly folded
the wing, dropped down, and found himself. Memories
of his childhood, his mother's love and solicitude for her
frail infant, the house at Blois where his father came to
rest after the wars, the love-letters of thirteen years ago,
his daughter at her evening prayer, the beauty of many
sunsets, the voice of the sea heard from high headlands,
the festival of the starry heaven above, and, below, the
human watcher, a "vain shadow, obscure and taciturn,"
yet seeming for a moment " the mysterious king of this
nocturnal pomp," — these and such as these are the
themes over which the poet lingers with a grave sadness
and joy. The feeling for external nature throughout is
fervent, but large and pure. The poet stands in the
2 F
450 The Poetry of Victor Hugo,
presence of nature, and receives her precious influences ;
lie is not yet enveloped by her myriad forces and made
one with them ; neither does he yet stand at odds with
her, the human will contending in titanic struggle with
the avay%n of natural law. God in these poems is a
beneficent Father.
But now, again, Victor Hugo looked abroad. In " Les
Orientales " he had treated subjects remote from his per-
sonal history. " Les Feuilles d'Automne " was ajrecord
of private joys and sorrows. In " Les ChantSj
puscule " the personal and impersonal have mej
union ; the individual appears, but his indiv
important less for its own sake than because it
the common spiritual characteristics of the period,
faith of France in her restored monarchy, her monarchy
by divine right, had waned, and finally become extinct ;
and with the faith of France, that also of her chief poet.
Many things had been preparing his spirit to accept the
democratic movement of modern society. The literary
war in which he had been engaged was a war of independ-
ence ; it cultivated the temper of revolt, disdain of
authority, self-confidence and a forward gaze into the
future. None but a literary Danton could have dared in
French alexandrines to name by its proper name le cochon.
The noblesse of the poetical vocabulary had been rudely
dealt with by Victor Hugo ; and a rough swarm of words,
which in a lexicon would have been branded with the
obelus, now forced their way into the luxurious tenements
of aristocratic noun-substantive and adjective. Victor
Hugo had said to verse, " Be free ; " to the words of the
dictionary, " Be republican, fraternise, for you are equal."
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 45 r
And in the enfranchisement of speech, was not thought
enfranchised also ? The poet had eloquently vindicated
the rights of the grotesque in art. My Lady Beauty
was no more needful to the world than her humorous
clown ; Quasimodo's face looked forth from, the cathedral
door, and vindicated all despised and insulted things.
It was inevitable that the literary revolution should
coalesce with the political revolution. Moreover, the
monarchy had discredited itself, — it had been the agent
of jjfc-der ; and the People had made itself beautiful by
tl jj^ie of the days of July.
m Phen the first acclamations which greeted a con-
stitutional king had died away, there came a season of
hesitation and surmise, a season of distrust. The dawn
had seemed to open before men's eyes ; and now again
it was twilight — twilight of religious doubt, twilight of
political disquietude. " Les Chants du> Crepuscule ' :
corresponds to this moment of welter and relapse in the
wave of thought. Incertitude within, a vaporous dim-
ness without — such is the stuff out of which this poetry
has shaped itself ; and the poet himself, hearing " Yes,"
and " No," cried by conflicting voices, is neither one of
those who deny nor one of those who affirm. He is one
of those_who hope. The mysterious light upon the edge
of the horizon, like the distant fire of a forge at night, is
it the promise of the dawn, or the last brightness of
receding day ? Is the voice of Ocean a voice of joy or
of fear ? What is this murmur which rises from the
heart of man ? — a song, or perhaps a cry ?
Notwithstanding the doubtful accent of " Les Chants
du Crepuscule," this volume leaves little uncertainty as
452 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
to the direction in which the poet is tending. He is
one of those who hope ; and with Victor Hugo to hope
is already half to believe. His former royalist Catholic
convictions were not savagely demolished ; they remained
as a sacred and poetic ruin, appealing, as ruins do, to the
sense in us of pathos and pity ; but they exercised no
authority over the will or the masculine part of the im-
agination. In " Les Chants du Crepuscule " we can dis-
cern this imagination venturing itself into the presence
of the popular life and movement, and arrested and
aroused by the new and marvellous objects which became
visible. An exiled king is deserving of a respectful and
sympathising gaze ; but see, the billowy inundation of
the people, the irresistible advance ! and listen, the
rumours, the terror, the joy, the mystery of the wind
and of these waves that roll before it ; the stormy
murmur of the people around each great idea ! Here is
space, and strength, and splendour for the imagination
to delight in, more satisfying to it than the livery of
courtiers and the ceremonial of state days. And upon
the other hand — (for what could Victor Hugo's imagina-
tion effect without a contrast ?) — observe the gloomy
faces of the enemies of liberty and of the people ; not
kings (for kings were not all tyrants in 1835), but the
pernicious counsellors of kings, fulfilled with perjury and
boldness, " unhappy, who believed in their dark error
that one morning they could take the freedom of the
world like a bird in a snare." The material of much
future prophecy, triumphant and indignant, lies already
in existence here.
But Victor Hugo was not going to allow his poetry to
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 453
become the instrument of party politics. He must not
allow the harmony of his nature to be violated. He
must maintain his soul above the tumult ; unmoved
himself, he must be austere and indulgent to others.
He must belong to all parties by their generous, and to
no party by its vicious sides. His grave respect for the
people must be united with scorn for mobs and mob-
leaders. He must live with external nature as well as
with man. He may safely point out errors in little
human codes if he contemplate by day and by night the
text of the divine and eternal codes. And holding- him-
self thus above all that is merely local and transitory,
his poetry must be the portrait — profoundly faithful —
of himself, such a portrait of his own personality being
perhaps the largest and most universal work which a
thinker can give to the world.*
Such was the spirit in which " Les Yoix Interieures "
and " Les Rayons et les Ombres " were written. It was
a time of high resolves, and of successful conduct of his
moral nature. And what gives joy and what restores
faith like successful conduct of the moral nature ? We
cannot trace each step of the progress from " Les Chants
du Crepuscule " to " Les Rayons et les Ombres," but we
can see that the progress was accomplished. The twilight
had dissipated itself, and it was the dawn indeed which
came, and not the darkness. Human love seemed to
grow a more substantial and a diviner thing. Beside
the light of their own beauty there was an "auxiliar
light," illuminating the faces of the flowers. Some
* Prefaces of "Les Voix Interieures " and of "Les Rayons et les
Ombres."
454 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
counter-charm of space and hollow sky had been
found :
"Let no one ask me how it came to pass ;
It seems that I am happy, that to me
A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass,
A purer sapphire melts into the sea."
Nature which had been a tender mother, now becomes
a strong and beautiful bride, with embracing arms, who
has need of her eager lover the poet. God, who had
been a beneficent father, is now something more than
can be expressed by any human relation : He is joy,
and law, and light. God and nature and man have
approached and play through one another. What a
moment ago was divine grace, is now light, and as it
touches the heart it again changes into love, and once
more is transformed from love to faith and hope. There
is an endless interchange of services between all forces
and objects spiritual and material. Nothing in the
world is single. Small is great, and great is small.
Below the odour of a rose-bud lies an abyss — the whole
mysterious bosom of the earth, — and above it in the
beauty of a woman's bending face, and the soul behind
that face, rises an unfathomable heaven. The calm of
" Les Rayons et les Ombres," if it is profound, is also
passionate. This is that " high mountain apart," the
mountain of transfiguration. They who ascend there
say, " It is good for us to be here," not knowing what
they say : presently they come down from the mountain,
with human help for those who are afflicted and diseased,
— help which to some seems supernatural, and which
assuredly those who have remained below are not always
able to afford.
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 455
•
In the autumn of 1843, Leopoldine, daughter of
Victor Hugo, and Charles Yacquerie, who had been her
husband during some few spring and summer months,
were drowned. After the Coup d'fitat of December 2,
the poet became an exile from France. In 1853 was
published in Brussels the volume entitled " Les Chati-
ments." In 1856 (twelve years had elapsed since his
daughter's death) appeared the two volumes of " Les
Contemplations."
Joy had been Victor Hugo's preparation for his great
sorrow. Had a blow so sudden and dreadful fallen
before his soul had been tempered and purified by joy,
the soul might have been crushed into formless apathy,
or shattered into fragments. But because joy and love
and faith had maintained his nature in a state of high
efficiency, because every part of it was now vital and
sensitive, he was fitted to endure the blow. Extreme
anguish can be accepted as a bitter gift if it comes from
the hands of Life ; martyrdom is unendurable only by
one who is already half deceased, and little sensitive to
pain. " Les Contemplations " is the lyrical record of
twenty -five years. More than any other of Victor
Hugo's collections of poetry it holds, as in a rocky
chalice, the gathered waters of his life. "The author
has allowed the book to form itself, so to speak, within
him. Life, filtering drop by drop through events and
sufferings, has deposited it in his heart." These deep
waters have slowly amassed themselves in the soul's secret
places. " Les Contemplations " completes the series of
personal memorials which had preceded it by one more
comprehensive than all the rest. Here nothing is absent
456 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
— reminiscences of school-boy years, youth, the loves and
fancies, the gaiety and the illusions of youth, the literary
warfare of early manhood, and the pains and delights of
poetical creation, friendship, sorrow, the innocent mirth
of children, the tumult of life, the intense silence of the
grave, the streams, the fields, the flowers, the tumbling
of desolate seas, the songs of birds, solitude, the devout
aspiration, doubt and the horror of doubt, the eager
assault of the problems Whence ? and Whither ? and
Wherefore ? and the baffled vision and arrested foot
there upon " the brink of the infinite." Into this book
the sunlight and clear azure have gone ; the storm and
the mists. But when these, its tributaries, demand each
the book as of right belonging to itself, when the forest
claims it, and the blossoming meadow-land, and the
star, and the great winds, and the heaven, and the
tempestuous sea, and the nests of birds — the poet refuses
all these ; he gives it to the tomb. An exiled man, he
cannot now lay a flower upon his children's grave ; he
can only send to them his soul.
The first three books contain poems of many moods of
joy. The fourth book includes the poems which recall
all his daughter's sweetness and pretty ways in childhood
— poems of a lovely purity and sadness. The father
waits in his study for the morning visit of his child ; she
enters with her " Bonjour, mon petit pere," takes his pen,
opens his books, sits upon his bed, disturbs his papers,
and is gone like a flying bird. Then his work begins
more joyously, and on some page scribbled with her
childish arabesques, or crumpled by her little hands,
come the sweetest verses of his song. How the winter
The Poetry of Victor Hugo, 457
evenings passed with grammar and history lessons, and
the four children at his knee, while their mother sat
near and friends were chatting by the hearth ! And
those summer walks of the father, thirty years of age,
and the daughter, ten, coming home by moonlight,
when the moths were brushing the window panes. And
the sight of the two fair children's heads stooping over
the Bible, the elder explaining, and the younger listening,
while their hands wandered from page to page over
Moses, and Solomon, and Cyrus, and Moloch, and
Leviathan, and Jesus. And she is dead ; and to set
over against all these, there is the walk begun at
dawn, by forest, by mountain ; the man silent, with
eyes which see no outward thiug, solitary, unknown,
with bent back and crossed hands, and the day seeming
to him like the night ; and then when the evening gold
is in the sky unseen, and the distant sails are descending
towards Harfleur, the arrival, and a bunch of green holly
and blossoming heath to lay upon the tomb.
Once more as the poems close Victor Hugo attains to
peace. But it is not the peace of " Les Rayons et les
Ombres," the calm of the high table-lands of joy, the calm
of a halt in clear air and under the wide and luminous
sky. It is rather the peace of swiftest motion, the sleep
of an orb spinning onward through space. For now the
stress of life has become very urgent. Joy and sorrow
are each intenser than before, and are scarcely tolerable.
That atom, the human will, while still retaining con-
sciousness and individuality, is enveloped by forces
material and spiritual, and whirled onward with them in
unfaltering career towards their goal. Odours, songs, the
458 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
blossoms of flowers, the chariots of the suns, the genera-
tions of men, the religions and philosophies of races, the
tears of a father over his dead child, winters and sum-
mers, the snows, and clouds, and rain, and among all
these the individual soul, hasten forward with incredible
speed and with an equal repose to that of the whirlpool's
edge toward some divine issue. If the gloom is great,
so is the splendour. We, poor mortals, gazing Godward
are blind ; yet we who are blind are dazzled as we gaze.
The poems of later date in these volumes bear tokens of
strain : the stress of life has become too intense, and
the art of the poet, it may be, suffers in consequence.
Shakspere was able, after enduring the visions of Lear
upon the heath, and Othello by the bedside, to retire to
a little English country town, and enjoy the quiet dignity
of a country gentleman. Not all great artists are so
framed. With Beethoven in his later period the passion
of sound became overmastering, and almost an agony of
delight. With Turner in his later period, the splendour
of sunlight almost annihilated his faculty of vision.
