LIBRARY 
 
 M.IFORNIA 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 THE ENGLISH POETS.
 
 ** FOR FULL LIST OF THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES, 
 SEE CATALOGUE AT EXD OF BOOK.
 
 THE ENGLISH POETS: LESSING, 
 ROUSSEAU: ESSAYS BY JAMES 
 RUSSELL LOWELL, WITH "AN 
 APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE." 
 
 LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, LTD. 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 SPENSER . . . . . .II 
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE . . . , 8 ; 
 
 MILTON . . -149 
 
 yAVORDSWORTH . .194 
 
 KEATS . .... 240 
 
 LESSING . . . . . .261 
 
 ROUSSEAU AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS . . 311
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE. 
 
 THE Editor of this little volume asks me to furnish it 
 with a preface. I am by no means clear that I have 
 any native desire to do this, while I am perfectly so, 
 that whatever is written from an extraneous impulse alone 
 must be a thing of naught. The Moralist no doubt assures 
 me that to do what we do not like is good for us. But here 
 the question is rather what is good for other people, since it 
 is tor them that prefaces are intended ; and this is a point 
 about which I have observed that the most sincere lovers of 
 then neighbour are apt to be mistaken. 
 
 Prefaces may be roughly classed in two general divisions. 
 They either are apologetic or explanatory. In the one case 
 they prompt the retort of Dean Swift to his deprecatory 
 host, that he would go where he could get what he wanted 
 for his money ; in the other they seem to cast a slight on 
 the reader s intelligence, who is apt to grumble, " Does the 
 fellow fancy himself so mighty deep, then, that I can t catch 
 his drift without a nudge from his elbow at every turn ? " 
 
 But whatever prefaces may be, their effect too commonly
 
 yiii AN APOLOGY FOR A PREFACE. 
 
 is to remind the reader of his experience at an Ordinary, 
 where the imposing flourish with which the waiter lifts a 
 cover is apt to be in inverse ratio to the m:rit of the 
 viands he be! rays. Nevertheless, all prefaces may be said 
 to have one valid excuse for being namely, that the 
 judicious reader can, and generally does, skip them, thus 
 securing one pleasurable emotion at least from his book, 
 a success beyond the average, if T may trust my own 
 experience. 
 
 And yet, feeling as I do my incompetence for this species 
 of literature, in which I have had no more practice than one 
 has in dying, having written but one in my life, I see no 
 great harm in doing, out of mere good-nature or easiness of 
 disposition, what I had rather not do at all, just as an 
 indifferent whist-player may consent to take his place at 
 table to make out a fourth hand. But if he should, one 
 can only wish that he may be as sure of a saint as he is of a 
 marlyr in his partner. And this puts one upon thinking 
 that in the game of prefaces one s vis-a-vis is the Public, and 
 in no conceivable hagiology will that respected name 
 (which, I think, has parted with some of its dignity in 
 dropping its final K) ever appear with an S before, or, if its 
 bearer have any choice in the matter, an M after it. 
 
 Meanwhile, having been asked for a few paragraphs only, 
 I find that I have nearly completed the task imposed on 
 me in making my excuses for not venturing to attempt it
 
 AN APOLOG Y FOR A PREFACE. ix 
 
 And as I say this anolher obstacle rises in my path. The 
 papers of which this volume is made up are more than 
 thirty years old. Now, a preface is in some sort also a 
 letter of introduction, and how shall I assume such a 
 responsibility in respect of a person so little known to me 
 as Myself of a generation ago ? We are no longer on 
 speaking terms, and, if we still nod to each other on the 
 rare occasions when we chance to meet, it is more from 
 involuntary habit than for any reason of good-fellowship. 
 We are still intimate with each other s failings and weak 
 nesses, as those of the same blood are apt to be ; but there 
 is likewise such an estrangement between us as is possible 
 only between those who by birth are in possession of those 
 fatal secrets. 
 
 Yet in trying to evade writing a preface, it occurs to me 
 that there is one explanation I should be glad to make. 
 The contents of this book (with the single exception of the 
 essay on Lessing) were originally written as lectures for an 
 audience consisting not only of my own classes, but also of 
 whatever other members of the University might choose to 
 attend. This will account for, if it do not excuse, their 
 more rhetorical tone. They were meant to be suggestive 
 rather than methodically pedagogic. As my own excur 
 sions widened, as I opened new vistas through the crowding 
 growth of my own prejudices and predilections, I was fain 
 to encourage in others that intellectual hospitality which in
 
 x AN APOLOG Y FOR A PREFACE. 
 
 myself I had found strengthening from an impulse till it 
 became a conviction that the wiser mind should have as 
 many entrances for unbidden guests as was fabled of the 
 Arabian prince s tent. I have had much gratifying evidence 
 that I was fairly successful in hitting what I aimed at, 
 though never satisfied that I had in me the stuft of which a 
 perfectly adequate professor is made, however well it might 
 have served the turn tor a tolerable Mercury. I make 
 this confession because I am conscious that, while capable 
 ol endless drudgery in acquisition, I am by nature quite 
 too impatient ot detail in communicating what 1 have 
 acquired. Moreover, in giving what 1 had written to the 
 press, I omitted much subsidiary and illustrative matter; 
 and this I regret now when it is too late. 
 
 Let me end with saying how much it pleases me to think 
 that I should find readers here in the Old Home, where I 
 have never been made to feel that I was a stranger, though 
 my ancestor did his best to make me one by seeking a new 
 home in New England two hundred and fifty years ago. 
 
 J. R. LOWELL. 
 October i^tfi, 1888.
 
 ESSAYS ON THE ENGLISH POETS. 
 
 SPENSER. 
 
 /"^HAUCER had been in his grave one hundred and fifty 
 ^~J years ere England had secreted choice material enough 
 for the making of another great poet. The nature of men 
 living together in societies, as of the individual man, seems to 
 have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the 
 ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line 
 of shore between them is in one generation a hard sandy 
 actuality strewn only with such remembrances of beauty as a 
 dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with 
 those lace-like curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and 
 that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and 
 holds the sunshine. 
 
 From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the inde 
 fatigable Ritson, in his Bibliographia Poe/ica, has made us a 
 catalogue of some six hundred English poets, or, more properly, 
 verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere 
 names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some of 
 them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their 
 works have perished because they were written in an obsolete 
 dialect ; for it is the poem that keeps the language alive, and 
 not the language that buoys up the poem. The revival of 
 letters, as it is called, was at first the revival of ancient letters, 
 which, while it made men pedants, could do very little toward
 
 12 SPENSER. 
 
 making them poets, much less toward making them original 
 writers. There was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity, 
 invention, and careless faith in the present which make many 
 of the productions of the Norman Trouveres delightful reading 
 even now. The whole of Europe during the fifteenth century 
 produced no book which has continued readable, or has become, 
 in any sense of the word, a classic. I do not mean that that 
 century has left us no illustrious names, that it was not enriched 
 with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic suc 
 cession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still 
 unextinguished torch of intelligence, the lampada vita, to 
 those who came after them. But a classic is properly a book 
 which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of 
 matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between 
 the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every 
 mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without being 
 vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something 
 neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of 
 growing old. It is not his Latin which makes Horace cos 
 mopolitan, nor can Beranger s French prevent his becoming so. 
 No hedge of language, however thorny, no dragon-coil of 
 centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of the 
 Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them. If 
 poems die, it is because there was never true life in them that 
 is, that true poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no 
 airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communi 
 cate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty, 
 the imagination. Take Aristotle s ethics, the scholastic philo 
 sophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic system of 
 astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the Middle 
 Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, 
 and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of 
 such an incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live ? Yes, 
 Dante can create such a soul under these ribs of death that one 
 hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in 
 these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth century since his 
 death. Accordingly, I am apt to believe that the complaints
 
 SPENSER. 13 
 
 one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature are 
 the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does 
 not need to advertise the squirrels \\here the nut-trees are, nor 
 could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their 
 teeth on a hollow nut. 
 
 On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth century has 
 more meat in it than the English, but this is to say very little. 
 Where it is meant to be serious and lofty it falls into the same 
 vices of unreality and allegory which were the fashion of the 
 day, and which there are some patriots so fearfully and wonder 
 fully made as to relish. Stripped of the archaisms (that turn 
 every y to a meaningless z, spell which quhilk, shake scliaik, 
 buijle bowgill, powder puldir^ and will not let us simply whistle 
 till we have puckered our mouths to quhissill) in which the 
 Scottish antiquaries love to keep it disguised as if it were 
 nearer to poetry the further it got from all human recognition 
 and sympathy stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it 
 from the contemporary verse-mongering south of the Tweed. 
 Their compositions are generally as stiff and artificial as a 
 trellis, in striking contrast with the popular ballad-poetry of 
 Scotland (some of which possibly falls within this period, 
 though most of it is later), which clambers, lawlessly if you will, 
 but at least freely and simply, twining the bare stem of old 
 tradition with graceful sentiment and lively natural sympathies. 
 I find a few sweet and flowing verses in Dunbar"s " Merle and 
 Nightingale" indeed, one whole stanza that has always seemed 
 exquisite to me. It is this 
 
 " Ne er sweeter noise was heard by living ni;iu 
 Than made this merry, gentle nightingale, 
 Her sound went with the river as it ran 
 Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale ; 
 merle, quoth she, fool, leave off thy tale, 
 For in thy song good teaching there is none, 
 For both are lost the time and the travail 
 Of every love but upon God alone." 
 
 But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the serious 
 verses of D unbar that does not seem to me tedious and
 
 I 4 SPENSEX. 
 
 pedantic. I dare say a few more lines might be found scattered 
 here and there, but I hold it a sheer waste of time to hunt 
 after these thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy haystacks of 
 verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it the better. His 
 " Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins," over which the excellent 
 Lord Hailes went into raptures, is wanting in everything but 
 coarseness ; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley- 
 slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the 
 sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has 
 painted for us. What he means for humour is but the dullest 
 vulgarity ; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, 
 failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a 
 great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his 
 Chronicle of Scottish Poetry, has admiringly preserved more 
 than enough of it, and seems to find a sort of national savour 
 therein, such as delights his countrymen in a haggis, or the 
 German in his sauer-kraut. The uninitiated foreigner puts his 
 handkerchief to his nose, wonders, and gets out of the way as 
 soon as he civilly can. Barbour s " Brus," if not precisely a 
 poem, has passages whose simple tenderness raises them to 
 that level. That on Freedom is familiar.* But its highest 
 merit is the natural and unstrained tone of manly courage in it, 
 the easy and familiar way in which Barbour always takes 
 chivalrous conduct as a matter of course, as if heroism were the 
 least you could ask of any man. I modernise a few verses to 
 show what I mean. When the King of England turns to fly 
 from the battle of Bannockburn (and Barbour, with his usual 
 generosity, tells us he has heard that Sir Aymer de Valence 
 led him away by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles 
 d Argente 
 
 " Saw the king thus and his menie 
 Shape them to flee so speedily, 
 He came right to the king in hy [hastily] 
 
 * Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the word in 
 that generalised meaning which is common now, but which could not 
 without an impossible anachronism have been present to his mind. lie 
 meant merely freedom from prison.
 
 SPENSER. 15 
 
 And said, Sir, since that is so 
 That ye thus gate your gate will go, 
 Have ye good-day, for back will I : 
 Yet never fled I certainly, 
 And I choose here to bide and die 
 Than to live shamefully and fly. " 
 
 The * Brus" is in many ways the best rhymed chronicle ever 
 written. It is national in a high and generous way, but I 
 confess I have little faith in that quality in literature which is 
 commonly called nationality a kind of praise seldom given 
 where there is anything better to be said. Literature that loses 
 its meaning, or the best part of it, when it gets beyond sight of 
 the parish steeple, is not what I understand by literature. To 
 tell you, when you cannot fully taste a book, that it is because it 
 is so thoroughly national, is to condemn the book. To say it of 
 a poem is even worse, for it is to say that what should be true 
 of the whole compass of human nature is true only to some 
 north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can understand the 
 nationality of Firdusi when, looking sadly back to the former 
 glories of his country, he tells us that " the nightingale still 
 sings old Persian ;" I can understand the nationality of Burns 
 when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough burr thistle, 
 and hopes he may write a song or two for dear auld Scotia s 
 sake. That sort of nationality belongs to a country of which 
 we are all citizens that country of the heart which has no 
 boundaries laid down on the map. All great poetry must 
 smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in it, must suck life and 
 substance from it, but it must do so with the aspiring instinct of 
 the pine that climbs forever toward diviner air, and not in the 
 grovelling fashion of the potato. Any verse that makes you 
 and me foreigners is not only not great poetry, but no poetry 
 at all. Dunbar s works were disinterred and edited some 
 thirty years ago by Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough 
 to like thistles may browse there to his heart s content. I 
 am inclined for other pasture, having long ago satisfied myself 
 by a good deal of dogged reading that every generation is sure 
 of its own share of bores without borrowing from the past.
 
 16 SPENSER. 
 
 A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of 
 the jEneid is linguistically valuable, and whose introduc 
 tions to the seventh and twelfth books the one describing 
 winter and the other May have been safely praised, they 
 are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic feeling 
 in them ; and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthu 
 siasm as is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady 
 yoke of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and then 
 turns about to lay the next as cleverly alongside it as he can. 
 But it is a wrong done to good taste to hold up this item kind of 
 description any longer as deserving any other credit than that 
 of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a post-mortem 
 inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not called 
 for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery- 
 book is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like 
 true word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head dues 
 not give us everything, but only the best of everything. He 
 selects, he combines, or else gives what is characteristic only ; 
 while the false style of which I have been speaking seems to be 
 as glad to get a pack of impertinences on its shoulders as 
 Christian in the Pilgrim s Progress was to be rid of his. One 
 strong verse that can hold itself upright (as the French critic 
 Rivarol said of Dante) with the bare help of the substantive 
 and verb, is worth acres ot this dead cord-wood piled stick on 
 stick, a boundless continuity of dryness. I would rather have 
 written that half-stanza of Longfellow s, in the " Wreck of the 
 Hesperus," of the "billow that swept her crew like icicles from 
 her deck," than all Gawain Douglas s tedious enumeration of 
 meteorological phenomena put together. A real landscape is 
 never tiresome ; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed 
 succession of isolated particulars ; we take it in with one sweep 
 of the eye its light, its shadow, its melting gradations of dis 
 tance ; we do not say it is this, it is that, and the other ; and we 
 may be sure that if a description in poetry is tiresome there is a 
 grievous mistake somewhere. All the pictorial adjectives in the 
 dictionary will not bring it a hair s-breadth nearer to truth 
 and nature. The fact is that what we see is in the mind to
 
 SPENSEJt. 17 
 
 a greater degree than we are commonly aware. As Coleridge 
 
 says 
 
 " lady, we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone doth Nature live ! " 
 
 I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a diatribe on 
 the subject of descriptive poetry, because I find that this old 
 ghost is not laid yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the 
 life out of a true enjoyment of poetry and the medicine by 
 which vampires were cured was to unbury them, drive a stake 
 through them, and get them under ground again with all 
 despatch. The first duty of the Muse is to be delightful, and it 
 is an injury done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by a 
 kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the critics of some 
 thing to which our judgment will not consent, and from which 
 our taste revolts. A collection of poets is commonly made up, 
 nine parts in ten, of this perfunctory verse-making, and I never 
 look at one without regretting that we have lost that excellent 
 Latin phrase, Corpus poetarum. In fancy I always read it on 
 the backs of the volumes a body of poets, indeed, with scarce 
 one soul to a hundred of them. 
 
 One genuine English poet illustrated the early years of the 
 sixteenth century John Skelton. Pie had vivacity, fancy, 
 humour, and originality. Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility 
 alternate in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was 
 truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is a freedom and 
 hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular attraction. 
 A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender stream of his 
 verse, under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catching and 
 casting back the sunshine like a stream blown on by clear 
 western winds. 
 
 But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn. A long 
 and dreary winter follows. Surrey, who brought back with him 
 from Italy the blank-verse not long before introduced by 
 Trissino, is to some extent another exception. He had 
 the sentiment of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he 
 has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We 
 have Gascoyne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, 
 
 552
 
 1 8 SPENSER. 
 
 systematic as a country cemetery, and, worst of all, the whole 
 time desperately in love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and 
 regular as a lath, and their poems are nothing more than 
 bundles of such tied trimly together. They are said to have 
 refined our language. Let us devoutly hope they did, for it 
 would be pleasant to be grateful to them for something. But I 
 fear it was not so, for only genius can do that ; and Sternhold 
 and Hopkins are inspired men in comparison with them. For 
 Sternhold was at least the author of two noble stanzas : 
 
 " The Lord descended from above 
 
 And bowed the heavens high, 
 
 And underneath his feet he cast 
 
 The darkness of the sky ; 
 On cherubs and on cherubims 
 
 Full royally he rode, 
 And on the wings of all the winds 
 Came flying all abroad." 
 
 But Gascoyne and the rest did nothing more than put the 
 worst school of Italian love poetry into an awkward English 
 dress. The Italian proverb says, " Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo 
 incarnato," that an Englishman Italianized is the very devil 
 incarnate, and one feels the truth of it here. The very titles of 
 their poems set one yawning, and their wit is the cause of the 
 dulness that is in other men. "The lover, deceived by his 
 love, repenteth him of the true love he bare her." As thus : 
 
 " Where I sought heaven there found I hap ; 
 
 From danger unto death, 
 Much like the mouse that treads the trap 
 
 In hope to find her food, 
 And bites the bread that stops her breath, 
 
 So in like case I stood." 
 
 " The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithfulness, proposeth 
 to live in liberty." He says : 
 
 " But I am like the beaten fowl 
 That from the net escaped ; 
 And tlion art like the ravening owl 
 That all the night hath waked.,"
 
 SPENSEX. lg 
 
 And yet at the very time these men were writing there were 
 simple ballad-writers who could have set them an example of 
 simplicity, force, and grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of 
 these poetasters to kindle themselves by a painted flame, 
 and to be pathetic over the lay figure of a mistress, with 
 the wild vigour and almost fierce sincerity of the "Twa 
 Corbies " : 
 
 " As I was walking all alone, 
 I heard twa corbies making a moan ; 
 The one unto the other did say, 
 Where shall we gang dine to-day ? 
 In beyond that old turf dyke 
 I wot there lies a new -slain knight ; 
 And naebody kens that he lies there 
 But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair. 
 His hound is to the hunting gone, 
 His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home, 
 His lady has ta en another mate, 
 So we may make our dinner sweet. 
 O er his white bones as they lie bare 
 The wind shall blow forevermair." 
 
 There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy friends, could 
 they have understood it But they were as much afraid of an 
 attack of nature as of the plague. 
 
 Such was the poetical inheritance of style and diction into 
 which Spenser was born, and which he did more than any one 
 else to redeem from the leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic 
 conceit. Sir Philip Sidney, born the year after him, with a 
 keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emancipated than 
 his own, would have been, had he lived longer, perhaps even 
 more directly influential in educating the taste and refining 
 the vocabulary of his contemporaries and immediate succes 
 sors. The better of his pastoral poems in the "Arcadia" are, 
 in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above all, more 
 pathetic than those of Spenser, who sometimes strains the 
 shepherd s pipe with a blast that would better suit the trumpet. 
 Sidney had the good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated
 
 20 SPENSER. 
 
 sentiment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted such 
 themes.* He recognised the distinction between simplicity 
 and vulgarity, which Wordsworth was so long in finding out, 
 and seems to have divined the fact that there is but one kind 
 of English that is always appropriate and never obsolete, 
 namely, the very best.t With the single exception of Thomas 
 Campion, his experiments in adapting classical metres to Eng 
 lish verse are more successful than those of his contemporaries. 
 Some of his elegiacs are not ungrateful to tr.e ear, and it can 
 hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from his eclogue of 
 Strephon and Klaius the pleasing movement of his own 
 Catullian Hendecasyllabics. Spenser, perhaps out of defer 
 ence to Sidney, also tried his hand at English hexameters, the 
 introduction of which was claimed by his friend Gabriel 
 Harvey, who thereby assured to himself an immortality of 
 grateful remembrance. But the result was a series of jolts and 
 jars, proving that the language had run off the track. He 
 seems to have been half conscious of it himself, and there is a 
 gleam of mischief in what he writes to Harvey : " I like your 
 late English hexameter so exceedingly well that I also enure 
 my pen sometime in that kind, which I find indeed, as I have 
 often heard you defend in word, neither so hard nor so harsh 
 but that it will easily yield itself to our mother-tongue. For 
 the only or chiefest hardness, which seemeth, as in the accent, 
 which sometime gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favouredly, 
 coming short of that it should, and sometime exceeding the 
 measure of the number, as in Carpenter / the middle syllable 
 being used short in speech, when it shall be read long in verse, 
 seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her ; 
 
 * In his "Defence of Poesy" he condemns the archaisms and provin 
 cialisms of the "Shepherd s Calendar." 
 
 t " There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a language 
 of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chaucer s time, and is 
 spoken in ours ; equally understood then and now ; and of which the Bible 
 is the written and permanent standard, as it has undoubtedly been the 
 great means of preserving it." (Southey s Life and Correspondence, iii., 
 193, 194.)
 
 SPENSER. 21 
 
 and Heaven being used short as one syllable, when it is in 
 verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds 
 up one leg."* It is almost inconceivable that Spenser s hex 
 ameters should have been written by the man who was so soon 
 to teach his native language how to soar and sing, and to give a 
 fuller sail to English verse. 
 
 One of the most striking facts in our literary history is the 
 pre-eminence at once so frankly and unanimously conceded to 
 Spenser by his contemporaries. At first, it is true, he had not 
 many rivals. Before the " Faery Queen," two long poems were 
 printed and popular the " Mirror for Magistrates " and 
 Warner s "Albion s England" and not long after it came 
 the " Polyolbion " of Drayton and the " Civil Wars " of Daniel. 
 This was the period of the saurians in English poetry, inter 
 minable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like 
 far-stretching -vertebra, that at first sight would seem to have 
 rendered earth unfit for the habitation of man. They most of 
 them sleep well now, as once they made their readers sleep, 
 and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep morasses of 
 Chambers and Anderson. We wonder at the length of face 
 and general atrabilious look that mark the portraits of the men 
 of that generation ; but it is no marvel, when even their 
 relaxations were such downright hard work. Fathers, when 
 their day on earth was up, must have folded down the leaf and 
 left the task to be finished by their sons a dreary inheritance. 
 Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of 
 them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their 
 genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could 
 make poetry coalesce with gazetteering or chronicle-making. 
 It was like trying to put a declaration of love into the forms of 
 
 * Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the English 
 Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey s hexameters in 
 prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which is all up hill and 
 down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfield, and goes like a 
 horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up t 
 the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes." It was a happy thought to 
 satirise {in this inverted way) prose written in the form of verse.
 
 22 SPENSER. 
 
 a declaration in trover. The " Polyolbion " is nothing less than 
 a versified gazetteer of England and Wales fortunately Scot 
 land was not yet annexed, or the poem would have been longer, 
 and already it is the plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains, rivers, 
 and even marshes are personified, to narrate historical episodes, 
 or to give us geographical lectures. There are two fine verses 
 in the seventh book, where, speaking of the cutting down some 
 noble woods, he says : 
 
 "Their trunks, like aged folk, now bare and naked stand, 
 As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand ; " 
 
 and there is a passage about the sea in the twentieth book that 
 comes near being fine ; but the far greater part is mere joiner- 
 work. Consider the life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, 
 that our days are as a post ; and then think whether we can 
 afford to honour such a draft upon our time as is implied in 
 these thirty books all in alexandrines ! Even the laborious 
 Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more enter 
 taining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth 
 book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable 
 lightsomeness of fancy, as his " Nymphidia" proves. His poem, 
 " To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp," is full of vigour ; it 
 runs, it leaps, clashing its verses like swords upon bucklers, and 
 moves the pulse to a charge. 
 
 Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. He did 
 indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the praise his con 
 temporaries concur in giving him of being " well-languaged."* 
 Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need 
 of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not 
 more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. 
 
 * Edmund Bolton, in his Ilypcrcritica, says, "The works of Sam Daniel 
 contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and copious English, 
 and words as warrantable as any man s, and fitter, perhaps, for prose than 
 measure." I have italicised his second thought, which chimes curiously 
 with the feeling Daniel leaves in the mind. (See HaslewoodCs Ancient 
 Critical Essays, vol. ii.) Wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired 
 Daniel s poem to the Countess of Cumberland.
 
 SPENSZX. 23 
 
 This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equally 
 remarkable judgment. There is an equable dignity in his 
 thought and sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best 
 poems always remind me of a table-land, where, because all is 
 so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a plane we are 
 standing. I think his " Musophilus" the best poem of its kind 
 in the language. The reflections are natural, the expression 
 condensed, the thought weighty, and the language worthy of it. 
 But he also wasted himself on an historical poem, in which the 
 characters were incapable of that remoteness from ordinary 
 associations which is essential to the ideal. Not that we can 
 escape into the ideal by merely emigrating into the past or the 
 unfamiliar. As in the German legend, the little black Kobold 
 of prose that haunts us in the present will seat himself on 
 the first load of furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the 
 magician be not there to exorcise him. No man can jump off 
 his own shadow, nor, for that matter, off his own age ; and it is 
 very likely that Daniel had only the thinking and languaging 
 parts of a poet s outfit, without the higher creative gift which 
 alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life and with 
 an interest which transcends the parish limits of his generation. 
 In the prologue to his " Masque at Court" he has unconsciously 
 defined his own poetry : 
 
 " Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport, 
 But tender passions, motions soft and grave, 
 The still spectator must expect to have." 
 
 And, indeed, his verse does not snatch you away from ordinary 
 associations and hurry you along with it as is the wont of the 
 higher kind of poetry, but leaves you, as it were, upon the 
 bank watching the peaceful current, and lulled by its somewhat 
 monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blunderingly 
 misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the 
 Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace s 
 Integer Vitcz, and when we compare it with the original we miss 
 the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of 
 the original. It is very fine English, but it is the English cf
 
 24 SPENSER. 
 
 diplomacy somehow, and is never downright this or that, but 
 always has the honour to be so or so, with sentiments of the 
 highest consideration. Yet the praise of well-languaged^ since 
 it implies that good writing then as now demanded choice and 
 forethought, is not without interest for those who would classify 
 the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colours well. 
 His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, 
 has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and 
 endurance. His "Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a 
 more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that 
 reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern 
 than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us Occidentals 
 he has a kindly prophetic word : 
 
 " And who in time knows whither we may vent 
 The treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores 
 The gain of our best glory may be sent 
 To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 
 What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
 May come refined with accents that are ours ? " 
 
 During the period when Spenser was getting his artistic 
 training a great change was going on in our mother-tongue, 
 and the language of literature was disengaging itself more and 
 more from that of ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, 
 and France began to rain influence, and to modify and refine 
 not only style but vocabulary. Men were discovering new 
 worlds in more senses than one, and the visionary finger of 
 expectation still pointed forward. There was, as we learn from 
 contemporary pamphlets, very much the same demand for a 
 national literature that we have heard in America. This 
 demand was nobly answered in the next generation. But no 
 man contributed so much to the transformation of style and 
 language as Spenser ; for not only did he deliberately 
 endeavour at reform, but by the charm of his diction, the 
 novel harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treatment, 
 and the splendour of his fancy, he made the new manner 
 popular and fruitful. We can trace in Spenser s poems the 
 gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure
 
 SFENSEK. 25 
 
 to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at 
 length found out the true bent of his genius that happiest of 
 discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a 
 man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality. Before 
 his time the boundary between poetry and prose had not been 
 clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal 
 treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded 
 them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point 
 of view which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at first 
 sought for that remoteness, which is implied in an escape from 
 the realism of daily life, in the pastoral a kind of writing 
 which, oddly enough, from its original intention as a protest in 
 favour of naturalness, and of human as opposed to heroic 
 sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial of 
 abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his error, and 
 was not long in choosing between an unreality which pretended 
 to be real and those everlasting realities of the mind which 
 seem unreal only because they lie beyond the horizon of the 
 every-day world, and become visible only when the mirage of 
 fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in an ideal atmosphere. 
 As in the old fairy tales, the task which the age imposes on its 
 poet is to weave its straw into a golden tissue ; and when 
 every device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, and 
 with a touch the miracle is achieved, simple as miracles always 
 are after they are wrought. 
 
 Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 1553.* 
 Nothing is known of his parents, except that the name of his 
 mother was Elizabeth ; but he was of gentle birth, as he more 
 than once informs us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor 
 man of genius at a time when the business talent of the middle 
 
 * Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to the Globe 
 edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on the strength of a line 
 in the sixtieth sonnet. But it is not established that this sonnet was 
 written in 1593, and even if it were, a sonnet is not upon oath, and the 
 poet would prefer the round number forty, which suited the measure of his 
 verse, to thirty-nine or forty-one, which might have been truer to the 
 measure of his days.
 
 26 SPENSER. 
 
 class was opening to it the door of prosperous preferment. In 
 1569 he was entered as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 
 and in due course took his bachelor s degree in 1573, and his 
 master s in 1576. He is supposed, on insufficient grounds, as it 
 appears to me, to have met with some disgust or disappointment 
 during his residence at the University.* Between 1576 and 
 1578 Spenser seems to have been with some of his kinsfolk " in 
 the North." It was during this interval that he conceived his 
 fruitless passion for the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another 
 shepherd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat perfunctorily 
 bemoaned in his pastorals.t Before the publication of his 
 " Shepherd s Calendar," in 1579, he had made the acquaintance 
 of Sir Philip Sidney, and was domiciled with him for a time at 
 Penshurst, whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain. 
 In October 1579 he is in the household of the Earl of Leicester. 
 In July 1580 he accompanied Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland 
 
 * This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel Harvey s 
 letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the many allusions 
 in Harvey s pamphlets against Nash, that it was his own wrongs which he 
 had in mind, and his self-absorption would take it for granted that 
 Spenser sympathised with him in all his grudges. Harvey is a remarkable 
 instance of the refining influence of classical studies Amid the pedantic 
 farrago of his omni-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come 
 suddenly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of move 
 ment, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These lucid intervals in 
 his overweening vanity explain and justify the friendship of Spenser. Yet 
 the reiteration of emphasis with which he insists on all the world s 
 knowing that Nash had called him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the 
 hint for one of the most comic touches in the character of Dogberry. 
 
 t The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay, makes it 
 extremely probable that Eosalinde is the anagram of Rose Daniel, sister of 
 the poet, and married to John Florio. He leaves little doubt, also, that 
 the name of Spenser s wife (hitherto unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See 
 Atlantic Monthly, vol. ii., 674, November 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed 
 me that he found the substance of his essay among the papers of his father, 
 the late Rev. N. J. Halpine, of Dublin The latter published in the series 
 of the Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract, entitled " Oberon," 
 which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for its ingenuity and 
 research.
 
 SPENSER. 27 
 
 as secretary, and in that country he spent the rest of his life, 
 with occasional flying visits to England to publish poems or in 
 search of preferment. His residence in that country has been 
 compared to that of Ovid in Pontus. And, no doubt, there 
 \verecertainoutwardpointsoflikeness. The Irishry by whom 
 he was surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, and as 
 tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as the Scythians* who 
 made Tomi a prison, and the descendants of the earlier English 
 settlers had degenerated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who 
 disgusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked on his life in 
 Ireland as a banishment. In his " Colin Clout s come Home 
 again" he tells us that Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 
 1589, and heard what was then finished of the " Faery Queen " 
 
 " Gan to cast great liking to my lore 
 And great disliking to my luckless lot, 
 That banisht had myself, like wight forlore, 
 Into that waste, where I was quite forgot. 
 The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me, 
 Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful, 
 And wend with him his Cynthia to see, 
 Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful." 
 
 But Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Castle (which, 
 with 3028 acres of land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of 
 Desmond, was confirmed to him by grant two years later), amid 
 scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied charm he felt 
 profoundly. He could not complain with Ovid 
 
 " Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem," 
 
 for he was within reach of a cultivated society, which gave him 
 the stimulus of hearty admiration both as poet and scholar. 
 Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study 
 and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with 
 his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which 
 would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did 
 
 * In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some memory of 
 Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the Scythians.
 
 28 SFENSEX. 
 
 not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest 
 was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of 
 the " Faery Queen " and to giving his " soul a loose " than 
 
 " The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome, 
 
 And all the busy pageantry 
 That wise men scorn and fools adore." 
 
 Yet he longed for London, if not with the homesickness of 
 Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Parisian sun, yet enough to 
 make him joyfully accompany Raleigh thither in the early 
 winter of 1589, carrying with him the first three books of the 
 great poem begun ten years before. Horace s nonum prematur 
 in annum had been more than complied with, and the success 
 was answerable to the well-seasoned material and conscientious 
 faithfulness of the work. But Spenser did not stay long in 
 London to enjoy his fame. Seen close at hand, with its 
 jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the court had lost the 
 enchantment lent by the distance of Kilcolman. A nature so 
 prone to ideal contemplation as Spenser s would be profoundly 
 shocked by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of con 
 temporaneous policy, and learning by what paltry personal 
 motives the noble opportunities of the world are at any given 
 moment endangered. It is a sad discovery that history is so 
 mainly made by ignoble men. 
 
 " Vide questo globo 
 Tal ch ei sorrise del suo vil sembiaute." 
 
 In his "Colin Clout," written just after his return to Ireland, he 
 speaks of the Court in a tone of contemptuous bitterness, in 
 which, as it seems to me, there is more of the sorrow of disil 
 lusion than of the gall of personal disappointment. He speaks, 
 so he tells us, 
 
 " To warn young shepherds wandering wit 
 Which, through report of that life s painted bliss, 
 Abandon quiet home to seek for it 
 And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss ; 
 For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life 
 For shepherd fit to live in that same place,
 
 S PEN SER. 29 
 
 Where each one seeks with malice and with strife 
 
 To thrust down other into foul disgrace 
 
 Himself to raise ; and he doth soonest rise 
 
 That best can handle his deceitful wit 
 
 In subtle shifts .... 
 
 To which him needs a guileful hollow heart 
 
 Masked with fair dissembling courtesy, 
 
 A filed tongue furnisht with terms of art, 
 
 No art of school, but courtiers schoolery. 
 
 For arts of school have there small countenance, 
 
 Counted but toys to busy idle brains, 
 
 And there professors find small maintenance, 
 
 But to be instruments of others gains, 
 
 Nor is there place for any gentle wit 
 
 Unless to please it can itself apply. 
 
 Even such is all their vaunted vanity, 
 
 Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away. 
 
 So they themselves for praise of fools do sell, 
 And all their wealth for painting on a wall. 
 
 Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty 
 Do wander up and down despised of all."* 
 
 And, again, in his " Mother Hubberd s Tales," in the most pithy 
 and masculine verses he ever wrote : 
 
 " Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate 
 Hath brought to Court to sue for Had-I-wist 
 That few have found and many one hath mist ! 
 Full little knowest thou that hast not tried 
 What hell it is in suing long to bide ; 
 To lose good days that might be better spent, 
 To waste long nights in pensive discontent, 
 To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow, 
 To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, 
 To have thy Prince s grace yet want her Peers , 
 To have thy asking yet wait many years, 
 To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, 
 To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, 
 
 * Compare Shakespeare s IxvL Sonnet.
 
 2 o SPENSER. 
 
 To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to ran, 
 To spend, to give, to want, to be undone. 
 
 Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate 
 In safe assurance, without strife or hate, 
 Finds all things needful for contentment meek, 
 And will to court for shadows vain to seek, 
 
 That curse God send unto mine enemy ! "* 
 
 When Spenser had once got safely back to the secure retreat 
 and serene companionship of his great poem, with what pro 
 found and pathetic exultation must he have recalled the verses 
 of Dante ! 
 
 " Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforistni 
 Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio, 
 E chi regnar per forza e per sofismi, 
 E chi rubare, e chi civil negozio, 
 Chi nei diletti della carne iuvolto 
 S affaticava, e chi si dava all ozio, 
 Quando da tutte queste cose sciolto, 
 Con Beatrice m era suso iu cielo 
 Cotanto gloriosamente accolto."t 
 
 What Spenser says of the indifference of the court to learning, 
 and literature is the more remarkable because he himself was 
 by no means an unsuccessful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed 
 on him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he received 
 
 * This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his dedication, 
 "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my youth." But he had 
 evidently retouched it. The verses quoted show a firmer hand than is 
 generally seen in it, and we are safe in assuming that they were added 
 after his visit to England. Dr. Johnson epigrammatised Spenser s indict 
 ment into 
 
 " There mark what ills the scholar s life assail, 
 Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail," 
 
 but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point. 
 
 t Paradiso, xi. 4-12. Spenser was familiar with the " Diviua Corn- 
 media," though I do not remember that his commentators have pointed 
 out his chief obligations to it.
 
 SPENSEX. 37 
 
 the grant of lands already mentioned. It is said, indeed, that 
 Lord Burleigh in some way hindered the advancement of the 
 poet, who more than once directly alludes to him either in 
 reproach or remonstrance. In " The Ruins of Time," after 
 speaking of the death of Walsingham, 
 
 " Since whose decease learning lies unregarded, 
 And men of armes do wander unrewarded," 
 
 he gives the following reason for their neglect : 
 
 " For he that now wields all things at his will, 
 Scorns th one and th other in his deeper skill. 
 grief of griefs I gall of all good hearts, 
 To see that virtue should despised be 
 Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts, 
 And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree, 
 Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be : 
 let the man of whom the Muse is scorned 
 Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned I " 
 
 And in the introduction to the fourth book of the " Faery 
 Queen " he says again : 
 
 " The rugged forehead that with grave foresight 
 Wields kingdoms causes and affairs of state, 
 My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite 
 For praising Love, as I have done of late, 
 
 By which frail youth is oft to folly led 
 
 Through false allurement of that pleasing bait, 
 
 That better were in virtues discipled 
 
 Thau with vain poems weeds to have their fancies fed. 
 
 " Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love 
 Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame ; 
 Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove, 
 Ne natural affection faultless blame 
 For fault of few that have abused the same : 
 For it of honour and all virtue is 
 The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame 
 That crown true lovers with immortal bliss, 
 The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."
 
 3 2 SPENSER. 
 
 If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of nightingales 
 tongues as the "Faery Queen," he is very much more to be 
 pitied than Spenser. The sensitive purity of the poet might 
 indeed well be wounded when a poem in which he proposed to 
 himself "to discourse at large" of "the ethick part of Moral 
 Philosophy"* could be so misinterpreted. But Spenser speaks 
 in the same strain, and without any other than a general 
 application, in his "Tears of the Muses," and his friend Sidney 
 undertakes the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. 
 But undervalued by whom? By the only persons about whom 
 he knew or cared anything, those whom we should now call 
 Society, and who were then called the Court. The inference I 
 would draw is that, among the causes which contributed to the 
 marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quarter of the 
 sixteenth century, the influence of direct patronage from above 
 is to be reckoned at almost nothing, t Then, as when the 
 same phenomenon has happened elsewhere, there must have 
 been a sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called, 
 draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature s common 
 and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mould of 
 countless generations (ofr? trep (f>v\\uv yeveri), and not from any 
 top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some 
 
 * His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd s Spenser, 
 I. Ix. ) The whole passage is very interesting as giving us the only glimpse 
 we get of the living Spenser in actual contact with his fellow-men. It 
 shows him to us, as we could wish to see him, surrounded with loving 
 respect, companionable and helpful. Bryskett tells us that he was 
 "perfect in the Greek tongue," and "also very well read in philosophy 
 both moral and natural. " He encouraged Bryskett in the study of Greek, 
 and offered to help him in it. Comparing the last verse of the above 
 citation of the " Faery Queen " with other passages in Spenser, I cannot 
 help thinking that he wrote, "do not love amiss." 
 
 f " And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know, 
 That t is not in the power of kings to raise 
 A spirit for verse that is i!bt born thereto ; 
 Nor are they born in every prince s days." 
 
 Daniel s Dedic. Tray, of " rhilotaz."
 
 SPENSER. 33 
 
 master s bidding.* England had long been growing more truly 
 insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation 
 came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her 
 more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had 
 been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating 
 foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they were proud 
 or not as the case might be, but there was no England as a 
 separate entity from the sovereign who embodied it for the time 
 being.t But now an English people began to be dimly aware 
 of itself. Their having got a religion to themselves must have 
 intensified them much as the having a god of their own did the 
 Jews. The exhilaration of relief after the long tension of 
 anxiety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed like the 
 hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their assurance of a 
 provincial deity, must also have been like sunshine to bring 
 into flower all that there was of imaginative or sentimental li 
 the English nature, already just in the first flush of its spring. 
 
 ("The yonge sonne 
 Had in the Bull half of his course yronne.") 
 
 And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze was dusty 
 with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, and Italy. If Keats 
 could say, when he first opened Chapman s Homer 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims ftito his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacific, and all his men 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise ; " 
 
 * Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to have 
 created French literature. He may more truly be said to have petrified 
 it so far as his influence went. The French renaissance in the preceding 
 century was produced by causes similar iu essentials to those which 
 brought about that in England not long after. The grand siecle grew 
 by natural processes of development out of that which had preceded it, 
 and which, to the impartial foreigner at least, has more flavour, and more 
 French flavour too, than the Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from 
 its stool. The best modern French poetry has been forced to temper its 
 verses in the colder natural springs of the ante-classic period. 
 
 t In the Elizabethan drama the words "England" and "France" are 
 constantly used to signify the kings ol those countries. 
 
 553
 
 34 SPENSER. 
 
 if Keats could say this, whose mind had been unconsciously fed 
 with the results of this culture results that permeated all 
 thought, all literature, and all talk fancy what must have 
 been the awakening shock and impulse communicated to men s 
 brains by the revelation of this new world of thought and fancy, 
 an unveiling gradual yet sudden, like that of a great organ, 
 which discovered to them what a wondrous instrument was in 
 the soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep thunders 
 of tragedy, and its passionate vox humana! It might almost 
 .seem as if Shakespeare had typified all this in Miranda, when 
 she cries out at first sight of the king and his courtiers 
 
 0, wonder ! 
 
 How many goodly creatures are there here I 
 How beauteous mankind is ! 0, brave new world 
 That hath such people in t 1 " 
 
 The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren period in English 
 literature, because they had been merely dynastic squabbles, in 
 which no great principles were involved which could shake all 
 minds with controversy and heat them to intense conviction. 
 A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out the moral no less 
 than the material forces of a people, but the ferment of hostile 
 ideas and convictions may realise resources of character which 
 before were only potential, may transform a merely gregarious 
 multitude into a nation proud in its strength, sensible of the 
 dignity and duty which strength involves, and groping after a 
 common ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought 
 or was going on in England. For the first time a distinct 
 image of her was disengaging itself from the tangled blur of 
 tradition and association in the minds of her children, and it 
 was now only that her great poet could speak exultingly to 
 an audience that would understand him with a passionate 
 sympathy of 
 
 " This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 This precious stone set in a silver sea, 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 
 This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, 
 England, bound in with the triumphant sea 1"
 
 SPENSER. 35 
 
 Such a period can hardly recur again, bat something like it, 
 something pointing back to similar producing causes, is 
 observable in the revival of English imaginative literature at the 
 close of the last and in the early years of the present century. 
 Again, after long fermentation, there was a war of principles, 
 again the national consciousness was heightened and stung by 
 a danger to the national existence, and again there was a crop 
 of great poets and heroic men. 
 
 Spenser once more visited England, bringing with him three 
 more books of the " Faery Queen," in 1595. He is supposed 
 to have remained there during the two following years.* In 
 1594 he had been married to the lady celebrated in his some 
 what artificial amorelti. By her he had four children. He was 
 now at the height of his felicity ; by universal acclaim the first 
 poet of his age, and the one obstacle to his material advance 
 ment (if obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by the 
 death of Lord Burleigh, August 1598. In the next month he 
 was recommended in a letter from Queen Elizabeth for the 
 shrievalty of the county of Cork. But alas for Polycrates ! In 
 October the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood for 
 sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked and burned his 
 castle, from which he with his wife and children barely escaped.t 
 He sought shelter in London, and died there on the i6th 
 
 * I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and Peregrine, 
 indicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spenser continued to 
 regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as exile. The two other 
 children are added on the authority of a pedigree drawn up by Sir W. 
 Betham and cited in Mr. Hales s Life of Spenser, prefixed to the Globe 
 edition. 
 
 t Ben Jonson told Drunimoud that one child perished in the flames. 
 But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one years, and, of course, 
 from hearsay. Spenser s misery was exaggerated by succeeding poets, who 
 used him to point a moral, and from the shelter of his tomb launched many 
 a shaft of sarcasm at an unappreciative public. Giles Fletcher, in his 
 " Purple Island " (a poem which reminds us of the " Faery Queen " by the 
 supreme tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else), set the example in 
 the best verse he ever wrote : 
 
 "Poorly, poor man, he liveil ; poorly, poor man, he died."
 
 36 SPENSER. 
 
 January 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster. He 
 was buried in the neighbouring Abbey next to Chaucer, at the 
 cost of the Earl of Essex, poets bearing his pall and casting 
 verses into his grave. He died poor, but not in want. On the 
 whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the 
 lives of the great poets must have commonly been. If they feel 
 more passionately the pang of the moment, so also the compen 
 sations are incalculable, and not the least of them this very 
 capacity of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is to be 
 measured, not by more or less of outward prosperity, but by the 
 opportunity given for the development and free play of the 
 genius. It should be remembered that the power of expression 
 which exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable consola 
 tion for them. We should measure what Spenser says of his 
 worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing 
 tears he shed for Rosalind. A careful analysis of these leaves 
 no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe 
 that the passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral 
 accessories of pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether 
 Spenser ever felt more than one profound passion in his life, 
 and that, luckily, was for his " Faery Queen." He was tortunate 
 in the friendship of the best men and women of his time, in the 
 seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the 
 past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we 
 know of him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to 
 
 Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as authentic 
 history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by comparison. 
 The whole story of his later days has a strong savour of legend. He must 
 have had ample warning of Tyrone s rebellion, and would probably have 
 sent away his wife and children to Cork, if he did not go thither himself. 
 I am inclined to think that he did, carrying his papers with him, and 
 among them the two cantos of " Mutability," first published in 1611. These, 
 it is most likely, were the only ones be ever completed, for, with all his 
 abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. When we remember 
 that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first three books, and 
 that five more elapsed before the next three were ready, we shall waste no 
 vain regrets on the six concluding books supposed to have been lost by the 
 carelessness of an imaginary servant on their way from Ireland.
 
 SPENSER. 37 
 
 the friendships of his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his 
 life. Above all, the ideal with him was not a thing apart and 
 unattainable, but the sweetener and ennobler of the street and 
 the fireside. 
 
 There are two ways of measuring a poet either by an 
 absolute aesthetic standard, or relatively to his position in the 
 literary history of his country and the conditions of his genera 
 tion. Both should be borne in mind as coefficients in a 
 perfectly fair judgment. If his positive merit is to be settled 
 irrevocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism will find 
 its advantage, not only in considering what he was, but what, 
 under the given circumstances, it was possible for him to be. 
 
 The fact that the great poem of Spenser was inspired by the 
 Orlando of Ariosto, and written in avowed emulation of it, and 
 that the poet almost always needs to have his fancy set agoing 
 by the hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to overlook 
 his manifest claim to originality. It is not what a poet takes, 
 but what he makes out of what he has taken, that shows what 
 native force is in him. Above all, did his mind dwell com 
 placently in those forms and fashions which in their very birth 
 are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively drawn to those 
 qualities which are permanent in language and whatever is 
 wrought in it ? There is much in Spenser that is contemporary 
 and evanescent ; but the substance of him is durable, and his 
 work was the deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample 
 culture. The publication of his "Shepherd s Calendar" in 1579 
 (though the poem itself be of little interest), is one of the epochs 
 in our literature. Spenser had at least the originality to see 
 clearly and to feel keenly that it was essential to bring poetry 
 back again to some kind of understanding with nature. His 
 immediate predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind 
 of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere between heaven 
 and earth, with no very well defined relation to either. It is 
 true that the nearest approach they were able to make to this 
 airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or so 
 from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and feathers, which 
 they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another, with
 
 38 SPEffSER. 
 
 the useful ambition at keeping it up as long as they could. To 
 my mind the old comedy of "Gammer Gurton s Needle" is 
 worth the whole of them. It may be coarse, earthy, but in 
 reading it one feels that he is at least a man among men, and 
 not a humbug among humbugs. 
 
 The form of Spenser s " Shepherd s Calendar," it is true, is 
 artificial, absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside 
 not, perhaps, the wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a 
 jail or a volume of the Congressional Globe but the spirit of it 
 is fresh and original. We have at last got over the superstition 
 that shepherds and shepherdesses are any wiser or simpler than 
 other people. We know that wisdom can be won only by wide 
 commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of 
 manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. 
 But the pastorals of Spenser were very different things, 
 different both in the moving spirit and the resultant form 
 from the later ones of Browne or the "Piscatory Eclogues" 
 of Phinehas Fletcher. And why? Browne and Fletcher wrote 
 because Spenser had written, but Spenser wrote from a strong 
 inward impulse an instinct it might be called to escape, at all 
 risks, into the fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into which 
 rhymer after rhymer had been pumping carbonic-acid gas with 
 the full force of his lungs, and in which all sincerity was on the 
 edge of suffocation. His longing for something truer and better 
 was as honest as that which led Tacitus so long before to 
 idealise the Germans, and Rousseau so long after to make an 
 angel of the savage. 
 
 Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole chasm 
 between himself and Chaucer, as Dante between himself and 
 Virgil. He called Chaucer master, as Milton was afterwards to 
 call him. And, even while he chose the most artificial of all 
 forms, his aim that of getting back to nature and life was 
 conscious, I have no doubt, to himself, and must be obvious to 
 whoever reads with anything but the ends of his fingers. It is 
 true that Sannazzaro had brought the pastoral into fashion 
 again, and that two of Spenser s are little more than transla 
 tions from Marot ; but for manner he instinctively turned back
 
 SPENSER. 39 
 
 to Chaucer, the first and then only great English poet. He has 
 given common instead of classic names to his personages, for 
 characters they can hardly be called. Above all, he has gone 
 to the provincial dialects for words wherewith to enlarge and 
 freshen his poetical vocabulary.* I look upon the " Shepherd s 
 Calendar" as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt 
 at reform than Thomson s "Seasons" were in the topics, and 
 Wordsworth s "Lyrical Ballads" in the language of poetry. 
 But the great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their 
 matter as their manner. They show a sense of style in its 
 larger meaning hitherto displayed by no English poet since 
 Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from Italy a certain inkling 
 of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But here was a new 
 language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety, 
 elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of 
 men. If not passion, there was fervour, which was perhaps as 
 near it as the somewhat stately movement of Spenser s mind 
 would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many experiments 
 in versification, which are curious and interesting, especially his 
 attempts to naturalise the sliding rhymes of Sannazzaro in 
 English. But there is everywhere the uncertainty of a prentice 
 hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at least in 
 verse, and we can trace the studies of Milton, a yet greater 
 master, in the " Shepherd s Calendar" as well as in the " Faery 
 
 * Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. " That same framing of his 
 style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus 
 in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian, did affect it." 
 (" Defence of Poesy.") Ben Jonson, on the other hand, said that Guarini 
 " kept not decorum in making shepherds speak as well as himself could." 
 ("Conversations with Drummond.") I think Sidney was right, for the 
 poets Arcadia is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. 
 But whoever looks into the glossary appended to the " Calendar," by 
 E. K. ( will be satisfied that Spenser s object was to find unhackneyed and 
 poetical words rather than such as should seem more on a level with the 
 speakers. See also the " Epistle Dedicatory." I cannot help thinking 
 that E. K. was Spenser himself, with occasional interjections of Harvey. 
 Who else could have written such English as many passages in this 
 Epistle ?
 
 40 SPENSER. 
 
 Queen." We have seen that Spenser, under the misleading 
 influence of Sidney* and Harvey, tried his hand at English 
 hexameters. But his great glory is that he taught his own 
 language to sing and move to measures harmonious and noble. 
 Chaucer had done much to vocalise it, as I have tried to show 
 elsewhere,t but Spenser was to prove 
 
 " That no tongue hath the muse s utterance heired 
 For verse, and that sweet music to the ear 
 Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this." 
 
 The "Shepherd s Calendar" contains, perhaps, the most 
 picturesquely imaginative verse which Spenser has written. 
 It is in the eclogue for February, where he tells us of the 
 
 " Faded oak 
 
 Whose body is sere, whose branches broke, 
 Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire." 
 
 It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked 
 in secret, that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untrans 
 latable into reasonable prose, and which the imagination 
 welcomes at once without caring whether it be exactly conform 
 able to barbara or celarent. Another pretty verse in the same 
 eclogue 
 
 " But gently took that uugently came" 
 
 pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. 
 But in general it is not so much the sentiments and images 
 that are new as the modulation of the verses in which they 
 float. The cold obstruction of two centuries thaws, and the 
 stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks out its old 
 windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The 
 service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite 
 sense of harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of 
 
 * It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has come 
 down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of Sidney s are 
 pleasing. 
 
 t See My Sludy Windows, 264 scqq.
 
 SPENSER. 41 
 
 barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong 
 the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition 
 from the cast-iron stiffness of " Ferrex and Porrex" to the 
 Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he 
 that 
 
 "(Taught the dumb on high to sing, 
 And heavy ignorance aloft to fly : 
 That added feathers to the learned s wing, 
 And gave to grace a double majesty." 
 
 I do not mean that in the "Shepherd s Calendar" he had 
 already achieved that transmutation of language and metre by 
 which he was afterwards to endow English verse with the most 
 varied and majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old 
 alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feeling of the 
 poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain, that 
 he had been talking prose all his life but already he gave 
 clear indications of the tendency and premonitions of the 
 power which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection. 
 A harmony and alacrity of language like this were unexampled 
 in English verse : 
 
 " Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook 
 
 Do bathe your breast, 
 Forsake your watery bowers and hither look 
 
 At my request. . . . 
 
 And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell, 
 Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, 
 
 Help me to blaze 
 
 Her worthy praise, 
 Which in her sex doth all excel." 
 
 Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal 
 and slow, as befits an invocation ; and now mark how the same 
 feet shall be made to quicken their pace at the bidding of the 
 tune : 
 
 " Bring here the pink and purple columbine, 
 
 With gilliflowers ; 
 
 Bring coronations and sops in wine, 
 Worne of paramours ;
 
 42 SPENSER. 
 
 Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies, 
 And cowslips and kingcups and loved lilies ; 
 
 The pretty paunce 
 
 And the chevisance 
 Shall match with the fair flowerdelice."* 
 
 The argument prefixed by E. K. to the tenth Eclogue has 
 a special interest for us, as showing how high a conception 
 Spenser had of poetry and the poet s office. By Cuddy he 
 evidently means himself, though choosing out of modesty 
 another name instead of the familiar Colin. "In Cuddy is 
 set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which, finding no 
 maintenance of his state and studies, complaineth of the con 
 tempt of Poetry and the causes thereof, specially having been 
 in all ages, and even amongst the most barbarous, always 
 of singular account and honour, and being indeed so worthy 
 and commendable an art, or rather no art, but a divine gift 
 and heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labour and learning, 
 but adorned with both, and poured into the wit by a certain 
 
 * Of course dillies and lilies must be read with a slight accentuation 
 of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to chime with delice. 
 In the first line I have put here instead of hcther, which (like other 
 words where th comes between two vowels) was then very often a mono 
 syllable, in order to throw the accent back more strongly on bring, where 
 it belongs. Spenser s innovation lies in making his verses by ear instead 
 of on the finger-tips, and in valuing the stave more than any of the single 
 verses that compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to all 
 others in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name. 
 Milton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from Spenser than 
 anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and applied it with 
 more various mastery. I have little doubt that the tune of the last stanza 
 cited above was clinging in Shakespeare s ear when he wrote those 
 exquisite verses in "Midsummer Night s Dream" ("I know a bank"), 
 where our grave pentameter is in like manner surprised into a lyrical 
 movement. See also the pretty song in the eclogue for August. Ben 
 Jonson, too, evidently caught some cadences from Spenser for his lyrics. 
 I need hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example) where Spenser 
 thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call the riding-rhyme of 
 Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He had evidently learned to scan his 
 master s verses better when he wrote his " Mother Hubberd s Tale. "
 
 SPENSER. 43 
 
 Enthousiasmos and celestial inspiration, as the author hereof 
 elsewhere at large discourseth in his book called THE 
 ENGLISH POET, which book being lately come into my hands, 
 I mind also by God s grace, upon further advisement, to 
 publish." E. K., whoever he was, never carried out his 
 intention, and the book is no doubt lost ; a loss to be borne 
 with less equanimity than that of Cicero s treatise, De Gloria, 
 once possessed by Petrarch. The passage I have italicised 
 is most likely an extract, and reminds one of the long-breathed 
 periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthorn den tells us, "he 
 [Ben Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser s Calen 
 dar, about wine, between Coline and Percye" (Cuddie and 
 Piers).* These verses are in this eclogue, and are worth 
 quoting, both as having the approval of dear old Ben, the 
 best critic of the day, and because they are a good sample 
 of Spenser s earlier verse : 
 
 " Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage; 
 0, if my temples were distained with wine, 
 And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine, 
 How I could rear the Muse on stately stage 
 
 And tench her tread aloft in buskin fine 
 With quaint Belloua in her equipage 1 " 
 
 * Driimmoml, it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes Cuddy 
 to be Colin. In Milton s " Lycidas " there are reminiscences of this 
 eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more evident, but 
 I think that Spenser s 
 
 " Cuddie, the praise is better than the price," 
 
 suggested Milton s 
 
 " But not the praise, 
 Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears." 
 
