THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 Shelburne Essays 
 
 By 
 
 Paul Elmer More 
 
 Second Series 
 
 Ov yap 7rpd ye T17S a\r)deia<; ti/h^tco? avr/p. 
 
 Plato, Republic. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York and London 
 Gbe Ifcntcfterbocher ipresg 
 
 1906
 
 Copyright, 1905 
 
 BV 
 
 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 Published, May, 1905 
 Reprinted, January, 1906 
 
 T£be tmlcfcerbocher Drees, "Hew lforh
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 Again thanks are due to the publishers of the Atlantic 
 Monthly, the New World, the Independent, and the 
 New York Evening Post for permission to reprint the 
 essays which appeared in those periodicals.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Elizabethan Sonnets i 
 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets 20 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn 46 
 
 The First Complete Edition of Hazlitt . 73 
 
 Charles Lamb 87 
 
 Kipling and FitzGerald 104 
 
 George Crabbe 126 
 
 The Novels of George Meredith . . .145 
 Hawthorne : Looking before and after . 173 
 Delphi and Greek Literature . . . .188 
 Nemesis, or the Divine Envy . , . .219
 
 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 SECOND SERIES 
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 
 
 The; Introduction to Mr. Sidney Lee's reprint 
 of the Elizabethan Sonnets, in Arber' s English 
 Garner, 1 has fallen plutnply into the quiet waters 
 of criticism. Since the gracious appearance of 
 Charles Lamb we have grown accustomed to speak 
 of every versifier of the great Queen's days with 
 bated breath ; their freshness, their exquisite feli- 
 city, their unflagging inventiveness, have become 
 a byword of praise among all whose reading of the 
 period extends beyond Shakespeare. But now 
 comes this iconoclast, with his terrifying know- 
 ledge of the three hundred thousand sonnets pro- 
 duced by Europe in the sixteenth century, and 
 declares roundly, nay, proves beyond cavil, that 
 
 1 Elizabethan Sonnets, newly arranged and edited. 
 With an Introduction by Sidney Lee. Vols. XI. and 
 XII. of An English Garner. New York : E. P. Dutton 
 & Co., 1904. 
 
 VOL. II.— I. 
 
 I
 
 2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the famous sonnet-sequences of Sidney and Spen- 
 ser and Daniel and Drayton, to name only the 
 better known, are a mere tissue of words and 
 ideas stolen from Italy and France. Worse than 
 that, a number of these poems are lifted solidly 
 from Petrarch and Ronsard and others without a 
 sign of credit or apology. It is shocking, but, 
 to be perfectly frank, his argument only confirms 
 the opinion which many have begun to hold, that 
 it would be an act of wisdom to revise our some- 
 what unreasonable estimate of the whole Eliza- 
 bethan literature. 
 
 In one respect it may seem that Mr. Lee has 
 gone too far. Because a poem is manifestly an 
 imitation or even a barefaced theft, it does not 
 always follow that the incident described is unreal 
 or that the sentiment is insincere. Sidney's son- 
 net on his victory in a tournament — 
 
 Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance 
 Guided so well that I obtained the prize — 
 
 may very well be modelled on Petrarch's account 
 of a Court entertainment, but it would be captious 
 to conclude that such a tourney did not actually 
 take place, or that the chivalrous knight was not 
 heartened in the combat by Stella's " heavenly 
 face." Again the same cavalier's apostrophe to 
 his couch — 
 
 Ah, bed ! the field where joy's peace some do see, 
 The field where all my thoughts to war be trained —
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 3 
 
 is no doubt an echo of innumerable cries from 
 sleepless Petrarchists, yet the emotion may be 
 sincere enough for all that. It is a fairly common 
 thing, I suppose, for young poets to be in love 
 and to tumble their beds — and to make capital of 
 their agony the next morning in whatever tags 
 of rhyme they can summon up. There is thus a 
 certain danger in dogmatising too absolutely 
 about any particular sonnet. 
 
 With this caveat, however, I am prepared to 
 follow Mr. Lee in his somewhat sweeping denun- 
 ciation of the Elizabethan sonneteers. His col- 
 lection embraces fifteen series, extending from 
 Sidney's Astrophcl and Stella, published in 1591 
 (though composed earlier), to Robert Tofte's 
 Latira, the Toys of a Traveller, published in 1597, 
 and including the work of Watson, Barnes, Lodge, 
 Constable, Daniel, Drayton, Spenser, and others 
 of less renown. Shakespeare, it will be observed, 
 is omitted, and Sidney, as Mr. Lee himself ad- 
 mits, rises in part fairly above the level of the 
 sonneteering herd ; but with these exceptions it 
 must be acknowledged that the perusal of this 
 branch of Elizabethan literature is likely to prove 
 a dull task to most readers. All that was re- 
 quired was a moderate acquaintance with Des- 
 portes or some other writer of the Pleiad and a 
 modicum of skill in making rhymes, and, look 
 you, your ambitious gentleman was ready to be- 
 stow immortality on any Diana or Delia who 
 might offer to break his heart.
 
 4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Write ! write ! help ! help, sweet Muse ! and never cease ! 
 In endless labours pens and papers tire ! 
 Until I purchase my long-wished Desire, 
 
 exclaimed the fluent Barnabe Barnes, speaking 
 for himself and his brothers ; but it was against 
 the Petrarchian canon that the long-wished desire 
 should ever be satisfied, and hence these "grief's 
 commentaries" never ending. Of actual experi- 
 ence or observation there is, so far as the language 
 betrays, painfully little. The whole thing is a 
 juggling with traditional figures and phrases. 
 One might go through these passionate pretences, 
 pencil in hand, and check off the score or more 
 recurring themes with perfect ease. There is the 
 Phoenix, springing from fire and fit symbol of 
 ever-renewed love ; there is the silly theft of Na- 
 ture, who must needs borrow the hues of my lady 
 to paint her roses and lilies; there is the inevitable 
 comparison of love with a living death ; rocks, 
 woods, hills, and streams are witnesses to so 
 many plaintive despairs that the whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth together ; Echo retorts 
 upon a querulous lover in sonnet after sonnet ; a 
 hundred times we read, " I burn yet am I cold, 
 I am a-cold yet burn," and a thousand times we 
 hear the cry, " Give me my heart, for no man 
 liveth heartless." To be sure the ideas are often 
 combined differently in these pilfered repetitions, 
 but the disguise is transparent. 
 
 My heart mine eye accuseth of his death,
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 5 
 
 writes Constable, borrowing from Petrarch and a 
 long line of Petrarchists. Then follows Drayton 
 with his 
 
 Whilst yet mine Eyes do surfeit with delight 
 My woeful heart (imprisoned in my breast), 
 
 and Griffin with his 
 
 Oft have mine eyes, the agents of mine heart 
 (False traitor eyes conspiring my decay !) — 
 
 nor did Shakespeare himself disdain the time- 
 worn theme. After reading much in these son- 
 net-sequences one feels as if he had visited that 
 celebrated chamber in the academy of L,agado, 
 where honest Gulliver beheld the project for im- 
 proving knowledge by practical and mechanical 
 operations. The Petrarchian tags are pasted on 
 the wooden dice of the frame ; at a word from 
 the professor the handles are turned, the bits of 
 wood are shifted about, and in the twinkling of 
 an eye a new sonnet stands before you in all the 
 majesty of meaningless rhetoric. There is a de- 
 lightful facility about the whole affair, but some- 
 how you are more interested in the process than 
 in the results. 
 
 Macaulay, in one of his essays, denounces Pe- 
 trarch as the malign power of Italian literature, 
 whose influence was always set against the better 
 tradition of Dante, as Ahriman was opposed to 
 Ormuzd. What would he have said had he 
 known the extent of that Ahrimanian malady in
 
 6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 English letters as well ? One can imagine him 
 perusing those three hundred thousand sonnets 
 of the sixteenth century and tabulating the com- 
 plicated plagiarisms with that serene assurance 
 which only a critic of his capacious memory could 
 assume. Those who have penetrated but a little 
 way into that jungle of delights, and boast a more 
 modest grasp of mind, may be content to trace the 
 main currents of tradition in our English sonnets 
 and let the details go by. And in doing this they 
 will, perhaps, not miss the truer pleasure. Pe- 
 trarch, of course, lies at the bottom of the whole 
 sonneteering mania ; there is the ab yove from 
 which any consideration of the subject must start. 
 But Petrarch himself is not a simple apparition. 
 In him first of all the currents of the old world 
 and the new met together, and it is a matter of nice 
 discrimination to determine what part of his work 
 is inspired directly by the classics and how far he 
 merely continues the tradition of the middle ages. 
 As I have reread his sonnets for this occasion, it 
 has seemed to me that too much of his inspiration 
 is commonly attributed to the reawakened enthu- 
 siasm of the Renaissance for the masters of Greece 
 and Rome. No doubt his style and imagery are 
 largely Latin ; he has put on the fair habit of the 
 ancient poets, but still, underneath, the passion 
 and the features of the man are of the Christian 
 world. His real innovation, so far as substance 
 goes, was the completeness with which he welded 
 into a compound of rare beauty the two mediaeval
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 7 
 
 ideals of love. The religious books of the preced- 
 ing centuries had been filled with bitter diatribes 
 against women, and with lamentations over the 
 subjection of man to feminine seduction. From 
 this source, more than from the odi et amo of the 
 Roman poets, sprang the woes and outcry of Pe- 
 trarch's muse. 
 
 Had I believed that death would loose the girth 
 Of amorous cares that drag me to the ground, 
 How long ago these hands the way had found 
 
 For weary limbs and burden under earth, 
 
 he writes in one of the early sonnets, and it re- 
 quires but a little knowledge of letters to discover 
 in this trepidation of grief a note purely Christian 
 and unknown to the pagan poets. Whatever is 
 added to the mediaeval spirit is that peculiar self- 
 consciousness which is not classic but marks the 
 beginning of the modern world. 
 
 With this feeling of subjection that cannot free 
 itself from shame, Petrarch combines the other 
 mediaeval tendency which idealised woman as the 
 symbol of the purer and more spiritual life. That 
 tendency, familiar enough in the romances of 
 chivalry and in the Mariolatry of the Church to 
 need no explanation, found its highest expression 
 in the Amor sementa in voi d'ogni virtute of the 
 poet who preceded Petrarch. In Dante, indeed, 
 this idealism is pure and almost unmixed, too 
 pure to find imitators among the very worldly 
 visionaries of the Renaissance; it needed the
 
 8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 composite genius of a Petrarch so to temper medi- 
 aeval ideals with mediaeval realism and then to 
 clothe these sentiments in such a garb of classical 
 imagery as to establish the conception of love for 
 centuries. Nor is the result of this union in the 
 great Italian himself as disparate or as unreal as 
 might be supposed. Whether it be the exquisite 
 vehicle of his style or some fine heat of the poet's 
 temperament, or, more likely, both of these to- 
 gether — whatever be the cause, the sonnets and 
 canzoni, which of late years have found so few 
 admirers, impress me as the genuine utterance of 
 a man in whom personal emotions and abstract 
 reflections and a sensuous perception of natural 
 beauties were so intimately bound together that 
 their confusion in his verse produces the effect of 
 a necessary and beautiful sincerity. The emotion 
 itself was not single and so may seem insincere ; 
 the expression corresponds to an actual experience 
 and state of mind. 
 
 Such is the basis of that vast literature of which 
 the works of the French Pleiad are, on the whole, 
 the most vital and genial, and our English Eliza- 
 bethan sonnets the least tolerable parts. Of the 
 mere copied agonies and despairs that rose from 
 Albion we need not stay to speak. How well it 
 would have been if the lamenting lovers had 
 heeded the admonition of their leader and master, 
 Sidney : 
 
 You that do dictionary's method bring 
 
 Into your rhymes running in rattling rows ;
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 9 
 
 You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes 
 With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing : 
 You take wrong ways ! 
 
 And how often the rebuke of the same poet is 
 brought to mind : 
 
 " Fool ! " said my Muse, " look in thy heart and write ! " 
 
 Again, to show by examples in what way these 
 amatory lovers imitated the Petrarchian idealism, 
 making of their lady the symbol and quintessence 
 of beauty and truth, would be to quote the better 
 part of Mr. L,ee's two volumes. As a single speci- 
 men of their manner I might cite Lodge's sixth 
 sonnet to Phillis, were it not that his language 
 here is a shade too luscious for our chaster days. 
 The eighth sonnet (so-called ; it has only twelve 
 lines) of the same series may stand in its place : 
 
 No stars her eyes to clear the wandering night, 
 But shining suns of true divinity, 
 That make the soul conceive her perfect light ! 
 No wanton beauties of humanity 
 Her pretty brows, but beams that clear the sight 
 Of him that seeks the true philosophy ! 
 No coral is her lip, no rose her fair, 
 But even that crimson that adorns the sun. 
 No nymph is she, but mistress of the air, 
 By whom my glories are but new begun. 
 But when I touch and taste as others do, 
 I then shall write, and you shall wonder too. 
 
 But though the basis of this literature is true 
 Petrarchism, there are elements imported from
 
 IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the French school and from direct reading of the 
 classics which give it at times a character of 
 its own. We catch here and there, for instance, 
 an echo of genuine Platonism, such as is rarely 
 to be found in the writers of the Continent. 
 I say genuine Platonism, because too often we 
 forget to discriminate between that spirit and the 
 Petrarchian love, which may be ideal, but is cer- 
 tainly not Greek. Yet the distinction is fairly 
 simple. Love, to Plato, was a daemonic power 
 lying between our mortality and the things of the 
 spirit ; and the vision of earthly beauty works a 
 divine madness in the soul that lifts the beholder 
 at last quite out of the sphere of human desires 
 into the contemplation of eternal truth. There is 
 no room here for that kind of symbolism which 
 raised the dead Laura to be the poet's ruling 
 mistress in the sky. You cannot conceive of Plato 
 either sighing to be delivered from the dominion 
 of her beauty in the flesh, or worshipping her 
 after death as a divinity : 
 
 E viva e bella e nuda al ciel salita, 
 Indi mi signoreggia, indi mi sforza. 
 
 When Daniel says of his Delia, 
 
 Chastity and beauty, which were deadly foes, 
 Live reconciled friends within her brow, 
 
 he is employing a sentiment which is primarily 
 Petrarchian, and which might without straining 
 be called Platonic also. But the two ideals soon
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS II 
 
 diverge. The mark of mediaeval idealism is the 
 endeavour to carry the conception of personality 
 into the realm of the infinite ; Platonic love leaves 
 the personal element behind in its heavenly 
 ascent. The attempt to make of Beatrice a guide 
 in the spiritual life would have seemed to the 
 Greek a sentimental sacrilege. Perhaps the finest 
 expression of the symbolism which derives from 
 the middle ages through Petrarch and is so com- 
 monly confused with Platonic love, may be found 
 in one of the two or three great sonnets in the 
 Amoretti of Spenser : 
 
 One day I wrote her name upon the strand, 
 But came the waves and washed it quite away ; 
 Again I wrote it with a second hand, 
 But came the tide and made my pains his prey. 
 
 Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay 
 A mortal thing so to immortalise ; 
 For I myself shall like to this decay, 
 And eke my name be wiped out, likewise. 
 
 Not so, quoth I, let baser things devise 
 To die in dust, but you shall live by fame ; 
 My verse your virtues rare shall eternise, 
 And in the heavens write your glorious name. 
 
 Where, whenas death shall all the world subdue, 
 Our love shall live and later life renew. 
 
 That is the idealism of the Petrarchist at its 
 best, the hope that his love shall somehow survive 
 mortality and mingle with eternal things. But 
 now and then another note breaks through — the
 
 12 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 true Platonism, nay, the true philosophy that 
 may be found in Christian and Oriental medita- 
 tions, and wherever the perception of life's illusion 
 suddenly smites upon the eyes. You will not 
 hear it in Petrarch, but, in Christianised form, it 
 makes the theme of Sidney's noblest lines: 
 
 Leave me, O love ! which reachest but to dust! 
 And thou, my mind ! aspire to higher things ! 
 Grow rich in that which never taketh rust ! 
 Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings. 
 
 Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might 
 To that sweet yoke, where lasting freedoms be ! 
 Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light 
 That doth both shine and give us sight to see. 
 
 O take fast hold ! Let that light be thy guide ! 
 
 In this small course which birth draws out to death : 
 
 And think how evil becometh him to slide 
 
 Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath ! 
 
 Then farewell, world ! Thy uttermost I see ! 
 Eternal Love, maintain Thy love in me ! 
 
 There is doubtless a different note in this from 
 the love which forms the background of Sidney's 
 as of all these other sonnets, yet the change does 
 not jar acutely on the mind ; we pass from one to 
 the other with a certain freedom, for after all they 
 both lie in the field of the ideal. But another ele- 
 ment has entered into the Elizabethan sonnets, 
 which is utterly discordant with their Petrarchian 
 basis, and which does much to produce the feeling 
 of vacuity and insincerity inhering in them. I
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 1 3 
 
 mean the Anacreontic vein, which spread through 
 the writings of the Pleiad after the publishing of 
 the pseudo-Anacreon by Stephanus in 1554, and 
 passed thence into England. To Plato, as to all 
 the great writers of the early age, " Eros, the son, 
 Aphrodite, was a mighty god," and as such he 
 appeared to Dante and Petrarch. To attempt any 
 fusion or juxtaposition of this great divinity, 
 "fairest among all the immortal gods," as Hesiod 
 calls him, with the laughing, mischievous boy of 
 decadent Greece and Rome, was to show that in- 
 veracity of imagination which renders a work 
 cold and meaningless. I do not mean to condemn 
 the Anacreontic poems in themselves. Many of 
 them in their airy Greek form are exquisite trifles. 
 That translucent little gem of Cupid and the bee, 
 for instance, not even Tom Moore could vulgarise 
 in his translation, and we recognise its grace in 
 Spenser' s paraphrase : 
 
 Upon a day, as Love lay sweetly slumb'ring. 
 
 There is something perfectly legitimate, even 
 charming, in the use of these delicate fancies in 
 the proper place and in the proper metre, as when 
 the same poet fashions this pretty conceit: 
 
 I saw, in secret to my Dame 
 
 How little Cupid humbly came, 
 
 And said to her : " All hayle, my mother ! " 
 
 But when he saw me laugh, for shame 
 
 His face with bashful blood did flame, 
 
 Not knowing Venus from the other.
 
 14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 That is well enough in a way, but any one can 
 see how the introduction of such trifling into the 
 idealism of Petrarchian love, with its life of melan- 
 choly abstinence and its visions of eternity, must 
 mar and distort the fair image of truth. Nor is 
 it an answer to say that each sonnet must be 
 judged by itself, and that there is no discordance 
 if we read Sidney's Platonic abstinence on one 
 page and Barnes's Anacreontic fancies on another. 
 In the first place, the very form of the sonnet, with 
 the noble gravity of its rhymes, is totally unfit for 
 these light themes, and further, these sonnets all 
 spring so manifestly from the same source and 
 breathe so completely the same atmosphere that 
 it is fair to criticise them as a single literary 
 production. Indeed, Sidney himself was half-con- 
 scious of this confusion between the worship of 
 the true Eros and the sportive dalliance with the 
 Anacreontic Erotion or Cupid, and expresses it 
 more than once. Out of this consciousness there 
 does even arise a kind of subtle reconciliation, as 
 in the eleventh sonnet : 
 
 In truth, O Love ! with what a boyish kind 
 Thou dost proceed in thy most serious ways ; 
 That when the heaven to thee his best displays, 
 Yet of that best thou leav'st the best behind. 
 
 For like a child, that some fair book doth find, 
 With gilded leaves or coloured vellum plays, 
 Or, at the most, on some fair picture stays, 
 But never heeds the fruit of writer's mind ;
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS I 5 
 
 So, when thou saw'st in Nature's cabinet 
 Stella, thou straight lookt'st babies in her eyes, 
 In her cheek's pit thou didst thy pitfold set, 
 
 And in her breast bo-peep or crouching lies, 
 Playing and shining in each outward part ; 
 But, fool, seek'st not to get into her heart. 
 
 But oftener Petrarch and Anacreon are jostled 
 together in such a manner as to make the former 
 look not a little undignified and the latter heavy. 
 Thus in Barnes's Parthenophil there is a sonnet to 
 Content, which may be quoted entire for the 
 serenity and strength of its noble lines: 
 
 Ah, sweet Content ! where is thy mild abode ? 
 
 Is it with shepherds and light-hearted Swains, 
 Which sing upon the downs and pipe abroad, 
 
 Tending their flocks and cattle on the plains ? 
 
 Ah, sweet Content ! where dost thou safely rest? 
 
 In heaven, with angels? which the praises sing 
 Of Him that made, and rules at His behest, 
 
 The minds and hearts of every living thing. 
 
 Ah, sweet Content ! where doth thine harbour hold ? 
 
 Is it in churches, with Religious Men, 
 Which please the gods with prayers manifold ; 
 
 And in their studies meditate it then ? 
 
 Whether thou dost in heaven or earth appear, 
 Be where thou wilt ! Thou wilt not harbour here ! 
 
 Barring the flat lines (the eleventh and twelfth), 
 which have a way of stumbling into the very best 
 of these sonnets, that is an excellent piece of work;
 
 l6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 but how disastrously the bland effect of it is dis- 
 pelled when the eye drops to the verses next 
 succeeding : 
 
 If Cupid keep his quiver iu thine eye, etc. 
 
 It is such incongruities as these that point to 
 the shallowness and falseness of this whole pro- 
 cedure. Iu fact, we must recognise that these 
 sonnets show Elizabethan literature almost at its 
 lowest, and that is low indeed. England has 
 always lacked art, and the lack was greater per- 
 haps in those licensed days than at any subse- 
 quent period. Give the greater men of that age 
 an exquisite fancy to daudle or some swift emo- 
 tion to utter in lyric form where the first impulse 
 of genius is sufficient ; let them have some over- 
 riding passion or extravagant humour to unfold in 
 a drama whose looseness of structure imposes no 
 restraint, and they will bring forth effects incom- 
 parable for freshness and penetrating beauty. 
 But put on them the habit of a stricter art, bid 
 them confine their expression to a mould where 
 form and conscious style are essential, and immedi- 
 ately they sprawl and are helplessly confounded. 
 How little sense of form they had is made evident 
 by their habit of ending the Italianate sonnet with 
 a couplet ; that trivial error in technique is vastly 
 significant. How frigid and unreal their senti- 
 ment became under constraint may be seen by 
 comparing their work with the better productions 
 of the Pleiad from whom they stole so unblush-
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS \J 
 
 ingly . Read through Mr. Lee's two volumes from 
 end to end, and you will not find a single sonnet 
 which voices the passion and pathos of fading 
 beauty, so genuine to the Renaissance, as in 
 Ronsard's " Quand vous serez bien vieille, au 
 soir, a la chandelle"; nor will you meet with 
 anything comparable to this other sonnet of Ron- 
 sard's whereinto the very essence of the age, with 
 its love of books and love of woman, seems to be 
 distilled: 
 
 Je veux lire en trois jours l'lliade d'Homere, 
 Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moy: 
 Si rien me vient troubler, je t'assure ina foy, 
 Tu sentiras combien pesaute est ma colere. 
 
 Je ne veux seulement que nostre chambriere 
 Vienue faire mon lit, ton compagnon, ny toy ; 
 Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer a requoy, 
 Poor follastrer, apres, une sepmaine entiere. 
 
 Mais si quelqu'un venoit de la part de Cassandre, 
 Ouvre-luy tost la porte, et ne le fais attendre ; 
 Soudain entre ma chambre, et me vien accoustrer. 
 
 Je veux tant seulement a luy seul me monstrer : 
 Au reste, si un dieu vouloit pour moy descendre 
 Du ciel, ferme la porte, et ne le laisse entrer. 
 
 But I would not force the note of criticism. 
 Some six or eight of Sidney's pieces and here and 
 there a single sonnet in the other collections stand 
 out with a beauty or simple realism all the more 
 remarkable for the surrounding waste. Several 
 of these I have quoted, but it will have been
 
 l8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 observed that even in these there almost invariably 
 creeps in a line or quatrain or badly hung couplet 
 that does much to mar the effect of the whole. 
 Only one sonnet occurs to me whose tone is per- 
 fectly sustained from the first word to the last, 
 and that is Drayton's famous jcn d' esprit, " Since 
 there 's no help, come, let us kiss and part," for 
 which, happily, Mr. L,ee has found no model in 
 foreign tongues. Aside, too, from these notable 
 exceptions, there are little groups within the 
 larger sequences, such as some of the earlier son- 
 nets in Lodge's Phillis, which are written with a 
 kind of lusciousness soothing to the ear, though 
 they may leave the mind and heart untouched. 
 And then not even these imitators of an imitation 
 could spin verses in those ebullient days without 
 chancing occasionally upon a line or quatrain that 
 breaks through their dull convention, like the 
 song of a bird piercing suddenly the monotonous 
 undertone of the woods. It may be an effect of 
 resonant melody found in the words alone and 
 not in the sense, as where Barnes, after the usual 
 frigid conceit, 
 
 These mine heart-eating eyes do never gaze, 
 
 adds magniloquently, 
 
 Upon thy sun's harmonious marble wheels ; 
 
 it may be an image of high splendour such as this 
 metaphor in the same poet, 
 
 And Phoebe carried in her amber couch ;
 
 ELIZABETHAN SONNETS 19 
 
 it may be Drayton's visionary Platonism, 
 
 Even as a man that in some trance hath seen 
 More than his wondering utterance can unfold, 
 
 That, rapt in spirit, in better worlds hath been; 
 So must your praise distractedly be told ; 
 
 — whatever the note be, when it strikes unexpect- 
 edly on the ear, we pause in our reading and 
 know that this poet, too, like Daniel, has for a 
 little while, and in spite of the convention that 
 hampers him, been in the company of that "clear- 
 eyed Rector of the holy Hill." This, perhaps, is 
 the most obvious pleasure to be got from going 
 through these all too similar sonnet-sequences. 
 Another satisfaction they have, of a negative na- 
 ture to be sure: they show more distinctly by way 
 of contrast the reality and emotional veracity 
 which remove the greater part of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets to a class by themselves. But of this an- 
 other time.
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 However disappointing the mass of Eliza- 
 bethan sonnets in Mr. Sidney L,ee's two volumes 
 may have been, one great service at least they 
 have performed: by contrast they have thrown 
 the realism and human passion of Shakespeare's 
 sonnets into a new and bold relief. They serve 
 as a touchstone, so to speak, by means of which 
 it is possible to tell with a kind of critical pre- 
 cision just where Shakespeare was juggling with 
 the conventional commonplaces of the Renais- 
 sance, as not seldom happened, and where, on 
 the contrary, he wrote from actual experience or 
 native emotion. And no one, I think, can come 
 back to these more personal sonnets after a perusal 
 of Mr. L,ee's collection without being impressed 
 anew by the miracle of their beauty and without 
 feeling that with this key the poet did veritably 
 unlock his heart. 
 
 Not that they contain any rationalised philoso- 
 phy or any formula of life ; on the contrary, their 
 value as a confession is bound up with the very 
 fact that they spring directly from the experience 
 of the writer without any attempt to shape that 
 experience into a system after the manner of the
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 21 
 
 more reflective artists. And in this they are in 
 harmony with the spirit of the plays. I am aware 
 of the peril of such a statement to-day, when it 
 has become the exercise of a certain class of per- 
 fervid critics to read into the dramas some favoured 
 idea, whether political or religious or moral or 
 literary. Yet withal the very difficulties and 
 contradictions that arise from the methodical 
 interpretation of Shakespeare might have warned 
 them that no such application of philosophy was 
 possible. We take recourse to Matthew Arnold's 
 saying, "Others abide our question, thou art 
 free," or, we quote from Lord Lytton : 
 
 Each guess of others into worlds unknown 
 Shakespeare revolves, but keeps concealed his own ; 
 As in the Infinite hangs poised his thought, 
 Surveying all things and asserting nought ; — 
 
 but few of us have the courage to admit that he 
 evades our questioning just because he has no 
 answer to give. It is with him as with the oracles 
 of which a skeptical poet has made complaint — 
 
 That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain, 
 Because there is no light beyond the curtain. 
 
 We may find the whole gamut of human emo- 
 tion in Shakespeare, but we begin to darken 
 counsel with words when we undertake to con- 
 struct out of the medley of his plots any coherent
 
 22 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 vision of life such as exists in Milton or Homer 
 or Dante or iEschylus. Other dramatists have 
 resorted for their tragic thesis to some definite 
 philosophy, whether of their own eliciting or of 
 the age — to the antinomy of fate and the indi- 
 vidual will, or the clashing of family and state, or 
 the conflict of duty and pleasure. Shakespeare 
 proceeds otherwise: simple passion is his theme, 
 and his tragic exaltation is obtained by magnify- 
 ing passion until it assumes the enormity of a 
 supernatural obsession and the bearer is shattered 
 by the excess of his own emotion. No one can 
 have failed to observe the incongruity of the 
 denouement in most of the tragedies — the accumu- 
 lated and unmeaning slaughters that bring an 
 end to Ro?neo and ^Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and 
 Lear. The simple fact is that these gruesome 
 conclusions, twist and turn as the system-mongers 
 will, do not grow out of any necessity of the plot, 
 but are the relics of a barbarous taste. The real 
 climax lies in the frenzy of the passion-driven 
 hero, and it is for this reason that madness forms 
 an essential part of the greater dramas. 
 
 In this sense Lear may be taken as the most 
 typical of Shakespeare's tragedies, where the very 
 winds and clouds re-echo the hurly-burly of over- 
 wrought passion. And the summit of that pas- 
 sion, I think, is to be found in those scenes before 
 Gloucester's castle and in Edgar's hovel, when 
 the King and his little band set the world topsy- 
 turvy with the unrestrained wildness of their
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 23 
 
 pathos and mockery, through which passes Lear's 
 cry of terror : "Oh, that way madness lies ! " On 
 the contrary, the formal conclusion of the play 
 has no consistence in reason, and, aside from the 
 separate passages of striking poetry, little art. 
 The needless intrigues and the universal butchery 
 bear no logical relation to the main theme and de- 
 grade the artistic enjoyment of the hearer. The 
 interest of the piece lies in the excess of passion 
 and not in any unravelling of a tragic nodus ; it 
 is a drama of character and not of plot. 
 
 And it is the same with the other plays. As 
 the stuff of life presents itself to Shakespeare, 
 broken and unarranged, so he reflects it in his 
 magnifying mirror — a tale full of sound and fury, 
 signifying nothing. I remember one warm even- 
 ing in earhy spring standing with a friend on a 
 balcony that overlooked the lights and the throb- 
 bing procession of Broadway. It was the hour 
 when the theatres were closing. The scene was 
 new to him, for he had come from a far Western 
 town, and the odour of the city, the constant mu- 
 tations of the throng, the snatches of conversa- 
 tion, and the occasional laughter that floated 
 above the murmur — the mystery of this boundless 
 activity, caught in passing glimpses, acted on his 
 nerves as an intoxicant. It fascinated and 
 troubled him at once ; he could find no answer to 
 the appeal of this enormous, ebullient life, and he 
 was haunted by the feeling that each human atom 
 of the mass was driven along in the current by
 
 24 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 some desire inexplicable to all the others — inex- 
 plicable, it might be, to himself. The whole 
 spectacle presented itself to the eye as a tangle of 
 passions woven on a web of illusion. " It is all 
 new to me," he said, "yet the sensation is 
 strangely familiar. How does it come ? ' ' And 
 then, after a pause: "I understand. It is the 
 world of Shakespeare, as we have just seen it on 
 the stage. And often before, while reading his 
 plays, I have been overwhelmed by the same feel- 
 ing of infinite interacting lives and infinite illu- 
 sion." And my friend knew his Shakespeare as 
 few of us know him in these laborious days. 
 
 Only there is something to add. Though 
 Shakespeare did not rationalise, or, in a sense, 
 translate the events of life into an artistic design, 
 though he gives back the crude material of emo- 
 tion as he finds it, yet in another way he did have 
 his own solution of the riddle — it may even be 
 that his solution is, when all is said, profounder 
 and more satisfying than that of any other poet. 
 The passions of his play may be knit into an in- 
 extricable tangle so that no dramatic unravelling 
 is possible, yet always when the emotion is 
 wrought to a height beyond which human nature 
 cannot go, always when the hearer is about to 
 cry out, "That way madness lies; let me shun 
 that," suddenly the poet waves aside the whole 
 fabric of enchantment with a word of royal com- 
 mand. From the fitful fever of life, in the turn- 
 ing of a moment, he carries us into that region of
 
 Shakespeare's sonnets 25 
 
 eventual calm wherefrom the stage of the world 
 seems as a little point at a mighty distance. He 
 who created this troubled scene is no longer a 
 partaker in its passionate perplexities ; he stands 
 a great way off, apart from it and above it, and 
 looks down where, far beneath, 
 
 . . . the tides of day and night 
 
 With flame and darkness ridge 
 The void, as low as where this earth 
 
 Spins like a fretful midge. 
 
 We need not dwell on this aspect of his genius, 
 though we may animadvert, by the way, that 
 Taiue's criticism, because it fails to recognise this 
 other element beside the passion of Shakespeare, 
 is finally false and shallow. Any one will recall 
 the great moments when the curtain of disillusion 
 falls. It is Hamlet's "The rest is silence"; or 
 the Dauphin's " Life is as tedious as a twice-told 
 tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man"; or 
 the Second Richard's "A brittle glory shineth in 
 this face"; or Macbeth's "To-morrow and to- 
 morrow and to-morrow"; or Kent's "Vex not 
 his ghost " ; or Prospero's " We are such stuff As 
 dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded 
 with a sleep." More than that, there would 
 seem to be something akin to this inner peripeteia 
 in the development of Shakespeare's genius. 
 The peculiar calm and beauty of The Tempest, 
 The Winter's Talc, and the other late plays have 
 often been commented upon. After the tumult
 
 26 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 of the great tragedies, those scenes of idyllic sport 
 come like the words of Macbeth, 
 
 There 's nothing serious in mortality, 
 All is but toys 
 
 as if the poet, finding no significance in the 
 thwarted fates of mankind, had turned at last to 
 the laughter of young girls and the innocence of 
 flowers. 
 
 No, we merely deceive ourselves if we go to 
 Shakespeare for any philosophic systematising 
 of life or any reshaping of the material afforded 
 by experience into a world of artistic significance, 
 such as we look for in the masters of Greek and 
 French literature. What we do get from him is a 
 sense of boundless life. Other men have suffered 
 and enjoyed privately, but in him were brought 
 together all the passions of mankind ; he is the 
 master of human experience, and there can come 
 to us no pinnacle of triumph or despair, of joy or 
 grief, no tragic melancholy or buoyant humour, 
 no envy or hate or love or pride or shame, but we 
 shall know that he on some day of his brief life 
 has felt as we feel and has spoken for us better 
 than we ourselves can speak. And so it is, I 
 think, that we hunger for some direct word from 
 this poet, some revelation of his own mind, more 
 than from any other writer of the world. What 
 had he to say of his passage through time ? Was 
 the sum of it sweet or bitter to him ; did he find it 
 a simple matter to live, or was he, too, infelixfatis
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 27 
 
 cxterritiis ; did he, in the sessions of silent thought, 
 regard with complacence his contact with daily 
 life, or was there in his memory still some touch 
 of regret — even of shame ? Just because there is 
 here no remoulding of experience to an ideal, we 
 believe that if he should open his heart to us in 
 these matters he would exhibit a peculiar frank- 
 ness ; and because his experience was broader and 
 deeper than that of any other man, we feel that 
 his word would have extraordinary validity. 
 Could Shakespeare confess, it would be, as it 
 were, a confession of the human race. 
 
 And to a certain extent Shakespeare has con- 
 fessed. I am not so rash as to suppose that here 
 and now we shall pluck out the heart of his mys- 
 tery; in the end a man of his wide-reaching vision 
 must remain as his own ^neas says: " The secrets 
 of nature have not more gift in taciturnity." 
 Yet no one can compare his sonnets with those in 
 Mr. Lee's volumes without being immediately 
 impressed by the directness of the self-revelation 
 they contain, nor can I conceive any reason for 
 taking this confession otherwise than at its face 
 value. And what has he to say for himself — this 
 man who ran through the gamut of human emo- 
 tions and made himself as it were the spokesman 
 of the race ? Alas, it is only the old story re- 
 peated. I do not see how one can read these son- 
 nets and not feel that the sum of life to the poet 
 of those spacious days was, as it had appeared to 
 the Preacher of Israel long ago, Vanity and vexa-
 
 28 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Hon, and he that increaseth experience increaseth 
 sorrow ! Not seldom, to be sure, there is a note 
 of serenity or triumph, but always there is this 
 peculiarity, that the more personal the tone be- 
 comes the sadder is its import. 
 
 He was, after all, a child of his age. There 
 was always present with him that sense of the 
 eternal flux of things which is so characteristic of 
 the Renaissance, but which, curiously enough, 
 rarely appears in the other Elizabethan sonneteers, 
 however common it may be in the dramatists. It 
 is safe to say that no single motive or theme recurs 
 more persistently through the whole course of 
 Shakespeare's works than this consciousness of 
 the servile depredations of time, that ' ' ceaseless 
 lackey to eternity." As with other men of the 
 period, this sense of brevity and mutability lay 
 upon his mind like an obsession, and no small 
 part of the tragic pathos in his plays arises from 
 the jostling together of the insatiable desires of 
 youth with the ever imminent perception of evan- 
 escence. One wonders whether Bacon could have 
 had in recollection these apostrophes to time when 
 he wrote in his Essays : "It is not good to look 
 too long upon these turning- wheels of vicissitude, 
 lest we become giddy." 
 
 Of the great passages in the dramas which re- 
 vert to this theme I need saj*- nothing, for they are 
 fresh in the memory of us all. But it is just as 
 prominent, though possibly less familiar, in the 
 poems. In the very midst of L,ucrece's agony
 
 SHAKESPEARE S SONNETS 29 
 
 she forgets herself awhile to rail against this 
 power that "turn[s] the giddy round of Fortune's 
 wheel ' ' : 
 
 Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly Night, 
 Swift subtle post, carrier of grisly care ! 
 
 And in the Venus and Adonis the thought, here 
 in its milder aspect, is still more essential. 
 
 The tender spring upon thy tempting lip 
 
 Shews thee unripe yet mayst thou well be tasted ; 
 
 Make use of time, let not advantage slip ; 
 
 Beauty within itself should not be wasted : 
 
 Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime 
 Rot and consume themselves in little time — 
 
 cries Venus to the reluctant youth, and the real 
 charm of this first heir of Shakespeare's invention 
 resides in a young poet's pity for what Freneau 
 long afterwards was to call ' ' the frail duration of 
 a flower," and in his longing to conquer muta- 
 bility by the prowess of love: 
 
 Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty. 
 
 We are carried by this theme immediately to 
 the earlier sonnets of the collection in which 
 Shakespeare scolds his boy friend for cherishing 
 an ' ' unthrifty loveliness ' ' : 
 
 Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee. 
 
 So striking is the resemblance between these first 
 seventeen sonnets and this part of the Venus and
 
 30 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Adonis just alluded to that the poem would seem 
 to be a mere dramatisation or obj edification (if I 
 may use the repellent word) of the more personal 
 expression of the idea, and would afford pretty 
 strong confirmation of the opinion that the early 
 sonnets, at least, were written about the year 1593 
 (the date of Ve?ius and Adonis) and were addressed 
 to that Earl of Southampton to whom the poem 
 was dedicated. Everything, too, — both the habit 
 of poets in those days and the unmistakable con- 
 tinuity of thought running through the greater 
 number of Shakespeare's series, — would indicate 
 that the succeeding sonnets were meant for the 
 same person, although some of them may have 
 been written considerably later. Even in the 
 more tragic part that was to come afterwards, 
 when the hesitant friend accepted Shakespeare's 
 advice quite too literally, he turns the theme of 
 the Venus and Adonis to the culprit's exoneration: 
 
 Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won, 
 Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed ; 
 And when a woman woos what woman's son 
 Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed ? 
 
 Indeed, it might be a question whether the dra- 
 matisation of the subject was undertaken to con- 
 firm the earlier exhortation, or later, when the 
 turning point of the sonnet-story occurred, to 
 uphold the example of Adonis to the tempted, 
 wavering youth. In either case the sonnets of 
 both periods and the poem would seem to be
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 3 I 
 
 written under the same inspiration and not far 
 apart in time. 
 
 Nor is it really so difficult to explain, theoretic- 
 ally, the mood in which Shakespeare wrote those 
 earlier exhortations as the mountainous contro- 
 versy over them would lead one to suppose. 
 Consider that this ambitious young poet had come 
 up to London with a hunger for beauty unequalled 
 perhaps in the history of literature; and that with 
 this hunger went the haunting consciousness of 
 the uncertainty and mutability of things which 
 was a part also of this Renaissance inheritance. 
 Naturally when, in the years following the first 
 riot of youth, he fell under the sway of the noble 
 boy, at once his patron and his love (whether it 
 was Southampton or another) — naturally this 
 perilous perception of beauty with its poignant 
 regret threw an ideal colour over their friendship. 
 And by virtue of that mingling together in Eng- 
 land of the currents of the Renaissance and the 
 Reformation, Shakespeare's passion for the boy 
 took on something of the sensuousness of that re- 
 lation as it was adopted in Italy from classical 
 tradition and at the same time the moral pudor of 
 the northern races. The result is thus easily ex- 
 plained in theory, but to most readers of to-day 
 the realisation of this mixed sentiment is not a 
 little baffling ; the sonnets would probably leave 
 them quite cold were it not that Shakespeare's 
 confession deals also with larger matters. His 
 love for the youth becomes, in fact, a beautiful
 
 32 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 symbol of that war against Time which runs 
 through all his work. In this respect the fifteenth 
 sonnet may be regarded as the keynote of the 
 whole first group, although in poetic diction it 
 cannot be ranked among the highest: 
 
 When I consider everything that grows 
 Holds in perfection hut a little moment, 
 That this huge stage presenteth nought hut shows, 
 Whereon the stars in secret influence comment ; 
 When I perceive that men as plants increase, 
 Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky, 
 Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, 
 And wear their brave state out of memory ; 
 Then the conceit of this inconstant stay 
 Sets you most rich in youth before my sight. 
 Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay, 
 To change your day of youth to sullied night ; 
 And all in war with Time for love of you, 
 As he takes from you, I engraft you new. 
 
 He looks back to " the chronicle of wasted time," 
 and is filled with alarm that the grace and nobility 
 of his young friend also " among the wastes of 
 time must go." Aided probably by some family 
 circumstances now quite obscure to us, he appeals 
 to the "sweet boy " to defy the heavy hand of age 
 by the creative faculty of love, and finds it easy to 
 write this appeal with the constant revolt of his 
 own nature against the reign of mutability. And 
 when, as it appears, the malicious youth let his 
 exhortations fall unheeded, or heeded them in a 
 manner quite foreign to the preacher's intention 
 and desire, it was still within the range of his
 
 Shakespeare's sonnets 33 
 
 Renaissance training to seek to accomplish by the 
 power of his own art what the other had failed to 
 acquire for himself. He will eternise in his verse 
 this " flow' ring pride, so fading and so fickle " (to 
 use Spenser's phrase on mutability), and so put 
 back the encroachments of decay ; he is but one 
 of many in those days who sought the " stedfast 
 rest of all things" in such an cere perennius. And 
 it soon grows evident that in the sonnets which 
 express this hope the sense of universal vicissitude 
 has almost driven from view his concern for the 
 particular \V. H., if those were the friend's 
 initials: 
 
 When I have seeu by Time's fell hand defaced 
 The rich proud cost of outworn buried age, 
 When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed 
 And brass eternal slave to mortal rage ; . . . 
 
 or turning to man's estate — 
 
 Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 
 
 So do our minutes hasten to their end ; 
 
 Each changing place with that which goes before, 
 
 In sequent toil all forwards do contend ; . . . 
 And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, 
 Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. 
 