Blake's songs of Innocence and of Experience became
mysterious prophecies of good and evil, of servitude and
freedom, of heaven and hell. With Victor Hugo the
joy and the sorrow of the world have been too exceed-
ingly strong, and his art has had to endure a strain.
" Les Chatiments," published some years earlier than
" Les Contemplations," belongs by its subject to a later
period of Victor Hugo's life. His private sorrow was for
a time submerged by the flood of indignation let loose
against the public malefactor. In the last poem of an
earlier collection Victor Hugo had spoken of three great
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 459
voices which were audible within him, and which sum-
moned him to the poet's task. One was the voice of
threatening, of protest and malediction against baseness
and crime, the voice of the muse who visited Jeremiah
and Amos : the second was all gentleness and pity and
pleading on behalf of the ignorance and errors of men :
the third was the voice of the Absolute, the Most-High,
of Pan, of Vishnu, who is affected neither by love nor
hatred, to whom death is no less acceptable than life,
who includes what seems to us crime as contentedly as
what we call virtue. Now, for a season, Victor Hugo
listened eagerly to what the first of these three voices
had to say. It was the hour for art to rise and show
that it is no dainty adornment of life, but an armed
guardian of the land. "The rhetoricians coldly say,
' The poet is an angel ; he soars, ignoring Fould, Magnan,
Morny, Maupas ; he gazes with ecstacy up the serene
night.' No ! so long as you are accomplices of these
hideous crimes, which step by step I track, so long as
you spread your veils over these brigands, blue heavens,
and suns and stars, I will not look upon you." " Les
Chatiments " is the roaring of an enraged lion. One could
wish that the poet kept his indignation somewhat more
under control. He is not Apollo shooting the faultless
and shining shafts against Python, but a Jupiter tonans,
a little robustious, and whirling superabundant thunder-
bolts with equal violence in every direction. It is now
the chief criminal, the Man of December, now it is the
jackals who form his body-guard, now the prostitute
priest, now the bribed soldier, now the bon bourgeois,
devotee of the god Boutique, and on each and all descend
460 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
the thunderbolts, with a rattling hail of stinging epithets,
and with fire that runs and leaps. This eruption, which
is meant to overwhelm the gewgaw Empire, goes on
fulgurantly, resoundingly and not without scorise and
smoke. Victor Hugo's faith in the people and in the
future remains unshaken. " Progress," " Liberty,"
" Humanity," remain more than ever magic watchwords.
The volume which opens with "Nox" — the blackness
of that night of violence and treason — closes with "Lux,"
the dreadful shining of the coming day of Freedom.
"Doubt not; let us believe, let us wait. God knows
how to break the teeth of Nero as the panther's teeth.
Let us have faith, be calm, and go onward." Let us
not slay this" man ; let us keep him alive — " Oh, a
superb chastisement ? Oh ! if one day he might pass
along the highway naked, bowed down, trembling, as the
grass trembles to the wind, under the execration of the
whole human race." . . . " People, stand aside ! this
man is marked with the sign. Let Cain pass ; he
belongs to God."
And now Victor Hugo's gaze travelled from his own
period backward over the universal history of man. Was
this triumph of evil for a season, with tyranny and cor-
ruption and luxury in the high places, and fidelity, and
truth, and virtue, and loyalty to great ideas cast out,
fading on remote and poisonous shores, or languishing in
dungeons, — was this a new thing in the world's history ?
The exile in the solitude of his rocky island, and
encircled by the moaning seas, loses the tender and
graceful aspect of things. As he looks backward through
all time, what does he perceive ? Always the weak
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 46 1
oppressed by the strong, the child cast out of his heritage
by violent men, the innocent entrapped by the crafty,
the light-hearted girl led blindfold to her doom, old age
insulted and thrust away by youth, the fratricide, the
parricide, the venal priest on one side of the throne, and
the harlot queening it on the other, the tables fuil of
vomit and filthiness, the righteous sold for silver, the
wicked bending their bow to cast down the poor and
needy. While he gazes, the two passions which had filled
"Les Chatiments ' from the beginning to the end, the
passions of Hatred and of Hope, condense and materialize
themselves, and take upon them two forms — the one,
that of the tyrant, the proud wrong-doer; the other,
that of the Justiciary, the irresistible avenger of wrong. 45 "
" La Legende des Siecles " is the imaginative record of the
crimes and the overthrow of tyrants. If no collection of
Victor Hugo's poetry formed itself so quietly and truly,
gathering drop by drop, as " Les Contemplations," there
is none which is so much the product of resolution and
determined energy as this, " La Legende des Siecles,"
which next followed. These poems are not lyrical out-
flowings of sorrow and of joy. The poet, with the design
of shaping a great whole out of many parts, chooses from
a wide field the subject of each brief epic ; having chosen
his subject, he attacks it with the utmost vigour and
audacity, determined to bring it into complete subjection
to his imagination. Breaking into a new and untried
province of art now when his sixtieth year was not
distant, Victor Hugo never displayed more ambition or
* M. Emile Mont^gut has already somewhere called attention to the
parts these two figures play in "La Legende des Siecles."
462 The Poetry of Victor Hugo.
greater strength. The alexandrine in his hands becomes
capable of any and every achievement ; its even stepping
is heard only when the poet chooses ; now it is a winged
thing and flies ; now it advances with the threatening
tread of Mozart's commandatore.
Occasional episodes, joyous or graciously tender, there
are in " La Legende des Siecles." The rapture of crea-
tion when the life of the first man-child was assured, the
sleep of Boaz, Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary,
the calm death of the eastern prophet, the gallantry of
the little page Aymerillot who took Narbonne, the
Infanta with the rose in her tiny hand, the fisherman
who welcomes the two orphan children, and will toil for
them as for his own — these relieve the gloom. But the
prominent figures (and sometimes they assume Titanic
size) are those of the great criminals and the great
avengers — Cain, pursued by the eye of God, Canute, the
seven evil uncles of the little King of Galicia, Joss the
great and Zeno the little, but equal in the instincts of
the tio-er, Ratbert and his court of titled robbers and
wanton women, Philip the Second, the Spanish inquisitors
and baptizers of mountains — where shall we look for
moral support against the cruelty and the treachery and
the effrontery of these ? Only in the persons of the
avengers, — Roland whirling Durandal in the narrow
gorge, Eviradnus standing over the body of the sleeping
countess, or shooting the corpses of the two defeated
wretches down their hideous oubliette — only in these
and in the future when all dark shadows of crime and of
sorrow shall have passed for ever away.
It is to be noted of "La Legende des Siecles " that the
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 463
aspect of nature as an antagonist of the will of man, or
as Victor Hugo would grandiosely express it, as " one
form of the triple avdyxri" that aspect presented with
such force and infinite detail in " Les Travailleurs de la
Mer," and in the earlier chapters of " L'Homme qui Rit,"
appears distinctly in some of these brief epic records of
human struggle and human victory or defeat.
" La Le'gende des Siecles " and the volume which next
followed become each more striking by the contrast they
present. Victor Hugo has somewhere told us how one
day he went to see the lion of Waterloo ; the solitary and
motionless figure stood dark against the sky, and the poet
stepped up the little hillock and stood within its shadow.
Suddenly he heard a song ; it was the voice of a robin
who had built her nest in the great mouth of the lion.
" Les Chansons des Rues et des Bois " viewed in relation
to "La Le'gende des Siecles " resembles this nest in the
lion's mouth. The volume was indeed a piquant surprise
to those who had watched the poet's career through its
later period, and who took the trouble to surmise about
his forthcoming works. After the tragic legends came
these slight caprices. The songs (while their tone and
colour are very different from those of Victor Hugo's
youth) are a return to youth by the subjects of many of
them, and by the circumstance that once again, as in the
" Odes ' and " Les Orientales," style becomes a matter
of more importance than the idea. These later feats of
style are the more marvellous through their very slight-
ness and curious delicacy. Pegasus, who has been soaring,
descends and performs to a miracle the most exquisite
circus accomplishments. Language, metre, and meaning
464 The Poetry of Victor Hitgo.
seem recklessly to approach the brink of irretrievable con-
fusion ; yet the artist never practised greater strictness,
or attained greater precision, because here more than
elsewhere these were indispensable. All styles meet in
mirthful reunion. Virgil w r alks side by side with Villon ;
Lalage and Jeanneton pour the wine ; King David is
seen behind the trees staring at Diana, and Actseon from
the housetop at Bathsheba ; the spider spins his web to
catch the flying rhymes from Minerva's indignant nose
to the bald head of St. Paul.
Yet all the while an ideal of beauty floats over this
Kermesse ; the goddesses do not lose their heavenly
splendour ; the sky bends overhead ; the verse, while it
sips its coffee, retains the fragrance of the dew. As to
idea — the idea of such songs as these is that they shall
have no idea. Enough of the mystery of life and death,
the ascending scale of beings, the searching in darkness,
the judicial pursuit of evil ! Enough of visions on the
mountain heights, of mysterious sadness by the sea ! Let
us live, and adjourn all these ; adjourn this measureless
task, adjourn Satan, and Medusa, and say to the Sphinx
"Go by, I am gossiping with the rose." Friend, this inter-
lude displeases you. What is to be done ? The woods are
golden. Up goes the notice-board, " Out for a holiday."
I want to laugh a little in the fields. What ! must I
question the corn-cockle about eternity ? Must I show
a brow of night to the lily and the butterfly ? Must I
terrify the elm and the lime, the reeds and rushes, by
hanging huge problems over the nests of little birds ?
Should I not be a hundred leagues from good sense if I
were to go explaining to the wagtails the Latin of the
The Poetiy of Victor Hugo. 465
Dies Tree ? Such is the mirthful spirit of the book ;
not mirth in the ''happy, prompt, instinctive way of
youth ; " but the wilfulness prepense of one who seeks
relief from thought and passion. The apparent recrude-
scence of sensuality in some of those songs is not an affair
of the senses at all, but of the fancy : or if the eye is
inquisitive and eager, it is because the vague bewildering
consciousness of youthful pleasure is absent.
Such songs as these could be no more than an
interlude in the literary life of Victor Hugo. But the
transition becomes tragic when we pass from " Les
Chansons des Rues et des Bois ,! to " L'Annee terrible."
The holiday in the woods is indeed over, and all laughter
and sportive ways. The fields are trampled by the steady
battalions of the invaders. The streets have a grave and
anxious air. Paris, the heroic city, the city of liberty,
the capital of the world, where Danton thundered, and
Moliere shone, and Voltaire jested, Paris is enduring her
agony. But the empire has fallen. The imperial
bandit " passes along the highway naked, bowed down,
trembling, as the grass trembles to the wind, under the
execration of the whole human race." And Victor
Hugo stands in republican France.
" L'Annee terrible " is a record for the imagination,
complete in every important particular, of the history of
Paris, from August 1870 to July 1871 ; and with the
life of Paris, the personal life of the poet is intertwined
inseparably, and for ever. Great joy, the joy of an
exile restored to his people, the joy of a patriot who has
witnessed the overthrow of a corrupt and enervating
despotism, and who is proud of the heroic attitude of the
2 G
466 The Poetry of Victor Hicgo.
besieged city — such joy is mingled with the great
sorrow of his country's defeat and dismemberment. He
is sustained by his confidence in the future, and in the
ultimate victory of the democratic ideas which form his
faith ; though once or twice this confidence seems for a
moment shaken by the rude assault of facts. The
extravagance of his love and devotion to France, the
extravagance of his scorn and hatred of the invader, must
be pardoned, if they need pardon — and passed by.
When will a poet arise who shall unite the most
accurate perception of facts as they really are — exag-
gerating nothing, diminishing nothing — with the most
ardent passion ; who shall be judicial and yet the
greatest of lovers ? He indeed will make such passion
as that of Victor Hugo look pale. Yet the wisdom and
charity and moderation of many poems of " L' Anne'e ter-
rible " must not be overlooked : nor the freedom of the
poet from party spirit. He is a Frenchman throughout ;
not a man of the Commune, nor a man of Versailles. The
most precious poems of the book are those which keep
close to facts rather than concern themselves with ideas.
The sunset seen from the ramparts, the floating bodies
of the Prussians borne onward by the Seine, caressed and
kissed and still swayed on by the eddying water, the
bomb which fell near the old man's feet while he sat
where had been the convent of the Feuillantines, and
where he had walked under the trees in Aprils long ago,
holding his mother's hand, the petroleuse dragged like a
chained beast through the scorching streets of Paris, the
gallant boy who came to confront death beside his friends,
— memories of these it is which haunt us when we have
The Poetry of Victor Hugo. 467
closed the book. Of these — and of the little limbs, and
transparent fingers and baby smile and murmur like the
murmur of bees, and the face changed from rosy health
to a pathetic paleness, of the one-year-old grandchild,
too soon to become an orphan.
In the works of 1877 no new direction has been
taken ; but splendours and horrors, heroisms and shames
still fill up the legendary record of the centuries ; and
amidst these glories and dishonours of adult manhood,
shines the divine innocence of the child.
1873.
THE POETRY OF DEMOCRACY: WALT
WHITMAN.