 Shakespeare had read and renumbered this pastoral. Compare 
 
 " Rut, ah, Mecsrnas is yd. d in clay, 
 And great Augustus Ion ago is dead, 
 And all the worthies liggtn wrapt in load," 
 with 
 
 " King Pandion, he is dead ; 
 All thy friends are lapt in lead " 
 
 It is odd that Shakespeare, in his " fapt in fead," is more Speuseriau than 
 Spenser himself, from whom he caught this " hunting of the letter."
 
 44 SPENSER. 
 
 In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious style which 
 was to distinguish him, and which, like his own Fame, 
 
 " With golden wings aloft doth fly 
 Above the reach of ruinous decay, 
 And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky, 
 Admired of base-born men from far away."* 
 
 He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding 
 the " Faery Queen " : 
 
 " Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust 
 
 To doubted knights whose woundless armour rusts 
 And helms unbruised waxen daily brown : 
 There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing, 
 And stretch herself at large from East to West." 
 
 Verses like these, especially the last (which Dryden would have 
 liked), were such as English ears had not yet heard, and 
 curiously prophetic of the maturer man. The language and 
 verse of Spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and 
 there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being 
 poetical. 
 
 It was this instantly felt if not easily definable charm that 
 forthwith won for Spenser his never-disputed rank as the chiel 
 English poet of that age, and gave him a popularity which, 
 during his life and in the following generation, was, in its select 
 quality, without a competitor. It may be thought that I lay too 
 much stress on this single attribute of diction. But apart from 
 its importance in his case as shewing their way to the poets 
 who were just then learning the accidence of their art, and 
 leaving them a material to work in already mellowed to theii 
 hands, it should be remembered that it is subtle perfection ot 
 phrase and that happy coalescence of music and meaning, 
 where each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet and 
 
 * "Ruins of Time." It Is, perhaps, not considering too nicely to 
 remark how often this image of wings recurred to Spenser s mind. A 
 certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings of his style.
 
 SPENSER. 45 
 
 make all ears converts and partisans. Spenser was an epicure 
 in language. He loved " seldseen costly " words perhaps too 
 well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness 
 and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some 
 charm of seeming association. He had not the concentrated 
 power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little 
 room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilatation 
 than compression.* But he was, with the exception of Milton 
 and possibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His 
 familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and 
 intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the 
 grand manner and high-bred ways of the society he frequented. 
 But even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt 
 rusticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that 
 preceded him. In the fifth book of the " Faery Queen," where 
 he is describing the passion of Britomart at the supposed 
 infidelity of Arthegall, he descends to a Teniers-like realismf 
 
 * Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the " sea-shouldering 
 whales," B. II. 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolongations. 
 For example, he makes such words as glorious, gratious, joyeous, 
 havior, chapelet dactyles, and that, not at the end of verses, where it 
 would not have been unusual, but in the first half of them. Milton 
 contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it were) in the uniformity of his 
 verse by a practice exactly the opposite of this. He also shuns a hiatus 
 which does not seem to have been generally displeasing to Spenser s 
 ear, though perhaps in the compound epithet bees-alluring he intentionally 
 avoids it by the plural form. 
 
 t " Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep 
 Is broken with some fearful dream s affright, 
 With frowartl will doth set himself to weep 
 Ne can be stilled for all his nurse s might, 
 But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight, 
 Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing, 
 Now seeking darkness and now seeking light, 
 Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing." 
 
 He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar example of 
 Homer s comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh book of the Iliad. 
 So also in the " Epithalamion " it grates our nerves to hear,
 
 46 SPENSER. 
 
 he whose verses generally remind us of the dancing Hours of 
 Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of the real earth, and that 
 far away beneath. But his habitual style is that of gracious 
 loftiness and refined luxury. 
 
 He first shows his mature hand in the " Muiopotmos," the 
 most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for delicate concep 
 tion and treatment, whose breezy verse seems to float between 
 a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable sunshine. No 
 other English poet has found the variety and compass which 
 enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch. It can 
 hardly be doubted that in Clarion, the butterfly, he has sym 
 bolised himself, and surely never was the poetic temperament 
 so picturesquely exemplified : 
 
 " Over the fields, in his frank lustiness, 
 And all the champain o er, he soared light, 
 And all the country wide he did possess, 
 Feeding upon their pleasures bounteously, 
 That none gainsaid and none did him envy. 
 
 " The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green, 
 With his air-cutting wings he measured wide, 
 Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen, 
 Nor the rank grassy fens delights untried ; 
 But none of these, however sweet they been, 
 Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide ; 
 His choiceful sense with every change doth flit ; 
 No common things may please a wavering wit. 
 
 " To the gay gardens his unstaid desire 
 
 Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights ; 
 There lavish Nature, in her best attire, 
 Pours forth sweet odours and alluring sights, 
 And Art, with her contending doth aspire, 
 To excel the natural with made delights ; 
 And all that fair or pleasant may be found, 
 In riotous excess doth there abound. 
 
 " Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful, 
 Pour out to all that wull." 
 
 Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser s aurum 
 potabile the language needed.
 
 SPENSER. 47 
 
 " There he arriving, round about doth flie, 
 From bed to bed, from one to the other border, 
 And takes survey with *urious busy eye, 
 Of every flower and herb there set in order, 
 Now this, DOW that, he tasteth tenderly, 
 Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder, 
 Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace, 
 But pastures on the pleasures of each place. 
 
 " And erermore with most variety 
 And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet) 
 He casts his glutton sense to satisfy, 
 Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet, 
 Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie, 
 Now in the same bathing his tender feet ; 
 And then he percheth on some branch thereby 
 To weather him and his moist wings to dry. 
 
 " And then again he turneth to his play, 
 To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise ; 
 The wholesome sage, the lavender still grey, 
 Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes, 
 The roses reigning in the pride of May, 
 Sharp hyssop good for green wounds remedies 
 Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme, 
 Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime. 
 
 " Cool violets, and orpine growing still, 
 Embathe d balm, and cheerful galingale, 
 Fresh costmary and breathful carnomill, 
 Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale, 
 Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill, 
 Sound savoury, and basil hearty-hale, 
 Fat cole worts and comforting perseliue, 
 Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemariue.* 
 
 * I could not bring myself to root out this odourous herb-garden, though 
 it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence of his master 
 Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser himself. He could 
 not help planting a flower or two among his serviceable plants, and after 
 all this abundance he is not satisfied, but begins the next stanza with 
 "And whatso else, "
 
 4 8 SPENSEJ? 
 
 "And whatso else of virtue good or ill, 
 Grew in this garden, fetched from far away, 
 Of every one he takes and tastes at will, 
 And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ; 
 Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill, 
 In the warm sun he doth himself embay, 
 And there him rests in riotous suffisance 
 Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance. 
 
 " What more felicity can fall to creature 
 Than to enjoy delight with liberty, 
 And to be lord of all the works of nature ? 
 To reign in the air from earth to highest sky, 
 To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, 
 To take whatever thing doth please the eye ? 
 Who rests not pleased with such happiness, 
 Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness." 
 
 The " Muiopotmos " pleases us all the more that it vibrates 
 in us a string of classical association by adding an episode to 
 Ovid s story of Arachne. " Talking the other day with a friend 
 (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that whenever 
 so great a poet told us anything in addition or continuation of 
 an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as classical 
 authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that 
 characteristic death of Ulysses ... we ought to receive the 
 information as authentic, and be glad that we have more news 
 of Ulysses than we looked for."* We can hardly doubt that 
 Ovid would have been glad to admit this exquisitely fantastic 
 illumination into his margin. 
 
 No German analyser of aesthetics has given us so convincing 
 a definition of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "To 
 reign in the air" was certainly Spenser s function. And yet 
 the commentators, who seem never willing to let their poet be 
 a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been so, they would 
 have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out from his 
 "Mother Hubberd s Tale" that he might have been a very 
 sensible matter-of-fact man if he would. For my own part, I 
 
 * Leigh Hunt s Indicator, xvii.
 
 SPENSER. 49 
 
 am quite willing to confess that I like him none the worse for 
 being impractical, and that my reading has convinced me that 
 being too poetical is the rarest fault of poets. Practical men 
 are not so scarce, one would think ; and I am not sure that the 
 tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted and left it 
 nothing but ship-timber. Such men as Spenser are not sent 
 into the world to be part of its motive power. The blind old 
 engine would not know the difference though we got up its 
 steam with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more to the 
 minute for it. What practical man ever left such an heirloom 
 to his countrymen as the " Faery Queen?" 
 
 Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful, and in the highest 
 vocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him " our sage 
 and serious poet, whom I dare be known to think a better 
 teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." And good Dr. Henry More 
 was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices so beautiful 
 now and then that we should not be very much afraid of them 
 if we chanced to meet them ; for he could not escape from his 
 genius, which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract 
 contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open to every 
 impression of sensuous delight. When he wrote the "Shep 
 herd s Calendar" he was certainly a Puritan, and probably so 
 by conviction rather than from any social influences or thought 
 of personal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the second 
 of the two detached cantos of " Mutability," 
 
 " Like that ungracious crew which feigns demurest grace," 
 
 which is supposed to glance at the straiter religionists, and 
 from which it has been inferred that he drew away from 
 them as he grew older. It is very likely that years and 
 widened experience of men may have produced in him their 
 natural result of tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty 
 destructiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more 
 generous side of Puritanism I think he sympathised to the 
 last. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan 
 tone, and as severe a one as any is in " Mother Hubberd s 
 
 554
 
 S o SPENSER. 
 
 Tale," published in 1591.* There is an iconoclastic relish in 
 his account of Sir Guyon s demolishing the Bower of Bliss 
 that makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered 
 abbeys as perhaps Shakespeare did when he speaks of the 
 winter woods as "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet 
 birds sang" : 
 
 " But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave 
 Guyon broke down with rigour pitiless, 
 Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save 
 Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness, 
 But that their bliss he turned to balefulness ; 
 Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface, 
 Their arbours spoil, their cabinets suppress, 
 Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase, 
 And of the fairest late now made the foulest place." 
 
 But whatever may have been Spenser s religious opinions 
 (which do not nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was 
 toward a Platonic mysticism, a supramundane sphere where 
 it could shape universal forms out of the primal elements 
 of things, instead of being forced to put up with their fortuitous 
 combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay. He 
 who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted 
 nearer to the real world than under some subterfuge of 
 pastoral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this untrammelled 
 ether : 
 
 "Lifting himself out of the lowly dust 
 On golden plumes up to the purest sky." 
 
 * Ben Jouson told Drummond " that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had 
 of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the Puritans 
 were understood." But this is certainly wrong. There were very 
 different shades of Puritanism, according to individual temperament. 
 That of Winthrop and Hiirginson had a mellowness of which Endicott and 
 Standish were incapable. The gradual change of Milton s opinions was 
 similar to that which I suppose in Spenser. The passage in " Mother 
 Hubberd " may have been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he 
 says much the same thing in his " View of the State of Ireland "), but it 
 is general in its terms.
 
 SPENSER. 51 
 
 Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous 
 aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though 
 rising to an enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops 
 short of vehemence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, 
 especially the latter. There is an exulting spurn of earth 
 in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I shall make 
 no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately coherent 
 and transcendentally logical poems that " moveth altogether 
 if it move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which 
 would maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals. What 
 ever there is of sentiment and passion is for the most part 
 purely disembodied and without sex, like that of angels 
 a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion, 
 whether to our gain or not may be questioned. Perhaps 
 one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are 
 those that stand in least need of stimulation. Spenser s 
 notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those of 
 our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not 
 to disqualify him for achieving the quest of the Holy Grail, and 
 accordingly it is not uninstructive to remember that he had 
 drunk, among others, at French sources not yet deboshed with 
 absinthe* Yet, with a purity like that of thrice-bolted snow, he 
 had none of its coldness. He is, of all our poets, the most truly 
 sensuous, using the word as Milton probably meant it when he 
 said that poetry should be " simple, sensuous, and passionate." 
 A poet is innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and 
 illumines his senses ; when they, on the other hand, muddy the 
 mind, he becomes sensual. Every one of Spenser s senses was 
 as exquisitely alive to the impressions of material, as every 
 organ of his soul was to those of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, 
 
 * Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his earliest 
 known verses are translations from Bellay, a poet who was charming 
 whenever he had the courage to play truant from a bad school. We must 
 not suppose that an analysis of the literature of the demi-monde will give 
 us all the elements of the French character. It has been both grave and 
 profound ; nay, it has even contrived to be wise and lively at the same 
 time, a combination so incomprehensible by the Teutonic races that they 
 have labelled it levity. It puts them out as Nature did FuseU.
 
 52 SPENSER. 
 
 if he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could not help 
 making them "of glorious feature." It was this, it may be 
 suspected, rather than his " praising love," that made Lord 
 Burleigh shake his " rugged forehead." Spenser s gamut, 
 indeed, is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal delight 
 in "precious odours fetched from far away" upward to such 
 refinement as 
 
 " Upon her eyelids many graces sate 
 Under the shadow of her even brows," 
 
 where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. He is court- 
 painter in ordinary to each of the senses in turn, and idealises, 
 these frail favourites of his majesty King Lusty Juventus, till 
 they half believe themselves the innocent shepherdesses into, 
 which he travesties them. * 
 
 In his great poem he had two objects in view first, the 
 ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and then that of reconv 
 mending himself to the permanent approval of his own and 
 following ages as a poet, and especially as a moral poet. To 
 meet the first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in con 
 temporary England, and brings in all the leading personages of 
 the day under the thin disguise of his knights and their squires 
 and lady-loves. He says this expressly in the prologue to the. 
 second book : 
 
 * Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little eating 
 and drinking there is in the " Faery Queen." The only time he fairly sets 
 a table is iu the house of Malbecco, where it is necessary to the conduct of 
 the story. Yet taste is not wholly forgotten : 
 
 " In her left hand a cup of gold she held, 
 And with her right the riper fruit did reach, 
 Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld, 
 Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach 
 Of her flue fingers without foul impeach, 
 That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet." 
 
 B. II., c. xii., 5fl. 
 
 Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment I
 
 SPENSER. 53 
 
 " Of Faery Laud yet if he more inquire, 
 By certain signs, here set in sundry place, 
 He may it find ; . . . 
 And thou, fairest princess unier sky, 
 In this fair mirror niayst behold thy face 
 And thine own realms in laud of Faery." 
 
 Many of his personages we can still identify, and all of them 
 were once as easily recognisable as these of Mademoiselle de 
 Scudery. This, no doubt, added greatly to the immediate 
 piquancy of the allusions. The interest they would excite 
 may be inferred from the fact that King James, in 1596, wished 
 to have the author prosecuted and punished for his indecent 
 handling of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, under the name 
 of Duessa. * To suit the wider application of his plan s other and 
 more important half, Spenser made all his characters double 
 their parts, and appear in his allegory as the impersonations of 
 abstract moral qualities. When the cardinal and theological 
 virtues tell Dante, 
 
 " Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel siamo stelle," 
 
 the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a slight gulp, 
 to swallow without solution the problem of being in two places 
 at the same time. But there is something fairly ludicrous in 
 such a duality as that of Prince Arthur and the Earl of 
 Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphcebe and 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 "In this same interlude it doth befall 
 That 1, one Snout by name, present a wall." 
 
 * Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his friend 
 Raleigh s saying, that " whosoever in writing modern history shall follow 
 truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth." The passage 
 is one of the very few disgusting ones in the " Faery Queen." Spenser was 
 copying Ariosto ; but the Italian poet, with the discreeter taste of his 
 race, keeps to generalities. Spenser goes into particulars which can only 
 be called nasty. He did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary s 
 rival ; and this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary 
 manners. It becomes only the more marvelloiis that the fine flower of his 
 . genius could have transmuted the juices of such a soil into the purity and 
 sweetness which are its own peculiar properties.
 
 54 SPENSER. 
 
 The reality seems to heighten the improbability, already hard 
 enough to manage. But Spenser had fortunately almost as 
 little sense of humour as Wordsworth,* or he could never have 
 carried his poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he 
 did. It is evident that to him the Land of Faery was an unreal 
 world of picture and illusion, 
 
 " The world s sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil," 
 
 in which he could shut himself up from the actual, with its 
 shortcomings and failures. 
 
 " The ways through which my weary steps I guide 
 
 In this delightful land of Faery 
 Are so exceeding spacious and wide, 
 And sprinkled with such sweet variety 
 Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye, 
 That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight, 
 
 My tedious travail do fo^t-t thereby, 
 And, when I gin to feel decay of might, 
 It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright." 
 
 Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness ; but the 
 alacrity of his mind is so great that, even where his invention 
 fails a little, we do not share his feeling nor suspect it, charmed 
 as we are by the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty 
 or vigour of his similes, the musical felicity of his diction, and 
 the mellow versatility of his pictures. In this last quality 
 Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice 
 in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost 
 their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book 
 should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were 
 any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness 
 of poetry it must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every fault 
 
 * There is a gleam of humour in one of the couplets of " Mothei 
 Hubberd s Tale," where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they should 
 disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg the more 
 successfully, says 
 
 " Be you the soldier, for you likest are 
 For manly semblance and fjnall ekiU in war "
 
 SPENSER. 55 
 
 of which that kind of writing is capable. The characters are 
 vague, and, even were they not, they drop out of the story so 
 often and remain out of it so long, that we have forgotten who 
 they are when we meet them again ; the episodes hinder the 
 advance of the action instead of relieving it with variety of 
 incident or novelty of situation ; the plot, if plot it may be 
 called, 
 
 " That shape has none 
 Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb," 
 
 recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance ; 
 while the fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously 
 sincere, is between shadow and shadow, where we know 
 that neither can harm the other, though we are tempted 
 to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, 
 and says that it won t bite us nor meddle with us if we do 
 not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which after all is 
 the fatal question ? The truth is that it is too often forced upon 
 us against our will, as people were formerly driven to church till 
 they began to look on a day of rest as a penal institution, and 
 to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of defective inspira 
 tion which was awakened in them by the preaching. The true 
 type of the allegory is the " Odyssey," which we read without 
 suspicion as pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in 
 divining its double meaning, as if we somehow got a better 
 bargain of our author than he meant to give us. But this 
 complex feeling must not be so exacting as to prevent our 
 lapsing into the old Arabian Nights simplicity of interest 
 again. The moral of a poem should be suggested, as when in 
 some mediaeval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a 
 fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transitoriness of life 
 by the mortuary tablets under our feet. The vast superiority 
 of Bunyan over Spenser lies in the fact that we help to make 
 his allegory out of our own experience. Instead of striving to 
 embody abstract passions and temptations, he has given us his 
 own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the Ulysses of his 
 own prose-epic. This is the secret of his power and his charm
 
 5 6 SPENSER. 
 
 that, while the representation of what may happen to all men 
 comes home to none of us in particular, the story of any one 
 man s real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every 
 one of us. The very homeliness of Bunyan s names and the 
 everydayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we 
 soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical 
 beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream. In^ 
 deed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at 
 setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of 
 Bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the 
 figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that 
 the creatures of his mind become things, as clear to the 
 memory as if we had seen them. But Spenser s are too often 
 mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered on the 
 Muses muster-roll by the specious trick of personification. 
 There is, likewise, in Bunyan, a childlike simplicity and taking- 
 for-granted which win our confidence. His Giant Despair,* 
 for example, is by no means the Ossianic figure into which 
 artists who mistake the vague for the sublime have mis 
 conceived it. He is the ogre of the fairy-tales, with his 
 malicious wife ; and he comes forth to us from those regions 
 of early faith and wonder as something beforehand accepted by 
 the imagination. Tfeese figures of Bunyan s are already familiar 
 inmates of the mind, and, if there be any sublimity in him, it is 
 the daring frankness of his verisimilitude. Spenser s giants 
 are those of the later romances, except that grand figure with 
 the balances in the second Canto of Book V., the most original 
 of all his conceptions, yet no real giant, but a pure eidolon 
 of the mind. As Bunyan rises not seldom to a natural poetry, 
 so Spenser sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, 
 to unmistakable prose. Take his description of the House of 
 Alma,t for instance : 
 
 * Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giant s suicidal offer of " knife, 
 halter, or poison," from Spenser s "swords, ropes, poison," in "Faery 
 Queen," B. I., c. ix., 1. 
 
 t Book II., c. ix.
 
 SPENSER. 57 
 
 " The master cook wascald Concoction, 
 
 A careful man, and full of comely guise ; 
 The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion, 
 Did order all the achates in seemly wise." 
 
 And so on through all the organs of the body. The author of 
 Eccelsiastes understood these matters better in that last 
 pathetic chapter of his, blunderingly translated as it apparently 
 is. This, I admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind ; 
 though, even here, when he gets on to the organs of the mind, 
 the enchantments of his fancy and style come to the rescue 
 and put us in good-humour again, hard as it is to conceive of 
 armed knights entering the chamber of the mind, and talking 
 with such visionaiy damsels as Ambition and Shamefastness. 
 Nay, even in the most prosy parts, unless my partiality 
 deceive me, there is an infantile confidence in the magical 
 powers of Prosopopoeia which half beguiles us, as of children 
 who p. ay that everything is something else, and are quite 
 satisfied with the transformation. 
 
 The problem for Spenser was a double one : how to commend 
 poetry at all to a generation which thought it effeminate 
 trifling,* and how he, Master Edmund Spenser, of imagination 
 all compact, could commend his poetry to Master John Bull, 
 the most practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at 
 that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about his soul. 
 Omne lulit puncitim qui miscuit utile dulri was not only 
 an irrefragable axiom because a Latin poet had said it, 
 but it exactly met the case in point. He would convince the 
 scorners that poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master 
 Bull his new way of making fine words butter parsnips, in 
 a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then practised, was 
 imagination adapted for beginners, in words of one syllable and 
 illustrated with cuts, and would thus serve both his ethical and 
 pictorial purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, he 
 proceeded to put forth ; but he so bordered it with bright- 
 
 * See Sidney s Defence and Puttenham s Art of English Poesy, 
 Book I., c. viii.
 
 5 8 SPENSER. 
 
 coloured fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded 
 the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as 
 in the Grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten 
 in the ecstasy of its adornment. Worse than all, does not liis 
 brush linger more lovingly along the rosy contours of his sirens 
 than on the modest wimples of the Wise Virgins ? " The 
 general end of the book," he tells us in his Dedication to Sir 
 Walter Raleigh, " is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in 
 virtuous and gentle discipline." But a little further on he 
 evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how generously he had 
 interpreted his promise of cuts : " To some I know this method 
 will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline 
 delivered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large,* as 
 they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices." 
 Lord Burleigh was of this way of thinking, undoubtedly, but 
 how could poor Clarion help it? Has he not said, 
 
 " And whatso else, of virtue good or ill, 
 
 Grew in that garden, fetclit from far away, 
 Of every one he takes and tastes at will, 
 
 And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ? " 
 
 One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were the pure 
 sense of the beautiful incarnated to the one end that he might 
 interpret it to our duller perceptions. So exquisite was his 
 sensibility,t that with him sensation and intellection seem 
 identical, and we "can almost say his body thought." This 
 subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that gives his poetry 
 a crystalline purity without lack of warmth. He is full of 
 feeling, and yet of such a kind that we can neither say it is mere 
 intellectual perception of what is fair and good, nor yet 
 associate it with that throbbing fervour which leads us to call 
 sensibility by the physical name of heart. 
 
 * We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, who 
 was a kind of Spenser in a cassock. 
 
 t Of this he himself gives a striking hint, where speaking in his owi? 
 person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the passionate cry, 
 "Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled," 
 
 " Faery Queen," 15. I., c x., 43.
 
 SPENSEX. 59 
 
 Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when 
 he called him the poets poet. We may fairly leave the allegory 
 on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the 
 reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, 
 not because it was becoming, but because it was the only wear. 
 The true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as 
 the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a 
 time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to 
 cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice ; for not 
 only is his style Venetian,* but as the gallery there is housed in 
 the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted 
 allegory. And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from 
 Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, 
 where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, 
 like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along 
 from picture to picture. 
 
 " If all the pens that ever poet held 
 Had fed the feeling of their master s thoughts, 
 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts 
 Their minds and muses on admired themes, 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
 
 * Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example ? 
 
 " Arachne figured how Jove did abuse 
 Europa like a bull, and on his back 
 Her through the sea did bear : . . . 
 She seemed still back unto the land to look, 
 And her playfellows aid to call, and fear 
 The dashing of the waves, that up she took, 
 Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near. . . . 
 Before the bull she pictured winged Love, 
 With his young brother Sport, . . . 
 And many nymphs about them flocking round, 
 And many Tritons which their horns did sound." 
 
 Muiopotmos, 281-296. 
 
 Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the " Commonwealth 
 and Government of Venice " (1599) with this beautiful verse, 
 " Fair Venice, flower of the Last world s delight. 
 Perhaps we shouk read "lost"?
 
 60 SPENSER. 
 
 If these had made one poem s period, 
 And all combined in beauty s worthiness ; 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best, 
 Which into words no virtue can digest." * 
 
 Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this 
 unattainable something as any other poet. He is so purely 
 poet that with him the meaning does not so often modulate the 
 music of the verse as the music makes great part of the: 
 meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant paths. No 
 poet is so splendidly superfluous as he ; none knows so well 
 that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but 
 is a beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless 
 abundance only to be justified by incomes of immortal youth. 
 
 " Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco 
 Si puo quivi albergare in alcun cuore ; 
 Non eutra quivi disagio ne inopia, 
 Ma vi sta ogn or col corno pien la Copia." t 
 
 This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser 
 appear in the very structure of his verse. He found the ottava 
 rima too monotonously iterative ; so, by changing the order of 
 his rhymes, he shifted the couplet from the end of the stave, 
 where it always seems to put on the brakes with a jar, to the 
 middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a bridge ; he 
 found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another line,, 
 and then ran that added line into an alexandrine, in which the 
 melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward 
 after that which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his- 
 metre more than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows- 
 wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back 
 in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by 
 
 * Marlowe s " Tamburlaine," Part I., Act v., 2. 
 
 t " Greyheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may 
 Take up its lodging here in any heart ; 
 Unease nor Lack can enter at this door ; 
 But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore." 
 
 Orl. Fur., c. vi., 73i-
 
 SPENSER. 6 1 
 
 the next. In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no 
 slumberous monotony ; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a 
 great composer. By the variety of his pauses now at the close 
 of the first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the 
 fourth he gives spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency 
 it certainly is to become languorous. He knew how to make it 
 /rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as, 
 
 " But he, my lion, and my noble lord, 
 How does he find in cruel heart to hate 
 Her that him loved and ever most adored 
 As the God of my life ? Why hath he me abhorred ? "* 
 Or this, 
 
 " Come hither, come hither, 0, come hastily !"f 
 
 Joseph Warton objects to Spenser s stanza, that its " constraint 
 led him into many absurdities." Of these he instances three, 
 of which I shall notice only one, since the two others (which 
 suppose him at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem 
 valid to any one who knows the poet. It is that it "obliged 
 him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however unimportant, 
 with trifling and tedious circumlocutions namely, Faery 
 Queen, II., ii., 44 : 
 
 Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face 
 
 Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world, 
 Sith last I left that honourable place, 
 In which her royal presence is enrolled. 
 
 That is, it is three months since I left her palace. "+ But Dr. 
 Warton should have remembered (what he too often forgets in 
 his own verses) that, in spite of Dr. Johnson s dictum, poetry is 
 
 * B. I., c. iii., 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympathetic of critics, has 
 remarked the passionate change from the third to the first person in the 
 last two verses. 
 
 f B. II., c. viii.,3. 
 
 j Observations on Faery Queen, vol. i., pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes also 
 objects to Spenser s measure, that it is "closed always by a full-stop, in 
 the same place, by which every stanza is made as it were a distinct
 
 62 SPENSER. 
 
 not prose, and that verse only loses its advantage over the 
 latter by invading its province.* Verse itself is an absurdity, 
 except as an expression of some higher movement of the mind, 
 or as an expedient to lift other minds to the same ideal level. 
 It is the cothurnus which gives language an heroic stature. I 
 have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser s style was 
 its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than com 
 presses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural 
 in an age when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as 
 now. He is the last of the poets who went (without affecta 
 tion) by the great clock of the firmament. Dante, the miser of 
 words, who goes by the same timepiece, is full of these round 
 about ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to do with 
 Spenser s stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these 
 stately revolutions of the superne ruote. Time itself becomes 
 more noble when so measured ; we never knew before of 
 how precious a commodity we had the wasting. Who would 
 prefer the plain time of day to this ? 
 
 " Now when Aldebaran was mounted high 
 
 Above the starry Cassiopeia s chair ; " 
 or this ? 
 
 " By this the northern wagoner had set 
 
 His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star 
 
 paragraph." (Todd s Spenser, II., xli.) But he could hardly have read the 
 poem attentively, for there are numerous instances to the contrary. 
 Spenser was a consummate master of versification, and not only did 
 Marlowe and Shakespeare learn of him, but I have little doubt that, but 
 for the " Faery Queen," we should never have had the varied majesty of 
 Milton s blank-verse. 
 * As where Dr. Warton himself says : 
 
 " How nearly had my spirit past, 
 
 Till stopt by Metcalf s skilful hand, 
 To death s dark regions wide and waste 
 And the black river s mournful strand, 
 Or to," etc., 
 
 to the end of the next stanza. That is, I had died but for Dr. Metcalfs 
 boluses.
 
 SPENSEX. 63 
 
 That was in ocean s waves yet never wet, 
 
 But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far 
 To all that in the wide deep wandering are ; " 
 or this ? 
 
 " At last the golden oriental gate 
 
 Of greatest heaven gan to open fair, 
 And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, 
 Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair 
 And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air." 
 
 The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less 
 as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of endless 
 leisures which it is one chief merit of the poem to suggest. 
 But Spenser s dilatation extends to thoughts as well as to 
 phrases and images. He does not love the concise. Yet his 
 dilatation is not mere distension, but the expansion of natural 
 growth in the rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest 
 stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms. Here is one of 
 his, suggested by Homer :* 
 
 " Upon the top of all his lofty crest 
 A bunch of hairs discoloured diversely, 
 With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest, 
 Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity ; 
 Like to an almond-tree ymounted high 
 On top of green Selinus all alone 
 With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, 
 Whose tender locks do tremble every one 
 
 At every little breath that under heaven is blown." 
 
 And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant verses of 
 Dante : 
 
 " Seggendo in piume 
 In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre, 
 
 * Iliad, xvii., 55 seqq. Referred to in Upton s note on "Faery 
 Queen," B. I., c. vii., 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off with an 
 alexandrine has Homer s irvoial iravrolwv avtfjiwv expanded 1 Chapman 
 unfortunately has slurred this passage in his version, and Pope tittivated 
 it more than usual in his. I have no other translation at hand. Marlowe 
 was so taken by this passage in Spenser that he put it bodily into his 
 Tamburlaine.
 
 64 SPENSER. 
 
 Seiiza la qnal chi sua vita consunia, 
 
 Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia 
 
 Qual furao in acre ed in acqua la schiuma."* 
 
 " Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she, 
 
 Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss, 
 
 Does waste his days in dark obscurity 
 
 And in oblivion ever buried is ; 
 
 Where ease abounds it s eath to do amiss : 
 
 But who his limbs with labours and his mind 
 
 Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss. 
 
 Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind, 
 Who seeks with painful toil shall Honour soonest find 
 
 " In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell, 
 
 And will be found with peril and with pain, 
 
 Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell 
 
 Unto her happy mansion attain ; 
 
 Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain, 
 
 And wakeful watches ever to abide ; 
 
 But easy is the way and passage plain 
 
 To pleasure s palace ; it may soon be spied, 
 And day and night her doors to all stand open wida."t 
 
 Spenser s mind always demands this large elbow-room. His 
 thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a stately and 
 sonorous proclamation, as if under the open sky, that seems to 
 me very noble. For example 
 
 * Jj\fcnw, xxiv., 46-52. 
 
 " For sitting upon down, 
 Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame, 
 Withouten which whoso his life consumeth 
 Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth 
 As smoke in air or in the water foam." LONGFELLOW. 
 
 It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that none of 
 the commentators on Spenser notice his most important obligations to the 
 great Tuscan. 
 
 t "Faery Queen," B. II., c. iii., 40, 41.
 
 SPENSER. 65 
 
 " The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought 
 And is with child of glorious-great intent 
 Can never rest until it forth have brought 
 The eternal brood of glory excellent."* 
 
 One s very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. And here 
 is a passage which Milton had read and remembered : 
 
 " And is there care in Heaven? and is there love 
 In heavenly spirits to these creatures base, 
 That may compassion of their evils move ? 
 There is : else much more wretched were the case 
 Of man than beasts : but 0, the exceeding grace 
 Of highest God, that loves his creatures so, 
 And all his works with mercy doth embrace, 
 That blessed angels he sends to and fro, 
 
 To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe ! 
 
 " How oft do they their silver bowers leave, 
 
 To come to succour us that succour want ! 
 
 How oft do they with golden pinions cleave 
 
 The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant, 
 
 Against foul fiends to aid us militant ! 
 
 They for us fight, they watch and duly ward, 
 
 And their bright squadrons round about us plant ; 
 
 And all for love and nothing for reward ; 
 0, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ?"f 
 
 His natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. 
 He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed 
 sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily. So 
 entirely are beauty and delight in it the native element of 
 Spenser, that, whenever in the "Faery Queen" you come 
 suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant 
 surprise, a kind of grit, as when one s teeih close on a bit of 
 gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the most 
 fluent of our poets. Sensation passing through emotion into 
 revery is a prime quality of his manner. And to read him puts 
 one in the condition of revery, a state of mind in which our 
 thoughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish do in a 
 
 * Ibid., B. I., c. v., 1. t Ibid., 15. IF., c. viii., 1, 2. 
 
 555
 
 66 SPENSER. 
 
 gentle stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep 
 themselves from going down with the current, while their 
 bodies yield indolently to all its soothing curves. He chooses 
 his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity 
 of meaning. To characterise his style in a single word, 1 
 should call it cosily. None but the daintiest and nicest phrases 
 will serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with 
 such cunning bnits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses of 
 verse, that never any word seems more eminent than the rest, 
 nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to 
 the end before you have time to stop and muse over the wealth 
 that has been lavished on you. But he has characterised 
 and exemplified his own style better than any description 
 could do : 
 
 " For round about the walls yclotlied were 
 
 With goodly arras of great majesty, 
 
 Woven with gold and silk so close and near 
 
 That the rich metal lurked privily 
 
 As faining to be hid from envious eye ; 
 
 Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares 
 
 It showed itself and shone unwillingly 
 
 Like to a discoloured snake whose hidden snares 
 Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back 
 declares." * 
 
 And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a sample : 
 
 " And, more to lull him in his slumber soft, 
 A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down 
 And ever drizzling rain upon the loft, 
 Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun 
 Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon. 
 No other noise, nor peoples troublous cries, 
 As still are wont to annoy the walled town, 
 Might there be heard : but careless quiet lies 
 
 Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies, "f 
 
 In the world into which Spenser carries us there is neither 
 lime nor space, or rather it is outside of and independent of 
 them both, and so is purely ideal, or, more truly, imaginary 
 * B. III., c. xL, 23. t B. I., c. i., 41.
 
 SPENSER. 67 
 
 yet it is full of form, colour, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if 
 not real, yet apprehensible by the senses. There are no men and 
 women in it, yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that 
 have the likeness of men and women, and hint at some kind of 
 foregone reality. Now this place, somewhere between mind 
 and matter, between soul and sense, between the actual and the 
 possible, is precisely the region which Spenser assigns (if I 
 have rightly divined him) to the poetic susceptibility of im 
 pression 
 
 " To reigii in the air from earth to highest sky." 
 
 Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul and spirit of 
 it, dormant till they are magnetised by some powerful emotion. 
 Then whatever is imperishable in us recognises for an instant 
 and claims kindred with something outside and distinct 
 from it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it, that 
 flashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes all 
 other companionship. This exaltation with which love some 
 times subtilises the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and 
 see, not the thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the 
 joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to 
 have been the normal condition of Spenser. While the senses 
 of most men live in the cellar, his " were laid in a large upper 
 chamber which opened toward the sunrising." 
 
 " His birth was of the womb of morning dew, 
 And his conception of the joyous prime." 
 
 The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one 
 of them ?) have a way, I admit, of getting within our inmost 
 consciousness and in a manner betraying us to ourselves. 
 There is in Spenser a remoteness very different from this, but 
 it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, perhaps quite as 
 wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away from 
 ourselves and those importunate trifles which we gravely call 
 the realities of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind 
 everything 
 
 "Suffers a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strauge."
 
 68 SPENSER. 
 
 He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal 
 distance where no mortal, I had almost said human, fleck is 
 visible. Instead of the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his 
 wife with an Epithalamion fit for a conscious goddess, and the 
 "savage soil"* of Ireland becomes a turf of Arcady under her 
 feet, where the merchants daughters of the town are no more 
 at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan 
 mythology whom they meet there. He seems to have had a 
 common-sense side to him, and could look at things (if we may 
 judge by his tract on Irish affairs) in a practical and even hard 
 way ; but the moment he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the 
 condition which his teacher Plato imposes on poets, and had 
 not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His fancy, 
 habitually moving about in words not realised, unrealises 
 everything at a touch. The critics blame him because in his 
 Prothalamion the subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans 
 and leave it at Temple Gardens as noble damsels ; but to those 
 who are grown familiar with his imaginary world such a trans 
 formation seems as natural as in the old legend of the Knight 
 of the Swan. 
 
 " Come, now, ye damsels, daughters of Delight, 
 
 Help quickly her to dight : 
 But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot 
 In Jove s sweet paradise of Day and Night, . . . 
 And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen, 
 The which do still adorn her beauty s pride, 
 Help to adorn my beautifulest bride. 
 
 Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal, 
 And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine, 
 And let the Graces dance unto the rest . 
 For they can do it best. 
 The whiles the maidens do their carols sing, 
 To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring." 
 
 * This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of Ormond, and 
 in that to I/ord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to the " Faery 
 Queen." These sonnets are of a much stronger build than the " Amoretti," 
 and some of them (especially that to Sir John Norris) recall the firm tread 
 of Milton s, though differing in structure.
 
 SPENSEK. 69 
 
 The whole "Epithalamion" is very noble, with an organ-like 
 roll and majesty of numbers, while it is instinct with the same 
 joyousness which must have been the familiar mood of Spenser. 
 It is no superficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound 
 delight in the beauty of the universe, and in that delicately- 
 surfaced nature of his which was its mirror and counterpart. 
 Sadness was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be sure, a 
 decorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a 
 temperament ; but his condolences are graduated to the unim- 
 passioned scale of social requirement. Even for Sir Philip 
 Sidney his sighs are regulated by the official standard. It was 
 in an unreal world that his affections found their true object 
 and vent, and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never 
 known, that he puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has 
 evaporated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic 
 verses he ever penned : 
 
 " I hate the day because it londeth light 
 To see all things, but not my love to see."* 
 
 In the "Epithalamion" there is an epithet which has been much 
 admired for its felicitous tenderness : 
 
 " Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, 
 Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes 
 And blesseth her with his two happy hands." 
 
 But the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already 
 guided him to this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holiness 
 a dame surely as far abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as 
 we can readily conceive of to Una, who, like the visionary 
 Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of womanhood, except 
 that of being alive, as Juliet and Beatrice are. 
 
 " happy earth, 
 Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread I "t 
 
 Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would be as 
 soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen can we 
 
 * " Daphuaida," 407, 403. t " Faery Queen," H. I., c. x., 9.
 
 7o SPENSEJt. 
 
 conceive of her treading anything so sordid ? No ; it is only 
 on some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks securely, 
 herself a dream. And it is only when Spenser has escaped 
 thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife 
 till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagina 
 tion as the other ideal images with which he converses, that 
 his feeling becomes as nearly passionate as nearly human, I 
 was on the point of saying as with him is possible. I am so 
 far from blaming this idealising property of his mind, that I 
 find it admirable in him. It is his quality, not his defect. 
 Without some touch of it life would be unendurable prose. If 
 I have called the world to which he transports us a world of 
 unreality, I have wronged him. It is only a world of unrealism. 
 It is from pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inch- 
 long politics that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that 
 to-morrow, always coming and never come, where ideas shall 
 reign supreme.* But I am keeping my readers from the sweetest 
 idealisation that love ever wrought : 
 
 " Unto this place whenas the elfin knight 
 Approached, him seemed that the merry sound 
 Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, 
 And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, 
 That through the woods their echo did rebound ; 
 He nigher drew to wit what it mote be. 
 There he a troop of ladies dancing found 
 Full merrily and making gladful glee ; 
 
 And in the midst a shepherd piping he did sue. 
 
 " He durst not enter into the open green 
 For dread of them unwares to be descried, 
 For breaking of their dance, if he were seen ; 
 But in the covert of the wood did bide 
 Beholding all, yet of them unespied \ 
 There he did see that pleased so much his sight 
 
 * Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not much more imaginary than 
 that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He who is 
 familiar with mediaeval epics will be extremely cautious in drawing 
 inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He evidently 
 archaises like the rest.
 
 SPENSER. 73 
 
 That even he himself his eyes envied, 
 A hundred naked maidens lily-white, 
 All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight. 
 
 " All they without were ranged in a ring, 
 
 And danced round ; but in the midst of them 
 
 Three other ladies did hoth dance and sing, 
 
 The while the rest them round about did hem, 
 
 And like a garland did in compass stem. 
 
 And in the midst of these same three wa? placed 
 
 Another damsel, as a precious gem 
 
 Amidst a ring most richly well enchased, 
 That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. 
 
 " Look how the crown which Ariadne wove 
 
 Upon her ivory forehead that same day, 
 
 That Theseus her unto his bridal bore 
 
 (When the bold Cantaurs made that bloody fray, 
 
 With the tierce Lapithes, that did them dismay), 
 
 Being now placed in the firmament, 
 
 Through the bright heaven doth her beams display, 
 
 And is unto the stars an ornament, 
 Which round about her move in order excellent : 
 
 " Such was the beauty of this goodly band, 
 Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell, 
 But she that in the midst of them did stand, 
 Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel, 
 Crowned with a rosy garland that right well 
 Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew 
 About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell, 
 And fragrant odours they upon her threw ; 
 
 But most of all those three did her with gifts endue. 
 
 " Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight, 
 
 Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt 
 
 Upon this hill and dance there, day and night ; 
 
 Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant 
 
 And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt 
 
 Is borrowed of them ; but that fair one 
 
 That in the midst was placed paravant, 
 
 Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone, 
 That made him pipe so merrily, as never none.
 
 7 2 SPENSER. 
 
 " She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd s lass 
 
 Which piped there unto that merry rout ; 
 
 That jolly shepherd that there piped was 
 
 Poor Colin Clout (who knows not Colin Clout ? ) ; 
 
 lie piped apace while they him danced about ; 
 
 Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace, 
 
 Unto thy love that made thee low to lout ; 
 
 Thy love is present there with thee in place, 
 Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace." * 
 
 Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles 
 with simple delight as this ? It is a sky of Italian April, full of 
 sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of larks. And \ve like it all 
 the more that it reminds us of that passage in his friend 
 Sidney s Arcadia, where the shepherd-boy pipes " as if he 
 would never be old." If we compare it with the mystical scene 
 in Dante,t of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost 
 like a bit of real life ; but taken by itself, it floats as unconcerned 
 in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud. 
 The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far 
 away as Thessaly, when Apollo was keeping sheep there. 
 Sorrow, the great idealiser, had had the portrait of Beatrice on 
 her easel for years, and every touch of her pencil transfigured 
 the woman more and more into the glorified saint. But 
 Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of flesh and blood, who 
 would sit down at meat with the poet on the very day when he 
 had thus beatified her. As Dante was drawn upward from 
 heaven to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser lifted 
 away from the actual by those of that ideal Beauty whereof his 
 mind had conceived the lineaments in its solitary musings over 
 Plato, but of whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses 
 had already premonished him. The intrusion of the real 
 world upon this supersensual mood of his wrought an instant 
 disenchantment : 
 
 " Much wondered CaliJore at this strange sight 
 Whose like before his eye had never seen, 
 
 * " Faery Queen," B. VI., c. x., 10-16. t Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX.
 
 SPENSER. 73 
 
 And, standing long astonished, in sprite 
 And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween, 
 Whether it were the train of Beauty s Queen, 
 Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show 
 With which his eyes might have deluded been, 
 Therefore resolving what it was to know, 
 Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go. 
 
 " But soon as he appeared to their view 
 They vanished all away out of his sight 
 And clean were gone, which way he never knew, 
 All save the shepherd , who, for fell despite 
 Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite." 
 
 Ben Jonson said that " he had consumed a whole night 
 looking to his great toe, about which he had seen Tartars and 
 Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination ;" 
 and Coleridge has told us how his " eyes made pictures when 
 they were shut." This is not uncommon, but I fancy that 
 Spenser was more habitually possessed by his imagination 
 than is usual even with poets. His visions must have accom 
 panied him "in glory and in joy" along the common thorough 
 fares of life, and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more 
 real than the men and women he met there. His "most fine 
 spirit of sense " would have tended to keep him in this exalted 
 mood. I must give an example of the sensuousness of which 
 I have spoken : 
 
 " And in the midst of all a fountain stood 
 Of richest substance that on earth might be, 
 So pure and shiny that the crystal Hood 
 Through every channel running one might see ; 
 Most goodly it with curious imagery 
 Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys, 
 Of which some seemed with lively jollity 
 To ily about, playing their wanton toys, 
 
 Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys. 
 
 " And over all, of purest gold was spread 
 A trail of ivy in his native hue ; 
 For the rich metal was so coloured 
 That he who did not well avided it view
 
 74 SPENSER. 
 
 Would surely deem it to be ivy true ; 
 Low his lascivious arms adown did creep 
 That themselves dipping in the silver dew 
 Their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep, 
 Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep. 
 
 " Infinite streams continually did well 
 Out of this fountain, sweet and fair to see, 
 The which into an ample laver fell, 
 And shortly grew to so great quantity 
 That like a little lake it seemed to be 
 Whose depth exceeded not three cubits height, 
 That through the waves one might the bottom se? 
 All paved beneath with jasper shining bright, 
 
 That seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright. 
 
 "And all the margent round about was set 
 With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend 
 The sunny beams which on the billows bet, 
 And those which therein bathed mote offend. 
 As Guyon happened by the same to wend, 
 Two naked Damsels he therein espied, 
 Which therein bathing seemed to contend 
 And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide 
 
 Their dainty parts from view of any which them eyed 
 
 " Sometimes the one would lift the other quite 
 Above the waters, and then down again 
 Her plunge, as overmastered by might, 
 Where both awhile would covered remain, 
 And each the other from to rise restrain ; 
 The whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil, 
 So through the crystal waves appeared plain : 
 Then suddenly both would themselves unhele, 
 
 And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal 
 
 " As that fair star, the messenger of morn, 
 His dewy face out of the sea doth rear ; 
 Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born 
 Of the ocean s fruitful froth, did first appear ; 
 Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear 
 Crystalline humour dropped down apace. 
 Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him near, 
 And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace ; 
 
 His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace.
 
 SPENSER. 75 
 
 1 The wanton Maidens him espying, stood 
 
 Gazing awhile at his unwonted guise ; 
 
 Then the one herself low ducked in the flood, 
 
 Abashed that her a stranger did avise ; 
 
 But the other rather higher did arise, 
 
 And her two lily paps aloft displayed, 
 
 And all that might his melting heart entice 
 
 To her delights, she unto him bewrayed ; 
 The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made. 
 
 " With that the other likewise up arose, 
 
 And her fair locks, which formerly were bound 
 
 Up in one knot, she low adown did loose, 
 
 Which flowing long and thick her clothed around, 
 
 And the ivory in golden mantle gowned : 
 
 So that fair spectacle from him was reft, 
 
 Yet that which reft it no less fair was found ; 
 
 So hid in locks and waves from lookers theft, 
 Naught but her lovely face she for his looking left. 
 
 " Withal she laughed, and she blushed withal, 
 That blushing to her laughter gave more grace, 
 And laughter to her blushing, as did fall. 
 
 Kftsoones they heard a most melodious sound, 
 Of all that mote delight a dainty ear, 
 Such as at once might not on living ground, 
 Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere : 
 Right hard it was for wight which did it hear 
 To read what manner music that mote be ; 
 For all that pleasing is to living ear 
 Was there consorted in one harmony ; 
 Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree. 
 
 " The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade, 
 
 Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet ; 
 
 The angelical soft trembling voices made 
 
 To the instruments divine respondence mete ; 
 
 The silver-sounding instruments did meet 
 
 With the base murmur of the water s fall ; 
 
 The water s fall with difference discreet, 
 
 Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; 
 The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."
 
 76 SPENSER. 
 
 Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, had said, " Why, 
 a God s name, may not we, as else the Greeks, have the 
 kingdom of our own language ? This is in the tone of Bellay, 
 as is also a great deal of what is said in the epistle prefixed to 
 the " Shepherd s Calendar/ He would have been wiser had he 
 followed more closely Bellay s advice about the introduction of 
 novel words : " Fear not, then, to innovate somewhat, particu 
 larly in a long poem, with modesty, however, with analogy, 
 and judgment of ear ; and trouble not thyself as to who may 
 think it good or bad, hoping that posterity will approve it she 
 who gives faith to doubtful, light to obscure, novelty to antique, 
 usage to unaccustomed, and sweetness to harsh and rude 
 things." Spenser s innovations were by no means always 
 happy, as not always according with the genius of the lan 
 guage, and they have, therefore, not prevailed. He forms 
 English words out of French or Italian ones, sometimes, I 
 think, on a misapprehension of their true meaning ; nay, he 
 sometimes makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion of 
 Romance on a Teutonic root. His theory, caught from Bellay, 
 of rescuing good archaisms from unwarranted oblivion, was 
 excellent ; not so his practice of being archaic for the mere 
 sake of escaping from the common and familiar. A permissible 
 archaism is a word or phrase that has been supplanted by 
 something less apt, but has not become unintelligible ; and 
 Spenser s often needed a glossary, even in his own day.* But 
 he never endangers his finest passages by any experiments of 
 this kind. There his language is living, if ever any, and of one 
 substance with the splendour of his fancy. Like all masters of 
 speech, he is fond of toying with and teasing it a little ; and it 
 may readily be granted that he sometimes " hunted the letter," 
 as it was called, out of all cry. But even where his alliteration 
 is tempted to an excess, its prolonged echoes caress the ear 
 like the fading and gathering reverberations of an Alpine horn, 
 
 * I find a goodly number of Yankecisms in him, such as idee (not 
 as a rhyme) ; but the oddest is his twice spelling dew deow, which ia 
 just as one would spell it who wished to phonetise its sound in rural 
 New England.
 
 SPENSEK. 77 
 
 and one can find in his heart to forgive even such a debauch of 
 initial assonances as 
 
 " Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, 
 More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky." 
 
 Generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, reminding us of 
 the arrangement of voices in an ancient catch, where one voice 
 takes up the phrase another has dropped, and thus seems 
 to give the web of harmony a firmer and more continuous 
 texture. 
 
 Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, mirrors 
 that differ very widely in the truth and beauty of the images 
 they reflect ; but Spenser s is a magic glass in which we see 
 few shadows cast back from actual life, but visionary shapes 
 conjured up by the wizard s art from some confusedly remem 
 bered past or some impossible future. It is like one of those 
 still pools of mediaeval legend which covers some sunken city 
 of the antique world a reservoir in which all our dreams seem 
 to have been gathered. As we float upon it, we see that it 
 pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds that drift over it, 
 the trees that grow about its margin ; but in the midst of these 
 shadowy echoes of actuality we catch faint tones of bells that 
 seem blown to us from beyond the horizon of time, and looking 
 down into the clear depths, catch glimpses of towers and far- 
 shining knights and peerless dames that waver and are gone. 
 Is it a world that ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a 
 delusion ? Spenser s world, real to him, is real enough for us 
 to take a holiday in, and we may well be content with it when 
 the earth we dwell on is so often too real to allow of such vaca 
 tions. It is the same kind of world that Petrarca s Laura has 
 walked in for five centuries, with all ears listening for the music 
 of her footfall. 
 
 The land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but it is also the 
 land of Rest. To read him is like dreaming awake, without 
 even the trouble of doing it yourself, but letting it be done for 
 you by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how to 
 colour his dreams like life, and make them move before you in
 
 78 SPENSER. 
 
 music. They seem singing to you as the sirens to Guyon, and 
 we linger like him : 
 
 " 0, thou fair son of gentle Faery 
 That art in mighty arms most magnified 
 Above all knights that ever battle tried, 
 0, turn thy rudder hithenvard awhile, 
 Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride, 
 This is the port of rest from troublous toil, 
 
 The world s sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.* 
 
 " With that the rolling sea, resounding swift 
 
 In his big bass, them fitly answered, 
 
 And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft, 
 
 A solemn mean unto them measured, 
 
 The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled 
 
 His treble, a strange kind of harmony 
 
 Which Guyon s senses softly tickeled 
 
 That he the boatman bade row easily 
 And let him hear some part of their rare melody." 
 
 Despite Spenser s instinctive tendency to idealise, and his 
 habit of distilling out of the actual an ethereal essence in 
 which very little of the possible seems left, yet his mind, as 
 is generally true of great poets, was founded on a solid basis of 
 good-sense. I do not know where to look for a more cogent 
 and at the same time picturesque confutation of Socialism than 
 in the Second Canto of the Fifth Book. If I apprehend rightly 
 his words and images, there is not only subtile but profound 
 thinking here. The French Revolution is prefigured in the 
 well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rousseau s fallacies 
 exposed two centuries in advance. Spenser was a conscious 
 Englishman to his inmost fibre, and did not lack the sound 
 
 * This song recalls that in Dante s Purgatorio (xix., 19-24), in which 
 the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements. Browne s beauti 
 ful verses ("Turn, hither turn your winged pines") were suggested by 
 these of Spenser. It might almost seem as if Spenser had here, in his 
 usual way, expanded the sweet old verses : 
 
 " Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely 
 When Knut king rew thereby ; 
 Roweth knightes near the loml, 
 That I may hear these monkes song. "
 
 SPENSER. 79 
 
 judgment in politics which belongs to his race. He was the 
 more English for living in Ireland, and there is something that 
 moves us deeply in the exile s passionate cry : 
 
 " Dear Country ! how dearly dear 
 Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band 
 Be to thy foster-child that from thy hand 
 Did common breath and nouriture receive I 
 How brutish is it not to understand 
 How much to her we owe that all us gave, 
 That gave unto us all whatever good we have 1 " 
 
 His race shows itself also where he tells us that 
 " chiefly skill to ride seems a science 
 Proper to gentle blood," 
 
 which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury s saying that 
 the finest sight God looked down on was a fine man on a fine 
 horse. 
 
 Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, tells us that the 
 "Faery Queen" "faded before" Sylvester s translation of Du 
 Bartas. But Wordsworth held a brief for himself in this case, 
 and is no exception to the proverb about men who are their own 
 attorneys. His statement is wholly unfounded. Both poems, no 
 doubt, so far as popularity is concerned, yielded to the graver 
 interests of the Civil War. But there is an appreciation much 
 weightier than any that is implied in mere popularity, and the 
 vitality of a poem is to be measured by the kind as well as the 
 amount of influence it exerts. Spenser has coached more poets 
 and more eminent ones than any other writer of English verse. 
 I need say nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples like 
 Browne, the two Fletchers, and More. Cowley tells us that he 
 became " irrecoverably a poet " by reading the " Faery Queen" 
 when a boy. Dryden, whose case is particularly in point because 
 he confesses having been seduced by Du Bartas, tells us that 
 Spenser had been his master in English. He regrets, indeed, 
 comically enough, that Spenser could not have read the rules of 
 Bossu, but adds that " no man was ever born with a greater 
 genius or more knowledge to support it." Pope says, " There 
 is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one s
 
 8o SPENSER. 
 
 old age as it did in one s youth. I read the Faery Queen 
 when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight ; and I 
 think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or 
 two ago." Thomson wrote the most delightful of his poems in 
 the measure of Spenser ; Collins, Gray, and Akenside show 
 traces of him ; and in our own day his influence reappears in 
 Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Landor is, I believe, 
 the only poet who ever found him tedious. Spenser s mere 
 manner has not had so many imitators as Milton s, but no 
 other of our poets has given an impulse, and in the right 
 direction also, to so many and so diverse minds ; above all, no 
 other has given to so many young souls a consciousness of 
 their wings and a delight in the use of them. He is a standing 
 protest against the tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the 
 seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the 
 dull uses to which it may be put. 
 