 It is only in this way, I think, by connecting 
 
 Shakespeare's love for this chosen boy with the 
 
 deeper current of his thought and feeling that we 
 
 can understand, in part at least, the riddle of the 
 
 sonnets. 
 3
 
 34 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 But, after all, this restiveness under the hand 
 of time, however personally expressed by Shake- 
 speare and however strangely omitted by his com- 
 patriot sonneteers, was a commonplace of his age 
 — of all ages poetically inspired, from Homer's 
 ' ' Like as the generations of leaves ' ' down to 
 Keats' s " Forever wilt thou love and she be fair." 
 It is possible to go beyond this in the sonnets, 
 and to catch a note of sadness which is by no 
 means a ' ' topic ' ' of the age, which is indeed now 
 and again almost painfully intimate and individual. 
 I am aware of the temerity of such a statement, 
 but, taken as a whole and with all their splendours 
 considered, these sonnets to me seem to join with 
 the plays in forming one of the saddest human 
 documents ever penned. There is of course 
 humour here in abundance ; but from the days of 
 Aristophanes to the present time humour has had 
 a strange trick of springing luxuriantly from a 
 bitter soil. It is common also to point to the 
 pastoral scenes in The Tempest, The Winter's 
 Tale, and the other later dramas as a proof of the 
 large joy ousness and final serenity that lay at the 
 basis of Shakespeare's nature ; and in one sense 
 the assertion is perfectly just. Yet here, as always, 
 it is necessary to distinguish. We may not be 
 able to mark off the passages with mathematical 
 precision, but no one can read the plays with such 
 a quest in mind without feeling in a general way 
 that at times the poet is commenting on life in the 
 tone of his own direct experience, and that again
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 35 
 
 he speaks from that far Olympian height where 
 his own personality is forgotten and wherefrom 
 he looks down upon the business of men as on the 
 pretty sport of children — and then it is that the 
 tricks of Ariel and Miranda's brave new world 
 become a wonder equal to a dukedom, and the 
 breath of a dim violet grows as important as the 
 jealous rage of Leontes. This serenity is due, in 
 part, no doubt, to the calming influence of years, 
 and falls like the wind-swept purity of the atmo- 
 sphere after a storm; it is no less the gift of genius, 
 with its well-known faculty of dwelling alternately 
 within and without itself. 
 
 But our concern to-day is with the poet's inner 
 life alone, and I see no reason to question the 
 common belief that Hamlet expresses more of 
 Shakespeare's personal experience than any other 
 play or character. So far as I know, no one has 
 pointed out how strongly that opinion is reinforced 
 by the similarity of tone between the dramatic 
 utterances of Hamlet and the confessions of the 
 sonnets. Compare, for instance, the list of evils 
 pronounced by the melancholy Dane: 
 
 The whips and scorns of time, 
 The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, 
 The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, 
 The insolence of office, and the spurns 
 That patient merit of the unworthy takes — 
 
 consider how foreign all these details are to the 
 actual situation of Hamlet and how appropriate 
 they are to the fortune of Shakespeare himself;
 
 36 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 consider with them the misplaced diatribe of 
 Lucrece : 
 
 The patient dies while the physician sleeps ; 
 
 The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds ; 
 
 Justice is feasting while the widow weeps ; 
 
 Advice is sporting while infection breeds — 
 
 and then turn to the sixty-sixth sonnet and see 
 how clearly they express not the mere common- 
 place lament over the insufficiency of life, but the 
 poet's own very personal and very bitter ex- 
 perience : 
 
 Tired with all these for restful death I cry. 
 
 Indeed, as we read over the sonnets and mark 
 the lines where he speaks his own relation to the 
 whips and scorns of time, we may well be over- 
 whelmed by the magnitude and the intimacy of 
 the confession, and it is easy to understand why 
 he never gave this work willingly to the public as 
 he did his only other two non-dramatic poems. 
 The one word that occurs to me as expressive of 
 his feeling is indignity; if it were not for the 
 sound of the word in connection with so revered 
 a name I should say shame — indignity against 
 the soilure that is forced upon him from contact 
 with the world, shame for his too facile yielding 
 to contamination. The story is best told by 
 bringing together some of these passages without 
 comment: — 
 
 Sonnet 29 : 
 
 When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 
 I all alone beweep my outcast state.
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 37 
 
 Sonnet 36 : 
 
 I may not evermore acknowledge thee, 
 
 Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame. 
 
 Sonnet 37 : 
 
 So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite. 
 
 Sonnet 88 : 
 
 Upon my part I can set down a story 
 
 Of faults concealed, wherein I am attainted. 
 
 Sonnet 90 : 
 
 Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross, 
 Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow. 
 
 Sonnet 112 : 
 
 Your love and pity doth the impression fill 
 Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow. 
 
 Sonnet 119 : 
 What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, 
 Distilled from limbecs foul as hell within. 
 
 Sonnet 121 : 
 
 'T is better to be vile than vile esteemed. 
 
 These are only a few of the lines that might be 
 quoted. Take them all together and I do not be- 
 lieve you will find, in the whole course of English 
 literature, any confession comparable to them for 
 the indignity and shame of a noble spirit outraged 
 by the familiarity of "sluttish Time." Some- 
 thing of this is due, no doubt, to the peculiar 
 position of the actor in those days. Says Casca, 
 when he wishes to pull the great Caesar down into 
 the mire of common buffeted humanity : " If the 
 tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him
 
 38 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 according as he pleased and displeased them, as 
 they use to do the players in the theatre, I am 
 no true man." We do not often, while under the 
 spell of Shakespeare's magic, consider what it 
 must have meant to so sensitive and self-conscious 
 a nature as his to have been exposed to the out- 
 rageous approval and disapproval of an Eliza- 
 bethan audience. The groundlings, we know, 
 paid for the discomfort of their place in the pit by 
 boisterous assertion of their pleasure, and the 
 comments of the nobles who sometimes sat on the 
 stage at the very elbows of the actors must often 
 have been as galling as the jeers of the mob be- 
 low. The growing sect of the Puritans, too, gave 
 them something worse than contempt. Thus, 
 after the earthquake of 1580, the Lord Mayor of 
 London writes to the Privy Council, April 12th: 
 
 When it happened on Sundaie last that some great dis- 
 order was committed at the Theatre, I sent for the under- 
 shireve of Middlesex to understand the circumstances, to 
 the intent that by myself or by him I might have caused 
 such redresse to be had as in dutie and discretion I might, 
 and therefore did also send for the plaiers to have apered 
 afore me, and the rather because those playes doe make 
 assembles of cittizens and there families of whome I have 
 charge ; but forasmuch as I understand that your Lord- 
 ship, with other of his majesties most honourable Coun- 
 sell, have entered into examination of that matter, I have 
 surceassed to procede further, and do humbly refer the 
 whole to your wisdomes and grave considerations ; how- 
 beit, I have further thought it my dutie to informe your 
 Lordship, and therewith also to beseche to have in your
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 39 
 
 honourable rememberance, that the players of playes 
 which are used at the Theatre and other such places, and 
 tumblers and such like, are a very superfluous sort of 
 men and of suche facultie as the lawes have disalowed, 
 and their exersise of those playes is a great hinderaunce 
 of the service of God, who hath with His mighty hand so 
 lately admonished us of oure earnest repentance. 
 
 Is it strange that Shakespeare should have re- 
 treated from Iyondon to the quiet of his Stratford 
 home as soon as he was freed from the necessity 
 of serving such a public ? More than once he 
 shows in the sonnets how deeply the iron had 
 entered into his heart, and how he felt the re- 
 proach of being classed among this " very super- 
 fluous sort of men." The chief passages are 
 often quoted : 
 
 Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there, 
 
 And made myself a motley to the view, 
 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, 
 
 Made old offences of affections new ; 
 
 Most true it is that I have looked on truth 
 
 Askance and strangely ; — 
 
 and, in the following sonnet: 
 
 O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 
 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Thau public means which public manners breeds ; 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, etc. 
 
 The confession is sufficiently frank and carries us 
 far enough away from the elegant couveutionali-
 
 40 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 ties that ruled the other Elizabethan sonneteers. 
 It is not entirely pleasant to know that the man we 
 reverence this side — often yonder side — idolatry, 
 could have laid his heart open in this way even in 
 the intimacy of friendship. 
 
 But there is a more painful element in the son- 
 nets than mere outcry against the harshness of the 
 guilty goddess. This man, whose knowledge of 
 the heart enabled him, without the synthetic 
 imagination of the other supreme poets, to build 
 up so marvellous a literature, whose sense of pas- 
 sion was so profound that it took the place of 
 tragic conflict in other dramatists — how is it with 
 him when, laying aside the comfortable disguise 
 of masque and cothurnus, he speaks directly for 
 himself? We call him the master of human ex- 
 perience, and that is his honour to-day ; but how 
 was it with him when he stood on the stage of the 
 Globe Theatre, a motley to the view, or indulged 
 in the wanton life of that superfluous sort of men 
 who were his fellows ? If the hazard and spite of 
 fortune produced in him a feeling of indignity, 
 the subjection to the wild beast within his own 
 heart left, for a time at least, what can only be 
 called a stamp of shame. It is not necessary to 
 dwell at length on the particular incident which 
 forms the heart of this confession, nor to make any 
 conjectures in regard to the identity and charac- 
 ter of that " worser spirit, a woman coloured ill," 
 who was his love "of despair." All that is essen- 
 tial is told only too frankly in the later sonnets.
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 41 
 
 There are confessions of guilt in English — a plenty 
 of them ; but ordinarily these are made after the 
 sinner has reached a state of grace, and when we 
 probe the matter we are likely to find, as in the 
 case of Bunyan, that the remembered enormities 
 were such crimes as bell-ringing and dancing on 
 the green. The peculiarity of Shakespeare's con- 
 fession is that we see a sensitive soul actually in 
 the toils of evil, which he deplores yet hugs to his 
 breast. It is this association which makes the 
 terrible one hundred and twenty-ninth sonnet 
 unique in English — unique, so far as I know, in 
 any language. Only the conscience of the Puri- 
 tan united to the libertine fancy of a Cavalier (a 
 phenomenon not easily conceivable outside of 
 England) could have produced those words : 
 
 The expense of spirit iu a waste of shame 
 
 Is lust iu action. . . . 
 
 All this the world well knows ; yet none knows well 
 To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. 
 
 If you wish to see how much of the world's ex- 
 perience has entered into these lines, turn back to 
 Horace's Epistles and see in what way the matter 
 presented itself to that clear-eyed pagan. 
 
 Sperne voluptates, nocet empta dolore voluptas, 
 
 was the height of his argument, and between that 
 admonition and the anguish of Shakespeare have 
 passed all the middle ages and the whole of 
 Christianity. Or, if you care to set in relief the
 
 42 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 personal and intimate nature of the sonnet, com- 
 pare it with Byron's stanza in Childe Harold : 
 
 'Tis an old lesson ; Time approves it true, 
 And those who know it best, deplore it most ; 
 When all is won that all desire to woo, 
 The paltry prize is hardly worth the cost : 
 Youth wasted, minds degraded, honour lost, 
 These are thy fruits, successful Passion ! 
 
 The thought is the same as Shakespeare's, but it 
 is expressed by a man of the world who speaks 
 the wisdom of his kind ; there is lacking that in- 
 dividual conviction of sin, as the Puritans whom 
 Shakespeare so despised would have called it. 
 
 We must not, however, forget that these son- 
 nets were not written for the world to read, but 
 for the privacy of one or two persons; their enigma 
 would indeed be inexplicable were they intended 
 for the public. And just as Shakespeare's sense 
 of universal vicissitude is the true means of inter- 
 preting the opening appeal to the boy friend to 
 perpetuate his beauty through the power of love, 
 so the indignities of his public career, in his early 
 years at least, and the remorse of submission to 
 his own passions are the only explanation of those 
 extravagant terms of admiration and love which 
 he bestows on his young patron. 
 
 It is not necessary to believe all the stories of 
 Shakespeare's irregular youth, yet we can hardly 
 doubt that his beginnings in L,ondon were humble 
 and not desirable in the eyes of the world. What
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 43 
 
 he wrung from fortune came by struggle and by 
 coining the experience of his life for public usage. 
 In comparison with his own ragged honours, the 
 brilliant person of such a child of fortune as 
 Southampton would seem to hold as a visible 
 symbol all that he sought and could obtain, if 
 obtained even in part, only by paying for it in 
 the sanctities of his own character. Southampton 
 (or another), beautiful, proud, desired of women, 
 rich, to whom Fortune gave all things without 
 price, was more than a person to Shakespeare, he 
 was an ideal ; and the poet's devotion to this 
 patron, his almost cringing submission to a boy's 
 whims, is only comprehensible when we consider 
 the relation between the two in this light. There 
 is in the friendship the vicarious power of trans- 
 mitting virtues : 
 
 Thy love is better than high birth to me, 
 Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost, 
 Of more delight than hawks or horses be : 
 And having thee, of all men's pride I boast. 
 
 Almost the association with this ideal of youth is 
 able to cleanse the stains of time. Editors have 
 been troubled by the lines in which Shakespeare 
 speaks of his age — 
 
 That time of year thou mayest in me behold— 
 
 and have cited them as proof that the sonnets 
 must have been composed later than 1594, when 
 he was only thirty. They forget that this early
 
 44 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 assumption of age was a commonplace of the Re- 
 naissance. And, apart from this, it does not 
 appear that the difficulty is solved by making him 
 thirty-six or thirty-eight ; even at that age the 
 ordinary man is not quite in the yellow leaf. 
 The fact is that the very intensity of Shake- 
 speare's passions and the depth of his experience 
 made him feel thus old in comparison with one 
 untried by life. And in the freshness of his 
 friend's blossoming he would find a cloak for his 
 own losses at the hand of Time: 
 
 But when my glass shews me myself, indeed, 
 Beated and chopt with tanned antiquity, 
 Mine own self love quite contrary I read, 
 Self so self-loving were iniquity. 
 
 'Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise 
 Painting my age with beauty of thy days. 
 
 Yet, even considered in this way, there remains 
 something disconcerting in the peculiar tone of 
 self-humiliation which Shakespeare assumes be- 
 fore a fledgling of the Court. He pays more 
 than the ordinary adulation of the poets in those 
 days, and pays it in a different kind : 
 
 Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee 
 So far from home into my deeds to prye, 
 To find out shames and idle hours in me? 
 
 And the triangular comedy, in which Shakespeare 
 and his two loves of comfort and despair play their 
 extraordinary r61es, leaves the poet in a position
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 45 
 
 not calculated to enhance his honour in the eyes 
 of saint or worldling. Something of this whole 
 relation between the great exemplar of human ex- 
 perience and his boyish patron may be accounted 
 for by the poet's faculty of dramatising the gap in 
 his own nature between ideal and reality ; some- 
 thing of it is still inexplicable, an enigma never 
 meant for our solving, and best, no doubt, left in 
 obscurity. 
 
 And if you ask me, then, why I have at- 
 tempted, so far as I could, to lay bare this 
 darker side of Shakespeare's character, my only 
 reply is that there is a fascination in following 
 out what seems to one the truth. And, after all, 
 some comfort, not of an ignoble sort I trust, 
 abounds in knowing a little more precisely that 
 this spokesman of mankind rose to the power 
 and tranquillity of his vision through experiences 
 very like our own, and that he, too, suffered the 
 indignities of time and the remorse of his own 
 excesses.
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 There was something almost as romantic in Mr. 
 Hearn's life as in his books. He was, I believe, 
 the child of an Irish father and a woman of the 
 Greek islands ; his early manhood he passed in 
 this country, and then converted himself into a 
 subject of the Mikado, taking a Japanese wife and 
 adopting the customs and religion of the land. 
 On his death this winter (1904) he was buried 
 with full Buddhist rites, being the first foreigner 
 so distinguished in Japan; and almost his last act 
 was to pass by cablegram on the final proofs of 
 his most serious attempt to transfer the illusive 
 mystery of the Orient into Western speech. His 
 yapa?i, an Interpretation thus rounded out what 
 must be deemed one of the most extraordinary 
 artistic achievements of modern days. For it is 
 as an art of strange subtlety that we should regard 
 his literary work, an art that, like some sympa- 
 thetic menstruum, has fused into one compound 
 three elements never before brought together. 
 
 In the mere outward manner of this art there 
 is, to be sure, nothing mysterious. One recog- 
 nises immediately throughout his writing that 
 sense of restraint joined with a power of after- 
 46
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 47 
 
 suggestion, which he has described as appertain- 
 ing to Japanese poetry, but which is no less his 
 own by native right. There is a term, ittakkiri, 
 it seems, meaning " all gone," or " entirely van- 
 ished," which is applied contemptuously by the 
 Japanese to verse that tells all and trusts nothing 
 to the reader's imagination. Their praise they 
 reserve for compositions that leave in the mind 
 the thrilling of a something unsaid. " Like the 
 single stroke of a bell, the perfect poem should 
 set murmuring and undulating, in the mind of 
 the hearer, many a ghostly aftertone of long dura- 
 tion." Now these ghostly reverberations are pre- 
 cisely the effect of the simplest of Mr. Hearn's 
 pictures. Let him describe, for instance, the im- 
 pression produced by walking down the deep 
 canon of Broadway, between those vast structures, 
 beautiful but sinister, where one feels depressed 
 by the mere sensation of enormous creative life 
 without sympathy and of unresting power with- 
 out pity, — let him describe this terror of Broad- 
 way, and in a few words he shall set ringing 
 within you long pulsations of emotion which 
 reach down to the depths of experience. Or, let 
 him relate by mere allusion the story of hearing 
 a girl say "Good-night" to some one parting 
 from her in a London park, and there shall be 
 awakened in your mind ghostly aftertones that 
 bring back memories of the saddest separations 
 and regrets of life. He employs the power of 
 suggestion through perfect restraint.
 
 48 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 But this self-restrained and suggestive style is 
 merely the instrument, the manner, so to speak, 
 of his art. If we examine the actual substance 
 of his writings, we shall discover that it is bor- 
 rowed from three entirely distinct, in fact almost 
 mutually destructive, philosophies, any one of 
 which alone would afford material for the genius 
 of an ordinary writer. He stands and proclaims 
 his mysteries at the meeting of three ways. To 
 the religious instinct of India, — Buddhism in par- 
 ticular, — which history has engrafted on the 
 aesthetic sense of Japan, Mr. Hearn brings the 
 interpreting spirit of Occidental science ; and 
 these three traditions (Hindu, Japanese, and 
 European) are fused by the peculiar sympathies 
 of his mind into one rich and novel compound, — 
 a compound so rare as to have introduced into 
 literature a psychological sensation unknown be- 
 fore. More than any other recent author, he has 
 added a new thrill to our intellectual experience. 
 
 Of Japan, which gives the most obvious sub- 
 stratum to Mr. Hearn's work, it has been said that 
 her people, since the days of ancient Greece, are 
 the only genuine artists of the world ; and in a 
 manner this is true. There was a depth and 
 pregnancy in the Greek imagination which made 
 of Greek art something far more universally sig- 
 nificant than the frail loveliness of Japanese crea- 
 tion, but not the Greeks themselves surpassed, or 
 even equalled, the Japanese in their all-embracing 
 love of decorative beauty. To read the story of
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 49 
 
 the daily life of these people, as recorded by 
 Mr. Mortimer Menpes and other travellers, is 
 to be brought into contact with a national tem- 
 perament so far removed from Western compre- 
 hension as to seem to most of us a tale from 
 fairyland. When, for instance, Mr. Menpes, 
 with a Japanese friend, visited Danjuro, he found 
 a single exquisite kakemono, or painting, dis- 
 played in the great actor's chamber. On admir- 
 ing its beauty, he was told by the friend that 
 Danjuro had taken pains to learn the precise 
 character of his visitor's taste, and only then had 
 exhibited this particular picture. To the Japan- 
 ese the hanging of a kakemono or the arranging 
 of a bough of blossoms is a serious function of life. 
 The placing of flowers is indeed an exact science, 
 to the study of which a man may devote seven 
 years, even fourteen years, before he will be 
 acknowledged a master. Nature herself is sub- 
 jected to this elaborate system of training, and 
 often what in a Japanese landscape seems to a 
 foreigner the exuberance of natural growth is 
 really the work of patient human artifice. 
 
 There is no accident [writes Mr. Menpes] in the 
 beautiful curves of the trees that the globe-trotter so 
 justly admires : these trees have been traiued and shaped 
 and forced to form a certain decorative pattern, and the 
 result is — perfection. We in the West labour uuder the 
 delusion that if Nature were to be allowed to have her 
 sweet way, she would always be beautiful. But the 
 Japanese have gone much farther than this : they realise
 
 50 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 that Nature does not always do the right thing ; they 
 know that occasionally trees will grow up to form ugly 
 lines ; and they know exactly how to adapt and help her. 
 She is to them like some beautiful musical instrument, 
 finer than any ever made by human hands, but still an 
 instrument, with harmonies to be coaxed out. 
 
 And the same aesthetic delicacy, touched with 
 artificiality if you will, pervades the literature of 
 this people. We are accustomed, and rightly, to 
 regard the Japanese as a nation of imitators. But 
 their poetry, we are assured by Mr. Hearn, is the 
 one original art which they have not borrowed 
 from China, or from any other country ; and no- 
 where better than in their poetry can we observe 
 the swiftness and dexterity of their imagination 
 and that exquisite reserve with its haunting echo 
 in the memory. To reproduce in English the 
 peculiar daintiness of these poems is, we are told 
 and can well believe, quite an impossibility ; but 
 from the seemingly careless translations scattered 
 through Mr. Hearn 's pages we do at least form 
 some notion of their art in the original. Many 
 of these stanzas are mere bits of folk-lore or the 
 work of unknown singers, like this tiny picture 
 of the cicada : 
 
 Lo ! on the topmost pine, a solitary cicada 
 Vainly attempts to clasp one last red beam of sun. 
 
 That is light enough in English, but even one 
 entirely ignorant of the Japanese language can 
 see that, in comparison with the rhythm of the
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 5 I 
 
 original, 1 it is like the step of a quadruped com- 
 pared with the fluttering of a moth. It contains 
 only sixteen syllables in the original ; and indeed 
 all these poems are wrought into the brief compass 
 of a stanza, like certain fragile little vases painted 
 inside and out which are so highly prized by con- 
 noisseurs. Yet these tiny word-paintings, by 
 virtue of their cunning restraint, are capable at 
 times of gathering into their loveliness echoes of 
 emotion as wide-reaching as love and as deep as 
 the grave: 
 
 Perhaps a freak of the wind — yet perhaps a sign of re- 
 membrance, — 
 This fall of a single leaf on the water I pour for the dead. 
 
 I whispered a prayer at the grave : a butterfly rose and 
 
 fluttered — 
 Thy spirit, perhaps, dear friend ! 
 
 To have been able to convey through the coarser 
 medium of English prose something of this aes- 
 thetic grace, this deftness of touch, and this sug- 
 gestiveness of restraint, would in itself deserve no 
 slight praise. But beneath all this artistic deli- 
 cacy lies some reminiscence of India's austere re- 
 ligious thought, a sense of the nothingness of life 
 strangely exiled among this people of graceful 
 artists, yet still more strangely assimilated by 
 
 1 Semi hitotsu 
 
 Matsu no yu-bi wo 
 
 Kaka£-keri.
 
 52 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 them ; and this, too, Mr. Hearn has been able to 
 reproduce. We feel this shadow of India's faith 
 lurking in the sunshine of many of the lightest 
 of the stanzas, — a touch of swift exotic poignancy, 
 if nothing more. We feel it still more strongly in 
 such poems as these, which are inspired by the 
 consciousness of endless change and of unceasing 
 birth and death and again birth: 
 
 All things change, we are told, in this world of change 
 
 and sorrow ; 
 But love's way never changes of promising never to 
 
 change. 
 
 Even the knot of the rope tying our boats together 
 Knotted was long ago by some love in a former birth. 
 
 Endless change, a ceaseless coming and going, 
 and the past throwing its shadow on into the 
 future,— that is the very essence of Hindu philo- 
 sophy ; but how the tone of this philosophy has 
 itself become altered in passing from the valley of 
 the Ganges to the decorated island of the Mikado! 
 Over and over again Buddha repeats the essential 
 law of being, that all things are made up of con- 
 stituent parts and are subject to flux and change, 
 that all things are impermanent. It is the All 
 things pass and nothing abides of the Greek philo- 
 sopher, deepened with the intensity of emotion 
 that makes of philosophy a religion. In this 
 ever-revolving wheel of existence one fact only is 
 certain, karma, the law of cause and effect which
 
 LAFCADIO IIEARN 53 
 
 declares that every present state is the effect of 
 some previous act and that every present act must 
 inevitably bear its fruit in some future state. As 
 a man soweth so shall he reap. We are indeed 
 the creatures of a fate which we ourselves have 
 builded by the deeds of a former life. We are 
 bound in chains which we ourselves have riveted, 
 yet still our desires are free, and as our desires 
 shape themselves, so we act and build up our 
 coming fate, our karma ; and as our desires abne- 
 gate themselves, so we cease to act and become 
 liberated from the world. Endless change subject 
 to the law of cause and effect — not even our per- 
 sonality remains constant in this meaningless 
 flux, for it too is made up of constituent parts 
 and is dissolved at death as the body is dissolved, 
 leaving only its karma to build up the new per- 
 sonality with the new body. From the perception 
 of this universal impermanence springs the so- 
 called ' ' Truth ' ' of Buddhism, that sorrow is the 
 attribute of all existence. Birth is sorrow, old 
 age is sorrow, death is sorrow, every desire of the 
 heart is sorrow ; and the mission of Buddha was 
 to deliver men out of the bondage of this sorrow 
 as from the peril of a burning house. The song 
 of victory uttered by Gotama when the great en- 
 lightenment shone upon him, and he became the 
 Buddha, was the cry of a man who has escaped a 
 great evil. 
 
 But because the Buddhist so dwells on the im- 
 permanence and sorrow of existence, he is not
 
 $4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 therefore properly called a pessimist. On the 
 contrary, the one predominant note of Buddhism 
 is joy, for it too is a gospel of glad tidings. The 
 builders who rear these prison houses of life are 
 nothing other than the desires of our own hearts, 
 and these we may control though all else is be- 
 yond our power. To the worldly this teaching of 
 Buddha may seem wrapped in pessimistic gloom, 
 for deliverance to them must be only another 
 name for annihilation ; but to the spiritually 
 minded it brought ineffable joy, for they knew 
 that deliverance meant the passing out of the 
 bondage of personality into a freedom of whose 
 nature no tongue could speak. It is an austere 
 faith, hardly suited, in its purer form, for the 
 sentimental and vacillating, — austere in its recog- 
 nition of sorrow, austere in its teaching of spiritual 
 
 joy- 
 Yet the wonderful adaptability of Buddhism is 
 shown by its acceptance among the Japanese, cer- 
 tainly of all peoples the most dissimilar in temper- 
 ament to the ancient Hindus. Here the brooding 
 of the Hindu over the law of impermaneuce melts 
 into the peculiar sensitiveness to fleeting impres- 
 sions so characteristic of the Japanese, and the 
 delicacy of their sesthetic taste is enhanced by 
 this half-understood spiritual insight. And it 
 deepens their temperament: I think that the feel- 
 ing awakened by all these dainty stanzas of some- 
 thing not said but only hinted, that the avoidance 
 of ittakkiri to which Mr. Hearn alludes, the echo-
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 55 
 
 ing reverberations that haunt us after the single 
 stroke of the bell, are due to the residuum of 
 Hindu philosophy left in these vases of Japanese 
 art. "Buddhism," writes Mr. Hearn, "taught 
 that nature was a dream, an illusion, a phantasma- 
 goria ; but it also taught men [men of Japan, he 
 should say] how to seize the fleeting impressions 
 of that dream, and how to interpret them in rela- 
 tion to the highest truth." 
 
 Buddhism when it passed over to Japan came 
 into contact with the national religion of Shinto, 
 a kind of ancestor-worship, which proclaimed 
 that the world of the living was directly governed 
 by the world of the dead. On this popular belief 
 the doctrine of karma was readily engrafted, and 
 the two flourished henceforth side by side. Faith 
 in the protecting presence of ancestors and faith 
 in the present efficacy of our own multitudinous 
 preexistence were inextricably confused. To the 
 Japanese Buddhist the past does not die, but 
 lives on without end, involving the present in an 
 infinite web of invisible influences not easily com- 
 prehensible to the Western mind. 
 
 And the Indian horror of impermanence and 
 the rapture of deliverance have suffered like trans- 
 formation with their causes. First of all, the 
 sharp contrast between the horror and the joy is 
 lightened. The sorrow fades to a fanciful feeling 
 of regret for the beauty of the passing moment, — 
 the same regret that speaks through a thousand 
 Western songs such as Herrick's "Gather ye
 
 56 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 rosebuds while ye may," and Malherbe's " Et 
 rose elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses," but 
 touched here in Japanese poetry with a little mys- 
 tery and made more insistent by some echo of 
 Hindu brooding. And the joy, severed from its 
 spiritual sustenance, loses its high ecstasy and 
 becomes almost indistinguishable from regret. 
 Sorrow, too, and joy are impermanent, and the 
 enlightened mind dwells lingeringly and fondly 
 on each fair moment garnered from the waste of 
 Time. Here is no longer the spiritual exaltation, 
 the dhyana, of the Indian monk, but the charmed 
 impressions of the artist. The religion of the 
 Ganges has assumed in Japan the mask of aes- 
 thetic emotionalism. 
 
 Now this refinement of emotionalism Mr. Hearn 
 by his peculiar temperament has been able to re- 
 produce almost miraculously in the coarser fibre 
 of English. But more specially he has sought to 
 interpret the deeper influence of India on Japan, 
 — the thoughts and images in which we see the 
 subtlety of the Japanese turned aside into a strange 
 new psychology. One may suppose that some 
 tendency to mingle grace and beauty with haunt- 
 ing suggestions was inherent in the Japanese 
 temper from the beginning, but certainly the par- 
 ticular form of imagination that runs through 
 most of the tales Mr. Hearn has translated is not 
 the product of Japan alone. Nor is it purely 
 Hindu: the literature of India includes much that 
 is grotesque but hardly a touch of the weird or
 
 LAFCADIO 1IEARN 57 
 
 ghostly, for its religious tone is too austere and 
 lacks the suggestive symbolism which that quality 
 demands. Out of the blending of the stern sense 
 of impermanence and moral responsibility with 
 the flower-like beauty of Japan there arises this 
 new feeling of the weird. How intimately the 
 two tempers are blended and how rare their pro- 
 duct is, may be seen in such sketches as that 
 called Ingwa-banashi : A Tale of Karma. 
 
 Had it been that Mr. Hearn's art sufficed only 
 to reproduce the delicacy and haunting strange- 
 ness of Japanese tales, he would have performed 
 a notable but scarcely an extraordinary service to 
 letters. But into the study of these byways of 
 Oriental literature he has carried a third element, 
 the dominant idea of Occidental science ; and this 
 element he has wedded with Hindu religion and 
 Japanese sestheticism in a union as bewildering as 
 it is voluptuous. In this triple combination lies 
 his real claim to high originality. 
 
 Now the fact is well known to those who have 
 studied Buddhism at its genuine sources that our 
 modern conception of evolution fits into Buddhist 
 psychology more readily and completely than into 
 any dogmatic theology of the West. It is natural, 
 therefore, that the Western authors quoted most 
 freely by Mr. Hearn in support of his Oriental 
 meditations should be Huxley and Herbert 
 Spencer. For the most part these allusions to 
 Western science are merely made in passing. 
 But in one essay, that on The Idea of Preexistence,
 
 58 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 he endeavours with something of philosophic sys- 
 tem to develop the harmony between evolution 
 and the Buddhist conception of previous exist- 
 ences, a conception which, as he shows, has little 
 in common with the crude form of metempsychosis 
 embodied by Wordsworth in such poems as Fidelity 
 and Intimations of Immortality. To justify his 
 theory he turns to Professor Huxley and quotes 
 these words: " None but very hasty thinkers will 
 reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. 
 Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of trans- 
 migration has its roots in the world of reality; and 
 it may claim such support as the great argument 
 from analogy is capable of supplying." Again, 
 in his essay on Nirv&na he compares the doctrine 
 of impermanence, out of which the conception of 
 Nirvana springs as a natural corollary, with simi- 
 lar ideas in evolutional scieuce. " Every feeling 
 and thought, " so he quotes from Herbert Spencer, 
 " being but transitory ; nay, the objects amid 
 which life is passed, though less transitory, being 
 severally in the course of losing their individuali- 
 ties, whether quickly or slowly, — we learn that 
 the one thing permanent is the Unknowable Reality 
 hidden tinder all these changing shapes.'" 
 
 The parallel is at once apt and misleading. In 
 both Oriental faith and Occidental science we do 
 indeed have the conception of all phenomena, in- 
 cluding that ultimate phenomenon which we name 
 our personality, — we do indeed have the concep- 
 tion of these as suffering endless flux and change
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 59 
 
 behind which lies a permanent inexpressible 
 Reality. The parallel so far is close and makes 
 possible the peculiar blending of traditions which, 
 as I have said, is the chief mark of originality in 
 Mr. Hearn's essays. But in the next step the 
 two diverge as far as the rising sun is from the 
 setting. To Mr. Spencer and all the spokesmen 
 of science it is the impermanent sphere of phe- 
 nomena that is alone knowable, whereas the per- 
 manent Reality hidden from the eyes is the great 
 Unknowable. To the Buddhist on the contrary, 
 all impermanence is wrapt in illusion, as indeed 
 the very meaning of the word would seem to 
 imply, whereas the permanent Reality, though 
 inexpressible, is alone knowable. The difference 
 is of great importance when we come to consider 
 the effect of interpreting Japanese ideas in Occi- 
 dental terms. It even seems that Mr. Hearn him- 
 self is not aware of the gulf set between these two 
 methods of viewing existence, and that conse- 
 quently he has never measured the full originality 
 of this realm of sensation which his art has opened 
 by spanning a bridge between the two. In the 
 fusion of Mr. Hearn's thought the world of im- 
 permanent phenomena is at once knowable and 
 unknowable: it is the reality of Western cogni- 
 tion, and therefore is invested with an intensity 
 of influence and fulness of meaning impossible to 
 an Oriental writer ; and at the same time it is the 
 unreality of Eastern philosophy, and hence is in- 
 volved in illusion and subtle shadows into which
 
 60 SIIELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 it threatens momentarily to melt away. It is a 
 realm of half reality, this phenomenal world, a 
 realm of mingled spirit and matter, seeming now 
 to tantalise the eyes with colours of unimaginable 
 beauty that fade away when we gaze on them too 
 intently, and again to promise the Soul that one 
 long-sought word which shall solve the riddle of 
 her existence in this land of exile. It is a new 
 symbolism that troubles while it illumines. It 
 leads the artist to dwell on the weirder, more im- 
 palpable phases of Japanese literature, and to lend 
 to these subconscious motives a force of realism 
 which they could never possess in the original. 
 The perception of impermanence is accompanied 
 with a depth of yearning regret quite beyond the 
 frailer beauty of the songs of the East which could 
 see little gravity of meaning in phenomena dis- 
 severed from the spirit, and equally beyond the 
 songs of the West composed before science had 
 carried the law of material mutability into the 
 notion of personality. From this union with 
 science the Oriental belief in the indwelling of the 
 past now receives a vividness of present actuality 
 that dissolves the Soul into ghostly intimacy with 
 the mystic unexplored background of life. As a 
 consequence of this new sense of impermanence 
 and of this new realism lent to the indwelling 
 past, all the primitive emotions of the heart are 
 translated into a strange language, which, when 
 once it lays hold of the imagination, carries us 
 into a region of dreams akin to that world which
 
 LAFCADIO I [EARN 6 1 
 
 our psychologists dimly call the subliminal or 
 subconscious. The far-reaching results of this 
 psychology on literature it is not easy to foresee. 
 Mr. Hearn has nowhere treated systematically 
 this new interpretation of human emotions, but 
 by bringing together scattered passages from his 
 essays we may form some notion of its scope and 
 efficacy. 
 
 Beauty itself, which forms the essence of Mr. 
 Hearn 's art as of all true art, receives a new 
 content from this union of the East and the West. 
 So standing before a picture of nude beauty we 
 might, in our author's words, question its mean- 
 ing. That nudity which is divine, which is the 
 abstract of beauty absolute, — what power, we ask, 
 resides within it or within the beholder that 
 causes this shock of astonishment and delight, 
 not unmixed with melancholy ? The longer one 
 looks, the more the wonder grows, since there 
 appears no line, or part of a line, whose beauty 
 does not surpass all memory of things seen. 
 Plato explained the shock of beauty as being the 
 Soul's sudden half- remembrance of the World of 
 Divine Ideas : " They who see here any image or 
 resemblance of the things which are there receive 
 a shock like a thunderbolt, and are, after a man- 
 ner, taken out of themselves." The positive psy- 
 chology of Spencer declares in our own day that 
 the most powerful of human passions, first love, 
 when it makes its appearance, is absolutely ante- 
 cedent to all individual experience. Thus do
 
 62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 ancient thought and modern — metaphysics and 
 science — accord in recognising that the first deep 
 sensation of human beauty known to the indi- 
 vidual is not individual at all. Must not the same 
 truth hold of that shock which supreme art gives ? 
 The emotion of beauty, like all our emotions, is 
 certainty the inherited product of unimaginably 
 countless experiences in an immeasurable past. 
 In every aesthetic sensation is the stirring of tril- 
 lions of trillions of ghostly memories buried in the 
 magical soil of the brain. And each man carries 
 within him an ideal of beauty which is but an 
 infinite composite of dead perceptions of form, 
 colour, grace, once dear to look upon. It is dorm- 
 ant, this ideal, — potential in essence, — cannot be 
 evoked at will before the imagination ; but it 
 may light up electrically at any perception by the 
 living outer sense of some vague affinity. Then 
 is felt that weird, sad, delicious thrill, which ac- 
 companies the sudden backward-flowing of the 
 tides of life and time. 
 
 So, again, to follow Mr. Hearn, it is easy to in- 
 fer how this perception of the indwelling of the 
 past gives a wonderful significance to the thral- 
 dom of love, — to first love most of all, when the 
 shock of emotion comes untroubled by worldly 
 calculations of the present. What is the glamour, 
 we ask with our author, that blinds the lover in 
 its sweet bewildering light when first he meets the 
 woman of his involuntary choice? Whose the 
 witchcraft ? Is it any power in the living idol ?
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 63 
 
 Rather it is the power of the dead within the 
 idolater. The dead cast the spell. Theirs the 
 shock in the lover's heart ; theirs the electric 
 shiver that tingled through his veins at the first 
 touch of one girl's hand. We look into the eyes 
 of love and it is as though, through some intense 
 and sudden stimulation of vital being, we had 
 obtained — for one supercelestial moment — the 
 glimpse of a reality never before imagined, and 
 never again to be revealed. There is, indeed, an 
 illusion. We seem to view the divine; but this 
 divine itself, whereby we are dazzled and duped, 
 is a ghost. Our mortal sight pierces beyond the 
 surface of the present into profundities of myriads 
 of years, — pierces beyond the mask of life into the 
 enormous night of death. For a moment we are 
 made aware of a beauty and a mystery and a 
 depth unutterable : then the Veil falls again for- 
 ever. The splendour of the eyes that we worship 
 belongs to them only as brightness to the morning 
 star. It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of 
 the Now, — a ghost-light of vanished suns. Un- 
 knowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the 
 gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of 
 heaven, — eyes otherwhere passed into darkness 
 and dust. 
 
 And if we turn to another and purer form of 
 love, it is the same force we behold. So long as 
 we supposed the woman soul one in itself, — a 
 something specially created to fit one particular 
 physical being, — the beauty and the wonder of
 
 64 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 mother-love could never be fully revealed to us. 
 But with deeper knowledge we must perceive that 
 the inherited love of numberless millions of dead 
 mothers has been treasured up in one life ; — that 
 only thus can be interpreted the infinite sweetness 
 of the speech which the infant hears, — the infinite 
 tenderness of the look of caress which meets its 
 gaze. 
 
 So too when we listen to the harmonies of in- 
 strumental music or the melody of the human 
 voice, there arises a strange emotion within us 
 which seems to magnify us out of ourselves into 
 some expanse of illimitable experiences, to lift us 
 above the present cares of our petty life into some 
 vast concern — so vast that the soul is lost between 
 the wonderings of divine hope and divine fear. 
 Great music is a psychical storm, agitating to 
 fathomless depths the mystery of the past within 
 us. Or we might say that it is a prodigious in- 
 cantation. There are tones that call up all ghosts 
 of youth and joy and tenderness ; — there are tones 
 that evoke all phantom pain of perished passion ; 
 — there are tones that resurrect all dead sensations 
 of majesty and might and glory, — all expired 
 exultations, — all forgotten magnanimities. Well 
 may the influence of music seem inexplicable to 
 the man who idly dreams that his life began less 
 than a hundred years ago ! He who has been 
 initiated into the truth knows that to every ripple 
 of melody, to every billow of harmony, there an- 
 swers within him, out of the Sea of Death and
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 65 
 
 Birth, some eddying immeasurable of ancient 
 pleasure and pain. 
 
 Genius itself, the master of music and poetry 
 and all art that enlarges mortal life, genius itself 
 is nothing other than the reverberation of this 
 enormous past on the sounding board of some 
 human intelligence, so finely wrought as to send 
 forth in purity the echoed tones which from a 
 grosser soul come forth deadened and confused by 
 the clashing of the man's individual impulses. 
 
 Is it not proper to say, after reading such pass- 
 ages as these, that Mr. Hearn has introduced a 
 new element of psychology into literature ? We 
 are indeed living in the past, we who foolishly cry 
 out that the past is dead. In one remarkable 
 study of the emotions awakened by the baying of 
 a gaunt white hound, Mr. Hearn shows how even 
 the very beasts whom we despise as unreasoning 
 and unremembering are filled with an inarticulate 
 sense of this dark backward and abysm of time, 
 whose shadow falls on their sensitive souls with 
 the chill of a vague dread, — dread, I say, for it 
 must begin to be evident that this new psychol- 
 ogy is fraught with meanings that may well 
 trouble and awe the student. In the ghostly 
 residuum of these meditations we may perceive 
 a vision dimly foreshadowing itself which man- 
 kind for centuries, nay for thousands of years, has 
 striven half unwittingly to keep veiled. I do not 
 know, but it seems to me that the foreboding of 
 this dreaded disclosure may account for many 
 
 VOL. II.— 5.
 