That school of criticism which has attempted in recent
years to connect the history of literature and art with
the larger history of society and the general movement
of civilizations, creeds, forms of national life and feeling,
and which may be called emphatically the critical school
of the present century, or the naturalist as contradis-
tinguished from the dogmatic school, has not yet
essayed the application of its method and principles to
the literature and art of America. For a moment one
wonderingly inquires after the cause of this seeming
neglect. The New World, with its new presentations
to the senses, its new ideas and passions, its new social
tendencies and habits, must surely, one thinks, have
given birth to literary and artistic forms corresponding
to itself in strange novelty, unlike in a remarkable
degree those sprung from our old-world, and old-world
hearts. A moral soil and a moral climate so different
from those of Europe must surely have produced a fauna
and flora other than the European, a fauna and flora
which the writers of literary natural history cannot but
be curious to classify, and the peculiarities of which
they must endeavour to account for by the special con-
ditions of existence and of the development of species
in the new country. It is as much to be expected that
The Poetry of Democracy. 469
poems and pictures requiring new names should be
found there as that new living things of any other kind,
the hickory and the hemlock, the mocking-bird and the
katydid, should be found. So one reasons for a moment,
and wonders. The fact is, that while the physical con-
ditions, fostering certain forms of life, and repressing
others, operated without let or hindrance, and disclosed
themselves in their proper results with the simplicity and
sureness of nature, the permanent moral powers were
met by others of transitory or local, but for the time,
superior authority, which put a hedge around the litera-
ture and art of America, enclosing a little paradise of
European culture, refinement, and aristocratic delicatesse
from the howling wilderness of Yankee democracy, and
insulating it from the vital touch and breath of the
land, the winds of free, untrodden places, the splendour
and vastness of rivers and seas, the strength and tumult
of the people.
Until of late indigenous growths of the New World
showed in American literature like exotics, shy or
insolent. We were aware of this, and expected in an
American poet some one to sing for us gently, in a
minor key, the pleasant airs we know. Longfellow's
was a sweet and characteristic note, but, except in
a heightened enjoyment of the antique — a ruined
Rhine castle, a goblet from which dead knights had
drunk, a suit of armour, or anything frankly mediseval
— except in this, Longfellow is one of ourselves — an
European. " Evangeline " is an European idyl of
American life, Hermann and Dorothea having emigrated
to Acadie. "Hiawatha" might have been dreamed in
470 The Poetry of Democracy.
Kensington by a London man of letters who possessed
a graceful idealizing turn of imagination, and who had
studied with clear-minded and gracious sympathy the
better side of Indian character and manners. Long-
fellow could amiably quiz, from a point of view of
superior and contented refinement, his countrymen who
went about blatant and blustering for a national art and
literature which should correspond with the large pro-
portions and freedom of the Republic. " We want,"
cries Mr Hathaway in " Kavanagh," " a national drama,
in which scope enough shall be given to our gigantic
ideas, and to the unparalleled activity and progress of
our people. . . . We want a national literature,
altogether shaggy and unshorn, that shall shake the
earth, like a herd of buffaloes, thundering over the
prairies !" And Mr Churchill explains that what is
best in literature is not national but universal, and is
the fruit of refinement and culture. Longfellow's
fellow-countryman, Irving, might have walked arm-in-
arm with Addison, and Addison would have run no risk
of being discomposed by a trans-Atlantic twang in his
companion's accent. Irving, if he betrays his origin at
all, betrays it somewhat in the same way as Longfellow,
by his tender, satisfied repose in the venerable, chiefly
the venerable in English society and manners, by his
quiet delight in the implicit tradition of English civility,
the scarcely-felt yet everywhere influential presence of a
beautiful and grave Past, and the company of unseen
beneficent associations. In Bryant, Europe is more in
the background ; prairie and immemorial forest occupy
the broad spaces of his canvas, but he feels pleasure in
The Poetry of Democracy. 47 1
these mainly because he is not native to their influences
The mountains are not his sponsors ; there are not the
unconscious ties between him and them which indicate
kinship, nor the silences which prove entire communion.
Moreover, the life of American men and women is
almost unrepresented in the poetry of Bryant. The
idealized Keel man is made use of as picturesque, an
interesting and romantic person ; but the Yankee is
prosaic as his ledger. The American people had
evidently not become an object of imaginative interest
to itself in the mind of Bryant.
That the historical school of criticism should not have
occupied itself with American literature is then hardly
to be wondered at. A chapter upon that literature until
recently must have been not a criticism but a prophecy.
It was this very fact, the absence of a national literature,
which the historical school was called on to explain.
And to explain it evident and sufficient causes were
producible, and were produced. The strictly Puritan
origin of the Americaus, the effort imposed upon them of
subduing the physical forces of the country, and of yoking
them to the service of man, the occupation of the entire
community with an absorbing industry, the proximity of
Europe, which made it possible for America to neglect
the pursuit of the sciences, literature, and the fine arts
without relapsing into barbarism — these causes were
enumerated by De Tocqueville as having concurred to fix
the minds of the Americans upon purely practical objects.
"I consider the people of the United States as that
portion of the English people which is commissioned to
explore the wilds of the New World ; whilst the rest of
47 2 The Poetry of Democracy.
the nation, enjoying more leisure, and less harassed by
the drudgery of life, may devote its energies to thought,
and enlarge in all directions the empire of the mind."
Beside which, before a nation can become poetical to
itself, consciously or unconsciously, it must possess a
distinctive character, and the growth of national as of
individual character is a process of long duration in
every case, of longer duration than ordinary when a
larger than ordinary variety of the elements of character
wait to be assimilated and brought into harmony.
In Emerson a genuine product of the soil was perhaps
for the first time apparent to us. We tasted in him the
flavour of strange sap, and knew the ripening of another
sun and other winds. He spoke of what is old and
universal, but he spoke in the fashion of a modern man,
and of his own nation. His Greek head pivoted rest-
lessly on true Yankee shoulders, and when he talked
Plato he did so in a dialectical variety of Attic peculiar
to Boston.* Lowell, at times altogether feudal and
European, has also at times a trans- Atlantic air, in the
earnest but somewhat vague spiritualism of his earlier
poems, his enthusiasm about certain dear and dim
general ideas, and more happily in a conception of the
democratic type of manhood which appears in some of
the poems of later years, especially in that very noble
" Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21,
1865." But taken as a whole, the works of Lowell do
not mirror the life, the thoughts, and passions of the
nation. They are works, as it were, of an English poet
who has become a naturalized citizen of the United
* " A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders." — Lowell.
The Poetry of Democracy. 473
States, who admires the institutions, and has faith in the
ideas of America, but who cannot throw off his allegiance
to the old country, and its authorities.
At last steps forward a man unlike any of his pre-
decessors, and announces himself, and is announced with
a nourish of critical trumpets, as Bard of America, and
Bard of democracy. What cannot be questioned after
an hour's acquaintance with Walt Whitman and his
" Leaves of Grass," is that in him we meet a man not
shaped out of old-world clay, not cast in any old-world
mould, and hard to name by any old-world name. In his
self-assertion there is a manner of powerful nonchalant-
ness which is not assumed ; he does not peep timidly
from behind his works to glean our suffrages, but seems
to say, " Take me or leave me, here I am, a solid and
not an inconsiderable fact of the universe." He disturbs
our classifications. He attracts us ; he repels us ; he
excites our curiosity, wonder, admiration, love ; or, our
extreme repugnance. He does anything except leave us
indifferent. However we feel towards him we cannot
despise him. He is "a summons and a challenge."
He must be understood and so accepted, or must be got
rid of. Passed by he cannot be. His critics have, for
the most part, confined their attention to the personality
of the man ; they have studied him, for the most part,
as a phenomenon isolated from the surrounding society,
the environment, the milieu, which has made such a
phenomenon possible. In a general way it has been said
that Whitman is the representative in art of American
democracy, but the meaning of this has not been in-
vestigated in detail. It is purposed here to consider
474 The Poetry of Democracy.
some of the characteristics of democratic art, and to
inquire in what manner they manifest themselves in
Whitman's work.
A word of explanation is necessary. The representa-
tive man of a nation is not always the nation's favourite.
Hebrew spiritualism, the deepest instincts, the highest
reaches of the moral attainment of the Jewish race, appear
in the cryings and communings of its prophets ; yet the
prophets sometimes cried in the wilderness, and the
people went after strange gods. American democracy is
as yet but half-formed. The framework of its institutions
exists, but the will, the conscience, the mature desires of
the democratic society are still in process of formation.
If Whitman's writings are spoken of as the poetry of
American democracy, it is not implied that his are the
volumes most inquired after in the libraries of New York
or Boston. What we mean is that these are the poems
which naturally arise when a man of imaginative genius
stands face to face with a great democratic world, as yet
but half-fashioned, such as society is in the United
States of the present day. Successive editions of his
works prove that Whitman has many readers. But
whether he had them now, or waited for them in years
to come, it would remain true that he is the first
representative democrat in art of the American con-
tinent. Not that he is to be regarded as a model or
a guide ; great principles and great passions which
must play their part in the future, are to be
found in his writings ; but these have not yet cleared
themselves from their amorphous surroundings. At
the same time he is before all else a living man, and
The Poetry of Democracy. 475
must not be compelled to appear as mere official
representative of anything. He will not be com-
prehended in a formula. No mew of him can image
the substance, the life and movement of his manhood,
which contracts and dilates, and is all over sensitive and
vital. Such views are, however, valuable in the study
of literature, as hypotheses are in the natural sciences, at
least for the colligation of facts. They have a tendency
to render criticism rigid and doctrinaire ;(|the critic must
therefore ever be ready to escape from his own theory of
a man, and come in contact with the man himself.
Every one doubtless moves in some regular orbit, and all
aberrations are only apparent, but what the precise orbit
is we must be slow to pronounce. Meanwhile we may
legitimately conjecture, as Kepler conjectured, if only we
remain ready, as Kepler was, to vary our conjectures as
the exigencies of the observed phenomena require.
A glance at the art of an aristocratic period will inform
us in the way of contrast of much that we may expect to
find under a democracy. And before all else we are
impressed by the great regard which the artists of an
aristocratic period pay to form. The dignity of letters
maintains itself, like the dignity of the court, by a
regulated propriety of manners. Ideas and feelings
cannot be received unless they wear the courtly costume.
Precise canons applicable to the drama, the ode, the
epic, to painting, sculpture, architecture, music, are
agreed upon, and are strictly enforced. They acquire
traditional authority, the precedents of a great period of
art (such, for example, as that of Louis XIV.), being
final and absolute with succeeding generations. " Style
47 & The Poetry of Democracy.
» • •
is deemed of almost as much importance as thought.
The tone of mind is always dignified, seldom very
animated, and writers care more to perfect what they
produce than to multiply their productions."* The
peril to which an aristocratic literature is hereby exposed
is of a singular kind ; matter or substance may cease to
exist, while an empty and elaborately studied form, a
variegated surface with nothing below it, may remain.
This condition of things was actually realized at different
times in the literatures of Italy, of Spain, of France, and
of England, when such a variegated surface of literature
served for disport and display of the wits of courtiers, of
ingenious authors, of noble and gentle persons male and
female, and when reflection and imagination had ceased
to have any relation with letters.
Again, the literature of an aristocracy is distinguished
by .-its striving after selectness, by its exclusive spirit,
and the number of things it proscribes. This is especially
the case with the courtly art which has a great monarchy
for its centre of inspiration. There is an ever-present
terror of vulgarity. Certain words are ineligible in
poetry ; they are mean or undignified, and the things
denoted by them must be described in an elegant
periphrasis. Directness and vividness are sacrificed to
propriety. The acquired associations of words are felt
to be as important, and claim as much attention as their
immediate significance, their spiritual power and personal
character. In language as in life there is, so to speak,
an aristocracy and a commonalty ; words with a heritage
of dignity, words which have been ennobled, and a rabble
* " Democracy in America," vol. iii. p. 115, ed. 1S40.
The Poetry of Democracy. 477
of words which are excluded from positions of honour
and of trust. But this striving after selectness in forms
of speech is the least important manifestation of the
exclusive spirit of aristocratic art. Far the greater
number of men and women, classes of society, conditions
of life, modes of thought and feeling, are not even con-
ceived as in any way susceptible of representation in art
which aspires to be grave and beautiful. The common
people do not show themselves en masse except as they
may follow in a patient herd, or oppose in impotent and
insolent revolt the leadership of their lords. Individually
they are never objects of equal interest with persons of
elevated worldly station. Even Shakspeare could hardly
find in humble life other virtues than a humorous
honesty and an affectionate fidelity. Robin Hood, the
popular hero, could not be quite heroic were he not of
noble extraction, and reputed Earl of Huntingdon.
In the decline of an aristocratic period, dramatic
studies of individual character and the life of the peasant
or artisan may be made from a superior point of view.