 Three of Spenser s own verses best characterise the feeling 
 his poetry gives us : 
 
 " Among wide waves set like a little nest," 
 " Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies," 
 " The world s sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil." 
 
 We are wont to apologise for the grossness of our favourite 
 authors sometimes by saying that their age was to blame and 
 not they ; and the excuse is a good one, for often it is the frank 
 word that shocks us while we tolerate the thing. Spenser 
 needs no such extenuations. No man can read the " Faery 
 Queen" and be anything but the better for it. Through that 
 rude age, when Maids of Honour drank beer for breakfast and 
 Hamlet could say a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely 
 abstracted and high, the Don Quixote of poets. Whoever can 
 endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and paint 
 ing and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought 
 and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let 
 him read in the " Faery Queen." There is the land of pure 
 heart s ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 IT may be doubted whether any language be rich enough to 
 maintain more than one truly great poet and whether 
 there be more than one period, and that very short, in the life 
 of a language, when such a phenomenon as a great poet is 
 possible. It may be reckoned one of the rarest pieces of good- 
 luck that ever fell to the share of a race, that (as was true of 
 Shakespeare) its most rhythmic genius, its acutest intellect, its 
 profoundest imagination, and its healthiest understanding 
 should have been combined in one man, and that he should 
 have arrived at the full development of his powers at the 
 moment when the material in which he was to work that 
 wonderful composite called English, the best result of the 
 confusion of tongues was in its freshest perfection. The 
 English-speaking nations should build a monument to the 
 misguided enthusiasts of the Plain of Shinar ; for, as the 
 mixture of many bloods seems to have made them the most 
 vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers 
 speeches given them a language which is perhaps the noblest 
 vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed. 
 
 Had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would 
 have been cramped by a book-language not yet flexible enough 
 for the demands of rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently 
 popularised for the natural and familiar expression of supreme 
 thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as to render 
 possible that ideal representation of the great passions which 
 is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice and 
 general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to 
 ease and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been 
 born fifty years later, his ripened manhood would have found 
 
 556
 
 8 2 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE, 
 
 itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of 
 political and religious problems, from which his whole nature 
 was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, 
 ordered and planetary in functions and degrees as the angelic 
 hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could 
 crowd itself with various and brilliant picture, and whence his 
 impartial brain one lobe of which seems to have been 
 Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious could 
 draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons of 
 prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakespeare, it 
 should never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially 
 observer and artist, and incapable of partisanship. The 
 passions, actions, sentiments, whose character and results he 
 delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those of man in society 
 as it existed ; and it no more occurred to him to question the 
 right of that society to exist than to criticise the divine 
 ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they 
 were, not with man as he ought to be with the human soul 
 as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex experi 
 ence of life, not in its abstract essence, as something to be 
 saved or lost. During the first half of the seventeenth century, 
 the centre of intellectual interest was rather in the other world 
 than in this rather in the region of thought and principle and 
 conscience than in actual life. It was a generation in which the 
 poet was, and felt himself, out of place. Sir Thomas Browne, 
 our most imaginative mind since Shakespeare, found breathing- 
 room, for a time, among the " O altitudines ! " of religious 
 speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the 
 exactitudes of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century 
 earlier would have been Fletcher s rival, compels his clipped 
 fancy to the conventual discipline of prose (Maid Marian turned 
 nun), and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. 
 Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large- 
 utteranced genius on the desolate Noman s Land of a religious 
 epic only by the lucky help of Satan and his colleagues, with 
 whom, as foiled rebels and republicans, he cannot conceal his 
 sympathy. As purely poet, Shakespeare would have come too
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 83 
 
 late, had his lot fallen in that generation. In mind and tempera 
 ment too exoteric for a mystic, his imagination could not have 
 at once illustrated the influence of his epoch and escaped from 
 it, like that of Browne ; the equilibrium of his judgment, essen 
 tial to him as an artist, but equally removed from propagandism, 
 whether as enthusiast or logician, would have unfitted him for 
 the pulpit ; and his intellectual being was too sensitive to the 
 wonder and beauty of outward life and Nature to have found 
 satisfaction, as Milton s could (and perhaps only by reason of his 
 blindness), in a world peopled by purely imaginary figures. 
 We might fancy him becoming a great statesman, bu he 
 lacked the social position which could have opened that caieer 
 to him. What we mean when we say Shakespeare, is some 
 thing inconceivable either during the reign of Henry the 
 Eighth, or the Commonwealth, and which would have been 
 impossible after the Restoration. 
 
 All favourable stars seem to have been in conjunction at his 
 nativity. The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous 
 fermentation, and its clarified results remained as an element 
 of intellectual impulse and exhilaration ; there were small signs 
 yet of the acetous and putrefactive stages which were to follow 
 in the victory and decline of Puritanism. Old forms of belief 
 and worship still lingered, all the more touching to Fancy, 
 perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted ; the light of 
 sceptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious 
 shapes still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw 
 material of Imagination. The invention of printing, without 
 yet vulgarising letters, had made the thought and history of the 
 entire past contemporaneous ; while a crowd of translators put 
 every man who could read in inspiring contact with the select 
 souls of all the centuries. A new world was thus opened to 
 intellectual adventure at the very time when the keel of 
 Columbus had turned the first daring furrow of discovery in 
 that unmeasured ocean which still girt the known earth with a 
 beckoning horizon of hope and conjecture, which was still fed 
 by rivers that flowed down out of primeval silences, and 
 which still washed the shores of Dreamland. Under a wise,
 
 84 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 cultivated, and firm-handed monarch, also, the national feeling 
 of England grew rapidly more homog-eneous and intense, the 
 rather as the womanhood of the sovereign stimulated a more 
 chivalric loyalty ; while the new religion, of which she was the 
 defender, helped to make England morally, as it was geo 
 graphically, insular to the continent of Europe. 
 
 If circumstances could ever make a great national poet, here 
 were all the elements mingled at melting-heat in the alembic, 
 and the lucky moment of projection was clearly come. If a 
 great national poet could ever avail himself of circumstances, 
 this was the occasion and, fortunately, Shakespeare was equal 
 to it. Above all, we may esteem it lucky that he found words 
 ready to his use, original and untarnished types of thought 
 whose sharp edges were unworn by repeated impressions. In 
 reading Hakluyt s Voyages, we are almost startled now and 
 then to find that even common sailors could not tell the story of 
 their wanderings without rising to an almost Odyssean strain, 
 and habitually used a diction that we should be glad to buy 
 back from desuetude at any cost. Those who look upon 
 language only as anatomists of its structure, or who regard it as 
 only a means of conveying abstract truth from mind to mind, as 
 if it were so many algebraic formulae, are apt to overlook the 
 fact that its being alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do 
 not mean what is technically called a living language the 
 contrivance, hollow as a speaking-trumpet, by which breathing 
 and moving bipeds, even now, sailing o er life s solemn main, 
 are enabled to hail each other and make known their mutual 
 shortness of mental stores but one that is still hot from the 
 hearts and brains of a people, not hardened yet, but moltenly 
 ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear relief in the moulds of 
 new thought. So soon as a language has become literary, so 
 soon as there is a gap between the speech of books and that of 
 life, the language becomes, so far as poetry is concerned, almost 
 as dead as Latin, and (as in writing Latin verses) a mind in 
 itself essentially original becomes in the use of such a medium 
 of utterance unconsciously reminiscential and reflective, lunar 
 and not solar, in expression and even in thought. For words
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 85 
 
 and thoughts have a much more intimate and genetic relation, 
 one with the other, than most men have any notion of; and it 
 is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us, 
 and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary. 
 "Ye know not," says Ascham, "what hurt ye do to Learning, 
 that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce 
 betwixt the Tongue and the Heart." Lingua Toscana in bocca 
 Romano, is the Italian proverb ; and that of poets should be, 
 The tongue of the people in the mouth of the scholar. I imply 
 here no assent to the early theory, or, at any rate, practice, of 
 Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought with 
 rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by 
 absconding into a diction more Latinised than that of any poet 
 of his century. 
 
 Shakespeare was doubly fortunate. Saxon by the father and 
 Norman by the mother, he was a representative Englishman. 
 A country boy, he learned first the rough and ready English of 
 his rustic mates, who knew how to make nice verbs and 
 adjectives courtesy to their needs. Going up to London, he 
 acquired the lingua aulica precisely at the happiest moment, 
 just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word, 
 modern just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments 
 from the Latin and Latinised languages, with new words to 
 express the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing 
 and translation were fast making cosmopolitan words which, 
 in proportion to their novelty, and to the fact that the mother- 
 tongue and the foreign had not yet wholly mingled, must have 
 been used with a more exact appreciation of their meaning.* 
 It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage, that a 
 thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly 
 elements of English was brought about. Already, Puttenham, 
 in his Arte of English Poesy, declares that the practice of the 
 capital and the country within sixty miles of it was the standard 
 of correct diction, the jus et nonna loqucndi. Already Spenser 
 had almost re-created English poetry and it is interesting to 
 
 * As where Ben Jonson is able to say 
 
 " Men may securely sin, but safely never."
 
 86 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 observe that, scholar as he was, the archaic words which he was 
 at first over-fond of introducing are often provincialisms of 
 purely English original. Already Marlowe had brought the 
 English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto justified but 
 half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to a 
 perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has never 
 been surpassed. Shakespeare, then, found a language already 
 to a certain extent established^ but not yet fetlocked by 
 dictionary and grammar mongers a versification harmonised, 
 but which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, nor been 
 set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory 
 feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges 
 are insensible. That the language was established is proved by 
 its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who 
 wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson s satire 
 upon Marston s neologisms ; that it at the same time admitted 
 foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than 
 now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater 
 import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words 
 and low ; vulgar then meant simply what was common ; poetry 
 had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of 
 an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the 
 stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while 
 they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break 
 it to the sense. The hot conception of the poet had no time to 
 cool while he was debating the comparative respectability of 
 this phrase or that ; but he snatched what word his instinct 
 prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak as 
 his country nurse might have taught him.* It was Waller who 
 first learned in ranee that to talk in rhyme alone compelled 
 with the state of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the 
 living tongue resembled that tree which Father Hue saw in 
 , whose leaves were languaged and every hidden root 
 
 * " Vulgarem locutioueiu appellamus eani qua infantes adsuefiunt ab 
 adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt : vel, quod brevius 
 di< i potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula, 
 nutricem imilantes accejiimus." Daute s de Vulrj. Elijquio, Lib. I., cap. i.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 8? 
 
 of thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new 
 shoots and leafage of expression, fed from those unseen sources 
 in the common earth of human nature. 
 
 The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the 
 mystic word for anything attained to absolute mastery over that 
 thing. The reverse of this is certainly true of poetic expres 
 sion ; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought, who 
 imaginatively conceives an idea or image, becomes master of 
 the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it. Heminge 
 and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot 
 in the manuscripts they received from Shakespeare ; and this 
 is the natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination 
 as his is as unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty 
 of the phrase in which it embodied itself.* We believe 
 that Shakespeare, like all other great poets, instinctively 
 used the dialect which he found current, and that his words 
 are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than 
 followed necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought 
 or stress of passion they were called on to support 
 He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in the weeds 
 of unfamiliar phraseology ; for the life that was in his 
 mind could transfuse the language of every day with an 
 intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery 
 purpose, and at each new reading a new creation. He could 
 
 * Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing was 
 done so well as at the first concoction" adding, as a reason, " We think 
 in words." Ben Jonsou said, it was a pity Shakespeare had not blotted 
 more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense and cited in proof of it the 
 verse, 
 
 " Crcsar did never wronf; but with just cause." 
 
 The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands, and 
 Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in consequence of 
 Jonson s criticism. This is very probable ; but we suspect that the pen 
 that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague. 
 The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of the 
 general who had just accomplished a successful cuvp d etat, the condemna 
 tion of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every honest man 
 he met, and which he would therefore be forever indirectly palliating.
 
 88 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 say with Dante, that " no word had ever forced him to say 
 what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say 
 what it would not " but only in the sense that the mighty 
 magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost 
 secret of power or pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used 
 the current language of his day, I mean only that he habitually 
 employed such language as was universally comprehensible 
 that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory as 
 to the fitness of this or that component of English for expres 
 sing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a 
 choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his 
 day as in ours is evident from the praises bestowed by 
 his contemporaries on Drayton, and by the epithet "well- 
 languaged" applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is as modern 
 as that of Tennyson ; but the endless absurdities about the 
 comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by 
 persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other, 
 were as yet unheard of. Hasty generalisers are apt to over 
 look the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great extent, a 
 literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the 
 names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of 
 complex ideas, derived from them. The author of " Piers 
 Ploughman " wrote for the people Chaucer for the court. 
 We open at random and count the Latin * words in ten verses 
 of the " Vision " and ten of the " Romaunt of the Rose " (a 
 translation from the French), and find the proportion to be 
 seven in the former and five in the latter. 
 
 The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff 
 in learning languages. He acquired only about as many 
 British words as we have Indian ones, and I believe that more 
 French and Latin was introduced through the pen and the eye 
 than through the tongue and the ear. For obvious reasons, the 
 question is one that must be decided by reference to prose- 
 writers, and not poets ; and it is, we think, pretty well settled 
 that more words of Latin original were brought into the 
 
 * We use the word Latin here to express words derived either mediately 
 or immediately from that language.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 89 
 
 language in the century between 1550 and 1650 than in the 
 whole period before or since and for the simple reason, that 
 they were absolutely needful to express new modes and com 
 binations of thought.* The language has gained immensely, 
 by the infusion, in richness of synonyme and in the power of 
 expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but more than all 
 in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the music of 
 verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar 
 Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry 
 as in sweat and perspiration; but there are vastly more in which 
 the Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question 
 between the old English again-rising and resurrection; but 
 there can be no doubt that conscience is better than inwit, and 
 remorse than again-bite. Should we translate the title of Words 
 worth s famous ode, " Intimations of Immortality," into " Hints 
 of Deathlessness," it would hiss like an angry gander. If, 
 instead of Shakespeare s 
 
 " Age cannot wither her, 
 Nor custom stale her infinite variety," 
 
 we should say, " her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment 
 would suffer in exact proportion with the music. What 
 home-bred English could ape the high Roman fashion of such 
 togated words as 
 
 The multitudinous sea incarnadine " 
 
 where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of 
 the speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste 
 of ocean more vividly than the famous phrase of yEschylus does 
 its rippling sunshine ? Again, sailor is less poetical than 
 mariner, as Campbell felt, when he wrote, 
 
 " Ye mariners of England," 
 and Coleridge, when he chose 
 
 " It was an ancient mariner," 
 rather than 
 
 " It was an elderly seaman ; " 
 
 * The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory (translating 
 from the French, 1470) is less Latinised than that of Bacon, Browne,
 
 go SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain 
 remoteness and strangeness as familiarity ; and .it is essential 
 not only that we feel at once the meaning of the words in 
 themselves, but also their melodic meaning in relation to each 
 other, and to the sympathetic variety of the verse. A word 
 once vulgarised can never be rehabilitated. We might say 
 now a buxom lass, or that a chambermaid was buxom, but we 
 could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of 
 boivsome that is, lithe, gracefully bending.* 
 
 But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in the 
 pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verb?, as in having 
 
 Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser s "Shepherd s Calendar" (1579) 
 explains words of Teutonic and Romanic root in about equal propor 
 tions. The parallel but independent development of Scotch is not to be 
 forgotten. 
 
 * I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of English 
 have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them than the 
 Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Craik, in his 
 English of Shakespeare, derives head, through the German haupt, from the 
 Latin caput I I trust that its genealogy is nobler, and that it is of kin 
 with coclum tueri, rather than with the Greek /ce^aXr;, if Suidas be right in 
 tracing the origin of that to a word meaning vacuity. Mr. Craik suggests, 
 also, that quick and wicked may be etymologically identical, because he 
 fancies a relationship between busy and the German bose, though icicked is 
 evidently the participial form of A.-S. wacan (German weichen), to bend, 
 to yield, meaning one who has given vay to temptation, while quick seems 
 as clearly related to wegan, meaning to more, a different word, even if 
 radically the same. In the London Literary Gazette for November 13, 
 1858, 1 find an extract from Miss Millington s Heraldry in History, Poetry, 
 and Romance, in which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales, 
 Depar lloumout ich diene, she says : " The precise meaning of the former 
 word [Houmout] has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly 
 the German Hochmuth, and the whole would read, Depar (Aits) Uochmuth 
 ich diene " Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost is the Saxon 
 meaning of the word knave (A.-S. cnava, German knabe), that the name 
 nawic, assumed by railway-labourers, has been transmogrified into 
 navigator. I believe that more people could tell why the month of July 
 was so called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the 
 week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer 
 that puzzle the modern reader.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 91 
 
 something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of 
 speech vividly conscious of it. It is when expression becomes 
 an act of memory, instead of an unconscious necessity, that 
 diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is not 
 safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does 
 to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in 
 poetry. Because Lear s "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the 
 all-dreaded thunder-stone" in " Cymbeline," are so fine, we 
 would not give up Milton s Virgilian " fulmined over Greece," 
 where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and 
 reverberation, but avoids that of riving and shattering. In the 
 experiments made for casting the great bell for the Westminster 
 Tower, it was found that the superstition which attributed the 
 remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to 
 the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no founda 
 tion in fact. It was the cunning proportion in which the 
 ordinary metals were balanced against each other, the 
 perfection of form, and the nice gradations of thickness, that 
 wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with the language of 
 poetry. The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use 
 (else what use in his being poet at all?) ; and even then, unless 
 the proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that 
 Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, 
 he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through all its 
 parts with a silvery unison in other words, a poem. 
 
 I think the component parts of English were in the latter 
 years of Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the 
 other. Yet Bacon had no faith in his mother-tongue, trans 
 lating the works on which his fame was to rest into what he 
 called "the universal language," and affirming that "English 
 would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of it, 
 nevertheless ; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him 
 in prose the same commendation which he gave Shakespeare 
 in verse, saying, that he " performed that in our tongue which 
 may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or 
 haughty Rome j" and he adds this pregnant sentence: "In 
 short, within his view and about his time were all the wits born
 
 ga SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily 
 iall : wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards." Ben 
 had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of 
 science, of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a 
 spendthrift of literary genius. An attack of immortality in a 
 family might have been looked for then as scarlet-fever would 
 be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within 
 fourteen years of each other ; and in England, while Spenser 
 was still delving over the propria qua maribus, and Raleigh 
 launching paper navies, Shakespeare was stretching his baby 
 hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral,, 
 had discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter. 
 It almost takes one s breath away to think that "Hamlet" and: 
 the " Novum Organon" were at the risk of teething and 
 measles at the same time. But Ben was right also in thinking: 
 that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived long enough 
 to see the language of verse become in a measure traditionary 
 and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the neces 
 sary order of events, partly because the most natural and 
 intense expression of feeling had been in so many ways 
 satisfied and exhausted but chiefly because there was no man 
 left to whom, as to Shakespeare, perfect conception gave 
 perfection of phrase. Dante, among modern poets, his only 
 rival in condensed force, says : " Optimis conceptionibus optima 
 loquela conveniet ; sed optimae conceptiones non possunt esse 
 nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est ; . . . et sic non omnibus 
 versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine 
 scientia et ingenio versificantur." * 
 
 Shakespeare must have been quite as well aware of the 
 provincialism of English as Bacon was ; but he knew that 
 great poetry, being universal in its appeal to human nature, 
 can make any language classic, and that the men whose 
 
 * De Vulgari Eloquio, Lib. II., cap. i., adfinem. I quote this treatise 
 as Dante s, because the thoughts seem manifestly his ; though I believe 
 that in its present form it is an abridgment by some transcriber, who 
 sometimes copies textually, and sometimes substitutes his own language 
 for that of the original.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 93 
 
 appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to 
 get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his 
 home-bred speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims : 
 
 " Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
 Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme." 
 
 He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of 
 the great trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as the 
 embodier and perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities 
 in his sonnets, he would do so a fortiori in his plays, both for 
 the purpose of immediate effect on the stage and of future 
 appreciation. Clear thinking makes clear writing, and he who 
 has shown himself so eminently capable of it in one case is not 
 to be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others. The 
 difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either 
 as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of 
 Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer 
 theory and better understanding of it. 
 
 While I believe that our language had two periods of 
 culmination in poetic beauty one of nature, simplicity, and 
 truth, in the ballads, which deal only with narrative and feeling 
 another of Art (or Nature as it is ideally reproduced through 
 the imagination), of stately amplitude, of passionate intensity 
 and elevation, in Spenser and the greater dramatists and that 
 Shakespeare made use of the latter as he found it, I by no 
 means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or that any 
 inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great 
 poet s inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural 
 expansion and exhilaration of which it was conscious, in 
 yielding to the mastery of a genius that could turn and wind it 
 like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel its life in every limb. He 
 enriched it through that exquisite sense of music (never 
 approached but by Marlowe), to which it seemed eagerly 
 obedient, as if every word said to him, 
 
 " Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear," 
 
 as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to 
 Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden,
 
 94 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 crying, " Here am I, Lord ! do with me what thou wilt !" That 
 he used language with that intimate possession of its meaning 
 possible only to the most vivid thought is doubtless true ; but 
 that he wantonly strained it from its ordinary sense, that he 
 found it too poor for his necessities, and accordingly coined 
 new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he violated 
 any of its received proprieties, I do not believe. I have said that 
 it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our 
 language was at its best ; but it was fortunate also for us, because 
 our costliest poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the 
 gleaming precipitate in which it united itself with his thought. 
 
 That the propositions I have endeavoured to establish have a 
 direct bearing in various ways upon the qualifications of 
 whoever undertakes to edit the works of Shakespeare will, I 
 think, be apparent to those who consider the matter. The hold 
 which Shakespeare has acquired and maintained upon minds so 
 many and so various, in so many vital respects utterly unsym 
 pathetic and even incapable of sympathy with his own, is one of 
 the most noteworthy phenomena in the history of literature. 
 That he has had the most inadequate of editors, that, as his own 
 Falstaff was the cause of the wit, so he has been the cause of 
 the foolishness that was in other men (as where Malone 
 ventured to discourse upon his metres, and Dr. Johnson on his 
 imagination), must be apparent to every one and also that his 
 genius and its manifestations are so various, that there is no 
 commentator but has been able to illustrate him from his own 
 peculiar point of view, or from the results of his own favourite 
 studies. But to show that he was a good common lawyer, that 
 he understood the theory of colours, that he was an accurate 
 botanist, a master of the science of medicine, especially in its 
 relation to mental disease, a profound metaphysician, and of 
 great experience and insight in politics all these, while they 
 may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove 
 that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and 
 accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later 
 parallel, are really outside the province of an editor. 
 
 We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two men
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 95 
 
 living in 1623 than to the two obscure actors who in that year 
 published the first folio edition of Shakespeare s plays. But for 
 them, it is more than likely that such of his works as had 
 remained to that time unprinted would have been irrecoverably 
 lost, and among them were "Julius Caesar," "The Tempest," 
 and " Macbeth." But are we to believe them when they assert 
 that they present to us the plays which they reprinted from 
 stolen and surreptitious copies " cured and perfect of their 
 limbs," and those which are original in their edition " absolute 
 in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them?" Alas, 
 we have read too many theatrical announcements, have been 
 taught too often that the value of the promise was in an inverse 
 ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, too easily to 
 believe that ! Nay, we have seen numberless processions of 
 healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the 
 lusty shouts of drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by step- 
 dame Nature with two heads, was brought to us in a triumphal 
 car, avant-couriered by a band of music as abnormal as itself, 
 and announced as the greatest wonder of the age. If a double 
 allowance of vituline brains deserve such honour, there are few 
 commentators on Shakespeare that would have gone afoot, and 
 the trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our 
 minds too many monstrous and deformed associations. 
 
 What, then, is the value of the first folio as an authority ? 
 For eighteen of the plays it is the only authority we have, and 
 the only one also for four others in their complete form. It 
 is admitted that in several instances Heminge and Condell 
 reprinted the earlier quarto impressions with a few changes, 
 sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse ; and it is 
 most probable that copies of those editions (whether surrep 
 titious or not) had taken the place of the original prompter s 
 books, as being more convenient and legible. Even in these 
 cases it is not safe to conclude that all or even any of the 
 variations were made by the hand of Shakespeare himself. 
 And where the players printed from manuscript, is it likely to 
 have been that of the author ? The probability is small that a 
 writer so busy as Shakespeare must have been during his
 
 96 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 productive period should have copied out their parts for the 
 actors himself, or that one so indifferent as he seems to have 
 been to the immediate literary fortunes of his works should 
 have given much care to the coirection of copies, if made by 
 others. The copies exclusively in the hands of Heminge and 
 Condell were, it is manifest, in some cases, very imperfect, 
 whether we account for the fact by the burning of the Globe 
 Theatre or by the necessary wear and tear of years, and (what 
 is worthy of notice) they are plainly more defective in some 
 parts than in others. " Measure for Measure" is an example of 
 this, and we are not satisfied with being told that its ruggedness 
 of verse is intentional, or that its obscurity is due to the fact 
 that Shakespeare grew more elliptical in his style as he grew 
 older. Profounder in thought he doubtless became ; though in 
 a mind like his, we believe that this would imply only a more 
 absolute supremacy in expression. But, from whatever original 
 we suppose either the quartos or the first folio to have been 
 printed, it is more than questionable whether the proof-sheets 
 had the advantage of any revision other than that of the 
 printing-office. Steevens was of opinion that authors in the 
 time of Shakespeare never read their own proof-sheets ; and 
 Mr. Spedding, in his recent edition of Bacon, comes inde 
 pendently to the same conclusion.* We may be very sure that 
 Heminge and Condell did not, as vicars, take upon themselves 
 a disagreeable task which the author would have been too 
 careless to assume. 
 
 Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against 
 
 * Vol. iii. , p 348, note. He grounds bis belief, not on the misprinting 
 of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We were struck 
 with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman s Hiron s Con 
 spiracy and Tragedy. And yet, in comparing two copies of this edition, 
 I have found corrections which only the author could have made. One 
 of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords both a hint and a 
 warning to the conjectural emendator. In the edition of The Advance 
 ment of Learning, printed in 1605, occurs the word dusinesse. In a later 
 edition this was conjecturally changed to business ; but the occurrence of 
 vertigine in the Latin translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, 
 dizziness.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 97 
 
 the Folio of 1623, whatever sins of omission we may lay to the 
 charge of Heminge and Condell, or of commission to that of the 
 printers, it remains the only text we have with any claims 
 whatever to authenticity. It should be deferred to as authority 
 in all cases where it does not make Shakespeare write bad 
 sense, uncouth metre, or false grammar, of all which we believe 
 him to have been more supremely incapable than any other 
 man who ever wrote English. Yet we would not speak unkindly 
 even of the blunders of the Folio. They have put bread into 
 the mouth of many an honest editor, publisher, and printer for 
 the last century and a half; and he \vho loves the comic side of 
 human nature will find the serious notes of a variorum edition 
 of Shakespeare as funny reading as the funny ones are serious. 
 Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred 
 years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, 
 if he had only been at Shakespeare s elbow, he could have 
 given valuable advice ; scarce one who did not know off-hand 
 that there was never a sea-port in Bohemia as if Shakespeare s 
 world were one which Mercator could have projected ; scarce 
 one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key 
 to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of 
 planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres ; 
 scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that 
 intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but 
 whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being 
 and Consciousness, mock the plummet ; scarce one but could 
 speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelli 
 gence so utterly without congener that our baffled language 
 must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as 
 to say Shakesperian of any other. And yet, in the midst of our 
 impatience, we cannot help thinking also of how much healthy 
 mental activity this one man has been the occasion, how much 
 good he has indirectly done to society by withdrawing men to 
 investigations and habits of thought that secluded them from 
 baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the circle of 
 study and reflection ; since there is nothing in history or 
 politics, nothing in art or science, nothing in physics or 
 
 557
 
 98 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 metaphysics, that is not sooner or later taxed for his illustration. 
 This is partially true of all great minds, open and sensitive t& 
 truth and beauty through any large arc of their circumference ; 
 but it is true in an unexampled sense of Shakespeare, the vast 
 round of whose balanced nature seems to have been equatorial, 
 and to have had a southward exposure and a summer sympathy 
 at every point, so that life, society, statecraft, serve us at last but 
 as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered of 
 thought, of knowledge, and of experience, confronted with his 
 marvellous page, shrinks to a mere foot-note, the stepping- 
 stone to some hitherto inaccessible verse. We admire in 
 Homer the blind, placid mirror of the world s young manhood, 
 the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poems all memory, 
 all life and bustle, adventure and picture ; we revere in Dante 
 that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a 
 private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in 
 its significance ; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet, 
 wise by weariless observation, witty with intention, the stately 
 Geheimerrath of a provincial court in the empire of Nature. 
 As we study these, we seem in our limited way to penetrate into 
 their consciousness, and to measure and master their methods ; 
 but with Shakespeare it is just the other way the more we 
 have familiarised ourselves with the operations of our own 
 consciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that he has 
 been beforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly 
 endeavouring to find the door of his being, he has searched 
 every nook and cranny of our own. While other poets and 
 dramatists embody isolated phases of character and work 
 inward from the phenomenon to the special law which it 
 illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with human 
 nature itself, and his own soul to have been the law and life- 
 giving power of which his creations are only the phenomena. 
 We justify or criticise the characters of other writers by our 
 memory and experience, and pronounce them natural or 
 unnatural ; but he seems to have worked in the very stuff of 
 which memory and experience are made, and we recognise his 
 truth to Nature by an innate and unacquired sympathy, as if he
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE, 99 
 
 alone possessed the secret of the "ideal form and universal 
 mould," and embodied generic types rather than individuals. 
 In this Cervantes alone has approached him ; and Don Quixote 
 and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakespeare, are the 
 contemporaries of every generation, because they are not 
 products of an artificial and transitory society, but because they 
 . are animated by the primeval and unchanging forces of that 
 humanity which underlies and survives the forever-fickle creeds 
 and ceremonials of the parochial corners which we who dwell in 
 them sublimely call The World. 
 
 That Shakespeare did not edit his own works must be 
 attributed, we suspect, to his premature death. That he should 
 not have intended it is inconceivable. Is there not something 
 of self-consciousness in the breaking of Prospero s wand and 
 burying his book a sort of sad prophecy, based on self- 
 knowledge of the nature of that man who, after such 
 thaumaturgy, could go down to Stratford and live there for 
 years, only collecting his dividends from the Globe Theatre, 
 lending money on mortgage, and leaning over his gate to chat 
 and bandy quips with neighbours ? His mind had entered into 
 every phase of human life and thought, had embodied all of 
 them in living creations ; had he found all empty, and come 
 at last to the belief that genius and its work were as phantas 
 magoric as the rest, and that fame was as idle as the rumour of 
 the pit? However this may be, his works have come down to 
 us in a condition of manifest and admitted corruption in some 
 portions, while in others there is an obscurity which may be 
 attributed either to an idiosyncratic use of words and condensa 
 tion of phrase, to a depth of intuition for a proper coalescence 
 with which ordinary language is inadequate, to a concentration 
 of passion in a focus that consumes the lighter links which 
 bind together the clauses of a sentence, or of a process of 
 reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music which 
 mingles music and meaning without essentially confounding 
 them. We should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a 
 thorough glossological knowledge of the English contemporary 
 with Shakespeare ; second, enough logical acuteness of mind
 
 ioo SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite 
 processes of thought ; third, such a conviction of the supremacy 
 of his author as always to prefer his thought to any theory of 
 his own ; fourth, a feeling for music, and so much knowledge of 
 the practice of other poets as to understand that Shakespeare s 
 versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in degree ; 
 fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books ; 
 and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so great 
 a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in 
 general, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shake 
 speare, as will prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess 
 of light, and enable him to understand fully that the Gothic 
 Shakespeare often superimposed upon the slender column of a 
 single word, that seems to twist under it, but does not like 
 the quaint shafts in cloisters a weight of meaning which 
 the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly 
 unjustfiable by correct principle. 
 
 Many years ago, while yet Fancy claimed that right in me 
 which Fact has since, to my no small loss, so successfully 
 disputed, I pleased myself with imagining the play of " Hamlet" 
 published under some alias, and as the work of a new candidate 
 in literature. Then I played, as the children say, that it came 
 in regular course before some well-meaning doer of criticisms, 
 who had never read the original (no very wild assumption, as 
 things go), and endeavoured to conceive the kind of way in 
 which he would be likely to take it. I put myself in his place, 
 and tried to write such a perfunctory notice as I thought would 
 be likely, in filling his column, to satisfy his conscience. But it 
 was a tour de force quite beyond my power to execute without 
 grimace. I could not arrive at that artistic absorption in my 
 own conception which would ennble me to be natural, and found 
 myself, like a bad actor, continually betraying my self-con 
 sciousness by my very endeavour to hide it under caricature. 
 The path of Nature is indeed a narrow one, and it is only the 
 immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find 
 themselves cramped therein. My result was a dead failure 
 satire instead of comedy. I could not shake off that strange
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 101 
 
 accumulation which we call self, and report honestly what I saw 
 and felt even to myself, much less to others. 
 
 Yet I have often thought, that, unless we can so far free 
 ourselves from our own prepossessions as to be capable of 
 bringing to a work of art some freshness of sensation, and 
 receiving from it in turn some new surprise of sympathy and 
 admiration some shock even, it may be, of instinctive distaste 
 and repulsion though we may praise or blame, weighing our 
 pros and cons in the nicest balances, sealed by proper authority, 
 yet we shall not criticise in the highest sense. On the other 
 hand, unless we admit certain principles as fixed beyond ques 
 tion, we shall be able to render no adequate judgment, but 
 only to record our impressions, which may be valuable or not, 
 according to the greater or less ductility of the senses on which 
 they are made. Charles Lamb, for example, came to the old 
 English dramatists with the feeling of a discoverer. He brought 
 with him an alert curiosity, and everything was delightful 
 simply because it was strange. Like other early adventurers, 
 he sometimes mistook shining sand for gold ; but he had the 
 great advantage of not feeling himself responsible for the 
 manners of the inhabitants he found there, and not thinking it 
 needful to make them square with any Westminster Catechism 
 of aesthetics. Best of all, he did not feel compelled to compare 
 them with the Greeks, about whom he knew little, and cared 
 less. He took them as he found them, described them in a few 
 pregnant sentences, and displayed his specimens of their growth 
 and manufacture. When he arrived at the dramatists of the 
 Restoration, so far from being shocked, he was charmed with 
 their pretty and unmoral ways ; and what he says of them 
 reminds us of blunt Captain Dampier, who, in his account of the 
 island of Timor, remarks, as a matter of no consequence, that 
 the natives " take as many wives as they can maintain, and as 
 fot religion, they have none." 
 
 Lamb had the great advantage of seeing the elder dramatists 
 as they were ; it did not lie within his province to point out 
 what they were not. Himself a fragmentary writer, he had 
 more sympathy with imagination where it gathers into the
 
 102 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 intense focus of passionate phrase than with that higher form 
 of it, where it is the faculty that shapes, gives unity of design, 
 and balanced gravitation of parts. And yet it is only this 
 higher form of it which can unimpeachably assure to any work 
 the dignity and permanence of a classic ; for it results in that 
 exquisite something called Style, which, like the grace of per 
 fect breeding, everywhere pervasive and nowhere emphatic, 
 makes itself felt by the skill with which it effaces itself, and 
 masters us at last with a sense of indefinable completeness. 
 On a lower plane we may detect it in the structure of a sen 
 tence, in the limpid expression that implies sincerity of thought ; 
 but it is only where it combines and organises, where it eludes 
 observation in particulars to give the rarer delight of perfection 
 as a whole, that it belongs to art. Then it is truly ideal, the 
 forma ment:s eeterna, not as a passive mould into which the 
 thought is poured, but as the conceptive energy which finds all 
 material plastic to its preconceived design. Mere vividness of 
 expression, such as makes quotable passages, comes of the com 
 plete surrender of self to the impression, whether spiritual or 
 sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, in which the 
 young poet is richer than the mature, his very inexperience 
 making him more venturesome in those leaps of language 
 that startle us with their rashness only to bewitch us the more 
 with the happy ease of their acccmplishmei.t. For this there 
 are no existing laws of rhetoric, for it is from such felicities that 
 the rhetoricians deduce and codify their statutes. It is some 
 thing which cannot be improved upon or cultivated, for it is 
 immediate and intuitive. But this power of expression is sub 
 sidiary, and goes only a little way toward the making of a great 
 poet. Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and 
 not a quality ; it looks before and after, it gives the form that 
 makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given 
 end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a 
 servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunder 
 stood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all 
 who have the gift of dreams, or v. ho can afford to buy it in a 
 vulgar drug as De Quincey bought it.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 103 
 
 The true poetic imagination is of one quality, whether it be 
 ancient or modern, and equally subject to those laws of grace, 
 of proportion, of design, in whose free service, and in that alone, 
 it can become art. Those laws are something which do not 
 
 " Alter when they alteration find, 
 And bend with the remover to remove." 
 
 And they are more clearly to be deduced from the eminent 
 examples of Greek literature than from any other source. It 
 is the advantage of this select company of ancients that their 
 works are defecated of all turbid mixture of contemporaneous 
 ness, and have become to us pure literature, our judgment and 
 enjoyment of which cannot be vulgarised by any prejudices of 
 time or place. This is why the study of them is fitly called a 
 liberal education, because it emancipates the mind from every 
 narrow provincialism, whether of egoism or tradition, and is 
 the apprenticeship that every one must serve before becoming 
 a free brother of the guild which passes the torch of life from 
 age to age. There would be no dispute about the advantages 
 of that Greek culture which Schiller advocated with such 
 generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity had not 
 been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, 
 and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, 
 instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on 
 her highest mood. The discouraged youth too naturally 
 transfers the epithet of dead from, the languages to the authors 
 that wrote in them. What concern have we with the shades ot 
 dialect in Homer or Theocritus, provided they speak the 
 spiritual lingua franca that abolishes all alienage of race, and 
 makes whatever shore of time we land on hospitable and home 
 like ? There is much that is deciduous in books, but all that 
 gives them a title to rank as literature in the highest sense is 
 perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another 
 blood or tongue, but of human nature ; their truth is not 
 topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation ; and thus 
 all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but 
 of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows
 
 104 SRARESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own 
 life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition. 
 Their meaning is absolute, not conditional ; it is a property of 
 theirs, quite irrespective of manners or creed ; for the highest 
 culture, the development of the individual by observation, 
 reflection, and study, leads to one result, whether in Athens 
 or in London. The more we know of ancient literature, the 
 more we are struck with its modernness, just as the more we 
 study the maturer dramas of Shakespeare, the more we feel 
 his nearness in certain primary qualities to the antique and 
 classical. Yet even in saying this, I tacitly make the admission 
 that it is the Greeks who must furnish us with our standard of 
 comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowed measures 
 and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor does a consciousness 
 of this, nor a constant reference to it, in any sense reduce us to 
 the mere copying of a bygone excellence ; for it is the test of 
 excellence in any department of art, that it can never be 
 bygone ; and it is not mere difference from antique models, 
 but the way in which that difference is shown, the direction it 
 takes, that we are to consider in our judgment of a modern 
 work. The model is not there to be copied merely, but that 
 the study of it may lead us insensibly to the same processes of 
 thought by which its purity of outline and harmony of parts 
 were attained, and enable us to feel that strength is consistent 
 with repose, that multiplicity is not abundance, that grace is 
 but a more refined form of power, and that a thought is 
 none the less profound that the limpidity of its expression 
 allows us to measure it at a glance. To be possessed with 
 this conviction gives us at least a determinate point of view, 
 and enables us to appeal a case of taste to a court of 
 final judicature, whose decisions are guided by immutable 
 principles. When we hear of certain productions, that they 
 are feeble in design, but masterly in parts, that they are 
 incoherent, to be sure, but have great merits of style, we 
 know that it cannot be true ; for in the highest examples we 
 have, the master is revealed by his plan, by his power of making 
 all accessories, each in its due relation, subordinate to it, and
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 105 
 
 that to limit style to the rounding of a period or a distich is 
 wholly to misapprehend its truest and highest function. Donne 
 is full of salient verses that would take the rudest March winds 
 of criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like 
 charades and then delight us with the felicity of their solution ; 
 but these have not saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the 
 formless and the fragmentary. To take a more recent instance 
 Wordsworth had, in some respects, a deeper insight, and a 
 more adequate utterance of it, than any man of his generation. 
 But it was a piece-meal insight and utterance ; his imagination 
 was feminine, not masculine, receptive, and not creative. His 
 longer poems are Egyptian sand-wastes, with here and there an 
 oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand image, Sphinx-like, half 
 buried in drifting commonplaces, or the solitary Pompey s Pillar 
 of some towering thought. But what is the fate of a poet who 
 owns the quarry, but cannot build the poem ? Ere the century 
 is out he will be nine parts dead, and immortal only in that 
 tenth part of him which is included in a thin volume of 
 "beauties." Already Moxon has felt the need of extracting this 
 essential oil of him ; and his memory will be kept alive, if at 
 all, by the precious material rather than the workmanship of 
 the vase that contains his heart. And what shall we forebode of 
 so many modern poems, full of splendid passages, beginning 
 everywhere and leading nowhere, reminding us of notMng so 
 much as the amateur architect who planned his own house, and 
 forgot the staircase that should connect one floor with another, 
 putting it as an afterthought on the outside? 
 
 Lichtenberg says somewhere, that it was the advantage of 
 the ancients to write before the great art of writing ill had been 
 invented ; and Shakespeare may be said to have had the good 
 luck of coming after Spenser (to whom the debt of English 
 poetry is incalculable) had reinvented the art of writing well. 
 But Shakespeare arrived at a mastery in this respect which sets 
 him above all other poets. He is not only superior in degree, 
 but he is also different in kind. In that less purely artistic 
 sphere of style which concerns the matter rather than the form 
 his charm is often unspeakable. How perfect his style is may
 
 106 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 be judged from the fact that it never curdles into mannerism, 
 and thus absolutely eludes imitation. Though here, if any 
 where, the style is the man, yet it is noticeable only, like the 
 images of Brutus, by its absence, so thoroughly is he absorbed 
 in his work, while he fuses thought and word indissolubly 
 together, till all the particles cohere by the best virtue of each. 
 With perfect truth he has said of himself that he writes 
 
 " All one, ever the same, 
 Putting invention in a noted weed, 
 That every word doth almost tell his name." 
 
 And yet who has so succeeded in imitating him as to remind us 
 of him by even so much as the gait of a single verse 1* Those 
 magnificent crystallisations of feeling and phrase, basaltic 
 masses, molten and interfused by the primal fires of passion, are 
 not to be reproduced by the slow experiments of the laboratory 
 striving to parody creation with artifice. Mr. Matthew Arnold 
 seems to think that Shakespeare has damaged English poetry. 
 I wish he had ! It is true he lifted Dryden above himself in "All 
 for Love;" but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive 
 conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle 
 none dared tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances 
 of modern diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age 
 against the degeneracy of art into artifice, that has characterised 
 the silver period in every literature ? We see in them only the 
 futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the 
 secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We 
 do not find the extravagances in Shakespeare himself. We 
 never saw a line in any modern poet that reminded us of him, 
 and will venture to assert that it is only poets of the second 
 class that find successful imitators. And the reason seems to 
 
 * "At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to 
 write in styles much alike ; nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger 
 and the others ; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived 
 and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I suppose it is because 
 Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no iiuinner." Coleridge s 
 Table-talk, 214.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 107 
 
 us a very plain one. The genius of the great poet seeks repose 
 in the expression of itself, and finds it at last in style, which is 
 the establishment of a perfect mutual understanding between 
 the worker and his material.* The secondary intellect, on the 
 other hand, seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates 
 itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as 
 style is its unconscious abnegation. No poet of the first class 
 has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommuni 
 cable ; while, just as surely as the ther.r.ometer tells of the 
 ne ; ghbourhood of an iceberg, you may detect the presence of a 
 genius of the second class in any generation by the influence of 
 his mannerism, for that, being an artificial thing, is capable of 
 reproduction. Dnnte, Shakespeare, Goethe, left no heirs either 
 to the form or mode of their expression ; while Milton, Sterne, 
 and Wordsworth left behind them whole regiments uniformed 
 with all their external characteristics. We do not mean that 
 great poetic geniuses may not have influenced thought (though 
 we think it would be difficult to show how Shakespeare had 
 done so, directly and wilfully), but that they have not infected 
 contemporaries or followers with mannerism. The quality in 
 him which makes him at once so thoroughly English and so 
 thoroughly cosmopolitan is that aeration of the understanding 
 by the imagination which he has in common with all the 
 greater poets, and which is the privilege of genius. The 
 modern school, which mistakes violence for intensity, seems to 
 catch its breath when it finds itself on the verge of natural 
 expression, and to say to itself, " Good heavens ! I had almost 
 forgotten I was inspired ! " But of Shakespeare we do not even 
 suspect that he ever remembered it. He does not always speak 
 in that intense way that flames up in Lear and Macbeth through 
 the rifts of a soil volcanic with passion. He allows us here and 
 there the repose of a commonplace character, the consoling 
 distraction of a humorous one. He knows how to be equable 
 and grand without effort, so that we forget the altitude of 
 
 * Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, 
 because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a grace of curve 
 which it refused to the utmost pains of others.
 
 io8 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 thought to which he has led us, because the slowly receding 
 slope of a mountain stretching downward by ample gradations 
 gives a less startling impression of height than to look over the 
 edge of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its flank. 
 
 Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of 
 profuseness and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by 
 a Sophoclean scale. The simplicity of the antique tragedy is 
 by no means that of expression, but is of form merely. In the 
 utterance of great passions, something must be indulged to 
 the extravagance of Nature ; the subdued tones to which 
 pathos and sentiment are limited cannot express a tempest of 
 the soul. The range between the piteous "no more but so," 
 in which Ophelia compresses the heart-break whose com 
 pression was to make her mad, and that sublime appeal of 
 Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, if matched 
 at all, in the " Prometheus," is a wide one, and Shakespeare is 
 as truly simple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of 
 poetry is not that of prose, nor its clearness that of ready 
 apprehension merely. To a subtile sense, a sense heightened 
 by sympathy, those sudden fervours of phrase, gone ere one can 
 say it lightens, that show us Macbeth groping among the com 
 plexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and reveal 
 the intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eye 
 darkened to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their 
 logical sequence, the grandeur of the conception, and its truth 
 to Nature clearer than sober daylight could. There is an 
 obscurity of mist rising from the undrained shallows of the 
 mind, and there is the darkness of thunder-cloud gathering its 
 electric masses with passionate intensity from the clear element 
 of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, but by the 
 natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those flashes 
 of expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be 
 apprehended by the poetic instinct. 
 
 In that secondary office of imagination, where it serves the 
 artist, not as the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of 
 his conceptions into words, there is a distinction to be noticed 
 between the higher and lower mode in which it performs its
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 109 
 
 function. It may be either creative or pictorial, may body forth 
 the thought or merely image it forth. With Shakespeare, for 
 example, imagination seems immanent in his very conscious 
 ness ; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, as if 
 without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse, 
 
 " Sei die Braut das Wort, 
 Brautigam der Geist ; " 
 
 in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accord 
 ingly, the bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the 
 latter toward over-diffuseness. Shakespeare s temptation is to 
 push a willing metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion 
 over-inform its tenement of words ; Milton cannot resist run 
 ning a simile on into a fugue. One always fancies Shakespeare 
 in his best verses, and Milton at the key-board of his organ. 
 Shakespeare s language is no longer the mere vehicle of 
 thought, it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The 
 pleasure it gives us is unmixed, direct, like that from the smell 
 of a flower or the flavour of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his 
 little pitfalls of bookish association for the memory. I know 
 that Milton s manner is very grand. It is slow, it is stately, 
 moving as in triumphal procession, with music, with historic 
 banners, with spoils from every time and every region, and 
 captive epithets, like huge Sicambrians, thrust their broad 
 shoulders between us and the thought whose pomp they 
 decorate. But it is manner, nevertheless, as is proved by the 
 ease with which it is parodied, by the danger it is in of 
 degenerating into mannerism whenever it forgets itself. Fancy 
 a parody of Shakespeare I do not mean of his words, but of 
 his tone, for that is what distinguishes the master. You might 
 as well try it with the Venus of Melos. In Shakespeare it is 
 always the higher thing, the thought, the fancy, that is pre 
 eminent ; it is Caesar that draws all eyes, and not the chariot in 
 which he rides, or the throng which is but the reverberation of 
 his supremacy. If not, how explain the charm with which he 
 dominates in all tongues, even under the disenchantment of 
 translation ? Among the most alien races he is as solidly at
 
 no SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 home as a mountain seen from different sides by many lands, 
 itself superbly solitary, yet the companion of all thoughts and 
 domesticated in all imaginations. 
 
 In description Shakespeare is especially great, and in that 
 instinct which gives the peculiar quality of any object of con 
 templation in a single happy word that colours the impression 
 on the sense with the mood of the mind. Most descriptive 
 poets seem to think that a hogshead of water caught at the 
 spout will give us a livelier notion of a thunder-shower than the 
 sullen muttering of the first big drops upon the roof. They 
 forget that it is by suggestion, not cumulation, that profound 
 impressions are made upon the imagination. Milton s parsi 
 mony (so rare in him) makes the success of his 
 
 " Sky lowered, and, muttering thunder, some sad drops 
 Wept at completion of the mortal sin." 
 
 Shakespeare understood perfectly the charm of indirectness, 
 of making his readers seem to discover for themselves what he 
 means to show them. If he wishes to tell that the leaves of the 
 willow are grey on the under side, he does not make it a 
 mere fact of observation by bluntly saying so, but makes it 
 picturesquely reveal itself to us as it might in Nature : 
 
 " There is a willow grows athwart the flood, 
 That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream." 
 
 Where he goes to the landscape for a comparison, he does not 
 ransack wood and field for specialties, as if he were gathering 
 simples, but takes one image, obvious, familiar, and makes it 
 new to us either by sympathy or contrast with his own imme 
 diate feeling. He always looked upon Nature with the eyes of 
 the mind. Thus he can make the melancholy of autumn or the 
 gladness of spring alike pathetic : 
 
 " That time of year thou mayst in me behold, 
 When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang 
 Upon those boughs that shake against the cold, 
 Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang."
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. ^ 1 1 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " From thce have 1 been absent in the spring, 
 When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, 
 Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, 
 That heavy Saturn leaped and laughed with him." 
 
 But as dramatic poet, Shakespeare goes even beyond this, 
 entering so perfectly into the consciousness of the characters he 
 himself has created, that he sees everything through their 
 peculiar mood, and makes every epithet, as if unconsciously, 
 echo and re-echo it. Theseus asks Hermia 
 
 " Can you endure the livery of a nun, 
 For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, 
 To live a barren sister all your life, 
 Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon? " 
 
 When Romeo must leave Juliet, the private pang of the lovers 
 becomes a property of Nature herself, and 
 
 " Envious streaks 
 Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east." 
 
 But even more striking is the following instance from 
 " Macbeth " : 
 
 " The raven himself is hoarse 
 
 That croaks the fatal enterance of Duncan 
 
 Under your battlements." 
 
 Here Shakespeare, with his wonted tact, makes use of a vulgar 
 superstition, of a type in which mortal presentiment is already 
 embodied, to make a common ground on which the hearer and 
 Lady Macbeth may meet. After this prelude we are prepared 
 to be possessed by her emotion more fully, to feel in her 
 ears the dull tramp of the blood that seems to make the 
 raven s croak yet hoarser than it is, and to betray the stealthy 
 advance of the mind to its fell purpose. For Lady Mac 
 beth hears not so much the voice of the bodeful bird as of 
 her own premeditated murder, and we are thus made her 
 shuddering accomplices before the fact. Every image receives 
 the colour of the mind, every word throbs with the pulse of
 
 112 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 one controlling passion. The epithet fatal makes us feel the 
 implacable resolve of the speaker, and shows us that she is 
 tampering with her conscience by putting off" the crime upon 
 the prophecy of the Weird Sisters to which she alludes. In 
 the word battlements, too, not only is the fancy led up to the 
 perch of the raven, but a hostile image takes the place of a 
 hospitable ; for men commonly speak of receiving a guest 
 under their roof or within their doors. That this is not over- 
 ingenuity, seeing what is not to be seen, nor meant to be 
 seen, is clear to me from what follows. When Duncan and 
 Banquo arrive at the castle, their fancies, free from all sug 
 gestion of evil, call up only gracious and amiable images. 
 The raven was but the fantastical creation of Lady Macbeth s 
 overwrought brain. 
 
 " This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air 
 Nimbly and sweetly doth commend itself 
 Unto our gentle senses. 
 
 This guest of summer, 
 The temple-haunting martlet, doth approve 
 By his laved mansi&nry that the heaven s breath 
 Smells wooingly here ; no jutty, frieze, 
 Buttress, or coigne of vantage, but this bird 
 Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle." 
 
 The contrast here cannot but be as intentional as it is marked. 
 Every image is one of welcome, security, and confidence. 
 The summer, one may well fancy, would be a very different 
 hostess from her whom we have just seen expecting them. 
 And why temple-haunting, unless because it suggests sanc 
 tuary ? O tmmaginativa, che si ne rubi delle cose di fttor, how 
 infinitely more precious are the inward ones thou givest in 
 return ! If all this be accident, it is at least one of those 
 accidents of which only this man was ever capable. I divine 
 something like it now and then in ^schylus, through the 
 mists of a language which will not let me be sure of what 
 I see, but nowhere else. Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I 
 have said, as respects English, the privilege which only first- 
 comers enjoy. The language was still fresh from those sources
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 113 
 
 at too great a distance from which it becomes fit only for the 
 service of prose. Wherever he dipped, it came up clear and 
 sparkling, undefiled as yet by the drainage of literary factories, 
 or of those dye-houses where the machine-woven fabrics of 
 sham culture are coloured up to the last desperate style of 
 sham sentiment. Those who criticise his diction as sometimes 
 extravagant should remember that in poetry language is 
 something more than merely the vehicle of thought, that it 
 is meant to convey the sentiment as much as the sense, and 
 that, if there is a beauty of use, there is often a higher use 
 of beauty. 
 
 What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain ; how 
 much he had is disputed ; that he had as much as he wanted, 
 and of whatever kind he wanted, must be clear to whoever 
 considers the question. Dr. Farmer has proved, in his 
 entertaining essay, that he got everything at second-hand 
 from translations, and that, where his translator blundered, 
 he loyally blundered too. But Goethe, the man of widest 
 acquirement in modern times, did precisely the same thing. 
 In his character of poet he set as little store by useless learning 
 as Shakespeare did. He learned to write hexameters, not 
 from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty ; 
 yet somehow Hermann und Dorothea is more readable than 
 Luise. So far as all the classicism then attainable was 
 concerned, Shakespeare got it as cheap as Goethe did, who 
 always bought it ready-made. For such purposes of mere 
 aesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other minds 
 if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses 
 milk ir.ay be called. There were plenty of professors who 
 were forever assiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on 
 Pentelican slopes among the vestiges of antiquity, slowly 
 secreting lacteous facts, and not one of them would have 
 raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan 
 had made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe 
 wish to work up a Greek theme ? He drove out Herr Bottiger, 
 for example, among that fodder delicious to him for its very 
 dryness, that sapless Arcadia of scholiasts, let him graze, 
 
 558
 
 ii4 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 ruminate, and go through all other needful processes of the 
 antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner 
 and milked him. The product, after standing long enough, 
 mantled over with the rich Goethean cream, from which a 
 butter could be churned, if not precisely classic, quite as 
 good as the ancients could have made out of the same material. 
 But who has ever read the Achilleis, correct in all essential 
 particulars as it probably is ? 
 
 It is impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other 
 respects, made such booty of the world around him, whose 
 observation of manners was so minute, and whose insight into 
 character and motives, as if he had been one of God s spies, 
 was so unerring that we accept it without question, as we do 
 Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain his 
 confessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy 
 instinct rather than to the conscientious perfecting of 
 exceptional powers till practice made them seem to work 
 independently of the will which still directed them it is 
 impossible that such a man should not also have profited by 
 the converse of the cultivated and quick-witted men in whose 
 familiar society he lived, that he should not have over and over 
 again discussed points of criticism and art with them, that he 
 should not have had his curiosity, so alive to everything else, 
 excited about those ancients whom university men then, no 
 doubt, as now, extolled without too much knowledge of what 
 they really were, that he should not have heard too much rather 
 than too little of Aristotle s Poetics, Quinctilian s Rhetoric, 
 Horace s Art of Poetry, and the Unities, especially from Ben 
 Jonson in short, that he who speaks of himself as 
 
 "Desiring this man s art and that man s scope, 
 With what he most enjoyed contented least," 
 
 and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic of human 
 concern, should never have turned his thought to the principles 
 of that art which was both the delight and business of his life, 
 the bread-winner alike for soul and body. Was there no 
 harvest of the ev for him whose eye had stocked its garners
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 115 
 
 so full as well-nigh to forestall all after-comers ? Did he who 
 could so counsel the practisers of an art in which he never 
 arrived at eminence, as in Hamlet s advice to the players, never 
 take counsel with himself about that other art in which the 
 instinct of the crowd, no less than the judgment of his rivals, 
 awarded him an easy pre-eminence ? If he had little Latin 
 and less Greek, might he not have had enough of both for 
 every practical purpose on this side pedantry? The most 
 extraordinary, one might almost say contradictory, attainments 
 have been ascribed to him, and yet he has been supposed 
 incapable of what was within easy reach of every boy at 
 Westminster School. There is a knowledge that comes of 
 sympathy as living and genetic as that which comes of mere 
 learning is sapless and unprocreant, and for this no profound 
 study of the languages is needed. 
 