 66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 things in the obscure history of the race. By 
 reason of this terror the savage trembled before 
 the magician who seemed to have penetrated the 
 mysteries of nature about him. Among the free- 
 hearted Greeks it showed itself in many ways, 
 even in persecutions and deaths, as later among 
 the Christians. It expressed itself mythologically 
 in the haunting legend of Prometheus, who, by 
 stealing the celestial fire (a symbol of forbidden 
 prying into natural laws), brought on himself tor- 
 ment and chains and on mankind a life of brutal 
 labour. 
 
 But more particularly in the Christian world 
 this formless terror has taken to itself a body and 
 a name ; it is the heart of the inquisition, which 
 has always followed with excommunications and 
 tortures the unveiling of the recondite powers of 
 nature. It has thus made of itself a potent factor 
 of civilisation — some would say against civilisa- 
 tion, yet he is a very bold man or a very ignorant 
 man who would brush away this long protest of 
 religion against scientific discoveries as the mere 
 vapourings of superstition. If we examine this 
 bitter warfare between science and revelation, we 
 shall find the Church actuated throughout by 
 one ever-present, obscure dread, and when the 
 source of this dread is made clear to us we shall 
 be slow to condemn her conduct. We shall at 
 least have sympathy with her in the struggle, for 
 if she has been a persecutor, she has also been the 
 champion of a losing cause.
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 67 
 
 At the first, indeed, she was victorious. In the 
 conflict with what remained of Greek philosophy 
 and science the prophets of the new revelation 
 were easily victors. " Ignorance is the mother 
 of devotion," was the motto of Gregory, and 
 ignorance won the day. We love to think of the 
 bright naturalism of antiquity as suffering martyr- 
 dom with Hypatia, philosopher and mathema- 
 tician, — 
 
 Hypatia, fair embodiment 
 
 Of learning's great delight. 
 
 And the picture of her naked body torn to pieces 
 by oyster shells in the hands of a bigoted mob is 
 a true emblem of the dismemberment of the old 
 nature-worship. Man was no longer to be an in- 
 tegral part of the world ; he was set apart and 
 raised above it. 
 
 But the Church did not fare so well in the cease- 
 less conflict with learning, when, at the time of 
 the Renaissance, she laid violent hands on the 
 followers of Copernicus. It may seem to us now 
 a futile crime that Giordano Bruno should have 
 been burned at the stake for teaching the infinity 
 of space and the revolution of the earth about the 
 sun, and that Galileo should have languished in 
 prison for the same cause. But at bottom the 
 question was one of vital importance to religion ; 
 and Bruno may have been right in saying that 
 the sentence was pronounced against him with 
 greater fear than he received it. Despite the
 
 68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 narrow bigotry displayed, it was a sublime contest 
 for the integrity of the human soul, — for who 
 would believe that the divine drama of redemption 
 was wrought out for a race of puny creatures in- 
 habiting a mere atom in the illimitable expanse of 
 space ? Copernicus and his followers disabused 
 us of the old belief that the universe revolved 
 about the home of man. Henceforth the history 
 of the earth was the insignificant story of one of the 
 least of a countless multitude of worlds. The su- 
 premacy and lordship of man in creation were no 
 longer conceivable, and in the triumph of science 
 our personal pride received a blow from which it 
 has never fully recovered. 
 
 Custom and time, however, did in a way heal 
 the wound, and things went well until the forces 
 of science rallied once again under the banner of 
 evolution. Volumes have been written to prove 
 that the new belief only adds to the dignity of 
 man, and Darwin himself professed never to 
 understand the widespread opposition to his 
 theory. But the new terror that aroused theo- 
 logical hostility was as firmly grounded as it was 
 against the invasion of Copernicus centuries be- 
 fore. There is no place for Providence or for the 
 divine prerogatives of the human soul in the law 
 of evolution. We are made a brother to the brute 
 and akin to unclean things that crawl in the dust. 
 Yet this quarrel also was adjusted after a fashion, 
 as the quarrels before it had been composed. 
 What though ignorance is necessary to obscure
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 69 
 
 our kinship with living nature, as Pope Gregory 
 declared ; what though our home is but a point in 
 space ; what though we are inheritors of a past of 
 brutal degradation ; — still our consciousness has 
 no recking of these things, and dwells serene in 
 its assumption of divine supremacy and isolation. 
 But now at the last we are shocked out of our 
 security. We are made conscious of the shame 
 of the hidden past, and the ancient haunting 
 terror is revealed in all its hideous nakedness. 
 Have you ever by chance strayed through a 
 museum where the relics of old-world life are 
 gathered together, — filthy amphibians armed with 
 impenetrable scales, grotesque serpents eight 
 fathoms long that churned the seas, huge reptiles 
 that beat the air with wings of nightmare 
 breadth ? The imagination recoils from picturing 
 what the world must have been when Nature ex- 
 hausted herself to fashion these abhorrent mon- 
 strosities. We have burrowed the soil and 
 brought into the light of day these reluctant 
 hidden records of bestial growths. Consider for 
 a moment what it would mean if some new geo- 
 logy should lay bare the covered strata of memory 
 in our own brain corresponding to these records 
 of the earth ; for there is nothing lost, and in 
 some mysterious way the memories of all that ob- 
 scure past are stored up within us. If evolution 
 be true, we are the inheritors in our soul of the 
 experience and life of those innumerable genera- 
 tions whose material forms lie moulded in the
 
 JO SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 bed-rock of earth. Consider the horror of behold- 
 ing in our own consciousness the remembrance of 
 such fears and frenzies, such cruel passions and 
 wallowing desires as would correspond to those 
 gigantic and abortive relics of antiquity. Would 
 not the world in its shame cry out for some 
 Lethean draught of sleep, though it were as pro- 
 found as the oblivion of Nirvana ? This is the 
 terror, then, that from the beginning has beset 
 the upholders of religion, and has caused them 
 to attack the revelations of natural science ; for 
 what faith or beauty of holiness can abide after 
 such an uncovering ? None, unless to obtain 
 spiritual grace the whole memory and personality 
 of a man be blotted out, and the spirit be severed 
 from the experiences of the body by an impassable 
 gulf. And I think the shadow of this dread is 
 typified in the curse which Noah laid upon his 
 son Ham. 
 
 The final outcome of this dread in all its naked- 
 ness we see foreshadowed in these fantasies and 
 essays of an author, who, as I have attempted to 
 show, has brought together into indissoluble union 
 our Western theory of Darwin and that strange 
 doctrine of metempsychosis which was carried to 
 Japan with Buddhism and is so curiously engrafted 
 on the laughing fancies of the people of the Mi- 
 kado. To understand the tremendous realism of 
 horror and gloom connected with this doctrine of 
 everlasting birth and death, and re-birth, one 
 must go to the burning valley of the Gauges,
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 7 1 
 
 where the conception first laid hold of the human 
 mind. But overpowering as this notion of end- 
 less unrest may be, a new shadow would seem to 
 be added to it by contact with the scientific hypo- 
 thesis of evolution which has been developed in 
 the Occident. Evolution is a theory, drawn from 
 the observation of outer phenomena, that man 
 is the last product of myriads of generations of life 
 reaching back into the past ; but evolution has 
 foreborne to make any appeal to the inner con- 
 sciousness of the human soul. Metempsychosis, 
 on the contrary, is a half mystical theory evolved 
 out of the consciousness of the soul, which in a 
 dim way seems to carry remembrance of illimita- 
 ble existence before its present birth. But this 
 symbolic faith of the Orient has never sought con- 
 firmation in scientific study of the outer world. 
 Now comes the blending of these two theories, and 
 the result is a laying bare of those hideous realities 
 (pray heaven they prove pseudo-realities in the 
 end) that mankind has instinctively shunned and 
 denounced. 
 
 It is because I see in Mr. Hearn's sketches and 
 translations a suggestion of the incalculable in- 
 fluences that may spring from this union of the 
 East and the West, that I have treated them with 
 a seriousness that will seem to many readers 
 greater than they deserve. The skeptical I would 
 refer, in conclusion, to that little essay on the 
 Nightmare- Touch, which attempts to account for 
 the shuddering fear of seizure that so often
 
 72 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 troubles our dreams, and to associate that fear 
 with the widespread superstitious dread of being 
 touched by a ghost. The closing words of the 
 essay have the sinister beauty and acrid odour of 
 the flowers in some Rappacciui's garden : 
 
 Furthermore, through all the course of evolution, 
 heredity would have been accumulating the experience 
 of such feeling. Under those forms of imaginative pain 
 evolved through reaction of religious beliefs, there would 
 persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and 
 again, under this, a dimmer, but incomparably deeper, 
 substratum of ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of 
 the modern child all tbese latencies might quicken — one 
 below another — unfathomably — with the coming and tbe 
 growing of nightmare. 
 
 It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any par- 
 ticular nightmare have a history older than the brain in 
 which they move. But the shock of the touch would 
 seem to indicate some point of dream-contact with the 
 total race-experience of shadowy seizure. It may be that 
 profundities of Self — abysses never reached by any ray 
 from the life of sun — are strangely stirred in slumber, and 
 that out of their blackness immediately responds a shud- 
 dering of memory, measureless even by millions of years.
 
 THE FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF 
 HAZLITT 
 
 If one should turn to William Hazlitt expecting 
 to find critical essays like those we connect with 
 writers of more recent days, he would be sadly 
 disappointed. There is in Hazlitt's work little — 
 were it not for a few exceptional passages that 
 occur to memory, I should say nothing — of that 
 looking before and after, that linking of literary 
 movements with the great currents of human 
 activity, which has become a part of criticism 
 along with the growth of the historical method. 
 He is not concerned with the searching out of 
 larger cause and effect, but is intensely occupied 
 with the individual man, and studies to deduce 
 the peculiar style of each writer from his character 
 and temperament. Nor can we hope to find in 
 him — I say "hope" from the common point of 
 view to-day — any trace of that scientific method 
 which would analyse the products of the human 
 brain as a chemist deals with " vitriol and sugar." 
 He wrote before these things were known. He 
 was, quite as much as Byron or Wordsworth, a 
 child of the revolution, and his blood tingled with 
 the new romanticism. Yet even here certain dis- 
 73
 
 74 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 tinctions must be drawn. When we speak to-day 
 of the romantic critic, we think of one who has 
 joined the sensibility and fluency of the revolu- 
 tionary temperament to the sympathies of the later 
 historic method, and has taught his soul to trans- 
 form itself cunningly into the various types that 
 it chooses to study. We associate the word with 
 that kind of fluctuating egotism which makes of 
 the critic one " qui raconte les aventures de son 
 ame au milieu des chefs-d'oeuvre." Hazlitt was 
 an egotist in all conscience, but of this particular 
 form of the disease we can hardly hold him guilty. 
 His was one of the rarest, yet most characteristic, 
 traits of the revolutionary spirit — gusto he himself 
 would call it. The word, now unfortunately fall- 
 ing into desuetude, connotes the power of intense 
 enjoyment based on understanding, and is so 
 common in his essays that Henley ' took it as the 
 keynote of all his work. But a still stronger term 
 than gusto is needed, I think, to describe the 
 swift qualities of Hazlitt' s mind ; he is the writer, 
 to a supreme degree, of passion. 
 
 What he loved — the few great books, the one 
 great man, the chosen scenes of nature, his youth- 
 ful scheme of philosophy — he laid to his heart 
 with passionate zest and clung to with desperate 
 tenacity ; what was hateful to him he spurned 
 with equal vehemence. Byron speaks of his own 
 
 1 In the Introduction to Hazlitt's Complete Works, in 
 12 vols., published by McClure, Phillips, & Co., New 
 York. 1904.
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT 7$ 
 
 mind as having the motion of a tiger ; if he 
 missed his leap there was no retrieving the error. 
 That is true of Byron, who almost alone shares 
 with Hazlitt the untamed passion of the revolu- 
 tionary spirit ; but it is still more true of Hazlitt, 
 and, apart from the stress of journalism, accounts 
 for the singular unevenness of his work. There 
 is something even in the keen sinewy language 
 of Hazlitt that suggests the tiger's spring. His 
 sentences succeed one another like the rapid 
 bounds of such an animal, and at the last comes 
 one straight unerring leap and the prey is fixed, 
 bleeding, you might almost say, in his grasp. 
 There is nothing just like it among English 
 authors. Genuine passion, indeed, if one con- 
 siders it, is a rare, almost the rarest, trait in 
 literature. Certainly in English it would not be 
 easy to find another author whose work is so 
 dominated by this quality as Hazlitt's. It gives 
 the tone to his critical writing ; it explains the 
 keenness and the limitations of his psychological 
 insight ; it causes the innumerable contradictions 
 that occur in his views ; it gives rapidity to his 
 style ; it imparts a peculiar zest to his very man- 
 ner of quoting ; it lends exhilarating interest to 
 his pages, yet in the long run, if we read him too 
 continuously, it wearies us a little, for not many 
 of us are keyed up to his high pitch. We go to 
 him for superb rhetoric, for emotions in literary 
 experience that stir the languid blood, but we 
 hardly look to him for judgment. There is much
 
 ?6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 in English that assumes the passionate tone ; 
 place it beside Hazlitt and for the most part it 
 appears tame or false. 
 
 Something of this passion we get in the very- 
 life of the man. It may be that we lend to our 
 image of him the colours his rhetoric assumes 
 whenever he turns aside from some critical or 
 psychological disquisition to speak, as he so often 
 does, of his own wayward career. Certain it is 
 that in our fancy he moves among the group of men 
 that we gather about his name and Lamb's (and 
 how well we know them, and which of our living 
 friends stands so clearly revealed to us, — the gentle 
 Saint Charles, the cold, mechanical Godwin, the 
 impulsive, unsubstantial Hunt, Wordsworth wrapt 
 in the stiff robes of his priestcraft, Southey of the 
 bustling, shallow, loyal mind, Coleridge the cloud- 
 compeller !) — he moves among them like some 
 creature of burning skies and flaming horizons 
 amid the cold children of the mists. His friend- 
 ships were swift, and his hatreds — how they stir in 
 memory, still throbbing with venom ! The very 
 houses he has occupied and the scenes he has 
 visited become vitalised with the prodigious life 
 of the man. Memorable as is the house at No. 
 19 York Street for the years during which it was 
 Milton's home, it is almost more interesting still 
 for its association with Hazlitt. Here for a time 
 he lived in his irregular way, going to bed when 
 others were rising, getting up at one or two o'clock 
 in the day, lingering for hours, when not pressed
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT J? 
 
 by work, over innumerable cups of tea which he 
 brewed to an extraordinary strength in place of 
 forbidden intoxicants, sitting " silent, motionless, 
 and self-absorbed, as a Turk over his opium 
 pouch." From his windows he could look down 
 into the garden of that monumental maker of con- 
 stitutions, Jeremy Bentham (his landlord, by the 
 way), whose heartless, frigid zeal for reform seems 
 to have sent a shudder of aversion through Haz- 
 litt's whole frame. His picture of Bentham throws 
 light on his own character as being in every re- 
 spect its opposite. ' ' There you may see the lively 
 old man," he writes, " his mind still buoyant with 
 thought and with the prospect of the futurity, in 
 eager conversation with some Opposition member, 
 some expatriated patriot, or transatlantic adven- 
 turer, urging the extinction of close boroughs, or 
 planning a code of laws for some ' lone island in 
 the watery waste,' his walk almost amounting to 
 a run, his tongue keeping pace with it in shrill, 
 cluttering accents, negligent of his person, his 
 dress, and his manner, intent only on his grand 
 theme of utility — or pausing, perhaps, for want 
 of breath and with lack-lustre eye," etc. — no 
 wonder Hazlitt's friends or enemies trembled 
 when they heard he was to write about them ! 
 One imagines that he was conscious while por- 
 traying Bentham of his own contrasted qualities 
 — his loose, shambling walk, his slow, inter- 
 rupted speech, except when passion made him 
 eloquent, his dark burning eyes, his contempt
 
 78 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 for the nerveless, cold-blooded reformers of the 
 day. 
 
 And if his London home — one of them at least, 
 for much of life he passed in lodging houses of a 
 nondescript character — stands out thus vivid in 
 memory, no less do Wem and Winterslow, his 
 country residences, form an integral part of the 
 impression made upon us by his writings. At 
 Wem he lived with his father, a Unitarian min- 
 ister, from his tenth to his twenty-second year, a 
 sluggish, brooding period during which his powers 
 seemed to have lain in some strange abeyance. 
 Yet the vividness of his allusions to Wem in after 
 times shows that even then he must have been 
 gathering up those personal experiences that lend 
 so much individuality to his most abstract essays. 
 And it was at Wem that the impulse came which 
 made the young man's ambition leap up within 
 his breast like a smouldering coal beneath a sud- 
 den breeze. Coleridge came to preach at Shrews- 
 bury, only ten miles away, and thither Hazlitt, 
 then nearly twenty years old, walked to hear the 
 divine words that were to be to him " far above 
 singing." Better than that ; Coleridge visited 
 Hazlitt' s father, and the meeting of the torpid 
 youth with that soaring genius Hazlitt described 
 years afterward in one of those essays that deal 
 with his memorable first experiences: 
 
 On Tuesday following the half-inspired speaker came. 
 I was called down into the room where he was, and went, 
 half hoping, half afraid. He received me very graciously,
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT 79 
 
 and I listened for a long time without uttering a word. I 
 did not suffer in bis opinion by my silence. " For those 
 two hours," he afterwards was pleased to say, "he was 
 conversing with William Hazlitt's forehead." His ap- 
 pearance was different from what I had anticipated from 
 seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light 
 of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his 
 aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with 
 the smallpox. His complexion was at that time clear, 
 and even bright — 
 
 " As are the children of yon azure sheen." 
 
 His forehead was high, light, as if built of ivory, with 
 large projecting eyebrows; and his eyes rolling beneath 
 them, like a sea with darkened lustre. " A certain tender 
 bloom his face o'erspread," a purple tinge as we see it in 
 the pale, thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait- 
 painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross, 
 voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured 
 and round ; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the in- 
 dex of the will, was small, feeble, nothing — like what he 
 was. It might seem that the genius of his face as from a 
 height surveyed and projected him (with sufficient ca- 
 pacity and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of 
 thought and imagination, with nothing to support or 
 guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched 
 his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, 
 without oars or compass. 
 
 I may be pardoned for quoting Hazlitt at this 
 length, for in no other way, as his latest biog- 
 rapher has confessed, can the style and method 
 of the man be set forth. The virtue of his work 
 lies not in his analytic criticism, which can be 
 studied apart from his own language, but in the
 
 80 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 fusion of passion and insight ; and in this portrait 
 of Coleridge, which has passed into the universal 
 heritage of English letters, we may see blended 
 together that perception of physical traits, which 
 was heightened no doubt by Hazlitt's training as 
 a painter, and that power of seizing the psycho- 
 logical peculiarities of a man and using them to 
 explain the character of his writing. Still more 
 explicitly in another passage he develops the na- 
 ture of Johnson's style by allusion to the dictator's 
 physical and moral inertia ; as elsewhere, he finds 
 in Cowper's nervousness the source of his literary 
 method, and makes of Dante the personification 
 of blind will. 
 
 When Coleridge departed from Wem he left 
 with the youth whose forehead he had so much 
 admired an invitation to visit him at Nether 
 Stowey, where also Wordsworth was to be seen. 
 Hazlitt walked with him six miles on the road 
 to Shrewsbury, drinking in reverently the poet's 
 wise discourse. "On my way back," he wrote, 
 " I had a sound in my ears — it was the voice of 
 Fancy ; I had a light before me — it was the face 
 of Poetry. The one still lingers there, the other 
 has not quitted my side! " And we who read the 
 story of his glorious, passionate enthusiasm hear 
 as it were a distant echo of that sound, and catch 
 a fleeting glimpse of that golden light, and are 
 heartened in our obscure walk through a world 
 where few of us meet such poets to beguile us into 
 forgetfulness. Truly it might be said in those
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT 8l 
 
 days, ov yap r ayvdoTSS Oeol aWijXmffi 7ti\ov- 
 raij — not unknown does one god meet with 
 another. 
 
 All this happened at Wera, but not less famous 
 is Winterslow, where Hazlitt went with his wife, 
 and where in later years, embittered by many dis- 
 appointments, he retired to dream over a life 
 which had been to him " a tissue of passion " — 
 
 Storm, and what dreams, ye holy Gods, what dreams! 
 
 To this spot, where the happiest years of his 
 young manhood were spent, he retired as to a 
 sheltered place of refuge — "of all that dream- 
 world nothing left but pain." There is no more 
 striking artifice in any of our essayists than the 
 way in which he breaks suddenly into some 
 critical discourse to describe the scenes about him 
 at his beloved Winterslow, whether from the 
 open window he beholds the world freshened by 
 a recent shower, or descants on a country lass 
 picking up stones, or moralises on a spider crawl- 
 ing along the matted floor of his room. Here, as 
 he thought, his very language was apt to be " re- 
 dundant and excursive," although at other times 
 it might be " cramped, dry, abrupt." Or, again, 
 his fancy took a wider range, as in his Farewell 
 to Essay Writing : 
 
 We walk through life, as through a narrow path, with 
 
 a thin curtain drawn around it ; behind are ranged rich 
 
 portraits, airy harps are strung — yet we will not stretch 
 vol. n.— 6.
 
 82 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 forth our hands and lift aside the veil, to catch glimpses 
 of the one, or sweep the chords of the other. As in a 
 theatre, when the old-fashioned green curtain drew up, 
 groups of figures, fantastic dresses, laughing faces, rich 
 banquets, stately columns, gleaming vistas appeared be- 
 yond ; so we have only at any time to " peep through the 
 blanket of the past," to possess ourselves at once of all 
 that has regaled our senses, that is stored up in our 
 memory, that has struck our fancy, that has pierced our 
 hearts — yet to all this we are indifferent, insensible, and 
 seem intent only on the present vexation, the future dis- 
 appointment. ... I can easily, by stooping over the 
 long-spreut grass and clay-cold clods, recall the tufts 
 of primroses, or purple hyacinths, that formerly grew on 
 the same spot, and cover the bushes with leaves and sing- 
 ing birds, as they were eighteen summers ago ; or pro- 
 longing my walk and hearing the sighing gale rustle 
 through a tall, straight wood at the end of it, can fancy 
 that I distinguish the cry of hounds, and the fatal group 
 issuing from it, as in the tale of Theodore and Honoria. 
 A moaning gust of wind aids the belief ; I look once more 
 to see whether the trees before me answer to the idea of 
 the horror-stricken grove, and an air-built city towers 
 over their grey tops. 
 
 " Of all the cities in Romanian lands, 
 The chief and most renown'd Ravenna stands." 
 
 I return home resolved to read the entire poem through, 
 and, after dinner, drawing my chair to the fire, and hold- 
 ing a small print close to my eyes, launch into the full 
 tide of Dryden's couplets (a stream of sound), comparing 
 his didactic and descriptive pomp with the simpler pathos 
 and picturesque truth of Boccaccio's story. 
 
 A cynic might point a moral from the fact that 
 the only events of Hazlitt's life which were utterly
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT 83 
 
 free from the intrusion of passion were his two 
 ventures into matrimony. His first marriage, to 
 Sarah Stoddart, was to all appearances purely an 
 affair of convenience arranged, or at least fostered, 
 by Mary Lamb. That the bride had an income 
 of £120 from cottages at Wiuterslow seems to 
 have been her chief attraction for the eccentric 
 wooer. Later on Hazlitt, to suit his pleasure, 
 allowed her to obtain a divorce. A second mar- 
 riage, with a widow, Mrs. Bridgewater, contained 
 an element of almost comical indifference on both 
 sides, and the two soon separated to their mutual 
 advantage. But from these experiments in matri- 
 mony it should not be argued that Hazlitt was 
 deaf to the elemental appeal of love. It is to be 
 feared, on the contrary, that he turned wilfully 
 from the Uranian to the Pandemian goddess. 
 Certainly the episode, which was the occasion of 
 his divorce and which he gave to the world in his 
 Liber A?noris — whatever else may be said about it 
 — is one of the few stories of strong, unrestrained 
 passion in the range of English letters. We 
 might like, for decorum's sake, to expunge that 
 relation from his life and from his works ; " there 
 is," as he himself confessed, "something in it dis- 
 cordant to honest ears." The tale is simply the 
 vulgar adventure of a man who dandles the 
 daughter of his lodging-house keeper on his 
 knees, becomes infatuated with her, pours out 
 the agony of his dejection in letters to his friends, 
 and then prints letters and all, somewhat expur-
 
 84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 gated to be sure, in a book. That is bad enough, 
 in all conscience ; but the matter has been made 
 worse by the recent publication of the actual cor- 
 respondence. As Mr. Austin Dobson says: " The 
 whole sentimental structure of the Liber Amoris 
 now sinks below the stage, and joins the realm of 
 things unspeakable — 'vile kitchen stuff,' fit only 
 for the midden." And yet there is a reservation 
 to be made withal to this criticism. The book is 
 something more than merely sentimental ; it is in 
 part one of the very few expressions of genuine 
 passion in the English language, of that absolute 
 passion which taught him, as it long ago taught 
 Propertius, 
 
 Hanc animam extremae reddere nequitiae. 
 
 No one, I think, can read Hazlitt's last despairing 
 letter without feeling that note of verity and gen- 
 uineness which does much to justify what might 
 otherwise seem an indecent exposure of personal 
 emotion. " I saw her pale, cold form glide silent 
 by me," he writes, "dead to shame as to pity. 
 Still I seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to 
 my bosom ; this lifeless image, which was all that 
 was left of my love, was the only thing to which 
 my sad heart clung. Were she dead, should I 
 not wish to gaze once more upon her pallid feat- 
 ures ? She is dead to me ; but what she once 
 was to me can never die ! The agony, the con- 
 flict of hope and fear, of adoration and jealousy is 
 over ; or it would, ere long, have ended my life."
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT 85 
 
 And his last words are touched with the strange 
 tenderness and pathos of a man whose life is 
 centred in the brooding faculties of the mind : 
 
 I am afraid she will soon grow common to my imagina- 
 tion, as well as worthless in herself. Her image seems 
 fast "going into the wastes of time," like a weed that the 
 wave bears farther and farther from me. Alas ! thou 
 poor hapless weed, when I entirely lose sight of thee, and 
 forever, no flower will ever bloom on earth to glad my 
 heart again ! 
 
 It is not surprising, after all, that Hazlitt took 
 a sort of glory to himself in this episode which his 
 biographers to-day would so gladly forget. " I 
 am in some sense proud," he says, " that I can 
 feel this dreadful passion — it gives one a kind of 
 rank in the kingdom of love." One is reminded 
 again of the boast of Cynthia's lover, that the 
 Roman youths would do reverence at his tomb for 
 his long ardours. The vulgarity of this incident in 
 Hazlitt' s life is not due to the excess of his emo- 
 tion, but to the worthlessness of the object on 
 which his emotion was expended. There is some- 
 thing pitiful as well as degrading in the spectacle 
 of this vehement passion beating itself against a 
 poor flabby creature which could neither withstand 
 nor return the shock. It is only fair after expos- 
 ing this episode in Hazlitt' s life to quote Lamb's 
 beautiful encomium of his old friend: 
 
 But, protesting against much that he has written, and 
 some things which he chooses to do ; judging him by his 
 conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so
 
 86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 deeply ; or by his books, in those places where no cloud- 
 ing passion intervenes— I should belie my own conscience 
 if I said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural 
 and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits 
 breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy, 
 which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for 
 so many years to have preserved it entire ; and I think I 
 shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to 
 find, such another companion. 
 
 Such is the man whose scattered works are now 
 for the first time collected in a complete and criti- 
 cally annotated edition, and it has been at least 
 curious to observe the comments brought out in 
 the press by this belated rehabilitation. There 
 seems to be a concerted opinion that Hazlitt is 
 read only by those technically interested in author- 
 ship, as if his essays were out of touch with life, 
 were indeed essentially bookish, and for the book- 
 ish reader only. In attempting to show the per- 
 versity of this view, I have perhaps dwelt too 
 much on Hazlitt the man, and said too little 
 specifically about his essays ; my justification lies 
 in the fact that the temperament of the writer 
 dominates his work to so overmastering a degree 
 that to unfold the one is properly to criticise the 
 other.
 
 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 In a well-known essay Hazlitt, writing from 
 memory, has attempted to record one of those 
 famous conversations that took place among the 
 little group that used to gather in Lamb's cham- 
 bers in the Inner Temple. The subject on this 
 particular night was Persons One Would Wish to 
 Have Seen, and the discussion ended with that 
 beautiful comparison by the host himself of their 
 supposed behaviour if Shakespeare and " that 
 other ' ' should suddenly appear at the door. I 
 think to-day if such a conversation should occur 
 that Lamb's own name would be almost the first 
 to arise on the lips of any lover of literature. 
 Other writers — great poets and philosophers and 
 novelists — we may admire more for their accom- 
 plishment, but none of these has so endeared him- 
 self to us personally as " Elia," none of them is 
 cherished in our imagination with so sweet a 
 savour. There has in fact grown up a kind of 
 legend about his name. 1 He is, if ever writer 
 
 1 It may be counted as the latest step in Lamb's canon- 
 isation that two scholars have been spending the labour of 
 years in giving his works proper editorial care. The edi- 
 tion of Mr. E.V. Lucas, imported by G. P. Putnam's Sons, 
 is notable for the assiduity with which he has run down 
 
 87
 
 88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 were, human in his weaknesses as in his strength, 
 yet he dwells apart in our affection not quite as 
 other men do. " If there be a Good Man, Charles 
 Lamb is one," said Wordsworth, who was not 
 overmuch given to praising. Good man he was, 
 but to us he has come to be something more. We 
 like to think of him rather in the words of Thack- 
 eray, which FitzGerald remembered and quoted 
 long afterwards: " ' Saint Charles! ' said Thack- 
 eray to me thirty years ago, putting one of C. L.'s 
 letters to his forehead." Thirty years ago went 
 back to 1848, and the letter that so moved Thack- 
 eray was one written by Lamb in 1824 to Bernard 
 Barton, with a pretty postcript to Lucy who was 
 later to bring the ill-fate of matrimony upon Fitz- 
 Gerald. That was the year also, 1824, in which 
 Lamb wrote his verses In the Album of Lucy 
 Barton : 
 
 Little Book, surnamed of white, 
 Clean as yet, and fair to sight, 
 Keep thy attribution right. 
 
 Never disproportion 'd scrawl ; 
 Ugly blot, that 's worse than all ; 
 On thy maiden clearness fall ! 
 
 Lamb's allusions and quotations. The edition of Mr. 
 William Macdonald, imported by E. P. Dutton & Co., is 
 one of Dent's admirable publications, and is better fitted 
 for ordinary reading. Both editions are very complete, 
 and contain much new matter. The restoration of the 
 true text of the Letters is alone a service to be grateful 
 for. 1904.
 
 CHARLES LAMB 89 
 
 Whitest thoughts in whitest dress, 
 Candid meanings, best express 
 Mind of quiet Quakeress. 
 
 It would be a pretty fancy to visualise the 
 scene that dwelt so long in FitzGerald's memory 
 — the letter which Lucy Barton had cherished for 
 twenty-four years and had apparently lent or 
 given to FitzGerald, her lover, if that word can 
 be used of so cool a wooer ; FitzGerald showing 
 it to Thackeray, and the great novelist, with the 
 story of Pendcnnis then at work in his brain, lay- 
 ing it reverently to his forehead as if it had been 
 some holy relic. Lionel Johnson has caught the 
 phrase up into a poem that expresses most aptly 
 our feeling to-day: 
 
 Saint Charles ! for Thackeray called thee so : 
 Saint, at whose name our fond hearts glow : 
 See now, this age of tedious woe, 
 
 That snaps and snarls ! 
 Thine was a life of tragic shade ; 
 A life, of care and sorrow made : 
 But nought could make thine heart afraid, 
 
 Gentle Saint Charles ! 
 
 Encumbered dearly with old books, 
 Thou, by the pleasant chimney nooks, 
 Didst laugh, with merry-meaning looks, 
 
 Thy griefs away ; 
 We, bred on modern magazines, 
 Point out, how much our sadness means, 
 And some new woe our wisdom gleans, 
 
 Day by dull day.
 
 90 SIIELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Lover of London ! whilst thy feet 
 Haunted each old familiar street, 
 Thy brave heart found life's turmoil sweet, 
 
 Despite life's pain. 
 We fume and fret and, when we can, 
 Cry up some new and noisy plan, 
 Big with the Rights and Wrongs of Man : 
 
 And where 's the gain? 
 
 Gentle Saint Charles ! I turn to thee, 
 Tender and true : thou teachest me 
 To take with joy, what joys there be, 
 
 And bear the rest. 
 Walking thy London day by day, 
 The thought of thee makes bright my way, 
 And in thy faith I fain would stay, 
 
 Doing my best. 
 
 That is the golden chain from the past to the 
 present — Lamb, Lucy Barton, Thackeray, Fitz- 
 Gerald, Lionel Johnson. 
 
 But if Lamb has grown to be Saint Charles to 
 us, it is for other reasons than those which hallow 
 the sacred names of the calendar. We think of 
 the saints as of men who have risen above the 
 turmoil of life, together with its frailties, and there 
 is something austere in their altitude. To us 
 they seem a little sad, and we are not sure we 
 should choose them for companions. With Lamb 
 it is quite different. His very errors have become 
 a part of the sweet legend that surrounds him. 
 We remember his taste for the exhilarating cup, 
 and think we should like him best when warmed 
 by kindly potations. Who could have resisted an
 
 CHARLES LAMB 91 
 
 invitation to those nodes ambrosiana : " Cards & 
 cold mutton in Russell St. on Friday at 8 & nine. 
 Gin and Jokes from }4 past that time to 12"? 
 We remember, too, his reply to the bishop who 
 inquired how he had learned to smoke such furi- 
 ous pipes: " Sir, I toiled for it as some men toil 
 for virtue!" Even his trick of stammering is 
 a cherished accident of his humorous talk, and 
 without his wavering gait and those poor spindle- 
 legs we should lose some relish of his perambula- 
 tions in London streets. Were this all, we might 
 enjoy his wit and laugh at his oddities as it had 
 been another Theodore Hook ; but beneath this 
 seeming levity there was, as all the world now 
 knows, a deep-sunk basis of character and of 
 tragic circumstance. There is no need to rehearse 
 the fatal scene in the Temple when Mary in a 
 sudden frenzy of madness killed her mother, or to 
 relate the brother's lifelong devotion and renunci- 
 ation. Lamb was twenty-one years old at the time 
 of the incident, a youth given to indulge in some- 
 what vague literary aspirations and vaguer relig- 
 ious yearnings under the domination of Coleridge. 
 The effect of that frightful scene on his over- 
 sensitive nerves (he had himself passed six weeks 
 in a madhouse less than a year before) was in- 
 delible. At first it deepened his religious vein 
 with results not fortunate for literature ; for the 
 piety of a young man is not often edifying, and if 
 there be any part of Lamb's writings one could 
 wish away, it is certainly those early letters in
 
 92 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 which he mouths religion with his mentor. But 
 the mood soon changes. Rather abruptly in the 
 year 1800 (four years after the calamity) we ob- 
 serve a complete alteration in his tone. He has 
 shaken off the ghostly dominion of Coleridge, 
 whose patronising ways have evidently grown a 
 little irksome. The last straw, apparently, was 
 when Coleridge used the epithet " gentle " of him 
 in a poem. L,amb resents the word with some 
 asperity, and, in place of confessing his soul, 
 breaks out into the boast that he is "suffering 
 from the combined effects of two days' drunken- 
 ness." We hope that he exaggerates his de- 
 bauchery somewhat, but, true or fanciful, that 
 confession marks the beginning of the real Charles 
 Lamb. Thenceforth his letters and his more de- 
 liberate productions show what can only be called 
 a half-conscious pose, a humorous waiving of the 
 serious matters of life, a refusal to harbour the 
 deeper emotions, as if he had chosen for his motto 
 those words in an earlier letter: " With me ' the 
 former things are passed away,' and I have some- 
 thing more to do than to feel." The tragic cir- 
 cumstance is still not far removed, and the recur- 
 ring allusion to Mary ' ' from home ' ' throws a 
 touch of half-averted pathos into the humour — 
 pathos that only at long intervals rises into shrill- 
 ness, as when, under unusual stress, he exclaims 
 to Wordsworth : ' ' They have had the care of her 
 before. I see little of her: alas ! I too often hear 
 her. Sunt lachrymce rerum ! ' ' But for the most
 
 CHARLES LAMB 93 
 
 part the sadness of his mood passes through the 
 same change as the other emotions and peers at 
 us through the quaint mask of a jest. " The 
 wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs," he writes 
 in a letter to Miss Hutchinson, after telling how 
 Mary has been "gone from home these five 
 weeks." 
 
 This, then, is the Lamb so endeared to our 
 imagination. When the calamity first smote him 
 down and he cried out to his friend for consola- 
 tion, Coleridge responded : "I look upon you 
 as a man called by sorrow and anguish, and a 
 strange desolation of hopes, into quietness, and a 
 soul set apart and made peculiar to God ! " He 
 was indeed a soul set apart, but it was to man, 
 not to God. He alone found the secret of sacri- 
 ficing his heart to stern and unrelenting duty and 
 of dwelling the while resolutely on the surface of 
 life, a patron of puns and a devotee of the genial 
 vices. And this is the quality of his writings as 
 well as of his character, although some, I know, 
 misled by their devotion, would discover graver 
 traits in his work. One of his latest editors, Mr. 
 Macdonald, insists that "his intellect was the 
 primary and really great thing in him, greater and 
 rarer far than his humour or any other separa- 
 ble qualities recognised in literature." That is 
 true in a sense, but it is intellect turned from 
 the deeper questions and made to play over the 
 surface of things with a coruscating light that 
 prevents the eye from penetrating into their
 
 94 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 depths. There is an exquisite make-believe 
 about his essays, like the quieting unreality of 
 country scenes to one whose life has been " in 
 populous cities pent." No doubt a vein of pathos 
 runs through them all, but it is of a mocking 
 kind and makes no appeal to the lacrimarum fons. 
 Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago was 
 in reality a school of hard discipline ; passed 
 through the alembic of Lamb's fancy, it becomes 
 unreal and very beautiful, a memory of dreams. 
 He goes to Oxford in the Vacation, and that city 
 of scholars and gay livers is suddenly transformed 
 into a refuge of ghosts. 
 
 What a place to be in is au old library ! [he exclaims.] 
 It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that 
 have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were 
 reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I 
 do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their wind- 
 ing sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to 
 inhale learning, walking amid their foliage : and the 
 odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as 
 the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid 
 the happy orchard. 
 
 The same dissolving power of the fancy is turned 
 upon The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, and 
 the place is forever haunted by those three reven- 
 ants, Thomas Coventry, Samuel Salt, and Peter 
 Pierson, walking not with arms linked together — 
 " as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets" 
 — but with hands folded behind their backs, 
 strange figures that are very much of this earth,
 
 CHARLES LAMB 95 
 
 yet somehow unconcerned with its prosaic busi- 
 ness. He writes of those " dim specks" of the 
 London streets, the childish Chimney -Sweepers 
 "blooming through their first nigritude," who 
 " from their pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the 
 nipping air of a December morning, preach a les- 
 son of patience to mankind"; and their sermon 
 is a quaint echo of the Shakespearian, 
 
 Golden lads and lasses must, 
 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
 
 Or he takes the beggars of the metropolis for a 
 theme, and in place of the brutal and hideous 
 pictures which a modern "naturalist " would give 
 us, he turns to muse on the idyllic tenderness of 
 Vincent Bourne's blind vagrant and dog : 
 
 Hi mores, haec vita fuit, dum fata sinebant. 
 
 Again, he gathers up into an essay the bereave- 
 ments and long abnegations of his bachelor life, 
 and instead of the bitter arraignment of Thom- 
 son's outcast in The City of Dreadful Night or the 
 half-renounced envy of Christina Rossetti — 
 
 While I ? I sat alone and watched ; 
 
 My lot in life, to live alone 
 In mine own world of interests, 
 
 Much felt but little shown ; — 
 
 instead of these, he has woven his regrets into 
 Dream Children, a Reverie, where the pathos is as
 
 96 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 aerial and undisturbing as the shadows that fall 
 irom smoke. 
 
 And his critical disquisitions, fine and pene- 
 trating as they are in many respects, have to my 
 mind something of the same unsubstantiality. I 
 read of Shakespeare in Lamb's essays, and I do 
 not seem to be in the presence of the great con- 
 structive dramatist who carried the weight of hu- 
 man experience in his brain, but of some sovereign 
 alchemist skilled to convert the leaden cares of 
 life into golden leaf. It is characteristic of Lamb's 
 paradoxical spirit and half-conscious irony that 
 he should have found Shakespeare more fitted for 
 the cabinet, where the reader's fancy had freer 
 license to sport, than for the stage with its closer 
 confinement of realism. The whole Elizabethan 
 drama, which he so loved and which he did so 
 much to restore to general favour, attracted him 
 chiefly by its salient points of light, and the plays 
 of the Restoration were avowedly dear to him be- 
 cause they carry us into a region ' ' beyond the 
 diocese of the strict conscience," into the vision 
 of that "pageant where we should sit as uncon- 
 cerned at the issues, for life or death, as at a battle 
 of the frogs and mice. ' ' 
 
 Much of Lamb's poetry is of a frankly ephe- 
 meral sort, album verses for importunate young 
 ladies and the like, but even in those poems that 
 are in a way dedicated to the severer muses the 
 same note of fanciful unreality, concealing a 
 basis of discarded emotions, may be heard as in
 
 CHARLES LAMB 97 
 
 the letters and essays. I think this note can be 
 detected in his tragedy of John Woodvil, in his 
 lament over The Old Familiar Faces, written, be 
 it observed, when he was scarcely out of his teens, 
 and in those lovely stanzas to Hester, whose close 
 rises higher in poetic grace perhaps than he any- 
 where else attained : 
 
 My spritely neighbour, gone before 
 To that unknown and silent shore, 
 Shall we not meet, as heretofore, 
 Some Summer morning, 
 
 When from thy cheerful eyes a ray 
 Hath struck a bliss upon the day, 
 A bliss that would not go away, 
 A sweet fore-warning ? 
 