The literature of benevolence and piely stooping down to
view the sad bodies and souls of men tends in this
direction. And there are poems and novels, and
paintings and sculptures, which flatter the feeling of
mild benevolence. Pictuies like those of Faed, in
which some aged cottager, some strong delver of the
earth, or searcher of the sea, some hard- worked father of
children, says appealingly, " By virtue of this love I
exhibit towards my offspring, by virtue of the correct
sense I have of the condescension of my betters, by
virtue of this bit of pathos — indubitably human — in my
478 The Poetry of Democracy.
eye, confess now am I not a man and a brother ? " —
pictures like these are produced, and may be purchased
by amiable persons of the upper classes who would
honour the admirable qualities which exist in humble
life. But when the aristocratic period is in its strength,
and especially in courtly art and literature, these con-
descending studies, not without a certain affection and
sincerity in them, are unknown. It is as if the world
were made up of none but the gently born and bred.
At most rustic life is glanced at for the sake of the
suggestions of pretty waywardness it may supply to the
fancy of great people tired of greatness. To play at
pastoral may be for a while the fashion, if the shepherds
and shepherdesses are permitted to choose graceful classi-
cal names, if the crooks are dainty, and the duties of the
penfold not severe, if Phyllis may set off a neat ankle
with the latest shoe, and Cory don may complain of the
cruel fair in the bitterness of roundel or sonnet. The
middle classes, however, the bourgeoisie, figure consider-
ably in one department of poetry — in the comic drama.
Moliere indeed, living under a stricter rule of courtliness,
suffered disgrace in consequence of the introduction of so
low-bred a person as the excellent M. Jourdain. But to
the noble mind of our own Restoration period how rich a
material of humour, inexhaustibly diverting, if somewhat
monotonous in theme, was afforded by the relations of
the high-born and the moneyed classes. The bourgeois
aping the courtier, the lord making a fool of the mer-
chant, while he makes love to the merchant's wife
and daughter — what unextinguishable laughter have
variations upon these elementary themes compelled from
The Poetry of Democ7 r acy. 479
the occupants of the boxes iD our Restoration theatres !
There is an innocence quite touching in their openness
to impressions from the same comic effects repeated
again and again. Harlequin still at the close of the
pantomime belabouring Pantaloon is not more sure of
his success with the wide-eyed on-lookers in the front row
than was the gallant engaged in seducing the draper's or
hosier's pretty wife with gold supplied by her husband,
in the playhouses favoured by our mirthful monarch
and his companions.
All that is noblest in an aristocratic age embodies
itself not in its comedy, but its serious art, and in the
persons of heroic men and women. Very high and
admirable types of character are realized in the creations
of epic and dramatic poetry. All the virtues which a
position of hereditary greatness, dignity, and peril calls
forth — energy of character, vigour of will, disregard of
life, of limb, and of property in comparison with honour,
the virtues of generosity, loyalty, courtesy, magnificence —
these are glorified and illustrated in man ; and in woman
all the virtues of dependence, all the graces insensibly
acquired upon the surface of an externally beautiful
world, and at times the rarer qualities called forth by
occasional exigencies of her position, which demand vir-
tues of the masculine kind. It is characteristic and rig-nt
that our chief chivalric epic, the " Faerie Queene," should
set before itself as the general end of all the book " to
fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and
gentle discipline." The feudal world with Artegall and
Calidore, with Britomart and Una, was not wanting in
lofty conceptions of human character, male and female.
40O The Poetry of Democracy,
Other characteristics of the art of an aristocratic period
may be briefly noted. It is not deeply interested in the
future, it gazes forward with no eyes of desire. Why
should it ? when nothing seems better than that things
should remain as they are, or at most that things should
be ameliorated, not that a new world should be created.
The aristocratic society exists by inheritance, and it
hopes from to-morrow chiefly a conserving of the good
gifts handed down by yesterday and to-day. Its feeling
of the continuity of history is in danger of becoming
formal and materialistic ; it does not always perceive
that the abandonment of old things and the acceptance
of new may be a necessary piece of continuity in govern-
ment, in social life, in art, in religion. At the Present
the artist of the period of aristocracy looks not very often,
and then askance upon certain approved parts of the
Present. But he loves to celebrate the glories of the
Past. He displays a preference accordingly for antique
subjects, chosen out of the history of his own land, or
the histories of deceased nations. Shelley with his
eyes fixed upon the golden age to come may stand as
representative of the democratic tendencies in art ; Scott,
celebrating the glories of feudalism, its heroism and its
refinements, will remain our great aristocratic artist of
the period subsequent to the first French Revolution.
The relation of the art to the religion of an age of
aristocracy is peculiarly simple. The religious dogma
which constitutes the foundation and formative principle
of the existing society must have been fully established,
and of supreme power, before the aristocratic form of
social and political life can have acquired vigour and
The Poetry of Democracy. 481
stability; the intellectual and moral habits favoured by
the aristocratic polity — loyalty, obedience, veneration for
authority, pride in the past, a willingness to accept
things as they come to us from our fathers, a distrust of
new things, all favour a permanence of belief. The art,
therefore, will upon the whole (peculiar circumstances
may of course produce remarkable exceptions) be little
disturbed by the critical or sceptical spirit, and, un-
troubled by doubts, that art will either concern itself not
at all with religion, or, accepting the religious dogma
without dispute, will render it into artistic form in
sublime allegory and symbol, and as it is found embodied
in the venerable history of the Church. We may finally
note from De Tocquevjlle the shrinking in an aristocratic
society from whatever, even in pleasure, is too startling,
violent, or acute, and the especial approval of choice
gratifications, of refined and delicate enjoyments.
Now in all these particulars the art of a democratic
age exhibits characteristics precisely opposite to those of
the art of an aristocracy. Form and style modelled on
traditional examples are little valued. No canons of
composition are agreed upon or observed without formal
agreement. No critical dictator enacts laws which are
accepted without dispute, and acquire additional authority
during many years. Each new generation, with its new
heave of life, its multitudinous energies, ideas, passions,
is a law to itself. Except public opinion, there is no
authority on earth above the authority of a man's own
soul, and public opinion being strongly in favour of
individualism, a writer is tempted to depreciate unduly
the worth of order, propriety, regularity of the academic
2 H
482 The Poetry of Democracy.
kind ; he is encouraged to make new literary experi-
ments as others make new experiments in religion ; he
is permitted to be true to his own instincts, whether
thev are beautiful instincts or the reverse. The appeal
which a work of art makes is to the nation, not to a class,
and diversities of style are consequently admissible.
Every style can be tolerated except the vapid, everything
can be accepted but that which fails to stimulate the
intellect or the passions.
Turning to Whitman, we perceive at once that his
work corresponds with this state of things. If he had
written in England in the period of Queen Anne, if he
had written in France in the period of the grand
monarque, he must have either acknowledged the supre-
macy of authority in literature and submitted to it, or on
the other hand revolted against it. As it is, he is remote
from authority, and neither submits nor revolts. Whether
we call what he has written verse or prose, we have no
hesitation in saying that it is no copy, that it is some-
thing uncontrolled by any model or canon, something
which takes whatever shape it possesses directly from the
soul of its maker. With the Bible, Homer, and Shak-
spere familiar to him, Whitman writes in the presence
of great models, and some influences from each have
doubtless entered into his nature ; but that they should
possess authority over him any more than that he should
possess authority over them, does not occur to him as
possible. The relation of democracy to the Past comes
out very notably here. Entirely assured of its own
right to the Present, it is prepared to acknowledge fully
the right of past generations to the Past. It is not
The Poetry of Democracy. 48
1
hostile to that Past, rather claims kinship with it, but
also claims equality, as a full-grown son with a father: —
" I conn'd old times ;
I sat studying at the feet of the great masters :
Now, if eligible, O that the great masters might return and study
me !
In the name of These States, shall I scorn the antique ?
Why These are the children of the antique, to justify it.
Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
Language-shapers on other shores,
Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn or desolate,
I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left,
wafted hither :
I have perused it, own it is admirable (moving awhile among it) ;
Think nothing can ever be greater, — nothing can ever deserve
more than it deserves ;
Eegarding it all intently a long while, — then dismissing it,
I stand in my place, with my own day, here."
It is the same thought which finds expression in the
following enumeration of the benefactors of the soul of
man in Whitman's prose essay "Democratic Vistas;"
after wdiich enumeration, they are dismissed, and a
summons is sent forth for the appearance of their modern
successors : —
" For us along the great highways of time, those monuments
stand — those forms of majesty and beauty. For us those beacons
burn through all the nights. Unknown Egyptians, graving
hieroglyphs ; Hindus with hymn and apothegm and endless epic ;
Hebrew prophet, with spirituality, as in flashes of lightning,
conscience, like red-hot iron, plaintive songs and screams of ven-
geance for tyrannies and enslavement ; Christ, with bent head,
brooding love and peace, like a dove ; Greek, creating eternal
shapes of physical and esthetic proportion ; Eoman, lord of satire,
the sword, and the codex ; — of the figures some far-off and veiled,
others nearer and visible ; Dante, stalking with lean form, nothing
but fibre, not a grain of superfluous flesh ; Angelo, and the great
4% 4 Th e Poetry of Democracy.
painters, architects, musicians ; rich Shakspeare, luxuriant as the
sun, artist and singer of Feudalism in its sunset, with all the
gorgeous colours, owner thereof, and using them at will ; and so to
such as German Kant and Hegel, where they, though near us,
leaping over the ages, sit again impassive, imperturbable, like the
Egyptian gods. Of these, and the like of these, is it too much,
indeed, to return to our favourite figure, and view them as orbs
and systems of orbs, moving in free paths in the spaces of that
other heaven, the kosmic intellect, the Soul ?
" Ye powerful and resplendent ones ! ye were in your atmos-
pheres, grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the Feudal
and the old — while our genius is Democratic and modern. Yet
could ye, indeed, but breathe your breath of life into our New
"World's nostrils — not to enslave us, as now, but for our needs, to
breed a spirit like your own — perhaps (dare we to say it X) to
dominate, even destroy, what } 7 ou yourselves have left ! On your
plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and
measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic
bards, with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth,
sweet democratic despots of the west ! "
As in all else, so with regard to the form of what he
writes, Walt Whitman can find no authority superior to
himself, or rather to the rights of the subject which
engages him. There is, as Mr Rossetti has observed, " a
very powerful and majestic rhythmical sense " throughout
his writings, prose and verse (if we consent to apply the
term verse to any of them), and this rhythmical sense,
as with every great poet, is original and inborn. His
works, it may be, exhibit no perfect crystal of artistic
form, but each is a menstruum saturated with form in
solution. He fears to lose the instinctive in any process
of elaboration, the vital in anything which looks like
mechanism. He does not write with a full consciousness
of the processes of creation, nor does any true poet.
Certain combinations of sound are preconceived, and his
imagination excited by them works towards them by a
The Poetry of Democracy,
kind of reflex action, automatically. His ars poetica is
embodied in the precept that the poet should hold him-
self passive in presence of the material universe, in
presence of society, in presence of his own soul, and
become the blind yet unerringly guided force through
which these seek artistic expression. No afterthought,
no intrusion of reasoning, no calculating of effects, no
stepping back to view his work is tolerated. The artist
must create his art with as little hesitation, as little
questioning of processes, and as much sureness of result
as the beaver builds his house. Very nobly Whitman
has spoken on this subject, and let those who, because
they do not know him, suppose him insensible to any
attractions in art except those of the extravagant, the
incoherent, and the lawless, read what follows from the
preface to " Leaves of Grass : " —
" The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the
light of letters is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity —
nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness. To
carry on the heave of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and
give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor
very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect
rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals, and the
unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods, and
grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art. If you have
looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the
masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not
contemplate the flight of the grey-gull over the bay, or the mettle-
some action of the blood-horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers on
their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven,
or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfac-
tion than you shall contemplate him. The greatest poet has less a
marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and things
without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himsetf.
He swears to his art What I tell I tell for precisely what
it is. Let who may exalt, or startle, or fascinate, or soothe, I will
486 The Poetry of Democracy.
have purposes as health, or heat, or snow has, and be as regardless
of observation."
Seeing much of deep truth in this, it must be added
that, when the poet broods over his half-formed creation,
and fashions it with divine ingenuity, and gives it
shapeliness and completion of detail, and the lustre of
finished workmanship, he does not forsake his instincts,
but is obedient to them; he does not remove from
nature into a laboratory of art, but is the close com-
panion of nature. The vital spontaneous movement of
the faculties, far from ceasing, still goes on like "the
flight of the grey-gull over the bay," while the poet
seeks after order, proportion, comeliness, melody — in a
word beautv ; or rather, as Whitman himself is fond of
saying, does not seek but is sought — the perfect form
preconceived but unattained, drawing the artist towards
itself with an invincible attraction. An artist who does
not yield to the desire for perfect order and beauty of
form, instead of coming closer to nature is really for-
saking nature, and doing violence to a genuine artistic
instinct. Walt Whitman, however, knows this in all
probability well enough, and does not need to be taught
the mysteries of his craft. We will not say that his
poems, as regards their form, do not, after all, come
rio-ht or that for the matter which he handles his
manner of treatment may not be the best possible. One
feels, as it has been well said, that although no counting
of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music, the
music is there, and that " one would not for something
chano-e ears with those who cannot hear it." Whitman
himself anticipates a new theory of literary composition
The Poetry of Democracy. 48 7
for imaginative works, and especially for highest poetry,
and desires the recognition of new forces in language, and
the creation of a new manner of speech which cares less
for what it actually realizes iu definite form than " for
impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigo-
rates to grow." Nevertheless, when we read not the
lyrical portions of Whitman's poetry, but what may be
called his poetical statements of thoughts and things, a
suspicion arises that if the form be suitable here to the
matter, it must be because the matter belongs rather
to the chaos than the kosmos of the new-created world
of art.