 If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were 
 at least as unlucky in not knowing him. But is it incredible 
 that he may have laid hold of an edition of the Greek 
 tragedians, Graece et Latin}, and then, with such poor wits 
 as he was master of, contrived to worry some considerable 
 meaning out of them ? There are at least one or two 
 coincidences which, whether accidental or not, are curious, 
 and which I do not remember to have seen noticed. In the 
 Electro, of Sophocles, which is almost identical in its leading 
 motive with Hamlet, the Chorus consoles Electra for the 
 supposed death of Orestes in the same commonplace way 
 which Hamlet s uncle tries with him. 
 
 Qvrjrov Trt<pvKas Trarpos, HXttcrpa, <pp6vei, 
 Qvyrbs d O/^crrT/y wore (JLTJ \iav oreVe, 
 Haffiv yap r^jlv TOUT 
 
 " Your father lost a father ; 
 That father lost, lost his. . . . 
 
 But to persever 
 
 In obstinate condolement is a course 
 Of impious stubbornness. . . . 
 
 T is common ; all that live must die.
 
 ri6 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the 
 sentiment in both cases is almost verbally identical. The 
 resemblance is probably a chance one, for commonplace and 
 consolation were always twin sisters, whom always to escape is. 
 given to no man ; but it is nevertheless curious. Here is. 
 another, from the CEdipus Coloneus : 
 
 " Tens TOL SIKCLIOIS xw Ppaxbs VLKQ fj^yav," 
 " Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just." 
 
 Hamlet s " prophetic soul " may be matched with the 
 0v/j.6s of Peleus (Eurip. Androm., 1075), and his " sea of 
 troubles " with the /ca/ctDv TrAayos of Theseus in the Hippolytus, 
 or of the Chorus in the Hercules Furens. And, for manner and 
 tone, compare the speeches of Pheres in the Alcestis, and 
 Jocasta in the Phatnissce, with those of Claudio in Measure for 
 Measure, and Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. 
 
 The Greek dramatists were somewhat fond of a trick of 
 words in which there is a reduplication of sense as well as of 
 assonance, as in the Electra : 
 
 " AXcKTpa yT]p<iffKov<Tai> aw/Afraid re." 
 
 So Shakespeare : 
 
 " Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled;" 
 
 and Milton after him, or, more likely, after the Greek : 
 " Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved,"* 
 
 I mention these trifles, in passing, because they have 
 interested me, and therefore may interest others. I lay no 
 
 * The best instance I remember is in the "Frogs," where Bacchus pleads 
 bis inexperience at the oar, and says he is 
 
 " 8,irfipos, dtfaXdrrwros, dcraXa/t/i/tos," 
 which might be rendered, 
 
 " Unskilled, unsea-soned, and un-Salamised.
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 117 
 
 stress upon them, for, if once the conductors of Shakespeare s 
 intelligence had been put in connection with those Attic 
 brains, he would have reproduced their message in a form of 
 his oun. They would have inspired, and not enslaved him. 
 His resemblance to them is that of consanguinity, more 
 striking in expression than in mere resemblance of feature. 
 The likeness between the Clytemnestra ywaiKos di>dp6j3ov\ov 
 tXirifrv Ktapof ./Eschylus and the Lady Macbeih of Shake 
 speare was too remarkable to have escaped notice. That 
 between the two poets in their choice of epithets is as great, 
 though more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive student 
 of Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something familiar 
 to him in such phrases as " flame-eyed fire," " flax-winged 
 ships," "star-neighbouring peaks," the rock Salmydessus, 
 
 " Rude jaw of the sea, 
 Harsh hostess of the seaman, step-mother 
 Of ships," 
 
 and the beacon with its " speaking eye of fire." Surely there 
 is more than a verbal, there is a genuine, similarity between 
 the dv/ipiO/jLov yt\a<r(j.a and " the unnumbered beach " and 
 "multitudinous sea." yEschylus, it seems to me, is willing, 
 just as Shakespeare is, to risk the prosperity of a verse upcn 
 a lucky throw of words, which may come up the sices of 
 hardy metaphor or the ambsace of conceit. There is such 
 a difference between far-reaching and far-fetching ! Poetry, 
 to be sure, is always that daring one step beyond, which 
 brings the right man to fortune, but leaves the wrong one 
 in the ditch, and its law is, Be bold once and again, yet 
 be not over-bold. It is true, also, that masters of language 
 are a little apt to play with it But whatever fault may be 
 found with Shakespeare in this respect will touch a tender 
 spot in /Eschylus also. Does he sometimes overload a word, so 
 that the language not merely, as Dryden says, bends under him, 
 but fairly gives way, and lets the reader s mind down with the 
 shock as of a false step in taste ? He has nothing worse than 
 dovv vfKpols. A criticism, shallow in human nature,
 
 ti8 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE, 
 
 however deep in Campbell s Rhetoric, has blarfied him for 
 making persons, under great excitement of sorrow, or whatever 
 other emotion, parenthesise some trifling play upon words in the 
 very height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms 
 have either never felt a passion or seen one in action, or else 
 they forget the exaltation of sensibility during such crises, so 
 that the attention, whether of the senses or the mind, is arrested 
 for the moment by what would be overlooked in ordinary moods. 
 The more forceful the current, the more sharp the ripple from 
 any alien substance interposed. A passion that looks forward, 
 like revenge or lust or greed, goes right to its end, and is 
 straightforward in its expression ; but a tragic passion, which is 
 in its nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of the 
 inevitable, or remorse, is reflective, and liable to be continually 
 diverted by the suggestions of fancy. The one is a concen 
 tration of the will, which intensifies the character and the phrase 
 that expresses it ; in the other, the will is helpless, and, as in 
 insanity, while the flow of the mind sets imperatively in one 
 direction, it is liable to almost ludicrous interruptions and 
 diversions upon the most trivial hint of involuntary association. 
 I am ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows his 
 characters to spend time, that might be better employed, in 
 carving some cherry-stone of a quibble ;* that he is sometimes 
 tempted away from the natural by the quaint ; that he some 
 times forces a partial, even a verbal, analogy between the 
 abstract thought and the sensual image into an absolute 
 identity, giving us a kind of serious pun. In a pun our pleasure 
 arises from a gap in the logical nexus too wide for the reason, 
 but which the ear can bridge in an instant. " Is that your own 
 hare, or a wig?" The fancy is yet more tickled where logic is 
 treated with a mock ceremonial of respect. 
 
 * So Euripides (copied by Theocritus, Id., xxvii.) : 
 
 IlevOcbs S OTTUS fjirj Trtvdos eicrourei 56/xws. (Bacchtz, 363.) 
 *&<TU(f>p6vriff(i> OVK f-^ovcra. autppoveiv. (HippoL, 1037.) 
 
 So Cal&eron: "Y apenas llega, cuando llega a peuas."
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. no 
 
 " His head was turned, and so he chewed 
 His pigtail till he died." 
 
 Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the result is 
 one of those ill-distributed syllogisms which in rhetoric are 
 called conceits. 
 
 " Hard was the hand that struck the blow, 
 Soft was the heart that bled." 
 
 I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its beauty, 
 though I should have thought nothing could be worse, had I 
 not seen General Morris s 
 
 " Her heart and morning broke together 
 In tears." 
 
 Of course, I would not rank with these Gloucester s 
 
 " What ! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster 
 Sink in the ground ? I thought it would have mounted ; " 
 
 though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class.* It might 
 be defended as a bit of ghastly humour characteristic of the 
 speaker. But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two 
 greater Greek tragedians. In a chorus of the "Seven against 
 Thebes" we have : 
 
 iv 5 yalq. 
 
 ZWO. <pr>VO[)VTIg 
 
 M^/a/crcu, K dp TO. 5 elo 5/j.ai/j.oi. 
 
 And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon 
 his own name quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar 
 circumstances ? Nor does the coarseness with which our great 
 poet is reproached lack an yEschylean parallel. Even the Nurse 
 in "Romeo and Juliet" would have found a true gossip in her 
 of the "Agamemnon," who is so indiscreet in her confidences 
 
 * I have taken the first passage in point that occurred to my memory. 
 It may not be Shakespeare s, though probably his. The question of 
 authorship is, I think, settled, so far as criticism can do it, in Mr. 
 Grant White s admirable essay appended to the Second Part of Henry VI,
 
 t2o SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 concerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right 
 or not in warning historians against following truth too close 
 upon the heels, the caution is a good one for poets as respects 
 truth to Nature. But it is a mischievous fallacy in historian or 
 critic to treat as a blemish of the man what is but the common 
 tincture of his age. It is to confound a spatter of mud with a 
 moral stain. 
 
 But I have been led away from my immediate purpose. I 
 did not intend to compare Shakespeare with the ancients, much 
 less to justify his defects by theirs. Shakespeare himself has 
 left us a pregnant satire on dogmatical and categorical aesthetics 
 (which commonly in discussion soon lose their ceremonious 
 tails and are reduced to the internecine dog and cat of their 
 bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and 
 Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a 
 cast-iron definition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions 
 of the beautiful whose source is as much in the man who looks 
 as in the thing he sees. In the fine arts a thing is either good 
 in itself or it is nothing. It neither gains nor loses by having it 
 shown that another good thing was also good in itself, any more 
 than a bad thing profits by comparison with another that is 
 worse. The final judgment of the world is intuitive, and is 
 based, not on proof that a work possesses some of the qualities 
 of another whose greatness is acknowledged, but on the 
 immediate feeling that it carries to a high point of perfection 
 certain qualities proper to itself. One does not flatter a fine 
 pear by comparing it to a fine peach, nor learn what a fine 
 peach is by tasting ever so many poor ones. The boy who 
 makes his first bite into one does not need to ask his father if or 
 how or why it is good. Because continuity is a merit in some 
 kinds of writing, shall we refuse ourselves to the authentic 
 charm of Montaigne s want of it ? I have heard people 
 complain of French tragedies because they were so very French. 
 This, though it may not be to some particular tastes, and may 
 from one point of view be a defect, is from another and far 
 higher a distinguished merit. It is their flavour, as direct a 
 tell-tale of the soil whence they draw it as that of French wines
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 121 
 
 is. Suppose we should tax the Elgin marbles with being too 
 Greek? When will people, nay, when will even critics, get over 
 this self-defrauding trick of cheapening the excellence of one 
 thing by that of another, this conclusive style of judgment 
 which consists simply in belonging to the other parish ? As one 
 grows older, one loses many idols, perhaps comes at last to 
 have none at all, though he may honestly enough uncover in 
 deference to the worshippers before any shrine. But for the 
 seeming loss the compensation is ample. These saints of 
 literature descend from their canopied remoteness to be even 
 more precious as men like ourselves, our companions in field 
 and street, speaking the same tongue, though in many dialects, 
 and owing one creed under the most diverse masks of form. 
 
 Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for the 
 ancient tragedy is due, if I am not mistaken, to circumstances 
 external to the drama itself to custom, to convention, to the 
 exigencies of the theatre. It is formal rather than organic. 
 The "Prometheus 1 seems to me one of the few Greek tragedies in 
 which the whole creation has developed itself in perfect 
 proportion from one central germ of living conception. The 
 motive of the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in 
 the modern (at least in the English) it is necessarily within. 
 Goethe, in a thoughtful essay,* written many years later than 
 his famous criticism of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister> says that 
 the distinction between the two is the difference between sollen 
 and wollen that is, between must and would. He means that 
 in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained by an 
 inexorable Destiny, while the element of Free-will, and con 
 sequently of choice, is the very axis of the modern. The 
 definition is conveniently portable, but it has its limitations. 
 Goethe s attention was too exclusively fixed on the Fate 
 tragedies of the Greeks, and upon Shakespeare among the 
 moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom, loyalty, 
 honour, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as 
 doom. In the " Antigone," on the other hand, the crisis lies in 
 the character of the protagonist. In this sense it is modern, 
 * " Shakespeare uud kein Ende."
 
 i22 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 and is the first example of true character-painting in tragedy. 
 But, from whatever cause, that exquisite analysis of complex 
 motives, and the display of them in action and speech, which 
 constitute for us the abiding charm of fiction, were quite 
 unknown to the ancients. They reached their height in 
 Cervantes and Shakespeare, and, though on a lower plane, still 
 belong to the upper region of art in Le Sage, Moliere, and 
 Fielding. The personages of the Greek tragedy seem to be 
 commonly rather types than individuals. In the modern 
 tragedy, certainly in the four greatest of Shakespeare s tragedies, 
 there is still something very like Destiny, only the place of it is 
 changed. It is no longer above man, but in him ; yet the 
 catastrophe is as sternly foredcomed in the characters of Lear, 
 Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet as it could be by an infallible 
 oracle. In " Macbeth," indeed, the Weird Sisters introduce an 
 element very like Fate ; but generally it may be said that with 
 the Greeks the character is involved in the action, while with 
 Shakespeare the action is evolved from the character. In the 
 one case, the motive of the play controls the personages ; in the 
 other, the chief personages are in themselves the motive to 
 which all else is subsidiary. In any comparison, therefore, 
 of Shakespeare with the ancients, we are not to contrast him 
 with them as unapproachable models, but to consider whether 
 he, like them, did not consciously endeavour, under the 
 circumstances and limitations in which he found himself, to 
 produce the most excellent thing possible, a model also in its 
 own kind whether higher or lower in degree is ano her 
 question. The only fair comparison would be between him and 
 that one of his contemporaries who endeavoured to anachronise 
 himself, so to speak, and to subject his art, so far as might be, 
 to the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonson was a great 
 man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an eye for the 
 external marks of character ; but when he would make a whole 
 of them, he gives us instead either a bundle of humours or an 
 incorporated idea. With Shakespeare the plot is an interior 
 organism, in Jonson an external contrivance. It is the 
 difference between man and tortoise. In the one the osseous
 
 StfAKESPEARE OXCJZ MORE. 123 
 
 structure is out of sight, indeed, but sustains the flesh and blood 
 that envelop it, while the other is boxed up and imprisoned in 
 his bones. 
 
 I have been careful to confine myself to what may be called 
 Shakespeare s ideal tragedies. In the purely historical or 
 chronicle plays, the conditions are different, and his imagination 
 submits itself to the necessary restrictions on its freedom of 
 movement. Outside the tragedies also, the "Tempest" makes 
 :an exception worthy of notice. If I read it rightly, it is an 
 example of how a great poet should write allegory not 
 embodying metaphysical abstractions, but giving us ideals 
 abstracted from life itself, suggesting an under-meaning every 
 where, forcing it upon us nowhere, tantalising the mind with 
 hints that imply so much and tell so little, and yet keep the 
 attention all eye and ear with eager, if fruitless, expectation. 
 Here the leading characters are not merely typical, but 
 symbolical that is, they do not illustrate a class of persons, 
 they belong to universal Nature. Consider the scene of the 
 play. Shakespeare is wont to take some familiar story, to lay 
 his scene in some place the name of which, at least, is familiar 
 well knowing the reserve of power that lies in the familiar as 
 a background, when things are set in front of it under a new 
 and unexpected light. But in the "Tempest" the scene is laid 
 nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map. 
 Nowhere, then ? At once nowhere and anywhere for it is in 
 the soul of man, that still vexed island hung between the upper 
 and the nether world, and liable to incursions from both. 
 There is scarce a play of Shakespeare s in which there is such 
 variety of character, none in which character has so little to do 
 in the carrying on and development of the story. But consider 
 for a moment if ever the Imagination has been so embodied as 
 in Prospero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute Understanding as 
 in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the 
 glorious liquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural 
 lord, the higher Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Woman 
 hood, as truly so before she sees Ferdinand as Eve before she 
 was wakened to consciousness by the echo of her own nature
 
 124 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from that: 
 of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth,, 
 compelled to drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice 
 of will and abnegation of self win him his ideal in Miranda. 
 The subordinate personages are simply types : Sebastian and 
 Antonio, of weak character and evil ambition ; Gonzalo, of 
 average sense and honesty ; Adrian and Francisco, of the 
 walking gentlemen who serve to fill up a world. They are not 
 characters in the same sense with lago, Falstaff, Shallow, or 
 Leontius ; and it is curious how every one of them loses his 
 way in this enchanted island of life, all the victims of one 
 illusion after another, except Prospero, whose ministers are 
 purely ideal. The whole play, indeed, is a succession of 
 illusions, winding up with those solemn words of the great 
 enchanter who had summoned to his service every shape of 
 merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of 
 life, and who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his 
 triumphs. For in Prospero shall we not recognise the Artist 
 himself 
 
 " That did not better for his life provide 
 Than public means which public manners breeds, 
 Whence comes it that his name receives a brand" 
 
 who has forfeited a shining place in the world s eye by devotion- 
 to his art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the 
 leaky carcass of a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate 
 Island (as men always do who find their true vocation) where 
 he is absolute lord, making all the powers of Nature serve him, 
 but with Ariel and Caliban as special ministers? Of whom else- 
 could he have been thinking, when he says 
 
 " Graves, at my command, 
 
 Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth, 
 By my so potent art ? " 
 
 Was tiis man, so extraordinary from whatever side we look at" 
 him, who ran so easily through the whole scale of human senti 
 ment, from the homely common-sense of, " When two men rid&-
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 125 
 
 of one horse, one must ride behind," to the transcendental 
 subtilty of 
 
 " No, Time, thou slialt not toast that I do change ; 
 Thy pyramids, built up with newer might, 
 To me are nothing novel, nothing strange ; 
 They are but dressings of a former sight " 
 
 was he alone so unconscious of powers, some part of whose 
 magic is recognised by all mankind, from the school-boy to the 
 (philosopher, that he merely sat by and saw them go without 
 ithe least notion what they were about ? Was he an inspired 
 idiot, votre bizarre Shakespeare? a vast, irregular genius? a 
 simple rustic, warbling his native wood-notes wild in other 
 words, insensible to the benefits of culture? When attempts 
 have been made at various times to prove that this singular 
 and seemingly contradictory creature, not one, but all mankind s 
 epitome, was a musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a Catholic, a Pro 
 testant, an atheist, an Irishman, a discoverer of the circulation of 
 the blood, and finally, that he was not himself, but somebody 
 else, is it not a little odd that the last thing anybody should have 
 thought of proving him was an artist ? Nobody believes any 
 longer that immediate inspiration is possible in modern times 
 (as if God had grown old) at least, nobody believes it of the 
 prophets of those days, of John of Leyden, or Reeves, or 
 Muggleton and yet everybody seems to take it for granted 
 of this one man Shakespeare. He, somehow or other, without 
 knowing it, was able to do what none of the rest of them, 
 though knowing it all too perfectly well, could begin to do. 
 Everybody seems to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaire plays 
 gentleman usher for him to his countrymen, and then, per 
 ceiving that his countrymen find a flavour in him beyond that 
 of Zaire or Mahomet, dicovers him to be a Sauvage ivre, sans 
 le moindre ttincelle de bon gout, et sans le moindre connoissance 
 des regies. Goethe, who tells us that Gotz von Berlichingen was 
 written in the Shakespearian manner and we certainly should 
 not have guessed it, if he had not blabbed comes to the final 
 conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, but not a dramatist.
 
 126 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 Chateaubriand thinks that he nas corrupted art. " If, to 
 attain," he says, "the height of tragic art, it be enough to heap 
 together disparate scenes without order and without connection,. 
 to dovetail the burlesque with the pathetic, to set the water- 
 carrier beside the monarch and the huckster-wench beside the 
 queen, who may not reasonably flatter himself with being the 
 rival of the greatest masters ? Whoever should give himself 
 the trouble to retrace a single one of his days, ... to keep* 
 a journal from hour to hour, would have made a drama in the 
 fashion of the English poet." But there are journals and journals, 
 as the French say, and what goes into them depends on the 
 eye that gathers for them. It is a long step from St. Simon to 
 Dangeau, from Pepys to Thoresby, from Shakespeare even to 
 the Marquis de .Chateaubriand. M. Hugo alone, convinced 
 that, as founder of the French Romantic School, there is a kind 
 of family likeness between himself and Shakespeare, stands 
 boldly forth to prove the father as extravagant as the son. 
 Calm yourself, M. Hugo, you are no more a child of his than 
 Will Davenant was ! But, after all, is it such a great crime to 
 produce something alsolutely new in a world so tedious as ours, 
 and so apt to tell its old stories over again ? I do not mean 
 new in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surely 
 the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much 
 variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and 
 familiar. He invents nothing, but seems rather to rediscover 
 the world about him, and his penetrating vision gives to things 
 of daily encounter something of the strangeness of new creation. 
 Meanwhile the changed conditions of modern life demand a 
 change in the method of treatment. The ideal is not a strait- 
 waistcoat. Because Alexis and Dora is so charming, shall we 
 have no Paul and Virginia f It was the idle endeavour to 
 reproduce the old enchantment in the old way that gave us the 
 pastoral, sent to the garret now with our grandmothers achieve 
 ments of the same sort in worsted. Every age says to its poets, 
 like a mistress to her lover, " Tell me what I am like ;" and he 
 who succeeds in catching the evanescent expression that reveals 
 character which is as much as to say, what is intrinsically
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 127 
 
 human will be found to have caught something as imperish 
 able as human nature itself. Aristophanes, by the vital and 
 essential qualities of his humorous satire, is already more nearly 
 our contemporary than Moliere ; and even the Trouveres, care 
 less and trivial as they mostly are, could fecundate a great poet 
 like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading. 
 
 The Attic tragedy still keeps its hold upon the loyalty ol 
 scholars through their imagination, or their pedantry, or their 
 feeling of an exclusive property, as may happen, and, however 
 alloyed with baser matter, this loyalty is legitimate and well 
 bestowed. But the dominion of the Shakespearian is even 
 wider. It pushes forward its boundaries from year to year, and 
 moves no landmark backward. Here Alfieri and Lessing own 
 a common allegiance ; and the loyalty to him is one not of 
 guild or tradition, but of conviction and enthusiasm. Can this 
 be said of any other modern? of robust Corneille? of tender 
 Racine ? of Calderon even, with his tropical warmth and vigour 
 of production ? The Greeks and he are alike and alone in this, 
 and for the same reason, that both are unapproachably the 
 highest in their kind. Call him Gothic, if you like, but the 
 inspiring mind that presided over the growth of these clustered 
 masses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is neither 
 Greek nor Gothic it is simply genius lending itself to embody 
 the new desire of man s mind, as it had embodied the old. 
 After all, to be delightful is to be classic, and the chaotic never 
 pleases long. But manifoldness is not confusion, any more 
 than formalism is simplicity. If Shakespeare rejected the 
 unities, as I think he who complains of "Art made tongue-tied 
 by Authority" might very well deliberately do, it was for the 
 sake of an imaginative unity more intimate than any of time 
 and place. The antique in itself is not the ideal, though its 
 remoteness from the vulgarity of every-day associations helps 
 to make it seem so. The true ideal is not opposed to the real, 
 nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, but lies in it, and 
 blessed are the eyes that find it ! It is the metis divinior which 
 hides within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact into matter- 
 of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. In this
 
 128 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 sense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, Shake 
 speare often more truly so than the Greeks. I think it is a more 
 or less conscious perception of this ideality, as it is a more or 
 less well-grounded persuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that 
 assures to him, as to them, and with equal justice, a permanent 
 supremacy over the minds of men. This gives to his characters 
 their universality, to his thought its irradiating property, while 
 the artistic purpose running through and combining the endless 
 variety of scene and character will alone account for his power 
 of dramatic effect. Goethe affirmed, that, without Schroder s 
 prunings and adaptations, Shakespeare was too undramatic for 
 the German theatre that, if the theory that his plays should be 
 represented textually should prevail, he would be driven from 
 the boards. The theory has prevailed, and he not only holds 
 his own, but is acted oftener than ever. It is not irregular 
 genius that can do this, for surely Germany need not go abroad 
 for what her own Werners could more than amply supply her 
 with. 
 
 But I would much rather quote a fine saying than a bad 
 prophecy of a man to whom I owe so much. Goethe, in one of 
 the most perfect of his shorter poems, tells us that a poem* is 
 like a painted window. Seen from without (and he accordingly 
 justifies the Philistine, who never looks at them otherwise), they 
 seem dingy and confused enough ; but enter, and then 
 
 " Da ist s auf einmal farbig helle, 
 Geschicht und Zierath gla nzt in Schnelle." 
 
 With the same feeling he says elsewhere in prose, that " there 
 is a destructive criticism and a productive. The former is very 
 easy ; for one has only to set up in his mind any standard, any 
 model, however narrow ;> (let us say the Greeks), " and then 
 boldly assert that the work under review does not match with 
 it, and therefore is good for nothing the matter is settled, and 
 one must at once deny its claim. Productive criticism is a great 
 deal more difficult ; it asks, What did the author propose to 
 himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and comprehensible ? 
 and how far has he succeeded in carrying it out?" It is in
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 129 
 
 applying this latter kind of criticism to Shakespeare that the 
 Germans have set us an example worthy of all commendation. 
 If they have been sometimes over-subtile, they at least had the 
 merit of first looking at his works as wholes, as something that 
 very likely contained an idea, perhaps conveyed a moral, if we 
 could get at it. The illumination lent us by most of the 
 English commentators reminds us of the candles which guides 
 hold up to show us a picture in a dark place, the smoke of 
 which gradually makes the works of the artist invisible under 
 its repeated layers. Lessing, as might have been expected, 
 opened the first glimpse in the new direction ; Goethe followed 
 with his famous exposition of Hamlet ; A. W. Schlegel took a 
 more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridge 
 worked over into English, adding many fine criticisms of his 
 own on single passages ; and finally, Gervinus has devoted 
 four volumes to a comment on the plays, full of excellent matter, 
 though pushing the moral exegesis beyond all reasonable 
 bounds.* With the help of all these, and especially of the last, 
 I shall apply this theory of criticism to Hamlet, not in the hope 
 of saying anything new, but of bringing something to the 
 support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as a play 
 wright, he was even greater as a dramatist that, if his 
 immediate business was to fill the theatre, his higher object was 
 to create something which, by fulfilling the conditions and 
 answering the requirements of modern life, should as truly 
 deserve to be called a work of art as others had deserved it by 
 doing the same thing in former times and under other circum 
 stances. Supposing him to have accepted consciously or not 
 is of little importance the new terms of the problem which 
 makes character the pivot of dramatic action, and consequently 
 the key of dramatic unity, how far did he succeed ? 
 
 Before attempting my analysis, I must clear away a little 
 rubbish. Are such anachronisms as those of which Voltaire 
 accuses Shakespeare in " Hamlet," such as the introduction of 
 cannon before the invention of gunpowder, and making Christians 
 
 * I do not mention Ulrici s book, for it seems to me unwieldy and dull- 
 zeal without knowledge. 
 
 559
 
 130 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 of the Danes three centuries too soon, of the least bearing 
 aesthetically 1 I think not ; but as they are of a piece with a 
 great many other criticisms upon the great poet, it is worth 
 while to dwell upon them a moment. 
 
 The first demand we make upon whatever claims to be a 
 work of art (and we have a right to make it) is that it shall be 
 in keeping. Now this propriety is of two kinds, either extrinsic 
 or intrinsic. In the first I should class whatever relates rather 
 to the body than the soul of the work, such as fidelity to the 
 facts of history (wherever that is important), congruity of 
 costume, and the like in short, whatever might come under 
 the head of picturesque truth, a departure from which would 
 shock too rudely our preconceived associations. I have seen 
 an Indian chief in French boots, and he seemed to me almost 
 tragic ; but, put upon the stage in tragedy, he would have been 
 ludicrous. Lichtenberg, writing from London in 1775, tells us 
 that Garrick played Hamlet in a suit of the French fashion, 
 then commonly worn, and that he was blamed for it by some of 
 the critics ; but, he says, one hears no such criticism during the 
 play, nor on the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed 
 till the emotion roused by the great actor has had time to 
 subside. He justifies Garrick, though we should not be able to 
 endure it now. Yet nothing would be gained by trying to make 
 Hamlet s costume true to the assumed period of the play, for 
 the scene of it is laid in a Denmark that has no dates. 
 
 In the second and more important category, I should put, 
 first, co-ordination of character, that is, a certain variety in 
 harmony of the personages of a drama, as in the attitudes and 
 colouring of the figures in a pictorial composition, so that, while 
 mutually relieving and setting off each other, they shall combine 
 in the total impression ; second, that subordinate truth to 
 Nature which makes each character coherent in itself; and, 
 third, such propriety of costume and the like as shall satisfy the 
 superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher 
 drama appeals. All tliese come within the scope of imaginative 
 truth. To illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck 
 criticises John Kemble s dressing for Macbeth in a modern
 
 SHAKESPEARE OACE MORE. 131 
 
 Highland costume, as being ungraceful without any counter 
 vailing merit of historical exactness. I think a deeper reason 
 for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that his garb, 
 with its purely modern and British army associations, is out of 
 place on Forres Heath, and drags the Weird Sisters down with 
 it from their proper imaginative remoteness in the gloom of the 
 past to the disenchanting glare of the foot-lights. It is not the 
 antiquarian, but the poetic conscience, that is wounded. To 
 this, exactness, so far as concerns ideal representation, may not 
 only not be truth, but may even be opposed to it. Anachron 
 isms and the like are in themselves of no account, and become 
 important only when they make a gap too wide for our illusion 
 to cross unconsciously, that is, when they are anacoluthons 
 to the imagination. The aim of the artist is psychologic, 
 not historic truth. It is comparatively easy for an author 
 to get up any period with tolerable minuteness in externals, 
 but readers and audiences find more difficulty in getting them 
 down, though oblivion swallows scores of them at a gulp. 
 The saving truth in such matters is a truth to essential 
 and permanent characteristics. The Ulysses of Shakespeare, 
 like the Ulysses of Dante and Tennyson, more or less 
 harmonises with our ideal conception of the wary, long-con 
 sidering, though adventurous son of Laertes, yet Simon Lord 
 Lovat is doubtless nearer the original type. In " Hamlet," 
 though there is no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare 
 has suggested the prevailing rudeness of manners quite enough 
 for his purpose. We see it in the single combat of Hamlet s 
 father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar wassail of the 
 king, in the English monarch being expected to hang 
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige 
 his cousin of Denmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a 
 gentleman of, becoming instantly capable of any the most 
 barbarous treachery to glut his vengeance. We cannot fancy 
 Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating at Wittenberg, 
 but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and 
 Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through 
 the play we get the notion of a state of society in which a
 
 i 3 2 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 savage nature has disguised itself in the externals of civilisa 
 tion, like a Maori deacon, who has only to strip and he 
 becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his mouth watering 
 for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date of 
 " Hamlet," the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies 
 alive in their houses, with as much of their family about them 
 as might be to make it comfortable. Shakespeare seems 
 purposely to have dissociated his play from history by changing 
 nearly every name in the original legend. The motive of the 
 play revenge as a religious duty belongs only to a social 
 state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, 
 but, with infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, 
 not untamed Nature, as he found it in history, but the period of 
 transition, a period in which the times are always out of joint, 
 and thus the irresolution which has its root in Hamlet s own 
 character is stimulated by the very incompatibility of that 
 legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the past with the 
 new culture and refinement of which he is the representative. 
 One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to have 
 possessed was Florio s Montaigne^ and he might well have 
 transferred the Frenchman s motto, Que s$ais je? to the front 
 of his tragedy ; nor can I help fancying something more than 
 accident in the fact that Hamlet has been a student at Witten 
 berg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whose results in 
 unsettling men s faith, and consequently disqualifying them for 
 promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye 
 witness, but which he must actually have experienced in himself. 
 One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it 
 has been urged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of 
 low characters and comic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick, 
 who had just assisted at the Stratford Jubilee, where Shake 
 speare had been pronounced divine, was induced by this absurd 
 outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage to omit the 
 grave-diggers scene from Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact that 
 Shakespeare would not have been the representative poet he is 
 if he had not given expression to this striking tendency of the 
 Northern races, which shows itself constantly, not only in their
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 133 
 
 literature, but even in their mythology and their architecture, 
 the grave-diggers scene always impresses me as one of the 
 most pathetic in the whole tragedy. That Shakespeare 
 introduced such scenes and characters with deliberate inten 
 tion, and with a view to artistic relief and contrast, there can 
 hardly be a doubt. We must take it for granted that a man 
 whose works show everywhere the results of judgment some 
 times acted with forethought. I find the springs of the 
 profoundest sorrow and pity in this hardened indifference of 
 the grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as to whether 
 Ophelia s death was by suicide or no, in their singing and 
 jesting at their dreary work. 
 
 " A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, 
 For and a shron ding-sheet : 
 0, a pit of clay for to be made 
 For such a guest is meet ! " 
 
 We know who is to be the guest of this earthen hospitality- 
 how much beauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in 
 that pit of clay. All we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us 
 with tenfold force, and we recoil from our amusement at the 
 ghastly drollery of the two delvers with a shock of horror. 
 That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on this grave of 
 all others, that it should be here that he should pause to muse 
 humorously on death and decay all this prepares us for the 
 revulsion of passion in the next scene, and for the frantic 
 confession 
 
 " I loved Ophelia ; forty thousand brothers 
 Could not with all their quantity of love 
 Make up my sum ! " 
 
 And it is only here that such an asseveration would be true even 
 to the feeling of the moment ; for it is plain from all we know of 
 Hamlet that he could not so have loved Ophelia, that he was 
 incapable of the self-abandonment of a true passion, that he 
 would have analysed this emotion as he does all others, would 
 have peeped and botanised upon it till it became to him a mere
 
 134 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 matter of scientific interest. All this force of contrast, and this 
 horror of surprise, were necessary so to intensify his remorseful 
 regret that he should believe himself for once in earnest. The 
 speech of the King, " O, he is mad, Laertes," recalls him to 
 himself, and he at once begins to rave : 
 
 "Zounds ! show me what thou lt do ! 
 
 Woul t weep ? woul t fight ? woul t fast ? woul t tear thyself? 
 Woul t driuk up eysil ? eat a crocodile ? " 
 
 It is easy to see that the whole plot hinges upon the character 
 of Hamlet, that Skakespeare s conception of this was the ovum 
 out of which the whole organism was hatched. And here let 
 me remark, that there is a kind of genealogical necessity in the 
 character a thing not altogether strange to the attentive reader 
 of Shakespeare. Hamlet seems the natural result of the 
 mixture of father and mother in this temperament, the resolu 
 tion and persistence of the one, like sound timber worm-holed 
 and made shaky, as it were, by the other s infirmity of will and 
 discontinuity of purpose. In natures so imperfectly mixed it is 
 not uncommon to find vehemence of intention the prelude and 
 counterpoise of weak performance, the conscious nature striving 
 to keep up its self-respect by a triumph in words all the more 
 resolute that it feels assured beforehand of inevitable defeat in 
 action. As in such slipshod housekeeping men are their own 
 largest creditors, they find it easy to stave off utter bankruptcy 
 of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise with another 
 larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindling becomes 
 habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge 
 discount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as 
 the figures lengthened on the paper ! As with Hamlet, so it is 
 with Ophelia and Laertes. The father s feebleness comes up 
 again in the wasting heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the 
 daughter, while the son shows it in a rashness of impulse and 
 act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential feebleness we are 
 all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so steady on 
 its keel, and drawing so much water, as that of Horatio the 
 foil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 135 
 
 natural, also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius 
 should have her softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy ; for 
 there are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks, and that 
 which bends. Ophelia s is of the former kind ; Hero is her 
 counterpart, giving way before calamity, and rising again so 
 soon as the pressure is removed. 
 
 I find two passages in Dante that contain the exactest 
 possible definition of that habit or quality of Hamlet s mind 
 which justifies the tragic turn of the play, and renders it natural 
 and unavoidable from the beginning. The first is from the 
 second canto of the Inferno : 
 
 " E quale e quei che disvuol cio che voile, 
 E per nuovi pensier cangia proposta, 
 Si che del cominciar tutto si tolle ; 
 Tal mi fee* io in quella oscura costa : 
 Perche pensando consumai la impresa 
 Che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta." 
 
 " And like the man who unwills what he willed, 
 And for new thoughts doth change his first intent, 
 So that he cannot anywhere begin, 
 Such became I upon that slope obscure, 
 Because with thinking I consumed resolve, 
 That was so ready at the setting out." 
 
 Again, in the fifth of the Purgatorio : 
 
 " Che sempre 1 uomo in cui pensier rampoglia 
 Sovra pensier, da se dilunga il segno, 
 Perche la foga 1 un dell altro insolla." 
 
 " For always he in whom one thought buds forth 
 Out of another farther puts the goal, 
 For each has only force to mar the other." 
 
 Dante was a profound metaphysician, and as in the first 
 passage he describes and defines a certain quality of mind, so 
 in the other he tells us its result in the character and life,
 
 136 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 namely, indecision and failure the goal farther off at the end 
 than at the beginning. It is remarkable how close a resem 
 blance of thought, and even of expression, there is between the 
 former of these quotations and a part of Hamlet s famous 
 soliloquy : 
 
 " Thus conscience [i.e., consciousness] doth make cowards of us all ; 
 And thus the native hue of resolution 
 Is sicklied o er with the pale cast of thought, 
 And enterprises of great pitch and moment 
 With this regard their currents turn awry, 
 And lose the name of action 1 " 
 
 It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet s that it 
 should be conscious of its own defect. Men of his type are for 
 ever analysing their own emotions and motives. They cannot 
 do anything, because they always see two ways of doing it. 
 They cannot determine on any course of action, because they 
 are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and see too 
 well the disadvantages of every one of them. It is not that 
 they are incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between 
 the motive power and the operative faculties is relaxed and 
 loose. The engine works, but the machinery it should drive 
 stands still. The imagination is so much in overplus, that 
 thinking a thing becomes better than doing it, and thought, 
 with its easy perfection, capable of everything, because it can 
 accomplish everything with ideal means, is vastly more attrac 
 tive and satisfactory than deed, which must be wrought at best 
 with imperfect instruments, and always falls short of the 
 conception that went before it. " If to do," says Portia in the 
 " Merchant of Venice " " if to do were as easy as to know what 
 twere good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men s 
 cottages princes palaces." Hamlet knows only too well what 
 twere good to do, but he palters with everything in a double 
 sense : he sees the grain of good there is in evil, and the grain 
 of evil there is in good, as they exist in the world, and, finding 
 that he can make those feather-weighted accidents balance
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 137 
 
 each other, infers that there is little to choose between the 
 essences themselves. He is of Montaigne s mind, and says 
 expressly that "there is nothing good or ill, but thinking makes 
 it so." He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas that the 
 world of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth the while ; and 
 he has been so long objectless and purposeless, so far as actual 
 life is concerned, that, when at last an object and an aim are 
 forced upon him, he cannot deal with them, and gropes about 
 vainly for a motive outside of himself that shall marshal his 
 thoughts for him and guide his faculties into the path of action. 
 He is the victim not so much of feebleness of will as of an 
 intellectual indifference that hinders the will from working long 
 in any one direction. He wishes to will, but never wills. His 
 continual iteration of resolve shows that he has no resolution. 
 He is capable of passionate energy where the occasion presents 
 itself suddenly from without, because nothing is so irritable as 
 conscious irresolution with a duty to perform. But of deliberate 
 energy he is not capable ; for there the impulse must come 
 from within, and the blade of his analysis is so subtile that it 
 can divide the finest hair of motive twixt north and northwest 
 side, leaving him desperate to choose between them. The very 
 consciousness of his defect is an insuperable bar to his repairing 
 it ; for the unity of purpose, which infuses every fibre of the 
 character with will available whenever wanted, is impossible 
 where the mind can never rest till it has resolved that unity 
 into its component elements, and satisfied itself which on the 
 whole is of greater value. A critical instinct so insatiable that it 
 must turn upon itself, for lack of something else to hew and hack, 
 becomes incapable at last of originating anything except 
 indecision. It becomes infallible in what not to do. How easily 
 he might have accomplished his task is shown by the conduct 
 of Laertes. When he has a death to avenge, he raises a mob, 
 breaks into the palace, bullies the king, and proves how weak 
 the usurper really was. 
 
 The world is the victim of splendid parts, and is slow to 
 accept a rounded whole, because that is something which is 
 long in completing, still longer in demonstrating its completion.
 
 138 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 We like to be surprised into admiration, and not logically con 
 vinced that we ought to admire. We are willing to be delighted 
 with success, though we are somewhat indifferent to the homely 
 qualities which insure it. Our thought is so filled with the 
 rocket s burst of momentary splendour so far above us, that we 
 forget the poor stick, useful and unseen, that made its climbing 
 possible. One of these homely qualities is continuity of 
 character, and it escapes present applause because it tells 
 chiefly, in the long run, in results. With his usual tact, 
 Shakespeare has brought in such a character as a contrast and 
 foil to Hamlet. Horatio is the only complete man in the play, 
 solid, well-knit, and true ; a noble, quiet nature, with that 
 highest of all qualities, judgment, always sane and prompt ; 
 who never drags his anchors for any wind of opinion or fortune, 
 but grips all the closer to the reality of things. He seems one 
 of those calm, undemonstrative men whom we love and admire 
 without asking to know why, crediting them with the capacity 
 of great things, without any test of actual achievement, because 
 we feel that their manhood is a constant quality, and no mere 
 accident of circumstance and opportunity. Such men are 
 always sure of the presence of their highest self on demand. 
 Hamlet is continually drawing bills on the future, secured by 
 his promise of himselt to himself, which he can never redeem. 
 His own somewhat feminine nature recognises its complement 
 in Horatio, and clings to it instinctively, as naturally as Horatio 
 is attracted by that fatal gift of imagination, the absence of 
 which makes the strength of his own character, as its overplus 
 does the weakness of Hamlet s. It is a happy marriage of two 
 minds drawn together by the charm of unlikeness. Hamlet 
 feels in Horatio the solid steadiness which he misses in him 
 self; Horatio in Hamlet that need of service and sustainment 
 to render which gives him a consciousness of his own value. 
 Hamlet fills the place of a woman to Horatio, revealing him to 
 himself not only in what he says, but by a constant claim upon 
 his strength of nature ; and there is great psychological truth in 
 making suicide the first impulse of this quiet, undemonstrative 
 man. after Hamlet s death, as if the very reason for his being
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 139 
 
 were taken with his friend s need of him. In his grief, he for the 
 first and only time speaks of himself by his loss. If this manly 
 reserve of Horatio be true to Nature, not less so are the 
 communicativeness of Hamlet, and his tendency to soliloquise. 
 If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is just as truly the 
 happiness of the other. Like a musician distrustful of himself, 
 he is forever tuning his instrument, first overstraining this cord 
 a little, and then that, but unable to bring them into unison, or 
 to profit by it if he could. 
 
 We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he " was not a 
 pipe for Fortune s finger to play what stop she please," till 
 Hamlet told him so. That was Fortune s affair, not his ; let 
 her try it, if she liked. He is unconscious of his own peculiar 
 qualities, as men of decision commonly are, or they would not 
 be men of decision. When there is a thing to be done, they go 
 straight at it, and for the time there is nothing for them in the 
 whole universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on 
 the other hand, is always studying himself. This world and the 
 other, too, are always present to his mind, and there in the 
 corner is the little black kobold of a doubt making mouths at 
 him. He breaks down the bridges before him, not behind him, 
 as a man of action would do ; but there is something more than 
 ;his. He is an ingrained sceptic ; though his is the scepticism, 
 not of reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith in him 
 self. In him it is passive, a malady rather than a function of 
 the mind. We might call him insincere ; not that he was in 
 any sense a hypocrite, but only that he never was and never could 
 be in earnest. Never could be, because no man without 
 
 ntense faith in something ever can. Even if he only believed 
 in himself, that were better than nothing ; for it will carry a 
 man a great way in the outward successes of life nay, will 
 even sometimes give him the Archimedean fulcrum for moving 
 the world. But Hamlet doubts everything. He doubts the 
 
 immortality of the soul, just after seeing his father s spirit, and 
 hearing from its mouth the secrets of the other world. He 
 
 doubts Horatio even, and swears him to secrecy on the cross of 
 
 his sword, though probably he himself has no assured belief in
 
 T4Q SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 the sacredness of the symbol. He doubts Ophelia, and asks 
 her, " Are you honest ? " He doubts the ghost, after he has 
 had a little time to think about it, and so gets up the play to 
 test the guilt of the king. And how coherent the whole character 
 is ! With what perfect tact and judgment Shakespeare, in 
 the advice to the players, makes him an exquisite critic ! For 
 just here that part of his character which would be weak in 
 dealing with affairs is strong. A wise scepticism is the first 
 attribute of a good critic. He must not believe that the fire- 
 insurance offices will raise their rates of premium on Charles 
 River, because the new volume of poems is printing at Riverside 
 or the University Press. He must not believe so profoundly 
 in the ancients as to think it wholly out of the question that 
 the world has still vigour enough in its loins to beget some 
 one who will one of these days be as good an ancient as any of 
 them. 
 
 Another striking quality in Hamlet s nature is his perpetual 
 inclination to irony. I think this has been generally passed 
 over too lightly, as if it were something external and accidental, 
 rather assumed as a mask than part of the real nature of the 
 man. It seems to me to go deeper, to be something innate, 
 and not merely factitious. It is nothing like the grave 
 irony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly 
 in earnest the boomerang of argument, which one throws 
 in the opposite direction of what he means to hit, and which 
 seems to be flying away from the adversary, who will presently 
 find himself knocked down by it. It is not like the irony of 
 Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of a clear mind 
 twisting awry whatever enters it or of lago, which is the 
 slime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty 
 and goodness to taint them with distrust : it is the half-jest, 
 half-earnest of an inactive temperament that has not quite made 
 up its mind whether life is a reality or no, whether men were 
 not made in jest, and which amuses itself equally with finding 
 a deep meaning in trivial things and a trifling one in the 
 profoundest mysteries of being, because the want of earnest 
 ness in its own essence infects everything else with its own
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 141 
 
 indifference. If there be now and then an unmannerly rudeness 
 and bitterness in it, as in the scenes with Polonius and Osrick, 
 we must remember that Hamlet was just in the condition 
 which spurs men to sallies of this kind : dissatisfied, at one 
 neither with the world nor with himself, and accordingly 
 casting about for something out of himself to vent his spleen 
 upon. But even in these passages there is no hint of earnest 
 ness, of any purpose beyond the moment ; they are mere 
 cat s-paws of vexation, and not the deep-raking ground-swell 
 of passion, as we see in the sarcasm of Lear. 
 
 The question of Hamlet s madness has been much discussed 
 and variously decided. High medical authority has pronounced, 
 as usual, on both sides of the question. But the induction 
 has been drawn from too narrow premises, being based on 
 a mere diagnosis of the case, and not on an appreciation of 
 the character in its completeness. We have a case of pre- 
 ended madness in the Edgar of "King Lear ; " and it is certainly 
 true that that is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared 
 with the delicate drawing, the lights, shades, and half-tints 
 of the portraiture in Hamlet. But does this tend to prove 
 that the madness of the latter, because truer to the recorded 
 observation of experts, is real, and meant to be real, as the 
 other to be fictitious ? Not in the least, as it appears to me. 
 Hamlet, among all the characters of Shakespeare, is the most 
 eminently a metaphysician and psychologist. He is a close 
 observer, continually analysing his own nature and that of 
 others, letting fall his little drops of acid irony on all who 
 come near him, to make them show what they are made of. 
 Even Ophelia is not too sacred, Osrick not too contemptible for 
 experiment If such a man assumed madness, he would play 
 his part perfectly. If Shakespeare himself, without going mad, 
 could so observe and remember all the abnormal symptoms 
 as to be able to reproduce them in Hamlet, why should it be 
 beyond the power of Hamlet to reproduce them in himself? 
 If you deprive Hamlet of reason, there is no truly tragic 
 motive left. He would be a fit subject for Bedlam, but not 
 for the stage. We might have pathology enough, but no
 
 142 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE 
 
 pathos. Ajax first becomes tragic when he recovers his wits. 
 If Hamlet is irresponsible, the whole play is a chaos. That 
 he is not so might be proved by evidence enough, were it not 
 labour thrown away. 
 
 This feigned madness of Hamlet s is one of the few points 
 in which Shakespeare has kept close to the old story on which 
 he founded his play ; and as he never decided without deliber 
 ation, so he never acted without unerring judgment. Hamlet 
 drifts through the whole tragedy. He never keeps on one tack 
 long enough to get steerage-way, even if, in a nature like 
 his, with those electric streamers of whim and fancy for 
 ever wavering across the vault of his brain, the needle of 
 judgment would point in one direction long enough to strike a 
 course by. The scheme of simulated insanity is precisely the 
 one he would have been likely to hit upon, because it enabled 
 him to follow his own bent, and to drift with an apparent pur 
 pose, postponing decisive action by the very means he adopts 
 to arrive at its accomplishment, and satisfying himself with the 
 show of doing something that he may escape so much the 
 longer the dreaded necessity of really doing anything at all It 
 enables him to play with life and duty, instead of taking them 
 by the rougher side, where alone any firm grip is possible to 
 feel that he is on the way toward accomplishing somewhat, 
 when he is really paltering with his own irresolution. Nothing, 
 I think, could be more finely imagined than this. Voltaire 
 complains that he goes mad without any sufficient object or 
 result. Perfectly true, and precisely what was most natural for 
 him to do, and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare meant 
 that he should do. It was delightful to him to indulge his 
 imagination and humour, to prove his capacity for something 
 by playing a part : the one thing he could not do was to bring 
 himself to act, unless when surprised by a sudden impulse of 
 suspicion as where he kills Polonius, and there he could not 
 see his victim. He discourses admirably of suicide, but does 
 not kill himself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by 
 the chance to kill the king with the excuse that he will not do it 
 while he is praying, lest his soul be saved thereby, though it is
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 143 
 
 more than doubtful whether he believed it himself. He allows 
 himself to be packed off to England, without any motive except 
 that it would for the time take him farther from a present duty : 
 the more disagreeable to a nature like his because it was 
 present, and not a mere matter for speculative consideration. 
 When Goethe made his famous comparison of the acorn 
 planted in a vase which it bursts with its growth, and says that 
 in like manner Hamlet is a nature which breaks down under 
 the weight of a duty too great for it to bear, he seems to have 
 considered the character too much from one side. Had 
 Hamlet actually killed himself to escape his too onerous com 
 mission, Goethe s conception of him would have been satis 
 factory enough. But Hamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like 
 Werther ; on the contrary, he saw things only too clearly in 
 the dry north-light of the intellect. It is chance that at last 
 brings him to his end. It would appear rather that Shake 
 speare intended to show us an imaginative temperament 
 brought face to face with actualities, into any clear relation 
 of sympathy with which it cannot bring itseli The very 
 means that Shakespeare makes use of to lay upon him the 
 obligation of acting the ghost really seems to make it al 
 the harder for him to act ; for the spectre but gives an 
 additional excitement to his imagination and a fresh topic for 
 his scepticism. 
 
 I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral significance from 
 the play, even if I thought it possible ; for that would be aside 
 from the present purpose. The scope of the higher drama is to 
 represent life, not every-day life, it is true, but life lifted above 
 the plane of bread-and-butter associations, by nobler reaches 
 of language, by the influence at once inspiring and modulating 
 of verse, by an intenser play of passion condensing that misty 
 mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the ordinary 
 atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase 
 whose brief, but terrible, illumination prints the outworn land 
 scape of every-day upon our brains, with its little motives and 
 mean results, in lines of tell-tale fire. The moral office of 
 tragedy is to show us our own weaknesses idealised in grander
 
 M4 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 figures and more awful results to teach us that what we pardon 
 in ourselves as venial faults, if they seem to have but slight 
 influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as long as those 
 of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives, that 
 they are dry-rotting the very fibre of will and conscience, so 
 that, if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or 
 a stringent emergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden 
 and complete as that we shudder at in the unreal scene of the 
 theatre. But the primary object of a tragedy is not to inculcate 
 a formal moral. Representing life, it teaches, like life, by 
 indirection, by those nods and winks that are thrown away on 
 us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be sure, 
 plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have 
 kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a 
 father s death to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy ; but 
 Lear may teach us to draw the line more clearly between a wise 
 generosity and a loose-handed weakness of giving ; Macbeth, 
 how one sin involves another, and forever another, by a fatal 
 parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks forbidden 
 doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that may 
 not be so dark as blood, but that will not out ; Hamlet, that all 
 the noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like 
 sand through the grasp of an infirm purpose ; Othello, that the 
 perpetual silt of some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious 
 temper depositing their one impalpable layer after another, may 
 build up a shoal on which an heroic life and an otherwise 
 magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All this we 
 may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well 
 aware of all this and more ; but I do not believe that he wrote 
 his plays with any such didactic purpose. He knew human 
 nature too well not to know that one thorn of experience is 
 worth a whole wilderness of warning that, where one man 
 shapes his life by precept and example, there are a thousand 
 who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. 
 He did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the 
 nailing of one hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next 
 from coming down souse into the hen-yard. No, it is not the
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 145 
 
 poor bleaching victim hung up to moult its draggled feathers in 
 the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the hawk-nature 
 as well as the hen-nature ; and if he is unequalled in anything, 
 it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of reason, 
 that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and 
 misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist 
 
 Whether I have fancied anything into "Hamlet" which the 
 author never dreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern 
 myself to inquire. Poets are always entitled to a royalty on 
 whatever we find in their works ; for these fine creations as 
 truly build themselves up in the brain as they are built up with 
 deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will, that which the 
 artist did not mean to put into his work, but which found itself 
 there by some generous process of Nature of which he was as 
 unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has 
 somewhat in it that snatches us into sympathy with higher 
 things than those which come by plot and observation. Goethe 
 wrote his " Faust" in its earliest form without a thought of the 
 deeper meaning which the exposition of an age of criticism was 
 to find in it : without foremeaning it, he had impersonated in 
 Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall this subtract 
 from the debt we owe him ? Not at all. If originality were 
 conscious of itself, it would have lost its right to be original. I 
 believe that Shakespeare intended to impersonate in Hamlet 
 not a mere metaphysical entity, but a man of flesh and blood : 
 yet it is certainly curious how prophetically typical the char 
 acter is of that introversion of mind which is so constant a 
 phenomenon of these latter days, of that over-consciousness 
 which wastes itself in analysing the motives of action instead of 
 acting. 
 
 The old painters had a rule, that all compositions should be 
 pyramidal in form a central figure, from which the others 
 slope gradually away on the two sides. Shakespeare probably 
 had never heard of this rule, and, if he had, would not have 
 been likely to respect it more than he has the so-called classical 
 unities of time and place. But he understood perfectly the 
 artistic advantages of gradation, contrast, and relief. Taking 
 
 560
 
 146 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 Hamlet as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character, 
 which, on the one hand, is contrasted with the feebleness that 
 springs from overweening conceit in Polonius and with frailty 
 of temperament in Ophelia, while, on the other hand, it is 
 brought into fuller relief by the steady force of Horatio and the 
 impulsive violence of Laertes, who is resolute from thoughtless 
 ness, just as Hamlet is irresolute from overplus of thought. 
 
 If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem to be. 
 that Will is Fate, and that, Will once abdicating, the inevitable 
 successor in the regency is Chance. Had Hamlet acted, 
 instead of musing how good it would be to act, the king might 
 have been the only victim. As it is, all the main actors in the 
 story are the fortuitous sacrifice of his irresolution. We see 
 how a single great vice of character at last draws to itself as 
 allies and confederates all other weaknesses of the man, as in 
 civil wars the timid and the selfish wait to throw themselves 
 upon the stronger side. 
 