 Those verses, we know, were inspired by a 
 young Quaker whom Lamb was " in love with " 
 for some years while he lived at Pentonville, and 
 to whom, characteristically, he never once spoke. 
 Their charm is of the Elizabethan school, but 
 they follow the models of the lesser poets who 
 turned from the direct expression of the emotions 
 and from the language of power to the more wan- 
 ton light of the fancy. It would be interesting, 
 if not too technical, to carry this contrast into the 
 very mechanism of Lamb's style and show how it 
 is based on the Euphuistic school and on the meta- 
 physical writers who cared more for the lambent 
 play of the intellect than for directness and depth 
 of impression. His language does not flow, but
 
 98 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 moves with a continual eddy ; the interest is in 
 the quaintness of individual words and phrases 
 rather than in sustained harmony. The effect is 
 delightful, piquant, tantalising, and at times, it 
 must be confessed, a little saccade and even weari- 
 some. We remember this criticism which L,amb 
 pronounced on Elia, " The informal habit of his 
 mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of 
 speech, forbade him to be an orator," and we 
 wonder whether this impediment does not 
 now and then manifest itself in a certain re- 
 tardation of his written, as well as his spoken, 
 utterance. Unique and exquisite as his more arti- 
 ficial language often is, I confess to like even better 
 those occasional passages where he forgets his 
 mannerism and speaks out with simple straight- 
 forwardness. As an illustration of this chaster 
 style I would select that vindication of his friend 
 in the letter of Elia to Robert Southey, which I 
 have already cited in my characterisation of Haz- 
 litt. The passage, thus inviting a comparison 
 with Hazlitt, would have the further merit of 
 calling attention to the widely different traditions 
 which, coming down side by side in English 
 literature from the beginning, have divided the 
 aims of these two friends. Hazlitt, with his 
 passion and force and weight of utterance, de- 
 scends by direct inheritance from Marlowe and 
 Hooker and Milton ; L,amb, with his quaintness 
 and emphasis on phrase and word, is a later-born 
 brother of Lyly and Sidney and Quarles and Fuller.
 
 CHARLES LAMP, 99 
 
 Only one writer, perhaps, ever united in his own 
 genius these two divergent temperaments — Sir 
 Thomas Browne. 
 
 But we must not forget that it is the man 
 Charles Lamb after all which makes his writings 
 so precious, uor lose sight of that fine personality 
 of his which so intimately pervades his essays and 
 sketches that they seem all to drop naturally into 
 place with his private correspondence. Nor, as I 
 have attempted to show, is the whimsical license 
 of his character the least fascinating phase of it 
 for us to-day. With what Olympian assurance 
 this man of many renunciations knew how to 
 jest ! There is a story of his Jovian hilarity told 
 in Haydon's Diary which has been quoted more 
 than once, and which I may be permitted to bor- 
 row in turn. A constellation of poets, as Lamb 
 might say, had foregathered in Haydon's cham- 
 bers, and into their midst had strayed an admiring 
 but prosaic gentleman, a nameless Comptroller of 
 Stamps. Says the diarist ; 
 
 Wheu we retired to tea we found the Comptroller. In 
 introducing him to Wordsworth I forgot to say who he 
 was. After a little time the Comptroller looked down, 
 looked up, and said to Wordsworth, " Don't you think, 
 sir, Milton was a great genius?" Keats looked at me, 
 Wordsworth looked at the Comptroller. Lamb, who was 
 dozing by the fire, turned round and said: "Pray, sir, 
 did you say Milton was a great genius?" "No, sir, I 
 asked Mr. Wordsworth if he were not?" "Oh," said 
 Lamb, " then you are a silly fellow." " Charles! my dear 
 Charles !" said Wordsworth ; but Lamb, perfectly mno-
 
 lOO SI1KLBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 cent of the confusion he had created, was off again by 
 the fire. 
 
 After an awful pause, the Comptroller said ; " Don't 
 you think Newton a great genius ? " I could not stand it 
 any longer. Keats put his head into my books. Ritchie 
 squeezed in a laugh. Wordsworth seemed asking him- 
 self, " Who is this ? " Lamb got up, and taking a candle, 
 said : " Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenologi- 
 cal development?" He then turned his back on the 
 poor man, and at every question of the Comptroller he 
 chanted : 
 
 "Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John 
 Went to bed with his breeches on." 
 
 The man in office, finding Wordsworth did not know who 
 he was, said in spasmodic and half-chuckling anticipation 
 of assured victory: "I have had the honour of some 
 correspondence with you, Mr. Wordsworth." " With 
 me, sir?" said Wordsworth; "not that I remember." 
 "Don't you, sir? I am a Comptroller of Stamps." 
 There was a dead silence ; the Comptroller evidently 
 thinking that was enough. While we were waiting for 
 Wordsworth's reply, Lamb sung out: 
 
 "Hey diddle, diddle, 
 The cat and the fiddle." 
 
 " My dear Charles !" said Wordsworth. 
 
 " Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John," 
 
 chanted Lamb ; and then, rising, exclaimed : " Do let me 
 have another look at that gentleman's organs." Keats 
 and I hurried Lamb into the painting room, shut the 
 door, and gave way to inextinguishable laughter. Monk- 
 house followed and tried to get Lamb away. We went 
 back, but the Comptroller was irreconcilable. We
 
 CHARLES LAMB ioi 
 
 soothed and smiled, and asked him to supper. He 
 stayed, though his dignity was sorely affected. How- 
 ever, being a good-natured man, we parted all in good 
 humour, and no ill effects followed. 
 
 All the while, until Monkhouse succeeded, we could 
 hear Lamb struggling in the painting room and calling at 
 intervals, " Who is that fellow? Allow me to see his or- 
 gans once more." 
 
 Certainly the denizens of Olympus laid aside 
 their dignity on that day ; an unsympathetic ob- 
 server might even have found them acting peril- 
 ously like buffoons. Indeed, there is another 
 aspect that cannot be disregarded in the whole 
 conduct of this genial wit. Sometimes, if the 
 truth must out, that terrible picture of the man as 
 he appeared to Carlyle recurs unpleasantly to the 
 memory : 
 
 Charles Lamb and his sister came daily once or oftener ; 
 a very sorry pair of phenomena. Insuperable proclivity 
 to gitt, in poor old Lamb. His talk contemptibly small, 
 indicating wondrous ignorance and shallowness 
 in fact, more like " diluted insanity " (as I defined it) 
 than anything of real jocosity, "humour," or geniality. 
 . . . He was the leanest of mankind, tiny black 
 breeches buttoned to the knee-cap, and no farther, sur- 
 mounting spindle legs also in black, face and head fineish, 
 black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather ; in the eyes 
 a kind of smoky brightness or confused sharpness ; spoke 
 with a stutter ; in walking tottered and shuffled ; emblem 
 of imbecility bodily and spiritual (something of real 
 insanity, I have understood), and yet something, too, of 
 humane, ingenuous, pathetic, sportfully much-enduring. 
 Poor Lamb ! He was infinitely astonished at my Wife ; 
 
 LiB? f 
 UNIVERSITY Of CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 102 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 and her quiet encounter of his too ghastly London wit by 
 cheerful native ditto. Adieu, poor Lamb ! 
 
 There are occasions when his persistent refusal to 
 face, in words at least, the graver issues of life, 
 when his deliberate search for the quaint and the 
 affected do actually present him in this spectral 
 aspect which struck Carlyle. He could jest in 
 an essay over his drunkenness ; hanging and the 
 stocks were to him a subject of laughter ; the stale 
 Elizabethan mockery of ' ' horns ' ' was still comical 
 to him ; love, sickness, death, even friendship, in 
 which he was so much honoured, were in turn 
 given over to his amusement. We remember 
 Emerson's trumpet-text from the Koran : " The 
 heavens and the earth, and all that is between 
 them, think ye we have created them in jest?" 
 How refreshing it would be if a little oftener this 
 much-enduring man would lay aside his pose and 
 speak out straight from the heart, if he could find 
 confidence to lose his wit in the tragic emotions 
 that must have waked with him by day and slept 
 with him at night. And in the end it seems 
 almost as if fate had taken revenge on him for his 
 wilful disregard of sorrow and pain. All letters 
 are sad as the writer approaches old age, but few 
 are so strangely and unconsciously disturbing as 
 Lamb's. As the burden of years closed in upon 
 him and the buoyancy of spirit passed away, there 
 came in its place a weary vacuity, a bleak mockery 
 of wit, broken at times by a stammering cry of 
 pain such as it is not good to hear. We resent
 
 CHARLES LAMB 103 
 
 this failure of his long-sustained wit. The picture 
 of the lonely man moving from home to home 
 in the suburbs of London is pathetic almost to 
 tears. So the ineluctable Nemesis overtook him, 
 too, at the last. And if you ask me how I recon- 
 cile this aspect of Lamb with that other aspect 
 which has gained for him the title of saint, I reply 
 that I do not attempt to reconcile them. It all 
 depends on the reader and on the reader's chang- 
 ing moods. There is a time to look solemnly into 
 the face of life, and then these letters and essays 
 repel us, as they did Carlyle, with their ghastly 
 London wit. There is a time for laughter and for 
 quaint fancy that dallies lightly with the emo- 
 tions, and then we reflect on the sublime courage 
 of this man who could smile where others would 
 despair, and with Thackeray we lay his letters to 
 our forehead, and call him Saint Charles. And 
 the latter mood is wiser, on the whole, and safer 
 and more just.
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 
 
 " THE SEVEN SEAS " AND " THE RUBAIYAT " 
 
 There was a story current not long ago of a 
 London editor who was rash enough to wager 
 that no paragraph on Kipling or FitzGerald should 
 appear in his journal during a stated period, — and, 
 needless to add, he lost the bet in the very next 
 issue. This endless flux of gossip about two 
 chosen names, with here and there a word of seri- 
 ous criticism smuggled in, is indeed one of the 
 curiosities of our modern literary magazines ; and 
 the peculiarity of it all is enhanced by the fact that 
 two authors could scarcely be selected from the 
 body of English literature more opposed to each 
 other in style and intention. 1 
 
 Apart from this journalistic notoriety, none of 
 
 1 This essay was written for the Atlantic Monthly in the 
 year 1899, and was not, I think, a false presentation of 
 literary conditions when both Kipling and FitzGerald 
 were at their apogee. Since that time the habit of writ- 
 ing recklessly about Kipling, at least, has gone out 
 of style. As regards FitzGerald, I feel, in reading over 
 these pages, that the silly talk of the day led me to pass 
 too lightly over the extraordinary beauty and humanity 
 of his work. 
 
 104
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 105 
 
 our poets, not even Byron, has enjoyed just the 
 kind of popularity which Kipling has achieved. 
 Other poets have received equal or greater honour 
 from the cultured public, but our new Anglo- 
 Saxon bard appeals with like force to the scholarly 
 and the illiterate ; his speech has become, as it 
 were, the voice of the people. Mr. William Archer, 
 in his American Jottings, gives an apt illustration 
 of this. On leaving his steamer at New York Mr. 
 Archer ' ' jumped on the platform of a horse-car on 
 West Street," and was accosted by the conductor 
 asfollows: " ' I s' pose you 've heard that Kipling 
 has been very ill ? . . . He's pulling through 
 now, though. . . . He ought to be the next 
 Poet Laureate. . . . He don't follow no beaten 
 tracks. He cuts a road for himself every time, 
 right through ; an' a mighty good road, too ! ' " 
 
 The fame of the Rub&iy&t is of a different sort 
 altogether, yet not less real in its own sphere. 
 One of our ambassadors, himself a devotee of the 
 " Suffolk dreamer," has related how he heard a 
 stanza of the poem quoted in a far-away mining 
 camp ; and I have read of a society of enthusiasts 
 in England, who, with roses garlanding their 
 brows, meet together and dine in honour of their 
 prophet. Very few poems, perhaps no poem of 
 its length, have exercised so marked an effect on 
 writers of a certain class ; and the homage paid to 
 this jewel among translations is strikingly mani- 
 fested by the number of aspirants — including Mr. 
 L,e Gallienne, it may be observed, one of Kipling's
 
 106 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 few literary foes — who have tried, and are still 
 trying, to do the work over again more to their 
 own taste, eager apparently to win renown by 
 gilding refined gold. 
 
 The interest taken in these two authors is, in 
 fact, so persistent and so extraordinary that it 
 might seem as if the corpus vulgatum of our poetry 
 were destined to shrink within these narrow limits; 
 and it is a timely question to consider what strange 
 fatality has yoked together in notoriety this ill- 
 assorted couple, and what their fame signifies to 
 us in our racial development. 
 
 The cause of Kipling's popularity is not far to 
 seek. For many years the Anglo-Saxon people, 
 in their ever-growing self-consciousness, have 
 been waiting for some poet to formulate their ex- 
 periences and needs, and have not been slow to 
 express open dissatisfaction with otherwise ac- 
 credited singers. Tennyson dwelt for them in a 
 world of shadowy idealism ; he had no sympathy 
 with the democratic movement ; he lapsed in his 
 latter days into a vein of pantheistic mysticism 
 especially abhorrent to the straightforward Briton. 
 Browning was concerned mainly with that subtle 
 line of demarcation between the worlds of sense 
 and faith which finds its problems and symbolism 
 in the Roman Church, — and nothing so disturbs 
 the stolid Philistine as this blending of the real 
 and the unreal ; furthermore Browning was ob- 
 scure. Iyongfellow sang with exquisite grace the 
 virtues and aspirations of the home-loving people,
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 107 
 
 but failed to voice its rude conquering temper out- 
 of-doors. Matthew Arnold chose for himself a 
 region of sublimated doubt and faith, interesting 
 enough to Oxford, but incomprehensible to the 
 larger public. Each and all of these poets had of 
 necessity strong traits of the Anglo-Saxon char- 
 acter, but they missed its dominant chord, and so 
 remained more or less isolated in the realm of pure 
 art. 
 
 For this reason we can understand the acclaim 
 with which a poet has been received who actually 
 sings in stirring rhythms the instincts of the peo- 
 ple. And in truth both the virtues and defects of 
 Kipling are such as to render him a popular idol. 
 One cannot easily imagine to himself a car con- 
 ductor enthusiastic over Milton or Spenser or 
 Shakespeare ; these luminaries revolve in a region 
 beyond his comprehension. Yet if Kipling fails to 
 strike the highest note, the reception given him 
 by such critics as Professor Norton proves that he, 
 too, in his own way, is a true artist and no moun- 
 tebank of the crossroads. 
 
 Probably what first impresses every one on 
 reading The Seven Seas — and the idea comes 
 with peculiar emphasis these days — is the im- 
 perialistic temper of the poet ; his earnest con- 
 viction that the English race, " the Sons of the 
 Blood," are destined to sweep over the earth and 
 fulfil the law of order and civilisation. " After the 
 use of the English, in straight-flung words and 
 few," he has sung his stave of victory so lustily
 
 108 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 that the hearts of the toilers in the fields and of 
 the " dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man- 
 stifled town," have leaped in response to his call. 
 So great is the influence of hymns like the Reces- 
 sional and The White Alan's Burden that to his 
 fame as a poet has been added something of the 
 authority of a statesman ; he has made himself, 
 as no other poet before him, accepti pars imperii. 
 His sympathy with the impulse towards expansion 
 and his penetration into the hidden causes of fer- 
 ment are written large in his Song of the English. 
 He sees in the forward movement no ministerial 
 programme or prudential wisdom, such as guides 
 the rulers of Germany and France to fortify their 
 empire by seizing new lauds, but an irresistible 
 impulse of the people driving them out to subdue 
 and possess. 
 
 Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power 
 
 with the Need, 
 Till the Soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead. 
 As the deer breaks — as the steer breaks — from the herd 
 
 where they graze, 
 In the faith of little children we went on our ways. 
 
 But there is another and a deeper instinct of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race than the impulse to expand 
 and absorb. With the power of conquest they 
 carry everywhere the law of order and obedience. 
 
 The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone ; 
 'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own ; 
 'E keeps 'is side-arms awful : 'e leaves 'em all about, 
 An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen 
 out,—
 
 KII'LING AND FITZGERALD 109 
 
 sings Tommy Atkins in his vigorous barrack- 
 room idiom ; and he is right. It is the sense of 
 life as a vast complicated organisation, in which 
 every member must play his part bravely and un- 
 complainingly in subjection to the whole; it is the 
 hearkening to " Law, Orrder, Duty an' Restraint, 
 Obedience, Discipline ! " so eloquently ascribed by 
 Mister Mc Andrews to his beloved " seven thou- 
 sand horse-power," that impels the race inevitably 
 to its goal. There may be, indeed there are, a 
 few left, even in England, who are not " damned 
 ijjits," and who still think something of the old 
 romance at sea is spoiled by steam ; who feel that 
 in some way the fairer and richer flower of life is 
 crushed out by the grinding of mill wheels, and 
 that there is a deeper joy of philosophy than can 
 come to a man driven ruthlessly and restlessly by 
 his own invented machine. But the truth remains 
 that the civilisation of the day is a product of iron 
 and steam, and that victory belongs to those who 
 are strong to adapt themselves to the new de- 
 mands. Our late war with Spain was sufficient 
 proof of this. 
 
 Is it strange, therefore, that the people of Eng- 
 land and America, in these days of unsettled 
 ideals, should be genuinely thrilled by the clarion 
 notes of a poet who sings of the courage and dis- 
 cipline of the men behind the "reeking tube" with 
 a vigour and truth, if not with a grace, equal to 
 Homer's glorification of the ancient bronze-clad 
 heroes ; who sees in one of the masterful inven-
 
 IIO SHELBUKNE ESSAYS 
 
 tions of commerce a mystical Power carrying 
 salutations and warnings " o'er the waste of the 
 ultimate slime," and whispering its message of 
 union to worlds dissevered by the sea ; who has 
 brought together, and in a way spiritualised, all 
 the "miracles" of a materialistic age for the cele- 
 bration of his love ; who has discovered in the 
 despised banjo, that can "travel with the cooking- 
 pots and pails," a true successor of the heroic lyre, 
 and has heard from this " Prophet of the Utterly 
 Absurd" a divine song crying to the dweller in 
 wild places : 
 
 By the wisdom of the centuries I speak — 
 To the tune of yestertnorn I set the truth — 
 
 I, the joy of life unquestioned — I, the Greek — 
 I, the everlasting Wonder Song of Youth ! — 
 
 is it strange that such a singer should appeal to 
 the busy brood of the old ' ' Sea wife ' ' with some- 
 thing more than the force of a mere lover of beauty 
 and maker of pretty verses ? The eyes even of 
 the dullest are opened, and from the midst of his 
 homely surroundings he seems to see arise in the 
 purity of uncorrupted loveliness the vision of the 
 True Romance : 
 
 A veil to draw 'twixt God His law 
 
 And man's infirmity, 
 A shadow kind to dumb and blind 
 
 The shambles where we die. 
 
 But there is a still higher reach in Kipling than 
 this glorification of a prosaic civilisation and this
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD III 
 
 lauding of the character militant. At its best, his 
 sense of order and obedience rises into a pure feel- 
 ing for righteousness that reminds one of the 
 ancient Hebrew prophets. He has in him some- 
 thing of the stern Calvinistic temper of his own 
 Mc Andrews brooding over a world in which the 
 active and mechanical virtues fulfil their mission 
 under the law of " interdependence absolute, fore- 
 seen, ordained, decreed." We shall not soon out- 
 live the impression produced on the Anglo-Saxon 
 heart by those unexpected words, " Lest we for- 
 get, lest we forget ! " Amid the empty jubilation 
 of a thoughtless optimism, the mind was suddenly 
 brought to recoil upon itself, and ask what higher 
 destiny was ruling in the affairs of men. The 
 Anglo-Saxon race more than any other has re- 
 tained the real temper of Hebraism, the worship 
 of a force, dwelling apart yet human in its limita- 
 tions, that shapes the activities of the world to its 
 own devising. Jehovah, the Lord of righteous- 
 ness, is still England's God, and nowhere else is 
 the religion of the laud better expressed than in 
 the Hymn before Action : 
 
 The earth is full of anger, 
 
 The seas are dark with wrath, 
 The Nations in their harness 
 
 Go up against our path : 
 Ere yet we loose the legions — 
 
 Ere yet we draw the blade, 
 Jehovah of the Thunders, 
 
 Lord God of Battles, aid !
 
 112 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 When to Kipling's instinctive utterance of the 
 popular needs are added his wit and dramatic 
 power, his skill in telling a story, his mastery of 
 the clinging epithet, his pulsating language and 
 sturdy rhythms, it is easy to understand his im- 
 mense vogue. The limitations that debar him 
 from ranking with the truly great poets of Eng- 
 land and the world are again inherent in the peo- 
 ple for whom he writes, — limitations which the 
 master singers were able to transcend while still 
 retaining the strength of the national character. 
 
 It is one of the ironical whims of Fate that the 
 man who stands preeminently for the Anglo- 
 Saxon and Hebraic temperament should have 
 been born in India, the land furthest removed 
 from that temper of all the world. Righteous- 
 ness that rules in the hurly-burly of a contentious 
 life, he knows and celebrates; but of that other 
 spirit that turns from the passion and toil of ex- 
 istence as from a wasteful illusion, and whose eyes 
 are set on solitude and a triumph of peace beyond 
 earthly victories, there is in Kipling hardly a 
 breath. I know that a poet is not called to be a 
 mystic, that his office is not that of a Hindu rishi 
 or a mediaeval Thomas a Kempis. There must be 
 about him always something of that union of 
 V illusion et la sagesse which to Joubert seemed the 
 essence of art. Yet poetry, to accomplish its 
 nobler mission, must both evoke and lay the pas- 
 sions. Through the din of personal struggle and 
 personal emotions must break at times the voice
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD I I 3 
 
 of something deeper within us, calling us to rest. 
 In the clash of worldly ambitions it happens now 
 and then to a man to pause, while a feeling of 
 unreality comes over him; and for a moment he 
 knows that his concern in the drama about him is 
 purely fictitious, and that there is a witness look- 
 ing down with disdain on the strutting part he 
 plays. No man ever achieved anything really 
 great in this world without these moments of 
 deeper insight, and without a certain contemp- 
 tuous indifference to his own fate. No poet ever 
 causes the hearts of his hearers to expand with 
 the larger joy who does not lift the veil occa- 
 sionally and destroy the illusion he is himself 
 creating. 
 
 So at times, in Homer, the ten years of calamity 
 about Ilium seem filled with the warfare of 
 shadows. 
 
 Thus the gods fated, and such ruin wove, 
 That song might flourish for posterity, 
 
 he sings, as if the wrath of Achilles and the tragic 
 courage of Hector were no more than the phan- 
 tasmagoria of a dream. Both Achilles and Hec- 
 tor fight ever with the sure foreboding of death 
 upon them ; and in the last book of the Odyssey, 
 — which is certainly added as a summing up and 
 conclusion for both poems, — the stalwart heroes 
 who led the tumult of battle now move before us 
 as shadows whose futile life is but a mockery of 
 their former strenuous deeds. Virgil makes the 
 
 VOL. II.— 8.
 
 114 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 plot of his epic revolve about the dim pantheistic 
 scenes of the sixth canto, where all that precedes 
 and all the events that are to follow arise in vision, 
 like figures beheld through the uncertain glimmer- 
 ing of the moon. Throughout the poet's works 
 the mind is continually startled by phrases filled 
 with a strange mystical glamour. Dabit deus his 
 quoque finem ! cries iEneas, and we feel always 
 that there is a fate akin to the peace of death 
 brooding over the actions and guiding them to 
 their end. Nor is Shakespeare different in this 
 respect from the masters of antiquity. Who can 
 forget the sensation of sudden liberty and enlarge- 
 ment that came to him, as if some new chamber 
 of thought or windows of wider outlook were 
 opened to his mind, when, after the storm of pas- 
 sion and ambition in Macbeth, the fated victim 
 hears of the queen's death ? His cry of disillusion 
 is in the memory of every one, but repeated 
 quotation cannot diminish its force or pertinency: 
 
 She should have died hereafter ; 
 There would have been a time for such a word. 
 To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
 To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle ! 
 Life 's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 
 And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing.
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 1 1 5 
 
 So essential is this higher element of poetry 
 that a French writer of some reputation has de- 
 veloped it into a complete theory of mysticism. 
 By the side of the indispensable dialogue which 
 depends on the action of a drama he finds almost 
 always another dialogue seemingly superfluous 
 yet really that to which the soul listens atten- 
 tively; and on the quality and extent of this un- 
 necessary dialogue depend the character and inner 
 power of the work. The mysterious and haunt- 
 ing beauty of true tragedy is found in the words 
 that are spoken by the side of the strict and mani- 
 fest truth — in the words that conform to a truth 
 profounder and incomparably nearer the invisible 
 soul that breathes through the poem. Now I am 
 far from sustaining a theory which would substi- 
 tute dramas built on any such pseudo-mysticism 
 for the ballads of Kipling. Yet one must confess 
 that he misses in Kipling just this added touch 
 of something deeper than what first meets the ear, 
 and that, missing this, he comes away unsatisfied. 
 We hear Kipling constantly praised for his virility 
 and out-of-door freedom; and this is well. But 
 Homer and Shakespeare, no poets of the closet 
 certainly, were able to combine this liberty with 
 the insight of a profounder spirituality. Our new 
 bard is lauded also for loyalty to the present; and 
 this too is well. Yet Byron found it possible to 
 speak for his own age, and at the same time as- 
 similated largely from what was memorable in the 
 past. In Childe Harold's reflections on Italy and
 
 Il6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 other scenes of former grandeur, we enjoy the 
 same largeness of release from the fretful con- 
 straints of circumstance which in Virgil comes to 
 us from his pensive brooding over Fate. One 
 may indeed question whether any writer so little 
 formed by the traditions of the past as Kipling 
 can, in this day of inherited wisdom, escape the 
 charge of crudeness. 
 
 An attentive study of the examples quoted in 
 Matthew Arnold's Essay on Poetry might lead one 
 to call this defect in Kipling a lack of the ' ' high 
 seriousness " which that critic adopts as a touch- 
 stone of the great style; but the term at least de- 
 mands definition. Seriousness, if understood as 
 a quality of the emotions, cannot be denied to the 
 author of The Seven Seas ; it is in fact a marked 
 and distinguishing trait of the Anglo-Saxon race. 
 Nor is the defect due to any weakness of the intel- 
 lect. The world was never more ready than at 
 the present hour to expend its intellectual force on 
 social or artistic problems ; it revels in labour of 
 the sort. As a matter of fact, the peculiarity of 
 Kipling's vocabulary and the continual looseness 
 of his grammar, even apart from the vitality of 
 his thought, render him one of the harder poets 
 to read, yet they in no way detract from his 
 popularity. 
 
 The fault lies in another and more essential fac- 
 ulty, — the will; and here again there is need of 
 careful analysis. Any one who looks deeply into 
 his own heart must recognise there two distinct
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 117 
 
 principles governing his life, — the will to act, and, 
 — let us not say the will to renounce, for fear of 
 misinterpretation, — but rather the will to refrain; 
 and on the right understanding of these two fac- 
 ulties depends largely our insight into much that 
 is best and much that is worst in literature. Now 
 no one can read a page of The Seven Seas without 
 being struck by its splendid virility: the book is 
 in this respect a faithful reflection of the restless 
 energy impelling the race, by fair means or foul, 
 to overrun and subdue the globe. But in that 
 other and higher will, the will to refrain, the 
 Anglo-Saxons are, and have always been, singu- 
 larly deficient. To this character must be at- 
 tributed both the lack of any genuinely mystical 
 literature in England, and the comparative free- 
 dom from decadence, — phenomena which, indeed, 
 the true Briton finds far from easy to distinguish 
 one from the other. In fact, much of the confu- 
 sion of mind in regard to genius and degeneracy, 
 spread abroad over the world by such writers as 
 L,ombroso and Max Nordau, is due to the same 
 imperfect analysis. Let the active individual will 
 be weakened by immorality, or whatever cause, 
 and there often arises a dissolution of the person- 
 ality into a flaccid dream state, which the ordinary 
 observer associates with mysticism, but which is 
 in reality the very opposite of that. Out of the 
 deliquescence of character and loosening of the 
 grip on things actual, such as may be seen in Paul 
 Verlaine and Maeterlinck, springs a sham spirit-
 
 Il8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 uality that wraps itself in the allurements of the 
 senses. Quite different from this is the mysticism 
 of an Emerson or a Juan de la Cruz or a Plato, 
 where in a strong character the higher will to re- 
 frain holds the lower will as a slave subservient 
 to its purpose. The one is the defalcation of the 
 will altogether; the other is the subjection of the 
 lower will to the higher, an exercise of the func- 
 tion which Emerson, quoting I know not what 
 Eastern source, calls the "inner check." The 
 one is but a bewildering illusion; the other is the 
 truest disillusion. I would repeat that the poet 
 is not called to be a mystic, — the sensuous ele- 
 ment must always be too predominant in his work 
 for that; and yet only by comparison with genuine 
 mysticism can the recurring note of disillusion in 
 the greater poets be explained. It was probably 
 the voice of this higher personality heard in Dante 
 that led Matthew Arnold to quote his In la sua 
 voluntade e nostra pace as an illustration of 
 " high seriousness " in verse. 
 
 Kipling is indeed serious, with the strength of 
 his Hebraic spirit; but the general absence of this 
 will to refrain in his work, although it may add 
 to his popularity among a people of restless en- 
 ergy, must effectually exclude him from the baud 
 of sacri vates. I remember the shock of surprise 
 that came to me when, on first reading The Seven 
 Seas, I met the lines, 
 
 For to possess in loneliness 
 The joy of all the earth ;
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 1 19 
 
 so incongruous did the words appear with the 
 bustling spirit of the book as a whole. For the 
 moment I seemed to be rapt away from the society 
 of Tommy Atkins and Mr. McAndrews to the re- 
 gion out of which the inspired poets of old spoke 
 to us. Had Kipling written more in this vein, he 
 would have escaped the charge of superficiality. 
 
 But there is something else wanting in Kipling, 
 which may, at the last analysis, be closely akin to 
 this lack of true insight. I mean the seeking 
 after beauty as an end in itself, as an instinct of 
 supreme joy like that which inspired the opening 
 lines of Keats' s Endymion. In its purer manifes- 
 tation this element of beauty is but the expression 
 of an inner harmony of the faculties depending on 
 the same will to refrain; it is the law of the Del- 
 phian Apollo, Nothing too much, working itself 
 out in perfect proportion of thought and form. 
 The very foundation of poetry, as possessing that 
 higher liberty of spirit growing out of the har- 
 mony of restraint, lies therein; and such, I gather, 
 was the notion of Coleridge when he traced the 
 source of metre " to the balance in the mind ef- 
 fected by that spontaneous effort which strives to 
 hold in check the workings of passion." Even in 
 its lower manifestation, in the love of mere beauty 
 of detail as displayed by the lesser romantic 
 writers, there must still remain something of the 
 power to withdraw the mind from the immediate 
 uses of things, and read into them a higher sig- 
 nificance. Of this longing after beauty there is
 
 120 SHELRURNE ESSAYS 
 
 singularly little in Kipling in comparison with the 
 force and breadth of his genius. His most ardent 
 admirers would probably be surprised to find how 
 few passages of real loveliness they could recall 
 in his poems; and it is no doubt this deficiency 
 that inspires Kipling's enemies — and even he has 
 enemies — to speak so contemptuously of his work. 
 I have attempted thus far to show how the 
 poetry of The Seven Seas reflects both the domi- 
 nant strength and the deficiencies of the Anglo- 
 Saxon temper; there is a curious interest in 
 comparing with it another volume of almost equal 
 popularity, in which all that is un-English might 
 seem to have come to flower. Within the body 
 of the people has sprung up, of late years, a small 
 circle of men to whom the restless activity of the 
 race is strongly repellent : they are quietists and 
 worshippers of pure beauty. The movement be- 
 gan with the pre-Raphaelites, who sought in me- 
 diaeval Italy all that was wanting in the England 
 about them, and has grown to include an ever 
 widening band of malcontents. For the very 
 reason that they are cut off from the broader sym- 
 pathies with actual life, there is something ineffi- 
 cient in their work, something very frail and 
 fragile, which we are wont to stigmatise as effemi- 
 nate or dilettante. Beauty and form are indeed 
 the feminine elements of genius, which, as has 
 been often observed, must embrace both the mas- 
 culine and the feminine principles to accomplish 
 its best results. Alone and unsupported by the
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 121 
 
 aggressive virility of thought and action, the love 
 of beauty has always a tendency to degenerate 
 into effeminacy. It is just this flowerlike grace, 
 apart from any sturdier character, that appeals to 
 the class of dilettantes in FitzGerald's translation 
 of the Rubdiydt. English poetry contains nothing 
 more exquisitely lovely than such stanzas as this: 
 
 Earth could not answer ; nor the Seas that mourn 
 In flowing purple, of their Lord forlorn ; 
 
 Nor rolling Heaven, with all his Signs reveal'd 
 And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn. 
 
 There is in such writing all the apt felicity of 
 Horace, to whom FitzGerald is sometimes likened; 
 but it must be added that there is, on the other 
 hand, too little of the manly tone of Horace, and 
 of his shrewd reflection on life, which have made 
 him the friendly mentor of the centuries. 
 
 It might seem at first sight as if the Rubdiydt 
 should attract this small coterie alone, were it not 
 further true that there is a touch of the dilettante 
 inherent in the whole race. The very fact that 
 a person has little appreciation of harmony and 
 beauty in their higher manifestation leads him to 
 make a sharp distinction in his taste between 
 what appeals to the reason or dominant emotions 
 and what, under the designation of beauty, is a 
 mere titillation of the fancy. This divorce be- 
 tween the reason and the imagination, due to an 
 original defect of temperament in the race, has 
 been so widened by the exigencies of modern life
 
 122 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 that any real synthesis of the powers has become 
 almost impossible. Unwholesome and irrational 
 as it is, the division has entered even into our 
 scheme of education, and in our universities we 
 now see the classical and modern-language facul- 
 ties separated into semi-hostile groups of pure 
 philologians on the one side, and shallow dabblers 
 in literature on the other; and so impossible is any 
 mediating ground between the two that even when 
 the scholar, who looks down so superciliously on 
 the aesthetes, himself turns by chance to notice lit- 
 erature, we commonly see him fall into the same 
 trifling attitude. Our libraries are flooded with 
 works that have no style or form on the one hand, 
 and with books of style that have no substance on 
 the other. And to this same division in a way is 
 due the almost equal popularity of authors so op- 
 posite as Kipling and FitzGerald. 
 
 But our English Omar has another claim on our 
 attention besides this mere verbal grace: his work 
 possesses a genuine psychological interest in so far 
 as it reflects a peculiar mood of the day. The 
 band of dilettantes to whom his felicities of style 
 appeal so strongly represent also a marked reac- 
 tion against the predominance of Anglo-Saxon 
 ideals. To a few men has come an inner awaken- 
 ing after the despotism of the recent scientific 
 period, and a weariness born of enthusiasms that 
 have failed to carry the mind beyond their own 
 restricted circle. Religious faith in the old form- 
 ulas of salvation has been weighed and rejected
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 123 
 
 by the scientific spirit of which Renan in France 
 and Huxley in England made themselves the 
 spokesmen. But in the end the new faith has 
 been found no more enlarging and no less dog- 
 matic than the old; and to some the whirl and 
 stress of mechanical progress seem to have taken 
 from life the few things that were really worth 
 possessing. Even the mass of the Anglo-Saxon 
 people, whose strenuous unreflecting minds ac- 
 cepted the doctrine of material advance most 
 eagerly, have begun at last to question dumbly 
 their own enthusiasm. The exultant words of a 
 Kipling still draw them with the force of inspira- 
 tion, but in their hours of relaxation they can 
 listen to another voice that tells of indifference 
 and repose. Out of the ruin of past ideals no new 
 vision of human spirituality has grown as yet, and 
 no poet has arisen to stir the heart to higher aspi- 
 rations. Only we listen in our uncertainty to this 
 prophet of disillusion and doubt: 
 
 Alike for those who for To-day prepare, 
 And those that after some To-morrow stare, 
 
 A muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries, 
 " Fools, your reward is neither Here nor There." 
 
 The revelations of Devout and Learn'd 
 Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn'd, 
 
 Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep, 
 They told their fellows, and to Sleep return'd. 
 
 The Rubdiydt has often been compared with 
 the Epicurean tone of the De Rerum Natura, and
 
 124 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 there is no doubt a superficial resemblance. 
 " This too I have seen: how that men recline at 
 table cup in hand, and shadow their brows with 
 garlands, and how they cry out from the depth of 
 their heart, ' Brief is this joy for feeble men; even 
 now it has been, and never again shall we call it 
 to return,' " — sang Lucretius to the Romans; and 
 to-day we read in English verse: 
 
 Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn 
 I lean'd the Secret of my Life to learn : 
 
 And Lip to Lip it murmur'd — " While you live, 
 Drink ! — for, once dead, you never shall return." 
 
 Yet in spirit the two poems are quite at variance. 
 The work of Lucretius is but a new faith of philo- 
 sophy, of the dux vita Philosophia, summoning 
 men to put away their vain, disturbing supersti- 
 tious, and to conquer for themselves a better and 
 surer peace in strenuous thought; it is at the last 
 the utterance of the will to refrain speaking with 
 all the stress of the Roman character. Lucretius 
 would have been the first to repudiate the indif- 
 ferentism of the Persian: 
 
 Perplext no more with Human or Divine, 
 To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign, 
 And lose your fingers in the tresses of 
 The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine. 
 
 The stanzas of the Rubdiydt announce the sur- 
 render of the will altogether; they speak the creed 
 of defeat, and have little in common with the
 
 KIPLING AND FITZGERALD 1 25 
 
 mysticism — if I may use that ambiguous word — 
 of the great poets of England and antiquity. 
 
 We have still to await the coming of the true 
 modern poet, who shall unite the virility of Kip- 
 ling and the graceful charm of Omar with a yet 
 deeper note of insight into spiritual truth than has 
 been vouchsafed to either. Meanwhile we cannot 
 but admire the strange fatality that has linked to- 
 gether the restless rover of the seven seas and the 
 gentle " Suffolk dreamer" in their fellowship of 
 fame.
 
 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 It would be a pleasure to suppose that the new 
 edition of Crabbe in a single volume ' would at 
 last bring to him that popularity which his lover, 
 FitzGerald, laboured so insistently to create, but 
 any such hope is bound to be frustrate. Here is, 
 in fact, one of the curiosities of literature: that a 
 poet who has been admired so extravagantly by 
 the wisest of England's readers should fail, I do 
 not say of popularity, but even of recognition 
 among critics and historians. For certainly no 
 one would call Crabbe popular, and to realise the 
 neglect of the critics we need only turn to the 
 most sympathetic study of the poet in recent years 
 and read Professor Woodberry's opening words: 
 ' ' We have done with Crabbe. ' ' Yet to Byron this 
 was " the first of living poets"; and Byron's epi- 
 gram," Nature's sternest painter, yet the best," — 
 commonly misquoted, by the way, — is on the lips 
 of a host of readers who have never so much as 
 opened a volume of Crabbe' s works. Nor was 
 
 1 The Life and Poetical Works of George Crabbe. By 
 bis son. A new and complete edition. London : John 
 Murray. 1901. Imported by Charles Scribner's Sons, 
 New York. 
 
 126
 
 GEORGE CRABBE 127 
 
 Byron alone among the great men of that period 
 to reverence what we have elected to forget. On 
 his deathbed Fox called for Crabbe's poems, and 
 in the sorrows of Phoebe Dawson found consolation 
 while his life was ebbing away. And of Scott we 
 are told that these same poems were at all times 
 more frequently in his hands than any other work 
 except Shakespeare, and that during his last days 
 at Abbotsford the only books he asked to be read 
 aloud to him were his Bible and his Crabbe. But 
 the true worshipper of our poet's genius was that 
 gentle cynic and recluse, Edward FitzGerald. 
 There is something really pathetic in FitzGerald's 
 constant lamentation that no one reads his " eter- 
 nal Crabbe. ' ' Our English Omar at least is popu- 
 lar, and it looks as if the Suffolk poet were to 
 attain a kind of spurious fame from the way his 
 name is imbedded in the letters of the " Suffolk 
 dreamer. ' ' 
 
 Now it is superfluous to say that a writer who 
 has been so lauded by the greatest poet, the most 
 ardent orator, the most honoured novelist, and 
 the most refined letter-writer of England in a 
 century, must himself have possessed extraordi- 
 nary qualities. Yet it remains true that Crabbe 
 is not read, is not even likely to be much read for 
 many years to come; and the reason of this is per- 
 fectly simple: his excellences lie in a direction 
 apart from the trend of modern thought and senti- 
 ment, while his faults are such as most strongly 
 repel modern taste.
 
 128 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 As for the faults of Crabbe, it is enough to say 
 that he is an avowed imitator of Pope in all formal 
 matters, and that the antithetic style of the master 
 too often descends in him to a grotesque flaccidity. 
 It would not be impossible to quote a dozen lines 
 almost as absurd as the parody in Rejected Ad- 
 dresses : 
 
 Regained the felt, and felt what he regained. 
 
 But even where his style is wrought with nervous 
 energy, it fails to attract an audience who have 
 tasted the rapturous liberties of Shelley and Keats, 
 and who love to take their sentiment copiously in 
 unrestrained draughts. They do not see that the 
 despised heroic couplet permits the narrative poet 
 to condense into a pair of verses the insignificant 
 joinings of a tale which in any other form would 
 occupy a paragraph; nor does it interest them 
 that in the hands of a moral poet the couplet is 
 like a keen two-edged sword to strike this way 
 and that. They are only offended by what seems 
 to them the monotonous seesaw of the rhythm; 
 and a style which opposes an effort of the judicial 
 understanding at every pause in the flow of senti- 
 ment repels those who think wit (in the old sense 
 of the word) a poor substitute for celestial inspira- 
 tion. It is partly a matter of psychology, partly 
 a matter of inscrutable taste, that a generation of 
 readers who are attracted by the slipshod rhythms 
 of EpipsychuUon or Endymion should find the 
 close-knit periods of Crabbe unendurable.
 
 GEORGE CRABBE 129 
 
 To me personally there is no tedium, but only 
 endless delight, in these mated rhymes which 
 seem to pervade and harmonise the whole rhythm. 
 And withal they help to create the artistic illusion, 
 that wonderful atmosphere, I may call it, which 
 envelops Crabbe's world. No one, not even the 
 most skeptical of Crabbe's genius, can deny that 
 he has succeeded in giving to his work a tone or 
 atmosphere peculiarly and consistently his own. 
 It would be curious to study this question of at- 
 mosphere in literature, and determine the elements 
 that go to compose it. Why are the works of 
 Dickens or Smollett or Spenser, to choose almost 
 at random, so marked by a distinctive atmosphere, 
 while in a greater writer, in Shakespeare for ex- 
 ample, it may be less observable ? Something of 
 bulk is necessary to its existence, for it can hardly 
 be created by a single book or a single poem. A 
 certain consistency of tone is needed, and a unity 
 of effect. It cannot exist without perfect sincerity 
 in the writer; and, above all, there is required 
 some idiosyncrasy of genius, some peculiar emo- 
 tional or intellectual process in the author's mind, 
 which imposes itself on us so powerfully that 
 when we arise from his works the life of the world 
 no longer seems quite the same to us; for we have 
 learned to see the quiet fields of nature and the 
 thronging activities of mankind through a new 
 medium. 
 