The principle of equality upon which the democratic
form of society is founded, obviously opposes itself to the
exclusive spirit of the aristocratical polity. The essential
thing which gives one the freedom of the world is not to
be born a man of this or that rank, or class, or caste,
but simply to be born a man. The literature of an
aristocratic period is distinguished by its aim at select-
ness, and the number of things it proscribes ; we should
expect the literature of a democracy to be remarkable
for its comprehensiveness, its acceptance of the persons
of all men, its multiform sympathies. The difference
between the President and the Broadway mason or
hodman is inconsiderable — an accident of office ; what is
common to both is the inexpressibly important thing,
their inalienable humanity. Rich and poor, high and
low, powerful and feeble, healthy and diseased, deformed
and beautiful, old and young, mau and woman, have
this in common, and by possession of this are in the one
essential thing equal, and brethren oue of another. Even
4-8 8 The Poetry of Democracy.
between the virtuous man and the vicious the difference
is less than the agreement ; they differ by a quality, but
agree by the substance of their manhood. The "man in
all men, however it may be obscured by cruel shocks
and wrenches of life which distort, by long unnatural
uses which deform, by ignorance, by the well-meaning
stupidity of others, or by one's own stupidity, by foul
living, or b}^ clean, hard, worldly living, is surely some-
where discoverable. How can any human creature be
rejected, any scorned, any mocked ? Such satire and
such comedy as appear in aristocratic society are dis-
couraged by the genius of democracy. The spirit of
exclusiveness will, it is true, never fail to find material
for its support, and baser prides may replace the calm,
conservative, but unaggressive pride of hereditary dignity.
Nevertheless it remains no less true that the spectacle of
a great democracy present to the imagination, and the
temper of the democracy accepted by the understanding
heart, favour only such prides as are founded on nature
— that is, on the possession, acquired or inherited, of
personal qualities, personal powers, and virtues, and
attainments.
If this be a true account of some characteristics of the
art which arises when a man of imaginative genius stands
face to face with a great democracy, Walt Whitman in
these particulars is what he claims to be, a representative
democrat in art. No human being is rejected by him,
no one slighted, nor would he judge any, except as '* the
light falling around a helpless thing ' ; judges. No one
in his poems comes appealing "Am I not interesting,
am I not deserving, am I not a man and a brother ? "
The Poetry of Democracy, 489
We have had, he thinks, "ducking and deprecating
about enough." The poet studies no one from a superior
point of view. He delights in men, and neither
approaches deferentially those who are above him, nor
condescendingly gazes upon those who are beneath. He
is the comrade of every man, high and low. His ad-
miration of a strong, healthy, and beautiful body, or a
strong, healthy, and beautiful soul, is great when he sees
it in a statesman or a savant ; it is precisely as great
when he sees it in the ploughman or the smith. Every
variety of race and nation, every condition in society,
every degree of culture, every season of human life, is
accepted by Whitman as admirable and best, each in its
own place. Working men of every name — all who engage
in field-work, all who toil upon the sea, the city artisan, the
woodsman and the trapper, fill him with pleasure by
their presence; and that they are interesting to him
not in a general way of theory or doctrine (a piece of
the abstract democratic creed), but in the way of close,
vital human sympathy, appears from the power he pos-
sesses of bringing before us with strange precision, vivid-
ness, and nearness in a few decisive strokes the essential
characteristics of their respective modes of livino-. If
the strong, full-grown working man wants a lover and
comrade, he will think Walt Whitman especially made
for him. If the young man wants one, he will think
him especially the poet of young men. Yet a rarer and
finer spell than that of the lusty vitality of youth, or the
trained activity of manhood, is exercised over the poet
by the beautiful repose or unsubdued energy of old ao-e.
He is " the caresser of life, wherever moving." He does
490 The Poetry of Democracy.
not search antiquity for heroic men and beautiful women;
his own abundant vitality makes all the life which
surrounds him a source of completest joy ; " what is
commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me .... not
asking the sky to come down to my good-will ; scattering
it freely for ever."
But it is not those alone who are beautiful and healthy
and good who claim the poet's love. To all " the others
are down on " Whitman's hand is outstretched in help,
and through him come to us the voices — petitions or
demands — of the diseased and despairing, of slaves, of
prostitutes, of thieves, of deformed persons, of drunkards.
Every man is a divine miracle to him, and he sees a
redeemer, whom Christ will not be ashamed to acknow-
ledge a comrade, in every one who performs an act of
loving self-sacrifice : —
"Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row, from three lusty
angels with shirts bagged out at their waists ;
The snag-tooth'd hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and
to come,
Selling all he possesses, travelling on foot to fee lawyers for his
brother, and sit by him while he is tried for forgery."
Does no limit, then, exist to the poet's acceptance of
the persons of men ? There is one test of his tolerance
more severe than can be offered by the vicious or the
deformed. Can he tolerate the man of science ? Yes,
though he were to find him peeping and botanizing upon
his mother's grave. Science and democracy appear
before Whitman as twin powers which bend over the
modern world hand in hand, great and beneficent.
Democracy seems to him that form of society which
alone is scientifically justifiable ; founded upon a re-
The Poetry of Democracy. 49 1
cognition of the facts of nature, and a resolute denial of
social fables, superstitions, and uninvestigated tradition.
Moreover he looks to science for important elements
which shall contribute to a new conception of nature
and of man, and of their mutual relations, to be itself
the ideal basis of a new poetry and art — " after the
chemist, geologist, ethnologist, finally shall come the
Poet worthy that name ; the true Son of God shall come
singing his songs." Lastly, Whitman has a peculiar
reason of his own for loving science ; he is a mystic, and
such a mystic as finds positive science not unacceptable.
Whitman beholds no visions of visible things in heaven
or hell unseen to other men. He rather sees with
extraordinary precision the realities of our earth, but he
sees them, in his mystical mood, as symbols of the
impalpable and spiritual. They are hieroglyphs most
clear-cut, most brilliantly and definitely coloured to his
eyes, but still expressive of something unseen. His own
personality as far as he can give it expression or is
conscious of it — that identity of himself, which is the
hardest of all facts and the only entrance to all facts, is
yet no more than the image projected by another ego,
the real Me, which stands " untouched, untold, altogether
unreached :" —
" Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and
bows,
With peals of ironical laughter at every word I have written,
******
Now I perceive I have not understood anything — not a single
object ; and that no man ever can.
I perceive Nature, here in sight of the sea, is taking advantage of
me, to dart upon me, and sting me,
Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all."
49 2 The Poetry of Democracy.
To such mysticism science cannot succeed in opposing
itself ; it can but provide the mystic with a new leaf
of the sacred writing in which spiritual truths are
recorded.
" Only (for me, at any rate, in all my prose and poetry), joyfully
accepting modern science, and loyally following it without the
slightest hesitation, there remains ever recognised still a higher
flight, a higher fact, the Eternal Soul of Man, (of all else too), the
Spiritual, the Eeligious — which it is to be the greatest office of
scientism, in my opinion, and of future poetry also, to free from
fables, crudities and superstitions, and launch forth in renewed faith
and scope a hundred fold. To me the worlds of Eeligiousness, and of
the conception of the Divine and of the Ideal, though mainly latent,
are just as absolute in Humanity and the Universe as the world of
Chemistry, or anything in the objective world. ... To me the
crown of Savantism is that it opens the way for a more splendid
Theology and for ampler and diviner songs."
If Whitman seems suspicious of any class of men
disposed to be antagonistic to any, it is to those whose
lives are spent among books, who are not in contact
with external nature, and the stir and movement of
human activity, but who receive things already prepared,
or, as Whitman expresses it, " distilled." He knows
that the distillations are delightful, and would intoxicate
himself also, but he will not let them. Rather he
chooses to " lean and loafe at his ease, observing a spear
of summer grass," to drink the open air (that is, every-
thing natural and unelaborated) ; he is " enamoured of
growing out-doors." At the same time his most ardent
aspiration is after a new literature, accordant with
scientific conceptions, and the feelings which correspond
with democracy. And to the literature of the old world
and of feudalism he willingly does justice. "American
students may well derive from all former lands, ....
The Poetry of Democracy. 493
from witty and warlike France, and markedly, and in
many ways, and at many different periods, from the
enterprise and soul of the great Spanish race, bearing
ourselves always courteous, always deferential, indebted
beyond measure to the mother-world, to all its nations
dead, as to all its nations living — the offspring, this
America of ours, the daughter not by any means of the
British Isles exclusively, but of the Continent, and of all
continents." True culture and learning Whitman vene-
rates ; but he suspects men of refinement and polite
letters and dainty information, the will-o'-the-wisps of
Goethe's " Mahrchen," who " lose themselves in countless
masses of adjustments," who end by becoming little better
than "supercilious infidels," whose culture, as Carlyle
long since observed, is of a " sceptical-destructive '
kind.
Men of every class then are interesting to Whitman.
But no individual is pre-eminently interesting to him.
His sketches of individual men and women, though
wonderfully vivid and precise, are none of them longer
than a page ; each single figure passes rapidly out of
sight, and a stream of other figures of men and women
succeeds. Even in " Lincoln's Burial Hymn ' : he has
only a word to say of " the large sweet soul that has
gone ; " the chords of his nocturn, with their implicated
threefold sweetness, odour and sound and light, having
passed into his strain, really speak not of Lincoln but of
death. George Peabody is celebrated briefly, because
through him, " a stintless, lavish giver, tallying the gifts
of earth," a multitude of human beings have been
blessed, and the true service of riches illustrated. No
494 The Poetry of Democracy.
single person is the subject of Whitman's song, or can be;
the individual suggests a group, and the group a multi-
tude, each unit of which is as interesting as every other
unit, and possesses equal claims to recognition. Hence
the recurring tendency of his poems to become catalogues
of persons and things. Selection seems forbidden to
him ; if he names one race of mankind the names of all
other races press into his page ; if he mentions one trade
or occupation, all other trades and occupations follow.
A long procession of living forms passes before him ;
each several form, keenly inspected for a moment, is
then dismissed. Men and women are seen en masse,
and the mass is viewed not from a distance, but close at
hand, where it is felt to be a concourse of individuals.
Whitman will not have the people appear in his poems
by representatives or delegates ; the people itself, in
its undiminished totality, marches through his poems,
making its greatness and variety felt. Waiting down
the headings of a Trades' Directory is not poetry ; but
this is what Whitman never does. His catalogues are
for the poet always, if not always for the reader, visions
— they are delighted — not perhaps delightful — enumera-
tions ; when his desire for the perception of greatness
and variety is satisfied, not when a really complete
catalogue* is made out, Whitman's enumeration ends ;
we may murmur, but Whitman has been happy ; what
has failed to interest our imaginations has deeply
interested his ; and even for us the impression of
multitude, of variety, of equality is produced, as perhaps
it could be in no other way. Whether Whitman's habit
of cataloguing be justified by what has been said, or is in
The Poetry of Democracy. 495
any way capable of justification, such at least is its true
interpretation and significance.
One can perceive at a glance that these characteristics
of Whitman's work proceed directly from the democratic
tendencies of the world of thought and feeling in which
he moves. It is curious to find De Tocqueville, before
there existed, properly any native American literature,
describing in the spirit of philosophical prophecy what
we find realized in Whitman's " Leaves of Grass " : —
< " He who inhabits a democratic country sees around him, on every
hand, men differing but little from each other ; he cannot turn his
mind to any one portion of mankind without expanding and dilating
his thought till it embraces the whole world .... The poets of
democratic ages can never take any man in particular as the subject
of a piece, for an object of slender importance, which is distinctly
seen on all sides, will never lend itself to an ideal conception. . . .
As all the citizens who compose a democratic community are nearly
equal and alike, the poet cannot dwell upon any one of them ; but
the nation itself invites the exercise of his powers. The general
similitude of individuals which renders any one of them, taken
separately, an improper subject of poetry, allows poets to include
them all in the same imagery, and to take a general survey of the
people itself. Democratic nations have a clearer perception than
any other of their own aspect ; and an aspect so imposing is ad-
mirably fitted to the delineation of the ideal."