 " In Life s small things be resolute and great 
 To keep thy muscles trained : know st thou when Fate 
 Thy measure takes ? or when she ll say to thee, 
 I find theo worthy, do this thing for me ? " 
 
 I have said that it was doubtful if Shakespeare had any 
 conscious moral intention in his writings. I meant only that 
 he was purely and primarily poet. And while he was an 
 English pcet in a sense that is true of no other, his method was 
 thoroughly Greek, yet with this remarkable difference that, 
 while the Greek dramatists took purely national themes and 
 gave them a universal interest by their mode of treatment, he 
 took what may be called cosmopolitan traditions, legends of 
 human nature, and nationalised them by the infusion of his 
 perfectly Anglican breadth of character and solidity of under 
 standing. Wonderful as his imagination and fancy are, his 
 perspicacity and artistic discretion are more so. This country 
 tradesman s son, coming up to London, could set high-bred 
 wits, like Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen 
 such as are seen nowhere else but on the canvas of Titian ; he
 
 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. i_i; 
 
 could take Ulysses away from Homer and expand the shrewd 
 and crafty islander into a statesman whose words are the pith 
 of history. But what makes him yet more exceptional was his 
 utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of character 
 which enabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so 
 unnoticeable a good citizen as to leave no incidents for 
 biography. His material was never far-sought (it is still dis 
 puted whether the fullest head of which we have record were 
 cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school precedent !) ; but 
 he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannot parallel, 
 identified himself with it, yet remained always its born and 
 questionless master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the 
 stage he makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, 
 and even his pathos ; he finds a fading rustic superstition, and 
 shapes out of it ideal Pucks, Titanias, and Ariels, in whose 
 existence statesmen and scholars believe forever. Always poet, 
 he subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives in " Hamlet" the 
 churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on the messenger of 
 God s revenge against murder ; always philosopher, he traces 
 in "Macbeth" the metaphysics of apparitions, painting the 
 shadowy Banquo only on the o erwrought brain of the 
 murderer, and staining the hand of his wife-accomplice 
 (because she was the more refined and higher nature) with 
 the disgustful blood-spot that is not there. We say he had 
 no moral intention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not 
 his to deal with the realities, but only with the shows of things ; 
 yet, with a temperament so just, an insight so inevitable as his, 
 it was impossible that the moral reality, which underlies the 
 mirage of the poet s vision, should not always be suggested. 
 His humour and satire are never of the destructive kind ; what he 
 does in that way is suggestive only not breaking bubbles with 
 Trier s hammer, but puffing them away with the breath of a 
 Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genial 
 cynic. Men go about to prove the existence of a God ! Was 
 it a bit of phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, 
 that, mixing with them, we feel as if we ourselves were but 
 fleeting magic-lantern shadows ?
 
 148 SHAKESPEARE ONCE MORE. 
 
 But higher even than the genius we rate the character o 
 this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote. 
 What has he told us of himself? In our self-exploiting nine 
 teenth century, with its melancholy liver-complaint, how serene 
 and high he seems ! If he had sorrows, he has made them the 
 woof of everlasting consolation to his kind ; and if, as poets are 
 wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting 
 air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the 
 many windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul.
 
 MILTON* 
 
 IF the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk 
 which Mr. Masson is giving to that of Milton, their authors 
 should send a phial of elixir vita with the first volume, that 
 a purchaser might have some valid assurance of surviving 
 to see the last. Mr. Masson has already occupied thirteen 
 hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to his 
 thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches 
 between the dates of the first and second instalments of his 
 published labours.t As Milton s literary life properly begins 
 at twenty-one, with the " Ode on the Nativity," and as by 
 far the more important part of it lies between the year at 
 which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six, 
 we might seem to have the terms given us by which to 
 make a rough reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land. 
 But when we recollect the baffling character of the winds 
 and currents we have already encountered, and the eddies 
 that may at any time slip us back to the reformation in 
 Scotland or the settlement of New England ; when we 
 consider, moreover, that Milton s life overlapped the grand 
 
 * The Life of John Milton : narrated in Connection with the Political^ 
 Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By DAVID MASSON,- 
 M.D., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the 
 University of Edinburgh. Vols. I., II. 1638-1643. London and New 
 York : Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. pp. xii., 608. 
 
 The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction, Notes, 
 and an Essay on Milton s English, by DAVID MASSON, M.A., LL.D., 
 Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of. 
 Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co. 1874. 
 
 t Since this essay was written, the remaining volumes have appeared,- 
 and Mr. Masson s work is now complete. ED.
 
 igo MILTON. 
 
 siede of French literature, with its irresistible temptations tti 
 digression and homily for a man of Mr. Masson s temperament, 
 we may be pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement 
 escape us. We envy the secular leisures of Melhusaleh, and 
 are thankful that his biography at least (if written in the same 
 longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject 
 would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson s spacious 
 predilections 1 Even if he himself can count on patriarchal 
 prorogations of existence, let him hang a print of the Countess 
 of Desmond in his study to remind him of the ambushes which 
 Fate lays for the toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared 
 to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his work. Even 
 with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I feel by 
 no means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in her 
 husband s house ; for it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, 
 with the diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us 
 while he goes into an exhaustive account of the Westminster 
 Assembly, and the political and religious notions of the 
 Massachusetts Puritans. One could not help thinking, after 
 having got Milton fairly through college, that he was never 
 more mistaken in his life than when he wrote, 
 
 " How soon hath Time, that subtle thief of youth, 
 Stolen on his wing my three-and-lwentieth year ! " 
 
 Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time s wheels? 
 
 It is plain from the preface to the second volume that Mr. 
 Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is 
 wrong, and that Milton ought somehow to be more than a mere 
 incident of his own biography. He tells us that, " whatever 
 may be thought by a hasty parson looking in on the subject 
 from the outside, no one can study the life of Milton as it ought 
 to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and 
 intimately the contemporary history of England, and even 
 incidentally of Scotland and Ireland too. . . . Thus on the very 
 compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the biography, a history 
 grew on my hands. It was not in human nature to confine the 
 historical inquiries, once they were in progress, within the;
 
 MILTON. igi 
 
 precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the biography, 
 even had it been possible to determine these limits beforehand ; 
 and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me, 
 was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always 
 with a sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous 
 in itself." If a "hasty person" be one who thinks eleven 
 years rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere 
 he begin his next sentence, I take to myself the sting of Mr. 
 Masson s covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a pusillanimity 
 that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem its 
 promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. I could scarce 
 await the "Autocrat" himself so long. The heroic age of 
 literature is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too 
 heavy (olov vvv pporot) for the descendants of men to whom the 
 folio was a pas .ime. But what does Mr. Masson mean by 
 "continuous"? To me it seems rather as if his somewhat 
 rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted 
 no\v and then by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like 
 Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us 
 what he has been doing in the meanwhile. The reader, 
 immersed in Scottish politics or the schemes of Archbishop 
 Laud, is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being 
 reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of 
 the drama. Pars minima est ipsa puella sui. 
 
 If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of 
 his age as well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in 
 order to understand the motives and conduct of the man we 
 must first make ourselves intimate with the time in which he 
 lived. We have therefore no fault to find with the thoroughness 
 of Mr. Masson s " historical inquiries." The more thorough the 
 better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory perform 
 ance of his task. But it is only such contemporary events, 
 opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of 
 the man we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to 
 familiarise ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of 
 explaining them as for understanding him. The biographer, 
 especially of a literary man, need only mark the main currents
 
 152 MILTON. 
 
 of tendency, without being officious to trace out to its marshy 
 source every runlet that has cast in its tiny pitcherful with the 
 rest. Much less should he attempt an analysis of the stream 
 and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever 
 effectual singly and not in combination. Human motives cannot 
 be thus chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any 
 true knowledge of character by such minute subdivision of its 
 ingredients. Nothing is so essential to a biographer as an eye 
 that can distinguish at a glance between real events that 
 are the levers of thought and action, and what Donne calls 
 " unconcerning things, matters of fact" between substantial 
 personages, whose contact or even neighbourhood is influential, 
 and the supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and 
 afterwards the interstices of a biographical dictionary. 
 
 " Time hath a wallet at his back 
 Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion." 
 
 Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and 
 merciful deposit, and not renew for us the bores of a former 
 generation as if we had not enough of our own. But if he 
 cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly com 
 plain when he insists on taking us along with him in the 
 processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted 
 results in their bearing on the life and character of his subject, 
 whether for help or hindrance. We are blinded with the dust 
 of old papers ransacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they 
 have no relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise if he 
 had kept constantly in view what Milton himself says of those 
 who gathered up personal traditions concerning the apostles : 
 " With less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John 
 had written than was listened to one that could say, Here he 
 taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went 
 habited ; and O, happy this house that harboured him, and that 
 cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought 
 such a miracle. . . . Thus while all their tnoughts were 
 poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after such men 
 as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this means they
 
 MILTON. 153 
 
 lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of 
 saving knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." Mr. 
 Masson has so poured out his mind upon circumstances, that his 
 work reminds us of Allston s picture of " Elijah in the Wilder 
 ness," where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at 
 the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape where 
 the very ravens could scarce have found him out, except by divine 
 commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a speck on the 
 enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through which he 
 may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. I will cite 
 a single example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is 
 reduced in order to hitch Milton on to his own biography. He 
 devotes the first chapter of his Second Book to the meeting 
 of the Long Parliament. " Already," he tells us, " in the earlier 
 part of the day, the Commons had gone through the ceremony 
 of hearing the writ for the Parliament read, and the names of 
 the members that had been returned called over by Thomas 
 Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the Crown of Chancery. His deputy, 
 Agar, Miltoris brother-in-la.iv, may have been in attendance on 
 such an occasion. During the preceeding month or two, at all 
 events, Agar and his subordinates in the Crown Office had 
 been unusually busy with the issue of the writs and with the 
 other work connected with the opening of Parliament." (Vol. 
 ii. p. 156.) Mr. Masson s resolute "at all events" is very 
 amusing. Meanwhile, 
 
 " The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." 
 
 Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, if to him 
 we owe the modern fashion of writing history picturesquely. 
 At least his method leads to most unhappy results when 
 essayed by men to whom nature has denied a sense of what 
 the picturesque really is. The historical picturesque does not 
 consist, in truth of costume and similar accessories, but in the 
 grouping, attitude, and expression of the figures, caught when 
 they are unconscious that the artist is sketching them. The 
 moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man 
 of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an
 
 154 MILTON. 
 
 inferior artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be 
 squeezed out of colour-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria 
 of jack-boots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property-room of 
 a deserted theatre, as if the light had been scenical and illusory, 
 the world an unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights. 
 It is the power of catching the actors in great events at 
 unawares that makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries 
 so vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the great 
 masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art 
 when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death 
 of Monseigneur, he saw " du premier coup (Pceil vivement 
 porte", tout ce qui leur echappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit." 
 It is the gift of producing this reality that almost makes us 
 blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a keyhole, and 
 had surprised secrets to which we had no right it is this only 
 that can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle 
 has this power of contemporising himself with bygone times, 
 he cheats us to 
 
 " Play with your fancies and believe we see ; " 
 
 but we find the tableaux vivanis of the apprentices who " deal 
 in his command without his power," and who compel us to 
 work very hard indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome. 
 The effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty bow has 
 filled the air of recent literature with more than enough fruitless 
 twanging. 
 
 Mr. Masson s style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably 
 awkward when he strives to make up for the want of St Simon s 
 premier coup cPaeil by impertinent details of what we must call 
 the pseudo-dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to 
 have traced Milton from the University to a " suburb sink " of 
 London ? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to 
 himself, "A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the 
 trouble to walk all the way to Aldersgate here, to peep 
 up the entry where I live, and so have an exact notion of 
 my whereabouts ? There has been plague in the neighbour 
 hood certainly ; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep
 
 MILTON. 155 
 
 tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall s innuendo 
 that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that lie 
 would rather " choose a virgin of mean fortunes honestly 
 bred?" Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm of 
 what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this wise: "What 
 have we here ? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to 
 construe it, than a marriage advertisement ! Ho, all ye 
 virgins of England (widows need not apply), here is an oppor 
 tunity such as seldom occurs : a bachelor, unattached ; age, 
 thirty-three years and three or four months ; height [Milton, 
 by the way, would have said hightti\, middle or a little less ; 
 personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion 
 and light auburn hair ; circumstances independent ; tastes 
 intellectual and decidedly musical ; principles Root-and-Branc*h ! 
 Was there already any young maiden in whose bosom, had 
 such an advertisement come in her way, it would have raised a 
 conscious flutter ? If so, did she live near Oxford?" If there 
 is anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to write 
 imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being 
 facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with 
 the broad damp foot of a hippopotamus. 
 
 I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history, 
 when it means, as it too often does, that dulness has a right of 
 sanctuary in gravity. Too well do I recall the sorrows of my 
 youth, when I was shipped in search of knowledge on the long 
 Johnsonian swell of the last century, favourable to anything but 
 the calm digestion of historic truth. I had even then an uneasy 
 suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that thoughts were 
 never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were strong 
 enough to go alone. But surely there should be such a thing 
 .as good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian 
 himself, that should not allow him to play any tricks with the 
 dignity of his subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto 
 invested the figure of Milton, and our image of him has dwelt 
 securely in ideal remoteness from the vulgarities of life. No 
 diaries, no private letters, remain to give the idle curiosity of 
 -after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion of
 
 156 MILTON. 
 
 his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles were written 
 in the language of Cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was 
 so great that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself, 
 he always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose 
 self-respect even in youth was so profound that it resembles the 
 reverence paid by other men to a far-off and idealised character 
 that he should be treated in this off-hand familiar fashion by 
 his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, a violation of 
 good manners no less than of the laws of biographic art. Milton 
 is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with im 
 punity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such presumpt 
 uous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least, be 
 kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer ! 
 
 But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idiomatic, 
 can do something worse than what has been hitherto quoted. 
 He can be even vulgar. Discussing the motives of Milton s 
 first marriage, he says, "Did he come seeking his ^500, and 
 did Mrs. Powell heave a daughter at him?" We have heard of 
 a woman throwing herself at a man s head, and the image is a 
 somewhat violent one ; but what is this to Mr. Masson s 
 improvement on it ? It has been sometimes affirmed that the 
 fitness of an image may be tested by trying whether a 
 picture could be made of it or not. Mr. Masson has 
 certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical 
 school of British art. A little further on, speaking of 
 Mary Powell, he says, " We have no portrait of her, nor any 
 account of her appearance ; but on the usual rule of the 
 elective affinities ofopposites, Milton being fair, we will vote 
 her to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of the good 
 taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the fact 
 that Mr. Masson himself had left us in doubt whether the 
 match was one of convenience or inclination. I know not how 
 it may be with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to- 
 resent this hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "0/2 wilf 
 vote." In some cases, Mr. Masson s indecorums in respect of 
 style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at humour by 
 one who has an imperfect notion of its ingredients. In such
 
 MILTON. 157 
 
 experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive element of the 
 compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious. 
 Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the 
 cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque 
 and vivid, I shall leave the reader to judge by an example or 
 two. In the manuscript copy of Milton s sonnet in which he 
 claims for his own house the immunity which the memory of 
 Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had 
 originally been, " On his Door when the City expected an 
 Assault? Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted 
 " When the Assault -was intended to the City" Mr. Masson 
 fancies "a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair;" but 
 we think rather that Milton s quiet assumption of equality with 
 two such famous poets was as seriously characteristic as 
 Dante s ranking himself sesto tra cotanto senno. Mr. Masson 
 takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince 
 Rupert s troopers entering the poet s study and finding some of 
 his "Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about in 
 advertently. Oho ! the Cavalier Captain might then have said, 
 
 Pindar and Euripides are all very well, by G ! I ve been 
 
 at college myself ; and when I meet a gentleman and scholar, 
 I hope I know how to treat him ; but neither Pindar nor 
 Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of Eng 
 land, by G ! It won t do, Mr. Milton ! " This, it may be 
 
 supposed, is Mr. Masson s way of being funny and dramatic at 
 the same time. Good taste is shocked with this barbarous 
 dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her son ? Again, 
 when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter 
 of 1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, " It was more 
 than an insult ; it was a sarcasm ! It was as if the King, while 
 giving Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his 
 royal eye over that reverend Presbyter s back ! " Now one can 
 conceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn League 
 and Covenant, but never his father under any circumstances. 
 He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but 
 surely we may take Marvell s word for it, that 
 " He nothing common did or mean,"
 
 158 MILTON. 
 
 upon any of the " memorable scenes " of his life. The image 
 is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarises the 
 chief personage in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a 
 great, was at least a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do 
 worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, who 
 wrote in defence of the Independents against Thomas 
 Edwards, he says, " People wondered who this she-Brownist, 
 Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest 
 in her when they found that she was an oldish woman, 
 and a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in 
 London. Indeed, she put her nails into Mr. Edwards with 
 some effect." Why did he not say at once, after the good 
 old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his 
 face?" In another place he speaks of "Satan standing 
 with his staff around him." Mr. Masson s style, a little 
 Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse when forced to 
 condescend to every-day matters. He can no more dismount 
 and walk than the man in armour on a Lord Mayor s day. 
 " It [Aldersgate Street] stretches away northwards a full fourth 
 of a mile as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by 
 Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the name of Alders- 
 gate Street, and, under the new names of Goswell Street and 
 Goswell Road, completes its tendency towards the suburbs and 
 fields about Islington." What a noble work might not the 
 Directory be if composed on this scale ! The imagination even 
 of an alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile 
 of continuous thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these 
 passages of civic grandeur ; but lie is more surprising, on the 
 whole, where he has an image to deal with. Speaking of 
 Milton s " two-handed engine" in " Lycidas," he says: "May 
 not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming Eng 
 lish Parliament, with its two Houses ? Whatever he meant, his 
 prophecy had come true. As he sat among his books in Alders- 
 gate Street, the two-handed engine at the door of the English 
 Church was on the swing. Once, twice, thrice, it had swept its 
 arcs to gather energy ; now it was on the backmost poise, and 
 the blow was to descend." One cannot help wishing that Mr.
 
 MILTON. 159 
 
 Masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast in 
 Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel. There is 
 something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no 
 matter what he meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he 
 might mean " whatever else " he pleased, so long as he may 
 have meant what we choose to think he did, reasoning back 
 ward from the assumed fulfilment ! But, perhaps, there may 
 be detected in Mr. Masson s "swept its arcs" a little of that 
 prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous 
 a latitude. How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a 
 broom (or besom, to be more dignified), 
 
 " Sweeping vehemently sweeping, 
 No pause admitted, no design avowed," 
 
 like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the Syracusan 
 saw ? I make the suggestion modestly, though somewhat 
 encouraged by Mr. Masson s system of exegesis, which reminds 
 one of the casuists doctrine of probables, in virtue of which a 
 man may be probabiliter obligatus and probabiliter deobligatus 
 at the same time. But, perhaps, the most remarkable instance 
 of Mr. Masson s figures of speech is where we are told that the 
 king might have established a bona fide government "by 
 giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary 
 element in his Council, and inducing the old leaven in it either 
 to accept the new policy, or to withdraw and become inactive? 
 There is something consoling in the thought that yeast should 
 be accessible to moral suasion. It is really too bad that bread 
 should ever be heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral 
 sense as should " induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr. 
 Masson s unhappy infection with the vivid style, an instance 
 or two shall be given in justification of what has been 
 alleged against him in that particular. He says of Loudon 
 that " he was committed to the Tower, where for more than 
 two months he lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner 
 had of a chop with the executioner s axe on a scaffold on 
 Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidiouf, but the word "chop"
 
 160 MILTON. 
 
 offends my ears with its coarseness, or, if that be too strong, 
 has certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly 
 placed. Old Auchinleck s saying of Cromwell, that " he gart 
 kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good example 
 of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe and the block, 
 and giving one of those dreadful hints to the imagination 
 which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose 
 skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly 
 picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will serve also 
 as an example of that tendency to surplusage which adds to 
 the bulk of Mr. Masson s sentences at the cost of their 
 effectiveness. If he had said simply "chop on Tower Hill" 
 (if chop there must be), it had been quite enough, for we all 
 know that the executioner s axe and the scaffold are implied in 
 it. Once more, and I have done with the least agreeable part 
 of my business. Mr. Masson, after telling over again the 
 story of Strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus : 
 " On Wednesday, the I2th of May, that proud curly head, the 
 casket of that brain of power, rolled on the scaffold of Tower 
 Hill." Why curly ? Surely it is here a ludicrous impertinence. 
 This careful thrusting fonvard of outward and unmeaning 
 particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture which 
 genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in 
 modern descriptive writing. It reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley 
 expedient of dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the 
 very clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with the 
 real halter round their necks wherewith they expiated it. It is 
 probably very effective with the torpid sensibilities of the class 
 who look upon wax figures as works of art. True imaginative 
 power works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving to 
 wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the 
 more there to the mind of the spectator because it is not there 
 at all, is a type of the methods it employs and the intensity of 
 their action. 
 
 Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. Masson s faults 
 of manner, which I should not have dwelt on so long had they 
 not greatly marred a real enjoyment in the reading, and were
 
 MILTON. 1 61 
 
 they not the ear-mark of a school which has become unhappily 
 numerous, I turn to the consideration of his work as a whole. 
 I think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was guilty 
 of a misnomer in his title. His book is not so much a life oi 
 Milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader 
 may sift the main facts of the poet s biography. His passion 
 for minute detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on 
 points mainly, if not altogether, irrelevant. He gives us a 
 Survey of British Literature, occupying one hundred and 
 twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written in the main with 
 good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion upon 
 every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a con 
 temporary of Milton. I have no doubt all this would be 
 serviceable and interesting to Mr. Masson s classes in Edin 
 burgh University, and they may well be congratulated on 
 having so competent a teacher ; but what it has to do with 
 Milton, unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to 
 have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not 
 clearly see. Most readers of a life of Milton may be presumed 
 to have some knowledge of the general literary history of the 
 time, or at any rate to have the means of acquiring it, and 
 Milton s manner (his style was his own) was very little affected 
 by any of the English poets, with the single exception, in his 
 earlier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also has some 
 thing to say about everybody, from Wentworth to the obscurest 
 Brownist fanatic who was so much as heard of in England 
 during Milton s lifetime. If this theory of a biographer s 
 duty should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see "A 
 Life of Thackeray, or who was who in England, France, 
 and Germany during the first Half of the Nineteenth 
 Century." These digressions of Mr. Masson s from what 
 should have been his main topic (he always seems some 
 how to be " completing his tendency towards the suburbs " 
 of his subject) gave him an uneasy feeling that he must get 
 Milton in somehow or other at inteivals, if it were only to 
 icmind the reader that he has a certain connection with the 
 book. He is eager even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though
 
 1 62 MILTON. 
 
 an untenable one, if it will only increase the number of pages 
 devoted specially to Milton, and thus lessen the apparent 
 disproportion between the historical and the biographical 
 matter. Milton tells us that his morning wont had been " to 
 read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention 
 be weary, or memory have his full fraught ; then with useful 
 and generous labours preserving the body s health and hardi 
 ness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to 
 the mind, to the cause of religion and our country s liberty when 
 it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover 
 their stations rather than see the ruin of our Protestantism and 
 the enforcement of a slavish life." Mr. Masson snatches at the 
 hint : " This is interesting," he says ; " Milton, it seems, has 
 for some time been practising drill ! The City Artillery Ground 
 was near. . . . Did Milton, among others, make a habit of 
 going there of mornings ? Of this more hereafter." When Mr. 
 Masson returns to the subject he speaks of Milton s " all but 
 positive statement . . . that in the spring of 1642, or a few 
 months before the breaking out of the Civil War, he was in the 
 habit of spending a part of each day in military exercise some 
 where not far from his house in Aldcrsgate Street" What he 
 puts by way of query on page 402 has become downright 
 certainty seventy-nine pages further on. The passage from 
 Milton s tract makes no " statement " of the kind it pleases Mr. 
 Masson to assume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that 
 he took regular exercise, because he believed that moral, no less 
 than physical, courage demanded a sound body. And what 
 proof does Mr. Masson bring to confirm his theory? Nothing 
 more nor less than two or three passages in " Paradise Lost," 
 of which I shall quote only so much as is essential to his 
 
 argument : 
 
 " And now 
 
 Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front 
 Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise 
 Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield, 
 Awaiting what command their mighty chief 
 Had U> impose."* 
 
 Book 1., 562-6C7.
 
 MILTON. 163 
 
 Mr. Masson assures us that " there are touches in this descrip 
 tion (as, for example, the ordering of arms at the moment of 
 halt, and without word of command) too exact and technical 
 to have occurred to a mere civilian. Again, at the same 
 review . . . 
 
 He now prepared 
 
 To speak ; whereat their doubled ranks they bend 
 From wing to wing, and half enclose him round 
 With all his peers ; attention held them mute. * 
 
 To the present day this is the very process, or one of the 
 processes, when a commander wishes to address his men. 
 They wheel inward and stand at attention. " But his main 
 argument is the phrase ported spears," in Book Fourth, on 
 which he has an interesting and valuable comment. He argues 
 the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that 
 Milton must have had some practical experience of military drill. 
 I confess a very grave doubt whether "attention" and "ordered" 1 
 in the passages cited have any other than their ordinary mean 
 ing, and Milton could never have looked on at the pike- 
 exercise without learning what " ported " meant. But, be this 
 as it may, I will venture to assert that there was not a boy in 
 New England, forty years ago, who did not know more of the 
 manual than is implied in Milton s use of these terms. Mr. 
 Masson s object in proving Milton to have been a proficient in 
 these martial exercises is to increase our wonder at his not 
 entering the army. " If there was any man in England of 
 whom one might surely have expected that he would be in 
 arms among the Parliamentarians," he says, "that man was 
 Milton." Milton may have had many an impulse to turn 
 soldier, as all men must in such times, but I do not believe that 
 he ever seriously intended it. Nor is it any matter of reproach 
 that he did not. It is plain, from his works, that he believed 
 himself very early set apart and consecrated for tasks of a very 
 different kind, for services demanding as much self-sacrifice 
 and of more enduring result. I have no manner of doubt tliaf 
 
 * Ibid., 615-1518.
 
 1 64 MILTON. 
 
 he, like Dante, believed himself divinely inspired with what he 
 had to utter, and, if so, why not also divinely guided in what he 
 should do or leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he 
 loved a weapon far more effective than a sword. 
 
 It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson s method, that a great 
 deal of space is devoted to what might have befallen his hero 
 and what he might have seen. This leaves a broad margin 
 indeed for the insertion of purely hypothetical incidents. Nay, 
 so desperately addicted is he to what he deems the vivid style 
 of writing, that he even goes out of his way to imagine what 
 might have happened to anybody living at the same time with 
 Milton. Having told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his 
 last visit to London, perhaps saw Milton " a fair child of six 
 playing at his father s door," he must needs conjure up an 
 imaginary supper at the Mermaid. "Ah! what an evening 
 . . . was that ; and how Ben and Shakespeare be-tongued 
 each other, while the others listened and wondered ; and how, 
 when the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard their 
 departing footsteps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs." 
 Certainly, if we may believe the old song, the stars "had 
 nothing else to do," though their chance of shining in the 
 middle of a London November may perhaps be reckoned 
 very doubtful. An author should consider how largely the 
 :art of writing consists in knowing what to leave in the ink 
 stand. 
 
 Mr. Masson s volumes contain a great deal of very valuable 
 matter, whatever one may think of its bearing upon the life of 
 Milton. The chapters devoted to Scottish affairs are particu 
 larly interesting to a student of the Great Rebellion, its causes 
 and concomitants. His analyses of the two armies, of the 
 Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly, are sensible 
 additions to our knowledge. A too painful thoroughness, 
 indeed, is the criticism we should make on his work as a 
 biography. Even as a history, the reader might complain that 
 it confuses by the multiplicity of its details, while it wearies by 
 want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks the skill of an 
 accomplished story-teller. A fact is to him a fact, never mind
 
 MILTON. 165 
 
 how unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his 
 devotion to accuracy. The very order of his title-page, The 
 Life of Milton, narrated in Connection with the Political^ 
 Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time, shows, it 
 should seem, a misconception of the true nature of his subject. 
 Milton s chief importance, it might be fairly said his only 
 importance, is a literary one. His place is fixed as the most 
 classical of our poets. 
 
 Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did Milton 
 leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in 
 the history of opinion. In both these lines of his activity 
 circumstances forced upon him the position of a controversialist 
 whose aims and results are by the necessity of the case 
 desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him and Hobbes 
 after him had a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles than 
 he. His studies in these matters were perfunctory and 
 occasional, and his opinions were heated to the temper of the 
 times and shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum, some 
 times to his own convenience at the moment, instead of being 
 the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened by 
 intellectual and above all historical sympathy with his subject. 
 His interest was rather in the occasion than the matter of the 
 controversy. No aphorisms of political science are to be 
 gleaned from his writings as from those of Burke. His intense 
 personality could never so far dissociate itself from the question 
 at issue as to see it in its larger scope and more universal 
 relations. He was essentially a doctrinaire, ready to sacrifice 
 everything to what at the moment seemed the abstract truth, 
 and with no regard to historical antecedents and consequences, 
 provided those of scholastic logic were carefully observed. 
 He has no respect for usage or tradition except when they 
 count in his favour, and sees no virtue in that power of the past 
 over the minds and conduct of/ men which alone insures the 
 continuity of national growth and is the great safeguard of 
 order and progress. The life of a nation was of less importance 
 to him than that it should be conformed to certain principles of 
 belief and conduct. Burke could distil political wisdom out of
 
 1 66 MILTON. 
 
 history because he had a profound consciousness of the soul 
 that underlies and outlives events, and of the national character 
 that gives them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his 
 words are still living and operative, while Milton s pamphlets are 
 strictly occasional and no longer interesting except as they illus 
 trate him. In the Latin ones especially there is an odd mixture 
 of the pedagogue and the public orator. His training, so far 
 as it was thorough, so far, indeed, as it may be called optional, 
 was purely poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made 
 boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic 
 honey. 
 
 Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match for some of 
 his antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical learning. But 
 he brought into the contest a white heat of personal conviction 
 that counted for much. His self-consciousness, always active, 
 identified him with the cause he undertook. " I conceived 
 myself to be now not as mine own person, but as a member 
 incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded and whereof 
 I had declared myself openly to be the partaker."* Accord 
 ingly it does not so much seem that he is the advocate of 
 Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or the People of England, 
 as that all these are he, and that he is speaking for himself. He 
 was not nice in the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows 
 a dirty lump from the dunghill of Luther ; but now and then the 
 gnarled sticks of controversy turn to golden arrows of Phoebus 
 in his trembling hands, singing as they fly and carrying their 
 messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his prose as in his 
 verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and there is 
 that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious 
 feet. From the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated 
 and set apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a divine 
 mission which sometimes lifts his speech from personal to 
 cosmopolitan significance ; his genius unmistakably asserts 
 itself from time to time, calling down fire from heaven to 
 kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the 
 
 * "Apology for Smectyinnuus,"
 
 MILTON, 167 
 
 hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of 
 mankind. Plainly enough here was a man who had received 
 something other than Episcopal ordination. Mysterious and 
 awful powers had laid their unimaginable hands on that fair head 
 and devoted it to a nobler service. Yet it must be confessed that, 
 with the single exception of the " Areopagitica," Milton s tracts 
 are wearisome reading, and going through them is like a long 
 sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated for the 
 moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a 
 drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of 
 silver, as if the conscious element were giving out all the moon 
 light it had garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon 
 its pallid regent. Which, being interpreted, means that his 
 prose is of value because it is Milton s, because it sometimes 
 exhibits in an inferior degree the qualities of his verse, and not 
 for its power of thought, of reasoning, or of statement. It is 
 valuable, where it is best, for its inspiring quality, like the 
 fervencies of a Hebrew prophet. The English translation of 
 the Bible had to a very great degree Judaised, not the English 
 mind, but the Puritan temper. Those fierce enthusiasts could 
 more easily find elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal 
 Israel than in a practical England. It was convenient to see 
 Amalek or Philistia in the men who met them in the field, and 
 one unintelligible horn or other of the Beast in their theological 
 opponents. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race 
 found something congenial in the English mind. Their national 
 egotism quintessentialised in the prophets was especially 
 sympathetic with the personal egotism of Milton. It was only 
 as an inspired and irresponsible person that he could live on 
 decent terms with his own self-confident individuality. There 
 is an intolerant egotism which identifies itself with omnipo 
 tence,* and whose sublimity is its apology ; there is an 
 intolerable egotism which subordinates the sun to the watch in 
 its own f ob. Milton s was of the former kind, and accordingly 
 
 * " For him I was not sent, nor yet (o free 
 
 That people, victor once, now vil) and base, 
 Deservedly made vassal." P. R., iv. 131-133.
 
 1 68 MILTOX. 
 
 the finest pas-ages in his prose and not the least fine in his 
 verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they 
 are often unconsciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin 
 and combustion hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the 
 Good Old Cause ; Philistia is the Restoration, and what 
 Samson did, that Milton would have done if he could. 
 
 The " Areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that also 
 is a plea rather than an argument, and his interest in the 
 question is not one of abstract principle, but of personal 
 relation to himself. He was far more rhetorician than thinker. 
 The sonorous amplitude of his style was better fitted to persuade 
 the feelings than to convince the reason. The only passages 
 from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional, 
 not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative 
 beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton s power lay in 
 dilation. Touched by him, the simplest image, the most 
 obvious thought, 
 
 " Dilated stood 
 Like Teneriffe or Atlas . . . 
 . . . nor wanted in his grasp 
 What seemed both spear and shield." 
 
 But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective 
 weapon than these fantastic arms of his. He had not the 
 secret of compression that properly belongs to the political 
 thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of himself, " nothing but 
 abstract ideas makes any impression." Almost every aphoristic 
 phrase that he has made current is borrowed from some one of 
 the classics, like his famous 
 
 " License they mean when they cry liberty," 
 
 from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his true 
 function, that of poet, is concerned. It is his peculiar glory 
 that literature was with him so much an art, an end and not a 
 means. Of his political work he has himself told us, " I should 
 not choose this manner of writing, wherein, knowing myself 
 inferior to myself (led by the genial power of nature to another 
 task), I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand."
 
 MILTON, 169 
 
 Mr. Ma-son has given an excellent analysis of these writings, 
 selecting with great judgment the salient passages, which have 
 an air of blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the 
 corrupted passages of Shakespeare. We are particularly 
 thankful to him for his extracts from the pamphlets written 
 against Milton, especially for such as contain criticisms on his 
 style. It is not a little interesting to see the most stately of 
 poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low words. We 
 seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his " choiceful sense" 
 to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his 
 native tongue " search all her coffers round " One cannot help 
 thinking also that his practice in prose, especially in the long 
 involutions of Latin periods, helped him to give that variety of 
 pause and that majestic harmony to his blank-verse which have 
 made it so unapproachably his own. Landor, who, like Milton, 
 seems to have thought in Latin, has caught somewhat more 
 than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his length of 
 stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, 
 but with how long an interval ! Bryant has not seldom attained 
 to its serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats 
 has caught something of its large utterance, but altogether fails 
 of its nervous severity of phrase. Cowper s muse (that moved 
 with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes stiff when (in his 
 translation of Homer) she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of 
 Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays the 
 grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of 
 the slow processes by which Milton arrived at that classicism 
 which sets him apart from, if not above, all our other poets. 
 
 In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. 
 Masson s work as a whole, we are inclined rather to regret his 
 copiousness for his own sake than for ours. The several parts, 
 though disproportionate, are valuable, his research has been 
 conscientious, and he has given us better means of under 
 standing Milton s time than we possessed before. But how is 
 it about Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, 
 for a fine bit of portrait-painting. There is hardly a more 
 stately figure in literary history than Milton s, no life in some of
 
 ryo MILTON. 
 
 its aspects more tragical, except Dante s. In both these great 
 poets, more than in any others, the character of the men makes 
 part of the singular impressiveness of what they wrote and of 
 its vitality with after times. In them the man somehow 
 overtops the author. The works of both are full of autobio 
 graphical confidences. Like Dante, Milton was forced to 
 become a party by himself. He stands out in marked and 
 solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the 
 Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Resto 
 ration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man. 
 Very much alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr. Masson 
 made him alive to us again ? I tear not. At the same time, 
 while we cannot praise either the style or the method of Mr. 
 Masson s work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for it. It is not 
 so much a book for the ordinary reader of biography as for the 
 student, and will be more likely to find its place on the library- 
 shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any sense belong to 
 light literature, but demands all the muscle ot the trained and 
 vigorous reader. " Truly, in respect ot itself, it is a good life ; 
 but in respect that it is Milton s life it is naught." 
 
 Mr. Masson s intimacy with the facts and dates of Milton s 
 career renders him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake 
 an edition of the poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has 
 distinguished merits. The introductions to the several poems 
 are excellent, and leave scarcely anything to be desired. The 
 general introduction, on the other hand, contains a great deal 
 that might well have been omitted, and not a little that is posi 
 tively erroneous. Mr. Masson s discussions of Milton s English 
 seem often to be those of a Scotsman to whom English is 
 in some sort a foreign tongue. It is almost wholly inconclusive, 
 because confined to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any 
 altogether satisfactory study should surely be Miltonic prose ; 
 nay, should include all the poetry and prose of his own age and 
 of that immediately preceding it. The uses to which Mr. 
 Masson has put the concordance to Milton s poems tempt one 
 sometimes to class him with those whom the poet himself 
 taxed with being "the mousehunts ^.nd ferret? of an index."
 
 MILTON. 171 
 
 For example, what profits a d scussion of Mihon s a.ira.% \ey6fjxva, 
 a matter in which accident is far more influential than choice?* 
 What sensible addition is made to our stock of knowledge by 
 learning that " the word ivoman does not occur in any form in 
 Milton s poetry before Paradise Lost, " and that it is " exactly 
 so with the \\ord. female?" Is it any way remarkable that such 
 words as Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Sin, Satan, and 
 Serpent should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise Lost?" 
 Would it not rather have been surprising that they should 
 not ? Such trifles at best come under the head of what old 
 Warner would have called cumber-minds. It is time to protest 
 against this minute style of editing and commenting great poets. 
 Gulliver s miscroscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the 
 Brobdignagian maids of honour " a mole here and there as 
 broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest 
 Hippocrene after the critic s solar miscroscope has betrayed to 
 us the grammatical, syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical 
 monsters that sprawl in every drop of it. When a poet has 
 been so much edited as Milton, the temptation of whosoever 
 undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen becomes 
 great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not 
 been seen before. 
 
 Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernise the 
 spelling of Milton, for surely the reading of our classics should 
 be made as little difficult as possible, and he is right also in 
 making an exception of such abnormal forms as the poet may 
 fairly be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. His 
 exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the original editions 
 seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself appears 
 to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme 
 in these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine 
 cases to the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by 
 immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills nearly four 
 pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds, in which, as if 
 
 * If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty infer 
 ences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson s invariably printing
 
 172 MILTON. 
 
 to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as men s 
 ears differ, he tells us that the short a sound is the same in 
 man and Darby, the short o sound in God and does, and what 
 he calls the long<? sound in broad and. wrath. Speaking of the 
 apostrophe, Mr. Masson tells us that " it is sometimes inserted, 
 not as a possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark : 
 herds for heroes, myrtle s for myrtles, Gorgons and Hydra s, 
 etc." Now, in books printed about the time of Milton s the 
 apostrophe was put in almost at random, and in all the 
 cases cited is a misprint, except in the first, where it serves to 
 indicate that the pronunciation was not heroes as it had formerly 
 been.* In the "possessive singular of nouns already ending in 
 s," Mr. Masson tells us, " Milton s general practice is not to 
 double the s; thus, Nereus wrinkled look, Glancus spell. The 
 necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms. 
 In a possessive followed by the word sake or the word side, dis 
 like to [of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the 
 inflection. In addition to l for righteousness^ sake] such phrases 
 as for thy name sake] and for mercy sake are allowed to 
 pass ; bedside is normal and riverside nearly so." The neces 
 sities of metre need not be taken into account with a poet like 
 Milton, who never was fairly in his element till he got off the 
 soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his verse under 
 him like a steed that knows his rider. But does the dislike of 
 the double sibilant account for the dropping of the s in these 
 cases ? Is it not far rather the presence of the s already in the 
 sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slovenliness 
 in the pronunciation of double consonants ? It was this which 
 led to such forms as conscience sake and on justice side, and 
 
 * " That you may tell heroes, when you come 
 To banquet with your wife." 
 
 CHAPMAN S Odyssey, viii. 336, 337. 
 
 In the fac-simile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find 
 
 " Thy firm, unshak n vertue ever brings," 
 which shows bow much faith we need give to the apostrophe.
 
 MILTON. 173 
 
 which beguiled Ben Jonson and Dryden into thinking, the one 
 that noise and the other that corps was a plural.* What does 
 Mr. Masson say to hillside, Bankside, seaside, Cheapside, 
 spindleside, spear side, gospelside (of a church), nightside, 
 countrsyide, wayside, brookside, and I know not how many 
 more? Is the first half of these words a possessive? Or is it 
 not rather a noun impressed into the service as an adjective? 
 How do such words differ from hilltop, townend, candlelight, 
 rushlight, cityman, and the like, where no double s can be 
 made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton would not have avoided 
 them for their sibilancy, he who wrote 
 
 " And airy tongues that syllable men s names 
 On sands and shores and desert wildernesses," 
 
 " So in his seed all nations shall be blest," 
 " And seat of Salmanasser whose success," 
 
 verses that hiss like Medusa s head in wrath, and who was, I 
 think, fonder of the sound than any other of our poets. 
 Indeed, in compounds of the kind we always make a distinc 
 tion wholly independent of the doubled s. Nobody would 
 boggle at mountainside; no one would dreajn of saying on 
 the fatherside or motherside. 
 
 Mr. Masson speaks of " the Miltonic forms vanquisht, markt, 
 lookt, etc." Surely he does not mean to imply that these are 
 peculiar to Milton ? Chapman used them before Milton was 
 born, and pressed them farther, as in naKt and saj t for naked 
 and saved. He often prefers the contracted form in his prose 
 also, showing that the full form of the past participle in ed was 
 
 * Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from Drum- 
 ruond, whom (as a Scotchman) he is fond of quoting for an authority in 
 English 
 
 " Sleep, Silence child, sweet father of soft rest." 
 
 The survival of horse for horses is another example. So by a reverse 
 process pult and shay have been vulgarly deduced from the supposed 
 plurals puL -e aiid chaise.
 
 174 MILTON. 
 
 passing out of fashion, though available in verse.* Indeed, I 
 venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling 01 
 accent to be found in Milton which is without example in his 
 predecessors or contemporaries. Even highth, which is thought 
 peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and 
 still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd 
 reason for Milton s preference of it, " as indicating more 
 correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix 
 th to the adjective high." Is an adjective, then, at the base of 
 growth, earth, birth, truth, and other words of this kind ? 
 Home Tooke made a better guess than this. If Mr. Masson be 
 right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the 
 spelling hearth (" Paradise Lost," ix., 624), which he interprets 
 as " collective produce," though in the only other instance 
 where it occurs it is neither more nor less than birth, it should 
 seem that Milton had hit upon Home Tooke s etymology. But 
 it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the 
 original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. Masson has 
 honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton had nothing to do 
 with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word uoutsafe he 
 hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Milton s 
 ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton "must have had a reason 
 for it,"t and finds that reason in " his dislike to [of] the sound 
 
 * Chapman s spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked after 
 his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron s Conspiracy, both 
 dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than the other, for it shows 
 corrections. The more solemn ending in ed was probably kept alive by 
 the reading of the Bible in churches. Though now dropped by the clergy, 
 it is essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in the 
 Old Testament, which are liner and more scientific than anything in the 
 language, unless it be some parts of " Samson Agonistes." I remember an 
 old gentleman who always used the contracted form of the participle in 
 conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable of reading. 
 Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At 
 any rate he has the spelling empuzzeltd in prose. 
 
 t He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though they 
 were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe s " Faustus " two consecutive 
 sentences (in prose) begin with the words " Cursed be he that struck." ID
 
 MILTON. 175 
 
 ch, or to [of] that sound combined with s. . . . . His fine ear 
 taught him not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at 
 large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid 
 harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, except when there 
 might be a musical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the 
 management of the letter s, the frequency of which in English 
 is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I believe, 
 most careful and skilful More rarely, I think, than in Shake 
 speare will one word ending in s be found followed immediately 
 in Milton by another word beginning with the same letter ; or, 
 if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as Moaffs sons, it will 
 be difficult to find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as 
 earttts substance^ of which many writers would think nothing. 
 [With the index to back him Mr. Masson could safely say this.] 
 The same delicacy of ear is even more apparent in his manage 
 ment of the sh sound. He has it often, of course ; but it may 
 be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He writes 
 Basan for Bashan, Sittim for Shittim, Silo for Shiloh, Asdod for 
 Ashdod. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary 
 of the compound sound ch as in church. Of his sensitiveness 
 to this sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose 
 pamphlet, entitled An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A 
 Modest Completion, etc., where, having occasion to quote these 
 lines from one of the Satires* of his opponent, Bishop Hall, 
 
 Teach each hollow grove to sound his love, 
 Wearying echo with one changeless word, 
 
 he adds, ironically, And so he well might, and all his auditory 
 besides, with his teach each ! " Generalisations are always 
 
 a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the old editions (there were 
 three) have stroke and strooke in the first instance, and all agree on strucke 
 in the second. No inference can be drawn from such casualties. 
 
 * The lines are not "from one of the Satires," and Milton made them 
 worse by misquoting and bringing love jiuglingly near to grove. Hall s 
 verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious. He long 
 before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms oi the preface to 
 "1 arudise Lost,
 
 iy<5 MILTON. 
 
 risky, but when extemporised from a single hint they are 
 maliciously so. Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of 
 ear to be set on edge by Hall s echo of teach each. Did 
 Milton reject the h from Bashan and the rest because he 
 disliked the sound of s/t, or because he had found it already 
 rejected by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators 
 of the Bible into English ? Oddily enough, Milton uses words 
 beginning with s/i seven hundred and fifty-four times in his 
 poetry, not to speak of others in which the sound occurs, 
 as, for instance, those ending in tion. Hall, had he lived 
 long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own 
 
 " Manliest, resolute^, breast, 
 As the magnetick hardest iron draws," 
 or his 
 
 " What moves thy inquisition ? 
 Know st thou not that my rising is thy fall, 
 And my promotion thy destruction ? " 
 
 With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have 
 hinted that too much est-est is as fatal to a blank-verse as 
 to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred by those 
 who too eagerly shunned it. Nay, he might even have found 
 an echo almost tallying with his own in 
 
 \ 
 
 "To begirt the almighty throne 
 
 Beseeching or besieging," 
 
 a pun worthy of Milton s worst prose. Or he might have 
 twitted him with "a J^uent king who seeks." As for the sh 
 sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his 
 ear who wrote, 
 
 " QnasAing for anguisA and despite and sAame, 
 
 or again, 
 
 "Then bursting forth 
 
 AfresA with conscious terrors vex me round 
 That rest or intermission, none I find. 
 Before miin eyes in opposition sits 
 Grini Death, my son."
 
 MILTOM in 
 
 And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave his ears 
 unnecessary pain by verses such as these 
 
 "Straight couches close ; then, rising, c/fanges oft 
 His coucAant wafcA, as one who cAose his ground ;" 
 
 still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."* 
 
 The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a 
 melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like 
 " Sabrina Fair") among his earlier poems, as could hardly 
 fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the 
 authors of our best English glees, as ravishing in their 
 instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also 
 showed from the first that larger style which was to be his 
 peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," 
 in the " Solemn Music," and in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood, 
 as regards metrical construction, than anything that had 
 thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of 
 him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till 
 he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various 
 language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevail 
 ing breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that 
 Milton was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of 
 Spenser s fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images. 
 In Milton it extends to the language also, and often to the 
 
 * Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton may have 
 committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of lep st, " for ease of sound." 
 Yet the poet could bear boasCst and one stares and gasps at it doat dst. 
 There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the ch sound predom 
 inates, not without a touch of sh, in a single couplet : 
 
 " Can any mortal mixture of earth s mould 
 
 Breathe such divine enchanting raYiaftment?" 
 So 
 
 " Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss," 
 
 and perhaps 
 
 " I see his tents 
 Pitched about Sechem" 
 might be added. 
 
 562
 
 178 MILTON. 
 
 single words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases 
 of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like 
 Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp 
 him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian 
 airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of 
 martial music. It is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so 
 scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being 
 obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-voweled 
 assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it 
 (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist 
 and a master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with 
 misleading intervals between and unobviously in his 
 blank-verse : 
 
 " There rest, if any rest can harbour there ; 
 And, reassembling our afflicted powers, 
 Consult how we may henceforth most offend 
 Our enemy, our own loss how repair, 
 How overcome this dire calamity, 
 What reinforcement we may gain from hope, 
 If not, what resolution from despair."* 
 
 There is one almost perfect quatrain 
 
 " Before thy fellows, ambitious to win 
 From me some plume, that thy success may show 
 Destruction to the rest. This pause between 
 (Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know ;" 
 
 and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance 
 
 " If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge 
 Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft 
 In worst extremes and on the perilous edge 
 Of battle when it raged, in all assaults." 
 
 * I think Coleridge s nice ear would have blamed the nearness of enemy 
 and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the comma after If 
 not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, ami certainly to 
 keep not a little farther apart from what (" teach each ! ").
 
 MILTON. 179 
 
 There can be little doubt that the rhymes in the first passage 
 cited were intentional, and perhaps they were so in the others ; 
 but Milton s ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming 
 couplets, and others in which the assonance almost becomes 
 rhyme, certainly a fault in blank-verse : 
 
 " From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these), 
 From India and the Golden Chersonese ;" 
 
 "That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired 
 What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired ; " 
 
 "And will alike be punished, whether thou 
 Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow ;" 
 
 "Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, 
 Save what is in destroying, other joy ;" 
 
 "Shall all be Paradise, far happier place 
 Than this of Eden, and far happier days ;" 
 
 "This my long sufferance and my day of grace 
 They who neglect and scorn shall never taste;" 
 
 " So far remote with diminution seen, 
 
 First in his East the glorious lamp was seen. "* 
 >C 
 These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to 
 
 show that Milton s ear was too busy about the larger interests 
 of his measures to be always careful of the lesser. He 
 was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, 
 beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses 
 through the most complicated evolutions without clash or 
 confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be 
 at the same angle. In reading "Paradise Lost" one has a 
 feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed 
 with sunshine or hung with constellations ; the abysses of space 
 are about you ; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen 
 ocean ; thundeis mutter round the horizon ; and if the scene 
 change, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting 
 of mighty winds. His imagination seldom condinses, like 
 
 * " First in his East " is not soothing to the ear.
 
 i8o MILTON. 
 
 Shakespeare s, in the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves 
 better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions, wherein he 
 seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the blue streams of air, 
 controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, 
 and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser expression. 
 He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the 
 indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any 
 other of our poets. He loved epithets (like old and far) that 
 suggest great reaches, whether of space or time. This bias 
 shows itself already in his earlier poems, as where he hears 
 
 " The far off curfew sound 
 Over some vndewatered shore," 
 
 or where he fancies the shores* and sounding seas washing 
 Lycidas far away ; but it reaches its climax in the " Paradise 
 Lost." He produces his effects by dilating our imaginations 
 with an impalpable hint rather than by concentrating them upon 
 too precise particulars. Thus in a famous comparison of his, 
 the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward 
 the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalises always 
 instead of specifying the true secret of the ideal treatment in 
 which he is without peer, and, though everwhere grandiose, he 
 is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with 
 
 " Chiama gli abitator dell ombre eterne 
 II rauco suon della tartarea tromba ; 
 Treman le spaziose atre caverne 
 E 1 aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba," 
 
 but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons 
 with thunder and intestinal convulsions of the earth ; in other 
 words, he is unwary enough to give us a standard of measure 
 ment, and the moment you furnish Imagination with a yard 
 stick she abdicates in favour of her statistical poor-relation, 
 Commonplace. Milton, with this passage in his memory, is too 
 
 * There seems to bu something wrong in this word shores. Did Milton 
 write shoals t
 
 MILTON. 181 
 
 wise to hamper himself with any statement for which he can be 
 brought to book, but wraps himself in a mist of looming 
 indefiniteness ; 
 
 " He called so loud that all the hollow deep 
 Of hell resounded," 
 
 thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his usual 
 method of prolonged evolution. No caverns, however spacious, 
 will serve his turn, because they have limits. He could practise 
 this self-denial when his artistic sense found it needful, whether 
 for variety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to be 
 gained by abruptness. His more elaborate passages have the 
 multitudinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a sullen 
 force again from its own reverberations, but he knew that the 
 attention is recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short 
 without echo and leave us listening. There are no such vistas 
 and avenues of verse as his. In reading the "Paradise Lost" 
 one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives. 
 Milton s respect for himself and for his own mind and its move 
 ments rises well-nigh to veneration. He prepares the way for 
 his thought and spreads on the ground before the sacred feet of 
 his verse tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology and 
 romance. There is no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe 
 at what a reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak 
 of himself, as at the beginning of the Third Book and the 
 Seventh. His sustained strength is especially felt in his 
 beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail ; the wind and 
 tide always serve ; there is never any fluttering of the canvas. 
 In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has 
 to go through with a greal deal &l yo-heave-oJting before he gets 
 under way. And though, in the didactic parts of " Paradise 
 Lost," the wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that 
 will not let us forget it, and ever and anon some eminent verse 
 lifts its long ridge above its tamer peers heaped with stormy 
 memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent ; we feel 
 all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great 
 controlling reason in whose-safe conduct we trust implicity.
 
 r8a MILTON, 
 
 Mr. Masson s discussions of Milton s English are, it seems to 
 me, for the most part unsatisfactory. He occupies some ten 
 pages, for example, with a history of the genitival form z /s, 
 which adds nothing to our previous knowledge on the subject, 
 and which has no relation to Milton except for its bearing on 
 the authorship of some verses attributed to him against the 
 most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr. 
 Masson is altogether too resolute to find traces of what he calls 
 oddly enough " recollectiveness of Latin constructions" in 
 Milton, and scents them sometimes in what would seem to the 
 uninstructed reader very idiomatic English. More than once, 
 at least, he has fancied them by misunderstanding the passage 
 in which they seem to occur. Thus, in " Paradise Lost," xi., 
 520, 521, 
 
 "Therefore so abject is their punishment, 
 Disfiguring not God s likeness but their own," 
 
 has no analogy with eorum deformantium } ior the context shows 
 that it is the punishment which disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson 
 so often finds constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words 
 needing annotation that are common to all poetry, nay, some 
 times to all English, that his notes seem not seldom to have 
 been written by a foreigner. On this passage in " Comus " 
 
 " I do not think my sister so to seek 
 Or so unprincipled in virtue s book 
 And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever 
 As that the single want of light and noise 
 
 (Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) 
 
 Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts," 
 
 Mr. Masson tells us, that " in very strict construction, not being 
 would cling to want as its substantive ; but the phrase passes 
 for the Latin ablative absolute." So on the words forestalling 
 night, " z .e., anticipating. Forestall is literally to anticipate the 
 market by purchasing goods before they are brought to the 
 stall." In the verse, 
 
 " Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good,"
 
 MILTON. 183 
 
 he explains that " while here has the sense of so long as." But 
 Mr. Masson s notes on the language are his weakest. He is 
 careful to tell us, for example, " that there are instances of the 
 use of shine as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other 
 poets." It is but another way of spelling sheen, and if Mr. 
 Masson never heard a shoeblack in the street say, " Shall I 
 give you a shine, sir ?" his experience has been singular.* His 
 notes in general are very good (though too long). Those on 
 the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. I think he 
 is sometimes a little too scornful of parallel passages,! for if 
 there is one thing more striking than another in this poet, it is 
 that his great and original imagination was almost wholly 
 nourished by books, perhaps I should rather say set in motion 
 by them. It is wonderful how, from the most withered and 
 juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his grand images rise like 
 an exhalation ; how from the most battered old lamp caught in 
 that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters of learning, 
 
 * But his etymological notes are worse. For example, "recreant, 
 renouncing the faith, from the old French recroire, which again is from the 
 mediaeval Latin recredere, to believe back, or apostatise." This is pure 
 fancy. The word has no such meaning in either language. He derives 
 serenate from sera, and says that parle means treaty, negotiation, though it 
 is the same word as parley, had the same meanings, and was commonly 
 pronounced like it, as in Marlowe s 
 
 " What, shall we parle with this Christian ?" 
 
 It certainly never meant treaty, though it may have meant negotiation. 
 When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the principals. On the 
 verses, 
 
 " And some flowers and some bays 
 For thy hearse to strew the ways," 
 
 he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken " in our sense of a 
 carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or framework over a 
 tomb," though the obvious meaning is " to strew the ways for thy hearse." 
 How could one do that for a tomb or the framework over it ? 
 
 f A passage from Dante (Inferno, xi. 96-105), with its reference to 
 Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of "Nature taught art," 
 which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and of his earlier commen 
 tators would also have been of great service in the astronomicfj notes.
 
 1 84 MILTON. 
 
 he could conjure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whatever 
 he touches swells and towers. That wonderful passage in 
 " Comus " of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in 
 suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry sentence in 
 Purchas s abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us to 
 understand the poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne 
 had said before Milton, that Adam " was the wisest of all men 
 since" I am glad to find this link between the most profound 
 and the most stately imagination of that age. Such parallels 
 sometimes give a hint also of the historical development of our 
 poetry, of its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every one has 
 noticed Milton s fondness of sonorous proper names, which have 
 not only an acquired imaginative value by association, and so 
 serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a 
 merely musical significance. This he probably caught from 
 Marlowe, traces of whom are frequent in him. There is 
 certainly something of what afterwards came to be called 
 Miltonic in more than one passage of " Tamburlaine," a play in 
 which gigantic force seems struggling from the block, as in 
 Michel Angelo s "Dawn." 
 