 All these qualities, and more particularly this 
 individuality of vision, pervade Crabbe's descrip-
 
 I30 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 tive passages and his portraits of men. They 
 colour all his painting of inanimate things, but 
 they are most evident, perhaps, in his pictures of 
 the sea, whose varied aspects, whether sublime or 
 intimate, seem to have become, through early as- 
 sociation, a part of his sensitive faculties. He has 
 caught the real life of the sea, its calm and tem- 
 pest or sudden change, as few poets in English 
 have done. Especially he loves the quiet scenes, 
 the beach when the tide retires; when all is calm 
 at sea and on land, and the wonders of the shore 
 lie glittering in the sunlight or the softer light of 
 the moon. Even more characteristic are his pic- 
 tures of the muddy, oozing shallows, as in that 
 passage where the dull terrors of such a waste are 
 employed to heighten the most tragic of his Tales : 
 
 When tides were neap, and, in the sultry day, 
 Through the tall bounding tnud-banks made their way, 
 Which on each side rose swelling, and below 
 The dark warm flood ran silently and slow ; 
 There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, 
 There hang his head, and view the lazy tide 
 In its hot slimy channel slowly glide; 
 Where the small eels that left the deeper way 
 For the warm shore, within the shallows play ; 
 Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud, 
 Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood ; — 
 Here dull and hopeless he 'd lie down and trace 
 How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race, 
 Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry 
 Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye ; 
 What time the sea-birds to the marsh would come, 
 And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home,
 
 GEORGE CRABBE 131 
 
 Gave from the salt ditch side the bellowing boom : 
 He nursed the feelings these dull scenes produce, 
 And loved to stop beside the opening sluice ; 
 Where the small stream, confined in narrow bound, 
 Ran with a dull, unvaried sadd'uing sound; 
 Where all, presented to the eye or ear, 
 Oppressed the soul with misery, grief, and fear. 
 
 There, if anywhere in English, is the artist's 
 vision, the power to concentrate the mind upon a 
 single scene until every detail in its composition 
 is corroded on the memory, and the skill, no less 
 important, to select and arrange these details to a 
 clearly conceived end. 
 
 These lines may serve to exemplify another 
 trait of Crabbe's genius, the rare union of scien- 
 tific detail with pervading human interest. He 
 was, in fact, all his life a curious and exact stu- 
 dent of botany and geology. Even in his old age 
 he kept up these scientific pursuits, and his son, 
 in the excellent biography, tells how the old man 
 on his visits would leave the house every morn- 
 ing, rain or shine, and go alone to the quarries to 
 search for fossils and to pick up rare herbs on the 
 wayside. "The dirty fossils," says the dutiful 
 son, "were placed in our best bedroom, to the 
 great diversion of the female part of my family; 
 the herbs stuck in the borders, among my choice 
 flowers, that he might see them when he came 
 again. I never displaced one of them, " — a pretty 
 picture of busy eld. Of this inanimate lore of 
 plants and rocks Crabbe is most prodigal in his 
 verse, but, by some true gift of the Muses, it never
 
 132 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 for a moment obscures the human interest of the 
 narrative. After all, it was man, and the moral 
 springs in man, that really concerned him. As 
 he himself says, the best description of sea or river 
 is incomplete: 
 
 But when a happier theme succeeds, and when 
 Men are our subjects and the deeds of men ; 
 Then may we find the Muse in happier style, 
 And we may sometimes sigh and sometimes smile. 
 
 Even when he submits his art to minute descrip- 
 tions, as for instance to a study of the growth of 
 lichens, there still lurks this human ethical in- 
 stinct behind the scientific eye. Read in their 
 proper place, the following lines are but a little 
 lesson to set forth the associations of mortal 
 antiquity: 
 
 Seeds, to our eyes invisible, will find 
 On the rude rock the bed that fits their kind ; 
 There, in the rugged soil, they safely dwell, 
 Till showers and snows the subtle atoms swell, 
 And spread the enduring foliage ; — then we trace 
 The freckled flower upon the flinty base ; 
 These all increase, till in unnoticed years 
 The stony tower as grey with age appears ; 
 With coats of vegetation, thinly spread, 
 Coat above coat, the living on the dead : 
 These then dissolve to dust, and make a way 
 For bolder foliage, nursed by their decay ; 
 The long-enduring Ferns in time will all 
 Die and depose their dust upon the wall ; 
 Where the winged seed may rest, till many a flower 
 Show Flora's triumph o'er the falling tower.
 
 GEORGE CRABBE I 33 
 
 I choose these lines for citation because they 
 form, perhaps, the most purely descriptive pas- 
 sage in Crabbe; and even here it is really the 
 association of generations of mankind with an 
 ancient house of worship that stirs the poet's feel- 
 ings. For pieces of greater scope one should go 
 to such pictures as the ocean tempest in The 
 Borough, which I would not spoil by quoting in- 
 complete. In his study of the Roman decadent 
 poets, M. Nisard has made an elaborate compari- 
 son of the storm scenes in the Odyssey, the ALneid, 
 and the Pharsalia, showing the regular increase 
 from Homer down of descriptive matter added for 
 merely picturesque effect, apart from its connec- 
 tion with the human action involved. It would 
 not be easy to find a better example of extended 
 description completely fused with human interest 
 than this tempest in The Borough. Every detail 
 of that animated picture is interpreted through 
 human activity and emotion. This does not mean 
 that Crabbe's attitude toward nature is that of an 
 emotional pantheism which uses the outer world 
 as a mere symbol of the soul. Very far from that : 
 the human emotions are in this passage the direct 
 outcome of a sharply defined natural occurrence. 
 In another scene, one that has achieved a kind of 
 fame among critics, he tells the story, in his quiet, 
 satirical manner, of a lover who goes a journey to 
 meet his beloved. The lover's way leads him 
 over a barren heath and a sandy road, but. in his 
 state of exalted expectation, everything that meets
 
 134 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 his eye is charged with loveliness. At last he ar- 
 rives only to find his mistress has gone away, — 
 gone, as he thinks, to see a rival. He follows 
 her, and now his way takes him 
 
 by a river's side, 
 Inland and winding, smooth, and full, and wide, 
 That rolled majestic on, in one soft-flowing tide ; 
 The bottom gravel, flowery were the banks, 
 Tall willows waving in their broken ranks ; 
 The road, now near, now distant, winding led 
 By lovely meadows which the waters fed. 
 
 But all is hideous to his jealous eye. " I hate 
 these scenes! " he cries: 
 
 I hate these long green lanes ; there 's nothing seen 
 In this vile country but eternal green. 
 
 All this is the furthest possible remove from 
 vague reverie; it is a bit of amusing psychology, 
 tending to distinguish more sharply between man 
 and nature rather than to blend them in any haze 
 of symbolism. 
 
 It may be imagined from Crabbe's power over 
 details that he should excel in another sort of de- 
 scription, in scenes of still life, which come even 
 closer to the affairs of humanity; and, indeed, 
 there are scattered through his poems little genre 
 pictures that for minuteness and accuracy can be 
 likened only to the masterpieces of Dutch art in 
 that kind. The locus classicus (if such a term may 
 be used of so unfamiliar a poet) of this genre writ-
 
 GEORGE CRABBE I 35 
 
 ing is the section of The Borough that describes 
 the dwellings of the poor. I cannot refrain from 
 quoting a few of the introductory lines to show 
 how skilfully he prepares the mind for the picture 
 that is to succeed : 
 
 There, fed by food they love, to rankest size, 
 Around the dwellings, docks and wormwood rise ; 
 Here the strong mallow strikes her slimy root, 
 Here the dull nightshade hangs her deadly fruit ; 
 On hills of dust the henbane's faded green 
 And pencilled flower of sickly scent is seen. 
 
 And this is the poet who has been censured for 
 lack of descriptive powers ! Of the scene that fol- 
 lows, — the " long boarded building," with one 
 vast room, where the degraded families of the out- 
 cast are huddled together, — no selection can con- 
 vey anything but the most inadequate impression; 
 it must be read intact, and once read it will cling 
 to the memory forever. Here, at least, is a bit 
 that is as vivid as a picture by Van Ostade, or 
 Teniers: 
 
 On swinging shelf are things incongruous stored, — 
 Scraps of their food, — the cards and cribbage-board, — 
 With pipes and pouches ; while on peg below, 
 Hang a lost member's fiddle and its bow ; 
 That still reminds them how he 'd dance and play, 
 Ere sent untimely to the Convicts' Bay. 
 
 It must be clear even from these imperfect selec- 
 tions that Crabbe was able to envelop his inani- 
 mate world with an atmosphere peculiar to his
 
 136 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 own genius. As for the human beings that move 
 through his scenes, if one were given to compari- 
 sons, he would probably liken them to the people 
 of Dickens. The comparison is apt both for its 
 accuracy and its limitations. The world of Crabbe 
 is on the surface much like that of Dickens, but 
 examined more closely it is seen to be less per- 
 vaded with humour, and more with wit; its pa- 
 thos, too, is less pungent and firmer, and its moral 
 tone is quite diverse. Save in his later Tales of 
 the Hall, — which, after all, are scarcely an excep- 
 tion to the rule, — the characters in Crabbe's poems 
 are taken from the ranks of the humble and poor; 
 they are in external appearance the L,ondon folk 
 of Dickens transferred to the country. But they 
 rarely ever descend, like Dickens's portraits, into 
 caricature, for the reason that their divergencies 
 grow more from some inner guiding moral trait, 
 and are less the mere outward distinctions of trick 
 and manner. They are, too, more directly the out- 
 come of divergent individual will; they are, for 
 this reason, more perfectly rounded out in their 
 personality, and they bear with them a more 
 complete sense of moral responsibility for their 
 associations. 
 
 We are carried to the green lanes and sandy 
 shores of England, but it is not the land of oid po- 
 etic illusions. Here are no scenes of idyllic peace^ 
 no Corydons murmuring liquid love to Phyllis or 
 Neaera in the shade. I do not mean to imply that 
 the orthodox pastoral dreams are without justi-
 
 GEORGE CRABBE I 37 
 
 fication, for that would be to condemn the central 
 theme of Paradise Lost, not to mention a host of 
 minor poems justly beloved. But certainly these 
 dreams lie perilously near to mavvkishness and in- 
 sincerity, and if for no other reason we could ad- 
 mire Crabbe for his manly resistance to their easy 
 allurements. It seems that he set himself delib- 
 erately to ridicule and rebuke the common vapid- 
 ities of that facile school. In those introductory 
 lines to The Village, notable chiefly because they 
 were tampered with by Dr. Johnson, he directly 
 satirises the poets — and his master, Pope, was in 
 youth one of the worst sinners in this respect — 
 who imitate Virgil rather than nature. He too 
 had sought the sweet peace and smiling resigna- 
 tion of rural life, but instead he had found only 
 the cry of universal labour and contention : 
 
 Here, wandering loug, amid these frowning fields, 
 I sought the simple life that Nature yields ; 
 Rapine and Wrong and Fear usurped her place, 
 And a bold, artful, surly, savage race. 
 
 An atmosphere of gloom is, indeed, over 
 Crabbe' s human world; not moroseness or morbid 
 sentimentality, but a note of stern judicial pity for 
 the frailties and vices of the men he knew and por- 
 trayed. His own early life in a miserable fishing 
 hamlet on the Suffolk coast, under a hard father, 
 his starving years of literary apprenticeship in 
 London, and then for a time the salt bread of 
 dependency as private chaplain to the Duke of
 
 138 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Rutland, acquainted hiin with many sorrows 
 which years of comparative prosperity could not 
 entirely obliterate. He is at bottom a true Calvin- 
 ist, showing that peculiar form of fatalism which 
 still finds it possible to magnify the free will, and 
 to avoid the limp surrender of determinism. Man- 
 kind as a body lies under a fatal burden of suffer- 
 ing and toil, because as a body men are depraved 
 and turn from righteousness; but to the individ- 
 ual man there always remains open a path up 
 from darkness into light, a way out of condemna- 
 tion into serene peace. And it is with this mix- 
 ture of judicial aloofness and hungering sympathy 
 that Crabbe dwells on the sadness of long and 
 hopeless waiting, the grief of broken love, the re- 
 morse of wasted opportunities, the burden of pov- 
 erty, the solitude of failure, which run like dark 
 threads through most of his Tales. And in one 
 poem, at least, he has attained the full tragic 
 style with an intensity and singleness cf effect 
 that rank him among the few master poets of hu- 
 man passion. The story of Peter Gri7nes — his 
 abuse of his old father, his ill-treatment of the 
 workhouse lads brought from London, and his 
 final madness and death — is the most powerful 
 tragedy of remorse in the English language. I 
 have already quoted the picture of the desolate 
 shallows and " the lazy tide in its hot slimy chan- 
 nel " where the wretch sought to hide his guilt; 
 but not less perfect in its art is Peter's own story 
 of the three lonely reaches in the river where the
 
 GEORGE CRABBE 
 
 '39 
 
 images of his victims used to rise up and haunt 
 his vision: 
 
 " There were three places, where they ever rose, — 
 The whole long river has not such as those, — 
 Places accursed, where, if a man remain, 
 He '11 see the things which strike him to the brain ; 
 And there they made me on my paddle lean, 
 And look at them for hours; — accursed scene ! " 
 
 Then madness struck into his soul : 
 
 "In one fierce summer-day, when my poor brain 
 Was burning hot, and cruel was my pain, 
 Then came this father-foe, and there he stood 
 With his two boys again upon the flood : 
 There was more mischief in their eyes, more glee 
 In their pale faces, when they glared at me : 
 Still they did force me on the oar to rest, 
 And when they saw me fainting and oppressed, 
 He with his hand, the old man, scooped the flood, 
 And there came flame about him mixed with blood; 
 He bade me stoop and look upon the place, 
 Then flung the hot-red liquor in my face ; 
 Burning it blazed, and then I roared for pain, 
 I thought the demons would have turned my brain." 
 
 But if the atmosphere of these poems is sombre, 
 that does not mean they are without brighter 
 glimpses of joy. As he himself expresses it, they 
 are relieved by ' ' gleams of transient mirth and 
 hours of sweet repose." In fact, Crabbe has con- 
 trived to include a vast number of human inter- 
 ests and passions in these simple Tales. There 
 are pages of literary satire on the Gothic romances 
 of the day, more neatly executed even than North- 
 anger Abbey. There are poems, like the second
 
 140 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 letter of The Borough, overflowing with tender 
 sentiment; tales such as Phccbe Dawson, where 
 the pathos is almost too painful to be easily sup- 
 ported. There are stories of quaint playfulness, 
 like The Frank Courtship. Humour, too, is not 
 wanting, and now and then comes a stroke of 
 memorable wit. Jealousy, ambition, pride, van- 
 ity, despair, and all the petty tyrannies of con- 
 ceit are set off with marvellous acuteness. Even 
 abounding joy is not absent. I do not know but 
 the sense of charm, of homely intimate life, of 
 tranquil resignation, is, for all their dark colours, 
 the final impression of these Talcs. And every- 
 where they show the delightful gift of the story- 
 teller. Each separate poem is a miniature novel 
 wrought out with unflagging zest and almost im- 
 peccable art. The story of the younger brother 
 in Tales of the Hall glows again with " the sober 
 certainty of waking bliss ' ' ; and the older brother's 
 history begins with a rapturous tide of romantic 
 dreaming that fairly sings and pulses with beauty. 
 The whole of this second story is, in fact, a liter- 
 ary masterpiece, for its scenes of joy, followed by 
 despondency and heroic forbearance, controlled 
 throughout by the unerring psychological instinct 
 of the poet. 
 
 But this unerring instinct is not confined to any 
 one tale ; it guides the poet in the creation of all 
 his multitudinous characters. At first, perhaps, 
 as we see the ethical motives that underlie a char- 
 acter so clearly defined, it seems the poet is deal-
 
 GEORGE CRABBE I4I 
 
 ing merely with a moral type ; but suddenly some 
 little limitation is thrown in, some modification of 
 motive, which changes the character from a cold 
 abstraction to a living and unmistakable person- 
 ality. Crabbe has been called a realist, and in one 
 sense the term is appropriate ; but in the meaning 
 commonly given to the word it is singularly inept. 
 The inner moral springs of character are what first 
 interested him, and his keen perception of man- 
 ners and environment only serves to save him from 
 the coldness of eighteenth-century abstractions. 
 
 I have dwelt at length on these phases of 
 Crabbe' s work which would strike even a casual 
 reader, for the sufficient reason that the casual 
 reader in his case scarcely exists. The real prob- 
 lem, as I have already intimated, is to explain 
 why a poet of such great, almost supreme powers 
 should fail to preserve a place in the memory of crit- 
 ics, not to mention his lack of a popular audience. 
 His failure is due in part, no doubt, to the use of 
 a metrical form which we choose to contemn, but 
 chiefly it is due to the fact that he is at once of us 
 and not of us. His presentation of the world is 
 in spirit essentially modern, so that we do not 
 grant him the indulgence unconsciously allowed 
 to poets who describe a different form of society, 
 and whose appeal to us is impersonal and general; 
 while at the same time he ignores or even derides 
 what has become the primary emotion we desire 
 in our literary favourites. Since the advent of 
 Shelley and Wordsworth and the other great
 
 142 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 contemporaries of Crabbe our attitude toward na- 
 ture has altered profoundly. We demand of the 
 poet a minute, almost a scientific acquaintance 
 with the obscurer beasts and flowers ; but still 
 more we demand, if the poet is to receive our 
 deeper admiration, a certain note of mysticism, a 
 feeling of some vast and indefinable presence 
 beyond the finite forms described, a lurking sense 
 of pantheism by which the personality of the ob- 
 server seems to melt into what he observes or is 
 swallowed up in a vague reverie. When we think 
 of the great nature-passages of the century, we 
 are apt to recall the solemn mysteries of Words- 
 worth's Tintern Abbey or Shelley's Ode to the 
 West Wind. Even in poets who are not frankly 
 of the romantic school, and who are imbued with 
 the classical spirit, the same undercurrent of rev- 
 erie is heard. Matthew Arnold's verse is full 
 of these subtle echoes. It may be caused by a 
 tide of reminiscence which dulls the sharpness of 
 present impressions, as in so simple a line as this : 
 
 Lone Daulis aud the high Cephissian vale; 
 
 or it may be present because the words are over- 
 freighted with reflection, as in the closing lines of 
 
 The Future ; 
 
 As the pale waste widens around him, 
 
 As the banks fade dimmer away, 
 
 As the stars come out, and the night-wind 
 
 Brings up the stream 
 
 Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea ; — 
 
 but everywhere this note of reverie runs through
 
 GEORGE CRABBE 143 
 
 the greater modern poets. Now of science Crabbe 
 owned more than a necessary share, but for 
 reverie, for symbolism, for mystic longings to- 
 ward the infinite, he had no sense whatever. It 
 is quite true, as Goethe declared, that a " sense 
 of infinitude " is the mark of high poetry, and I 
 firmly believe that the absence of this sense is the 
 one thing that shuts Crabbe out of the company 
 of the few divinely inspired singers, — the few who 
 bring to us gleanings from their ' ' commerce with 
 the skies," to use old Ovid's phrase. But it is 
 also true that this sense of infinitude as it speaks 
 in Homer and Shakespeare is something far more 
 sober and rational than the musings of the modern 
 spirit, — something radically different from the 
 ecstatic rhapsodies of Shelley's Promethetis Un- 
 bound ; and Crabbe's very limitations lend to his 
 verse a brave manliness, a clean good sense, that 
 tone up the mind of the reader like a strong cordial. 
 And there is the same difference in Crabbe's 
 treatment of humanity. Wordsworth, feeling this 
 difference, was led to speak slightingly of Crabbe's 
 " unpoetical mode of considering human nature 
 and society." His repulsion may be attributed in 
 part to Crabbe's constant use of a form of analysis 
 which checks the unconstrained flow of the emo- 
 tions ; but the chasm between the two is deeper 
 than that. Wordsworth was ready to ridicule 
 the sham idyllic poetry as freely as Crabbe or any 
 other ; but, at bottom, are not Michael and the 
 Leech-gatherer y and a host of others that move
 
 144 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 through Wordsworth's scenes, the true successors 
 of the Corydons and Damons that dance under 
 the trees on the old idyllic swards ? In place of 
 pastoral dreams of peace we hear now " the still, 
 sad music of humanity." Yet it is the same 
 humanity considered as a whole ; humanity be- 
 trayed by circumstances and corrupted by luxury, 
 but needing only the freedom of the hills and 
 lakes to develop its native virtues ; humanity 
 caught up in some tremulous vision of harmony 
 with the universal world; it is, in short, the vague 
 aspiration of what we have called humanitarian- 
 ism, and have endowed with the solemnities of a 
 religion. If this is necessary to poetry, Crabbe 
 is undoubtedly " unpoetical." In him there is no 
 thought of a perfect race made corrupt by luxury, 
 no vision of idyllic peace, no musing on humanity 
 as an abstraction, but always a sturdy understand- 
 ing of the individual man reaping the fruits of his 
 own evil-doing or righteousness; his interest is in 
 the individual will, never in the problem of classes. 
 His sharply defined sense of man's personal re- 
 sponsibility coincides with his lack of reverent 
 enthusiasm toward nature as an abstract idea, and 
 goes to create that unusual atmosphere about his 
 works which repels the modern sentimentalist. So 
 it happens, we think, that he can appeal strongly 
 to only a few readers of peculiar culture; for it is 
 just the province of culture or right education — 
 is it not ? — that it shall train the mind to breathe 
 easily an atmosphere foreign to its native habit.
 
 THE NOVELS OF GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 When a novelist's works come to us in a new 
 edition, revised and complete, it is time to con- 
 sider him seriously as one whose task is accom- 
 plished, and to ask what place he holds in the 
 history of fiction ; and such a consideration may 
 seem in an especial manner timely in the case of 
 an author like George Meredith, 1 whose novels 
 have elicited such extravagant praise and such 
 sweeping condemnation from different readers. 
 Indeed, I know of nothing much more discourag- 
 ing than to read in succession the various reviews 
 of Mr. Meredith's works. There appears to be no 
 middle ground between the homage of R. L,. 
 Stevenson, to whom Rhoda Fleming was " the 
 strongest thing in English letters since Shake- 
 speare died," and the equally excessive detraction 
 of William Watson, who has put on record his 
 impression of The Egoist as being ' ' the most en- 
 tirely wearisome book purporting to be a novel 
 that " he had "ever toiled through in " his "life." 
 And withal few or none of these critics have 
 deemed it necessary to give a rational explana- 
 
 1 The Works of George Meredith. 16 vols. New York : 
 
 Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898. 
 vol. 11. — IO. 
 
 145
 
 I46 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 tion of their opinions. One asks in amazement 
 whether the judgment is utterly and forever to be 
 excluded from criticism by this kind of irresponsi- 
 ble impressionism. 
 
 Probably the first characteristic of these novels 
 to attract the attention of even the most heedless 
 reader is the peculiar language employed, one 
 might almost say, with malice prepense. " Our 
 language is not rich in subtleties for prose. A 
 writer who is not servile, and has insight, must 
 coin from his own mint." So Mr. Meredith 
 states his case, and it must be admitted he has 
 coined with a liberal hand, not so much in the 
 formation of new words, — though he is apt to 
 prefer a strange word to a common one, — as in 
 his distortion of language in order to surcharge it 
 with thought and sensation. It is perhaps this 
 peculiarity of style that led an eminent critic to 
 declare his chief fault was inability to tell a story, 
 — rather a grave charge against a story-teller, if it 
 could be substantiated. The construction of a 
 plot like that of Evan Harriyigton may be suffi- 
 cient answer to such a charge, but it is not so easy 
 to refute the censure of over-cleverness to which 
 his pointed style lays him open. 
 
 Mr. Meredith alludes more than once to his own 
 philosophic intentions, and speaks with some irri- 
 tation of the necessity of disguising his deeper 
 meaning for fear of seeming obscure. We fancy, 
 however, that it is not profundity of reflection on 
 human life which causes obscurity so much as the
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 147 
 
 refraction of this into innumerable burning points. 
 And herein lies much of the difference between 
 real depth and mere cleverness. In any true 
 sense of the word there is as much depth of re- 
 flection in Henry Esmond as in The Egoist ; but 
 the earlier novel is less obscure, because the 
 thought is presented in broad masses, so to speak, 
 which rest the mind while stimulating it, whereas 
 The Egoist confuses with its endless clashing epi- 
 grams. Mr. Meredith, like his own Mrs. Mount- 
 stuart, is "mad for cleverness," and does not stop 
 often enough to remember his judgment on Sir 
 Austin Feverel : "A maker of proverbs — what is 
 he but a narrow mind, the mouthpiece of a nar- 
 rower ? " and, " A proverb is a halfway house to 
 an idea, I conceive. ' ' Now, although the highest 
 culture must always demand more repose of mind 
 than an epigrammatist can offer, yet the flippant 
 public is readily caught b3^ a superficial sparkling 
 cleverness, as recent popular novels sufficiently 
 attest, and Mr. Meredith might be expected to 
 attract such an audience, were it not for one grave 
 defect. His cleverness is sparkling, but it is by 
 no means superficial, and such cleverness does 
 not make easy reading. Mr. McCarthy, one of 
 his admirers, has said of the novels that "a man 
 or woman must be really in earnest to care much 
 about them at all." Really, our author seems to 
 be caught between the devil and the deep sea. 
 Yet criticise his style as .you will, there is after all 
 a note of sincerity in it, something so naturally
 
 148 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 artificial, if the paradox may be pardoned, that 
 we are prone to overlook its extravagances, and 
 can even appreciate its fascination for certain 
 minds. It may be pretty well characterised in his 
 own words as ' ' the puffing of a giant ; a strong 
 wind rather than speech." 
 
 To Stevenson, Meredith's is the only conversa- 
 tion since Shakespeare. It is a little hard to 
 understand Stevenson's unreasoning enthusiasm 
 for an author who is in every respect a direct con- 
 trast to him,— a contrast nowhere more apparent 
 than in the dialogue of these novels. Mr. Mere- 
 dith's characters all talk Meredith ; they are all 
 epigrammatic, and all his fools are wits. This 
 might perhaps be pardoned, if our author had 
 only learned from Shakespeare the further art of 
 making his fools witty and natural at the same 
 time ; but it must be confessed that Mr. Meredith 
 too often employs language so artificial as entirely 
 to destroy the illusion. In one respect, however, 
 he has been led by his oblique method of thought 
 into a false kind of realism which a deeper sense 
 of art would have corrected. He says of one of 
 his characters that " she had not uttered words, 
 she had shed meanings " ; and this is an admirable 
 description of much of his conversation. To be 
 sure, in real life we are apt to leave our thoughts 
 half expressed, or even to say one thing while an- 
 other thought is in our mind; but the artist should 
 remember that in actual conversation there are, 
 besides words, a hundred ways of conveying our
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 149 
 
 meaning which the printed page cannot employ. 
 To produce the same impression, the novelist's 
 language must necessarily be fuller and more ex- 
 plicit than is needed in life, and true realism 
 should recognise this difference. Generally Mr. 
 Meredith leaves his readers to gather this under- 
 current of thought as best they ma3 r , but in one 
 place he has been kind enough to add a comment 
 to the dialogue, which sets in so clear a light this 
 troublesome source of obscurity that I am tempted 
 to quote the passage in full, though it has already 
 been used for the same purpose. This conversa- 
 tion, then, between Rhoda Fleming and Robert 
 Eccles proceeds as follows: 
 
 "I've always thought you were born to be a lady." 
 (You had that ambition, young madam.) 
 
 She answered: "That's what I don't understand." 
 (Your saying it, O my friend !) 
 
 " You will soon take to your new duties." (You have 
 small objection to them even now.) 
 
 " Yes, or my life won't be worth much." (Know, that 
 you are driving me to it.) 
 
 " And I wish you happiness, Rhoda." (You are madly 
 imperilling the prospect thereof.) 
 
 To each of them the second meaning stood shadowy 
 behind the utterances. And further, — 
 
 " Thank you, Robert." (I shall have to thank you for 
 the issue.) 
 
 " Now it 's time to part." (Do you not see that there 
 is a danger for me in remaining ?) 
 
 "Good-night." (Behold, I am submissive.) 
 
 " Good-night, Rhoda." (You were the first to give the 
 signal of parting.)
 
 I50 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 " Good-night." (I am simply submissive.) 
 
 " Why not my name ? Are you hurt with me ? " 
 
 Rhoda choked. The indirectness of speech had been a 
 shelter to her, permitting her to hint at more than she 
 dared clothe in words. 
 
 Again the delicious dusky rose glowed between his 
 eyes. 
 
 But he had put his hand out to her, and she had not 
 taken it. 
 
 "What have I done to offend you? I really don't 
 know, Rhoda." 
 
 " Nothing." The flower had closed. 
 
 Here as so often Mr. Meredith has himself fur- 
 nished the means of criticising him. Indeed, it 
 would be quite practicable to compose a full re- 
 view of his work by forming a cento of phrases 
 from his own pen. The conversation just quoted 
 has been commended for its high realism, and the 
 praise is not undeserved ; but unfortunately the 
 volumes are packed with dialogue of this oblique 
 character, where there is no comment added to 
 guide the bewildered reader. The intellectual 
 labour required for such writing is prodigious ; 
 the pity of it is that simpler language would be a 
 higher form of realism, because truer to life as life 
 must be expressed through the novelist's artistic 
 medium. It is in the larger sense an error of 
 style, the same error which has led him to break 
 up his thought into points, and leave the tedium 
 of the intellect everywhere disagreeably manifest. 
 I have called it the substitution of cleverness for 
 true wisdom ; and if Mr. Meredith stands far
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 151 
 
 above the ordinary shrewd writer of the day, it 
 is because he is genuinely clever where others 
 only strive to be so. In the end we are tempted 
 once more to turn against him his own weapon 
 of attack, and quote from The Egoist : " You see 
 how easy it is to deceive one who is an artist in 
 phrases. Avoid them, Miss Dale ; they dazzle 
 the penetration of the composer. That is why 
 people of ability like Mrs. Mountstuart see so 
 little ; they are so bent on describing brilliantly." 
 One cannot help remarking, in this connection, 
 how few of our English novel-writers are great as 
 stylists. It is a noteworthy fact that any other 
 class of authors — essayists, historians, divines, 
 and even philosophers — can boast a greater num- 
 ber of avowed masters of language. Fielding has 
 a strong virile style, but lacks charm and grace ; 
 Sterne is exquisite but capricious ; Jane Austen's 
 language is as limpid as still water, and occasion- 
 ally as biting as acid, but fails in compass ; Haw- 
 thorne's style is perfect for romance, but scarcely 
 flexible enough for an ordinary novelist's use. 
 Perhaps Thackeray alone can be accounted a 
 master in word-craft, and certainly Meredith is 
 not the least peccant among the brotherhood. 
 For one who desires to penetrate into the secrets 
 of the art, I suppose no better course could be 
 adopted than the careful study of two books, 
 Henry Esmond and Castiglione's // Cortegia?w : 
 the former being the most perfect specimen 
 among English novels of the science of writing as
 
 152 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 cuuuingly defined by the Italian. I was amazed, 
 recently, to find that not a single copy of Castig- 
 lione's famous work was discoverable in a city of 
 six hundred thousand inhabitants ; and indeed, 
 Italian literature in general is so little read among 
 us that it may not be amiss to transcribe a sen- 
 tence or two from // Cortegiano. This work, as 
 the name indicates, is a discussion of the qualities 
 necessary to form a perfect courtier, or, as we 
 should say to-day, gentleman ; and in the first 
 book, after dwelling at some length on the need 
 of grace in every action, the dialogue turns aside 
 to touch on the use of language or style, and 
 continues as follows: 
 
 Often I have considered in myself -whence this grace 
 arises, and, leaving aside those who have received it from 
 the stars, I have discovered one universal rule which 
 more than any other seems to me in this respect to pre- 
 vail in all things that men do or say : and that is, so far 
 as possible, and as if it were a sharp and perilous rock, to 
 avoid affectation ; and, if I may be pardoned the word, to 
 adopt in everything a certain sprezzatura [I hardly know 
 how to translate the word ; it signifies an easy contempt 
 for the means employed, a sort of gentlemanlike su- 
 periority to the results]— a certain sprezzatura, which 
 hides the art, and shows that what we say or do is done 
 without fatigue and as it were without taking thought. 
 From this, as I think, springs the highest grace; for 
 every one knows the difficulty of things rare and well 
 done, and in such things a sense of ease produces the 
 greatest wonder ; whereas, the display of force and effort 
 destroys the charm and detracts from the honour of things 
 that may be great in themselves. . . .
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH I 53 
 
 Now writing, in my opinion, is only a form of speech 
 which abides after the man has spoken, being an image, 
 or rather the life itself, of his words. Therefore, in 
 spoken language, which is dispersed with the breath that 
 formed it, a certain license is permitted beyond what is 
 allowed in writing ; for writing preserves speech, sub- 
 mitting it to the judgment of him who reads and afford- 
 ing time for mature consideration. Hence it is reasonable 
 to employ greater diligence in order that our written 
 language may be pure and elegant, but not to such a 
 degree that it should differ essentially from speech. 
 
 Castiglione was an avowed Platonist, and it is 
 probable that his conception of style is based on a 
 study of that philosopher who certainly, more than 
 any other writer of the past or present, succeeded 
 in combining the elements of grazia and sprezza- 
 tura. In reading Thackeray, I have often been 
 struck by a kind of similarity in his use of lan- 
 guage to Plato's; there is the same easy conversa- 
 tional tone, which is always graceful, and rarely, 
 even at its loosest, slipshod, and which on the 
 proper occasion can express sentiments of true 
 sublimity without the slightest apparent effort. 
 It is the complete absence of this grace and this 
 sprezzatura that renders so much of Meredith un- 
 comfortable and at times even painful reading. 
 And yet it must be confessed that now and again, 
 without losing the peculiar flavour of his style, he 
 is able to produce pages of a strange and haunting 
 beauty that almost atone for chapters of dreary 
 affectation. I have quoted Mr. Meredith in 
 condemnation of himself; scant justice calls for
 
 154 SIIELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 quotation from that famous scene by the old weir 
 in Richard Fever el, withal one of the most enchant- 
 ing love scenes in our literature : 
 
 Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by 
 the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying 
 at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from 
 the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and 
 there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was 
 shaded by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that 
 left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nod- 
 ding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her 
 shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in 
 shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She 
 was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. 
 On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were 
 stained. This blooming young person was regaling on 
 dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water. 
 . . . The little skylark went up above her, all song, 
 to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from 
 a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird 
 fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note : the king- 
 fisher flashed emerald out of green osiers : a bow-winged 
 heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped 
 toward her, containing a dreamy youth ; and still she 
 plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy 
 prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished 
 not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the 
 green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the 
 weir-fall's thundering white, amid the breath and beauty 
 of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in 
 a fair setting ; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth 
 leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and 
 beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, 
 as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture 
 was so graceful, that though he was making straight for
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH I 55 
 
 the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one en- 
 ticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by 
 unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and 
 could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his 
 right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up 
 dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. 
 Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a 
 hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the 
 crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he 
 enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, 
 whither he followed her. 
 
 He had landed on an island of the still-vexed Ber- 
 moothes. The world lay wrecked behind him : Raynham 
 hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid reality of 
 this white hand which had drawn him thither away 
 thousands of leagues in an eye-twinkle. Hark, how 
 Ariel sang overhead ! What splendour in the heavens ! 
 What marvels of beauty about his enchanted brows ! 
 And, O you wonder ! Fair Flame ! by whose light the 
 glories of being are now first seen. . . . Radiant 
 Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is at your feet. 
 
 I have delayed at some length on this matter of 
 language, because it is really of vital importance, 
 — as vital, for instance, as colour to a painter, — and 
 because in Meredith particularly an appreciation 
 of his style carries with it a pretty general under- 
 standing of his work as novelist. There is the 
 same lack of graceful ease, the same laboured in- 
 genuity in his narration and character-drawing. 
 
 His characters do not stand forth smoothly or 
 naturally, so that we comprehend them and live 
 with them without effort. We seem to be with 
 the author in his phrontistcrion, or thinking-shop ;
 
 156 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 there is continual evidence of the intellectual ma- 
 chinery by which his characters are created. To 
 some this creaking of the wheels and pulleys is so 
 offensive that they throw away the books in dis- 
 gust, while others, themselves professional writers 
 in large part, take an actual pleasure in seeing the 
 whole process of construction laid bare before 
 them. We have in Mr. Meredith's works the 
 analytical novel par excellence, and it would be 
 hard to exaggerate the contrast between these and 
 the perceptive novel, or novel of manners, of 
 which Thackeray is the great exemplar. There 
 is undoubtedly a certain legitimate joy of the in- 
 tellect in pure analysis ; yet it should seem that 
 in the novel, as in every other form of art, the 
 true master imitates nature more unconsciously, 
 more objectively, if you will. The actions and 
 thoughts of his characters present themselves to 
 his mind as a concrete reality, and so he repro- 
 duces them. It is rather the part of the scientist 
 to evoke a character from conscious analysis of 
 motives. I have heard an eminent critic censure 
 Thackeray as shallow, and extol Meredith for his 
 profundity, without perhaps pausing to reflect that 
 the same logic would condemn Shakespeare. In- 
 deed, such a question would resolve itself into a 
 debate over the respective profundity of art and 
 science — surely the idlest of all possible questions. 
 More to the point is it to observe that the highest 
 pleasure, such as comes with a sense of inner ex- 
 pansion, and which art aims above all things to
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH I 57 
 
 bestow, is largely dependent on that sprezzatura 
 whose lack is felt as much in Mr. Meredith's 
 character study as in his style. 
 
 Despite the admirable narrative powers dis- 
 played in Rhoda Fleming and elsewhere, the same 
 lack of ease is too often manifest in the construc- 
 tion and plot of Mr. Meredith's stories. So diffi- 
 cult is it, for example, to follow the events in the 
 closing chapters of The Egoist that the pleasure of 
 a first reading of that inimitable book is consider- 
 ably diminished. But in the construction of these 
 novels there lurks a deeper error than mere want 
 of facility. We cannot but feel that the author 
 has shown unusual genius in a wrong direction ; 
 and in fact, strange as it may seem, any sound 
 criticism of Mr. Meredith must continually repro- 
 bate his methods, while at the same time admiring 
 his powers. To this is partly due, no doubt, the 
 extreme divergence of opinion in regard to his 
 work. It is easy to retort, as Mr. McCarthy re- 
 torted long ago, that the great advantage of the 
 novel lies in the very fact that it has not been 
 subjected to literary canons, and remains free to 
 follow any direction. Epic has been strangled by 
 epic law ; tragedy was for a long time suffocated 
 by the three unities; and so it has been with other 
 branches of literature ; but in the novel there is 
 no form admitted to be of itself right or wrong. 
 There is truth in this idea, and the nature of the 
 novel has kept it free from many useless restric- 
 tions. Yet, however we may welcome every form
 
 158 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 of narration, and even rejoice that novels are not 
 all cast in one mould, still our judgment must 
 distinguish, and must regard one form as higher 
 than another in so far as it is capable of arous- 
 ing greater and more satisfactory interest in the 
 reader. 
 
 Apart from the story of pure adventure, which 
 as a reaction has come into favour of late, but 
 which can never touch the reader's deeper feel- 
 ings, there have been from the beginning two 
 classes of novels ; and, although the terms may 
 be slightly misleading since the rules of prose and 
 poetical narration can never quite coincide, I 
 would distinguish these two classes as the epic 
 and the dramatic. Tom yones is epic in its aim ; 
 Clarissa Harlowe is dramatic. The two schools 
 still persist side by side, and a clear understanding 
 of their different aims is of prime importance in 
 estimating the works under question. 
 
 It is rather a far cry from latter-day fiction to 
 Homer and Sophocles ; yet in distinguishing be- 
 tween the aims of epic and dramatic narration 
 one is tempted to appeal to Greek rather than to 
 modern poets, for the very reason that in Greece 
 the various genres were more sharply defined in 
 practice. The theme of the Iliad is ostensibly the 
 wrath of Achilles, but in reality the effect of the 
 poem is double. The central theme is heightened 
 and diversified by the picture of its influence on a 
 great series of events, while at the same time a 
 wonderful panorama of war and life is unrolled
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH I 59 
 
 before us, to whose varied scenes unity of effect is 
 lent by the main subject. During a considerable 
 portion of the poem Achilles is almost forgotten. 
 No drama remains which deals directly with the 
 quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, but from the 
 other dramas of Sophocles it is not hard to con- 
 ceive how the action would appear on the stage. 
 The attention of the audience would be concen- 
 trated throughout on Achilles' s passion ; the lan- 
 guage employed would enhance its intensity; and 
 all the details of life not bearing directly upon it 
 would be omitted. In a sense, the aim of the epic 
 is breadth of view, the aim of tragedy is intensity. 
 the one proposes to offer a large picture of life 
 artistically disposed, the other to express a brief 
 passion or conflict. The drama which should at- 
 tempt to concentrate its passionate discourse upon 
 such a series of events as those depicted in the 
 epic would be intolerable. It would at once seem 
 out of proportion, for existence is not normally 
 narrowed down to one grand passion, and the 
 throwing of such intense light on the little details 
 of life would affect our emotional nature very 
 much as close confinement would affect the body : 
 we should gasp to be free. Besides keeping out 
 of view the trivial features of life, the tragedy 
 must further idealise by the generalising influence 
 of highly wrought metaphorical language. Com- 
 pare, for instance, one of Ibsen's plays with Mac- 
 beth. Ibsen has violated the law of tragedy by 
 descending to trivialities and by using prosaic
 
 l6o SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 language. The result is evident. He affects our 
 emotional nature strongly, more poignantly than 
 Shakespeare ; but we lay down such a play as 
 Ghosts with a sense of inner suffocation, whereas 
 Macbeth gives a feeling of expansion, and so, as 
 Aristotle would say, purges the passions. Ibsen 
 is as false to life as he is to art. Deep emotion in 
 reality tends to evoke general ideas, though in the 
 dumbness of our heart we may need a poet to give 
 them utterance. And all the while the daily trivial 
 events of existence go on about us as it were in 
 another sphere. We are conscious of a great gap 
 between them and our inner experience ; and 
 when at intervals the two spheres touch, the 
 shock is like a bitter awakening. Any artist 
 who confounds these regions of experience is false 
 to life and to his art. 
 
 And what has this to do with the novel ? Every- 
 thing. Despite its elasticity of form, the novel 
 which would do more than offer the lightest and 
 most transient amusement must in aim be either 
 epic or tragic, — tragic not because of its disastrous 
 denouement necessarily, but in the way it treats 
 the deeper passions. Now, whatever else fiction 
 may be, its first purpose is to entertain ; and its 
 power of entertainment becomes of a higher and 
 more lasting character in so far as it succeeds in 
 enhancing our sense of life and in purging the 
 emotions. Tom Jones and the works of that class 
 down to the great novels of Thackeray offer a 
 picture of the large currents of life ; the passions
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH l6l 
 
 and struggles of the hero are used, like the wrath 
 of Achilles, to give unity to the narrative ; and 
 we rise from perusing such books with a feeling 
 of expansion. Clarissa Harlowe and its succes- 
 sors, including modern problem novels, follow in 
 part the laws of tragedy. Everything revolves 
 about a single emotion ; and the longer and more 
 complicated the plot which the author is able to 
 concentrate upon this one emotion, the more con- 
 tracting and painful is the result. And this, we 
 maintain, is not an arbitrary question of literary 
 procedure, but a matter of psychology. 
 
 In the tragedy proper this sense of expansion is 
 obtained by purging the passious, — by liberating 
 them from the sphere of petty details, and so de- 
 personalising them, — and further by the use of 
 lofty thought couched in language far removed 
 above the speech of daily intercourse. Who ever 
 wept over Macbeth or Antigone f Indeed, the 
 story is well known that the Athenians actually 
 fined a dramatist for putting on the stage a tragedy 
 which appealed too strongly to their sympathies, 
 and forbade the play ever to be presented again. 
 But the novel which is denied the employment of 
 these tragic means must proceed in another man- 
 ner. Even more than the epos it must purge the 
 passions by enveloping them in the free current 
 of life, which proceeds serenely on its way un- 
 troubled by the anguish and complaints of the in- 
 dividual, — and thus lighten the emotions of their 
 personal poignancy. 
 