The democratic poet celebrates no individual hero, nor
does he celebrate himself. " I celebrate myself," sings
Whitman, and the longest poem in " Leaves of Grass "
is named by his own name ; bat the self-celebration
throughout is celebration of himself as a man and an
American ; it is what he possesses in common with all
others that he feels to be glorious and worthy of song,
not that which differentiates him from others ; manhood,
and in particular American manhood, is the real subject
496 The Poetry of Democracy.
of the poem " Walt "Whitman ; " and although Whitman
has a most poignant feeling of personality, which indeed is
a note of all he has written, it is to be remembered that in
nearly every instance in which he speaks of himself the
reference is as much impersonal as personal. In what
is common he finds what is most precious. The true
hero of the democratic poet is the nation of which he is
a member, or the whole race of man to which the nation
belongs. The mettlesome, proud, turbulent, brave, self-
asserting young Achilles, lover of women and lover of
comrades of Whitman's epic, can be no other than the
American people ; the Ulysses, the prudent, the 'cute,
the battler with the forces of nature, the traveller in
sea-like prairie, desolate swamp, and dense forest is
brother Jonathan. But if the American nation is his
hero, let it be observed that it is the American nation
as the supposed leader of the human race, as the
supposed possessor in ideas, in type of character, and in
tendency if not in actual achievement of all that is most
powerful and promising for the progress of mankind.
To the future Whitman looks to justify his confidence
in America and in democracy. The aspect of the present
he finds both sad and encouraging. The framework of
society exists ; the material civilization is rich and fairly
organized. Without any transcendentalism or political
mysticism about the principle of universal suffrage, not
o-lossino - over its " appalling dangers," and for his own
part content that until its time were come self-govern-
ment should wait, and the condition of authoritative
tutelage continue, he yet approves the principle as " the
only safe and preservative one for coming times," and sees
The Poetry of Democracy. 49 7
in America its guardian. He dwells with inexhaustible
delight upon certain elements in the yet unformed
personal character of the average American man and
woman. And his experience, and the experience of the
nation during the civil war — proving the faithfulness,
obedience, docility, courage, fortitude, religious nature,
tenderness, sweet affection of countless numbers of the un-
named, unknown rank and file of North and South — prac-
tically justifies democracy in Whitman's eyes "beyond the
proudest claims and wildest hopes of its enthusiasts."
But at the same time no one perceives more clearly, or
observes with greater anxiety and alarm, the sore
diseases of American society ; and leaving us to reconcile
his apparently contradictory statements he does not
hesitate to declare that the New World democracy,
" however great a success in uplifting the masses out of
their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and
in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellec-
tuality, is so far an almost complete failure in social
aspects, in any superb general personal character, and
in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic
results." Avast and more and more thoroughly appointed
body Whitman finds in the American world, and little
or no soul. His senses are flattered, his imagination
roused and delighted by the vast movement of life which
surrounds him, its outward glory and gladness, but when
he inquires, what is behind all this ? the answer is
of the saddest and most shameful kind. The following
passage is in every way, in substance and in manner,
highly characteristic of Whitman ; but the reader must
remember that in spite of all that he discerns of evil in
2 1
498 The Poetry of Democracy.
democratic America, Whitman remains an American
proud of his nationality, and a believer who does not
waver in his democratic faith ; —
" After an absence, I am now (September 1870,) again in NVw
York City and Brooklyn, on a few weeks' vacation. The splendour,
picturesqueness, and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities,
the unsurpassed situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly
and lofty new buildings, the facades of marble and iron of original
grandeur and elegance of design, with the masses of gay colour, the
preponderance of white and blue, the flags flying, the endless ships,
the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar,
hardly ever intermitted even at night; the jobbers' houses, the rich
shops, the wharves, the great Central Park, and the Brooklyn Park
of Hills (as I wander among them this beautiful fall weather, musing,
watching, absorbing) — the assemblages of the citizens in their
groups, conversations, trade, evening amusements, or along the by-
quarters — these, I say, and the like of these, completely satisfy my
senses of power, fulness, motion, &c, and give me, through such
senses and appetites, and through my aesthetic conscience, a con-
tinued exaltation and absolute fulfilment. Always, and more and
more, as I cross the East and North Eivers, the ferries, or with the
pilots in their pilot-houses, or pass an hour in Wall Street, or the
gold exchange, T realize (if we must admit such partialisms) that
not Nature alone is great in her fields of freedom, and the open
air, in her storms, the shows of night and day, the mountains,
forests, seas — but in the artificial, the work of man too is equally
great — in this profusion of teeming humanity, in these ingenuities,
streets, goods, houses, ships — these seething, hurrying, feverish
crowds of men, their complicated business genius (not least among
the geniuses), and all this mighty, many-threaded wealth and in-
dustry concentrated here.
"But sternly discarding, shutting our eyes to the glow and grand-
eur of the general effect, coming down to what is of the only real
importance, Personalities, and examining minutely, we question, we
ask, Are there, indeed, Men here worthy the name ] Are there
athletes 1 Are there perfect women, to match the generous material
luxuriance 1 Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners ?
Are there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons ? Are there
arts worthy Freedom, and a rich people ? Is there a great moral and
religious civilization — the only justification of a great material one ?
The Poetry of Democracy, 499
"Confess that rather to severe eyes, using the moral microscope
upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities,
crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing
meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere in shop, street, church,
theatre, bar-room, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgar-
ity, low cunning, infidelity — everywhere the youth puny, impudent,
foppish, prematurely ripe — everywhere an abnormal libidinousness,
unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignoned,
muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood
deceasing or deceased, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of
manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages
enjoyed) probably the meanest to be seen in the world."
Such a picture of the outcome of American democracy
is ugly enough to satisfy the author of "Shooting Niagara
— and aft^V but such a picture only represents the
worst side of the life of great cities. Whitman can
behold these things, not without grief, not without shame,
but without despair. He does not unfairly contrast the
early years of confusion and crudity of a vast industrial
and democratic era with the last and perfected results oi
an era of feudalism and aristocracy. He finds much to
make him sad ; but more to make him hopeful. He
takes account of the evil anxiously, accurately ; and can
still rejoice. Upon the whole his spirit is exulting and
prompt in cheerful action ; not self-involved, dissatisfied,
and fed by indignation. Contrast with the passage given
above Whitman's preface to " Leaves of Grass " prefixed
to Mr Kossetti's volume of Selections, with its joyous
confidence and pride in American persons and things, or
that very noble poem "A Carol of Harvest, for 1867,"
in which the armies of blue-clad conquering men are seen
streaming North, and melt away and disappear, while in
the same hour the heroes reappear, toiling in the fields,
harvesting the products, glad and secure under the
500 The Poetry of Democracy.
beaming sun, and under the great face of Her, the
Mother, the Republic, without whom not a scythe might
swing in security, "not a maize-stalk dangle its silken
tassels in peace." If all enthusiasm about political
principles be of the nature of Schivarmerei, Whitman's
feeling towards the Republic deserves that name ; but
he would have the principles of democracy sternly tested
by results, — results however not only present but such
prospective results as are logically inevitable, and he has
faith in them not because they seem to him to favour
freedom any more than because they seem to favour law
and self-control, and security and order. He, as much
as Mr Carlyle, admires "disciplined men," and believes
that with every disciplined man " the arena of Anti-
Anarchy, of God-appointed Order in this world' 3 is
widened ; but he does not regard military service as the
type of highest discipline, nor the drill-sergeant as
the highest conceivable official person in the land.
The principle of political and social equality once
clearly conceived and taken to heart as true, works
outward through one's body of thought and feeling in
various directions. As in the polity of the nation every
citizen is entitled by virtue of the fact of his humanity
to make himself heard, to manifest his will, and in his
place to be respected, so in the polity of the individual
man, made up of the faculties of soul and body, every
natural instinct, every passion, every appetite, every
organ, every power, may claim its share in the govern-
ment of the man. If a human being is to be honoured
as such, then every part of a human being is to be
honoured. In asserting one's rights as a man, one
The Poetry of Democracy. 501
asserts the rights of everything which goes to make up
manhood. It is the democratic temper to accept realities
unless it is compelled to reject them ; to disregard
artificial distinctions, and refer all things to natural
standards, consequently to honour things because they
are natural, and exist. Thus we find our way to the
centre of what has been called the " materialism ' : of
Whitman — his vindication of the body as it might be
more correctly termed. Materialist, in any proper sense
of the word, he is not ; on the contrary, as Mr Rossetti
has stated, "he is a most strenuous asserter of the soul,"
but " with the soul, of the body, as its infallible associate
and vehicle in the present frame of things." And as
every faculty of the soul seems admirable and sacred to
him, so does every organ and function and natural act of
the body. But Whitman is a poet ; it is not his manner
to preach doctrines in an abstract form, by means of a
general statement ; and the doctrine, which seems to
him of vital importance, that a healthy, perfect body —
male or female — is altogether worthy of honour, admira-
tion, and desire is accordingly preached with fulness and
plainness of detail.
The head of his offending with many who read, and
who refuse to read him, lies here. That lurking piece
of asceticism, not yet cast out of most of us, which
hints that there is something peculiarly shameful in
the desire of the sexes for one another, of the man
for the woman, and of the woman for the man, will
certainly find matter enough of offence in one short
section of " Leaves of Grass," that entitled " Children
of Adam." And one admission must be made to Whit-
502 The Poetry of Democracy.
man's disadvantage. If there be any class of sub-
jects which it is more truly natural, more truly human
not to speak of than to speak of (such speech producing
self-consciousness, whereas part of our nature, it may be
maintained, is healthy only while it lives and moves in
holy blindness and unconsciousness of self), if there be
any sphere of silence, then Whitman has been guilty of
invading that sphere of silence. But he has done this
by conviction that it is best to do so, and in a spirit as
remote from base curiosity as from insolent licence. He
deliberately appropriates a portion of his writings to the
subject of the feelings of sex, as he appropriates another,
"Calamus," to that of the love of man for man, "ad-
hesiveness," as contrasted with " amativeness," in the
nomenclature of Whitman, comradeship apart from all
feelings of sex. That article of the poet's creed, which
declares that man is very good, that there is nothing
about him which is naturally vile or dishonourable
prepares him for absolute familiarity, glad, unabashed
familiarity with every part and every act of the body.
The ascetic teaching of many Mediaeval writers is un-
favourable to morality by its essential character ; Whit-
man's may become unfavourable by accident. " As to
thy body, thou art viler than muck. Thou wast gotten
of so vile matter, and so great filth, that it is shame for
to speak, and abomination for to think. Thou shalt be
delivered to toads and adders for to eat." " If thou say
that thou lovest thy father and thy mother because thou
art of their blood and of flesh gotten, so are the worms
that come from them day by day. If thou love brethren
or sisters or other kindred, because the} 7 are of the same
The Poetry of Democracy. 503
flesh of father and mother and of the same blood, by the
same reason should thou love a piece of their flesh, if it
be shorn away." "All other sins [but wedlock] are
nothing but sins, but this is a sin, and besides de-
naturalizes thee, and dishonours thy body. It soileth
thy soul, and maketh it guilty before God, and moreover
defileth thy flesh."* These were the views of pious
persons of the great thirteenth century. Here the body
and the soul are kept in remote severance, each one the
enemy of the other. Such spirituality, condemned alike
by the facts of science and by the healthy natural human
instincts, is seen by Whitman to be, even in its modern
modifications, profoundly immoral. The lethargy of the
soul induces it willingly to take up under some form or
another with a theory which directs it heavenwards on
the swift wings of devotional aspiration, rather than
heavenwards for joy, but also earthwards for laborious
duty, to animate, to quicken, to glorify all that apart
from it is dull and gross. Both directions of the soul
are declared necessary to our complete life by Whitman
— the one in solitude, the other in society.
" Only in the perfect imcontamination and solitariness of in-
dividuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at
all. Only here, and on such terms, the meditation, the devout
ecstasy, the soaring flight. Only here, communion with the
mysteries, the eternal problems, whence? whither? Alone, and
identity, and the mood, — and the soul emerges, and all statements,
churches, sermons, melt away like vapours. Alone, and silent
thought, and awe, and aspiration, — and then the interior conscious-
ness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its
wondrous lines, to the sense. Bibles may convey, and priests
* Quotations from the " Mirror of S. Edmond " and " flali Meiden-
head," published by the Early English Text Society.
504 The Poetry of Democracy.
expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's
isolated self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine
levels, and commune with the unutterable."
Then the soul can return to the body, and to the
world, and possess them, and infuse its own life into
them : —
" I sing the Body electric ;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them ;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of
the Soul."