 Mr. Masson s remarks on the versification of Milton are, in 
 the main, judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one 
 cannot always agree with him. He seems to understand that 
 our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to 
 what he calls variations, he talks of the " substitution of the 
 Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, 
 or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." 
 This is always misleading. The shift of the accent in what Mr. 
 Masson calls " dissyllabic variations " is common to all penta 
 meter verse, and, in the other case, most of the words cited as 
 trisyllables either were not so in Milton s day,* or were so or 
 not at choice of the poet, according to their place in the verse. 
 There is not an elision of Milton s without precedent in the 
 
 * Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days be a 
 diphthong or not, at will. Milton s practice of elision was confirmed and 
 sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the Italians, with whose 
 nsage in this respect he closely conforms.
 
 MILTON. 185 
 
 dramatists from whom he learned to write blank-verse. Milton 
 was a greater metrist than any of them, except Marlowe and 
 Shakespeare, and he employed the elision (or the slur) oftener 
 than they to give a faint undulation or retardation to his verse, 
 only because his epic form demanded it more for variety s sake. 
 How Milton would have read them, is another question. He 
 certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in his manu 
 scripts. He doubtless composed according to quantity, so far 
 as that is possible in English, and as Cowper somewhat 
 extravagantly says, " gives almost as many proofs of it in his 
 Paradise Lost as there are lines in the poem."* But when 
 Mr. Masson tells us that 
 
 " Self- fed and self-consumed : if this fail," 
 and 
 
 " Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare," 
 
 are " only nine syllables," and that in 
 
 " Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream," 
 
 " either the third foot must be read as an anapcest or the word 
 hugest must be pronounced as one syllable, hugst? \ think 
 Milton would have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of 
 course Milton read it 
 
 " Created hugest that swim th ocean-stream," 
 just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson s fac-simile) 
 
 " Thus sang the uncouth swain to th oaks and rills, 
 a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur precisely as in 
 the Italian poets.t " Gest that swim " would be rather a knotty 
 anaptzst, an insupportable foot indeed ! And why is even 
 hug st worse than Shakespeare s 
 
 " Young st follower of thy drum ? " 
 In the same way he says of 
 
 " For we have also our evening and our morn," 
 
 * Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January 1791. 
 
 t So Dante : 
 
 " Ma sapienza e amore e virtute." 
 So Donne : 
 
 " Simony and sodomy in churchmen s lives."
 
 tS6 MILTON. 
 
 that "the metre of this line is irregular," and of the rapidly fine 
 
 " Came flying and in mid-air aloud thus cried," 
 
 that it is "a line of unusual metre." Why more unusual than 
 " As being the contrary to his high will ? " 
 
 Whnt would Mr. Masson say to these three verses from 
 
 Dekkar ? 
 
 " Ami knowing so much, I muse thon art so poor ;" 
 
 " I fan away the &\\$,t flying in mine eyes ; " 
 
 " Flowing o er with court news only of you and them," 
 
 All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) 
 were normally of one syllable, permissibly of two.* If Mr. 
 Masson had studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has 
 studied hint, he would never have said that the verse, 
 " Not this rock only ; his omnipresence fills," 
 
 was " peculiar as having a distinct syllable of over-measure. 
 He retains Milton s spelling of hunderd without perceiving the 
 metrical reason for it, that d, t, b, p, etc., followed by / or r, 
 might be either of two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we 
 find it both ways in two consecutive verses : 
 
 " A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse, 
 Two hundred thousand foot, brave men-at-arms, "f 
 
 Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending in one or 
 more unaccented syllables, and even argues in his introduction 
 that some of them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites 
 
 * Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the 
 versification to which Milton s youthful ear had been trained, but seems 
 to have learned something from Abbott s Shakespearian Gramtimr in the 
 interval between -writing his notes and his introduction. Walker s 
 Shakespeare s Versification would have been a great help to him in 
 default of original knowledge. 
 
 t Milton has a verse in "Comus" where the e is elided from the word 
 sister by its preceding a vowel : 
 
 " Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near ! " 
 This would have been impossible before a consonant.
 
 MTLTON. 187 
 
 some lines of Spenser as confirming his theory, forgetting that 
 rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case by throwing 
 the accent (appreciably even now, but more emphatically in 
 Spenser s day) on the last syllable. 
 
 " A spirit and judgment equal or superior," 
 
 he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consisting of twelve or 
 even thirteen syllables." Surely Milton s ear would never have 
 tolerated a dissyllabic " spirit " in such a position. The word 
 was then more commonly of one syllable, though it might be 
 two, and was accordingly spelt spreet (still surviving in sprite), 
 sprit, and even spirt, as Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. 
 Masson s fac-similes.* Shakespeare, in the verse 
 
 " Hath put a spirit of youth in everything 
 
 uses the word admirably well in a position where it cannot have 
 a metrical value of more than one syllable, while it gives a 
 dancing movement to the verse in keeping with the sense. Our 
 old metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern 
 verse has lost in proportion as our language has stiffened into 
 uniformity under the benumbing fingers of pedants. 
 
 This discussion of the value of syllables is not so trifling as it 
 seems. A great deal of nonsense has been written about 
 imperfect measures in Shakespeare, and of the admirable 
 dramatic effect produced by filling up the gaps of missing 
 syllables with pauses or prolongations of the voice in reading. 
 In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue this is possible, but in 
 passages of continuously level speech it is barbarously absurd. 
 I do not believe that any of our old dramatists has knowingly 
 left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a hap-hazard 
 way and in how mutilated a form their plays have mostly 
 reached us, we should attribute suchfautts (as a geologist would 
 call them) to anything rather than to the deliberate design of the 
 poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best metrists among 
 them, have given us a standard by which to measure what 
 licenses they took in versification the one in his translations, 
 * So spirilo and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old French,
 
 1 88 MILTON. 
 
 the other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton 
 are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after 
 his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and 
 increased those of error. There are only two, indeed, which 
 seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are, 
 
 " Burnt after them to the bottomless pit," 
 and 
 
 " With them from bliss to the bottomless deep. 
 
 This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out 
 or had been stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the 
 number of syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his 
 finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only the first of these lines, 
 and says that to make it regular by accenting the word bottom 
 less on the second syllable would be " too horrible." Certainly 
 not, if Milton so accented it, any more than blasphemous and 
 twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may 
 be, Milton could not have intended to close not only a period, 
 but a paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in the only 
 other passage where the word occurs it is accented as now on 
 the first syllable : 
 
 " With hideous ruin and combustion down 
 To bottomless perdition, there to dwell." 
 
 As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom, may be 
 monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am 
 persuaded that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to 
 the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others, 
 and that Milton wrote, or meant to write, 
 
 " Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit," 
 
 which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that 
 Milton liked best.* 
 
 * Milton, however, would not have balked at th bottomless any more 
 than Drayton at th rejected or Donne at th sea. Mr. Masson does not 
 seem to understand this elision, for he corrects V th midst to i the mvlst,
 
 MILTON. 189 
 
 Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduction of the 
 way in which the verses of Milton should be read is judicious 
 enough, though some of the examples he gives, of the 
 " comicality " which would ensue from compressing every 
 verse into an exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a 
 surprising ignorance of the laws which guided our poets just 
 before and during Milton s time in the structure of their verses. 
 Thus he seems to think that a strict scansion would require us 
 in the verses. 
 
 " So he with difficulty and labour hard," 
 and 
 
 "Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold," 
 
 to pronounce diffikty and purfi. Though Mr. Masson talks of 
 "slurs and elisions," his ear would seem somewhat insensible to 
 their exact nature or office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus 
 where none is intended, and his making purple of one syllable 
 wrecks the whole verse, the real slur in the latter case being an 
 azure or* When he asks whether Milton required " these 
 pronunciations in his verse," no positive answer can be given, 
 but I very much doubt whether he would have thought that 
 some of the lines Mr. Masson cites " remain perfectly good 
 blank verse even with the most leisurely natural enunciation of 
 the spare syllable," and I am sure he would have stared if told 
 that "the number of accents" in a pentameter verse was 
 "variable." It may be doubted whether elisions and compres 
 sions which would be thought in bad taste or even vulgar now 
 were more abhorrent to the ear of Milton s generation than to a 
 cultivated Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose. 
 After all, what Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible 
 axiom that poetry should be read as poetry. 
 
 Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main principles, but the 
 examples he quotes make one doubt whether he knows what a 
 
 and takes pains to mention it in a note. He might better have restored 
 the n in t , where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronun 
 ciation, as o" for of and on. 
 
 * Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to two 
 syllables.
 
 ige MILTON. 
 
 verse is. For example, he thinks it would be a " horror," if is 
 
 the verse 
 
 " That invincible Samson far renowned," 
 
 we should lay the stress on the first syllable of invincible. It is 
 hard to see why this should be worse than conventicle or remon 
 strance or si iccessor or incompatible (the three latter used by the 
 correct Daniel), or why Mr. Masson should clap an accent on 
 surface merely because it comes at the end of a verse, and 
 deny it to invincible. If one read the verse just cited with those 
 that go with it, he will find that the accent must come on the 
 first syllable of invincible or else the whole passage becomes 
 choas.* Should we refuse to say obleeged with Pope because 
 the fashion has changed ? From its apparently greater freedom 
 in skilful hands, blank verse gives more scope to sciolistic 
 theorising and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup 
 let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in the one that 
 would not be good in the other when handled by a master like 
 Dryden. Milton, like other great poets, wrote some bad verses, 
 and it is wiser to confess that they are so than to conjure up 
 some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept them 
 as the better for their badness. Such a bad verse is 
 
 " Eocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shapes of death," 
 which might be cited to illustrate Pope s 
 
 " And ten low words oft creep in one dull line." 
 
 Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low 
 words. He rather loved them tall, as the Prussian King loved 
 men to be six feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into the 
 grenadiers. He loved them as much for their music as for 
 their meaning perhaps more. His style, therefore, when it 
 
 * Hilton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him guilty of a 
 verse like 
 
 " Shoots invisible virtue ever to the deep," 
 
 while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions that he 
 loved.
 
 MILTON. 191 
 
 has to deal with commoner things, is apt to grow a little 
 cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the 
 owl would boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a 
 hole. Shakespeare would have understood this. Milton would 
 have made him talk like an eagle. His influence is not to 
 be left out of account as partially contributing to that decline 
 toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he died. 
 If it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may 
 be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets. 
 If to Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung to, they have 
 sat at the feet of Milton to be taught. Our language has no 
 finer poem than " Samson Agonistes," if any so fine in the 
 quality of austere dignity or in the skill with which the poet s 
 personal experience is generalised into a classic tragedy. 
 
 Gentle as Milton s earlier portraits would seem to show him, 
 he had in him by nature, or bred into him by fate, something of 
 the haughty and defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michel 
 Angelo. In no other English author is the man so large a part 
 of his works. Milton s haughty conception of himself enters 
 into all he says and does. Always the necessity of this one man 
 became that of the whole human race for the moment. There 
 were no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when he 
 wanted elbow-room ; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary 
 Powell, the cavalier s daughter, find the abode of a Roundhead 
 schoolmaster incompatible and leave it, forthwith the cry of the 
 universe was for an easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. 
 If he is blind, it is with the excess of light, it is a divine 
 partiality, an overshadowing with angels wings. Phineus and 
 Teiresias are admitted among the prophets because they, too, 
 had lost their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of more 
 account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme till he was past 
 fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his epic, and it at once becomes 
 "the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter 
 and lame metre." If the structure of his mind be undramatic, 
 why, then, the English drama is naught, learned Jonson, 
 sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will 
 compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the blinded Samson
 
 i9 MILTON. 
 
 for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme. Plainly he 
 belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no 
 way responsible for their to-morrows. And this makes him 
 perennially interesting even to those who hate his politics, 
 despise his Socinianism, and find his greatest poem a bore. A 
 new edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as he is really 
 great, he presents a fresh side to each new student, and Mr. 
 Masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us, with 
 much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that 
 is a solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge. 
 
 It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Milton into 
 the fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so 
 uniformly self-conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare 
 that he had the power of transforming himself into everything ; 
 of Milton, that he had that of transforming everything into him 
 self. Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the 
 cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the breath of 
 Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine. But Milton 
 never lets himself go for a moment. As other poets are 
 possessed by their theme, so is he ^//"-possessed, his great 
 theme being John Milton, and his great duty that of interpreter 
 between him and the world. I say it with all respect, for he 
 was well worthy translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the 
 version is made. Pope says he makes God the Father reason 
 " like a school-divine." The criticism is witty, but inaccurate. 
 He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and had 
 the poem been written a few years later, the Almighty would 
 have become more heterodox. Since Dante, no one had stood 
 en these visiting terms with heaven. 
 
 Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, I suspect, 
 which goes far toward making the sublime, and which, falling 
 by a hair s-breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puri 
 tanism showed both the strength and weakness of its prophetic 
 nurture ; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of England by 
 the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of the former 
 to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. It has 
 left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great
 
 MILTON. 193 
 
 monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton. 
 It is a high inspiration to be the neighbour of great events ; to 
 have been a partaker in them, and to have seen noble purposes 
 by their own self-confidence become the very means of ignoble 
 ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret 
 deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its 
 sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, 
 while it makes him the most impressive figure in our literary 
 history, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime 
 independence of human sympathy like that with which 
 mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But it is idle to talk of 
 the loneliness of one the habitual companions of whose mind 
 were the Past and Future. I always seem to see him 
 leaning in his blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, 
 sure that the one will guaid the song which the other had 
 rnspued. 
 
 563
 
 
 P x 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 1 
 
 A GENERATION has now passed away since Wordsworth 
 was laid with the family in the churchyard at Grasmere.* 
 Perhaps it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impartial 
 measure of his value as a poet. To do this is especially hard 
 for those who are old enough to remember the last shot which 
 the foe was sullenly firing in that long war of critics which 
 began when he published his manifesto as Pretender, and 
 which came to a pause rather than end when they flung up 
 their caps with the rest at his final coronation. Something of 
 the intensity of the odittm theologtcum (if indeed the tcstheticum 
 be not in these days the more bitter of the two) entered into 
 the conflict. The Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they 
 had the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclusiveness 
 and partiality to which sects are liable. The verses of the 
 master had for them the virtue of religious canticles stimulant 
 01 zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded 
 criticism. Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenanters, 
 they were songs of battle no less than of worship, and the 
 combined ardours of conviction and conflict lent them a fire that 
 was not naturally their own. As we read them now, that 
 virtue 01 the moment is gone out of them, and whatever of 
 Dr. Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock of disenchant 
 ment. It is something like the difference between the Mar 
 seillaise sung by armed propagandists on the edge of battle, or 
 
 * " I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at Gras 
 mere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) to Crabb 
 Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine, pathos, thirteen 
 years after his master s death. Wordsworth was always considerate and 
 kind with his servants, Robinson tells ua.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 195 
 
 by lirissotins in the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in 
 the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of Therese. It 
 was natural in the early days of Wordsworth s career to dwell 
 most fondly on those profounder qualities to appreciate which 
 settled in some sort the measure of a man s right to judge of 
 poetry at all. But now we must admit the shortcomings, the 
 failures, the defects, as no less essential elements in forming a 
 sound judgment as to whether the seer and artist were so 
 united in him as to justify the claim first put in by himself and 
 afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside the few 
 great poets who exalt men s minds, and give a right direction 
 and safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while 
 insensibly helping them toward balance of character and 
 serenity of judgment by stimulating their sense of proportion, 
 form, and the nice adjustment of means to ends. In none of 
 our poets has the constant propulsion of an unbending will, and 
 the concentration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat 
 narrow, sympathies done so much to make the original endow 
 ment of nature effective, and in none, accordingly, does the 
 biography throw so much light on the works, nor enter so largely 
 into their composition as an element whether of power or of 
 weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished 
 to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness and exper 
 ience. He early conceived himself to be, and through life was 
 confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he was, a "dedi 
 cated spirit,"* a state of mind likely to further an intense, but at 
 the same time one-sided, development of the intellectual powers. 
 The solitude in which the greater part of his mature life was 
 passearwhile it doubtless ministered to the passionate intensity 
 of his musings upon man and nature, was, it may be suspected, 
 
 * In the "Prelude" he attributes this consecration to a sunrise seen 
 (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some villagu 
 festival where he had danced all night : 
 
 " My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit." Book i7.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him of any standard of 
 proportion outside himself by which to test the comparative 
 value of his thoughts, and by rendering him more and more 
 , incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be gained only 
 by commerce with men more nearly on his own level, and which 
 I gives tone without lessening individuality. Wordsworth never 
 J quite saw the distinction between the eccentric and the original. 
 For what we call originality seems not so much anything 
 peculiar, much less anything odd, but that quality in a man 
 which touches human nature at most points of its circumference, 
 which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own powers 
 by recalling and confirming our own unvalued sensations 
 and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own amorphous 
 imaginings, and adequate utterance to our own stammering 
 conceptions or emotions. The poet s office is to be a Voice, 
 not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of already mag 
 netised acolytes, but singing amid the throng of men and lifting 
 their common aspirations and sympathies (so first clearly 
 revealed to themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer 
 ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if we would, read 
 the poetry ot Wordsworth as mere poetry ; at every other page 
 we find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthetics. The 
 world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar is of 
 precisely the same flavour when served to us from a Grecian 
 chalice or from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for decision 
 anew. The Teutonic nature has always shown a sturdy pref 
 erence of the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to 
 any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of sense. 
 Wordsworth never lets us long forget the deeply rooted stock 
 from which he sprang men ben da lid. 
 
 x/ WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born at Cockermouth in 
 J Cumberland on the 7th of April 1770, the second of five 
 * children. His father was John Wordsworth, an attorney-at- 
 law, and agent of Sir James Lowther, afterwards first Earl of 
 Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cookson, the daughter of a 
 mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors , had been settled
 
 , 
 
 WORDS WORTH. T 9 7 
 
 immemorially at Pcnistone in Yorkshire, whence his grandfather 
 had emigrated to Westmoreland. His mother, a woman of 
 piety and wisdom, died in March 1778, being then in her 
 thirty-second year. His fatFer, who never entirely cast off the 
 depression occasioned by her death, survived her but five years, 
 dying in December 1783, when William was not quite fourteen 
 years old. 
 
 The poet s early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, 
 and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first 
 teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of 
 Shenstone s Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her 
 pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not endeavouring to 
 cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by which children 
 are apt to be converted from natural logicians into impertinent 
 sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, 
 who afterwards became his wife. 
 
 In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, 
 Archbishop of York, in the year 1585, at Hawksheacl in 
 Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small market-town in the vale of 
 Esthwaite, about a third of a mile north-west of the lake. Here 
 Wordsworth passed nine years, among a people of simple 
 habits and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His 
 earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, and streams 
 of his native district, and the associations with which his mind 
 was stored during its most impressible period were noble and pure. 
 The boys were boarded among the dames of the village, thus 
 enjoying a freedom from scholastic restraints, which could be 
 nothing but beneficial in a place where the temptations were 
 only to sports that hardened the body, while they fostered a 
 love of nature in the spirit and habits of observation in the 
 mind. Wordsworth s ordinary amusements here were hunting 
 and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks around the lake 
 and among the hills, with an occasional scamper on horseback.* 
 His life as a school-boy was favourable also to his poetic 
 development, in being identified with that of the people among 
 
 * "Prelude," Book ii.
 
 I 9 8 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and where there 
 are small diversities of condition, the feelings and passions are 
 displayed with less restraint, and the young poet grew 
 acquainted with that primal human basis of character where the 
 Muse finds firm foothold, and to which he ever afterward 
 cleared his way through all the overlying drift of conven 
 tionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive and hardy race who 
 kept alive the traditions and often the habits of a more 
 picturesque time. A common level of interests and social 
 standing fostered unconventional ways of thought and speech, 
 and friendly human sympathies. Solitude induced reflection, a 
 reliance of the mind on its own resources, and individuality of 
 character. Where everybody knew everybody, and everybody s 
 father had known everybody s father, the interest of man in man 
 was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant 
 report. When death knocked at any door in the hamlet, there 
 was an echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its- 
 white flowers at every threshold. There was not a grave in the 
 churchyard but had its story ; not a crag or glen or aged tree 
 untouched with some ideal hue of legend. It was here that 
 Wordsworth learned that homely humanity which gives such 
 depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, culture,, 
 nothing could obliterate the deep trace of that early training 
 which enables him to speak directly to the primitive instincts of 
 man. He was apprenticed early to the difficult art of being 
 himself. 
 
 At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects .mposed by 
 the master, and also some voluntaries of his own, equally 
 undistinguished by any peculiar merit. But he seems to 
 have made up his mind as early as in his fourteenth year 
 to become a poet.* " It is recorded," says his biographer 
 vaguely, " that the poet s father set him very early to learn 
 portions of the best English poets by heart, so that at an. 
 
 * " I to the muses have been bound, 
 
 These fourteen years, by strong indentures." 
 
 Idiot Loy (1798).
 
 WORDSWORTH. 199 
 
 early age he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare, Milton, 
 and Spenser."* 
 
 The great event of Wordsworth s school-days was the 
 death of his father, who left what may be called a 
 hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of claims upon the 
 first Earl of Lonsdale, the payment of which, though their 
 justice was acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some 
 unexplained way to elude so long as he lived. In October 
 1787 he left school for St. John s College, Cambridge. He was 
 already, we are told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some 
 progress in mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his I 
 reading were Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Gulliver s Travels, and the 
 Tale of a 7 ub ; but at school he had also become familiar \th 
 the works of some English poets, particularly Goldsmith and 
 Gray, of whose poems he had learned many by heart. What is 
 more to the purpose, he had become, without knowing it, a 
 lover of Nature in all her moods, and the same mental 
 necessities of a solitary life which compel men to an interest 
 in the transitory phenomena of scenery, had made him also 
 studious of the movements of his own mind, and the mutual 
 interaction and dependence of the external and internal universe. 
 
 Doubtless his early orphanage was not without its effect in 
 confirming a character naturally impatient of control, and his 
 mind, left to itself, clothed itself with an indigenous growth, 
 which grew fairly and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic 
 plantations. It has become a truism, that remarkable persons 
 have remarkable mothers ; but perhaps this is chiefly true of 
 such as have made themselves distinguished by their industry, 
 and by the assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves ot 
 only an average quality. It is rather to be noted how little is 
 known of the parentage of men of the first magnitude, how often 
 they seem in some sort foundlings, and how early an apparently 
 adverse destiny begins the culture of those who are to encounter 
 and master great intellectual or spiritual experiences. 
 
 * I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the influence of 
 any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith was evidently liis 
 model in the "Descriptive Sketches " and the "Evening Walk." I spoak 
 of them as originally printed.
 
 2CO WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Of his disposition as a child litlle is known, but that little is 
 characteristic. He himself tells us that he was "stiff, moody, 
 and of violent temper." His mother said of him that he was 
 the only one of her children about whom she felt any anxiety 
 for she was sure that he would be remarkable for good or evil. 
 Once, in resen .ment at some fancied injury, he resolved to kill 
 himself, but his heart iailed him. I suspect that few boys of 
 passionate temperament have escaped these momentary sugges 
 tions ot despairing helplessness. " On another occasion," he 
 says, " while I was at my grandfather s house at Penrith, along 
 with my eldest brother Richard, we were whipping tops together 
 in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid 
 down on particular occasions. The walls were hung round 
 with family pictures, and I said to my brother, Dare you strike 
 your whip through that old lady s petticoat? He replied, 
 No, I won t. Then, said I, here goes, and I struck ir.y 
 lash through her hooped petticoat, for which, no doubt, though 
 I have iorgotten it, I was properly punished. But, possibly 
 from some want ot judgment in punishments inflicted, I had 
 become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and 
 rather proud ot it than otherwise." This last anecdote is as 
 happily typical as a bit of Greek mythology which always 
 prefigured the lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood. 
 Just so do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash 
 through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style of poetry, and 
 proudly unsubdued by the punishment of the Reviewers. 
 
 Of his college life the chief record is to be found in " The 
 Prelude." He did not distinguish himselt as a scholar, and if 
 his life had any incidents, they were of that interior kind which 
 rarely appear in biography, though they may be of controlling 
 influence upon the life. He speaks of reading Chaucer, 
 Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge,* but no reflection 
 from them is visible in his earliest published poems. The 
 
 * " Prelude," Book iii. He studied Italian also at Cambridge ; his 
 teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet Gray. It 
 may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first systematic study
 
 WORDSWORTH. 201 
 
 gi eater part of his vacations was spent in his native Lake- 
 country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of 
 his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, 
 chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the *. 
 formation and tendency of the poet s mind. It was she who 
 called forth the shyer sensibili .ies of his nature, and taught an 
 originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with 
 fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray ^ 
 of ferns. She was his first public, and belonged to that class 
 of prophetically appreciative temperaments whose apparent 
 office it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds 
 with messages from the future. Through the greater part 
 of his life she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience 
 to him. 
 
 Wordsworth s last college vacation was spent in a foot 
 journey upon the Continent (1790). In January 1791 he look 
 his degree of B.A., and left Cambridge. During the summer of 
 this. year he visited Wales, and, after declining to enter upon 
 holy orders under the plea that he was not of age for ordination, 
 went over to France in November, and remained during the 
 winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate with the 
 republican General Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations 
 he ardently sympathised. In the spring of 1792 he was at 
 Blois, and returned thence to Orleans, which he finally quitted 
 in October for Paris. He remained here as long as he could . 
 with safety, and at the close of the year went back to England, 
 thus, perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after overtook his 
 friends the Brissotins. 
 
 As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be called a fortunate 
 one, not less so in the training and expansion of his faculties 
 was this period of his stay in France. Born and reared in a 
 country where the homely and familiar nestles confidingly 
 amid the most savage and sublime forms of nature, he had 
 
 of English poetry was due to the copy of Anderson s British Poets, left 
 with him by his sailor brother Johrr on setting out for his last voyage in 
 1805. 
 
 H
 
 202 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 experienced whatever impulses the creative faculty can receive 
 from mountain and cloud and the voices of winds and waters, 
 but he had known man only as an actor in fireside histories and 
 tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied an ample stage. In 
 France he first felt the authentic beat of a nation s heart ; he 
 was a spectator at one of those dramas where the terrible 
 footfall of the Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in the 
 pauses of the action ; and he saw man such as he can only be 
 when he is vibrated by the orgasm of a national emotion. He 
 sympathised with the hopes of France and of mankind deeply, 
 as was fitting in a young man and a poet ; and if his faith in 
 the gregarious advancement of men was afterward shaken, he 
 only held the more firmly by his belief in the individual, and 
 his reverence for the human as something quite apart from the 
 popular and above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely blamed, 
 as if he had been recreant to the liberal instincts of his youth. 
 But it was inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical as 
 his, a mind which always compensated itself for its artistic 
 radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward external respecta 
 bility, should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and 
 destructive in politics, and above all in religion. He reads the 
 poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who does not find 
 in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur 
 of his destiny, founded always upon that personal dignity and 
 virtue, the capacity for whose attainment alone makes universal 
 liberty possible and assures its permanence. He was to make 
 men better by opening to them the sources of an inalterable 
 well-being ; to make them free, in a sense higher than 
 political, by showing them that these sources are within 
 them, and that no contrivance of man can permanently 
 emancipate narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics 
 were always those of a poet, circling in the larger orbit of 
 causes and principles, careless of the transitory oscillation of 
 events. 
 
 The change in his point of view (if change there was) 
 certainly was complete soon after his return from France, and 
 was perhaps due in part to the influence of Burke.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 203 
 
 " While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth, 
 Against all systems built on abstract rights, 
 Keen ridicule ; the majesty proclaims 
 Of institutes and laws hallowed by time ; 
 Declares the vital power of social ties 
 Endeared by custom ; and with high disdain, 
 Exploding upstart theory, insists 
 Upon the allegiance to which men are born. 
 . . . Could a youth, and one 
 In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved 
 Under the weight of classic eloquence, 
 Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired ? "* 
 
 He had seen the French for a dozen years eagerly busy in 
 tearing up whatever had roots in the past, replacing the vener 
 able trunks of tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, 
 then striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken, 
 and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence and con 
 tinuity which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-conscious 
 ness in a nation. He became a Tory through intellectual 
 conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism 
 of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809 
 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, "Wordsworth 
 may perhaps walk in ; if he do, I caution you both against his 
 terrific democratic notions;" and it must have been many 
 years later that Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson, " I 
 have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of 
 "the Chartist in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he 
 -travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the week.f He 
 afterwards became a theoretical church-goer. "Wordsworth 
 defended earnestly the Church establishment. He even said 
 foe would shed his blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a 
 
 * " Prelude," Book vii. Written before 1805, and referring to a still 
 earlier date. " Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked hat under 
 his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford s rout." (Southey to Miss Barker, 
 May 1806.) 
 
 f This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss 
 Wordsworth s journal, which she had evidently prepared for publication 
 as early as 1805. 
 
 I
 
 204 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 7 
 
 laugh raised against him on account of his having confessed 
 
 that he knew not when he had been in a church in his own 
 country. All our ministers are so vile, said he. The mischief 
 of allowing the clergy to depend on the caprice of the 
 multitude he thought more than outweighed all the evils of an. 
 establishment."* 
 
 In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, 
 and in the following year published "Descriptive Sketches" and 
 the " Evening Walk." He did this, as he says in one of his 
 letters, to" show that, although he had gained no honours at the 
 s University, he could do something. They met with no great 
 success, and he afterward corrected them so much as to destroy 
 . i all their interest as juvenile productions, without communi 
 cating to them any of the merits of maturity. In commenting, 
 
 sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems 
 
 " And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines 
 Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines " 
 
 he says: "This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I 
 recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. 
 . . . The moment was important in my poetical history ; for I 
 date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural 
 appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any ago 
 or country, so far as I was acquainted with them, and I made a 
 :csolution to supply in some degree the deficiency." 
 
 It is plain that Wordsworth s memory was playing him a 
 trick here, misled by that instinct (it may almost be called) of 
 consistency which leads men first to desire that their lives 
 should have been without break or seam, and then to believe 
 that they have been such. The more distant ranges of perspec 
 tive are apt to run together in retrospection. How far could 
 Wordsworth at fourteen have been acquainted with the poets of 
 all ages and countries he who to his dying day could not 
 endure to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon ? It 
 seems to me rather that the earliest influence traceable in him 
 
 CraUb Robinson, i., 250, Am. Ed.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 205 
 
 is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and it is, perhaps, 
 some slight indication of its having already begun that his first 
 volume of "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) was put forth by 
 Johnson, who was Cowper s publisher. By and by the powerful 
 impress of Burns is seen both in the topics of his verse and the 
 form of his expression. But whatever their ultimate effect upon 
 his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems were clothed in 
 the conventional habit of the eighteenth century. " The first 
 verses from which he remembered to have received great 
 pleasure were Miss Carter s Poem on Spring, a poem in the 
 six-line stanza, which he was particularly fond of, and had 
 composed much in for example, Ruth. " This is noteworthy, 
 for Wordsworth s lyric range, especially so far as tune is 
 concerned, was always narrow. His sense of melody was 
 painfully dull, and some of his lighter effusions, as he would 
 have called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace of 
 movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet the thrush-like 
 improvisation, the impulsively bewitching cadences, that cKarm 
 us in our Elizabethan drama, and whose last warble died with 
 Herrick ; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown 
 that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable, 
 even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond 
 recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if 
 vve compare such verses as 
 
 " Like an army defeated 
 The snow hath retreated 
 And now doth fare ill 
 On the top of the bare hill," 
 
 with Goethe s exquisite Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh, in which 
 the lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) 
 drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf. 
 
 "The Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches" show 
 plainly the prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn 
 of thought and the mechanism of the verse. They lack 
 altogether the temperance of tone and judgment in selection 
 which have made the " Traveller" and the " Deserted Village," 
 
 4^ 

 
 206 WORDS WOR TH. 
 
 & \F 
 
 perhaps, the most truly classical poems in the language. They 
 bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of the 
 maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in 
 the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, 
 from which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the follow 
 ing verses may suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate 
 of a chamois-hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes 
 back to the bereaved wife and son : 
 
 " Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze, 
 Passing his father s bones in future days, 
 Start at the reliques of that very thigh 
 On which so oft he prattled when a boy." 
 
 In these poems there is plenty of that "poetic diction" against 
 which Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later. 
 
 " To wet the peak s impracticable sides 
 He opens of his feet the sanguine tides, 
 Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes 
 Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies." 
 
 Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised 
 edition, as well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless 
 despair which Byron made fashionable not long after. Nor are 
 there wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as 
 coming from Wordsworth.* 
 
 " Farewell 1 those forms that in thy noontide shade 
 Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, 
 Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire 
 To throw the sultry ray of young Desire ; 
 Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go 
 Accordant to the cheek s unquiet glow ; 
 Those shadowy breasts in love s soft light arrayed, 
 And rising by the moon of passion swayed." 
 
 * Wordsworth s purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to prudery. 
 The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr. Arnold s table 
 denounce the first line in Keats s "Ode to a Grecian Urn" as indecent, 
 and Haydon records that when he saw the group of Cupid and Psyche he 
 exclaimed, " The dev-ils I "
 
 WORDSWORTH. 207 
 
 The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he 
 changes "despot courts" into "tyranny." One of the altera 
 tions is interesting. In the "Evening Walk" he had 
 originally written 
 
 " And bids her soldier come her wars to share 
 Asleep on Minden s charnel hill afar." 
 
 An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, 
 thus : 
 
 " Asleep on Bunker s charnel hill afar."* 
 
 Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl 
 a bodeful bird. He had himself done so in the "Evening 
 Walk," and corrects his epithets to suit his later iudgment, 
 putting " gladsome " for " boding," and replacing 
 
 " The tremulous sob of the complaining owl " 
 
 by 
 
 " The sportive outcry of the mocking owl " 
 
 Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in 
 the revision as to make the dates appended to them a mis 
 leading anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian 
 passage which already gives us a glimpse of that passion with 
 which he was the first to irradiate descriptive poetry, and which 
 sets him on a level with Turner. 
 
 
 "Tis storm ; and hid in mist from hour to hour 
 All day the floods a deepening murmur pour : 
 The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight ; 
 Dark is the region as with coming night ; 
 But what a sudden burst of overpowering light I 
 Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, 
 Glances the fire-clad eagle s wheeling form ; 
 Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine 
 The wood-crowned cliffs that o er the lake recline ; 
 Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, 
 
 * The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The original, a 
 quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately Charles Lamb s copy 
 of it is now owned by my Iriend, Professor C. E. Norton.
 
 ao8 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 At once to pillars turned that flame with gold ; 
 Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun 
 The West that burns like one dilated sun, 
 Where in a mighty crucible expire 
 The mountains, glowing hot like coals of tire." 
 
 Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and 
 that for the worse, by substituting "glorious" (which was 
 already implied in " glances " and " fire-clad ") for " wheeling." 
 In later life he would have found it hard to forgive the man 
 who should have made cliffs recline over a lake. On the 
 whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these poems is 
 their want 01 continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry 
 on a texture ot unmistakable prose ; perhaps we might add, 
 the incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the ceremonial 
 robes of poesy. 
 
 During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did not publish, 
 a political tract, in which he avowed himself opposed to 
 monarchy and to the hereditary principle, and desirous of a 
 republic, if it could be had without a revolution. He probably 
 continued to be all his lite in favour of that ideal republic 
 " which never was on land or sea," but fortunately he gave up 
 politics, that he might devote himself to his own nobler calling, 
 to which politics are subordinate, and for which he found 
 freedom enough in England as it was.* Dr. Wordsworth 
 admits that his uncle s opinions were democratical so late as 
 1802. I suspect that they remained so in an esoteric way to 
 the end of his days. He had himself suffered by the arbitrary 
 selfishness of a great landholder, and he was born and bred in 
 
 * Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so far 
 as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and 
 Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them 
 shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with Wordsworth 
 began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer. There is a 
 passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but apparently 
 written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that Wordsworth 
 had been accused of some kind of social heresy. " Wordsworth has 
 been caballed against so long and so loudly that he has found it 
 impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate to let him
 
 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 209 
 
 
 a part of England where there is a greater social equality than 
 elsewhere. The look and manner of the Cumberland people 
 especially are such as recall very vividly to a New-Englander 
 the associations of fifty years ago, ere the change from New 
 England trr New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, 
 which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or Republican; was 
 pressing upon him. The debt due to his father s estate had not 
 been paid, and Wordsworth was one of those real idealists who 
 esteem it the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for, and 
 not on, his neighbour. He at first proposed establishing a 
 periodical journal to be called The Philanthropist, but luckily 
 went no further with it, for the receipts from an organ of 
 opinion which professed republicanism, and at the same time 
 discountenanced the plans of all existing or defunct republicans, 
 would have been necessarily scanty. There being no appearance 
 of any demand, present or prospective, for philanthropists, he 
 tried to get employment as correspondent of a newspaper. 
 Here also it was impossible that he should succeed ; he was 
 too great to be merged in the editorial We, and had too well 
 defined a private opinion on all subjects to be able to express 
 that average of public opinion which constitutes able editorials. 
 But so it is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill- 
 omen are already on the wing with food from heaven ; and 
 while Wordsworth s relatives were getting impatient at what 
 they considered his waste of time, while one thought he had 
 gifts enough to make a good parson, and another lamented the 
 rare attorney that was lost in him,* the prescient muse guided 
 
 the house after their first agreement is expired." Perhaps, after all, it 
 was Wordsworth s insulation of character and habitual want of sympathy 
 (vith anything but the moods of his own mind that rendered him 
 incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have 
 regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly loved as much as it 
 was possible for Mm to love anything but his own poems) as a kind of 
 tributary dependency of his genius, much as a mountain might look 
 down on one of its ancillary spurs. 
 
 * Speaking to one of his neighbours in 1845 he said, "that, after 
 he had tiuished his college course, he was in great doubt as to what 
 
 564 
 
 

 
 3 
 
 2io WORDSWORTH. 
 
 the hand of Raisley Calvert while he wrote the poet s name in 
 his will for a legacy of ^900. By the death of Calvert, in 1795, 
 this timely help came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his 
 life, and made it honest for him to write poems that will never 
 die, instead of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills, or 
 leaders that led only to oblivion. 
 
 In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sister took up 
 their abode at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorset 
 shire. Here nearly two years were passed, chiefly in the study 
 of poetry, and Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the 
 fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and regained that 
 equable tenor of mind which alone is consistent with a healthy 
 productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had contrived to see 
 something more in the " Descriptive Sketches than the public 
 had discovered there, first made his acquaintance. The 
 sympathy and appreciation of an intellect like Coleridge s 
 supplied him with that external motive to activity which is the 
 chief use of popularity, and justified to him his opinion of his 
 own powers. It was now that the tragedy of " The Borderers " 
 
 Ms future employment should be. He did not feel himself good enough 
 for the Church ; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined for 
 that hciTy office, and that the struggle between his conscience and his 
 impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank from the 
 Law, although Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the 
 higher parts of the profession. He had studied military history with 
 great interest, and the strategy of war ; and he always fancied that he 
 had talents for command ; and he at one time thought of a military 
 1 fe, but then he was without connections, and he felt, if he were 
 ordered to the West Indies, his talents would not save him from the 
 yellow-fever, and he gave that up." (Memoirs, ii., 466.) It is curious 
 to fancy Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness between him 
 and Wellington" have often struck me. They resemble each other in 
 practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in a kind of 
 precise uprightness which made their personal character somewhat 
 uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington was piety in 
 Wordsworth, and the entire absence of imagination (the great point of 
 dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as anything to make Wellington a 
 great commander.
 
 WORDS WOR TH. 211 
 
 was for the most part written, and that plan of the Lyrical 
 Ballads suggested which gave Wordsworth a clew to lead him 
 out of the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entangled. 
 It was agreed between the two young friends, that Wordsworth 
 was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune uncommon 
 to such conspirators, Nature had already consented to the 
 arrangement. In July 1797 the two Wordsworths removed to 
 Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they might be near Coleridge, 
 who in the meanwhile had married and settled himself at 
 Nether-Stowey. In November "The Borderers" was finished, 
 and Wordsworth went up to London with his sister to offer it , 
 for the stage. The good Genius of the poet again interposing, 
 the play was decisively rejected, and Wordsworth went back 
 to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so 
 common to young authors. 
 
 The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as Jane Eyre. 
 It shares with many of Wordsworth s narrative poems the 
 defect of being written to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so 
 that the overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poetry 
 to the wall. Applied to the drama, such predestination makes 
 all the personages puppets, and disenables them for being 
 characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he 
 published "The Borderers" in 1842, and says in a note that 
 it was "at first written . . . without any view to [its exhibi 
 tion upon the stage." But he was mistaken. The contem 
 poraneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he was long 
 in giving up the hope of getting is accepted by some theatrical 
 manager. 
 
 He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume 
 of the Lyrical Ballads for the press, and it was published 
 toward the close of 1798. The book, which contained also 
 "The Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge, attracted little notice, 
 and that in great part contemptuous. W r hen Mr. Cottle, the 
 publisher, shortly after sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman, \ 
 that of the Lyrical Ballads was reckoned at zero, and it was \ 
 at last given up to the authors. A few persons were not want 
 ing, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new day in
 
 212 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 
 that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to extinguish 
 with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.* 
 
 Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and 
 findingTiimself famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a 
 blaze may be made with a little saltpetre that will be stared at 
 by thousands who would have thought the sunrise tedious. If 
 we may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have said 
 that he awoke and found himself in-famous, for the publication 
 of the Lyrical Ballads undoubtedly raised him to the dis 
 tinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus 
 has two peaks the one where improvising poets cluster ; the 
 other where the singer ot deep secrets sits alone a peak veiled 
 sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth- 
 born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glo.v the more 
 consciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown itselt with 
 imperishable stars. Words\vorth_Jiad_that self-trust which in 
 the man of genius is sublime, and in the man oi talent 
 insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the reviewers 
 had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence behind 
 him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical 
 Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at 
 a time when there were only two men in the world (himself and 
 Coleridge) who were aware that he had one, or at least one 
 anywise differing from those mechanically uniform ones which 
 are stuck drearily, side by side, in the great pin-paper ot 
 society. 
 
 * Cottle says, " The sale was so slow and the severity of most of the 
 reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be certain." But 
 the notices in the Monthly and Critical Reviews (then the most 
 influential) were fair, and indeed favourable, especially to Wordsworth s 
 share in the volume. The Monthly says, " So much genius and 
 originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to see another 
 from the same hand." The Critical,, after saying that "in the whole 
 tauge of English poetry we scarcely recollect anything superior to a 
 passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey, " sums up thus : " Yet every 
 piece discovers genius ; and ill as the author has frequently employed his 
 talents, they certainly rank him with the best of living poets." Such 
 treatment cannot surely be called discouraging.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 213 
 
 ..in Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, 
 and a r ter dinner they had a conversation, of which Wordsworth 
 took notes. The respectable old poet, who was passing the 
 evening of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby and Joan 
 like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been rather 
 bewildered by the apparition of a living genius. The record is 
 of value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into Wordsworth s 
 mind. Among other things he said, " that it was the province 
 of a great poet to raise people up to his""own level, hot to 
 descend to theirs " memorable words, the more memorable 
 that -artiterary life of sixty years was in keeping with them. 
 
 It would be instructive to know what were Wordsworth s 
 studies during his winter in Goslar. De Quincey s statement is 
 mere conjecture. It may be guessed fairly enough that he 
 would seek an entrance to the German language by the easy 
 path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him in his theories 
 as to the language of poetry. The Spinosism with which he 
 has been not unjustly charged was certainly not due to any 
 Germ an influence, for it appears unmistakably in the "Lines 
 composed at Tintern Abbey" in July 1798. It is more likely 
 to have been derived from his talks with Coleridge in 1797.* 
 When Emerson visited him in 1833, ne spoke with loathing of 
 Wilhelm Meisfet, a part of which he had read in Carlyle s 
 translation apparently. There was some affectation in this, it 
 should seem, for he had read Smollett. On the whole, it 
 may be fairly concluded that the help of Germany in the 
 development of his genius may be reckoned as very small, 
 though there is certainly a marked resemblance both in form 
 and sentiment between some of his earlier lyrics and those of 
 Goethe. His poem of the "Thorn," though vastly more 
 imaginative, may have been suggested by Burger s Pfarrer s 
 
 * A very improbable story of Coleridge s in the Biographia Literaria 
 represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion of treasonable 
 dealings with the French enemy by their constant references to a certain 
 "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems to show how they pronounced 
 the nan7e7 which was exactly in accordance with the usage of the last 
 generation in New England.
 
 214 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Tockter von Fanbenhain. The little gtave drei Spannen 
 
 in its conscientious measurement, certainly recalls a famous 
 
 couplet in the English poem. 
 
 After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his 
 sister returned to England in the spring of 1799, and settled 
 at Grasmere in Westmoreland. In 1800, the first edition of 
 the Lyrical Ballads being exhausted, it was republished 
 with the addition of another volume, Mr. Longman paying 
 ;ioo for the copyright of two editions. The book passed 
 to a second edition in 1802, and to a third in 1865.* Words 
 worth sent a copy of it, with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, 
 particularly recommending to his attention the poems "Michael" 
 and " The Brothers," as displaying the strength and perman 
 ence among a simple and rural population of those domestic 
 affections which were certain to decay gradually under the 
 influence of manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote 
 a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favourites among 
 the poems were "Harry Gill," "We are Seven," "The Mad 
 Mother," and "The Idiot," but that he was prepossessed 
 against the use of blank verse for simple subjects. Any 
 political significance in the poems he was apparently unable 
 to see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed an 
 
 (argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to the door of 
 the cathedral of English song the critical theses which he was 
 to maintain against all comers in his poetry and his life. It 
 was a new thing for an author to undertake to show the 
 goodness of his verses by the logic and learning of his prose ; 
 but Wordsworth carried to the reform of poetry all that fervour 
 and faith which had lost their political object, and it is another 
 proof of the sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that 
 
 (* Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) a hearing 
 in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, a Philadelphia 
 bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient tist of subscribers to reprint 
 ! the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The second English edition, 
 however, having been published before he had wholly completed his 
 reprinting, was substantially followed in the first American, which was 
 published in 1802.
 
 WORDS WOR Tff. 215 
 
 heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that he could 
 do so calmly what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater 
 number of his readers. Fifty years have since demon- 
 strate d that the true judgment of one man outweighs any 
 counterpoise of false judgment, and that the faith of mankind 
 is guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in Imnself. ^ 
 To this Defensio Wordsworth afterwards added a supplement, 
 and the two form a treatise of permanent value for philosophic 
 statement and decorous English. Their only ill effect has 
 been, that they have encouraged many otherwise deserving \ 
 young men to set a Sibylline value on their verses in proportion ! 
 as they were unsaleable. The strength of an argument for 
 self-reliance drawn from the example of a great man depends 
 wholly on the greatness of him who uses it ; such arguments 
 being like coats of mail, which, though they serve the strong 
 against arrow-flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate 
 the weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of oblivion. 
 
 An advertisement prefixed to the Lyrical Ballads, as 
 originally published in one volume, warned the reader that t 
 "they were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the . 
 language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of 
 society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In his 
 preface to the second edition, in two volumes, Wordsworth 
 already found himself forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps 
 in deference to the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge), 
 and now says of the former volume that "it was published as an 
 experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain 
 how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement, a selection of the 
 real language of men in a state of -vivid sensation, that sort of 
 pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a 
 poet may rationally endeavour to impart."* Here is evidence 
 of a retreat towards a safer position, though Wordsworth seems 
 to have remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years 
 longer clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose into 
 
 
 
 * Some of the weightiest passages in this Prefitce, as it is now printed, 
 were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 1815.
 
 2i WORDSWORTH 
 
 which his original theory had betrayed him. In 1815 his 
 opinions had undergone a still further change, and an nssiduous 
 study of the qualities of his own mind and of his own poetic 
 method (the two subjects in which alone he \va^ ever a thorough 
 scholar) had convinced him that poetry was in no sense that 
 appeal to the understanding which is implied by the words 
 " rationally endeavour to impart." In the preface of that year 
 he says, "The observations prefixed to that portion of these 
 volumes which was published many years ago under the title of 
 Lyrical Ballads have so little of special application to the 
 greater part of the present enlarged and diversified collection, 
 that they could not with propriety stand as an introduction to 
 it." It is a pity that he could not have become an earlier 
 convert to Coleridge s pithy definition, that " prose was words 
 in their best order, and poetry the best words in the best order." 
 But idealisation was something that Wordsworth was obliged 
 to lea:Tl painfully. It did not come to him naturally as to 
 Spenser and Shelley and to Coleridge in his higher moods. 
 Moreover, it was in the too frequent choice of subjects 
 incapable 01 being idealised without a manifest jar between 
 theme and treatment that Wordsworth s great mistake lay. 
 For example, in "The Blind Highland Boy" he had originally 
 the lollowing stanzas : 
 
 " Strong is the current, but be mild, 
 Ye waves, and spare the helpless child I 
 If ye in anger fret or chafe, 
 A bee-hive would be ship as safe 
 As that in which he sails. 
 
 " But say, what was it ? Thought of fear 1 
 Well may ye tremble when ye hear ! 
 A household tub like one of those 
 WhirTi women use to wash their clothes 
 This carried the blind boy." 
 
 In endeavouring to get rid of the downright vulgarity of 
 phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth invents an impossible 
 :ortoise-shell, and thus robs his story of the reality which alone
 
 WORDSWORTH. 217 
 
 gave it a living interest. Any extemporised raft would have 
 floated the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth never 
 quite learned the distinction between Fact, which suffocates the 
 Muse, and Truth, which is the very"~13reath of her nostrils. 
 Study and selFculture did much for him, but they never quite 
 satisfied him that he was capable of making a mistake. He 
 yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on certain points, and 
 gave up, for example, the ludicrous exactness of 
 
 " I ve measured it from side to side, 
 Tis three feet long and two feet wide." 
 
 But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying 
 day he could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute 
 detail which renders the narratives of uncultivated people so 
 tedious, and sometimes so distasteful.* " Simon Lee," after his 
 latest revision, still contains verses like these": 
 
 " And he is lean and he is sick ; 
 His body, dwindled and awry, 
 Bests upon ankles swollen and thick ; 
 His legs are thin and dry 
 
 Few months of life he has in store, 
 As he to you will tell, 
 For still, the more he works, the more 
 Do his weak ankles swell," 
 
 which are not only prose, but bad prose, and moreover guilty 
 of the same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. 
 Johnson s famous parody on the ballad-style that their 
 
 * " On my alluding to the line, 
 
 Three feet long and two feet wide, 
 
 i 
 
 
 and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he said, 
 They ought to be liked. " (Crabb Robinson, 9th May 1815.) His 
 ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered the power to 
 appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the critic s capacity to judge 
 ol poetry at alL
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 
 
 **> 
 
 " matter is contemptible." The sonorousness of conviction 
 with which Wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to common 
 places of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a ludicrous 
 effect on the profane, and even on the faithful, in unguarded 
 moments. We are reminded of a passage in the "Excursion :" 
 
 " List ! I heard 
 
 From yon huge breast of rock a solemn bleat, 
 Sent forth as if it were the mountain s voice." 
 
 In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and 
 was thenceforward never interrupted. He continued to live at 
 Grasmere, conscientiously diligent in the composition of poems, 
 secure of finding the materials of glory within and around him ; 
 for his genius taught him that inspiration is no product of a 
 foreign shore, and that no adventurer ever found it, though he 
 wandered as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the appreciation of 
 the best minds and the gratitude of the purest hearts gradually 
 centred more and more towards him. In 1802 he made a short 
 visit to France, in company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon 
 after his return to England was married to Mary Hutchinson, 
 on the 4th of October of the same year. Of the good fortune of 
 this marriage no other proof is needed than the purity and 
 serenity of his poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere else. 
 
 On the 1 8th of June 1803 his first child, John, was born, and 
 on the I4th ot August of the same year he set out with his 
 sister on a foot journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their 
 companion during a part of this excursion,"" o~f which Miss 
 Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he made the 
 acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him a part of the " Lay of 
 the Last Minstrel," then in manuscript. The travellers returned 
 to Grasmere on the 25th of September. It was during this year 
 that Wordsworth s intimacy with the excellent Sir George 
 Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of 
 considerable merit, and his friendship was undoubtedly of 
 service to Wordsworth in making him familiar with the laws 
 of a sister art, and thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies 
 of his criticism, the tendency of which was toward too great
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 219 
 
 exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont, dying in 1827, did not 
 forego his regard for (he poet, but contrived to hold his affection 
 in mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of ^100, to defray the 
 charges of a yearly journey. 
 
 In March 1805 the poet s brother, John, lost his life by the 
 shipwreck of the Abergavcnny East-Indiaman, of which he was 
 captain. He was a man of great purity and integrity, and 
 sacrificed himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave the 
 ship till it was impossible to save him. Wordsworth was deeply 
 attached to him, and felt such grief at his death as only solitary 
 natures like his are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of 
 the heroism which was the cause of it. The need of mental 
 activity as affording an outlet to intense emotion may account 
 for the great productiveness of this and the following year. He 
 now completed " The Prelude," wrote " The Wagoner," and 
 increased the number of his smaller poems enough to fill two 
 volumes, which were published in 1807. 
 
 This collection, which contained some of the most beautiful 
 of his shorter pieces, and among others the incomparable Odes 
 to Duty and on Immortality, did not reach a second edition till 
 1815. The reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged 
 while they scoffed, particularly Byron, among whose verses a 
 bit of Wordsworth showed as incongruously as a sacred vest 
 ment on the back of some buccaneering plunderer of an 
 abbey.* There was a general combination to put him down, 
 but on the other hand there was a powerful party in his favour, 
 consisting of William Wordsworth. He not only continued in 
 good heart himself, but, reversing the order usual on such 
 occasions, kept up the spirits of his friends.t 
 
 * Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these volumes not, 
 on the~~Tvhole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported as saying that 
 Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Review s attack on " Hours of 
 Idleness." "The young man will do something if he goes on," lie said. 
 
 t The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of his uncle 
 with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused dreariness are only 
 matched by the Rev. Mark Noble s History of the Protectorate House of 
 Cromwell. It is a misfortune that his materials were not put into the 

 
 
 
 
 
 220 
 
 Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir 
 George Beaumont s, at Coleorton in Leicestershire, the cottage 
 at Grasmere having become too small for his increased family. 
 On his return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the house at 
 Allan Bank, where he lived three years. During this period he 
 appears to have written very little poetry, for which his 
 biographer assigns as a primary reason the smokiness of the 
 Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure 
 of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth composed chiefly 
 in the open air. It did not prevent him from writing a 
 pamphlet upon the Convention of Cintra, which was published 
 too late to attract much attention, though Lamb says that its 
 effect upon him was like that which one of Milton s tracts might 
 have had upon a contemporary.* It was at Allan Bank that 
 
 hands of Professor Reed, whose notes to the American edition are among 
 the most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book 
 contains, however, some valuable letters of Wordsworth ; and those relat 
 ing to this part of his life should be read by every student of his works, for 
 the light th.y throw upon the principles which governed him in the 
 composition of his .poems. In a letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 
 1807) he says, "Trouble not yourself upon their present reception; of 
 what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny ! to 
 console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy 
 happier ; to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think 
 and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous ; this 
 is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that 
 is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves. ... To conclude, 
 my ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz [of hostile criticism], and my flesh 
 as insensible as iron to these petty stings ; and, after what I have said, I 
 am sure yours will be the same. I doubt not that you will share with me 
 an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little 
 poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and 
 society wherever found ; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in 
 making men wiser, better, and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the 
 ordinary relation between an unpopular poet and his little public of 
 admirers ; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them with faith 
 from his own inexhaustible cistern. 
 
 * " Wordsworth s pamphlet will fail of producing any general effect, 
 because the sentences are long and involved ; and his friend De Quincey, 
 who corrected the press, has rendered them more obscure by an unusuaJ
 
 WORDS IVOR TH. 2 2 1 
 
 Coleridge dictated " The Friend, 5 and Wordsworth contributed 
 to it two essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes* 
 (Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished in 
 the Notes to " The Excursion." Here also he wrote his 
 " Description of the Scenery of the Lakes." Perhaps a truer 
 explanation of the comparative silence of Wordsworth s Muse 
 during these years is to be found in the intense interest which 
 he took in current events, whose variety, picturesqueness, and 
 historical significance were enough to absorb all the energies 
 of his imagination. 
 
 In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to the Parsonage / 
 at Grastriere. Here he remained two years, and here he had 
 his second intimate experience of sorrow in the loss of two of 
 his children, Catharine and Thomas, one of whom died 4th 
 June, and the other ist December i8i2.t Early in 1813 he -. 
 bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed thither, changed 
 his abode no moTe during the rest of his life. In March of this~ 
 year he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for the county of 
 Westmoreland, an office whose receipts rendered him inde 
 pendent, and whose business he was able to do by deputy, thus 
 leaving him ample leisure for nobler duties. De Quincey speaks 
 of this appointment as an instance of the remarkable good-luck 
 which waited upon Wordsworth through his whole life. In our 
 view it is only another illustration of that scripture which 
 describes the righteous as never forsaken. Good-luck is the 
 willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscien 
 tious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his nomination to 
 
 system of punctuation." (Southey to Scott, 30th July 1809.) The tract 
 is, as Southey hints, heavy. 
 