 VOL. II.— II.
 
 l62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Were space at our disposal, it would be possible 
 to analyse in detail each of Mr. Meredith's novels, 
 and show how they turn for their effect to the 
 laws of the drama rather than the epos, and how, 
 in consequence, they leave the reader with a sense 
 of contraction. So, in brief, Richard Feverel 'holds 
 the mind from first to last on a single problem 
 (and that, by the way, a fairly disagreeable one), 
 and every incident is made to bear upon its de- 
 velopment. There seems to be but one aspect — 
 the sexual relation — to human life ; and this is 
 presented without any of the alleviating circum- 
 stances of genuine tragedy. The point is made 
 clear at once by comparison with Tom Jones or 
 Pendennis, where the infinite variety of human 
 activity is unrolled before us. So too in The 
 Egoist a single problem, as the name implies, is 
 studied with unflagging persistence. Not even a 
 complete character, but one predominant trait is 
 made the centre about which all the incidents of 
 the book revolve. The novel is unquestionably 
 a most astounding piece of analytical cleverness, 
 yet is it true to nature ? Hardly, we think. The 
 final impression is one of mental and emotional 
 contraction ; and however useful such an impres- 
 sion may be in a sermon, it is not altogether amus- 
 ing in a work of art. Compare the book with 
 Pride and Prejudice, where again a single trait in 
 hero and heroine is the central theme, but where 
 this theme is used rather to lend interest to a pic- 
 ture of life, a picture in miniature yet complete in
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH I 63 
 
 its way, and the difference is immediately appar- 
 ent. The one contracts, the other expands. Nor 
 should it be supposed that this difference depends 
 to any large extent on the tragic or non-tragic 
 ending of the plot ; although the formal law of 
 the epic demands a peaceful conclusion, and the 
 novel, to give the highest pleasure, would seem 
 to follow the epic rather than the drama in this 
 respect also. Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter, 
 conies nearer to justifying the employment of the 
 tragic scheme in prose narration than any other 
 English novelist ; but to do this he has created a 
 style which carries his book almost out of the re- 
 gion of the novel. He has so subordinated the 
 realistic representation of life to a subtle all-per- 
 vading symbolism that his work is properly a 
 romance or prose- poem. That elevation and 
 generalising ideal which the tragedian effects by 
 means of his poetic medium, Hawthorne achieves 
 in part by his inimitable language and in much 
 greater part by putting aside all that close por- 
 trayal of life which forms the very substance of 
 the regular novel and by making his people and 
 his plot mere symbols of some inner shadowy 
 mood of the soul. His method is perfectly justi- 
 fied by the results, but one cannot read a page of 
 The Scarlet Letter without feeling that the author's 
 purpose and accomplishment are quite different 
 from those of Mr. Meredith or of any regular 
 novelist whose first aim is to portray real life.' 
 1 As I read over these paragraphs written a uutuber of
 
 164 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 So much may be said to explain why a writer 
 of such extraordinary genius as Mr. Meredith 
 fails to produce works of art that can be ranked 
 with the greatest. And we would repeat that 
 these artistic laws which he transgresses are not 
 conventional rules imposed arbitrarily. They are 
 inherent in the medium which the novelist must 
 use; any infraction of them means that the author 
 does not adopt the best and highest method of 
 giving pleasure at his disposal, and his error is 
 more likely to be condoned by the half-informed 
 critic than by the unreflecting reader of native 
 good taste. 
 
 In the case of Mr. Meredith the artistic fault is 
 more or less intimately connected with a still 
 deeper error, which concerns his mode of regard- 
 ing human nature, and which associates him to a 
 certain degree with the naturalists. The weak- 
 ness of the naturalistic novel has been exposed 
 more than once, but never, perhaps, so exhaus- 
 tively and competently as by Juan Valera in his 
 Nnevos Estudios. Naturalism is an outgrowth or 
 degradation, he would have it, of romanticism. 
 The romantic movement reflected an abnegation 
 of the will as controlled by reason, and a substitu- 
 tion in its place of the emotions guided by the 
 vagaries of fancy. From this untrammelled use 
 
 years ago the distinction between the epic and the dra- 
 matic novel seems to me essentially just, but incomplete. 
 At another time Clarissa Harlowe may furnish the occa- 
 sion for developing the theory.
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH l6$ 
 
 of the fancy, naturalism, following in the wake 
 of the materialistic advances of science, turned to 
 the boasted study of reality, thus leaving room 
 neither for the free will nor for the imagination. 
 The novelist, according to Zola, " is one who 
 studies man experimentally, mounting and dis- 
 mounting piece by piece the human mechanism 
 by which, under the influence of environment, he 
 performs his functions. ' ' Here is no account of 
 man as a free agent ; his acts are the inevitable 
 outcome of his inherited disposition and surround- 
 ing circumstances. As Paul Alexis forcibly ex- 
 presses it in his book on Zola, " man is, fatally, 
 the product of a particular hereditary tempera- 
 ment, which unfolds itself in a certain physical, 
 intellectual, and moral environment." 
 
 It would be neither critical nor just to class Mr. 
 Meredith unreservedly with the naturalists. In 
 many respects he is widely removed from them. 
 Naturalism can flourish only where the audience 
 itself has lost faith in the will-power, and the 
 Anglo-Saxon race is too healthy to permit one of 
 its greatest writers to fall completely under this 
 decadent influence. Nevertheless, it is true that 
 such novels as Richard Feverel and The Egoist do 
 belong in part to this category. So long as the 
 free will is paramount, a novel tends to depict a full 
 character, and to unfold a picture of life wherein 
 the individual acts upon the world, and the world 
 reacts upon him. So soon as the will is de- 
 throned, the novel tends to become a treatise on
 
 l66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the influence of environment upon character orac 
 analytical study of particular inherited traits of 
 character. Just this has happened in the case of 
 Mr. Meredith. Like his own Captain Baskelett, 
 " the secret of his art would seem to be to show 
 the automatic human creature at loggerheadi 
 with a necessity that winks at remarkable preten- 
 sions, while condemning it perpetually to doll-like 
 actions." Richard Feverel is a long and patientK 
 elaborated monograph on the development of 
 character under peculiar circumstances. Given a 
 lad of normal temper, how will he be affected by a 
 certain systematic course of training ? It will be 
 noticed, however, that the modifying influence is 
 here the active personality of his father ; we are 
 still a wide step from regarding man as a mere 
 mechanism. Justice will further add that, despite 
 the delicacy of its theme, the book remains per- 
 fectly decent throughout. In The Egoist a par- 
 ticular trait of character is analysed and expatiated 
 on with vast ingenuity and, it must be confessed, 
 rather tedious monotony. Indeed, the ordinary 
 fault of naturalism is its lack of interest, so thai 
 we see the genuine naturalists constantly seeking 
 to attract readers by all sorts of illegitimate allure- 
 ments of the animal senses. Juan Valera curtly 
 asks : ' ' How can such novels interest, when they 
 present a temperament, and not a character ; a 
 mere machine which moves in obedience to physi- 
 ological laws ? ' ' 
 
 Mr. Meredith is again far from portraying mac
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 167 
 
 from the purely physiological point of view, al- 
 though parts of Richard Fcvcrcl and others of his 
 novels do approach perilously near this view, and 
 always there is in him a tendency to confuse 
 things of the body and of the spirit. This is seen 
 in his treatment of love and women, and more 
 generally in his analysis of the emotions. Now, 
 apart from the bald statement that a character feels 
 such and such an emotion, the novelist has at 
 command two modes of description, — conversation 
 and physical action. Readers of Plato will re- 
 member that philosopher's scathing denunciation 
 of the poets, and of Homer in particular, because 
 of their portrayal of passion by means of physical 
 attributes. Their heroes weep, rend the hair, 
 roll on the ground, and give way to other demon- 
 strations which excite the critical Athenian's 
 scorn. Plato in this is consistent, for his dismis- 
 sal of the poets is but a part of his sweeping con- 
 demnation of art in general, in so far as art must 
 depend on the body for its power of expression. 
 There is undoubtedly in all art an insidious lurk- 
 ing danger, which, as Plato clearly sets forth, lies 
 in its tendency to relax the moral fibre by trans- 
 lating things spiritual into corporeal symbols. If 
 this be true, we ought to be more jealous of any 
 false encroachment of physical methods into its 
 realm; for there is a right and a wrong method, 
 and unfortunately Mr. Meredith has not always 
 kept in the narrow path. Physical actions, which 
 are under control of the will and thus remain to
 
 l68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 a great extent voluntary, are legitimate ; physical 
 states, which do not depend on the free agency 
 of the individual, must be used with a sparing 
 hand, for frequent recurrence to such means of 
 expression at once tends to confuse the spirit with 
 the body, and to offer us the study of a tempera- 
 ment in place of true characterisation. This 
 pathological mode of description is distinctly a 
 sin of modern times, culminating in the nauseous 
 abuse of the naturalists. It would be easy to 
 take all the great emotions of the heart, — fear, re- 
 venge, love, jealousy, hate, rage, despair, — and 
 show how differently they are treated in this re- 
 spect by Fielding or Thackeray and by writers of 
 the modern school. Here again the translation 
 of these passions into physical acts that depend on 
 the energy of the will leaves us with a sense of 
 expansion and mental relief, whereas the patho- 
 logical method disturbs and contracts. I cannot 
 emphasise this truth better than by quoting sev- 
 eral brief passages from Meredith, and allowing 
 them to speak for themselves. So he says of one 
 of his characters : " His head throbbed with the 
 hearing of a heavy laugh, as if a hammer had 
 knocked it. ' ' Elsewhere : ' ' His natural horror of 
 a resolute man, more than fear, made him shiver 
 and gave his tongue an acid taste. ' ' And again : 
 " Emilia thought of Wilfrid in a way that made 
 the vault of her brain seem to echo with jarred 
 chords." It is not, of course, the occasional re- 
 course to such means which is objectionable, but
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 1 69 
 
 their perpetual use. Every one will admit with 
 our novelist that ' ' we are all in submission to mor- 
 tal laws," but a stauncher belief in the power of 
 the will hesitates to accept his declaration that 
 "our souls are hideously subject to the conditions 
 of our animal nature! " 
 
 In one respect Mr. Meredith has carried this 
 passive physical expression to a fantastic ex- 
 tremity, which I mention as much for its amusing 
 absurdity as for its real significance. Apparently 
 he has found a new seat of all the emotions : this 
 is no longer the heart, or the Biblical bowels, or 
 the brain, but — the eyelids. L,et me justify the 
 statement by quotations: " Hurt vanity led Wil- 
 frid to observe that the woman's eyes dwelt with a 
 singular fulness and softness void of fire, a true 
 ox-eyed gaze, but human in the fall of the eye- 
 lids." "She had reddened deliciously, and there- 
 with hung a dewy rosy moisture on her underlids." 
 "We are creatures of custom. I am, I confess, a 
 poltroon in my affections; I dread changes. The 
 shadow of the tenth of an inch in the customary 
 elevation of an eyelid! " These are not isolated 
 cases. After a while one begins to believe that 
 hope, fear, humour, love, hate, anger, horror, 
 friendship, cunning, timidity, modesty, — all the 
 passions of human nature are bound up with the 
 flutter of an eyelid. It is the very ad absurdum of 
 passive physical description. 
 
 Mr. Meredith's psychological attitude may be 
 further traced in his characterisation of women.
 
 i;0 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 It is, in fact, noteworthy that the present race of 
 novelists are wont to take more interest in, and 
 succeed better with, their feminine than their 
 male characters. But here we tread on perilous 
 ground. After all that has been written by women 
 on the failure of the masculine mind to grasp the 
 subtleties of the female heart, what man is rash 
 enough to step forward as a judge ? Fortunately 
 for me, a clever woman has settled the matter. 
 Miss Adeline Sargent has left on record that 
 "George Meredith is one of the few novelists of 
 any age or time who see not only man but woman 
 as she is." Strange that, after such an avowal, 
 she should object so vehemently to Mr. Mere- 
 dith's psychological analysis of woman ! We may 
 perhaps explain the discrepancy by supposing that 
 he depicts women as they are, though not as they 
 are to be. But let us hear Miss Sargent again. 
 She quotes from Meredith as follows: "Women 
 have us back to the conditions of the primitive 
 man, or they shoot us higher than the topmost 
 star. But it is as we please. Let them tell us 
 what we are to them : for us, they are the back 
 and front of life: the poet's Lesbia, the poet's 
 Beatrice, ours is the choice. They are to us what 
 we hold of best or worst within. ' ' Miss Sargent's 
 comment on this theory is naive : "In these sen- 
 tences there is an assumption of woman's want of 
 consciousness or want of volition in the matter." 
 So delicate is this subject that I may be pardoned 
 for again taking refuge behind authorities, — this
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 171 
 
 time a man, but a man of the most feminine 
 genius. Mr. Le Gallienne is enthusiastic in his 
 praise of our novelist, as will be seen: "In his de- 
 lineation of them [women] his fearless adoption 
 of the modern conception of the unity of body and 
 spirit finds its poetry. No writer with whom I 
 am acquainted has made us so realise ' the value 
 and significance of flesh,' and spirit as the flower 
 of it. In his women we seem to see the transmu- 
 tation in process." It is in the last analysis just 
 because Mr. Meredith discovers this " want of 
 volition" in human nature, and adopts so fear- 
 lessly this " modern conception of the unity of 
 body and spirit," that his feminine characters are 
 complete ; whereas his studies of men, though 
 wonderfully keen and incisive, always leave some- 
 thing to be desired. Clara Middleton and Diana, 
 with their feverish attempt at revolt, and their 
 final succumbing in marriage with a character of 
 placid but undeveloped strength, are perhaps his 
 most perfect creations. But I hasten to take 
 leave of this perilous subject, and with it of Mr. 
 Meredith. 
 
 In the end, I see that my criticism, whatever 
 its value, has been almost entirely destructive ; yet 
 I would not leave this as the final impression. In 
 spite of the error of his methods, Mr. Meredith is 
 a writer of extraordinary and, to me at least, fas- 
 cinating genius. If he cannot stand with the 
 three great novelists who were almost his contem- 
 poraries, this is due rather to perversion than to
 
 172 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 feebleness of wit; and at the least he ranks far 
 above the common herd. One might say of him, 
 distorting Gray's familiar line, — 
 
 Above the good how far — but far beneath the great. 
 
 There are many reasons, and alas that it should 
 be so, for believing that the novel, like other liter- 
 ary forms in the past, has reached its highest per- 
 fection and is already declining in excellence. 
 Mr. Meredith, if compared with Thackeray and 
 his peers, shows only too clearly a decadent ten- 
 dency; yet what a treasure of enjoyment his wit 
 and imagination have left to the world! And so 
 refreshing at times is his obstinate originality that 
 one is almost tempted, when reflecting on the 
 tameness of lesser men, to extol his faults as 
 added virtues.
 
 HAWTHORNE: LOOKING BEFORE AND 
 AFTER 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne was born just one 
 hundred years ago, and, by a happy coincidence, 
 the one artist who worked in materials thoroughly 
 American and who is worthy to take a place 
 among the great craftsmen of the world celebrates 
 his nativity on the birthday of the nation. 1 By 
 something more than a mere coincidence he lived 
 and wrote at the only period in the history of the 
 country which could have fostered worthily his 
 peculiar genius; he came just when the moral 
 ideas of New England were passing from the con- 
 science to the imagination and just before the 
 slow, withering process of decay set in. As I 
 read his novels and tales to-day, with the thought 
 of this centenary in my mind, the inevitable com- 
 parison arises with what preceded and what exists 
 
 1 On the Fourth of July, 1904, the centenary of Haw- 
 thorne's birth was celebrated at Salem, Mass., at Bow- 
 doin College and elsewhere. I was asked to write 
 something in commemoration of the season for the In- 
 dependent, and it seemed appropriate to consider Haw- 
 thorne's work historically, as the central point of a long 
 development in New England literature. 
 173
 
 174 SHEL1UJRNE ESSAYS 
 
 now; he stands as a connecting link between old 
 Cotton Mather and— magna cum parvis — Mary 
 Wilkins Freeman, and only by looking thus be- 
 fore and after can one get a clear idea of his 
 work . 
 
 It seldom happens, in fact, that the history of a 
 country shows so logical a development as that 
 represented by these three names. To look back- 
 ward, almost all of Hawthorne may be found in 
 germ in the group of ecclesiastical writers among 
 whom Cotton Mather rises pre-eminent, and he in 
 turn is but a spokesman of that half-civilisation 
 which migrated across the Atlantic under the 
 pressure of the L,audian persecutions. I say half- 
 civilisation, for the beginnings of New England 
 took place when the mother country was split, as 
 no people in the world ever before was divided, 
 not by sectional but by moral differences into two 
 hostile parties; nor do we always remember how 
 largely the brilliant flowering and quick decay of 
 New England depend on this incompleteness of 
 her origins. Especially is this true in literature. 
 Read through the critical essays that were written 
 in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages and you 
 will be struck by the fact that the most serious de- 
 bate was whether poetry had any right to exist at 
 all. That discussion, of course, is as old as Plato 
 and was taken up by the Italians of the Renais- 
 sance as part of their classical inheritance. But 
 in England the question was not academic, but 
 vital; it came to the actual test of battle. As
 
 HAWTHORNE 175 
 
 early as 1579, in the very first bloom of that "per- 
 petual spring of ever-growing invention," Stephen 
 Gosson dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney his School 
 of Abuse, which he aptly describes as " an invec- 
 tive against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and 
 such-like caterpillars of a Commonwealth." 
 " The fathers of lies, pipes of vanity, and schools 
 of abuse," to use another of the crabbed Gosson's 
 phrases, remained snugly in the mother country, 
 along with those who thought it possible to wor- 
 ship God with the homage of the imagination, 
 who made of religion, in fact, a fine sense of de- 
 corum in the ordering of the world. The wonder 
 might seem to be that any literature at all ever 
 sprang from the half-civilisation that came to New 
 England, or that any sense of art found root 
 among a people who contemned the imagination 
 as evil and restricted the outpouring of emotion 
 to the needs of a fervid but barren worship. The 
 root was indeed long in coming to flower, yet 
 there are passages in the Magnalia of Cotton 
 Mather both magnificent in themselves and indis- 
 pensable for a right understanding of what was to 
 follow. There is, for example, that famous ac- 
 count of the death of John Cotton, worthy of re- 
 peated quotation: 
 
 After this in that study, which had been perfumed with 
 many such days before, he now spent a day in secret 
 humiliations and supplications before the Lord ; seeking 
 the special assistances 1 f the Holy Spirit, for the great 
 work of dying, that was now before him. What glorious
 
 176 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 transactions might one have heard passing between the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and an excellent servant of his, now 
 coming unto him, if he could have had an hearing place 
 behind the hangings of the chamber, in such a day ! 
 But having finished the duties of the day, he took his 
 leave of his beloved study, saying to his consort, / shall 
 go into that room no more ! 
 
 That is the positive side of the ideal, and it is a 
 dull heart to-day that can read this story of rapt 
 holiness without a thrill of wonder and admira- 
 tion. But the negative side is close at hand. The 
 same annalist records of another of his family, 
 Nathaniel Mather, a little incident that shows 
 how inveterate was the suppression of the easy 
 enjoyments and emotions of life. The quotation 
 is from Nathaniel's diary: 
 
 When very young I went astray from God, and my 
 mind was altogether taken with vanities and follies ; 
 such as the remembrance of them doth greatly abase my 
 soul within me. Of the manifold sins which then I was 
 guilty of, none so sticks upon me, as that being very 
 young, I was whittling on the Sabbath-day ; and for fear 
 of being seen, I did it behind the door. A great reproach 
 of God ! a specimen of that atheism that I brought into 
 the world with me ! 
 
 One may be inclined to smile, perhaps, at this 
 early intrusion into sacred literature of the Yan- 
 kee's proverbial trick of whittling, but he will be 
 more apt to marvel at the austerity of a discipline 
 which could associate such a childish escapade 
 with life-long remorse. It is not strange that
 
 HAWTHORNE 1 77 
 
 melancholy hovered over that chosen laud. To 
 quote from the Magnalia once again: 
 
 There are many men, who in the very constitution of 
 their bodies, do afford a bed, wherein busy and bloody 
 devils, have a sort of lodging provided for them. . . . 
 'Tis well if self-murder be not the sad end, into which 
 these hurried people are thus precipitated. New Eng- 
 land, a country where splenetic maladies are prevailing 
 and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded 
 numberless instances, of even pious people, who have 
 contracted those melancholy indispositions, which have 
 unhinged them from all service or comfort ; yea not a 
 few persons have been hurried thereby to lay violent 
 hands upon themselves at the last. These are among 
 the unsearchable judgments of God ! 
 
 It is not fanciful, I think, to find in these three 
 passages from the greatest of the early New Eng- 
 land divines the ideas that were in due time to 
 blossom into a true and peculiar literature. That 
 isolation from the world and absorption in an 
 ideal that signalised the death of John Cotton were 
 to leave an echo in many lives through the follow- 
 ing years. Nor did the inability to surrender to 
 the common expansive emotions of human nature 
 and the dark brooding on damnation utterly die 
 out when the real cause ceased to act. They 
 changed, but did not pass away. When, with 
 the coming of the nineteenth century, the fierce 
 democracy of those Northern States asserted itself 
 against priestly control and at the same time 
 shook off the bondage of orthodoxy, it only moved 
 
 VOL. II. — 12.
 
 178 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the burden from one shoulder to the other, and 
 the inner tyranny of conscience became as exact- 
 ing as the authority of the Church had been. 
 But this shifting of the centre of authority from 
 without to within was at least fruitful in one im- 
 portant respect: it brought about that further 
 transition from the conscience to the imagination 
 which made possible the only serious literature 
 this country has yet produced. In that shift 
 from the conscience to the imagination lies the 
 very source of Hawthorne's art. The awful voice 
 of the old faith still reverberates in his stories of 
 New England life and gives them their depth of 
 consciousness; the dissolution of the commands 
 of a sectarian conscience into the forms of a subtle 
 symbolism lifts them from provincial importance 
 merely to the sphere of universal art. 
 
 Nor is it at all difficult to follow the religion of 
 the seventeenth into the art of the nineteenth 
 century. In an earlier essay on The Solitude of 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne I pointed out — what must 
 be plain to every reader of that author — the cen- 
 tral significance of his Ethan Bra7id in the circle 
 of his works. So manifestly do the doctrines of 
 Cotton Mather stalk through that tale under the 
 transparent mask of fiction that it might almost 
 seem as if Hawthorne had taken the passages just 
 quoted from the Magnalia as a text for his fancy. 
 For the first quotation, in place of the rigid theo- 
 logian " perfuming" the bleak atmosphere of his 
 study with meditations on the great work of dying
 
 HAWTHORNE 1 79 
 
 orthodoxly, we have Kthan Brand, the lime- 
 burner, dwelling in the fragrant solitude of the 
 mountains, watching his kiln through the long 
 revolutions of the sun and the stars, perplexing 
 his mind with no problem of predestination and 
 free-will, but with the meaning of life itself, with 
 its tangle of motives and restraining intelli- 
 gence. For the second quotation, in place of 
 remorse over one act of surrender to impulse 
 against the arbitrary dictates of religion, we 
 have a strange reversal of Puritan faith through 
 the lens of the imagination. Ethan Brand 
 returns to his long-abandoned lime-kiln after 
 wandering over the world, bringing with him 
 the sense that he has sought and found at 
 last in his own heart the Unpardonable Sin, the 
 sin of banishing from the breast all those natural, 
 spontaneous emotions in the pursuit of an idea. 
 He bears the mark, not of an artificial atheism, 
 like that which abased the soul of the young 
 divine, but of that auanthropism (if I may use the 
 word) which was the real sin of New England, 
 symbolised by the strange nature of his successful 
 search. " He had lost his hold of the magnetic 
 chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother- 
 man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of 
 our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, 
 which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; 
 he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind 
 as the subject of his experiment." There lies the 
 tragedy not of Ethan Brand alone, but of the
 
 180 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 later New England. The dogmas of faith had 
 passed away and left this loneliness of an unmean- 
 ing idealism; the enthusiasm which had trampled 
 on the kindly emotions of the day has succumbed, 
 and the contempt of the human heart has given 
 place to this intolerable loneliness. 
 
 And last of all there is the "splenetic malady," 
 the melancholy that pursues this thwarting of na- 
 ture and drives the wanderer to lay violent hands 
 on himself. The burning of Ethan Brand in the 
 lime- kiln, within the circle of whose crimson light 
 he had pondered the Unpardonable Sin, is not, 
 in the sense of Cotton Mather, one of the un- 
 searchable judgments of God, but a cunningly 
 devised symbol of literary art. 
 
 This is the second act of the New England 
 drama, and the third proceeds from it as naturally 
 as the second proceeded from the first. From the 
 religious intolerance of Cotton Mather to the im- 
 aginative isolation of Hawthorne and from that 
 to the nervous impotence of Mrs. Freeman's men 
 and women, is a regular progress. The great 
 preacher sought to suppress all worldly emotions; 
 the artist made of the solitude which follows this 
 suppression one of the tragic symbols of human 
 destiny; the living novelist portrays a people in 
 whom some native spring of action has been dried 
 up, and who suffer in a dumb, unreasoning in- 
 ability to express any outreaching passion of the 
 heart or to surrender to any common impulse of 
 the body. It is true, of course, that Mrs. Freeman
 
 HAWTHORNE l8l 
 
 describes only a single phase of New England 
 character, just as Hawthorne did before her; but 
 the very genealogy of her genius shows that she 
 has laid hold of an essential trait of that charac- 
 ter, and, indeed, it needs but little acquaintance 
 with the stagnant towns of coast and mountains 
 to have met more than one of the people of her 
 books actual in the flesh. Her stories are not 
 tragic in the ordinary sense of the word; they have 
 no universal meaning and contain no problem 
 of the struggle between human desires and the 
 human will, or between the will and the burden 
 of circumstances. They are, as it were, the echo 
 of a tragedy long ago enacted; they touch the 
 heart with the faint pathos of flowers pressed 
 and withered in a book, which, found by chance, 
 awaken the vague recollection of outlived emo- 
 tions. They are very beautiful in their own way, 
 but they are thoroughly provincial, just as the 
 treatises of Cotton Mather were provincial; they 
 have passed from the imagination to the nerves. 
 
 Already in Hawthorne we find the beginnings 
 of this strangely repressed life. Hepzibah Pyn- 
 cheon, struggling in an agony of shame and im- 
 potence to submit to the rude contact of the world, 
 is the true parent of all those stiffened, lonely 
 women that haunt the scenes of Mrs. Freeman's 
 little stage. Only there is this signal difference: 
 poor, blighted Hepzibah is part of a great drama 
 of the conscience which in its brooding over the 
 curse of ancestral sin can only be compared with
 
 182 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the Ate of the vEschylean theatre. All the char- 
 acters that move within the shadow of that House 
 of the Seven Gables are involved in one tragic 
 idea assimilated by the author's imagination from 
 the religious inheritance of the society about him 
 — the idea that pride, whether worldly or un- 
 worldly, works out its penalty in the separation 
 of the possessor from the common heart of hu- 
 manity. But in Mrs. Freeman's tales this moral 
 has utterly vanished; they have no significance 
 beyond the pathos of the lonely desolation de- 
 picted. Her first book, A Humble Romance, is 
 made up of these frustrate lives, which are with- 
 held by some incomprehensible paralysis of the 
 heart from accepting the ordinary joys of hu- 
 manity, and her latest book, The Givers, appeals 
 to our sympathy by the same shadow of a fore- 
 gone tragedy. 
 
 Very characteristic in the first book is the story 
 of the Two Old Lovers, There was nothing to 
 keep them apart, none of the well-used obstacles 
 of romance in the shape of poverty or tyrannous 
 parents or religious differences or an existing 
 alliance — nothing save the ingrown inability of 
 the man to yield to the simple call of his own 
 bosom. For many years he visits the girl and, 
 as time passes, the aged woman, as an accepted 
 but curiously undemonstrative lover. There is, 
 to me at least, a pathos like the nightly memory 
 of tears in the watchfulness of the waiting woman 
 over her diffident wooer:
 
 HAWTHORNE 1 83 
 
 She saw him growing an old man, and the lonely, un- 
 cared-for life that he led filled her heart with tender pity 
 and sorrow for him. She did not confine her kind offices 
 to the Saturday baking. Every week his little house was 
 tidied and set to rights, and his mending looked after. 
 Once, on a Sunday night, when she spied a rip in his 
 coat, that had grown long from the want of womanly 
 fingers constantly at hand, she had a good cry after he 
 had left and she had gone to her room. There was some- 
 thing more pitiful to her, something that touched her 
 heart more deeply, in that rip in her lover's Sunday coat, 
 than in all her long years of waiting. As the years went 
 on, it was sometimes with a sad heart that Maria stood 
 and watched the poor lonely old figure moving slower 
 than ever down the street to his lonely home ; but the 
 heart was sad for him always, and never for herself. 
 
 Only in the end, when he lies dying in his solitary 
 house and she is summoned to his bedside, does 
 the approach of the great silence of death unlock 
 the dumbness of his breast: 
 
 He looked up at her with a strange wonder in his 
 glazing eyes. "Maria" — a thin, husky voice, that was 
 more like a wind through dry cornstalks, said — "Maria, 
 I 'm dyin', an' — I allers meant to — have asked you — to — 
 marry me." 
 
 Is it fanciful to say that this story has the 
 shadowy pathos of emotions long ago fought 
 against and overcome? The tragedy of New 
 England came when Hawthorne wrought the 
 self-denial of the ancient religion into a symbol 
 of man's universal isolation, when out of the 
 deliberate contemning of common affections he
 
 1 84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 created the search for the Unpardonable Sin. 
 In the pages of Mrs. Freeman we hear only an 
 echo, we revive a fading memory, of that sombre 
 tragedy. Ethan Brand was a problem of the 
 will, a question of morality; the tale of the Two 
 Old Lovers is a sad picture of palsied nerves. 
 
 The latest volume of Mrs. Freeman's sketches 
 treats the same theme, with this difference, how- 
 ever, that here it is the woman who abandons her 
 lover for many years, returning to him only when 
 both are grown old and past the age of spon- 
 taneous pleasures. There is perhaps some soften- 
 ing of tone, a kindlier feeling that into this strange 
 desolation of the heart some consolation of the 
 spirit may descend with chastened joy. Hardly 
 in the earlier books, I think, will one find any 
 picture of the possible mellowing effect of solitude 
 comparable to this description of the waiting 
 lover: 
 
 He was a happy man, in spite of the unfulfilled natural 
 depths of his life. His great sweetness of nature had 
 made even of the legitimate hunger of humanity a bless- 
 ing for the promoting of spiritual growth. It had fos- 
 tered within him that grand acquiescence which is the 
 essence of perfect freedom. 
 
 But beautiful as this grand acqiiiescence may be, 
 it is not in that direction lies the real freedom of 
 New England life or literature. Rather shall the 
 deliverance come in the way hinted at in that 
 other phrase, the hunger of humanity. The whole
 
 HAWTHORNE 1 85 
 
 progress from Cotton Mather to Mrs. Freeman 
 was determined by the original attempt to stamp 
 out that legitimate hunger for the sake of an all- 
 absorbing pride of the spirit. And now, when the 
 spirit, after having been victorious in the long 
 warfare, has itself starved away and left the bar- 
 renness of a dreary stagnation, the natural reversal 
 may well be looked for, and we may expect the 
 hunger of humanity to grow up out of the waste, 
 untempered by spiritual ideals. Already in the 
 New England of Hawthorne, in the exaggerated 
 sentimentalism of the abolitionists and a thousand 
 other reforming sects, this movement had begun. 
 Hawthorne himself, despite his humorous in- 
 sight and his aloofness from the currents of life 
 about him, did not wholly escape its influence. 
 Through the dark pages of The House of the Seven 
 Gables moves the hopeful figure of young Hol- 
 grave, the daguerreotypist. To him, says Haw- 
 thorne, thinking no doubt of the burden that 
 weighed on his own imagination, it seemed " that 
 in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown 
 and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless 
 institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their 
 dead corpses buried, and everything to begin 
 anew." There is a world of significance in the 
 analysis which follows of Holgrave's restless and 
 ardent nature, of his generous impulses, that 
 might solidify him into the champion of some 
 practical cause. He is the type of a whole race of 
 men who were to take revenge on the despotism
 
 186 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 of the spirit by casting it out altogether for the 
 idealised demands of the hunger of humanity. 
 
 But what was foreshadowed in Hawthorne 
 becomes the one dominant human note of Mrs. 
 Freeman's stories, heard through the desert si- 
 lence that otherwise encompasses her characters. 
 This vision of a growing humanitarianism that 
 shall awaken new motives for healthy, active life 
 and feed the hunger of the heart is the real theme 
 of the best of her novels, yerome. There is a scene 
 in that book where the hero, beaten and marred 
 by hard circumstance, suddenly gives vent in his 
 awkward, unschooled manner to the late-born re- 
 calcitrance against the tyranny of Providence: 
 
 What was it to the moon and all those shining swarms 
 of stars, and that far star-dust in the Milky Way, whether 
 he, Jerome Edwards, had shoes to close or not? Whether 
 he and his mother starved or not, they would shine just 
 the same. . . . He was maddened at the sting and 
 despite of his own littleuess in the face of that greatness. 
 Suddenly a wild impulse of rebellion that was almost 
 blasphemy seized him. He clinched a puny fist at a 
 great star. "Wish I could make you stop shinin'," he 
 cried out, in a loud, fierce voice; "wish I could do 
 somethiu' !" 
 
 And then, later, comes the companion scene, 
 again under the cold eyes of the heavens, when 
 the final determination takes shape before him 
 and he sees at last the work which the world 
 holds for him: 
 
 A great passion of love and sympathy for the needy 
 and oppressed of his kind, and an ardent defence of
 
 HAWTHORNE 187 
 
 them, came upon Jerome Edwards, poor young shoe- 
 maker, going home with his sack of meal over his shoul- 
 der. Like a bird, which in the spring views every little 
 straw and twig as toward his nest and purpose of love, 
 Jerome would henceforth regard all powers and instru- 
 mentalities that came in his way only in their bearing 
 upon his great end of life. 
 
 We have followed the development of that half- 
 civilisation which moulded New England from the 
 religious enthusiasm of Cott6n Mather, through 
 the tragic art of Hawthorne, down to the pathetic 
 paralysis portrayed in these stories of a living 
 writer. We have seen a morbid spirituality, 
 spurning the common nourishment of mankind, 
 slowly starve itself into impotence. Now, as the 
 hunger of humanity begins to assert itself un- 
 hampered by any vision beyond its own impor- 
 tunate needs, are we to behold a new ideal create 
 in turn another half-civilisation, blindly material- 
 istic as its predecessor was harshly spiritual ? 
 That question may not be lightly answered. 
 Only it is clear that, for the present, the way of 
 growth for the literature of New England lies 
 through the opening of this door of strictly human 
 sympathies.
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 
 
 The wise Greek was taught to judge the poets 
 of his land according to their influence on char- 
 acter, and to ask first whether they made men 
 better in the cities. Only with Aristotle, when 
 poetry ceases to be an organic part of civic life, 
 do we find criticism that approaches the dreary 
 canon of " art for art's sake." So keen indeed 
 was this sense of moral responsibility that Homer 
 himself did not escape frequent censure for his 
 picture of the easy-living gods, and Plato, recalling 
 complacently "the ancient difference between 
 philosophy and poetry," would banish the singers 
 from his ideal state. Even the analytic mind of 
 the Greeks had not effected a divorce between 
 ethics and aesthetics; and on our part we may as- 
 sume that a true appreciation of the circumstances 
 under which their literature arose, and of the in- 
 fluence it exercised on this beauty-loving people, 
 as indeed any sound criticism of the literature 
 itself, must start from a sufficient study of the 
 ethical ideas it sought to convey. 
 
 It may be surmised at the outset of such a study 
 that Homer and his successors are pre-eminent 
 artists, not by reason of form alone, but because
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 1 89 
 
 they also embody more truth, more wise reflection 
 — in short, because they present a fairer criticism 
 of life — than is readily to be found elsewhere. It 
 is a contradiction that Homer and Sophocles 
 should be reckoned unsurpassed as poets, and 
 their views of life be regarded as immature and 
 incapable of instruction for our more experienced 
 age. Better were it to accept at once the standard 
 of Greece, and judge by their ethical import the 
 poets she was wont to honour as sages. If en- 
 couragement were needed for examining these 
 ancient works with such seriousness, it might be 
 found in the supposition that in our own land no 
 important revival, or shall we say creation, of 
 literature is likely to arise except from a renas- 
 cence of interest in Greek; and that further such 
 a study may throw a curious light on the religious 
 and moral confusion now troubling our minds. 
 For we have " traversed many paths in the wan- 
 derings of thought," and like Odysseus of old 
 have reached an iEaean island, where we know 
 neither the rising nor the setting of the sun and 
 doubt if there be any counsel for us. We, too, 
 like the companions of Odysseus, may meet with 
 some Circe to change us into bestial shapes, un- 
 less a god intervene with help. 
 
 Granted then that Greek literature owes its ex- 
 cellence largely to its ethical content, the question 
 first arises: Was there any one precept, any one 
 phase of moral truth, so constantly before the 
 people as to become a master law to which the
 
 I90 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 particular rules of conduct may be referred back, 
 and of which literature and art may be regarded 
 as the manifold expression ? Now it was the 
 established custom of the Greeks themselves, 
 when about to undertake a hazardous voyage of 
 conquest or discover}', to consult the oracle of 
 Apollo at Delphi. The gifts through centuries 
 of grateful kings and states had made Delphi one 
 of the great treasure houses of the world. So 
 numerous were the works of art collected here, 
 that even after the depredations of Sulla and 
 Nero it still displayed three thousand statues in 
 the time of Pliny; and in the days of its glory it 
 must have delighted the religious pilgrim with 
 more beauty than can be seen now in all the 
 galleries of Europe. The spot was well chosen 
 for the oracle of Greece. We may imagine 
 the traveller, anxious at heart perhaps with the 
 question he was to propound, climbing up the 
 mountain side from Cirrha on the gulf, or wind- 
 ing westward along the inland road that followed 
 the valley of the Pleistus. He had been taught 
 to regard the high hills as the peculiar dwelling- 
 place of the gods, and to believe that each globe 
 of mist hovering on a lonely summit might veil 
 the bodily presence of a divinity. The wild 
 scenery of Parnassus, with its misty hollows and 
 twin peaks rising into the sky, was calculated to 
 exalt his religious mood to a state of reverent 
 enthusiasm. It was remarked that even the at- 
 mosphere of the place had a peculiarly subtile,
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 191 
 
 Diting quality which affected strangely the bronze 
 of statuary; and this may have been a physical 
 stimulus to the mind also. What must have been 
 the feeling of admiration when the temple with 
 its marble front first came into view. Euripides 
 in one of his most exquisite scenes represents a 
 band of Athenian women coming to the shrine in 
 the early dawn. Ion, the child of Apollo and 
 dedicated from birth to the service of the god, is 
 seen . sweeping with laurel boughs the vestibule 
 and sprinkling the pavement with lustral water 
 brought in golden pitchers from the Castalian 
 fount. Now with threatening arrows he drives 
 away the polluting birds that would nest under 
 the eaves, and again and again he cries out in 
 joy — 
 
 O Paean, Paean, thou from Leto sprung, 
 Forever be thou blest, forever young! 
 
 The chorus of Athenian women appears winding 
 up toward the temple. They are rapt in wonder 
 at the rich scene unfolded before them: one after 
 another they point to the statues of Hercules 
 slaying the Hydra while Iolaus stands by with 
 kindled torch; of Bellerophon on the winged 
 horse, smiting the monstrous Chimaera; of the 
 gods engaged in battle with the giants. To be- 
 hold this unravaged beauty with the Athenian 
 women under the morning sky must have been a 
 joy such as the modern world can hardly equal. 
 If we had undertaken to enter into the temple,
 
 192 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 we should have been met at the threshold by the 
 greeting of the god. It is recorded that on the 
 columns were inscribed the wisest proverbs of 
 the land; and these were taken to be Apollo's 
 welcome to his visitor. Several of these sentences 
 we know, and two of them are distinguished by- 
 later writers as of the deepest import to Greek 
 philosophy. So Plutarch somewhere alludes to 
 them. "Consider," he says, " these inscriptions, 
 Know thyself and Nothing too much ; how many 
 philosophical discussions they have called forth, 
 and how great a multitude of words has sprung 
 from each as from a seed." Plato was never tired 
 of quoting them; especially in the Charmidcs he 
 weaves them into his argument on temperance 
 with admirable skill (164 D; Jowett): "And in 
 this I agree with him who dedicated the inscrip- 
 tion, ' Know thyself! ' at Delphi. That word, if 
 I am not mistaken, is put there as a sort of salu- 
 tation which the god addresses to those who enter 
 the temple; as much as to say the ordinary salu- 
 tation of ' Hail! ' is not right, and that the exhor- 
 tation ' Be temperate! ' would be a far better way 
 of saluting one another. The notion of him who 
 dedicated the inscription was, as I believe, that 
 the god speaks to those who enter his temple not 
 as men speak; but, when a worshipper enters, the 
 first word he hears is ' Be temperate! ' This, 
 however, like a prophet he expresses in a sort of 
 riddle, for ' Know thyself! ' and ' Be temperate! ' 
 are the same, as I maintain, and as the letters im-
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE I93 
 
 ply, and yet they may be easily misunderstood; 
 and succeeding sages who added ' Nothing too 
 much,' or ' Give a pledge, and evil is nigh at 
 hand,' would appear to have so misunderstood 
 them; for they imagined that 'Know thyself!' 
 was a piece of advice which the god gave, and 
 not his salutation of the worshippers at their first 
 coming in; and they dedicated their own inscrip- 
 tion under the idea that they too would give 
 equally useful pieces of advice." So far the 
 Charmides ; elsewhere Plato writes (Protag., 343 
 B): "And they [the seven Sages] met together 
 and dedicated in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, 
 as the first-fruits of their wisdom, the far-famed 
 inscriptions, which are in all men's mouths, 
 ' Know thyself ' and ' Nothing too much.' " We 
 have come to the god for instruction; let us accept 
 his words of salutation for the advice desired. If 
 Apollo ma} r be trusted, in these two brief commands 
 we shall find a sure guide for our proposed study. 
 
 Fortunately we need not stop here to discuss 
 the authorship of these apothegms. They were 
 ascribed to various members of the fabulous guild 
 of Sages, or even to a period antedating that 
 august body. Indeed, there was a tradition, 
 fostered no doubt by the priests, that Apollo him- 
 self was the author of " Know thyself." At any 
 rate the guardians of the oracle, by writing the 
 words on the temple, had assumed the responsi- 
 bility of them for the god. 
 
 Neither is their significance hard to discover. 
 
 VOL. II. 13.
 