Having acknowledged that Whitman at times forgets
that the " instinct of silence," as it has been well said,
" is a beautiful, imperishable part of nature," and that
in his manner of asserting his portion of truth there is
a crudity which needlessly offends, everything has
been acknowledged, and it ought not to be forgotten
that no one asserts more strenuously than does Whitman
the beauty, not indeed of asceticism, but of holiness or
healthiness, and the shameful ugliness of unclean
thought, desire, and deed. If he does not assert
holiness as a duty, it is because he asserts it so strongly
as a joy and a desire, and because he loves to see all
duties transfigured into the glowing forms of joys and
of desires. The healthy repose and continence, and
the healthy eagerness and gratification of appetite, are
equally sources of satisfaction to him.* If in some of
*
Whitman writes : — " Since I have been ill, (1873-74-75), mostly
without serious pain, and with plenty of time and frequent inclination
to judge my poems, (never composed with eye on the book-market, nor
for fame, nor for any pecuniary profit), I have felt temporary depression
more than once, for fear that in Leaves of Grass the moral parts are
not sufficiently pronounc'd. But in my clearest and calmest moods 1
have realized that as those Leaves, all and several, surely prepare the
ITY
The Poetry of Democracy. 505
his lyrical passages there seems entire self-abandonment
to passion, it is because he believes there are, to borrow
his own phrase, " native moments," in which the desires
receive permission from the supreme authority, con-
science, to satisfy themselves completely ; —
" From, the master — the pilot I yield the vessel to ;
The general commanding me, commanding all — from him per-
mission taking."
Whitman's most naked physical descriptions and
enumerations are those of a robust, vigorous, clean man,
enamoured of living, unashamed of body as he is un-
ashamed of soul, absolutely free from pruriency of
imagination, absolutely inexperienced in the artificial
excitements and enhancements of jaded lusts. ' I feel
deeply persuaded," writes one of Whitman's critics who
has received the impression of his mind most completely
and faithfully,* " that a perfectly fearless, candid, en-
nobling treatment of the life of the body (so inextricably
intertwined with, so potent in its influence on the life
of the soul), will prove of inestimable value to all earnest
and aspiring natures, impatient of the folly of the long
prevalent belief that it is because of the greatness of
the spirit that it has learned to despise the body, and
to ignore its influences t ; knowing well that it is, on the
contrary, just because the spirit is not great enough,
way for, and necessitate morals, and are adjusted to them, just the sarrte
as Nature does and is, they are what consistently with my plan, they
must and probably should be. (Tn a certain sense while the moral is
the purport and last intelligence of all Nature, there is absolutely
nothing of the moral in the works or laws or shows of Nature. They
only lead inevitably to it — begin and necessitate it)."
* " A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman." From late letters by
an English Lady to W. M. Rossetti. " The Radical," May, 1S70.
505 The Poetry of Democracy.
not healthy and vigorous enough, to transfuse itself
into the life of the body, elevating that and making it
holy with its own triumphant intensity ; knowing too
how the body avenges this by dragging the soul down
to the level assigned itself. Whereas the spirit must
lovingly embrace the body, as' the roots of a tree em-
brace the ground, drawing thence rich nourishment,
warmth, impulse. Or rather the body is itself the root
of the soul — that whereby it grows and feeds. The
great tide of healthful life that carries all before it,
must surge through the w T hole man, not beat to and fro
in one corner of his brain. ' the life of my senses
and flesh, transcendiug my senses and flesh.' For the
sake of all that is highest, a truthful recognition of this
life, and especially of that of it which underlies the
fundamental ties of humanity — the love of husband and
wife, fatherhood, motherhood — is needed."
The bod}' then is not given authority over the soul
by "Whitman. Precisely as in the life of the nation a
great material civilization seems admirable to him and
worthy of honour, yet of little value in comparison with
or apart from a great spiritual civilization, a noble
national character, so in the life of the individual all
that is external, material, sensuous, is estimated by the
worth of w T hat it can give to the soul. No Hebrew
ever maintained the rights of the spiritual more abso-
lutely. But towards certain parts of our nature,
although in the poet's creed their rights are dogmatically
laid down, he is practically unjust. The tendencies of
his own nature lead him in his preaching to sink un-
duly certain articles of his creed. The logical faculty,
The Poetry of Democracy, 507
in particular, is almost an offence to Whitman. The
processes of reasoning appear to him to have elaboration
for their characteristic, and nothing elaborated or manu-
factured seems of equal reality with what is natural and
has grown. Truth he feels to be, as Wordsworth has
said, "a motion or a shape instinct with vital functions;"
and were Whitman to seek for formal proof of such
truth, he, like Wordsworth, would lose all feeling of
conviction, and yield up moral questions in despair.
"A slumbering woman and child convince as an university
course can never convince : '
u Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul."
Whitman becomes lyrical in presence of the imagina-
tion attempting for itself an interpretation of the
problems of the world ; he becomes lyrical in presence of
gratified senses and desires ; but he remains indifferent
in presence of the understanding searching after con-
clusions. There is something like intolerance or want
of comprehensiveness here ; one's heart, touched by the
injustice, rises to take the part of this patient, serviceable,
despised understanding.
Whitman, as we have seen, accepts the persons of all
men, but for a certain make of manhood he manifests a
marked preference. The reader can guess pretty cor-
rectly from what has gone before what manner of man
best satisfies the desires of the poet, and makes him
happiest by his presence ; and what is the poet's ideal
of human character. The man possessed of the largest
mass of manhood, manhood of the most natural quality,
unelaborated, undistilled, freely displaying itself, is he
508 The Poetry of Democracy.
towards whom Whitman is instinctively attracted.
The heroes honoured by the art of an aristocracy are
ideal, not naturalistic. Their characters are laboriously
formed after a noble model, tempered as steel is temp-
ered, welded together and wrought into permanent
shape as their armour is. The qualities which diffe-
rentiate them from most men are insisted upon. They
are as little a growth of nature (in the vulgar sense of
the word nature), as is a statue. Corneille's stoical
heroes, for example, are the work of a great art applied
to human character. Our true nature can indeed only
be brought to light by such art processes, but there is
an art which works with nature, and another art which
endeavours to supersede it. Only through culture, only
through the strenuous effort to conceive things at their
best, not as they are, but as they may and ought to be,
only through the persistent effort to constrain them to
their ideal (that is their most real) shapes, can human
character and human society and the works of man
become truly natural. Such art does not supersede
nature, but is rather nature obtaining its most perfect
expression through the consciousness of man. So declares
Polixenes in " A Winter's Tale : " —
" Nature is made better by no mean r
But nature makes that mean ; so, over that art y
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock ;
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race : This is an art
Which does mend nature — change it rather ; but
The art itself is nature."
Whitman has not failed to perceive this truth, but
The Poetry of Democracy. 509
he fears that it may be abused. Meddling with nature
is a dangerous process. Any idea or model, after which
we attempt tc shape our humanity, must proceed from
some view of human nature, and our views are too
often formal and contracted, manufactures turned out
of the workshop of the intellect, of which the ultimate
product cannot but be a formal and contracted character.
But human nature itself is large and incalculable ; and,
if allowed to grow unconstrained and unperverted, it
will exhibit the superb vitality and the unimpeach-
able rectitude of the perfect animal or blossoming tree.
Using natural, then, in the vulgar sense, there are
some men more than others a part of nature ; men not
modelled after an idea remote from the instincts of
manhood ; vigorous children of the earth, of wholesome
activity, passionate, gay, defiant, proud, curious, free,
hospitable, courageous, friendly, wilful. In such men
Whitman sees the stuff of all that is most precious in
humanity. " Powerful uneducated persons ' are the
comrades he loves to consort with :
" I am enamour'd of growing out-doors ;
Of men that live among cattle, or taste of the ocean, or woods ;
Of the builders and steerers of ships, and the wielders of axes and
mauls, and the drivers of horses ;
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out."
These are certainly not the persons who engage the
imagination in the literature of an aristocracy.
It must not, however, be supposed that Whitman sets
himself against culture. He would, on the contrary,
studiously promote culture, but a culture which has
another ideal of character than that grown of feudal
aristocracies, and which, accepting the old perennial
5 1 o The Poetry of Democracy.
elements of noblest manhood, combines them " into
groups, unities appropriate to the modem, the democratic,
the West." No conception of manhood can be ap-
propriate unless it be of a kind which is suitable not to
the uses of a single class or caste, but to those of the
high average of men. The qualities of character which
are judged of most value by the democratic standard are
not extraordinary, rare, exceptional qualities ; the typical
personality, which the culture sets before itself as its
ideal, is one attainable by the average man. The most
precious is ever in the common. Such a culture, Whit-
man holds, will be that of "the manly and courageous
instincts, and loving perceptions, and of self-respect."
Central in the character of the ideal man is the simple,
unsophisticated Conscience, the primary moral element.
" If I were asked to specify m what quarter lie the
grounds of darkest dread, respecting the America of our
hopes, I should have to point to this particular
Our triumphant, modern Civilizee, with his all-schooling,
and his wondrous appliances, will still show himself
but an amputation while this deficiency remains." If
Whitman appears to be antagonistic to culture, as we
commonly understand or misunderstand the term, to
refinement, intellectual acquisition, multiform and deli-
cate sympathies, the critical spirit, it is " not for absolute
reasons, but current ones." In our times, he believes,
refinement and delicatesse " threaten to eat us up like a
cancer. ... To prune, gather, trim, conform, and ever
cram and stuff, is the pressure of our days. . . . Never,
in the Old World, was thoroughly upholstered Exterior
Appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely
The Poetry of Democracy. 5 1 1
on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere out-
side acquisition — never were Glibness, verbal Intellect
more the test, the emulation — more loftily elevated as
head and sample, — than they are on the surface of our
Republican States this day."
In antagonism to the conception of culture which
bears such fruit as this, Whitman desires one which, true
child of America, shall bring joy to its mother, " recruit-
ing myriads of men, able, natural, perceptive, tolerant,
devout, real men, alive and full." In like manner
Whitman's models of womanly personality — the young
American woman who works for herself and others, who
dashes out more and more into real hardy life, who holds
her own with unvarying coolness and decorum, who will
compare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers, "and
even boatmen and drivers," not losing all the while the
charm, the indescribable perfume of genuine woman-
hood, or that resplendent person down on Long Island,
known as the Peacemaker, well toward eighty years old,
of happy and sunny temperament, a sight to draw near
and look upon with her large figure, her profuse snow-
white hair, dark eyes, clear complexion, sweet breath,
and peculiar personal magnetism — these portraits, he
admits, are frightfully out of line from the imported
feudal models — "the stock feminine characters of the
current novelists, or of the foreign court poems (Ophelias,
Enids, Princesses, or Ladies of one thing or another),
which fill the envying dreams of so many poor girls, and
are accepted by our young men, too, as supreme ideals of
female excellence to be sought after. But I present
mine just for a change."
5 1 2 The Poetry of Democracy.
In the period of chivalry there existed a beautiful
relation between man and man, of which no trace
remains in existence as an institution — that of knight
and squire. The protecting, encouraging, downward
glance of the elder, experienced, and superior man was
answered by the admiring and aspiring, upward gaze of
the younger and inferior. The relation was founded
upon inequality ; from the inequality of the parties its
essential beauty was derived. Is there any possible
relation of no less beauty, corresponding to the new
condition of things, and founded upon equality ? Yes,
there is manly comradeship. Here we catch one of the
clearest and most often reiterated notes of Whitman's
song. The feelings of equality, individualism, pride,
self-maintenance, he would not repress ; they are to be
as great as the soul is great ; but they are to be balanced
by the feelings of fraternity, sympathy, self-surrender,
comradeship. European Radicals have for the most
part been divided into two schools, with the respective
watchwords of Equality and Fraternity. Whitman
expresses the sentiments of both schools, while his posi-
tion as poet rather than theorist or politician, saves him
from self-devotion to any such socialistic or communistic
schemes, as the premature interpretation of the feeling
of fraternity into political institutions has given birth to
in untimely abortion. One division of " Leaves of
Grass," that entitled "Calamus" (Calamus being the
grass with largest and hardiest spears and with fresh
pungent bouquet), is appropriated to the theme of com-
radeship. And to us it seems impossible to read the
poems comprised under this head without finding our
The Poetry of Democracy. 5 1 3
interest in the poet Walt Whitman fast changing into
hearty love of the man, these poems, through their tender
reserves and concealments and betrayals, revealing his
heart in its weakness and its strength more than any
others. The chord of feeling which he strikes may be
old — as old as David and Jonathan — but a fulness and
peculiarity of tone are brought out, the like of which
have not been heard before. For this love of man for
man, as Whitman dreams of it, or rather confidently
expects it, is to be no rare, no exceptional emotion,
making its possessors illustrious by its singular precious-
ness, but it is to be widespread, common, unnoticeable.
" I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy insti-
tutions ;
But really I am neither for nor against institutions :
(What indeed have I in common with them l Or what with the
destruction of them 1)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta, and in every city of
These States, inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel, little or large,
that dents the water,
"Without edifices, or rules, or trustees, or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades."
In this growth of America, comradeship, which Whit-
man looks upon as a sure growth from seed already lying
in the soil, he believes the most substantial hope and
safety of the States will be found. In it he sees a power
capable of counterbalancing the materialism, the selfish-
ness, the vulgarity of American democracy — a power
capable of spiritualizing the lives of American men.