 194 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 " Nothing too much " is the rule of outward con- 
 duct. It does not say, This thou shalt do, and 
 that thou shalt not do; but rather in the words 
 of Saint Paul, " All things are lawful unto me, 
 but all things are not expedient: all things are 
 lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the 
 power of any." Evil, accordingly, is not essen- 
 tially inherent in particular acts; but the carrying 
 of any act to excess is transgression; failure to 
 strike the true mean is error; and we shall find 
 that transgression or error is rebuked as due more 
 often to ignorance than to malevolence. Evil is 
 commonly regarded not as sin committed wilfully 
 against divine law, but as harm done to self or 
 to the community by ill-regulated conduct. In 
 manners this leads easily to the ideal of V 'honnete 
 homme qui ne se pique de rien. A perfect gentle- 
 man was shown by balance in acquisition and 
 comportment: he might not even learn music too 
 well, lest he should mar the just proportion of 
 attainments. Thus even what is good may be 
 desired in excess, and we have in Greece the 
 warning solemnly emphasised by Ecclesiastes : 
 " Be not righteous over much, neither make thy- 
 self over wise." Regarding man's position in 
 the world, too great prosperity also has its danger 
 and may awaken the jealousy of the gods. This 
 sentiment pervades the histories of Herodotus, 
 and is the subject of that famous letter to Poly- 
 crates: " It is sweet to learn the good fortune of 
 a friend united to us by ties of hospitality; yet I
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 195 
 
 am not content with thy great prosperity, know- 
 ing the envy of the divine nature; and I may say 
 I wish — both for myself and my connections — to 
 speed here and to fail there in my doings, with 
 chequered fortune. ... Be therefore per- 
 suaded of me and do as I bid in respect of thy 
 prosperity. Consider what thou mayst find of 
 highest value to thee, and what if lost would 
 bring greatest regret to thy heart, and this cast 
 away from thee, so as it shall never again be seen 
 among men." The same thought is common 
 enough in the writers of the period, however the 
 quaintness of its form here is peculiar to the 
 historian. The dramas of iEschylus repeat over 
 and over again the same warning against over- 
 ripe prosperity whose offspring are insolence and 
 blindness of heart and avenging calamity. In 
 the proper place it would be a fruitful exercise to 
 compare this idea as presented by the tragedian 
 and by the historian. In statecraft Solon had 
 raised it to be the cause of eunomy, or good gov- 
 ernment, "which," as he says, "should make 
 order and harmony to rule everywhere; which 
 should bind with chains the evil, make smooth 
 the rough, lower false pride, restrain violence, 
 and nip the flowers of calamity in the bud; . . . 
 and under her sway all things among men should 
 become harmonious and reasonable." Theognis 
 and others have the same ideal always before 
 them: indeed it arises naturally enough from 
 human experience.
 
 196 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 As this principle of moderation sums up the 
 empirical wisdom of Greek literature, so it is the 
 formal law of the poet and artist. "In der Be- 
 schrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister," writes 
 Goethe. In the strict setting of bounds to his 
 own faculties and to his subject-matter, we may 
 perhaps find the chief characteristic of the Greek 
 artist, as form resulting from proportion of parts 
 is the supreme excellence of his work. This 
 voluntary limitation is everywhere discoverable. 
 In language its result is a sharp distinction in 
 style; prose and poetry have their separate vo- 
 cabularies, and each branch of the latter has its 
 appropriate dialect. It penetrates still deeper 
 into style and causes that justness of emphasis, 
 that avoidance of undue stress which attaches to 
 the word classic. In treatment of the subject- 
 matter the result is no less marked. Thucydides 
 and Sophocles are both Athenians and contempo- 
 raries, yet they seem to speak from two different 
 worlds, so sharply defined are the aims of historian 
 and poet. Furthermore, each department of verse 
 has its own laws and themes which together 
 cover the range of human experience, yet never 
 intermingle. A still deeper limitation is observed. 
 Only those subjects and ideas are treated which 
 can be fully and luminously expressed; vague 
 thoughts, fleeting emotions, shadowy similitudes, 
 everything that would blur the general outline, 
 — la nuance, in short, is voluntarily renounced. 
 Hence, however other literatures may compare
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE IQ7 
 
 with the Greek in respect of content, depth of 
 thought, breadth of experience, and fineness of 
 feeling, yet in formal beauty at least the master 
 writers of Hellas have had no rivals. By a sort 
 of racial instinct they are led to avoid excess of 
 any kind. This law of limitation sometimes pro- 
 duces in the works of lesser men a meagreness 
 and jejuneness irritating to the modern reader; 
 but in the masterpieces of the true artists, who 
 sounded the national consciousness, and who 
 were strong enough to hold their ideas and mould 
 them at will, it has brought about a perfect bal- 
 ance and poise comparable only to the sculpture 
 of the same land. Shakespeare may, with Homer, 
 stand apart from other poets. They rise together 
 into the sky like the twin peaks of Parnassus, 
 and in them the Old World and the New meet 
 with equal and sufficient champions. We read 
 Shakespeare and are lost in amazement at the 
 boundless fertility of the human mind. Every 
 word is a metaphor, and all the emotions and 
 thoughts of the heart chase one another through 
 his lines. But sometimes, may it be confessed, 
 we turn with a feeling almost of relief from the 
 unrestrained exuberance of the modern genius 
 to the simplicity and graceful self-control of the 
 ancient. At first, it may be, we miss in the 
 older poem certain profounder voices of the soul 
 that speak of moral claims and experience won 
 by centuries of suffering; we call the Greek shal- 
 low. But if the real depth of a poem is to be
 
 I98 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 measured by its grasp on the essential passions of 
 humanity, there will be found in Homer a truth- 
 fulness and vividness in presenting these that may 
 rival Shakespeare himself, while man's relation- 
 ship to the divine world about and the dark mys- 
 teries below is pictured with a simplicity that 
 lends unparalleled beauty to human activity, and 
 with a depth of wisdom, of which forgetfulness 
 and long sophistication have to-day almost de- 
 prived us. 
 
 " Nothing too much " was the law of the artist 
 in his effort to create; so in abstract terms it de- 
 fined for the philosopher the process of cosmic 
 creation, or ceaseless becoming, as he would 
 have called it. On the other hand, from a rule 
 of prudential wisdom it passed readily into the 
 ethics of the schools. Beginning with Pythagoras, 
 its influence down through Aristotle may be un- 
 erringly traced in a variety of forms. Only with 
 this key can we unlock the strange doctrine of 
 Pythagoras (strange to us but perfectly simple to 
 his countrymen) regarding the finite and the in- 
 finite. The finite is good because bounded by 
 just limits; the infinite is bad because it escapes 
 these limits. Numbers are the expression of 
 quantity and limitation, and as such produce 
 the famous Pythagorean harmony ruling in the 
 heavens and in man. Akin to this conception is 
 the formal cause of Aristotle, between which and 
 the earlier theory stand the ideas of Plato as a 
 mediating ground. Matter, according to the
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE I99 
 
 Stagirite, is eternal and formless, form is eternal 
 and substanceless; from the union of these, that 
 is, from the law of limitation, springs the world 
 fashioned harmoniously, as we behold it. And 
 the final cause, which is the aim and purpose of 
 this union, will be satisfied when this infinite 
 amorphous matter is completely subjected to 
 form. 
 
 If, morally, " Nothing too much" receives its 
 ultimate expression in the ethics of Aristotle, 
 where every virtue becomes a mean between two 
 vices, the one of excess, the other of deficiency, 
 the sister saying, " Know thyself," may be held 
 to attain its full development in the mystic phi- 
 losophy of Plato. So in the Phczdrus we read: 
 " I must first know myself, as the Delphian in- 
 scription says; to be curious about that which is 
 not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of 
 my own self, would be ridiculous." Self-know- 
 ledge in the Academy became the beginning and 
 end of philosophic discipline. In this sense it 
 may be taken to express the inner spiritual phase 
 of Greek life, just as the " golden mean" gives 
 the model of outward practical conduct. Yet 
 how closely the two formulas are related may be 
 seen in the very philosophers who represent the 
 extreme of each. The argument of Plato's Re- 
 public amounts to this: By self-knowledge we 
 learn the nature of the soul and of the three facul- 
 ties working together in it. Consequently upon 
 such knowledge each faculty performs duly its
 
 200 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 proper function and attains its respective virtue, 
 — the rational faculty being thus distinguished by 
 wisdom, the will by courage, the sensuous nature 
 by temperance. The fourth virtue, justice, is 
 still to be accounted for. This must be the har- 
 monious interaction of the three faculties, each 
 working within strict bounds and not encroaching 
 on the function of the other two. The highest 
 virtue, then, which practically includes the others, 
 is no more than the application of the Delphian 
 " Nothing too much " to the soul itself. On the 
 other hand, Aristotle's ethical theory may be 
 summed up as follows: Each virtue is defined as 
 the golden mean between two vices; activity of 
 the soul in accordance with virtue is happiness; 
 and happiness is the end of life. The supreme 
 happiness is such activity of the highest faculty 
 of the soul, that is, the reason: man cannot dwell 
 continuously and absolutely in this activity, but 
 can only aim to approach such a state. Its attain- 
 ment is the contemplative life of the deity passed 
 in self- reflection; and this may be called his distin- 
 guishing virtue, for of him activity toward others 
 cannot be predicated. Curiously, Plato starts 
 from self-knowledge and ends with ' ' Nothing too 
 much"; his rival begins with the latter and ar- 
 rives at self-knowledge. One proceeds from 
 within outward; the other argues from conduct 
 inward. 
 
 But this clear distinction, by which the two 
 apothegms express the inner and outer faces of
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 201 
 
 the same truth, arose only after subtle analysis 
 had been brought to bear on them. Primarily 
 they were used almost without discrimination, as 
 is evident from the passage of Plato's Charmides 
 quoted above. " Know thyself" at first meant 
 simply, Know thy place in this world as a man 
 among men, and as a mortal subject to the im- 
 mortal gods; be moderate, aim not too high. 
 Abundant illustration of this might be offered. 
 Such, for example, is the meaning of the words 
 when put into the mouth of the seven Sages, as 
 may be proved from the number of proverbs that 
 contain the same admonition in different forms, 
 Periander's warning command, "Think as a 
 mortal," being perhaps the clearest exposition 
 of the thought. The worldly Simonides is said 
 to have given similar advice to Pausanias, " Re- 
 member thou art a man," — words whose signifi- 
 cance was revealed only too clearly to the 
 overweening general in his last imprisonment. 
 The same lesson is conveyed in the story of 
 Croesus as told by Herodotus; and Xenophon, 
 doubtless with a reminiscence of the famous dia- 
 logue of the earlier historian, relates of the same 
 prince that he asked the Delphian oracle in what 
 way he might pass the remainder of his life 
 happily, and received this answer: 
 
 Knowing thyself, O Croesus, thou shalt pass through life 
 happy. 
 
 Croesus rejoiced on hearing this, and thought it
 
 202 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 an easy task; others we may know, or may not, 
 but any man may know himself. Only after his 
 defeat by Cyrus did he recognise his error; for in 
 attempting to strive with so great a foe he had 
 proved his own self-ignorance. Similarly one 01 
 Plutarch's characters in sportive conversation de- 
 clares that Homer was the author of these pro- 
 verbs, and maintains that Hector knew himself, 
 who attacked others but " avoided combat with 
 Telamonian Ajax." 
 
 These illustrations will show how the primitive 
 meaning of the injunction persisted into a late 
 age. Yet its deeper spiritual force had been 
 partly recognised almost a century before the 
 revolution introduced by Socrates and the 
 sophists. Thus we read in Plutarch: "And 
 Heracleitus, as if he had done some great and 
 serious thing, says ' I searched out myself ; and 
 of the inscriptions at Delphi this seemed to him 
 the most divine, ' Know thyself.' ' Aristotle 
 assures us it was from the Ephesian sage that 
 Socrates derived his peculiar use of the words; 
 and we may see for ourselves that the sophists, so 
 far at least as they are represented by Protagoras, 
 follow the same master. To Heracleitus imper- 
 manence was the law of existence; like the water 
 of a stream all things pass away, and are yet the 
 same. But there is no reason to suppose he con- 
 nected this physical theory with his boasted self- 
 searching. It remained for the sophists to effect 
 this unholy alliance. Studying man's nature,
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 203 
 
 Protagoras finds that the impermanence of phe- 
 nomena is but a reflection of the instability of the 
 soul looking out upon them, for man is the 
 measure of all things. Know thyself, and thou 
 knowest what is true to thee — for the time being 
 at least; but to another man there is another 
 truth. Verity itself, like the physical world, be- 
 comes thus a matter of perpetual flux and change; 
 and the wisdom of Delphi is made the law of 
 shifting impressionism, whether in philosoph)' or 
 art or conduct. Plato would consider this sophis- 
 tical skepticism the outcome of a long line of 
 ancestors. His argument is quaintly expressed 
 (Thccet. 152 D): "I am about to speak of a high 
 argument, in which all things are said to be rela- 
 tive; you cannot rightly call anything by any 
 name, such as great or small, heavy or light, for 
 the great will be small and the heavy light — there 
 is no single thing or quality, but out of motion 
 and change and admixture all things are becom- 
 ing relatively to one another, which ' becoming ' 
 is by us incorrectly called being, but is really be- 
 coming, for nothing ever is, but all things are 
 becoming. Summon all philosophers, — Protago- 
 ras, Heracleitus, Empedocles, and the rest of 
 them, one after another, and, with the exception 
 of Parmenides, they will agree with you in this. 
 Summon the great masters of either kind of 
 poetr}' — Epicharmus, the prince of Comedy, and 
 Homer of Tragedy; when the latter sings of 
 
 Ocean whence sprang the gods, and mother Tethys —
 
 204 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 does he not mean that all things are the offspring 
 of flux and motion ? " 
 
 Compare with this flower 01 impressionism 
 Socrates, who also in a different way made man 
 the measure of all things. Protagoras isolates 
 the individual; there is no spiritual law binding 
 soul to soul; hence there is no truth but merely 
 shifting opinion. Socrates would find in man a 
 spirit which associates him with the divine powers; 
 hidden in himself he thought to discover eternal 
 precepts of wisdom, the same for all men because 
 springing in all from the same source: Know 
 thyself, and thou knowest the truth of the gods. 
 So much I think we may assert of the positive 
 teaching of Socrates; although the words, "Know 
 thyself," still retained something of their simpler 
 primitive meaning, for they were to him an ad- 
 monition of man's presumptuous ignorance. But 
 their positive force, more or less latent in the 
 master, is found fully developed in the disciple 
 Plato. So, for example, in the First Alcibiades 
 we read: " But how can we have a perfect know- 
 ledge of the things of the soul ? For if we know 
 them, then I suppose that we shall know our- 
 selves. Can we really be ignorant of the excel- 
 lent meaning of the Delphian inscription of which 
 we were just now speaking ? . . . And if the 
 soul, my dear Alcibiades, is ever to know herself, 
 must she not look at the soul; and especially at 
 that part of the soul in which her virtue resides, 
 and at any other which is like this ? . . . And
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 205 
 
 do we know of any part of our souls more divine 
 than that which has to do with wisdom and 
 knowledge ? . . . Then this is that part of 
 the soul which resembles the divine, and he who 
 looks at this and at the whole class of things 
 divine, will be most likely to know himself. . . . 
 And self-knowledge we agree to be wisdom." 
 
 Socrates and the sophists mark a revolution in 
 Greek thought; with them the mind is first turned 
 inward on herself, and self-consciousness becomes 
 an inheritance of the race. It may be a matter 
 of sad reflection that the people who chose beauty 
 and pleasure before absolute truth should have 
 made Protagoras their spokesman rather than 
 Socrates. Certainly it is a prophecy full of fore- 
 boding for the fate of Greece that the one was 
 loaded with riches and honour, whereas the other 
 died a felon's death in the gaol of Athens. 
 
 It was to be expected that the Delphian saluta- 
 tion, when so used by Socrates and Plato, would 
 become a sort of catch-word in the Academy. 
 From the Academy the doctrine of self-know- 
 ledge, together with other Socratic precepts, 
 passed readily into the discipline of the Stoics, 
 With them, too, happiness is the summum bomim, 
 — happiness which is the natural possession, the 
 flower, so to speak, of a virtuous life, and which, 
 indeed, cannot be conceived without virtue. If 
 asked wherein consists the virtuous life, Zeno, the 
 founder of the school, would reply, " In living in 
 conformity with one's self"; and Cleanthes, his
 
 206 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 pupil, would enlarge this to " living in conformity 
 with nature." Nor is there any contradiction in 
 these answers. For to Zeno, ' ' living in con- 
 formity with self ' ' meant to obey the dictates of 
 reason, which he deemed the highest part of man 
 and the true self. Now to him, as to all the 
 Stoics, the reason was not an isolated power 
 fashioned in the breast of man, but rather a por- 
 tion of that universal subtile element which they 
 in half- symbolical manner called fire. So far they 
 were pantheists. This subtile element, pervading 
 the world, is divine, is indeed God; and to the 
 degree that a man recognises this force within 
 him and surrenders to its guidance, he grows like 
 to God, and at death passes into the divine nature. 
 Self-knowledge is to Zeno and Cleanthes the root 
 of virtue and happiness, only Cleanthes emphasises 
 more strongly the kinship of this self to universal 
 reason. 
 
 This point of view, however, is not peculiar to 
 the Stoics; it marks all the philosophic schools of 
 the period. The old simplicity of life had passed 
 away, and with it the spontaneous joy of living 
 and that unconscious morality whose chief re- 
 striction could be summed up in the brief com- 
 mand, " Nothing too much." The youth has 
 grown to man's estate. In place of unconstrained 
 harmony with nature has come the conscious and 
 painful effort to conform his inner being to the 
 dictates of a vague, half-comprehended idea called 
 still by the old name Nature. Patriotism had
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 207 
 
 been the bond uniting men into brotherhood, and 
 counterbalancing what might otherwise have been 
 a narrow selfishness. With Alexander that local 
 attachment, so restricted and yet so efficient, 
 gives way to an ideal cosmopolitanism whose 
 shadowy bounds embrace gradually the whole 
 realm of existence. In this vague city of the 
 world the homeless spirit of man, finding that re- 
 lationship to all is kinship with none, is thrown 
 back on itself in brooding revery. The primi- 
 tive aim of self-knowledge, which would temper 
 action to sobriety, becomes less important than 
 its dormant significance, which absorbs action in 
 contemplation. Plato is already prophetic of the 
 new views; Aristotle, as if to mark off forever the 
 completion of a civilisation, rejects the new fer- 
 ment and sums up in scholastic terms all that was 
 truly Hellenic in thought and knowledge. Stoic 
 and Epicurean alike receive the tradition of 
 Greece, but add a spirit utterly foreign in char- 
 acter. Stepping beyond the limit set by Aristotle 
 and Alexander, we should be swept on through 
 the mazes of many philosophies that gradually 
 assume the attitude of religions, until we found 
 ourselves in the whirlpool that revolves about 
 Christianity. Our study of "Know thyself" 
 would be lost in the abyss of Gnosticism, for the 
 mystic knowledge of Gnostic and Manichaean 
 alike is but a late-born child of Delphi. Indeed, 
 the command of the god may still be heard above 
 the din of Saint Augustine's theology, as, for
 
 208 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 example, in that passage of the City of God (xi. 26) 
 where it is expanded into a curious proof or simili- 
 tude of the Trinity, and stands a true prophet of 
 the Cartesian syllogism. In its last form, cogito 
 ergo sum, it may be called the parent of modern 
 philosophy. The sister law, which gave to Greek 
 life its inimitable beauty, is lost to us perhaps for- 
 ever; the sadder words we have made our own. 
 
 Enough has been said to show how truly the 
 Delphian god voiced the moral aspirations of his 
 people. It would be instructive here, were it not 
 out of proportion to our design, to discover how 
 far these laws are recognised by other lands, and 
 how far they are modified or supplanted. I can- 
 not forbear digressing sufficiently to notice the 
 Hindus, who may claim after the Greeks the 
 honour of being the most intellectual people of 
 antiquity, and who likewise displayed their in- 
 sight by formulating their conception of life. 
 
 Tracing the first injunction in Greece, we find 
 that the course of development (which does not al- . 
 ways mean progress, be it observed) is ' ' Nothing 
 too much," temperance, self-restraint, Epicurean 
 tranquillity, Stoic apathy. The next step would 
 have carried them into " inattachment " and re- 
 nunciation, and this is the form it assumes in 
 India; so that the Hindus may be said in this 
 respect to have begun where the Greeks left off. 
 But if we draw the line of genuine Greek thought 
 at Aristotle, there is a wider gap between the 
 two. For to the Stagirite virtue is a deliberate
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 209 
 
 state lying in the mean as regards ourselves, de- 
 fined by reason and as the wise man would define 
 it. The wise man here is that good or exemplary 
 character (o GnovSaloi) whom Aristotle con- 
 stantly assumes to be the final arbiter of right and 
 wrong. It is he who most adequately exemplifies 
 man as a political being, adapted to his surround- 
 ings and acting with approved energy among his 
 fellows; so that in the end the theory of Aristotle 
 rests upon a common-sense empirical view. In 
 one passage (Nic. Eth., ix. 4) he gives a picture 
 of this exemplary character, symbolising the re- 
 lation of his inner faculties by the attitude of 
 friends to one another; he has strong desires, but 
 these are in accord with reason ; he is most keenly 
 attached to life, and contemplation does not sup- 
 plant but rather completes the general activity of 
 his nature. 
 
 Compare with this a passage of the Bhagavad- 
 gitd y the divine lay of India. It is the morning 
 of a great contest and the prince, seeing his own 
 army drawn up for battle and the host of the 
 enemy arrayed in opposition, is suddenly seized 
 with contrition for the many warriors who must 
 perish. In dejection he refuses to fight until 
 aroused by the exhortations of his charioteer, who 
 is, in reality, the incarnate Vishnu. The admoni- 
 tion of the god is drawn out into a remarkable 
 religious discourse: 
 
 II. 11. Thou art grieved for those that need no grief, yet 
 thy words are words of wisdom : 
 
 VOL. II. 14.
 
 2IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 They that have knowledge grieve not for the dead 
 or the living. 
 
 19. He who reckoneth It the slayer, and he who 
 deemeth It the slain, 
 They both distinguish ill : It slayeth not, nor is 
 It slain. 
 
 22. As a man putteth off his outworn garments and 
 taketh others new ; 
 So the Indweller putteth off these outworn bodies, 
 and taketh others new. 
 
 47. Thy service is in the work only, but in the fruits 
 
 thereof never ; 
 Be not impelled by the result of works, neither 
 set thy heart to do no work. 
 
 48. Standing firm in devotion, and putting away at- 
 
 tachment, so ever work on, O Prince : 
 Also in success or failure be thou indifferent ; in- 
 difference, too, is called devotion. 
 
 III. 25. As the ignorant work because of attachment to 
 works, O Prince, 
 So without attachment let the wise work for the 
 constraining of mankind. 
 
 27. For all works in all places are of a truth wrought 
 by the blind forces of Nature ; 
 Only he that is deluded by egotism thinketh in 
 himself, " I am the doer ! " 
 
 Here, in place of the law of moderation in de- 
 sire and action, is a new command, a strange 
 exhortation to work without desire, without 
 attachment, without interest in the result. The 
 author of the Gitd sees about him a world of
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 211 
 
 action which bears no discoverable relation to his 
 inner spiritual needs, yet in this futile turmoil he 
 is called by the exigencies of earthly existence to 
 play a part. He would perform the duties of his 
 station, but with complete indifference to the out- 
 come, unmoved by success or failure, incapable of 
 pleasure or pain. The strangeness of the doctrine 
 to us lies in this utter " inattachment," which, 
 be it said, was no mere scholastic abstraction, but 
 the genuine aspiration of a whole people; but to 
 the Hindu it was novel rather because it fell short 
 of the commoner ideal. Beyond ' ' inattachment ' ' 
 lay the utter renunciation of works, which bade 
 the spirit avoid all contact with the world and in 
 its own life of self-contemplation seek for perfect 
 peace : 
 
 Like an uneasy fool thou wanderest far 
 Into the nether deeps, 
 Or upward climbest where the dim-lit star 
 Of utmost heaven sleeps. 
 
 Through all the world thou rangest, O my soul, 
 Seeking and wilt not rest ; 
 Behold, the peace of Brahma, and thy goal, 
 Hideth in thine own breast. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that such a contrast in 
 philosophic principles was without influence on 
 literature. A minute comparison of the epics of 
 Greece and India would show as its effect a 
 radical difference of language and form and senti- 
 ment. L/Ook for a moment at the concluding
 
 212 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 scenes of the Iliad and the Mahabharata. To the 
 Greek the Iliad presented a drama of the pro- 
 foundest meaning for the very reason that the 
 passions and actions, the tragedy of the plot, 
 sprung from transgression of the highest moral 
 law known to him, the law of moderation. Aga- 
 memnon errs in this respect, and the wrath of 
 Achilles is fatal for this reason. The reconcilia- 
 tion of Achilles is brought about by a personal 
 attachment immoderate in its strength, and 
 through it his wrath against the Achaians is con- 
 verted to rage equally excessive against Hector. 
 Nothing in Greek literature is more perfect in its 
 art than the last scene of the poem, where anger 
 is subdued to pathos, and the immoderate passions 
 subside to measure and temperance. In one 
 sense the action is completed at the death of 
 Hector, but the underlying moral drama is form- 
 less and meaningless without the last interview 
 between Priam and Achilles. 
 
 On opening the Mahabharata we seem to have 
 entered into a different world. Monstrous crea- 
 tures and actions abound, and the force of the 
 poet's imagination is shown, not by the creation 
 of harmonious forms, but by enlarging everything 
 to fantastic immensity. There is no tragedy of 
 human passion, but rather some shadow)' conflict 
 of impersonal powers in which the character of 
 the individual man has little part. Briefly, the 
 poem is the story of the contest of two sets of 
 brothers for the throne. At last the rightful heirs
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 213 
 
 win back their inheritance and the usurpers are 
 crushed. The conclusion is as significant as the 
 final scene of the Iliad, for all this preliminary 
 trial is only preparatory to an act of religious re- 
 nunciation. Now the restored monarch, followed 
 by his four brothers, their common wife, and a 
 faithful dog, abandons the capital and leads them 
 forth as pilgrims to seek the home of the gods. 
 Yet one after another they fall by the way in con- 
 sequence of some former sin, till only the eldest is 
 left, whose life has been without blemish. Then 
 a very touching incident occurs when Indra ap- 
 pears from the sky and bids the prince mount up 
 with him in his chariot. ' ' Nay, ' ' cries the prince, 
 "but I must take this faithful hound along." 
 " There are no dogs in heaven; it cannot be." 
 " Then neither go I thither without this devoted 
 follower." Whereupon the dog suddenly disap- 
 pears, and in his place stands Dharmaraja, a god, 
 the Lord of Justice, the true father of the prince, 
 who has taken this humble form to prove his son. 
 Together they ascend to heaven ; but not even yet 
 is the trial complete. The prince is dismayed to 
 see his wicked cousins sitting with the gods, 
 while his own brothers, he is told, are enduring 
 torments in hell. " Then I too will go thither ! " 
 he exclaims, " for it is better to suffer with them 
 than enjoy bliss with the unrighteous." He per- 
 sists in his resolve and is led by a servant of the 
 gods to the infernal regions, where he beholds his 
 brothers tortured by malignant fiends. Still his
 
 214 SIIELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 purpose is unshaken; and at last a voice cries out, 
 " Lo, it is all maya, it is illusion! " Whereupon 
 the evil scenes vanish like a dream, and the prince 
 is once more in heaven on his throne amidst the 
 gods; and there too are his brothers and their 
 wife, who welcome him to the reward of bliss. 
 The closing scenes of the Indian epic are not 
 without impressiveness, but they are mystical 
 rather than human; they teach renunciation and 
 not temperance. 
 
 As regards knowledge, we are perhaps justly 
 proud in this passing century that the word has 
 acquired almost a new meaning: the past and the 
 future have been added to its sphere. History, 
 as an attempt to re-create foregone times and by 
 sympathy to throw ourselves backward into other 
 surroundings, is essentially a modern achieve- 
 ment. By its side, co-operating with it, stands 
 natural science, with its disregard of past notions 
 and its eye fixed, so far as it regards human con- 
 duct at all, on some perfectibility of society to be 
 brought about by the acquisition of mechanical 
 skill. Both study man as caught in a huge 
 movement of evolution. The ancient conceptions 
 of knowledge, whether it be the jnana of India, or 
 the gn6sis of early Christianity, or the self-know- 
 ledge of Greece, all agreed in this, that they 
 ignored the development of society, and recog- 
 nised some immutable principle upon whose com- 
 prehension the present virtue and happiness of 
 the individual depended. Concerning Greek self-
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 21 5 
 
 knowledge, enough for the present. As the in- 
 ward-looking face of that axiomatic Janus it bears 
 the same relation to the Hindu jnana (literally 
 and etymologically, gnosis) as was seen to exist 
 between temperance and renunciation. Self- 
 knowledge was the means of establishing modera- 
 tion. The Hindu deemed the phenomenal world 
 (and no Greek, not even Plato, could quite fol- 
 low him in this) totally evil, and knowledge was 
 the path of inner renunciation and deliverance. 
 From the beginning of eternity the spirit is 
 mewed by illusion in these shifting material 
 forms. The whole world is but the creation of 
 ignorance, and hence with knowledge ceases to 
 exist, as a stick seen in the road and mistaken for 
 a snake ceases to be a snake when rightly re- 
 garded. This jiiana is, too, a kind of self-know- 
 ledge. " Know thyself," the Delphian oracle 
 proclaimed, "learn thy individual nature and so 
 bring it into harmony with life about thee." 
 Tat tvam asz, " that art thou," is the watchword 
 on the Ganges: "thy soul is itself that god; know 
 this and thy illusive individuality comes to an 
 end, and the world vanishes from about thee." 
 This was not a mere difference of formulated 
 words; it penetrated the very life of the people. 
 With such views of man and nature the Greek 
 became the master of artists in every form of 
 beauty, whereas the Hindu sacrificed all to attain 
 a state of spiritual exaltation, and in religion won 
 a place as the teacher of mankind.
 
 2l6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 But at last the inevitable question remains: 
 What profit in it all ? Why isthe fate of Greece 
 only one of the many tragedies that go to make 
 up human history ? Temperance, harmony, the 
 proper balancing of faculties and dispositions, — 
 we might safely aver that these, if anything, were 
 calculated to preserve a person or a race against 
 decay and ruin. Other nations perished mainly 
 because they ignored this vital law; and this curi- 
 ous dilemma confronts us, that the degeneracy of a 
 people is accelerated by the very excellence which 
 wrought its earlier greatness. The strength of 
 Israel lay in its uncompromising worship of Je- 
 hovah and its intensely narrow national life; yet 
 in the end this same religious bigotry cut them 
 off from the new faith that sprung from their 
 midst and was to regenerate society, while their 
 racial prejudices caused them to be utterly crushed 
 as a nation by the Roman Empire. Again, the 
 greatness of Rome was her power of conquest and 
 government, and Rome at last, absorbed in her 
 dependencies, fell by her own weight. The Mo- 
 hammedans were* rendered doubly invincible by 
 their peculiar fatalism. If death came, it was by 
 the will of Allah, whether they courted or shunned 
 danger; in the days of their vigour, accordingly, 
 they fought with intrepid valour; in their decline 
 they lay idle, for God would accomplish all things 
 whether they acted or not. More tragic yet is 
 the fate of India. With undaunted courage the 
 Hindus sacrificed everything, — power, beauty,,
 
 DELPHI AND GREEK LITERATURE 2\J 
 
 personal aggrandisement, — to lay violent hands 
 on the kingdom of heaven; and for a time they 
 rose to a height of religious grandeur which must 
 now and always be regarded with wonder. But 
 life is not of the spirit alone. The body which 
 they so insolently neglected had its revenge. 
 Spiritual pride degenerated into moral indiffer- 
 ence; quietism begot effeminacy; and the proud 
 Hindu fell a prey to all the lusts of his own flesh 
 and to the cupidity of any adventurous conqueror. 
 But in Greece, where moderation was followed 
 as a kind of religion, what was it that caused the 
 same expansion and decay ? Paradoxical as it may 
 sound, may not their error have lain in the very 
 appropriation of such a standard? They, too, 
 made their renunciation, deliberately refusing to 
 accept any absolute idea which might destroy the 
 desired balance. Nothing is absolutely right or 
 wrong; nothing is absolutely true or false; seek 
 only the proper medium in all things. Is not this 
 in itself a kind of excess in raising the expedient 
 and beautiful above that eternal truth which in 
 its nakedness consumed the Hindu as in a de- 
 vouring fire ? If any one thing hastened the fall 
 of Greece, it was her disregard of that stern law 
 of righteousness which overawed the Jew, and 
 that mystic voice within which allured the Hindu 
 to the abysm. Plato somewhere observes: ' ' When 
 any one prefers beauty to virtue, what is this but 
 the real and utter dishonour of the soul ? For 
 such a preference implies that the body is more
 
 218 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 honourable than the soul; and this is false, for there 
 is nothing of earthly birth more honourable than 
 the heavenly." Yet let us read a little in the all- 
 wise Plato even, and turn then to the denuncia- 
 tions of Isaiah or the sermons of Buddha. We 
 are in doubt, when hearing the beautiful words 
 of the Greek, whether to admire the unruffled 
 serenity of his contemplation of life, or to anathe- 
 matise his lofty tolerance before evils that were 
 eating out the heart of his nation. By the side 
 of Plato grew up another pupil of Socrates, like- 
 wise a moralist in his own way, who illustrated 
 perfectly in his doctrine and life the real tendency 
 of Greece, — Aristippus of Cyrene, who made 
 pleasure and beauty the chief good, recognising 
 no evil action so long as a man remained master 
 of himself. To one who rebuked his intimacy 
 with L,ais the courtesan, he replied, ffabeo, non 
 habeor ab ilia ; and it is he who said, when cen- 
 sured for falling at the feet of the tyrant Dionysius, 
 " I am not to blame, but Dionysius who has his 
 ears in his feet." In all his words there is the 
 same wisdom of experience that gives so piquant 
 an interest to the comic fragments of the age. 
 There is grace and charm yet in Greece, but the 
 GrcBculus esuriens is not far to seek. The philo- 
 sophy of the Cyrenaic is only a new adaptation 
 of the salutation of the Delphian oracle. We 
 hardly know in the end whether these worshippers 
 of Apollo followed his command too well, or only 
 half understood its import.
 
 NEMESIS, OR THE DIVINE ENVY 
 
 From experience and reflection the Greeks for- 
 mulated a law of conduct, simple in expression, 
 but far-reaching in application. The Delphian 
 aphorisms, ' ' Nothing too much ' ' and ' ' Know 
 thyself," are the refined quintessence of their 
 practical wisdom and moral philosophy, summing 
 up briefly man's duty to himself and society with- 
 out reference for the most part to any supramun- 
 dane legislative power. Yet the Greeks were 
 peculiarly sensitive to the immanence of the divine 
 in human affairs, so that a complete understand- 
 ing of their moral views and their literature is 
 hardly possible without examining this law of 
 moderation and self-knowledge in another form, 
 as adapted to man's relations to the gods. 
 
 Here at once occur to the mind those words of 
 the sage Periander, Think as a mortal, and the 
 innumerable passages in poets and philosophers 
 that convey the same lesson in dramatic or dia- 
 lectic form. So in the mouth of Calchas they 
 become for Sophocles the sum of tragic warning: 
 " Misfortune from the gods overtakes men who 
 forget to think as mortals "; and the same words 
 are still heard in the last great prose of Athens. 
 Demosthenes, in one of his eloquent perorations, 
 219
 
 220 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 recalling the unforeseen revolutions in Grecian 
 affairs, — Sparta humiliated by Thebes, the Syra- 
 cusans fallen a prey to tyrants, and Dionysius in 
 turn degraded from his proud eminence, — ex- 
 claims that the whole world is full of uncertainty 
 and that trivial causes often effect the greatest 
 changes. " Wherefore," he avers, " being men 
 we ought to speak with caution, hoping and 
 praying the gods for prosperity, yet esteeming all 
 things human." 
 
 Greece was a land of revolutions so startling 
 that the plea of the orator is more than justified. 
 When the capture of Miletus was represented on 
 the Athenian stage the whole audience, we are 
 told, burst into tears, and the poet was fined a 
 thousand drachmae for reminding them of the 
 calamity. Yet the fall of the proud Ionian city, 
 ruthlessly sacked and depopulated by the Persians, 
 by no means stands alone in the atrocities of 
 Grecian war. Nor is it a singular story in Greek 
 annals to read of the dethroned Dionysius sailing 
 as a private man to Corinth and consorting in the 
 market-place of that city with shopkeepers and 
 outcasts. And there was no one of the Greeks, 
 the biographer adds, but was eager to see and 
 accost him, some through hatred rejoicing in his 
 overthrow and wishing to trample on one cast 
 down by fortune, others filled with compassion 
 and convinced by the manifest futility and change 
 in mortal things of the power of secret and divine 
 causes.
 
 NEMESIS 221 
 
 This actual uncertainty of fortune in Greece 
 lends a tone of realism to the constant outcry 
 of poet and moralist. But even apart from his- 
 torical causes the Hellenic mind seems to have 
 been peculiarly affected by the precariousness of 
 human state. Life, it appeared to them, was be- 
 sieged by infinite enemies and held its citadel only 
 by unceasing watchfulness, — as it were the little 
 flame of a lamp cherished in the hand against the 
 buffeting flaws of the night-wind. They might 
 well carve as a symbol of death the inverted and 
 extinguished torch. Such a feeling is, to be sure, 
 a commonplace of poetry, and the Hindu epigrams 
 for example are full of similar metaphors: 
 
 Old age like as a tiger held at bay 
 Still crouches ; sly diseases day by day 
 
 Our leaguered body sap ; 
 As water from a broken urn, so leak 
 The wasting moments ; — lo, this people seek 
 
 Oblivion in love's lap. 
 
 But for the Greek, with his eager zest of living 
 and his brave doubt of the future, the thought 
 assumes a poignancy and persistence that render 
 it distinctively characteristic of the race. ' ' Crea- 
 tures of a day — what are we ? what are we not ? ' ' 
 cries Pindar; " man is the dream of a shadow! " 
 The bewildered prophetess in the Agamemnon, 
 urged by the vision of ruin impending over her- 
 self and the house of Atreus, exclaims: " Alas for 
 human things! A prosperous man one might
 
 222 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 liken to a sketch; and if be fail — whj', then 't is 
 but the brushing of a wet sponge obliterates the 
 picture." And in Sophocles there is this noble 
 image of changing fortune: "Sorrow and joy 
 circle about to each like the revolving ways of the 
 starry Bear. Nor doth the palpitating night re- 
 main, nor evil, nor riches — but suddenly they are 
 gone." 
 
 Still, however persistently the Greeks may have 
 dwelt on this thought, it is nevertheless one com- 
 mon to the human race, a natural cry of universal 
 experience. Its notable feature here is its con- 
 nection with the oft-repeated command to think 
 as a mortal, in other words its frank assumption 
 into the religious sphere. Know thyself, and 
 learn moderation in thy dealings with men; know 
 thyself, and learn humility under the jealousy of 
 the divine powers. The mythology of the Greeks, 
 more than that of any other people, is a poetical 
 prosopopoeia on an extended scale, and their gods 
 still have meaning for us because they are the 
 most transparent personification of man's emo- 
 tions and ideals. It was inevitable therefore that 
 this brooding conception of our own littleness in 
 the midst of the threatening forces of nature 
 should be referred to the envy of the gods, and 
 should even assume individual attributes in the 
 Olympian hierarchy as Nemesis and the Erinyes. 
 To us who have been trained up in a religion 
 which emphasises so strongly (in theory at least) 
 the fatherhood and love of God, this ackiiowledg-
 
 NEMESIS 223 
 
 raent of the divine envy may at first appear in- 
 comprehensible and even repulsive. An effort of 
 the understanding is required to appreciate this 
 phase of Greek religion, which has permeated 
 and coloured the whole of their literature; so that 
 it becomes imperative, before entering upon a dis- 
 cussion of the subject as treated by Greek authors, 
 to examine the same idea elsewhere and observe 
 how universal it is, although everywhere differ- 
 ently expressed. 
 
 What else but this haunting, vaguely conceived 
 dread of a daemonic jealousy compels the savage to 
 bloody sacrifice and hideous rites, to incantations 
 for exorcising evil spirits — spirits not distin- 
 guished from his gods — and for driving away 
 terror from the darkness ? What else but a feel- 
 ing that heaven begrudges man every good thing 
 leads him to utter prayers of supplication ? 
 
 At the very beginning of the Hebrew religion 
 we are met by one of the most impressive denun- 
 ciations of the divine jealousy. Though the 
 words are placed in the mouth of the Serpent, 
 they none the less proclaim a feeling deep-seated 
 in the human heart: " For God doth know that 
 in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be 
 opened; and ye shall be as gods." Nor were the 
 words of the tempter entirely false; for the know- 
 ledge of good and evil brings a godlike element 
 into the actions of man that were otherwise hardly 
 distinguishable from the workings of mechanical 
 force or bestial instinct. The penalty of death,
 
 224 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 too, has its celestial ministry in wrapping trivial 
 earthly things in the mystery of the outer silent 
 world; and labour and sorrow may be, after all, 
 the only masters of the higher wisdom. Such an 
 interpretation of the passage in Genesis is by no 
 means a new one. Certain sects of the Gnostics, 
 mingling Oriental and Hellenic ideas with Christ- 
 ian dogma, made this a cardinal point in their 
 faith, boldly denouncing the Jewish God as a 
 malicious power who endeavoured to cheat man 
 of his heritage, and deeming the Serpent a mes- 
 senger of the truth, a forerunner and type of the 
 Messiah. Again, in the second commandment it 
 is written : ' ' For I the Lord thy God am a jealous 
 God." Now jealousy is near akin to envy, and 
 in fact the same word is elsewhere (Job v., 2) 
 translated envy; yet the slight difference in mean- 
 ing marks a distinction between Jewish and Greek 
 ideas. According to the latter, the envy of the 
 gods followed any departure from the just limits 
 of man's sphere and any intrusion into the field 
 of celestial action; whereas the Hebrews in their 
 intense monotheistic creed feared the jealousy of 
 Jehovah if in place of blind obedience they strove 
 for knowledge, or if they failed in perfect and ex- 
 clusive devotion. 
 
 Quainter in form is the picture of divine envy 
 in the Indian religion. We are left to wonder a 
 little why the gods of the Greek should suffer this 
 passion. Hardly can they fear the rivalry of man, 
 nor is any such exclusiveness found in their cult
 
 NEMESIS 225 
 
 as should arouse jealousy. Here, as in so many 
 other respects, we find the Greek conception pre- 
 sented by the Hindus more logically, so as to 
 satisfy better the speculative reason, but at the 
 same time divested of that moderation and nat- 
 uralness which lend beauty of form in art and 
 value of example in conduct. It was the ambi- 
 tion of the Hindu sage, by means of penance 
 which should strip the will bare of clogs and 
 magnify its scope indefinitely, to endow himself 
 with supernatural powers, equalling or even sur- 
 passing those of the gods. Hence the divine 
 envy; and Indra, the ruler in the sky, receives 
 warning in the drollest manner when any saint 
 begins to grow too mighty for his Olympian 
 security. Immediately the god's throne waxes 
 hot under him, and, thus advised in time, he dis- 
 patches a fair nymph or other sweet illusion to 
 seduce the sage from his abnegation, and to en- 
 feeble his will by rendering him once more subject 
 to the flesh. The fable is retained also by the Bud- 
 dhists, who, however, modify its spirit somewhat. 
 Sakka (the Buddhist Indra, lord of one of the 
 sensuous heavens) must benignantly assist the 
 Buddha, although his own kingdom is to be over- 
 thrown by the new teacher. Accordingly, after 
 the four admonitions, when the future Buddha is 
 about to retire from the world and obtain enlight- 
 enment, Sakka is made aware of his peril by the 
 customary sign: "At that moment the throne on 
 which Sakka was sitting grew hot. And Sakka,
 
 226 SIIELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 reflecting who it might be that wished to dislodge 
 him, perceived that the time had come for the 
 adorning of a Future Buddha." 
 
 Even the Christian faith, based as it is on the 
 law of mercy, is permeated by the same natural 
 dread. Indeed, one might say that nowhere else 
 does it show itself in such naked austerity as in 
 the rigid logic of Calvin, or in the tremendous 
 denunciations of Jonathan Edwards. God is 
 love; yet, in his omnipotent righteousness, he has 
 created millions of beings who are predestined 
 to everlasting torture. Born into sin, we should 
 seem to behold the heavens blazing above us with 
 wrath and hatred, like those flaming ramparts of 
 the sky which smote Lucretius with a frenzy of 
 horror. The very fundamental idea of an angry 
 deity, whose justice is appeased only by the sacri- 
 fice of his own son, raises this envy into such a 
 region of awful austerity as might fill the world 
 with shuddering. As if in mockery, Dante read 
 over the portal of hell: 
 
 Created me divine Omnipotence, 
 
 The highest Wisdom and the primal Love. 
 
 This, it may be, is the sterner face of Christianity, 
 yet in the courtly orations of Bossuet we may read 
 here and there sentences that present the old 
 Greek notion of Nemesis in the disguise of Christ- 
 ian garb. " I must raise myself," he says, 
 " above man that I may make every creature 
 tremble beneath the judgments of God. I will
 
 NEMESIS 227 
 
 enter, with David, into the might of the L,ord." 
 And elsewhere: " Then might she well say with 
 the prophet Isaiah: 'The Lord of hosts hath 
 purposed it, to stain the pride of all glory, and to 
 bring into contempt all the honourable of the 
 earth.' ' Again, he quotes from the Gospel: Vcz 
 qui ridetis, vce qui saturati estis — words of more 
 terrible import than any echoing cry of ancient 
 heathen tragedy. 
 
 Apart from religion, a slight examination of 
 literature would show that the master minds, 
 those who have looked directly into the wide in- 
 terplay of circumstance and searched the human 
 heart without paying allegiance to any dogmatic 
 creed, have bowed to the same belief in the divine 
 envy. It is needless to accumulate illustrations, 
 but one relevant passage may be quoted from 
 Goethe's Conversations. "You know," said he, 
 "that Napoleon wore habitually a uniform of 
 dark green. From long use and exposure to the 
 sun this uniform had faded badly, so that it be- 
 came necessary to replace it. Napoleon wished 
 the same colour, but in the island no piece of 
 cloth of the kind could be found. . . . The 
 master of the world could not obtain the colour 
 he desired, and nothing was left for him but to 
 have the old uniform turned and to wear it so. — 
 What say you to that ? Is it not a bit of genuine 
 tragedy ? Is there not something pathetic in the 
 sight of the master of kings reduced to wearing a 
 turned uniform ? ' And yet when you think that
 
 228 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 such an end befell a man who had trampled under 
 foot the life and happiness of millions of men, 
 destiny, even while turning against him, seems 
 still to have been very indulgent. Here is a 
 Nemesis, who, on considering the greatness of 
 the hero, could not refrain from employing still a 
 touch of gallantry. Napoleon gives us an ex- 
 ample of the dangers inherent in raising one's 
 self to the absolute and in sacrificing all to an 
 idea." 
 
 We have then in this feeling of man's frailty, in 
 this shrinking before an unsympathetic destiny, 
 one of the universal instincts of mankind; and 
 here as elsewhere the Greek people showed their 
 soundness of moral sense in raising to a general 
 law of conduct the maxim Think as a mortal, and 
 their sincerity of religious conviction in elevating 
 the cause of their fear to personality among the 
 gods. The Greeks, voicing in this, too, the com- 
 mon feeling of mankind, waver in their attitude 
 towards this personified fear. At one time it is 
 Erinys who upholds the divine justice, punishing 
 the trespasser only; at another time it is Nemesis, 
 taking pleasure in the downfall of human great- 
 ness and sporting wantonly with human pride. 
 
 Erinys, if we accept a thoroughly doubtful 
 etymology, was originally a nature myth, corre- 
 sponding to the Vedic Saranyu. But whether 
 Saranyu be the dawn that discovers the crimes of 
 the night, or a storm goddess who purifies the air 
 and at the same time kindles house and home, —
 
 NEMESIS 229 
 
 whether, iu short, we are justified at all iu seek- 
 ing the origin of these ethical divinities in old 
 nature myths is entirely problematical. Cer- 
 tainly in Homer's time Erinys, or the Erinyes, 
 had become altogether severed from any such 
 phenomena. There, as in later literature, they 
 are the demons whose charge it is to maintain the 
 existing order of things and especially to exact 
 punishment for crimes that relax the bonds of so- 
 ciety. So in Homer the horse of Achilles is for the 
 moment given human speech to warn his master 
 of coming fate, and then, " when he had spoken 
 thus, the Erinyes stayed his voice." The con- 
 stellations of heaven tremble before the same 
 power, and from them Plutarch has drawn this 
 admirable lesson: "And he who sees happiness 
 in those who are ever running about and wasting 
 the best part of life in wayside houses and inns, 
 is like to one who should think the wandering 
 planets fare better than the fixed stars. And 
 still each of the planets preserves his appointed 
 order, going about in one orbit as in an island: 
 for neither will the sun, saith Heracleitus, trans- 
 gress his bounds, else will the Erinj-es, the minis- 
 trants of justice, overtake him." The beasts 
 are held in silence by these watchful deities, and 
 the inanimate bodies of nature obey their will. 
 Among men they are the guardians of social ties; 
 they have in charge the rights of suppliants, the 
 claims of family, the maintenance of oaths; and 
 theirs, above all, is vengeance for the slaying of
 
 230 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 kin. " For this duty," they chant in the play 
 named from them, "this duty remorseless Destiny 
 hath woven for us to hold without swerving, that 
 when a man recklessly slayeth his kin, we should 
 follow after him till he come beneath the earth— 
 yet neither in death is he altogether free." As 
 avengers of perjury, also, their office is to guard 
 the existing order of things; for in Greek the 
 word for oath signifies literally a restraint or 
 boundary, and any infraction of a solemn vow 
 would seem to bring fatal confusion into social 
 life. The gods themselves have their own oath 
 by the imperishable water of the Styx, and the 
 immortal who swears falsely by this daughter of 
 Ocean is for nine years degraded from Olympus 
 and subjected to torment. 
 
 With implacable zeal the Erinyes hunt down 
 earthly glory that vaunts itself unduly. So in the 
 play of iEschylus they exclaim: " The vanity of 
 men and their pride that toucheth the sky, — all 
 this melteth at our dark-stoled approach, it 
 wasteth away unhonoured under earth." In 
 these fearful daughters of Night the Greek beheld 
 the penalty that overtakes those who forget in 
 pride or madness to think as mortals: and woe to 
 the man whom some higher law impels to disdain 
 these avenging deities, whether it be a Hamlet 
 of the modern world driven on by conscience and 
 ghostly apparitions, or an Orestes summoned by 
 oracular voices to confront their wrath in pur- 
 suance of a sterner duty. And woe to the man
 
 NEMESTS 231 
 
 whom the gods have endowed with gifts of super- 
 human wisdom, for to him also the grace of heaven 
 is not without peril. This inexorable law of the 
 Erinyes would seem to throw light on the strange 
 attitude of Greek literature toward those who 
 have received any form of inspiration or super- 
 natural favour. 
 
 For this reason the love of the gods for mortals 
 is represented as full of danger to the recipients 
 and to their offspring. The lament of sad Ca- 
 lypso, when summoned to part with Odysseus, 
 echoes through all the later poets: 
 
 Ungracious gods ! with spite and envy cursed ! 
 
 Still to your own ethereal race the worst ! 
 
 Ye envy mortal and immortal joy, 
 
 And love, the only sweet of life, destroy. 
 
 Did ever goddess by her charms engage 
 
 A favour'd mortal, and not feel your rage? 
 
 So when Aurora sought Orion's love, 
 
 Her joys disturb'd your blissful hours above, 
 
 Till, in Ortygia, Dian's winged dart 
 
 Had pierced the hapless hunter to the heart. 
 
 So when the covert of the thrice-ear'd field 
 
 Saw stately Ceres to her passion yield, 
 
 Scarce could Iasion taste her heavenly charms, 
 
 But Jove's swift lightning scorch'd him in her arms. 
 
 The story of Ion, the child of that Creusa who 
 was wooed and abandoned by Apollo, gave 
 Euripides material for one of his most exquisite 
 tragedies. But of all idyls of immortal love the 
 tale of Io and Zeus is the saddest and the rich- 
 est in meaning. What reader of Greek has not
 
 232 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 lingered over her confession in the Prometheus 
 Bound, — the maiden visited by visions of the 
 night in her virgin chambers, the tender princess 
 wooed by the sweet voice of dreams, and at last 
 driven forth from her home to be the prey of her 
 divine suitor and to wander helpless over the 
 wide earth. Even between man and woman the 
 power of Eros was fraught with- terror, just as his 
 ecstasy of joy seemed to transcend the bounds of 
 safety. 
 
 The gift of song came with like peril to the reci- 
 pient. Demodocus, the rhapsodist of the Odyssey, 
 to whom the Muses gave skill in singing but 
 added darkness of sight, and ' ' the blind old bard of 
 Chio's rocky isle," from whom sprang the legend 
 of Homer's blindness, are types of the poetic art 
 bestowed grudgingly by the gods, as if the power 
 of portraying to the inner vision could only be 
 won by closing the eyes on the winsome outer 
 world. In later times the poet was even regarded 
 as subject to a kind of daemonic possession which 
 deprived him of all worldly intelligence. 
 
 Something of the same sort was the madness 
 which overpowered the Bacchic revellers and those 
 who were initiated into other orgiastic rites. The 
 poets are replete with pictures of the Msenads 
 dancing wildly on the mountain ridges, uprending 
 trees in their fury, slaying savage beasts, and de- 
 vouring the raw flesh. And we know with what 
 horrible awakening one of them, the mother of 
 Pentheus, recognises in her hand the bleeding
 
 NEMESIS 233 
 
 head of her son whom, with the other frantic 
 Bacchanals, she has torn limb from limb. Such 
 was the penalty which fell alike upon him who, 
 in his Greek love of moderation, denied the god, 
 and upon her who surrendered herself to his re- 
 ligious enthusiasm. 
 
 But still more striking is the fate of the inspired 
 prophets who incurred the jealousy of Olympus 
 for penetrating or divulging its secrets. They 
 are smitten with blindness, or withered by age, or 
 must wander among men as babblers speaking an 
 incomprehensible tongue. Teiresias, with his 
 inner vision and darkened eyes, revolving through 
 seven ages the doom of Thebes, or endeavouring 
 in vain to arouse the guilty CEdipus; Cassandra, 
 tormented by her knowledge of Troy's fate and 
 condemned to inarticulate raving; Helenus, like- 
 wise unable to utter words of intelligence to his 
 countrymen, — are witnesses to the danger of wis- 
 dom that transcends human bounds. The most 
 graphic scene in the Argonautica is the picture of 
 Phineus, blind, shriveled with age, haunted by 
 the Harpies, for his oracular utterance to men of 
 the mind of Zeus. When at last the Argonauts 
 arrive, " he goes forth from his couch like a life- 
 less dream, leaning on a staff, tottering on his 
 stiffened feet, groping along the wall." There he 
 sits on the threshold before the house and fore- 
 tells to the sailors the adventures that await them. 
 
 It was the thought of this peril attendant on 
 superhuman gifts which led Plato to speak of the
 
 234 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 four kinds of divine madness, — the prophetic, the 
 initiatory, the poetic, and the erotic. These are 
 all akin, being essentially a high-wrought sym- 
 bolism concerned with different elements. One 
 foretells the purpose of the gods by sacrificial and 
 other signs; another displays the indwelling of 
 spiritual faith by the surrender of the reason to a 
 delirious enthusiasm, or presents the mysteries 
 of religion in a symbolic drama; another restores 
 the world of phenomena to the idealising mind 
 by means of rhythmic imitation; and the erotic 
 madness, in its wider sense, awakens the desire 
 of heavenly perfection by the vision of earthly 
 grace. They are all divine because they build a 
 ladder by which the soul may ascend to com- 
 munion with celestial things; they are a madness 
 because by the influx of these general ideas the 
 relation of the personality to specific things is 
 perturbed, — just as gazing at the stars one might 
 stumble into a well at his feet. 
 
 This divine madness illustrates once more the 
 reiterated command to think as a mortal; for the 
 Greek in general deliberately chose sanity within 
 set bounds, in preference to the hazardous har- 
 bouring of the unlimited. And as he found 
 beauty and health and reason in such limitations 
 he was content to worship the avengers of such 
 transgression as the peculiar champions of justice. 
 The perception of right order in the world was 
 the source of his moral feeling; and this right 
 order he personified, calling it Themis, the wife
 
 NEMESIS 235 
 
 of Zeus and mother of the Hours. Themis, more- 
 over, as knowing the decrees of fate that were to 
 dispose all things in their place, was a giver of 
 oracles and in this capacity preceded Apollo at 
 Delphi. If we could admit a conjecture from an 
 epithet (0€j>u3 'Ixvatia) in the Homeric hymn to 
 Apollo, she was even believed to track the guilty 
 like another Erinys. A comparison with the 
 Vedic rita and the Zoroastrian asha would show 
 how deeply this sense of primitive order in crea- 
 tion is planted in the mind of the eastern Aryans, 
 and would simplify for us the understanding of 
 the Greek gods. The Erinyes who maintain this 
 order are therefore the ministers of justice, but it 
 is not difficult to see how the notion of envy also 
 becomes associated with them. Right order and 
 the justice deriving therefrom would hold every 
 class of created things in its established place, 
 from the inanimate wanderers of the sky to the 
 Lords of Olympus. Yet through the whole world 
 runs an impulse and striving toward a higher 
 plane, which the Greeks could not fail to recog- 
 nise, and to which the Hindus have given expres- 
 sion in this terse epigram : 
 
 The rooted trees would walk ; the beast 
 For utterance yearning still is dumb ; 
 Man toils for some far heaven, wherefrom 
 
 The enthroned gods were fain released. 
 
 Naturally, then, the powers who oppose this in- 
 stinctive aspiration seem to be animated by a
 
 236 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 kind of envy; and the injunction to think as a 
 mortal becomes both a moral law and a maxim of 
 prudence. For the most part, the Krinyes main- 
 tain their character as guardians of the moral 
 sense, whereas the fear of the divine envy is per- 
 sonified in Nemesis. Yet, occasionally this dis- 
 tinction is overlooked. For instance, in the 
 Odyssey the daughters of Pandareus are snatched 
 away by the Harpies and given over to the 
 Erinyes, because they were too highly favoured 
 by certain of the gods. So, too, in the Iliad 
 Erinys, acting with Zeus and Destiny, sent upon 
 Agamemnon the infatuation that brought about 
 the fatal quarrel. 
 
 Nemesis is a late addition to the Pantheon, and 
 the divine envy was recognised long before her 
 advent. Homer already detected this trait in the 
 counsels of Olympus. We remember how Posei- 
 don envied the Phseacians their sea-craft; how 
 Eurytus challenged Apollo to a contest of the bow 
 and was killed by the irate deity; how the sons 
 and daughters of Niobe were slain because she 
 equalled herself to fair-cheeked Leto who had 
 borne only two children, whereas she had brought 
 forth many, — Niobe, symbol it may be of the 
 fruitful season of spring withered by the darts of 
 the sun, type of human pride and love smitten by 
 the hand of destiny. " Alas, most wretched 
 Niobe, thee I call a god, who in thy rocky tomb 
 forever weepest." Certain features of Homeric 
 worship also may spring from the same source.
 
 NEMESIS 237 
 
 The offering of first fruits and the pouring of 
 libations seem to arise from a haunting dread 
 that the gods unless propitiated may be jealous 
 of man's prosperity; and it may be that in our 
 habit of saying grace before meat there lurks a 
 remnant of the old uneasiness. 
 
 Passing to Hesiod, we notice a marked devel- 
 opment of the idea. From being an occasional 
 whim of the gods, envy is now reckoned one of 
 the chief motives animating Zeus in his govern- 
 ment of the world, and hence the consistent pic- 
 ture of the labour and hardship and humility of 
 man's lot. In Homer libation and sacrifice served 
 to propitiate the divine favour; Hesiod draws from 
 the sacrifice his quaintest allegory. The story 
 of Prometheus is twice told. According to the 
 Theogony, the sacrificial victim is divided into 
 two portions, and Zeus is deceived by the rich 
 envelope of fat. Enraged at this, he denies to 
 man the use of fire, which the Titan however 
 conveys to earth in a hollow reed. Thereupon 
 Zeus takes revenge by creating an evil plague 
 against man. Strange that this ancient theologian 
 should have laid his finger on the weak spot of 
 the generations to come, and foreseen the Nemesis 
 that was to destroy them. Beauty made perfect 
 by the cunning of the gods, beauty and pleasure 
 in the form of woman, is sent upon the world; 
 and when the fair evil is brought into view, gods 
 and men are filled with wonder at the work of 
 fatal, inexplicable treachery. In the Works and
 
 238 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 Days the story varies slightly. Here the woman 
 is called Pandora, the possessor of all gifts; and 
 here we read of the urn from which all calamities 
 flow upon the earth — only hope is left behind. 
 
 This Promethean struggle between the intelli- 
 gence of man and the forces that oppose his 
 activity contains the whole conception of the 
 divine envy, but as yet only in germ. The first 
 poet to recognise the full scope of the myth seems 
 to have been the uncertain author of the Cypria. 
 It is well known that a succession of poets, after 
 the example of Homer, took up the vast cycle of 
 legends that begins with the battle of the Titans, 
 passes through the Theban and Trojan wars, and 
 relates the death of Odysseus at the hands of 
 Telegonus, his son by Circe, concluding with the 
 tasteless espousal of Telegonus with Penelope and 
 Telemachus with Circe, who all enjoy immortality 
 together in the island of the enchantress. These 
 epics are the so-called Cyclic poems; and among 
 them the Cypria, if the number of quotations from 
 it in later works and its influence 011 legendary 
 mythology are trustworthy evidence, held the 
 place of honour. From the fragments preserved 
 and the summary of Proclus the entire plot of the 
 poem may be reconstructed, which, omitting cer- 
 tain episodes, proceeds as follows: A conference is 
 held between Zeus and Themis, at which the 
 Trojan war is planned. Eris is thereupon sent 
 among the gods assembled as guests at the mar- 
 riage feast of Peleus and Thetis; she stirs up
 
 NEMESIS 239 
 
 Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite to contend for the 
 palm of beauty. The three goddesses at the com- 
 mand of Zeus are led by Hermes to Mount Ida, 
 where Paris, bribed by Aphrodite with the prof- 
 fered possession of Helen, gives the award to the 
 Cyprian deity. In this connection the amours 
 of Zeus and Nemesis are related, and the birth of 
 their daughter Helen. Paris, at the suggestion 
 of Aphrodite, builds a ship and prepares to sail 
 with ^neas to Greece, although Helenus and 
 Cassandra prophesy the ruin to come. The 
 Trojan brothers are received by Menelaus in 
 Sparta, where at a banquet Paris tempts Helen 
 with gifts. Menelaus, being called away to Crete, 
 bids Helen entertain the guests until they depart. 
 Aphrodite now brings Paris and Helen together, 
 and they sail away at night, taking many pos- 
 sessions with them. A storm sent by Hera drives 
 them from their course, but with the aid of Aphro- 
 dite they finally reach Troy. There the nuptials 
 of Paris and Helen are celebrated, and the Tro- 
 jans, by partaking in the ceremonj^, become 
 sharers in the guilt. Iris conveys to Menelaus 
 news of what has happened, and he, with Aga- 
 memnon and Nestor, collects an armament against 
 Troy. After a mistaken expedition against Teu- 
 thrania, the forces are a second time mustered at 
 Aulis, where occurs the memorable sacrifice of 
 Iphigenia. For Agamemnon, while hunting, 
 brings down a stag, and in his elation boasts to 
 excel Artemis herself, so that the angered goddess
 
 240 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 sends continual storms which prevent the fleet 
 from sailing. Calchas declares the cause of the 
 deity's wrath, and orders that Iphigenia be sacri- 
 ficed to appease her. The young princess is sent 
 for, under pretext of wedding her to Achilles. 
 She is bound on the altar, but when the knife is 
 raised to immolate the victim Artemis intervenes, 
 secretly conveying the maiden to Tauris and sub- 
 stituting a fawn in her place. The army now 
 sails for Troy. Protesilaus, the first to disem- 
 bark, is slain by Hector; Achilles drives back the 
 Trojans in rout; and the long war of ten years 
 begins. 
 
 When, to this outline of the plot, the numerous 
 episodes are added, — such as the story of Castor 
 and Pollux, the sack of Epopeus, the tragedy of 
 CEdipus, the madness of Hercules, the loves of 
 Theseus and Ariadne, the expedition against 
 Teuthrania and the tale of Telephus, the amour 
 of Achilles and Deidamia, the abandonment of 
 Philoctetes, the first quarrel of Agamemnon with 
 Achilles, and the foraging excursions of the early 
 war, — we can form an idea of the wealth of legen- 
 dary matter in the poem and appreciate the extent 
 of its influence on later literature. Hence we are 
 justified in saying that this uncertain Cyclic poet 
 (whether Stasinus, or Hegesias, or another is un- 
 known) more than any other individual writer 
 gave currency to the notion of Nemesis and the 
 divine envy. The skill with which the poet 
 weaves this motive through the narrative is at
 
 NEMESIS 241 
 
 once remarkable. The opening lines are pre- 
 served, and at the outset Zeus is seen counselling 
 with Themis (goddess of order) against mankind 
 who have waxed too numerous for the broad earth: 
 ' ' There was a time when innumerable tribes of 
 men wandering over the land weighed down the 
 widtli of deep-breasted earth. And Zeus, behold- 
 ing this, had pity and in his mighty heart laid a 
 plan to relieve the all-nourishing earth of her 
 load, fanning the flames of that great strife of the 
 Trojan war that he might lighten the load by 
 death. So in Troy the heroes were slain, and the 
 will of Zeus was accomplished. ' ' The first words 
 of Greek epic, it will be remembered, tell how the 
 "will of Zeus was accomplished" by the wrath 
 of Achilles, and here the Cyclic poet seems to 
 have taken up the expression and developed its 
 meaning in accordance with his own ideas. 
 
 The grammarian who quotes these verses of the 
 Cypria gives a double reason for the action of 
 Zeus. The earth, he says, was overburdened 
 with the multitude of men, and, furthermore, 
 there remained no piety among them, — and this 
 double reason corresponds to the ambiguous char- 
 acter of the divine wrath as envy directed against 
 man's overweening greatness and as justice pur- 
 suing his evil courses. The same grammarian 
 points out the twofold means employed to carry out 
 the divine purpose. Zeus is persuaded by Momus 
 not to destroy the whole race with thunder- 
 bolt or deluge, but on the one hand to bring about
 
 242 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the union of the mortal Peleus with the immortal 
 Thetis whence should spring Achilles, and on 
 the other hand himself with Nemesis to beget 
 the beautiful Helen. One can hardly praise too 
 highly the invention by which these two events 
 are brought together, — the discord at the marriage 
 of Peleus, the decision of Paris, who reflects the 
 thought of the Greek poet in giving the prize to 
 the goddess of beauty, and the rape of Helen, 
 who thus becomes the instrument of vengeance. 
 Alread}' in Homer Helen is a strangely significant 
 figure, and in the proper place it would be inter- 
 esting to follow her down through Greek litera- 
 ture. Here it is sufficient to note the new version 
 of her birth which makes her the child of Nemesis, 
 instead of Leda. The fragment telling of the 
 amour of Zeus and Nemesis deserves to be quoted 
 in full: " And after these, the third he begot 
 Helen, a wonder to mortals, whom fair-haired 
 Nemesis mingling in love with Zeus bare to the 
 king of the gods by hard necessity; for she fled 
 and wished not to join in love with Zeus Cronion, 
 the father, and was troubled at heart with shame 
 and indignation. Over land she fled and over 
 the black unharvested water. And Zeus pursued, 
 longing in heart to seize her. Now like a fish she 
 sped through the waves of the loud-resounding 
 sea and stirred up the mighty deep, and again 
 over the ocean stream and the ends of the earth 
 she wandered, and again over the fertile main- 
 land. And ever, to escape him, she took the form
 
 NEMESIS 243 
 
 of all the wild monsters nourished by the earth." 
 So Helen the daughter becomes, as it were, a 
 human nemesis to work the will of her father; 
 nor is there anything inconsistent in the union of 
 this invidious office with her supreme beauty. 
 Through fragments of broken tradition we gather 
 that her mother, the Nemesis of the poem, con- 
 tained a like seeming contradiction in her im- 
 mortal nature. 
 
 The Greeks were slow to admit Nemesis into 
 their pantheon, and to the end her personality 
 was far more shadowy than that of the Erinyes. 
 The word is derived from the root meaning to dis- 
 tribute, and hence belongs in thought to that large 
 group of terms which by their etymology show 
 the association of ideas in distribution, order, 
 destiny, justice, retribution, indignation, envy. 
 Homer employs the word nemesis only as an ab- 
 stract. Its use in Hesiod is more doubtful. The 
 Works and Days announces that Nemesis and 
 Shame, at the coming on of the iron age, clad 
 themselves in white raiment and departed from 
 earth to join the immortal gods. Here Nemesis 
 is clearly the half- personified feeling of justice 
 and righteous indignation among men. But in 
 the Theogony of the same poet we are told that 
 " pernicious Night bare Nemesis also, a bane for 
 mortal men." There is no sufficient reason for 
 rejecting this line, with certain critics. The two 
 passages are of great interest as showing the 
 transference of human feelings to the gods and
 
 244 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 the personification of abstract ideas in the very 
 process. In the Cypria this ethical Nemesis 
 seems to have coalesced with an obscure legend 
 of a nymph of the same name, sprung from the 
 ocean like Aphrodite, probably indeed only a 
 local manifestation of the great goddess; so that 
 in a double sense, as instigator of Paris and 
 mother of Helen, the queen of beauty is made the 
 seducer and scourge of mankind. It is not easy 
 to decide how much of this allegory was conscious 
 in the mind of the epic bard; but to us at least 
 who look back on that old literature and weigh 
 the strength and error of that wonderful people, 
 this early union of Nemesis with Aphrodite car- 
 ries a haunting lesson. Its significance, however, 
 was soon lost, for the two deities were disassoci- 
 ated and Nemesis, to the later poets, became again 
 a separate person. 
 
 Other details of the Cyprian epic were more 
 fruitful of imitation. The tragic story of CEdipus, 
 the madness of Hercules, the fate of Protesilaus, 
 show the working of Nemesis in the episodes of 
 the poem, and must have influenced succeeding 
 writers. The ravings of Helenus and Cassandra 
 were not forgotten in later pictures of madness 
 sent by the divine envy. But most popular of all 
 was the pathetic story of Iphigenia, the echo of 
 whose lamentation is still heard in modern litera- 
 ture. Iphigenia, laying down her young life on 
 the altar to appease the envy of the goddess, 
 stands as the fairest, the most touching, emblem
 
 NEMESIS 245 
 
 of the dread that has haunted man's heart from 
 of old, the purest example of the sacrifice de- 
 manded by the religious instinct whether pagan 
 or Christian. She furnished a theme for several 
 of the noblest of Greek tragedies; her fate ani- 
 mated the bitterest lines of Lucretius, ending with 
 those words which the world has not forgotten 
 and can never forget, Tantum religio! Her story 
 has inspired modern poets to revive the beauty of 
 ancient mythology; and, among others, taught 
 L,andor to write verses that contain perhaps more 
 of the true classical spirit than any other poem of 
 the past century. 
 
 So far we have been dealing with pure mytho- 
 logy, with that form of art where symbol and ab- 
 stract thought are barely distinguishable. But 
 with the coming of the fifth century begins an age 
 of reflection or theology. Pindar stands at the 
 threshold of the new period; and in him myth 
 and theology, symbol and abstraction, speak side 
 by side. Pindar is the accepted singer of aris- 
 tocracy, the clear- voiced herald of splendid wealth, 
 of magnanimous deeds, of regal pride, of unpity- 
 ing strength. His odes unroll before us the 
 pageant of all that is glorious in individual 
 achievement. As in the golden pomp of tri- 
 umphal processions, his heroes pass before us 
 wearing the insolence of perfect self-reliance and 
 with the smile of uuembittered victory. By their 
 side move the blessed Olympians, bright with the 
 effulgence of immortality. Gods and men hold
 
 246 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 converse together, heedless of the thronging mul- 
 titudes that shout in acclaim: they lean upon one 
 another in graceful confidence, so that the eye 
 fails now and again to distinguish between deified 
 mortal and humanised god. Yet listen more at- 
 tentively to the poet's hymns of victory, and the 
 ear will be struck by one note that is sounded 
 over and over again: " Be bold, be bold; be not 
 too bold! " Nowhere else is the lesson of worldly 
 moderation so intimately blended with its divine 
 counterpart. Through all the exultant laudation 
 the warning words return, in every variety of 
 form. Now it is direct admonition: "Seek not 
 to become a god"; now it is a picture of man's 
 littleness, who is but " the dream of a shadow "; 
 now it is a hint conveyed in parable or fable; 
 again the poet recalls the frightful stones of old- 
 world mythology, Tantalus, Typhus, Ixion, 
 Tityus, Bellerophon, and others, all overwhelmed 
 in their mad efforts to rival the gods; and again 
 he himself bows before these gods whose jealous 
 wrath threatens the glory even of the poet who 
 adores them. 
 
 From the golden-mouthed singer of the heroic 
 days we turn naturally to the historian who cele- 
 brated the same period in no less famous prose. 
 Herodotus occupies a unique position in literature, 
 for the reason that he, more than any other, com- 
 bines two aspects of thought which make of him 
 at once a master historian and a complete ex- 
 ponent of the essentially Greek spirit. He was
 
 NEMESIS 247 
 
 eiidowed with the wondering eye of the child. In 
 the gardens of the Luxembourg, or elsewhere it 
 may be, we have seen a circle of children en- 
 thralled by the antic play of a puppet show; as 
 we watched them, gradually their enthusiasm 
 crept upon us until all the silly mechanism of the 
 tiny stage was forgotten; the painted dolls became 
 living creatures, their passions moved us to 
 laughter or tears, and the voice of the hidden 
 manager spoke with oracular wisdom. So Herod- 
 otus looked upon the world's stage with the won- 
 der of childlike delight; and, reading his long 
 narration, we are seized by the same intoxication. 
 The sordid wires and pulleys of history are for a 
 while ignored, all the nobler motives of humanity 
 wake a responsive chord in our hearts, and always 
 we hear the voice of the oracles of the gods, utter- 
 ing words of admonition and encouragement. 
 Were there nothing else in the historian's pages, 
 he would still rank among the great writers of 
 the world; for deep in our breast there remains a 
 haunting suspicion that somehow with the ex- 
 perience of age we have lost another, different 
 wisdom of childhood. But, side by side with this 
 uucontamiuated vision, there runs through Herod- 
 otus a vein of profound and mature reflection. 
 Here we discern the keen eye of the philosopher 
 who detected through all the tangle of events the 
 one paramount conflict of reason with unreason, 
 so that, following his record of the wars of Greece 
 and Persia, together with their long preparation,
 
 248 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 we seem to read once for all the struggle of the 
 human race. The victory at last is splendid; but 
 at every turn of the narrative, like a true Greek, 
 he insinuates his subtle warning, and the lesson 
 is the same as Pindar's, now made solemn by the 
 weight of historical example: Be bold, yet leaven 
 pride with humility beneath the eye of divine 
 envy. In the introduction to his work he writes: 
 ' ' The cities which once were great are now for 
 the most part insignificant, and those that are at 
 present illustrious were formerly small. Knowing 
 then the precarious nature of human felicity, I 
 shall speak of both alike." A little further on, 
 as if to give us in dramatic form the key to all 
 that follows, he introduces the memorable scene 
 between Croesus, the type of human prosperity, 
 and Solon, the mouthpiece of cautious wisdom. 
 The Athenian would count no man happy until 
 the end were seen, for oftentimes God gives men 
 a gleam of happiness and then plunges them into 
 ruin. Nay, man is but a thing of accident, and 
 the divine nature is full of envy and prone to send 
 tribulations. And after the departure of Solon, 
 the historian adds, a great nemesis from God 
 came upon Croesus, presumably because he deemed 
 himself the most prosperous of men. 
 
 It may be a matter of astonishment that this 
 perpetual fear of Nemesis never in Greece degen- 
 erated into vulgar superstition. The Romans also 
 shrunk from the divine envy, and how different 
 is the manifestation of their dread! There we
 
 NEMESIS 249 
 
 may behold Caesar, startled in his triumphal pro- 
 cession by an unlucky chance, climbing up the 
 steps of the Capitol on his knees; and Augustus, 
 terrified by nocturnal visions, begging alms on a 
 certain day each year, stretching out his hollow 
 hand to the people; we may behold Claudius also 
 mounting the Capitol on his knees, and the spec- 
 tacle will teach us the difference between servile 
 superstition and the free play of imagination. 
 Well might the insolent conquerors of the world 
 cringe before the wrath of Nemesis, and the down- 
 fall of the " Eternal City " may stand as the most 
 eloquent proof of her inexorable judgments. 
 
 The literature of Rome offers few examples of 
 belief in a personal Nemesis, for the mythopceic 
 faculty never flourished in that materialistic city. 
 But, on the other hand, Rome gave to the world 
 the two great religious poets of antiquity in whom 
 the sense of the divine envy speaks in clear and 
 diverse accents. Mention has already been made 
 of L,ucretius and his use of the Iphigenia legend. 
 From beginning to end, his work is inspired by 
 the same feeling of horror toward the gods as they 
 appeared to him in mythology. His soul is tor- 
 tured by the universal dread of a watchful malig- 
 nant power in the sky, by the servile homage and 
 degrading worship exacted from men, by the cruel 
 deeds perpetrated in the name of religion, and by 
 visions of future punishment. To escape once 
 for all from this superstition of divine envy, he 
 would utterly sweep away religion and the hopes
 
 250 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 of a future life. To Epicurus who has unbur- 
 dened the heart of these errors he vows himself as 
 to a hero greater than Hercules, who freed the 
 earth of physical monsters: "When human life 
 lay shamefully grovelling on the earth, oppressed 
 by religion which showed her head from the re- 
 gions of the sky lowering down upon mortals 
 with horrible aspect, then first a man of Greece 
 dared raise aloft his mortal eyes and take stand 
 against her. Him neither rumours of the gods 
 constrained, nor thunderbolts, nor the sky with 
 threatening murmurs; but only the more these 
 things embittered his mind with desire to break 
 down first the narrow bars of nature's door. 
 Therefore the living power of his mind prevailed; 
 therefore he proceeded far out beyond the flaming 
 ramparts of the world and with heart and soul 
 traversed the vast immensity. ' ' Such is his boast: 
 and in the empty spaces of the world what did he 
 find to replace the hated powers ? Only a blind, 
 swirling tempest of atoms which obey no law but 
 that of chance. And the comfort he found for the 
 human soul was like that which a later bard 
 brought back from the City of Dreadful Night : 
 
 Good tidings of great joy for you, for all : 
 There is no God ; no Fiend with names divine 
 Made us and tortures us ; if we must pine, 
 
 It is to satiate no Being's gall. 
 
 Lucretius consigned the gods to a far-off limbo 
 of unconcerned ease; Virgil retains them as a kind
 
 NEMESIS 251 
 
 of poetical machinery for his poem, although in 
 reality granting them no more authority than the 
 Epicurean. To replace them, he introduces the 
 working of Fate into the world, a power as im- 
 personal as chance and equally devoid of responsi- 
 bility. Its iron sway, whether it he called fortuna 
 omnipotens or inexorabile fatum or ineluctabile 
 tcmpus, is more pitiless than the divine envy of 
 the Greeks; there is no heart in the fata aspcra 
 for sympathy with human labour. Virgil would 
 replace the whims of Nemesis by a vast design of 
 Providence toward which the workings of Fate 
 inevitably move. Yet this Providence is as im- 
 personal as the decrees cf Fate which it executes; 
 and ^Eneas, carried on irresistibly to establish 
 Rome, herself the symbol of destiny on earth, 
 must endure every personal sacrifice,— the deso- 
 lation of his home, years of wandering, shipwreck, 
 the abandonment of love, cruel wars, — all that his 
 heart desires is swallowed up by the exigencies of 
 envious necessity. So, too, in the memorable 
 passage of the Georgics, where Virgil gives freest 
 utterance to his own views and longings, what is 
 it lends such peculiar pathos to the lines but the 
 feeling that somehow happiness forever floats just 
 beyond, and there needs but an effort on our part 
 to penetrate the clouds and behold its unsullied 
 glory, — only some strange fatality in our breast 
 remorselessly holds us back ! O fortunatos 
 nimiutn, sua si bona norint, he begins. Alas, 
 too happy indeed! I know not if it may appear a
 
 252 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 
 bit of pedantic subtlety, but in the single word 
 nimium I seem to read all the pathos of man's 
 vain aspirations beneath the frown of an incom- 
 prehensible Nemesis. 
 
 The chance and fate of the Roman poets, how- 
 ever, carry us out of the field of mythology. The 
 most notable effort to rationalise the divine envy 
 within mythology is the great trilogy of iEschylus 
 presenting the story of Orestes. His picture of 
 the Erinyes pursuing the house of Atreus as an 
 inherited curse is the most sombre in Greek liter- 
 ature. Yet, after all, they are the ministers of 
 justice; in the end they are appeased, and, losing 
 their savage aspect, remain as the Eumenides, the 
 kindly-disposed, the guardians of the Athenian 
 state. And if this fair allegory leaves unaltered 
 the real Nemesis who broods over human weak- 
 ness, still there is a word of consolation even here. 
 Zeus has appointed, the poet writes, that we grow 
 wise through suffering; and again and again he 
 hints that the soul may win, at the last, her own 
 profit from the envy of fortune. It is the old say- 
 ing of Genesis: " Ye shall be as gods knowing 
 good and evil." 
 
 With this word of good omen we may close. 
 If our study of the divine envy seems to leave the 
 subject after all as an unsolved problem, we only 
 reproduce in this the attitude of the Greeks them- 
 selves. Let us not be deceived: these questions 
 that touch man's deepest moral experience are not 
 capable of logical solution; indeed, they lose all
 
 NEMESIS 253 
 
 reality as soon as subjected to dogmatic definition. 
 So it is always refreshing and stimulating to 
 come into contact with a people who faced these 
 problems frankly and naturally, without the re- 
 straints of revelation or sophistication or indiffer- 
 ence. From his perception of harmony in the 
 world the Greek created the Erinyes, the up- 
 holders of order; from his experience of man's 
 frailty he bowed to Nemesis; and these two, the 
 divine justice and the divine envy, worked side 
 by side, now perfectly distinct and again insepar- 
 ably blended. At times he seemed to discern 
 a higher purpose speaking through the events of 
 human life, but still his mind was too upright to 
 avow any real understanding of what transcended 
 his own vision. Always he drew one lesson 
 from Erinyes and Nemesis alike: " Think as a 
 mortal ' ' ; and these words he made the religious 
 complement of the still more famous command 
 which Apollo spoke to him from the portal of the 
 temple at Delphi. 
 
 THE END
 
 Shelburne Essays 
 
 By Paul Elmer More 
 
 3 vols. Crown octavo. 
 Sold separately. Net, $1.25. (By mail, $1.35) 
 
 Contents 
 
 First Series : A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau — The Soli- 
 tude of Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Origins of Haw- 
 thorne and Poe — The Influence of Emerson — The Spirit 
 of Carlyle — The Science of English Verse — Arthur 
 Symonds: The Two Illusions— The Epic of Ireland — 
 Two Poets of the Irish Movement — Tolstoy; or, The 
 Ancient Feud between Philosophy and Art — The Re- 
 ligious Ground of Humanitarianism. 
 
 SECOND SERIES : Elizabethan Sonnets — Shakespeare's Son- 
 nets — Lafcadio Ilearn — The First Complete Edition of 
 ll.i/.litt — Charles Lamb — Kipling and FitzGerald — 
 George Crabbe — The Novels of George Meredith — 
 Hawthorne: Looking before and after — Delphi and 
 Greek Literature — Nemesis ; or, The Divine Envy. 
 
 THIRD SERIES : The Correspondence of William Cowper — 
 Whittier the Poet — The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve — 
 The Scotch Novels and Scotch History — Swinburne — 
 Christina Rossetti — Why is Browning Popular? — A Note 
 on Byron's "Don Juan" — Laurence Sterne — J. Henry 
 Shorthouse — The Quest. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 
 New York London
 
 A Few Press Criticisms on 
 Shelbume Essays 
 
 " It is a pleasure to hail in Mr. More a genuine critic, for 
 genuine critics in America in these days are uncommonly 
 scarce. . . . We recommend, as a sample of his breadth, 
 style, acumen, and power the essay on Tolstoy in the present 
 volume. That represents criticism that has not merely 
 a metropolitan but a world note. . . . One is thoroughly 
 grateful to Mr. More for the high quality of his thought, his 
 serious purpose, and his excellent style." — Harvard Gradu- 
 ates' Magazine. 
 
 " We do not know of any one now writing who gives 
 evidence of a better critical equipment than Mr. More. It 
 is rare nowadays to find a writer so thoroughly familiar with 
 both ancient and modern thought. It is this width of view, 
 this intimate acquaintance with so much of the best that has 
 been thought and said in the world, irrespective of local 
 prejudice, that constitute Mr. More's strength as a critic. 
 He has been able to form for himself a sound literary canon 
 and a sane philosophy of life which constitute to our mind 
 his peculiar merit as a critic." — Independent. 
 
 " He is familiar with classical, Oriental, and English 
 literature ; he uses a temperate, lucid, weighty, and not 
 ungraceful style ; he is aware of his best predecessors, and is 
 apparently on the way to a set of philosophic principles 
 which should lead him to a high and perhaps influential 
 place in criticism. . . . We believe that we are in the 
 presence of a critic who must be counted among the first who 
 take literature and life for their theme." — London Speaker. 
 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 New York London
 
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