Many, Whitman is aware, will regard this assurance of
his as a dream ; but such loving comradeship seems to
him implied in the very existence of a democracy,
2 K
514 The Poetry of Democracy.
" without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and in-
capable of perpetuating itself." In the following poem
the tenderness and ardour of this love of man for man
finds expression, but not its glad activity, its joyou?
fronting the stress and tumultuous agitation of life : —
" When I heard at the close of the day how my name had beet
receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy
night for me that follow'd ;
And else, when I carous'd, or when my plans were accomplished,
still I was not happy ;
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
refresh'd, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear
in the morning light,
When I wander d alone over the beach, and undressing, bathed,
lauo-hino- with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his
way coming, O then I was happy ;
then each breath tasted sweeter — and all that day my food
nourish'd me more — and the beautiful day pass'd well.
And the next came with equal joy — and with the next, at evening,
came my friend ;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly
continually up the shores,
1 heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to
me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover
in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast — and that night I
was happy."
Various workings in the poems of Whitman of the
influence of the principle of equality as realized in the
society which surrounds him have now been traced. No
portion of the poet's body of thought and emotion escapes
its pervading power, and in a direct and indirect manner
The Poetry of Democracy. 5 1 5
it lias contributed to determine the character of his
feeling with respect to external nature. In the way of
crude mysticism Whitman takes pleasure in asserting
the equality of all natural objects, and forces, and
processes, each being as mysterious and wonderful, each
as admirable and beautiful as every other ; and as the
multitude of men and women, so, on occasions, does the
multitude of animals, and trees, and flowers press into
his poems with the same absence of selection, the same
assertion of equal rights, the same unsearchableness,
and sanctity, and beauty, apparent or concealed in all.
By another working of the same democratic influence
(each man finding in the world what he cares to find)
Whitman discovers everywhere in nature the same
qualities, or types of the same qualities, which he admires
most in men. For his imagination the powers of the
earth do not incarnate themselves in the forms of god
and demi-god, faun and satyr, oread, dryad, and nymph
of river and sea — meet associates, allies or antagonists
of the heroes of an age, when the chiefs and shepherds
of the people were themselves almost demi-gods. But
the great Mother — the Earth — is one in character with
her children of the democracy, who, at last, as the poet
holds, have learnt to live and work in her great style.
She is tolerant, includes diversity, refuses nothing, shuts
no one out ; she is powerful, full of vitality, generous,
proud, perfect in natural rectitude, does not discuss her
duty to God, never apologizes, does not argue, is incom-
prehensible, silent, coarse, productive, charitable, rich in
the organs and instincts of sex, and at the same time
continent and chaste. The grass Whitman loves as
5 1 6 The Poetry of Democracy.
much as did Chaucer himself ; but his love has a certain
spiritual significance which Chaucer's had not. It is
not the " soft, sweet, smale grass," embroidered with
flowers, a fitting carpet for the feet of glad knights and
sportive ladies, for which he cares. In the grass he
beholds the democracy of the fields, earthborn, with close
and copious companionship of blades, each blade like
every other, and equal to every other, spreading in all
directions with lusty life, blown upon by the open air,
"coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious." The peculiar title of
his most important volume, " Leaves of Grass," as Mr
Rossetti has finely observed, " seems to express with
some aptness the simplicity, universality, and spontaneity
of the poems to which it is applied."
The character of Whitman's feeling with respect to
external nature bears witness to the joyous bodily health
of the man.* His communication with the earth, and
sea, and skies, is carried on through senses that are never
torpid , and never overwrought beyond the measure of
health. He presses close to nature, and will not be
satisfied with shy glances or a distant greeting. He
enjoys the strong sensations of a vigorous nervous system,
and the rest and recuperation which follow. His self-
projections into external objects are never morbid ; when
he employs the " pathetic fallacy " the world shares in
his joyousness ; he does not hear in the voices Of the
waters or of the winds echoes of a miserable egotism,
the moan of wounded vanity, or the crying of insatiable
* The above was written before the beginning of Whitman's long
and baffling attack of paralysis. A spiritual beauty, not unconnected
with the environing presence of Death, illuminates the best of his
recent poems.
The Poetry of Democracy. 5 1 7
lust. He is sane and vigorous. But his relation with
nature is not one in which the senses and perceptive
faculty have a predominant share. He passes through
the visible and sensible things, and pursues an invisible
somewhat —
" A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things ;"
and of this he can never quite possess himself. " There
is [in his poems] a singular interchange of actuality
and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While he sees
men with even abnormal exactness as men, he sees them
also ' as trees walking,' and admits us to perceive that
the whole show is in a measure spectral and unsubstan-
tial, and the mask of a larger and profounder reality
beneath it, of which it is giving perpetual intimations
and auguries."*
In the direction of religion and philosophy there is in
the democratic state of society a strong tendency, as
De Tocqueville has shown, towards a pantheistic form of
belief, and a strong tendency towards the spirit of
optimism. The equality existing between citizens, and
the habit of mind which refuses to observe the ancient
artificial social distinctions, give the general intellect a
turn for reducing things to unity, a passion for compre-
hending under one formula many objects, and reducing
to one cause many and various consequences.-?* Where
castes or classes of society exist, one caste or class seems
to object singularly little to the perdition of the inferior
* W. M. Rossetti. Prefatory notice to " Poems by Walt Whitman."
f See "La Democratic en Am£rique," tome 3, chaps, vii., "iii.
5 1 8 Z#£ Poetry of De7nocracy.
breeds of the human race— -" this people who knoweth
not the law are cursed." The Hindu could contemplate
the fate of a Mlechha, the Jew that of a Gentile, the
Mohammedan that of a Giaur, without overwhelming
concern. But when the vision of a common life of the
whole human race has filled the imagination, when a
real feeling of solidarity is established between all the
members of the great human community, the mind seems
to shrink in horror from the suspicion that the final pur-
poses of God or nature, with respect to man, can be other
than beneficent. Society in the democratic condition
is not fixed and desirous of conservation, but perpetually
moving, and men's desires (apart from the results of
scientific observation) induce them to hope, to conjecture,
to believe that this movement is progressive. Biology
and natural history with their doctrines of development
and evolution, the science of origins with its surveys of
the earliest history of our race, seems to confirm the
conviction, so flattering to men's desires, that nature and
man harmoniously work under laws which tend towards
a great and fortunate result. The events of the past are
interpreted in the light of this conviction. Faith in the
future becomes passionate, exists in the atmosphere, and
obtaining nutriment from every wind, appears to sustain
itself apart from all evidence — that miracle which belongs
to every popular faith. The past progress of the race,
the great future of the race to match the greatness of its
past, the broad dealings of Providence or of natural law
with mankind — when the thoughts of these, and feelings
corresponding to such thoughts, have occupied the mind
and heart, there appears something not only horrible,
The Poetiy of Democracy. 5 1 9
but something artificial, inconsequent, non-natural, in the
notion of endless and fruitless penal suffering. And it
is a noteworthy fact — the more remarkable when we bear
in mind the Puritanical basis of American religion —
that in the many new forms of religion which America
has put forth as a tree puts forth leaves, in the many
attempts towards the realization of a new conception of
our relation to God and to one another, an almost con-
stant element is the belief in the final happiness of all
men.
The religious faith of Whitman, as far as it has
definite form, reminds one of that taught in the Peda-
gogic Institution of Wilhelm Meisters Wanclerjahre, in
which from the Three Reverences inculcated, reverence
for what is above us, reverence for what is around us,
reverence for what is beneath us, springs the highest
reverence, reverence for oneself. And with Whitman
as with the Pedagogic company perfect reverence casts out
fear. But he is not anxious to give his creed a precise
form; he is so little interested in the exclusion of heretics
that he does not require very accurate symbols and
definitions.
" And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God,
and about death)."
Finding the present great and beautiful, contented
with the past, but not driven into the past to seek for
ideals of human character and a lost golden age, Whit-
man has entire confidence in what the future will brings
forth. He knows not what the purposes of life are for
520 The Poetry of Democracy.
us, but he knows that they are good. Nowhere in
nature can he find announcements of despair, or fixity of
evil condition. He is sure that in the end all will be
well with the whole family of men, and with every
individual of it. The deformed person, the mean man,
the infant who died at birth, the " sacred idiot," will
certainly be brought up with the advancing company of
men from whose ranks they have dropped : —
" The Lord advances, and yet advances ;
Always the shadow in front — always the reach'd hand, bringing
up the laggards."
At times this optimism leads Whitman to the entire
denial of evil ; " he contemplates evil as, in some sen^e,
not existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much
importance as anything else ; ' in some transcendental
wajr, he believes, the opposition of God and Satan can-
not really exist. Practically, however, he is not led
astray by any such transcendental reducing of all things
to the Divine. Any tendency of a mystical kind to
ignore the distinction between good and evil, is checked
by his strong democratic sense of the supreme importance
of personal qualities, and the inevitable perception of the
superiority of virtuous over vicious personal qualities.
By one who feels profoundly that the differences
between men are determined, not by rank, or birth, or
hereditary name or title, but simply by the different
powers belonging to the bodies and souls of men, there is
6mall danger of the meaning of bad and good being
forgotten. And Whitman never really forgets this.
The formation of a noble national character, to be itself
the source of all literature, art, statesmanship, is that
The Poetry of Democracy. 5 2 i
which above all else he desires. In that character the
element of religion must, according to Whitman's ideal,
occupy an important place, only inferior to that assigned
to moral soundness, to conscience. " We want, for
These States, for the general character, a cheerful,
religious fervour, imbued with the ever-present modifica-
tions of the human emotions, friendship, benevolence,
with a fair field for scientific inquiry [to check
fanaticism], the right of individual judgment, and
always the cooling influences of material Nature."
These are not the words of one who moves the land-
marks of right and wrong, and obscures their boundaries.
For Whitman the worth of any man is simply the worth
of his body and soul ; each gift of nature, product of
industry, and creation of art, is valuable in his eyes
exactly in proportion to what it can afford for the benefit
of body and soul. Only what belongs to these, and
becomes a part of them, properly belongs to us — the
rest is mere " material." This mode of estimating values
is very revolutionary, but it is essentially just and moral.
The rich man is not he who has accumulated unappro-
priated matter around him, but he who possesses much
of what " adheres, and goes forward, and is not dropped
by death."
Personality, character, is that which death cannot
affect. Here again Whitman's democratic feeling for
personality overmasters his democratic tendency towards
pantheism. He clings to his identity and his conscious-
ness of it, and will not be tempted to surrender that
consciousness in imagination by the attractions of any
form of nirvana. Death, which is a name to him full
2l
522 The Poetry of Democracy.
of delicious tenderness and mystery not without some
element of sensuousness curiously blended with it — ("
the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a
few moments, for reasons "), is but a solemn and
immortal birth : —
" Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome %
Then I chant it for thee — I glorify thee above all ;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly ." *
From such indications as these, and others that have
gone before, the reader must gather, as best as he can,
the nature of Whitman's religious faith. But the chief
thing to bear in mind is that Whitman cares far less to
establish propositions than to arouse energy and supply a
stimulus. His pupil must part from him as soon as
possible, and go upon his own way.
" I tramp a perpetual journey — (come listen all !)
My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from
the woods ;
No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair ;
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy ;
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, or exchange !
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents, and a plain
public road."
That plain public road eacn man must travel for himself.
Here we must end. We have not argued the question
* So Whitman kept his Passage to India (full of the thought of death)
for last word even to his Centennial dithyramb. ' * Not as in antiquity, at
highest festival of Egypt, the noisome skeleton of death was also sent
on exhibition to the revellers, for zest and shadow to the occasion's joy
and light— but as the perfect marble statue of the normal Greeks at
Klis, suggesting death in the form of a beautiful and perfect young
The Poetry of Democracy. 523
which many persons are most desirous to put about Walt
Whitman — " Is he a poet at all ?" It is not easy to
argue such a question in a profitable way. One thing
only needs to be said, — no adequate impression of Whit-
man's poetical power can be obtained from this study. A
single side of his mind and of his work has been examined,
but such criticism as the present, narrowed and perhaps
hardened by a tendency half doctrinaire, we attempt
with an abiding remembrance of the truth expressed by
Vauvenargues : — " Lorsque nous croyons tenir la verite
par un endroit, elle nous echappe par mille autres." To
pass through and beyond a view of such a writer as
Whitman, — a writer whose best function is to supply
stimulus and energy, — and to enter into a vital personal
contact with him is essential to true knowledge of his
character. But views may help us on our way.* k
man, with closed eyes, leaning on an inverted torch — emblem of rest
and aspiration after action — of crown and point to which all lives and
poems should steadily have reference, namely the justified and noble
termination of our identity, this grade of it, and outlet preparation to
another grade."
* Any one who desires to know Whitman aright, would do well to
make acquaintance with "Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person,"
by John Burroughs (New York, J. S. Redfield, 1871), and his moro
recent essay on Whitman in "Birds and Poets " (1877).
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