 * The first essay in the third volume of the second edition. 
 t Wordsworth s children were : 
 
 John, born 18th June 1803 ; still living ; a clergyman. 
 Dorothy, born 16th August 1804 ; died 9th July 1847. 
 Thomas, born 16th June 1806 ; died 1st December 1812. 
 Catharine, born 6th September 1808 ; died 4th June 1812. 
 William, born 12th May 1810 ; succeeded his father as Stamp- 
 Distributor.
 
 223 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 the friendly exertions of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to 
 atone as far as might be for the injustice of the first Earl, and 
 who respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated 
 the originality of the poet.* The Collectorship at Whitehaven 
 (a more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, 
 and declined. He had enough for independence, and wished 
 nothing more. Still later, on the death of the Stamp-Distributor 
 for Cumberland, a part ot that district was annexed to West 
 moreland, and Wordsworth s income was raised to something 
 \ more than ^1000 a-year. 
 
 In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow 
 in company with the Ettrick Shepherd. During this year " The 
 Excursion " was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, 
 wEich supplied the demand ior six years. Another edition of 
 the same number ot copies was published in 1827, and not 
 exhausted till 1834. In 1815 "The White Doe of Rylstone" 
 appeared, and in 1816 "A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in 
 which Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to be 
 observed by the biographers of literary men. It contains many 
 valuable suggestions, but allows hardly scope enough for 
 personal details, to which he was constitutionally indifferent.t 
 Nearly the same date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation 
 of the first three books of the ALneid, a specimen of which was 
 printed in the Cambridge Philological Museum (1832). In 
 1819 "Peter Bell," written twenty years before, was published, 
 and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers, 
 found a more rapid sale than any of his previous volumes. 
 " The Wagoner," printed in the same year, was less successful. 
 
 * Good luck (in the sense of Chance) seems properly to be the occurrence 
 of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor knows how to use it. 
 In such hands it commonly turns to ill-luck. Moore s Bermudan appoint 
 ment is an instance of it. Wordsworth had a sound common-sense and 
 practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fill his office as well as 
 Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man could not have been found ia 
 Westmoreland. 
 
 t " I am not one who much or oft delight 
 In personal talk."
 
 WORDSWORTH. 233 
 
 His next publication was the volume of Sonnets on the river 
 Duddon, with some miscellaneous poems, r&2o. A tour on the 
 Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for another collection, 
 published in 1822. This was followed in the same year by the 
 volume of Ecclesiastical Sketches. His subsequent publica- 
 
 tions were "Yarrow Revisited," 1835, an< ^ the tragedy of "The 
 Borderers," 1842. 
 
 During all these years his fame was increasing slowly but 
 steadily, and his age gathered to itself the reverence and the 
 troops of friends which his poems and the nobly simple life 
 reflected in them deserved. Public honours followed private 
 appreciation. In 1838 the University of Dublin conferred upon 
 him the degree of D.C.L. In 1839 Oxford did the same, and 
 the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the 
 University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of 
 Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honour of 
 putting him upon the civil list for a pension of ^300. In 1843 
 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding 
 that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such 
 as might be self-imposed. His only official production was an 
 Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the 
 University of Cambridge. His life was prolonged yet seven 
 years, almost, it should seem, that he might receive that honour 
 which he had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching 
 bravery of a literary life of half-a-century, unparalleled for the 
 scorn with which its labours were received, and the victorious 
 acknowledgment which at last crowned them. Surviving 
 nearly all his contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had, 
 a foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own 
 posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness of its growth gave 
 a safe pledge of its durability. He died on the 23rd of ApriL 
 1850, the anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. 
 We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth a 
 
 .x life uneventful even for a man of letters ; a life like that of an 
 oak, of quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots 
 toward the side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and 
 of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in
 
 2 2 4 WORDS WOR TH. 
 
 which it grows. The life and growth of his mind, and the 
 influences which shaped it, are to be looked for, even more 
 than is the case with most poets, in his works, for he deliber 
 ately recorded them there. 
 
 Of his personal characteristics little is related. He was 
 somewhat above the middle height, but, according to De 
 Quincey, of indifferent figure, the shoulders being narrow and 
 drooping. His finest feature was the eye, which was grey and 
 full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says, " I never beheld eyes 
 that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They were like fires, 
 half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of 
 regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had 
 such eyes." Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and 
 Haydon that he had none of form. The best likeness of him, 
 in De Quincey s judgment, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to 
 Richardson s notes on " Paradise Lost." He was active in his 
 habits, composing in the open air, and generally dictating his 
 poems. His daily life was regular, simple, and frugal ; his 
 manners were dignified and kindly ; and in his letters and 
 recorded conversations it is remarkable how little that was 
 personal entered into his judgment of contemporaries. 
 
 The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, perhaps, not 
 even yet to be fairly estimated, so hard is it to escape into the 
 quiet hall of judgment uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship 
 which besets the doors. 
 
 Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great poet, at a 
 time when the artificial school of poetry was enthroned with all 
 the authority of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, it 
 was almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature 
 and judgment was a rebel against the existing order, should 
 become a partisan. Unfortunately, he became not only the 
 partisan of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its repre 
 sentative. Right in general principle, he thus necessarily 
 became wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that great 
 ness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying its own 
 instincts, he perhaps reduced the following his instincts 
 too much to a system, mistook his own resentments for the
 
 WORDS IVOX Tff. 225 
 
 promptings of his natural genius, and, compelling principle to 
 the measure of his own temperament or even of the contro 
 versial exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the error of 
 making naturalness itself artificial. If a poet resolve to be 
 original, it will end commonly in his being merely peculiar. 
 
 Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as 
 he grew older, from the theories which he had laid down in his 
 prefaces ;* but those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in 
 retarding the growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed 
 a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems were to be 
 studied, and the public insisted on looking through them at his 
 mature works, and were consequently unable to see fairly what 
 required a different focus. He forced his readers to come to 
 his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and 
 thus gave them beforehand the impression of something like 
 mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented repose 
 of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living 
 creature ; but Wordsworth would not let his readers be 
 
 * How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence 
 he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so 
 vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of 
 common life has a verse in his " Thanksgiving Ode" which, if one met with it 
 by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope : 
 
 " While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast." 
 
 And in "The Italian Itinerant" and "The Swiss Goatherd" we find a 
 thermometer or barometer calltd 
 
 " The well-wrought scale 
 Whose tentient tube instructs to time 
 A purpose to a fickle cliiue." 
 
 Still worse in the " Eclipse of the Sun," 1821 : 
 
 " High on her speculative tower 
 Stood Science, waiting for the hour 
 When Sol was destined to endure 
 That darkening." 
 
 So in " The Excursion," 
 
 " The cold March wind raised in her tender throat 
 Viewless obstructions." 
 
 565
 
 2 26 WORDS WORTH. 
 
 children, and did injustice to himself by giving them an uneasy 
 doubt whether creations which really throbbed with the very 
 heart s blood of genius, and were alive with nature s life of life, 
 were not contrivances of wheels and springs. A naturalness 
 which we are told to expect has lost the crowning grace of 
 nature. The men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa s visionary 
 gardens had probably no more pleasurable emotion than that 
 of a shallow wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction in 
 thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy ; but to 
 a tree that has grown as God willed we come without a theory 
 and with no botanical predilections, enjoying it simply and 
 thankfully; or the Imagination recreates for us its past sum 
 mers and winters, the birds that have nested and sung in it, 
 the sheep that have clustered in its shade, the winds that have 
 visited it, the cloud-bergs that have drifted over it, and the 
 snows that have erHyned it in winter. The Imagination is a 
 faculty that flouts at foreordination, and Wordsworth seemed 
 to do all he could to" cheat his readers of her company by laying 
 out paths with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel ! at the 
 opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every conceivable 
 emotion, with guide-boards to tell each when and where it 
 must be caught. 
 
 But if these things stood in the way of immediate appreciation, 
 he had another theory which interferes more seriously with the 
 total and permanent effect of his poems. He was theoretically 
 determined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a great 
 philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce an epic. 
 Leaving aside the question whether the epic be obsolete or not, 
 it may be doubted whether the history of a single man s mind is 
 universal enough in its interest to furnish all the requirements 
 of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubled 
 whether a poet s philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible 
 into chapter and section. It is rather something which is more 
 energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts 
 unclose themselves instinctively at its simple Open sesame! 
 while they would stand firm against the reading of the whole 
 body of philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of
 
 WORDSWORTH, 227 
 
 greatness which " The Excursion " possesses indisputably is 
 heaviness. It is only the^pisodes that are universally read, and 
 the effect of these is diluted by the connecting and accom 
 panying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth had his epic 
 mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his " Per 
 seus," was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest 
 it should run short. Separated from the rest, the episodes are 
 perfect poems in their kind, and without example in the 
 language. 
 
 Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong minds, was a 
 good critic of the substance of poetry, but somewhat niggardly 
 in the allowance he made for those subsidiary qualities which 
 make it the charmer of leisure and the employment of minds 
 without definite object. It may be doubted, indeed, whether he 
 set much store by any contemporary writing but his own, and 
 whether he did not look upon poetry too exclusively as an 
 exercise rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the 
 imagination.* He says of himself, speaking of his youth : 
 
 " In fine, 
 
 I was a better judge of thoughts than words, 
 Misled in estimating words, not only 
 By common inexperience of youth, 
 But by the trade in classic niceties, 
 The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 
 From languages that want the living voice 
 To carry meaning to the natural heart ; 
 To tell us what is passion, what is truth, 
 What reason, what simplicity and sense." t 
 
 Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this was always 
 true of him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word 
 too weak to bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight can 
 help regretting that he did not earlier give himself to " the trade 
 of classic niceties." It was precisely this which gives to the 
 blank-verse of Landor the severe dignity and reserved force 
 
 * According to Laiidor, he pronounced all Scott s poetry to be " not 
 worth five shillings." 
 t "Prelude," Book vi.
 
 228 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 which alone among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and to 
 which" Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, Wordsworth s 
 blank- verse (though the -passion be profounder) is always 
 essentially that of Cowper. They were alike also in their love 
 of outward nature and of simple things. The main difference 
 between them is one of scenery rather than of sentiment, 
 between the life-long familiar of the mountains and the dweller 
 on the plain. 
 
 It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest 
 powers of the poetic mind were associated with" a certain 
 tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the under 
 standing (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his 
 imagination are imbedded.* He wrote too much to write 
 always well ; for it is not a great Xerxes-army of words, but a 
 compact Greek ten thousand, that march safely down to 
 posterity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is much the 
 same as trying to make Jove s eagle do the service of a clucking 
 hen. Throughout "The Prelude" and "The Excursion" he 
 seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the sand- 
 ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell- 
 word which would make the particles cohere. There is an 
 arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome. 
 Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we 
 rewarded! what golden rounds of verse do we not see stretch 
 ing heavenward with angels ascending and descending ! what 
 haunting harmonies hover around us deep and eternal like the 
 undying barytone of the sea ! and if we are compelled to fare 
 through sands and desert wildernesses, how often do we not 
 hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling 
 
 * This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss Martineau said 
 to Crabb liobinson in 1839, speaking of Words worth sconversation : 
 " Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity with which he dwells on 
 trifles ; at other times he Hows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong 
 impression of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read " ResolutFon " 
 and " Independence " to a lady, who was affected by it even to tears, and 
 then said, " I have not heard anything for years that so much delighted 
 me ; but, after all, it is nut poetry."
 
 WORDSWORTH, 229 
 
 personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest 
 aspiration, such as we wait for in vain in any other poet ! 
 
 Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot 
 but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was. 
 He had no humour, no dramatic power, and his temperament 
 was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all his published 
 correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. If 
 we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall 
 find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or 
 delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect 
 produced by external objects and events upon his own mind, 
 and of the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which they in 
 turn took from his mood or temperament. His finest passages 
 are always monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and 
 there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories 
 in the undue relative importance given to trivial matters. He 
 was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of particu- 
 larisation (for it is as truly a power as generalisation) is what 
 gives such vigour and greatness to single lines and sentiments 
 of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or 
 sentiment. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. 
 That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits which his 
 fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was never self-denying 
 enough to impose on itself. It suits his solitary and meditative 
 temper, and it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what 
 was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its narrow 
 bounds, Taut fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a 
 virtue his too common fault of giving undue prominence 
 to every passing emotion. He excels in monologue, and the 
 law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. In " The 
 Excursion" we are driven to the subterfuge of a French"verdict 
 of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach 
 and elemental movement of Milton s, which, like the trade- 
 wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets 
 from every quarter ; some deep with silks and spicery, some 
 brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, 
 but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long
 
 230 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the 
 unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an 
 organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable 
 equally of the trumpet s ardours or the slim delicacy of the flute, 
 and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his 
 prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. 
 If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he 
 j lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, 
 I the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar 
 stream, but that which Apollo breathed through, tending the 
 flocks of Admetus that which Pan endowed with every 
 melody of the visible universe the same in which the soul of 
 the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual 
 nature so that ever and anon, amid the notes of human joy or 
 sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, 
 thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity. 
 
 Wordsworth s absolute want of humour, while it no doubt 
 confirmed his self-confidence by making him insensible both to 
 the comical incongruity into which he was often led by his 
 earlier theory concerning the language of poetry and to the not 
 unnatural ridicule called forth by it, seems to have been indica 
 tive of a certain dulness of perception in other directions.* 
 We cannot help feeling that the material of his nature was 
 
 * Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when 
 he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of " Helen of Kirconnel " 
 a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness of movement and 
 savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. 
 Compare 
 
 " Curst be the heart that thought the thought, 
 And curst the hand that fired the shot, 
 When in my arms burd Helen dropt, 
 
 That died to succour me ! 
 O, think ye not my heart was sair 
 When my love dropt down and spake na mair?" 
 compare this with 
 
 " Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts 
 That through his brain are travelling, 
 And, starting up, to Bruce s heart 
 He launched a deadly javelin :
 
 WORDSWORTH. 231 
 
 essentially prose, which, in his inspired moments, he had the 
 power of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspiration 
 failed or was factitious, remained obstinately leaden. The 
 normal condition of many poets would seem to approach 
 that temperature to which Wordsworth s mind could be raised 
 only by the white heat of profoundly inward passion. And 
 in proportion to the intensity needful to make his nature 
 thoroughly aglow is the very high quality of his best verses. 
 They seem rather the productions of nature than of man, and 
 have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the 
 
 Fair Ellen saw it when it came, 
 And, stepping forth to meet the same, 
 Did with her body cover 
 The Youth, her chosen lover. 
 
 And Bruce (as soon as he had slain 
 The Gordon) sailed away to Spain, 
 And fought with rage incessant 
 Against the Moorish Crescent." 
 
 These are surely the verses of an attorney s clerk " penning a stanza 
 when he should engross." It will be noticed that Wordsworth here also 
 departs from his earlier theory of the language of poetry by substituting a 
 javelin for a bullet as less modern and familiar. Had he written 
 
 " And Gordon never gave a hint, 
 But, having somewhat picked his flint, 
 Let fly the fatal bullet 
 That killed that lovely pullet," 
 
 it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. He shows 
 the same insensibility in a note upon the " Ancient Mariner" in the second 
 edition of the Lyrical Ballads : " The poem of my friend has indeed 
 great defects ; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, 
 either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been 
 long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed 
 himself to partake of something supernatural ; secondly, that he does not 
 act, but is continually acted upon ; thirdly, that the events, having no 
 necessary connection, do not produce each other ; and lastly, that the 
 imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to 
 be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney s clerk aforenamed. 
 One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge s most truly original 
 poems lay in this very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
 
 232 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. 
 Is it his thought ? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. 
 Is it his feeling ? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil 
 ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immu 
 table grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, 
 the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But 
 this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its 
 very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in 
 endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even 
 than many poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet 
 of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having the feeling 
 sometimes that the poem is there for the sake of these passages, 
 rather than that these are the natural jets and elations of a 
 mind energised by the rapidity of its own motion. In other 
 words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems not to 
 spring from the inspiration of the poem conceived as a whole, 
 but rather to have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet 
 in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has 
 patiently built up around it a setting of verse too often ungrace 
 ful in form, and of a material whose cheapness may cast a 
 doubt on the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.* 
 During the most happily productive period of his life, Words 
 worth was impatient of what may be called the mechanical 
 portion of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first 
 to have been his scribes. In later years he had learned and 
 often insisted on the truth that poetry was an art no less than 
 a gift, and corrected his poems in cold blood, sometimes to 
 their detriment. But he certainly had more of the vision 
 
 Ithan of the faculty divine, and was always a little numb on 
 the side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best poem in 
 these respects is the " Laodamia," and it is not uninstructive 
 
 " A hundred times when, roving high and low, 
 I have been harassed with the toil of verse, 
 Much pains and little progress, and at once 
 Some lovely Image in the song rose up, 
 Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea." 
 
 Prelude, Book iv.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 233 
 
 to learn from his own lips that " it cost him more trouble than 
 almost anything of equal length he had ever written." His 
 longer poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate bond 
 of union than their more or less immediate relation to his 
 personality. Of character other than his own he had but 
 a faint conception, and all the personages of "The Excursion" 
 that are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of himself 
 upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature was incapable 
 of projecting itself into the consciousness of other men and 
 seeing the springs of action at their source in the recesses 
 of individual character. The best parts of these longer 
 poems are bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers 
 were always clumsy at the callida junclnra. The stream 
 of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing 
 reflections (viridesque placido tzquorc sylvas] ; we are forced to 
 do our own rowing, and only when the current is hemmed in by 
 some narrow gorge of the poet s personal consciousness do we 
 feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but impetuous rush 
 of unmistakable inspiration. The fact that what is precious in 
 Wordsworth s poetry was (more truly even than with some 
 greater poets than he) a gift rather than an achievement 
 should always be borne in mind in taking the measure of his 
 power. I know not whether to call it height or depth this 
 peculiarity of his, but it certainly endows those parts of his 
 work which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian with an 
 unexpectedness and impressiveness of originality such as we 
 feel in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to have been 
 half conscious of this, and recited his own poems to all comers 
 with an enthusiasm of wondering admiration that would have 
 been profoundly comic* but for its simple sincerity, and" for the 
 fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire, of Rydal Mount, was 
 one person, and the William Wordsworth whom he so heartily 
 
 * Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, and Mr. 
 Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, " These quotations 
 [from his own works] he read in a way that much impressed me ; it seemed 
 almost as if he were awed by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with 
 which he had been endowed." (The italics are mine.)
 
 2 34 WORDS IVOR TH. 
 
 reverenced quite another. We recognise two voices in him, as 
 Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and his scribe 
 Baruch. If the prophet cease from dictating, the amanuensis, 
 rather than be idle, employs his pen in jotting down some 
 anecdotes of his master, how he one day went out and saw an 
 old woman, and the next day did not, and so came home and 
 dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon, and how 
 another day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations have 
 been carelessly taken up into the text, have been religiously 
 held by the pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dex 
 terous exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular 
 meanings. Presently the real prophet takes up the word 
 again, and speaks as one divinely inspired, the Voice of a 
 higher and invisible power. Wordsworth s better utterances 
 have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time 
 and place, the immunity from decay, that belong to the grand 
 simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his own than 
 ours and every man s, the word of the inalterable Mind. This 
 gift of his was naturally very much a matter of temperament, 
 and accordingly by far the greater part of his finer product 
 belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had set his lumpish 
 foot on the pedal that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.* 
 
 ?He did not grow as those poets do in whom the artistic sense is 
 predominant. One of the most delightful fancies of the 
 
 * His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influ 
 ence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to 
 Wordsworth thathe alludes when he speaks of "those who have been so well 
 pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills 
 into their main stream." (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of 
 S. T. C., vol. i., pp. 5, 6.) " Wordsworth found fault with the repetition 
 of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare s line about bees : 
 
 The singing masons building roofs of gold. 
 
 This, he said, was a line that Milton ne"ver would have written. Keats 
 thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the 
 continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt s Autobiography.) Words 
 worth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, " My ear is susceptible to the 
 clashing of sounds almost to disease." One cannot help thinking that his 
 training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.
 
 WORDSWORTH. 235 
 
 Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had 
 his portrait drawn by a highly-idealising hand, does his best after 
 wards to look like it. Many of Wordsworth s later poems seem 
 like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self. They 
 would never, as Sir John Harrington says of poetry, " keep a 
 child from play and an old man from the chimney-corner."* 
 
 Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted a junior 
 counsel who was arguing certain obvious points of law at 
 needless length, by saying, " Brother Jones, there are some 
 things which a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in 
 equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth has this fault 
 of enforcing and restating obvious points till the reader feels as 
 if his own intelligence was somewhat underrated. He is over- 
 conscientious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly 
 absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows not when to 
 stop. If he feel himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping 
 the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series of questions 
 sometimes not needing, and often incapable of answer. There 
 are three stanzas of such near the close of the First Part of 
 " Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the dead 
 body in the water, all happily incongruous, and ending with one 
 which reaches the height of comicality : 
 
 " Is it a fiend that to a stake 
 Of fire his desperate self is tethering ? 
 Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell, 
 In solitary ward or cell, 
 Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? " 
 
 The same want of humour which made him insensible to incon 
 gruity may perhaps account also for the singular unconscious 
 ness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry 
 For example, a little farther on in " Peter Bell" we find : 
 
 " Now like a tempest-shattered bark 
 That overwhelmed and prostrate lies, 
 And in a moment to the verge 
 Is lifted of a foaming surge 
 Full suddenly the Ass doth rise ! " 
 
 * In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso. " 
 
 I/
 
 336 WOKDSWORTff. 
 
 And one cannot help thinking that the similes of the huge 
 stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble as they are in them 
 selves, are somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are 
 
 , Put-* 
 
 The movement of Wordsworth s mind was too slow and his 
 f mood to meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own 
 l thoughts and reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them 
 to the interests of his story. Moreover, it is never action that 
 interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or hinder it. 
 "The Wagoner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with 
 "Tarn O Shanter" infinitely to its own disadvantage. "Peter 
 Beiy full though it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, 
 is lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to confess 
 that he did not like it. "The WhiteTJoe," the most Words- 
 \vorthian of them all in the best meaning of the epithet, is also 
 only the more truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What 
 charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is the 
 
 " Happy tone 
 
 Of meditation slipping in between 
 The beauty coming and the beauty gone." 
 
 A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their words to the 
 tune of our own feelings and fancies, in the charm of their 
 manner, indefinable as the sympathetic grace of woman, are 
 everything to us without our being able to say that they are 
 much in themselves. They rather narcotise than fortify. 
 Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own before he admits 
 us to" his intimaey ; but, once admitted, it is for life, and we 
 find ourselves in his debt, not for what he has been to us in our 
 hours of relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a 
 reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal independence 
 of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first professed by 
 Dr. jearr Jaques and continued by Cowper, certainly breaks 
 down as a whole. The Solitary of " The Excursion," who has 
 not been cured of his scepticism by living among the medicinal 
 mountains, is, so far as we can see, equally proof against the 
 
 * In " Resolution " and " Independence-"
 
 WORDSWORTH. *tf 
 
 lectures of Pedjer and Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt 
 that this would Tie so, and accordingly never saw his way clear 
 to finishing the poem. But the treatment, whether a panacea 
 or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates 
 abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, 
 indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in 
 constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth s what Milton 
 would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of 
 manlier qualities. The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere 
 spiritual megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more 
 out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and passion 
 and by grappling with the facts of this world, rather than 
 muddling themselves over the insoluble problems of another. 
 If they had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand 
 it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, 
 and would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, 
 in the spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the 
 apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his 
 finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence. 
 
 But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those 
 qualifications and deductions against which even the greatest , 
 poet may not plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is 
 enough to justify his fame. Even \vhere~his genius is wrapped 
 in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of imagination struggles 
 through, flashing out unexpected vistas, and illuminating the 
 humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a radiance of 
 momentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. If it be 
 the most delightful function of the poet to set our lives to music, 
 yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our maturer gratitude 
 if he do his part also as moralist and philosopher to purify 
 and enlighten ; if he define and encourage our vacillating 
 perceptions of duty ; if he piece together our fragmentary- 
 apprehensions of our own life and that larger life whose 
 unconscious instruments we are, making of the jumbled bits of 
 our dissected map of experience a coherent chart. In the gnat 
 poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and sense 
 that sympathises like gossamer sea-moss with every movement
 
 lilt 
 
 * 3 8 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 of the element in which it floats, but which is rooted on the 
 solid rock of our common sympathies. Wordsworth shows less 
 of this finer feminine fibre of organisation than one or two of 
 his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley ; but he 
 was a masculine thinker, and in his more characteristic poems 
 there is always a kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching 
 principles that stimulates thought and challenges meditation. 
 Groping in the dark passages of life, we come upon some axiom 
 of his, as it were a wall that gives us our bearings and enables 
 us to find an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that he 
 lacks that serene impartiality of mind which results from 
 breadth of culture ; nay, he seems narrow, insular, almost 
 provincial. He reminds us of those saints of Dante who gather 
 brightness by revolving on their own axis. But through this 
 very limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the 
 impressiveness which results from eagerness of personal con 
 viction. If we read Wordsworth through, as I have just done, 
 we find ourselves changing our mind about him at every other 
 1 i page, so uneven is he. If we read our favourite poems or 
 y I passages only, he will seem uniformly great. And even as 
 regards " The Excursion " we should remember how few long 
 poems will bear consecutive reading. For my part I know of 
 but one the " Odyssey." 
 
 None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact 
 sense of the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts 
 and emotions which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the 
 doubtful limits of that shore between our abiding divine and 
 our fluctuating human nature, rooted in the one, but living 
 in the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible only at 
 exceptional moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no 
 other poet except Shakespeare have so many phrases become 
 household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current 
 more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the 
 nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily 
 possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldli- 
 ness of whose gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry 
 and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He
 
 WORDSWORTH. 239 
 
 has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition 
 which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or 
 indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely 
 sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. 
 Our language owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and 
 abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having 
 emboldened us to take delight in simple things, and to trust 
 ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It 
 needs not to bid 
 
 " Kenowiied Chaucer lie a thought more nigh 
 To rare Beaumond, and learned Beaumond lie 
 A little nearer Spenser ;" 
 
 for there is no fear of crowding in that little society with whom 
 he is now enrolled as fifth in the succession of the great 
 English Poets.
 
 KEATS. 
 
 I HERE are few poets whose works contain slighter hints of 
 -* their personal history than those of Keats ; yet there are, 
 perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather the conditions 
 upon which they lived, are more clearly traceable in what they 
 have written. To write the life of a man was formerly 
 understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of circum 
 stances, of those things which stood about the life and were 
 more or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But 
 Biography from day to day holds dates cheaper and facts 
 dearer. A man s life, so far as its outward events are con 
 cerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are by the tailor, 
 of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material ; but the gait and 
 gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves 
 characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. 
 It is those essential facts which underlie the life and make the 
 individual man that are of importance, and it is the cropping 
 out of these upon the surface that give us indications by which 
 to judge of the true nature hidden below. Every man has his 
 block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend very much 
 u;.on the shape of that upon the knots and twists which 
 existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the 
 cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and 
 shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is 
 the vain endeavour to make ourselves what we are not that has 
 strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in 
 the rough. 
 
 Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined 
 character, for that icsults commonly from the resistance made 
 by temperament to the many influences by which the world, as
 
 KEATS. 241 
 
 it may happen then to be, endeavours to mould every one in its 
 own image. What his temperament was we can see clearly, 
 and also that it subordinated itself more and more to the 
 discipline of art. 
 
 JOHN KEATS, the second of four children, like Chaucer and 
 Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike them, he was certainly 
 not of gentle blood. Lord Houghton, who seems to have had 
 a kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet, says that he 
 was "born in the upper ranks of the middle class." This shows 
 a commendable tenderness for the nerves of English society, 
 and reminds one of NorFhcote s story of the violin-player who, 
 wishing to compliment his pupil, George III., divided all 
 fiddlers into three classes those who could not play at all, 
 those who played very badly, and those who played very well 
 assuring his Majesty that he had made such commendable 
 progress as to have already reached the second rank. We shall 
 not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the father of Keats 
 (as Lord Houghton has told us in an earlier biography) " was 
 employed in the establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor 
 of large livery-stables on the Pavement in Mooi fields, nearly 
 opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So that, after all, 
 it was not so bad ; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a proprietor ; 
 second, he was the proprietor of an establishment ; third, he 
 was the proprietor of a large establishment ; and fourth, this 
 large establishment was nearly opposite Finsbury Circus a 
 name which vaguely dilates the imagination with all sorts of 
 potential grandeurs. It is true that Leigh Hunt asserts that 
 Keats " was a little too sensitive on the score of his origin,"* 
 but we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or 
 in such of his letters as have been printed. We suspect the 
 fact to have been that he resented with becoming pride the 
 vulgar BlackvfOod and Quarterly standard, which measured 
 genius by genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedigree 
 is of the best, tracing through Spenser to Chaucer, ard 
 
 * Hunt s Autobiography (Am. ed.), vol. ii., p. 36. 
 
 566
 
 242 KEATS. 
 
 that Pegasus does not stand at livery even in the largest 
 establishments in Moorfields. 
 
 As well as we can make out, then, the father of Keats was a 
 groom in the service of Mr. Jennings, and married the daughter 
 of his master. Thus, on the mother s side, at least, we find a 
 grandfather; on the father s there is no hint of such an 
 ancestor, and we must charitably take him for granted. It is of 
 more importance that the elder Keats was a man of sense and 
 energy, and that his wile was a " lively and intelligent woman, 
 who hastened the birth of the poet by her passionate love 
 of amusement," bringing him into the world, a seven-months 
 child, on the 29th October 1795, instead of the 29 .!) December, 
 as would have been conventionally proper. Lord Houghton 
 describes her as "tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat 
 saturnine demeanour." This last circumstance does not agree 
 very well with what he had just before told us of her liveliness, 
 but he consoles us by adding that " she succeeded, however, in 
 inspiring her children with the profoundest affection." This 
 was particularly true of John, who once, when between four and 
 five years old, mounted guard at her chamber door with an old 
 sword, when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her not to 
 be disturbed.* 
 
 In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father was killed 
 by a fall from his horse. His mother seems to have been 
 ambitious for her children, and there was some talk of sending 
 John to Harrow. Fortunately this plan was thought too 
 expensive, and he was sent instead to the school of Mr. Clarke 
 at Enfleld, with his brothers. A maternal uncle, who had 
 distinguished himself by his courage under Duncan at Camper- 
 down, was the hero of his nephews, and they went to school 
 resolved to maintain the family reputation for courage. John 
 was always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his school 
 fellows as a strange compound of pluck and sensibility. He 
 attacked an usher who had boxed his brother s ears ; and when 
 
 * Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord iloughton s 
 version the bvst
 
 KEATS. 243 
 
 his mother died, in 1810, was moodily inconsolable, hiding 
 himself for several days in a nook under the masters desk, and 
 refusing all comfort from teacher or friend. 
 
 He \vas popular at school, as boys of spirit always are, and 
 impressed his companions with a sense of his power. They 
 thought he would one day be a famous soldier. This may have 
 been owing to the stories he told them of the heroic uncle, 
 whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly famoused by the 
 boy Homer, and whom they probably took for an admiral at 
 the least, as it would have been well for Keats s literary 
 prosperity if he had been. At any rate, they thought John 
 would be a great man, which is the main thing, for the public 
 opinion of the playground is truer and more discerning than 
 that of the world, and if you tell us what the boy was, we will 
 tell you what the man longs to be, however he may be 
 repressed by necessity or fear of the police reports. 
 
 Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything else 
 especially worthy of record in the school-life of Keats. He 
 translated the twelve books of the ^Eneid, read Robinson 
 Crusoe and the Incas of Peru, and looked into Shakespeare. 
 He left school in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but he 
 had studied Spence s Polymetis, Tooke s Pantheon, and Lem- 
 priere s Dictionary, and knew gods, nymphs, and heroes, which 
 were quite as good company perhaps for him as aorists and 
 aspirates. It is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respect 
 able writers if their pages could suddenly have become alive 
 under their pens with all that the young poet saw in them.* 
 
 On leaving school he was apprenticed for five years to a 
 
 * There is always some oue willing to make himself a sort of accessary 
 alter the fact in any success ; always an old woman or two, ready to 
 remember omens of all quantities and qualities in the childhood of persons 
 who have become distinguished. Accordingly, a certain " Mrs. Graity, of 
 Craven Street, Finsbury, assures Mr. George Keats, when he tells her that 
 John is determined to be a poet, "that this was very odd, because when 
 he could just speak, instead of answering questions pat to him, he would 
 always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and then laugh." The 
 early histories of heroes, like those of nitions arc always more cr less
 
 244 KEATS. 
 
 surgeon at Edmonton. His master was a Mr. Hammond, " of 
 some eminence" in his profession, as Lord Houghton takes 
 care to assure us. The place was of more importance than the 
 master, for its neighbourhood to Enfield enabled him to keep 
 up his intimacy with the family of his former teacher, Mr. 
 Clarke, and to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was 
 in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke lent him 
 the " Faerie Queen." Nothing that is told of Orpheus or 
 Amphion is more wonderful than this miracle of Spenser s, 
 transforming a surgeon s apprentice into a great poet. Keats 
 learned at once the secret of his birth, and henceforward his 
 indentures ran to Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus 
 could the Muse defend her son. It is the old story the lost 
 heir discovered by his aptitude for what is gentle and knightly. 
 Haydon tells us " that he used sometimes to say to his brother 
 he feared he should never be a poet, and if he was not he 
 would destroy himself." This was perhaps a half-conscious 
 reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose genius and fate he had 
 an intense sympathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of 
 the shortness of his own career.* 
 
 Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then Shakespeare, 
 and afterwards Milton. But Chapman s translations had a 
 more abiding influence on his style both for good and evil. 
 That he read wisely, his comments on the " Paradise Lost" are 
 enough to prove. He now also commenced poet himself, but 
 does not appear to have neglected the study of his profession. 
 
 mythical, and I give the story for what it is worth. Doubtless there is a 
 gleam of intelligence in it, for the old lady pronounces it odd that any one 
 should determine to be a poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the 
 matter was determined earlier and by a higher disposing power. There 
 are few children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and 
 perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs. Grafty, of Craven 
 Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See Haydoris Auto 
 biography, vol. i., p. 361. 
 
 * " I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read some line? 
 from (I think) the Bristowe Tragedy withan enthusiasm of admiration 
 such as could be felt only by a poet, and which true poetry only could have 
 excited^" J. II. C., In Notes and Queries, 4th s. x. 157.
 
 KEATS. 245 
 
 He was a youth of energy and purpose, and though he no 
 doubt penned many a stanza when he should have been 
 anatomising, and walked the hospitals accompanied by the 
 early gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable examination 
 in 1817. In the spring of this year, also, he prepared to take 
 his first degree as poet, and accordingly published a small 
 volume containing a selection of his earlier essays in verse. It 
 attracted little attention, and the rest of this year seems to have 
 been occupied with a journey on foot in Scotland, and the com 
 position of " Endymion," which was published in 1818. Milton s 
 " Tetrachordon " was not better abused ; but Milton s assailants 
 were unorganised, and were obliged each to print and pay for 
 his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the natural laws of 
 demand and supply to furnish him with readers. Keats was 
 arraigned by the constituted authorities of literary justice. 
 They might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses, but the 
 sentence was published, and the penalty inflicted before all 
 England. The difference between his fortune and Milton s was 
 that between being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and 
 being set in the pillory. In the first case, the annoyance 
 brushes off mostly with the mud ; in the last, there is no solace 
 but the consciousness of suffering in a great cause. This 
 solace, to a certain extent, Keats had ; for his ambition was 
 noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputation, but to be a 
 great poet. Haydon says that Wordsworth and Keats were the 
 only men he had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty 
 purpose. 
 
 It is curious that men should resent more fiercely what they 
 suspect to be good verses, than what they know to be bad 
 morals. Is it because they feel themselves inrapable of the one 
 and not of the other ? Probably a certain amount of honest 
 loyalty to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be taken 
 into account, and quite as much of the cruelty of criticism is due 
 to want of thought as to deliberate injustice. However it be, 
 the best poetry has been the most savagely attacked, and men 
 who scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as if there 
 were never a not in any of them, felt every sentiment of their
 
 246 KEA TS. 
 
 better nature outraged by the Lyrical Ballads. It is idle to 
 attempt to show that Keats did not suffer keenly from the 
 vulgarities of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered in 
 proportion as his ideal was high, and he was conscious of falling 
 below it. In England, especially, it is not pleasant to be 
 ridiculous, even if yo i are a lord ; but to be ridiculous and an 
 apothecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was formerly 
 to be excommunicated. A priori, there was something absurd 
 in poetry written by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables 
 of Mr. Jennings, even though they were an establishment, and 
 a large establishment, and nearly opposite Finsbury Circus. 
 Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler, thought so in the Quarterly, and 
 Mr. Terry, the actor,* thought so even more distinctly in 
 Blackwood, bidding the young apothecary " back to his 
 gallipots ! " It is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your 
 inferiors who happen to have the advantage of position, nor to 
 be drenched with ditch-water, though you know it to be thrown 
 by a scullion in a garret. 
 
 Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensibility was 
 excessive, could not but be galled by this treatment. He was 
 galled the more that he was also a man of strong sense, and 
 capable of understanding clearly how hard it is to make men 
 acknowledge solid value in a person whom they have once 
 heartily laughed at. Reputation is in itself only a farthing- 
 candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, 
 but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. 
 Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. To 
 his friend Taylor he writes, " There is but one way for me. 
 The road lies through study, application, and thought." 
 Thrilling with the electric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in 
 vision, like Dante, that small procession of the elder poets to 
 which only elect centuries can add another laurelled head. Might 
 he, too, deserve from posterity the love and reverence which he 
 paid to those antique glories? It was no unworthy ambition, but 
 
 * Haydon (Autobiography, vol. i. p. 379) says that he "strongly 
 suspects " Terry to have written the articles in Blackwood.
 
 KEATS. 247 
 
 everything was against him birth, health, even friends, since 
 it was partly on their account that he was sneered at. His 
 very name stood in his way, for Fame loves best such syllables 
 as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like Spenserian, 
 Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great deal in 
 names, and when the fairies come with their gifts to the cradle 
 of the selected child, let one, wiser than the rest, choose a 
 name for him from which well-sounding derivatives can be 
 made, and, best of all, with a termination in on. Men judge 
 the current coin of opinion by the ring, and are readier to 
 take without question whatever is Platonic, Baconian, New 
 tonian, Johnsonian, Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, 
 and all the rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of 
 Keats the more pity and to say a thing is Keatsy is to 
 contemn it. Fortune likes fine names. 
 
 Haydon tells us that Keats was very much depressed by 
 the fortunes of his book. This was natural enough, but he 
 took it all in a manly way, and determined to revenge him 
 self by writing better poetry. He knew that activity, and not 
 despondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune. Haydon 
 is sure of the change in his spirits, because he would come 
 to the painting-room and sit silent for hours. But we rather 
 think that the conversation, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled 
 that in a young author s first play, where the other inter 
 locutors are only brought in as convenient points for the 
 hero to hitch the interminable web of his monologue upon. 
 Besides, Keats had been continuing his education this year, 
 by a course of Elgin marbles and pictures by the great Italians, 
 and might very naturally have found little to say about Mr. 
 Haydon s extensive works, that he would have cared to hear. 
 Lord Houghton, on the other hand, in his eagerness to prove 
 that Keats was not killed by the article in the Quarterly, is 
 carried too far toward the opposite extreme, and more than 
 hints that he was not even hurt by it. This would have 
 been true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant companionship 
 with mountains, had acquired something of their manners, 
 but was simply impossible to a man of Keats s temperament.
 
 24 8 KEATS. 
 
 On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect Keats the less 
 for having been gifted with sensibility, and may even say 
 what we believe to be true, that his health was injured by the 
 failure of his book- A man cannot have a sensuous nature and 
 be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be imaginative 
 as \ve!l as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the amount 
 of his imagination. It is perfectly true that what we call the 
 world, in these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken 
 spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves ; but as long as \ve 
 do not know it, it is a very passable giant. We are not without 
 experience of natures so purely intellectual that their bodies 
 had no more concern in their mental doings and sufferings 
 than a house has with the good or ill fortune of its occupant. 
 But poets are not built on this plan, and especially poets like 
 Keats, in whom the moral seems to have so perfectly interfused 
 the physical man, that you might almost say he could feel 
 sorrow with his hands, so truly did his body, like that of 
 Donne s Mistress Boulstred, think and remember and forebode. 
 The healthiest poet of whom our civilisation has been capable 
 says that when he beholds 
 
 " desert a beggar born, 
 And strength by limping sway disabled, 
 And art made tongue-tied by authority," 
 
 alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his day, 
 " And simple truth miscalled simplicity," 
 
 as it was long afterwards in Wordsworth s case, 
 
 " And captive Good attending Captain 111," 
 
 that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others, life seems to 
 have been dearest, as it was also the fullest of enjoyment, "tired 
 of all these," had nothing for it but to cry for "restful Death." 
 
 Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill-fortune courageously. 
 He certainly did not over-estimate " Endymion," and perhaps a 
 sense of humour which was not wanting in him may have served 
 as a buffer against the too importunate shock of disappointment.
 
 KEA TS. 
 
 249 
 
 " He made Ritchie promise," says Haydon, " he would carry his 
 Endymion to the great desert of Sahara and fling it in the 
 midst." On the 9th October 1818 he writes to his publisher, 
 Mr. Hessey, " I cannot but feel indebted to those gentlemen 
 who have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to get 
 acquainted with my own strength and weakness. Praise or 
 blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of 
 beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own 
 works. My own domestic criticism has given me pain without 
 comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could 
 inflict ; and also, when I feel I am right, no external praise can 
 give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception and 
 ratification of what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right in regard to 
 the slipshod " Endymion. " That it is so is no fault of mine. 
 No ! though it may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I 
 had power to make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its 
 being a perfect piece, and with that view asked advice and 
 trembled over every page, it would not have been written ; for 
 it is not in my nature to fumble. I will write independently. I 
 have written independently without judgment. I may write 
 independently and with judgment, hereafter. The Genius of 
 Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man. It cannot be 
 matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness 
 in itself. That which is creative must create itself. In Endy 
 mion I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become 
 better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the 
 rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a 
 silly pipe, and took tea and comfort.ible advice. I was never 
 afraid of failure ; for I would sooner fail than not be among the 
 greatest." 
 
 This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally the side 
 which a large-minded person would display to a friend. This is 
 what he thought, but whether it was what he felt, I think 
 doubtful. I look upon it rather as one of the phenomena of 
 that multanimous nature of the poet, which makes him for the 
 moment that of which he has an intellectual perception. Else 
 where he says something which seems to hint at the true state
 
 2 5 o KEATS. 
 
 of the case. " I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a 
 man : they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a 
 passion? One cannot help contrasting Keats with Wordsworth 
 the one altogether poet ; the other essentially a Wordsworth, 
 with the poetic faculty added the one shifting from form to 
 form, and from style to style, and pouring his hot throbbing 
 life into every mould ; the other remaining always the individual, 
 producing works, and not so much living in his poems as 
 memorially recording his life in them. When Wordsworth 
 alludes to the foolish criticisms on his writings, he speaks 
 serenely and generously of Wordsworth the poet, as if he 
 were an unbiassed third person, who takes up the argument 
 merely in the interest of literature. He towers into a bald 
 egotism which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy 
 was his employment ; it was Keats s very existence, and he felt 
 the rough treatment of his verses as if it had been the wounding 
 of a limb. To Wordsworth, composing was a healthy exercise ; 
 his slow pulse and imperturbable self-trust gave him assurance 
 of a life so long that he could wait ; and when we read his 
 poems we should never suspect the existence in him of any 
 sense but that of observation, as if Wordsworth the poet were 
 a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by Mr. Wordsworth 
 the distributor of stamps, as a kind of keeper. But every one 
 of Keats s poems was a sacrifice of vitality ; a virtue went away 
 from him into every one of them ; even yet, as we turn the leaves, 
 they seem to warm and thrill our fingers with the flush of his fine 
 senses, and the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not 
 wonder he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly. 
 
 In the meantime his younger brother languished and died, 
 his elder seems to have been in some way unfortunate, and had 
 gone to America, and Keats himself showed symptoms of the 
 hereditary disease which caused his death at last. It is in 
 October 1818 that we find the first allusion to a passion which 
 was, ere long, to consume him. It is plain enough beforehand, 
 that those were not moral or mental graces that should attract a 
 man like Keats. His intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his 
 art, his books, and his friends. He could have companionship
 
 KEATS. 251 
 
 and appreciation from men ; what he craved of woman 
 was only repose. That luxurious nature, which would have 
 tossed uneasily on a crumpled rose-leaf, must have something 
 softer to rest upon than intellect, something less ethereal than 
 culture. It was his body that needed to have its equilibrium 
 restored, the waste of his nervous energy that must be repaired 
 by deep draughts of the overflowing life and drowsy tropical 
 force of an abundant and healthily poised womanhood. 
 Writing to his sister-in-law, he says of this nameless person : 
 " She is not a Cleopatra, but is, at least, a Charmian ; she has 
 a rich Eastern look ; she has fine eyes and fine manners. 
 When she comes into a room she makes the same impression 
 as the beauty of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious 
 of herself to repulse any man who may address her. From 
 habit, she thinks that nothing particular, I always find myself 
 at ease with such a woman ; the picture before me always gives me 
 a life and animation which I cannot possibly feel with anything 
 inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to 
 be awkward or in a tremble. I forget myself entirely, because 
 I live in her. You will by this time think I am in love with her, 
 so, before I go any farther, I will tell you that I am not. She 
 kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart s might do. I 
 speak of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which 
 I can feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial 
 woman, the very yes and no of whose life is to me a banquet. 
 ... I like her and her like, because one has no sensation; 
 what \ve both are is taken for granted. . . . She walks across 
 a room in such a manner that a man is drawn toward her with 
 magnetic power. ... I believe, though, she has faults, the 
 same as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had. Yet she 
 is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way ; for there are two 
 distinct tempers of mind in which we judge of things the 
 worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical ; and the unearthly, 
 spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, 
 and this Charmian hold the first place in our minds ; in the 
 latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child s cradle, 
 and you, my dear sister, are the conquering feelings. As a
 
 252 KEATS. 
 
 man of the world, I love the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an 
 eternal being, I love the thought of you. I should like her to 
 ruin me, and I should like you to save me." 
 
 It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head with such 
 pains, while his whole body is so clearly visible, as in this 
 extract. This lady, it seems, is not a Cleopatra, only a 
 Charmian ; but presently we find that she is imperial. He 
 does not love her, but he would just like to be ruined by her, 
 nothing more. This glimpse of her, with her leopardess beauty, 
 crossing the room and drawing men after her magnetically, is 
 all we have. She seems to have been still living in 1848, and, 
 as Lord Houghton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred. 
 " She is an East-Indian," Keats says, " and ought to be her 
 grandfather s heir." Her name we do not know.* It appears 
 from Dilke s Papers of a Critic that they were betrothed : " It 
 
 is quite a settled thing between John Keats and Miss . 
 
 God help them. It is a bad thing for them. The mother says 
 she cannot prevent it, and that her only hope is that it will go 
 off. He don t like anyone to look at her or to speak to her." 
 Alas, the tropical warmth became a consuming fire ! 
 
 " His passion cm el grown took on a hue 
 Fierce and sanguineous." 
 
 Between this time and the spring of 1820 he seems to have 
 worked assiduously. Of course, worldly success was of more 
 importance than ever. He began " Hyperion," but had given it 
 up in September 1819, because as he said, "there were too 
 many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote " Lamia" after an 
 attentive study of Dryden s versification. This period also 
 produced the " Eve of St. Agnes," " Isabella," and the odes to 
 the "Nightingale" and to the "Grecian Urn." He studied 
 Italian, read Ariosto, and wrote part of a humorous poem, 
 " The Cap and Bells." He tried his hand at tragedy, and Lord 
 Houghton has published among his Remains, " Otho the 
 
 * The sale at public auction of Keats s love-letters has, since this essay 
 was written, made the name known only too well. Her name was Fanny 
 Brawne. [Fj).]
 
 KEA TS. 253 
 
 Great," and all that was ever written of " King Stephen." We 
 think he did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called upon to 
 show how ill his biographee could do anything. 
 
 In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on the top of a 
 stage-coach, and came home in a state of feverish excitement. 
 He was persuaded to go to bed, and in getting between the 
 cold sheets coughed slightly. " That is blood in my mouth," 
 he said ; " bring me the candle ; let me see this blood." It was 
 of a brilliant red, and his medical knowledge enabled him to 
 interpret the augury. Those narcotic odours that seem to 
 breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of the voyager 
 who is drifting towards the shore of the mysterious Other 
 World, appeared to envelop him, and, looking up with a 
 sudden calmness, he said, " I know the colour of that blood ; it 
 is arterial blood ; I cannot be deceived in that colour. That 
 drop is my death-warrant ; I must die." 
 
 There was a slight rally during the summer of that year, but 
 toward autumn he grew worse again, and it was decided that he 
 should go to Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend, 
 Mr. Severn, an artist. After embarking, he wrote to his friend, 
 Mr. Brown. We give a part of this letter, which is so deeply 
 tragic that the sentences we take almost seem to break away 
 from the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches of Dante s 
 lamentable wood. 
 
 " I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much. 
 There is one I must mention and have done with it. Even if 
 my body would recover of itself, this would prevent it. The 
 very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion 
 of my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it? Were I in 
 health it would make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state ? 
 I dare say you will be able to guess on what subject I am harp 
 ing you know what was my greatest pain during the first part 
 of my illness at your house. I wish for death every day and night 
 to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for 
 death would destroy even those pains, which are better than 
 nothing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great separ 
 ators, but Death is the great divorcer forever. When the pang
 
 254 KEATS. 
 
 of this thought has passed through my mind, I may say the 
 bitterness of death is passed. I often wish for you, that you 
 might flatter me with the best. I think, without my mention 
 ing it, for my sake, you would be a friend to Miss when 
 
 I am dead. You think she has many faults, but for my sake 
 think she has not one. If there is anything you can do for her 
 by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a state at 
 present in which woman, merely as woman, can have no more 
 power over me than stocks and stones, and yet the difference of 
 
 my sensations with respect to Miss and my sister is 
 
 amazing the one seems to absorb the other to a degree 
 incredible. I seldom think of my brother and sister in 
 America ; the thought of leaving Miss is beyond every 
 thing horrible the sense of darkness coming over me I 
 eternally see her figure eternally vanishing ; some of the 
 phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at 
 Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there another life? 
 Shall I awake and find all this a dream ? There must be ; we 
 cannot be created for this sort of suffering." 
 
 To the same friend he writes again from Naples, ist 
 November 1820 : 
 
 " The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. 
 My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, 
 and I should have remained well. I can bear to die I cannot 
 bear to leave her. O God ! God ! God ! Everything I have 
 in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a 
 spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling-cap scalds my 
 head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her I see her, 
 I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest 
 to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I 
 was in England ; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the 
 time that I was a prisoner at Hunt s, and used to keep my 
 eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope 
 of seeing her again now ! O that I could be buried near 
 where she lives ! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter 
 from her to see her handwriting would break my heart. Even 
 to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be mere
 
 KEATS. 255 
 
 than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do ? Where 
 can I look for consolation or ease ? If I had any chance of 
 recovery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the 
 whole of my illness, both at your house and at Kentish Town, 
 this fever has never ceased wearing me out." 
 
 The two friends went almost immediately from Naples to 
 Rome, where Keats was treated with great kindness by the 
 distinguished physician, Dr. (afterward Sir James) Clark.* 
 But there was no hope from the first. His disease was beyond 
 remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The very fact that 
 life might be happy deepened his despair. He might not have 
 sunk so soon, but the waves in which he was struggling looked 
 only the blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-torch 
 that promised safety and love and rest. 
 
 It is good to know that one of Keats s last pleasures was in 
 hearing Severn read aloud from a volume of Jeremy Taylor. 
 On first coming to Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but, 
 finding on the second page these lines, 
 
 " Misera me ! sollievo a me lion resta 
 Altro che il pianto, ed il plan to e delitto," 
 
 he laid down the book and opened it no more. On the I4th 
 February 1821 Severn speaks of a change that had taken 
 place in him toward greater quietness and peace. He talked 
 much, and fell at last into a sweet sleep, in which he seemed to 
 have happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft footfall of the 
 angel of Death, pacing to and fro under his window, to be his 
 Valentine. That night he asked to have this epitaph inscribed 
 upon his gravestone 
 
 "HERE LIES ONE WUUSE NAME WAS WHIT IN WATER." 
 On the 23rd he died, without pain and as if falling asleep. His 
 last words were, " I am dying ; I shall die easy ; don t be 
 frightened, be firm and thank God it has come ! " 
 
 * The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first house 
 on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn s Studio is said 
 to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of the Villa Negroni, 
 pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the Romnri home of their country 
 man Crawford.
 
 256 KEATS. 
 
 He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at Rome, in 
 that part of it which is now disused and secluded from the rest. 
 A short time before his death he told Severn that he thought 
 his intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of 
 flowers ; and once, after lying peacefully awhile, he said, " I 
 feel the flowers growing over me." His grave is marked by a 
 little headstone, on which are carved somewhat rudely his name 
 and age, and the epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or 
 shrub has been planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to their 
 buried lover, crowd his small mound with a galaxy of their 
 innocent stars, more prosperous than those under which he 
 lived. 
 
 In person, Keats was below the middle height, with a head 
 small in proportion to the breadth of his shoulders. His hair 
 was brown and fine, falling in natural ringlets about a face in 
 which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every 
 feature was delicately cut ; the chin was bold ; and about the 
 mouth something of a pugnacious expression. His eyes were 
 mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the recital 
 of a noble action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse with 
 tears, and his mouth trembled.t Haydon says that his eyes 
 had an inward Delphian look that was perfectly divine. 
 
 The faults of Keat s poetry are obvious enough, but it should 
 be remembered that he died at twenty-five, and that he offends 
 by superabundance and not poverty. That he was over- 
 languaged at first there can be no doubt, and in this was 
 implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of 
 diction. It is only by the rich that the costly plainness, which 
 at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable. 
 
 * Written in 1856. irony of Time I Ten years after the poet s death 
 the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend, Mr. Dilke, that the 
 kindest act would be to let him rest forever in the obscurity to which 
 circumstances had condemned him!" (Papers of a Critic, i., 11.) O 
 Time, the atoner ! In 1874 I found the grave planted with shrubs and 
 flowers, the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent Am eiican 
 sculptor. 
 
 + Leigh Hunt s Autobiography, ii. , 43.
 
 KEATS. 257 
 
 Whether Keats was original or not, I do not think it useful to 
 discuss until it has been settled what originality is. Lord 
 Houghton tells us that this merit (whatever it is) has beer, 
 denied to Keats, because his poems take the colour of the 
 authors he happened to be reading at the time he wrote them. 
 But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of 
 some one of them is for ever unexpectedly flashing out in the 
 features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several 
 generations. In the parliament of the present every man 
 represents a constituency of the past. It is true that Keats has 
 the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak, but this 
 is to make originality a mere question of externals, and in this 
 sense the author of a dictionary might bring an action of trover 
 against every author who used his words. It is the man 
 behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakespeare 
 help himself to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have 
 learned of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one, 
 and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other weighty 
 with meaning. Enough that we recognise in Keats that 
 indefinable newness and unexpectedness which we call genius. 
 The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands of 
 years it has built out of the same light and vapour its visionary 
 cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains 
 which night shall utterly abase and destroy. 
 
 Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other 
 Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron were the great means of 
 bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of 
 rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of 
 simplicity, sensuousncss, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth 
 was the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the 
 existing formalism injured his earlier poems by tinging them 
 with something of iconoclastic extravagance. He was the 
 deepest thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet, and Byron 
 the most keenly intellectual of the three. Kea .s had the 
 broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on more sides, 
 and he was able to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron, 
 equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of the greatnesses
 
 258 KEATS. 
 
 of the one and the many littlenesses of the other, while 
 Wordsworth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic character, 
 and Byron had only an uneasy and jealous instinct of con 
 temporary merit. The poems of Wordsworth, as he was the 
 most individual, accordingly reflect the moods of his own 
 nature ; those of Keats, from sensitiveness of organisation, the 
 moods of his own taste and feeling ; and those of Byron, 
 who was impressible chiefly through the understanding, the 
 intellectual and moral wants of the time in which he lived. 
 Wordsworth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding 
 poets ; Keats, their forms ; and Byron, interesting to men of 
 imagination less for his writings than for what his writings 
 indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but presents an ideal to 
 youth made restless with vague desires not yet regulated by 
 experience nor supplied with motives by the duties of life. 
 
 Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and sympathetic 
 imagination which belongs to the poet, of that imagination 
 which identifies itself with the momentary object of its 
 contemplation, than any man of these later days. It is not 
 merely that he has studied the Elizabethans and caught the r 
 turn of thought, but that he really sees things wiih their 
 sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified senses. His 
 imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he cheerful, he 
 "hops about the gravel with the sparrows ;" was he morbid, he 
 " would reject a Petrarchal coronation on account of my dying 
 day, and because women have cancers." So impressible was 
 he as to say that he "had no nature," meaning character. 
 But he knew what the faculty was worth, and says finely, " The 
 imagination may be compared to Adam s dream : he awoke 
 and found it truth." He had an unerring instinct for the 
 poetic uses of things, and for him they had no other use. We 
 are apt tp talk of the classic renaissance as of a phenomenon 
 long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to think the Greeks 
 and Romans alone had the mighty magic to work such 
 a miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects of 
 Keats is that in him we have an example of the renaissance 
 going on almost under our own eyes, and that the intellectual
 
 KEA TS. 259 
 
 ferment was in him kindled by a purely English leaven. He 
 had properly no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had, 
 but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever could serve his 
 purpose. His delicate senses absorbed culture at every pore. 
 Of the self-denial to which he trained himself (unexampled in 
 one so young) the second draft of "Hyperion" as compared with 
 the first, is a conclusive proof. And far indeed is his "Lamia" 
 from the lavish indiscrimination of "Endymion." In his Odes 
 he showed a sense of form and proportion which we seek vainly 
 in almost any other English poet, and some of his sonnets 
 (taking all qualities into consideration) are the most perfect in 
 our language. No doubt there is something tropical and of 
 strange overgrowth in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity 
 nevertheless. Happy the young poet who has the saving fault 
 of exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty that sooner or 
 later will amend it ! 
 
 As every young person goes through all the world-old 
 experiences, fancying them something peculiar and personal to 
 himself, so it is with every new generation, whose youth always 
 finds its representatives in its poets. Keats rediscovered the 
 delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary. 
 Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction which he found in 
 vogue, but his own language rarely rises above it, except when 
 it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine 
 words, which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and had 
 more of the power of poetic expression than any modern 
 English poet. And by poetic expression I do not mean merely 
 a vividness in particulars, but the right feeling which heightens 
 or subdues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone, and 
 gives entireness to the effect. There is a great deal more than 
 is commonly supposed in this choice of words. Men s thoughts 
 and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a 
 new phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought or feeling 
 a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it 
 best. This power of language is veiled in the old legends 
 which make the invisible powers the servants of some word. 
 As soon as we have discovered the word for our joy or sorrow
 
 z6o KEATS. 
 
 we are no longer its serfs, but its lords. We reward the 
 discoverer of an anaesthetic for the body, and make him 
 member of all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe for 
 the soul we elect into the small academy of the immortals. 
 
 The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English poetry ; for, 
 however often we may find traces of it in others, in them found 
 its most unconscious expression that reaction against the barrel- 
 o;gan style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy divine 
 right for half a century. The lowest point was indicated when 
 there was such an utter confounding of the co. union and the 
 uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke 
 prose. The most profound gospel of criticism was, that nothing 
 was good poetry that could not be translated into good prose, as 
 if one should say that the test of sufficient moonlight was that 
 tallow-candles could be made of it. We find Keats at first 
 going to the other extreme, and endeavouring to extract green 
 cucumbers from the rays of tallow ; but we see also incontest 
 able proof of the greatness and purity of his poetic gift in the 
 constant return toward equilibrium and repose in his later 
 poems. And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like 
 that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sunshine. In 
 him a vigorous understanding developed itself in equal measure 
 with the divine faculty ; thought emancipated itself from expres 
 sion without becoming its tyrant ; and music and meaning 
 floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on the smooth 
 element of his verse. Without losing its sensuousness. his 
 poetry refined itself and grew more inward, and the sensational 
 was elevated into the typical by the control of that finer sense 
 which underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.
 
 LESS ING.* 
 
 WHEN Burns s humour gave its last pathetic flicker in his 
 "John, don t let the awkward squad fire over me," was 
 he thinking of actual brother-volunteers, or of possible biog 
 raphers ? Did his words betray only the rhythmic sensitive 
 ness of poetic nerves, or were they a foreboding of that helpless 
 future, when the poet lies at the mercy of the plodder of that 
 bi-voluminous shape in which dulness overtakes and revenges 
 itself on genius at last? Certainly Burns has suffered as much 
 as most large-natured creatures from well-meaning efforts to 
 account for him, to explain him away, to bring him into har 
 mony with those well-regulated minds which, during a good 
 part of the last century, found out a way, through rhyme, to 
 snatch a prosincss beyond the reach of prose. Nay, he has 
 been wronged also by that other want of true appreciation, 
 which deals in panegyric, and would put asunder those t\vo 
 things which God has joined the poet and the man as if it 
 were not the same rash improvidence that was the happiness of 
 the verse and the misfortune of the ganger. But his death-bed 
 was at least not haunted by the unappeasable apprehension of 
 a German for his biographer ; and that the fame of Lessing 
 should have four times survived this cunningcst assault of 
 oblivion is proof enough that its base is broad and deep-set. 
 
 There seems to be, in the average German mind, an inability 
 or a disinclination to see a thing as it really is, unless it be a 
 
 * G. E. LESSING. Scin Lcben und seine Werke. Von ADOLF STAHR. 
 Vermehrtc und verbesserte Volks-Ausgabe. Dritte Auflage. Berlin, 1804. 
 
 The same. Translated by E. P. EVANS, Ph. D., Professor, etc., in the 
 University of Michigan. Boston : W. V. Spencer. 1866. 2 vols. 
 
 G. E. LesKing s Siimmtliche Schrifttn, herausgegoben von Karl Lach- 
 maun. 1853-57. 12 Brinde.
 
 262 LESS1NG. 
 
 matter of science. It finds its keenest pleasure in divining A 
 profound significance in the most trifling things, and the num 
 ber of mare s-nests that have been stared into by the German 
 Gelehrler through his spectacles passes calculation. They are 
 the one object of contemplation that makes that singular being 
 perfectly happy, and they seem to be as common as those of 
 the stork. In the dark forest of aesthetics, particularly, he finds 
 them at every turn " fanno tutto il loco varo." If the greater 
 part of our English criticism is apt only to skim the sur 
 face, the German, by way of being profound, too often 
 burrows in delighted darkness quite beneath its subject, 
 till the reader feels the ground hollow beneath him, and is fear 
 ful of caving into unknown depths of stagnant metaphysic air 
 at every step. The Commentary on Shakespeare of Gervinus,. 
 a really superior man, reminds one of the Roman Campagna,, 
 penetrated underground in all directions by strange winding, 
 caverns, the work of human borers in search of we know not 
 what. Above are the divine poet s larks and daisies, his incom 
 municable skies, his broad prospects of life and nature ; and 1 
 meanwhile our Teutonic teredo worms his way below, and offers 
 to be our guide into an obscurity of his own contriving. The 
 reaction of language upon style, and even upon thought, by its 
 limitations on the one hand, and its suggestions on the other, is 
 so apparent to any one who has made even a slight study of com 
 parative literature, that we have sometimes thought the German 
 tongue at least an accessory before the fact, if nothing more, in 
 the offences of German literature. The language has such a 
 fatal genius for going stern-foremost, for yawing, and for not 
 minding the helm without some ten minutes notice in advance, 
 that he must be a great sailor indeed who can safely make it the 
 vehicle for anything but imperishable commodities. Vischer s 
 AZsthetik) the best treatise on the subject, ancient or modern, is 
 such a book as none but a German could write, and it is written 
 as none but a German could have written it. The abstracts of 
 its sections are sometimes nearly as long as the sections 
 themselves, and it is as hard to make out which head belongs 
 to which tail, as in a knot of snakes thawing themselves into 1
 
 LESS1NG. 263 
 
 sluggish individuality under a spring sun. The average German 
 professor spends his life in making lanterns fit to guide us 
 through the obscurest passages of all the ologies and ystcs, and 
 there are none in the world of such honest workmanship. They 
 are durable, they have intensifying glasses, reflectors of the 
 most scientific make, capital sockets in which to set a light, and 
 a handsome lump of potentially illuminating tallow is thrown in. 
 But, in order to see by them, the explorer must make his own 
 candle, supply his own cohesive wick of common-sense, and 
 light it himself. And yet the admirable thoroughness of the 
 German intellect ! We should be ungrateful indeed if we did 
 not acknowledge that it has supplied the raw material in almost 
 every branch of science for the defter wits of other nations to 
 work on ; yet we have a suspicion that there are certain lighter 
 departments of literature in which it may be misapplied, and 
 turn into something very like clumsiness. Delightful as Jean 
 Paul s humour is, how much more so would it be if he only knew 
 when to stop ! Ethereally deep as is his sentiment, should we 
 not feel it more if he sometimes gave us a little less of it if he 
 would only not always deal out his wine by beer-measure ? So 
 thorough is the German mind, that might it not seem now and 
 then to work quite through its subject, and expatiate in cheerful 
 unconsciousness on the other side thereof? 
 
 With all its merits of a higher and deeper kind, it yet seems 
 to us that German literature has not quite satisfactorily answered 
 that so long-standing question of the French Abbe about esprit. 
 Hard as it is for a German to be clear, still harder to be light, he 
 is more than ever awkward in his attempts to produce that 
 quality of style, so peculiarly French, which is neither wit nor 
 liveliness taken singly, but a mixture of the two that must be 
 drunk while the effervescence lasts, and will not bear exportation 
 into any other language. German criticism, excellent in other 
 respects, and immeasurably superior to that of any other nation 
 in its constructive faculty, in its instinct for getting at whatever 
 principle of life lies at the heart of a work of genius, is seldom 
 lucid, almost never entertaining. It may turn its light, if we 
 have patience, into ever/ obscurest cranny of its subject, one
 
 264 LESSftfG. 
 
 after another, but it never flashes light out of the subject itself 
 as Sainte-Beuve, for example, so often does, and with such 
 unexpected charm. We should be inclined to put Julian 
 Schmidt at the head of living critics in all the more essential 
 elements of his outfit ; but with him is not one conscious at too 
 frequent intervals of the professorial grind of that German 
 tendency to bear on too heavily, where a French critic would 
 touch and go with such exquisite measure? The Great Nation, 
 as it cheerfully calls itself, is in nothing greater than its talent 
 for saying little things agreeably, which is perhaps the very top 
 of mere culture, and in literature is the next best thing to the 
 power of saying great things as easily as if they were little. 
 German learning, like the elephants of Pyrrhus, is always in 
 danger of turning upon what it was intended to adorn and 
 reinforce, and trampling it ponderously to death. And yet 
 what do we not owe it ? Mastering all languages, all recoi ds 
 of intellectual man, it has been able, or has enabled others, to 
 strip away the husks of nationality and conventionalism from 
 the literatures of many races, and to disengage that kernel of 
 human truth which is the germinating principle of them all. 
 Nay, it has taught us to recognise also a certain value in those 
 very husks, whether as shelter for the unripe or food for the 
 fallen seed. 
 
 That the general want of style in German authors is not 
 wholly the fault of the language is shown by Heine (a man of 
 mixed blood), who can be daintily light in German ; that it is 
 not altogether a matter of race, is clear from the graceful 
 airiness of Erasmus and Reuchlin in Latin, and of Grimm in 
 French. The sense of heaviness which creeps over the reader 
 from so many German books is mainly due, we suspect, to the 
 language, which seems well-nigh incapable of that aerial per 
 spective so delightful in first-rate French, and even English, 
 writing. But there must also be in the national character 
 an insensibility to proportion, a want of that instinctive 
 discretion which we call tact. Nothing short of this will 
 account for the perpetual groping of German imaginative 
 litera .ure after some foreign mould in which to cast its thought
 
 LESSIXG. 265 
 
 or feeling, now trying a Lous Qautorze pattern, then something 
 supposed to be Shakespearian, and at last going back to 
 ancient Greece, or even Persia. Goethe himself, limpidly per 
 fect as are many of his shorter poems, often fails in giving 
 artistic coherence to his longer works. Leaving deeper qualities 
 wholly out of the question, Wilhclm Meisler seems a mere 
 aggregation of episodes if compared with such a masterpiece as 
 Paul and Virginia, or even with a happy improvisation like the 
 Vicar of Wakcficld. The second part of Faust, too, is rather 
 a reflection of Goethe s own changed view of life and man s 
 relation to it, than an harmonious completion of the original 
 conception. Full of placid wisdom and exquisite poetry it 
 certainly is ; but if we look at it as a poem, it seems more as if 
 the author had striven to get in all he could, than to leave out 
 all he might. We cannot help asking what business have paper 
 money anel political economy and geognosy here ? We confess 
 that "Thales" and the "Homunculus" weaiy us not a little, 
 unless, indeed, a "poem be nothing, after all, but a prolonged 
 conundrum. Many of Schiller s lyrical poems though the 
 best of them find no match in modern verse for rapid energy, 
 the very axles of language kindling with swiftness seem dis 
 proportionately long in parts, and the thought too often has 
 the life well-nigh squeezed out of it in the sevenfold coils of 
 diction, dappled though it be with splendid imagery. 
 
 In German sentiment, which runs over so easily into senti- 
 mentalism, a foreigner cannot help being struck with a certain 
 incongruousness. What can be odder, for example, than the 
 mixture of sensibility and sausages in some of Goethe s earlier 
 notes to " Frau von Stein," unless, to be sure, the publishing 
 them ? It would appear that Germans were less sensible to the 
 ludicrous and we are far from saying that this may not have 
 its compensatory advantages than either the English or the 
 French. And what is the source of this sensibility, if it 
 be not an instinctive perception of the incongruous and 
 disproportionate ? Among all races, the English has ever 
 shown itself most keenly alive to the fear of making 
 itself ridiculous ; and among all, none has produced so
 
 266 L8SSIXG. 
 
 many humorists, only one of them, indeed, so profound 
 as Cervantes, yet all masters in their several ways. 
 What English-speaking man, except Boswell, could have 
 arrived at Weimar, as Goethe did, in that absurd Werther- 
 montining? And where, out of Germany, could he have found 
 a reigning Grand Duke to put his whole court into the same 
 sentimental livery of blue and yellow, leather breeches, boots, 
 and all, excepting only Herder, and that not on account of his 
 clerical profession, but of his age ? To be sure, it might be 
 asked also where else in Europe was a prince to be met with 
 capable of manly friendship with a man whose only decoration 
 was his genius? But the comicality of the other fact no less 
 remains. Certainly the German character is in no way so little 
 remarkable as for its humour. If we were to trust the evidence 
 of Herr Hub s dreary Deutsche komische und huinoristische 
 Dichtiing, we should believe that no German had even so much 
 as a suspicion of what humour meant, unless the book itself, as 
 we are half inclined to suspect, be a joke in three volumes, the 
 want of fun being the real point thereof. If German patriotism 
 can be induced to find a grave delight in it, we congratulate 
 Herr Hub s publishers, and for ourselves advise any sober- 
 minded man who may hereafter "be merry," not to "sing 
 psalms," but to read Hub as the more serious amusement of the 
 two. There are epigrams there that make life more solemn, 
 and, if taken in sufficient doses, would make it more precarious. 
 Even Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorous authors, and 
 never surpassed in comic conception or in the pathetic quality 
 of humour, is not to be named with his master, Sterne, as a 
 creative humorist. What are Siebenkas, Fixlein, Schmelzle, 
 and Fibel (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with 
 whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes), 
 compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his 
 brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets 
 in the author s mind, but poetically projected from it in an 
 independent being of their own ? Heine himself, the most 
 graceful, sometimes the most touching, of modern poets, and 
 clearly the most easy of German humorists, seems to me
 
 LEASING. 267 
 
 wanting in a refined perception of that inward propriety which 
 is only another name for poetic proportion, and shocks us 
 sometimes with an Unflathigkeit^ as at the end of his Deutsch- 
 land, which, if it make Germans laugh, as we should be sorry to 
 believe, makes other people hold their noses. Such things have 
 not been possible in English since Swift, and the persifleur 
 Heine cannot offer the same excuse of savage cynicism that 
 might be pleaded for the Irishman. 
 
 I have hinted that Herr Stahi j s Life of Lcssing is not 
 precisely the kind of biography that would have been most 
 pleasing to the man who could not conceive that an author 
 should be satisfied with anything more than truth in praise, or 
 anything less in criticism. My respect for what Lessing was, 
 and for what he did, is profound. In the history of literature it 
 would be hard to find a man so stalwart, so kindly, so sincere,* 
 so capable of great ideas, whether in their influence on the 
 intellect or the life, so unswervingly true to the truth, so free 
 from the common weaknesses of his class. Since Luther, 
 Germany has given birth to no such intellectual athlete to no 
 :son so German to the core. Greater poets she has had, but no 
 greater writer ; no nature more finely tempered. Nay, may 
 we not say that great character is as rare a thing as great 
 genius, if it be not even a nobler form of it ? For surely it is 
 easier to embody fine thinking, or delicate sentiment, or lofty 
 aspiration, in a book than in a life. The written leaf, if it be, as 
 some few are, a safe-keeper and conductor of celestial fire, is 
 secure. Poverty cannot pinch, passion swerve, or trial shake it. 
 Tut the man Lessing, harassed and striving life-long, always 
 poor and always hopeful, with no patron but his own right- 
 hand, the very shuttlecock of fortune, who saw ruin s plough 
 share drive through the hearth on which his first home-fire was 
 hardly kindled, and who, through all, was faithful to himself, to 
 his friend, to his duty, and to his ideal, is something more 
 inspiring for us than the most glorious utterance of merely 
 intellectual power. The figure of Goethe is grand, it is 
 
 * " If I write at all, it is not possible for me to write otherwise than just 
 1 s is I think and feel." Lessing to his father, 21st December 1767.
 
 268 LESSIA G. 
 
 rightfully pre-eminent, it has something of the calm, and 
 something of the coldness, of the immortals ; but the Valhall.i 
 of German letters can show one form, in its simple manhood, 
 statelier even than his. 
 
 Manliness and simplicity, if they are not necessary coefficients 
 in producing character of the purest tone, were certainly 
 leading elements in the Lessing who is still so noteworthy and 
 lovable to us when eighty-six years have passed since his 
 bodily presence vanished from among men. He loved clear" 
 ness, he hated exaggeration in all its forms. He was the first 
 German who had any conception of style, and who could be full 
 without spilling over on all sides. Herr Stahr, we think, is not 
 just the biographer he would have chosen for himself. His 
 book is rather a panegyric than a biography. There is some 
 times an almost comic disproportion between the matter, and 
 the manner, especially in the epic details of Lessing s onslaughts 
 on the nameless herd of German authors. It is as if Sophocles 
 should have given a strophe to every bullock slain by Ajax in 
 his mad foray upon the Grecian commissary stores. He is too 
 fond of striking an attitude, and his tone rises unpleasantly 
 near a scream, as he calls the personal attention of heaven and 
 earth to something which Lessing himself would have thought 
 a very matter-of-course affair. He who lays it down as an 
 axiom, that " genius loves simplicity," would hardly have 
 been pleased to hear the Letters on Literature called the 
 "burning thunderbolts of his annihilating criticism," or t .e 
 Anti-Gotze pamphlets, " the hurtling arrows that sped from the 
 bow of the immortal hero." Nor would he with whom 
 accuracy was a matter of conscience have heard patiently that 
 the Letters " appeared in a period distinguished for its lofty 
 tone of mind, and in their own towering boldness they are a 
 true picture of the intrepid character of the age."* If the age 
 was what Herr Stahr represents it to have been, where is the 
 
 * " I am sure that Kleist would rather have taken another wound with 
 him into his grave than have such stuff jabbered over him (sick solch Zeug 
 nachsc/watzcn lasscri)." Lessing to Gleim, 6th September 1759.
 
 LESSIAG. 269 
 
 great merit of Lessing ? He would have smiled, we suspect, a 
 little contemptuously, at Herr Stabr s repeatedly quoting a 
 certificate from the " historian of the proud Britons," that he 
 was " the first critic in Europe." Whether we admit or not 
 Lord Macaulay s competence in the matter, we are sure that 
 Lessing would not have thanked his biographer for this soup- 
 ticket to a ladleful of fame. If ever a man stood firmly on his 
 own feet, and asked help of none, that man was Gotthold 
 Ephraim Lessing. 
 
 Herr Stahr s desire to make a hero of his subject, and his 
 love for sonorous sentences like those we have quoted above, 
 are apt to stand somewhat in the way of our chance at taking a 
 fair measure of the man, and seeing in what his heroism really 
 lay. He furnishes little material for a comparative estimate 
 of Lessing, or for judging of the foreign influences which helped 
 from time to time in making him what he was. Nothing is 
 harder than to worry out a date from Herr Stahr s hay 
 stacks of praise and quotation. Yet dates ate of special value 
 in tracing the progress of an intellect like Lessing s, which, 
 little actuated by an inward creative energy, was commonly 
 stirred to motion by the impulse of other minds, and struck out 
 its brightest flashes by collision with them. He himself tells us 
 th it a cntic shou d "first seek out some one with whom he can 
 contend," and quotes in justification from one of Aristotle s 
 commentators, Sold Atistoteles qutzrere pugnam in snis libris. 
 This Lessing was always wont to do. He could only feel his 
 o\vn strength, and make others feel it could only call it into 
 full play in an intellectual wrestling-bout. He was always 
 anointed and icady for the ring, but with this distinction, that 
 he was no mere prize-fighter, or bully, for the side that would 
 pay him best, nor even a contender for mere sentiment, but a 
 self-forgetful champion for the truth as he saw it. Nor is this 
 true of him only as a critic. His more purely imaginative works 
 his "Minna," his "Emilia," his "Nathan" were all written, 
 not to satisfy the craving of a poetic instinct, nor to rid head 
 and heart of troublous guests by building them a lodging out 
 side himself, as Goethe used to do, but to prove some thesis of
 
 270 LESSING. 
 
 criticism or morals by which Truth could be served. His zeal 
 for her was perfectly unselfish. " Does one write, then, for the 
 sake of being always in the right ? I think I have been as 
 serviceable to Truth," he says, " when I miss her, and my 
 failure is the occasion of another s discovering her, as if I had! 
 discovered her myself."* One would almost be inclined to. 
 think, from Herr Stahr s account of the matter, that Lessing 
 had been an autochthonous birth of the German soil, without 
 intellectual ancestry or helpful kindred. That this is the suffi 
 cient natural history of no original mind we need hardly say, 
 since originality consists quite as much in the power of using to 
 purpose what it finds ready to its hand, as in that of producing 
 what is absolutely new. Perhaps we might say that it was 
 nothing more than the faculty of combining the separate, and 
 therefore ineffectual, conceptions of ethers, and making them 
 into living thought by the breath of its own organising spirit. 
 A great man without a past, if he be not an impossibility, will 
 certainly have no future. He would be like those conjectural 
 Miltons and Cromwells of Gray s imaginary Hamlet. The only 
 privilege of the original man is, that, like other sovereign 
 princes, he has the right to call in the current coin and reissue 
 it stamped with his own image, as was the practice of Lessing. 
 
 Herr Stahr s over-intensity of phrase is less offensive than 
 amusing when applied to Lessing s early efforts in criticism. 
 Speaking of poor old Gottsched, he says : " Lessing ass.iiled 
 him sometimes with cutting criticism, and again with exquisite 
 humour. In the notice of Gottsched : s poems, he says, among 
 other things, The exterior of the volume is so handsome that 
 it will do great credit to the bookstores, and it is to be hoped 
 that it will continue to do so for a long time. But to give 
 a satisfactory idea of the interior surpasses our powers. 
 And in conclusion he adds, These poems cost two thalers 
 and four groschen. The two thalers pay for the ridiculous, 
 and the four groschen pretty much for the useful. " Again, 
 he tells us that Lessing concludes his notice of Klopstock : s 
 
 Letter to Klotz, 9th June 1766.
 
 LESSING. 271 
 
 "Ode to God" "with these inimitably roguish words : What 
 presumption to beg thus earnestly for a woman ! Does not 
 a whole book of criticism lie in these nine words?" For a 
 young man of twenty-two, Lessing s criticisms show a great 
 deal of independence and maturity of thought ; but humour 
 he never had, and his wit was always of the bluntest 
 crushing rather than cutting. The mace, and not the scymitar, 
 was his weapon. Let Herr Stahr put all Lessing s "inimitably 
 roguish words " together, and compare them with these few 
 intranslatable lines from Voltaire s letter to Rousseau, thanking 
 him for his Discours sur F Ine galite : "On n a jamais employe* 
 tant d esprit a vouloir nous rendre betes ; il prend envie de 
 marcher a quatre pattes quand on lit votre ouvrage." Lessing 
 from the first was something far better than a wit. Force was 
 always much more characteristic of him than cleverness. 
 Sometimes Herr Stahr s hero-worship leads him into positive 
 misstatement. For example, speaking of Lessing s preface to 
 the Contributions to the History and Reform of the Theatre, he 
 tells us that " his eye was directed chiefly to the English 
 theatre and Shakespeare." Lessing at that time (1749) was 
 only twenty, and knew little more than the names of any foreign 
 dramatists except the French. In this very preface his English 
 list skips from Shakespeare to Dryden, and in the Spanish he 
 omits Calderon, Tirso de Molina, and Alarcon. Accordingly, 
 we suspect that the date is wrongly assigned to Lessing s 
 translation of To da da Vida es Sueuo. His mind was hardly 
 yet ready to feel the strange charm of this most imaginative of 
 Calderon s dramas. 
 
 Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on the 
 sources of Lessing, it is something of the dimmest. He 
 attributes " Miss Sara Sampson " to the influence of the " Mer 
 chant of London," as Mr. Evans translates it literally from the 
 German, meaning our old friend, " George Barnwell." But we 
 are strongly inclined to suspect from internal evidence that 
 Moore s more recent " Gamester " gave the prevailing impulse. 
 And if Herr Stahr must needs tell us anything of the " Tragedy 
 of Middle-Class Life," he ought to have known that on the
 
 272 LESSING. 
 
 English stage it preceded "Lillo" by more than a century- 
 witness the "Yorkshire Tragedy" and that something very 
 like it was even much older in Fiance. We are inclined to 
 complain, also, that he does not bring out more clearly how 
 much Lessing owed to Diderot both as dramatist and critic, 
 nor give us so much as a hint of what already existing English 
 criticism did for him in the way of suggestion and guidance. 
 But though we feel it to be our duty to say so much of Herr 
 Stahr s positive faults and negative shortcomings, yet we leave 
 him in very good humour. While he is altogether too full upon 
 certain points of merely transitory importance such as the 
 quarrel with Klotz yet we are bound to thank him both for the 
 abundance of his extracts from Lessing, and for the judgment 
 he has shown in the choice of them. Any one not familiar with 
 his writings will be able to get a very good notion of the quality 
 of his mind, and the amount of his literary performance, from 
 these volumes ; and that, after all, is the chief matter. As to 
 the absolute merit of his works other than critical, Herr Stahr s 
 judgment is too much at the mercy of his partiality to be of 
 great value. 
 
 Of Mr. Evans s translation we can speak for the most part 
 with high commendation. There are great difficulties in trans 
 lating German prose ; and whatever other good things Herr 
 Stahr may have learned from Lessing, terseness and clearness 
 are not among them. We have seldom seen a translation 
 which read more easily, or was generally more faithful. That 
 Mr. Evans should nod now and then we do not wonder, nor 
 that he should sometimes choose the wrong word. We have 
 only compared him with the original where we saw reason 
 for suspecting a slip ; but, though we have not found much 
 to complain of, we have found enough to satisfy us that 
 his book will gain by a careful revision. We select a 
 few oversights, mainly from the first volume, as examples. 
 On page 34, comparing Lessing with Goethe on arriving 
 at the University, Mr. Evans, we think, obscures, if he does 
 not wholly lose the meaning, when he translates Leben by 
 "social relations," and is altogether wrong in rendering
 
 LESSING. 273 
 
 Patrizier by "aristocrat." At the top of the next page, too, 
 "suspicious" is not the word for bedenklich. Had he been 
 writing English, he would surely have said " questionable." 
 On page 47, "overtrodden shoes" is hardly so good as the 
 idiomatic "down at the heel." On page 104, "A very 
 humorous representation" is oddly made to "confirm the 
 documentary evidence." The reverse is meant. On page 115, 
 the sentence beginning " the tendency in both" needs revising. 
 On page 138, Mr. Evans speaks of the "Poetical Village- 
 younker of Destouches." This, we think, is hardly the English 
 of Le Poete Campagnard, and almost recalls Lieberkiihn s 
 theory of translation, toward which Lessing was so unrelenting 
 "When I do not understand a passage, why, I translate it 
 word for word." On page 149, "Miss Sara Sampson" is called 
 "the first social tragedy of the German Drama." All tragedies 
 surely are social, except the " Prometheus. Biirgerliche 
 Tragodie means a tragedy in which the protagonist is taken 
 from common life, and perhaps cannot be translated clearly 
 into English except by " tragedy of middle-class life." So on 
 page 170 we find Emilia Galotti called a "Virginia bourgeoise? 
 and on page 172 a hospital becomes a lazaretto. On page 190 
 we have a sentence ending in this strange fashion: "in an 
 episode of the English original, which Wieland omitted 
 entirely, one of its characters nevertheless appeared in the 
 German tragedy." On page 205 we have the Seven Years 
 War called " a bloody process" This is mere carelessness, for 
 Mr. Evans, in the second volume, translates it rightly "law-suit? 
 What English reader would know what "You are intriguing 
 me " means, on page 228 ? On page 264, vol. ii., we find a 
 passage inaccurately rendered, which we consider of more 
 consequence, because it is a quotation from Lessing. " O, out 
 upon the man who claims, Almighty God, to be a preacher of 
 Thy word, and yet so impudently asserts that, in order to attain 
 Thy purposes, there was only one way in which it pleased Thee 
 to make Thyse/f known to him ! " This is very far from nur den 
 einzigen Weg gehabt den Du Dir gef alien lassen ihm kitnd zu 
 machen / The ihm is scornfully emphatic. We hope Professor 
 
 568
 
 274 LESSING. 
 
 Evans will go over his version for a second edition much more 
 carefully than we have had any occasion to do. He has done 
 an excellent service to our literature, for which we heartily 
 thank him, in choosing a book of this kind to translate, and 
 translating it so well. We would not look such a gift horse too 
 narrowly in the mouth. 
 
 Let us now endeavour to sum up the result of Lessing s life 
 and labour with what success we may. 
 
 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born (January 22, 1729) at 
 Camenz, in Upper Lusatia, the second child and eldest son of 
 John Gottfried Lessing, a Lutheran clergyman. Those who 
 believe in the persistent qualities of race, or the cumulative 
 property of culture, will find something to their purpose in his 
 Saxon blood and his clerical and juristic ancestry. It is worth 
 mentioning, that his grandfather, in the thesis for his doctor s 
 degree, defended the right to entire freedom of religious belief. 
 The name first comes to the surface in Parson Clement Lessigk, 
 nearly three centuries ago, and survives to the present day 
 in a painter of some distinction. It has almost passed into 
 a proverb, that the mothers of remarkable children have 
 been something beyond the common. If there be any truth 
 in the theory, the case of Lessing was an exception, as might 
 have been inferred, perhaps, from the peculiarly masculine 
 type of his character and intellect. His mother was in no wise 
 superior, but his father seems to have been a man somewhat 
 above the pedantic average of the provincial clergymen of his 
 day, and to have been a scholar in the ampler meaning of 
 the word. Besides the classics, he had possessed himself of 
 French and English, and was somewhat versed in the Oriental 
 languages. The temper of his theology may be guessed from 
 his having been, as his son tells us with some pride, one of "the 
 earliest translators of Tillotson." We can only conjecture him 
 from the letters which Lessing wrote to him, from which we 
 should fancy him as on the whole a decided and even choleric 
 old gentleman, in whom the wig, though not a predominant, 
 was yet a notable feature, and who was, like many other fathers, 
 permanently astonished at the fruit of his loins. He would
 
 LESSING. 275 
 
 have preferred one of the so-called learned professions for his 
 son theology above all and would seem to have never quite 
 reconciled himself to his son s distinction, as being in none of 
 the three careers which alone were legitimate. Lessing s 
 bearing towards him, always independent, is really beautiful 
 in its union of respectful tenderness with unswerving self- 
 assertion. When he wished to evade the maternal eye, Gotthold 
 used in his letters to set up a screen of Latin between himself 
 and her ; and we conjecture the worthy Pastor Primarius 
 playing over again in his study at Camenz, with some scruples 
 of conscience, the old trick of Chaucer s fox : 
 
 " Mulier cst homiuis confusio ; 
 Madam, the sentence of this Latin is, 
 Woman is manne s joy and mannes bliss." 
 
 He appears to have snatched a fearful and but ill-concealed joy 
 from the sight of the first collected edition of his son s works, 
 unlike Tillotson as they certainly were. Ah, had they only 
 been Opera / Yet were they not volumes, after all, and able to 
 stand on their own edges beside the immortals, if nothing 
 more ? 
 
 After grinding with private-tutor Mylius the requisite time, 
 Lessing entered the school of Camenz, and in his thirteenth 
 year was sent to the higher institution at Meissen. We learn 
 little of his career there, except that Theophrastus, Plautus, 
 and Terence were already his favourite authors, that he once 
 characteristically distinguished himself by a courageous truth 
 fulness, and that he wrote a Latin poem on the valour of the 
 Saxon soldiers, which his father very sensibly advised him to 
 shorten. In 1750, four years after leaving the school, he writes 
 to his father : " I believed even when I was at Meissen that one 
 must learn much there which he cannot make the least use of 
 in real life (der Welt\ and I now [afler trying Leipzig and 
 Wittenberg] see it all the more clearly " a melancholy 
 observation which many other young men have made under 
 similar circumstances. Sent to Leipzig in his seventeenth 
 year, he finds himself an awkward, ungainly lad, and sets
 
 276 LESSJNG. 
 
 diligently to perfecting himself in the somewhat unscholastic 
 accomplishments of riding, dancing, and fencing. He also 
 sedulously frequents the theatre, and wrote a play, " The 
 Young Scholar," which attained the honour of representation. 
 Meanwhile his most intimate companion was a younger brother 
 of his old tutor Mylius, a young man of more than questionable 
 morals, and who had even written a satire on the elders of 
 Camenz, for which over-confidently trusting himself in the 
 outraged city he had been fined and imprisoned ; so little 
 could the German Muse, celebrated by Klopstock for her 
 swiftness of foot, protect her son. With this scandalous 
 person and with play-actors, more than probably of both sexes, 
 did the young Lessing share a Christmas cake sent him by 
 his mother. Such news was not long in reaching Camenz, 
 and we can easily fancy how tragic it seemed in the little 
 parsonage there, to what cabinet councils it gave rise in the 
 paternal study, to what ominous shaking of the clerical wig in 
 that domestic Olympus. A pious fraud is practised on the boy, 
 who hurries home thinly clad through the winter weather, 
 his ill-eaten Christmas cake wringing him with remorseful 
 indigestion, to receive the last blessing, if such a prodigal might 
 hope for it, of a broken-hearted mother. He finds the good 
 dame in excellent health, and softened toward him by a cold he 
 has taken on his pious journey. He remains at home several 
 months, now writing Anacreontics of such warmth that his 
 sister (as volunteer representative of the common hangman) 
 burns them in the family stove ; now composing sermons to 
 convince his mother that " he could be a preacher any day " a 
 theory of that sacred office unhappily not yet extinct. At 
 Easter, 1747, he gets back to Leipzig again, with some scant 
 supply of money in his pocket, but is obliged to make his 
 escape thence between two days somewhere toward the middle 
 of the next year, leaving behind him some histrionic debts 
 (chiefly, we fear, of a certain Mademoiselle Lorenz) for which 
 he had confidingly made himself security. Stranded, by want 
 of floating or other capital, at Wittenberg, he enters himself, 
 with help from home, as a student there, but soon migrates
 
 LESSING. 277 
 
 again to Berlin, which had been his goal when making his 
 hegira from Leipzig. In Berlin he remained three years, 
 applying himself to his chosen calling of author at all work, by 
 doing whatever honest job offered itself verse, criticism, or 
 translation and profitably studious in a very wide range of 
 languages and their literature. Above all, he learned the great 
 secret, which his stalwart English contemporary, Johnson, also 
 acquired, of being able to " dine heartily " for threepence. 
 
 Meanwhile he continues in a kind of colonial dependence on 
 the parsonage at Camenz, the bonds gradually slackening, 
 sometimes shaken a little rudely, and always giving alarming 
 hints of approaching and inevitable autonomy. From the few 
 home letters of Lessing which remain (covering the period 
 before 1753, there are only eight in all), we are able to surmise 
 that a pretty constant maternal cluck and shrill paternal 
 warning were kept up from the home coop. We find Lessing 
 defending the morality of the stage and his own private morals 
 against charges and suspicions of his parents, and even making 
 the awful confession that he does not consider the Christian 
 religion itself as a thing " to be taken on trust," nor a Christian 
 by mere tradition so valuable a member of society as " one who 
 has prudently doubted, and by the way of examination has 
 arrived at conviction, or at least striven to arrive." Boyish 
 scepticism of the superficial sort is a common phenomenon 
 enough, but the Lessing variety of it seems to us sufficiently 
 rare in a youth of twenty. What strikes us mainly in the letters 
 of these years is not merely the maturity they show, though 
 that is remarkable, but the tone. We see already in them the 
 cheerful and never overweening self-confidence which always 
 so pleasantly distinguished Lessing, and that strength of tackle, 
 so seldom found in literary men, which brings the mind well 
 home to its anchor, enabling it to find holding-ground and 
 secure riding in any sea. " What care I to live in plenty," he 
 asks gaily, " if I only live?" Indeed, Lessing learned early, 
 and never forgot, that whoever would be life s master, and not 
 its drudge, must make it a means, and never allow it to become 
 an end. He could say more truly than Goethe, Mein Acker ist
 
 278 LESSING. 
 
 die Zeil, since he not only sowed in it the seed of thought for 
 other men and other times, but cropped it for his daily bread. 
 Above all, we find Lessing even thus early endowed with the 
 power of keeping his eyes wide open to what he was after, to 
 what would help or hinder him a much more singular gift 
 than is commonly supposed. Among other jobs of this first 
 Berlin period, he had undertaken to arrange the library of a 
 certain Herr Riidiger, getting therefor his meals and " other 
 receipts," whatever they may have been. His father seems to 
 have heard with anxiety that this arrangement had ceased, and 
 Lessing writes to him : " I never wished to have anything to 
 do with this old man longer than until I had made myself 
 thoroughly acquainted with his great library. This is now 
 accomplished, and we have accordingly parted." This was in 
 his twenty-first year, and we have no doubt, from the range of 
 scholarship which Lessing had at command so young, that it 
 was perfectly true. All through his life he was thoroughly 
 German in this respect also, that he never quite smelted his 
 knowledge clear from some slag of learning. 
 
 In the early part of the first Berlin residence, Pastor 
 Primarius Lessing, hearing that his son meditated a move 
 ment on Vienna, was much exercised with fears of the 
 temptation to Popery he would be exposed to in that capital. 
 We suspect that the attraction thitherward had its source in 
 a perhaps equally catholic, but less theological magnet the 
 Mademoiselle Lorenz above mentioned. Let us remember 
 the perfectly innocent passion of Mozart for an actress, and 
 be comforted. There is not the slightest evidence that 
 Lessing s life at this time, or any other, though careless, was 
 in any way debauched. No scandal was ever coupled with 
 his name, nor is any biographic chemistry needed to bleach 
 spots out of his reputation. What cannot be said of Wieland, 
 of Goethe, of Schiller, of Jean Paul, may be safely affirmed 
 of this busy and single-minded man. The parental fear of 
 Popery brought him a seasonable supply of money from home, 
 which enabled him to clothe himself decently enough to push 
 his liteiary fortunes, and put on a bold front with publishers.
 
 LESSING. 279 
 
 Poor enough he often was, but never in so shabby a pass 
 that he was forced to write behind a screen, like Johnson. 
 
 It was during this first stay in Berlin that Lessing was 
 brought into personal relations with Voltaire. Through an 
 acquaintance with the great man s secretary, Richier, he was 
 employed as translator in the scandalous Hirschel lawsuit, 
 so dramatically set forth by Carlyle in his Life of Frederick, 
 though Lessing s share in it seems to have been unknown to 
 him. The service could hardly have been other than distaste 
 ful to him ; but it must have been with some thrill of the 
 anche to / kind that the poor youth, just fleshing his maiden 
 pen in criticism, stood face to face with the famous author, 
 with whose name all Europe rang from side to side. This 
 was in February 1751. Young as he was, we fancy those 
 cool eyes of his making some strange discoveries as to the 
 real nature of that lean nightmare of Jesuits and dunces. 
 Afterwards the same secretary lent him the manuscript of 
 the Sihle de Louis XIV., and Lessing thoughtlessly taking 
 it into the country with him, it was not forthcoming when 
 called for by the author. Voltaire naturally enough danced 
 with rage, screamed all manner of unpleasant things about 
 robbery and the like, cashiered the secretary, and was, we 
 see no reason to doubt, really afraid of a pirated edition. This 
 time his cry of wolf must have had a quaver of sincerity in 
 it. Herr Stahr, who can never keep separate the Lessing 
 as he then was and the Lessing as he afterwards became, 
 takes fire at what he chooses to consider an unworthy sus 
 picion of the Frenchman, and treats himself to some rather 
 cheap indignation on the subject. For ourselves, we think 
 Voltaire altogether in the right, and we respect Lessing s 
 honesty too much to suppose, with his biographer, that it 
 was this which led him, years afterwards, to do such severe 
 justice to " Merope," and other tragedies of the same author. 
 The affair happened in December 1751, and a year later 
 Lessing calls Voltaire "a great man," and says of his "Amalie," 
 that "it has not only beautiful passages, it is beautiful through 
 out, and the tears of a reader of feeling will justify our
 
 280 LESSING. 
 
 judgment." Surely there is no resentment here. Our only 
 wonder would be at its being written after the Hirschel 
 business. At any rate, we cannot allow Herr Stahr to shake 
 our faith in the sincerity of Lessing s motives in criticism 
 he could not in the soundness of the criticism itself by 
 tracing it up to a spring at once so petty and so personal. 
 
 During a part of 1752* Lessing was at Wittenberg again as 
 student of medicine, the parental notion of a strictly pro 
 fessional career of some kind not having yet been abandoned. 
 We must give his father the credit of having done his best, in a 
 well-meaning paternal fashion, to make his son over again in 
 his own image, and to thwart the design of nature by coaxing 
 or driving him into the pinfold of a prosperous obscurity. But 
 Gotthold, with all his gifts, had no talent whatever for contented 
 routine. His was a mind always in solution, which the divine 
 order of things, as it is called, could not precipitate into any of 
 the traditional forms of crystallisation, and in which the time to 
 come was already fermenting. The principle of growth was in 
 the young literary hack, and he must obey it or die. He was to 
 the last a natura naturans, never a naturafa. Lessing seems 
 to have done what he could to be a dutiful failure. But there 
 was something in him stronger and more sacred than even 
 filial piety ; and the good old pastor is remembered now only 
 as the father of a son who would have shared the benign 
 oblivion of his own theological works, if he could only have had 
 his wise way with him. Even a r tcr never so many biog 
 raphies and review articles, genius continues to be a mar 
 vellous and inspiring thing. At the same time, considering the 
 then condition of what was pleasantly called literature in 
 
 * Herr Stalir heads the fifth chapter of his Second Book, "Lessing ;it 
 Wittenberg. December 1751 to November 1752." But we never feel quite 
 sure of his dates. The Richier affair puts Lessing in Berlin in December 
 1751, and he took his Master s degree at Wittenberg, 29th April 1752. We 
 are told that lie finally left Wittenberg "towa.d the end" of that year. 
 He himself, writing from Berlin in 1754, says that he lias been absent from 
 that city nur ein halbes Jahr since 1748. There is only one letter for 1752, 
 dated at Wittenberg, 9th June.
 
 LESSING. 281 
 
 Germany, there was not a little to be said on the paternal side of 
 the question, though it may not seem now a very heavy mulct 
 to give up one son out of ten to immortality at least the Fates 
 se dom decimate in (his way. Lessing had now, if we accept 
 the common standard in such matters, "completed his educa 
 tion," and the result may be summed up in his own words to 
 Michaelis, :6th October 1754 : " I have studied at the Fiirsten- 
 schule at Meissen, and after that at Leipzig and Wittenberg. 
 But I should be greatly embarrassed if 1 were asked to tell 
 what." As early as his twentieth year he had arrived at some 
 singular notions as to the uses of learning. On the 2Oth of 
 January 1749 he writes to his mother : " I found out that books, 
 indeed, would make me learned, but never make me a man." 
 Like most men of great knowledge, as distinguished from mere 
 scholars, he seems to have been always a rather indiscriminate 
 reader, and to have been fond, as Johnson was, of "browsing" 
 in libraries. Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor 
 exactness of scholarship could be deemed a match for Lessing ; 
 but they were alike in the power of readily applying whatever 
 they had learned, whether for purposes of illustration or argu 
 ment. They resemble each other, also, in a kind of absolute 
 common-sense, and in the force with which they could plant 
 a direct blow with the whole weight both of their training and 
 their temperament behind it. As a critic, Johnson ends where 
 Lessing begins. The one is happy in the lower region of the 
 understanding : the other can breathe freely in the ampler air 
 of reason alone. Johnson acquired learning, and stopped short 
 from indolence at a certain point. Lessing assimilated it, and 
 accordingly his education ceased only with his life. Both bad 
 something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to go with 
 great strength ; and both had to be baited by the antagonism 
 of circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but 
 into the possession of their entire force. Both may be more 
 properly called original men than, in the highest sense, original 
 writers. 
 
 From I75 2 t I7 OO > with an interval of something over two 
 years spent in Leipzig to be near a good theatre, Lessing was
 
 282 LESSING. 
 
 settled in Berlin, and gave himself wholly and earnestly to the 
 life of a man of letters. A thoroughly healthy, cheerful nature 
 he most surely had, with something at first of the careless light- 
 heartedness of youth. Healthy he was not always to be, not 
 always cheerful, often very far from light-hearted, but manly 
 from first to last he eminently was. Downcast he could never 
 be, for his strongest instinct, invaluable to him also as a critic, 
 was to see things as they really are. And this not in the sense 
 of a cynic, but of one who measures himself as well as his 
 circumstances who loves truth as the most beautiful of all 
 things and the only permanent possession, as bein.^ of one 
 substance with the soul. In a man like Lessing, whose 
 character is even more interesting than his works, the tone and 
 turn of thought are what we like to get glimpses of. And for 
 this his letters are more helpful than those of most authors, as 
 might be expected of one who said of himself, that, in his more 
 serious work, "he must profit by his first heat to accomplish 
 anything." He began, we say, light-heartedly. He did not 
 believe that " one should thank God only for good things." 
 " He who is only in good health, and is willing to work, has 
 nothing to fear in the world." " What another man would call 
 want, I call comfort." " Must not one often act thoughtlessly, 
 if one would provoke Fortune to do something for him?" In 
 his first inexperience, the life of " the sparrow on the house 
 top" (which we find oddly translated "roof") was the one he 
 would choose for himself. Later in life, when he wished to 
 marry, he was of another mind, and perhaps discovered that 
 there was something in the old father s notion of a fixed position. 
 " The life of the sparrow on the house-top is only right good if 
 one need not expect any end to it. If it cannot always last, 
 every day it lasts too long" he writes to Ebert in 1770. Yet 
 even then he takes the manly view. " Everything in the world 
 has its time, everything maybe overlived and overlooked, if one 
 only have health." Nor let any one suppose that Lessing, full 
 of courage as he was, found professional authorship a garden of 
 Alcinoiis. From creative literature he continually sought 
 refuge, and even repose, in the driest drudgery of mere scholar-
 
 LESSING. 283 
 
 ship. On the 26th of April 1768 he writes to his brother with 
 something of his old gaiety : " Thank God, the time will soon 
 come when I cannot call a penny in the world my own but 
 I must first earn it. I am unhappy if it must be by writing." 
 And again in May 1771 : "Among all the wretched, I think 
 him the most wretched who must work with his head, even 
 if he is not conscious of having one. But what is the good of 
 complaining?" Lessing s life, if it is a noble example, so far 
 as it concerned himself alone, is also a warning when another 
 is to be asked to share it. He too would have profited had he 
 earlier learned and more constantly borne in mind the pro- 
 foundest wisdom of that old saying, Si sit prudentia. Let the 
 young poet, however he may believe of his art that "all other 
 pleasures are not worth its pains," consider well what it is to 
 call down fire from heaven to keep the pot boiling, before he 
 commit himself to a life of authorship as something fine and 
 easy. That fire will not condescend to such office, though it 
 come without asking on ceremonial days to the free service 
 of the altar. 
 
 Lessing, however, never would, even if he could, have so 
 desecrated his better powers. For a bare livelihood, he always 
 went sturdily to the market of hack-work, where his learn 
 ing would fetch him a price. But it was only in extremest 
 need that he would claim that benefit of clergy. " I am 
 worried," he writes to his brother Karl, 8th April 1773, "and 
 work because working is the only means to cease being so. But 
 you and Voss are very much mistaken if you think that it could 
 ever be indifferent to me, under such circumstances, on what I 
 work. Nothing less true, whether as respects the work itself or 
 the principal object where for I work. I have been in my life 
 before now in very wretched circumstances, yet never in such 
 that I would have written for bread in the true meaning of the 
 word. I have begun my Contributions because this work 
 helps me ... to live from one day to another." It is plain 
 that he does not call this kind of thing in any high sense 
 writing. Of that he had far other notions ; for though he 
 honestly disclaimed the title, yet his dream was always to be a
 
 284 LESS TNG. 
 
 poet. But he was willing to work, as he claimed to be, because 
 he had one ideal higher than that of being a poet namely, to 
 be thoroughly a man. To Nicolai he writes in 1758 " All ways 
 of earning his bread are alike becoming to an honest man, 
 whether to split wood or to sit at the helm of state. It does 
 not concern his conscience how useful he is, but how useful 
 he would be." Goethe s poetic sense was the Minotaur to 
 which he sacrificed everything. To make a study, he would 
 soil the maiden petals of a woman s soul ; to get the delicious 
 sensation of a reflex sorrow, he would wring a heart. All 
 that saves his egoism from being hateful is, that, with its 
 immense reaches, it cheats the sense into a feeling of some 
 thing like sublimity. A patch of sand is unpleasing ; a desert 
 has all the awe of ocean. Lessing also felt the duty of self- 
 culture ; but it was not so much for the sake of feeding fat this 
 or that faculty as of strengthening character the only soil in 
 which real mental power can root itself and find sustenance. 
 His advice to his brother Karl, who was beginning to write 
 for the stage, is two parts moral to one literary. " Study 
 ethics diligently, learn to express yourself well and correctly, 
 and cultivate your own character. Without that I cannot 
 conceive a good dramatic author." Marvellous counsel this 
 will seem to those who think that wisdom is only to be found in 
 the fool s paradise of Bohemia ! 
 
 We said that Lessing s dream was to be a poet In com 
 parison with success as a dramatist, he looked on all other 
 achievement as inferior in kind. In 1767 he writes to Gleim 
 (speaking of his call to Hamburg) " Such circumstances were 
 needed to rekindle in me an almost extinguished love for the 
 theatre. I was just beginning to lose myself in other studies 
 which would have made me unfit for any work of genius 
 My Laocoon is now a secondary labour." And yet he ne\er 
 fell into the mistake of overvaluing what he valued so highly. 
 His unflinching common-sense would have saved him from 
 that, as it afterwards enabled him to see that something was 
 wanting in him which must enter into the making of true 
 poetry, whose distinction from prose is an inward one of
 
 LESSIA T G. 285 
 
 nature, and not an outward one of form. While yet under 
 thirty, he assures Mendelssohn that he was quite right in 
 neglecting poetry for philosophy, because "only a part of our 
 youth should be given up to the arts of the beautiful. We 
 must practise ourselves in weightier things before we die. 
 An old man, who lifelong has done nothing but rhyme, and 
 an old man who lifelong has done nothing but pass his breath 
 through a stick with holes in it I doubt much whether such an 
 old man has arrived at what he was meant for." 
 
 This period of Lessing s life was a productive one, though 
 none of its printed results can be counted of permanent value, 
 except his share in the Letters on German Literature. And 
 even these must be reckoned as belonging to the years of his 
 apprenticeship and training for the master-workman he after 
 wards became. The small fry of authors and translators were 
 hardly fitted to call out his full strength, but his vivisection of 
 them taught him the value of certain structural principles. "To 
 one dissection of the fore quarter of an ass," says Haydon in 
 his diary, " I owe my information." Yet even in his earliest 
 criticisms we are struck with the same penetration and steadi 
 ness of judgment, the same firm grasp of the essential and per 
 manent, that were afterwards to make his opinions law in the 
 courts of taste. For example, he says of Thomson, that, "as a 
 dramatic poet, he had the fault of never knowing when to leave 
 off ; he lets every character talk so long as anything can be 
 said ; accordingly, during these prolonged conversations, the 
 action stands still, and the slory becomes tedious." Of 
 Roderick Random, he says that "its author is neither a 
 Richardson nor a Fielding ; he is one of those writers of whom 
 there are plenty among the Germans and French." We cite 
 these merely because their firmness of tone seems to us uncom 
 mon in a youth of twenty-four. In the Letters, the range is 
 much wider, and the application of principles more consequent. 
 He had already secured for himself a position among the 
 literary men of that day, and was beginning to be feared for 
 the inexorable justice of his criticisms. His Fables and his 
 "Miss Sarah Sampson" had been translated into French, and
 
 286 LESSING. 
 
 had attracted the attention of Grimm, who says of them 
 (December 1754)- "These Fables commonly contain in a few 
 lines a new and profound moral meaning. M. Lessing has 
 much wit, genius, and invention ; the dissertations which follow 
 the Fables prove moreover that he is an excellent critic." In 
 Berlin, Lessing made friendships, especially with Mendelssohn, 
 Von Kleist, Nicolai, Gleim, and Ramler. For Mendelssohn 
 and Von Kleist he seems to have felt a real love; for the others 
 at most a liking, as the best material that could be had. It 
 certainly was not of the juiciest. He seems to have worked 
 hard and played hard, equally at home in his study and 
 Baumann s wine-cellar. He was busy, poor, and happy. 
 
 But he was restless. We suspect that the necessity of 
 forever picking up crumbs, and their occasional scarcity, made 
 the life o the sparrow on the house-top less agreeable than 
 he had expected. The imagined freedom was not quite so 
 free after all, lor necessity is as short a tether as dependence, 
 or official duty, or what not, and the regular occupation of 
 grub-hunting is as tame and wearisome as another. More 
 over, Lessing had probably by this time sucked his friends dry 
 of any intellectual stimulus they could yield him ; and when 
 friendship reaches that pass, it is apt to be anything but 
 inspiring. Except Mendelssohn and Von Kleist, they were not 
 men capable of rating him at his true value ; and Lessing was 
 one of those who always burn up the fuel of life at a fearful 
 rate. Admirably dry as the supplies of Ramler and the rest no 
 doubt were, they had not substance enough to keep his mind 
 at the high temperature it needed, and he would soon be driven 
 to the cutting of green stuff from his own wood-lot, more rich 
 in smoke than fire. Besides this, he could hardly have been at 
 ease among intimates, most of whom could not even conceive 
 of that intellectual honesty, that total disregard of all personal 
 interests where truth was concerned, which was an innate 
 quality of Lessing s mind. Their theory of criticism was, 
 Truth, or even worse, if possible, for all who do not belong to 
 our set ; for us, that delicious falsehood which is no doubt a 
 slow poison, but then so very slow. Their nerves were unbraced
 
 LESS1NG. 287 
 
 by that fierce democracy of thought, trampling on all prescrip 
 tion, all tradition, in which Lessing loved to shoulder his way 
 and advance his insupportable foot. " What is called a 
 heretic," he says in his Preface to Berengarius, "has a very 
 good side. It is a man who at least wishes to see with his own 
 eyes." And again, " I know not if it be a duty to offer up for 
 tune and life to the truth ; . . but I know it is a duty, if one 
 undertake to teach the truth, to teach the whole of it, or none 
 at all." Such men as Gleim and Ramler were mere dilettanti, 
 and could have no notion how sacred his convictions are to a 
 militant thinker like Lessing. His creed as to the rights of 
 friendship in criticism might be put in the words of Selden, the 
 firm tread of whose mind was like his own : " Opinion and 
 affection extremely differ. Opinion is something wherein I go 
 about to give reason why all the world should think as I think. 
 Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasing of myself." 
 How little his friends were capable of appreciating this view of 
 the matter is plain from a letter of Ramler to Gleim, cited by 
 Herr Stahr. Lessing had shown up the weaknesses of a cer 
 tain work by the Abbe Batteux (long ago gathered to his 
 literary fathers as conclusively as poor old Ramler himself), 
 without regard to the important fact that the Abbe s book had 
 been translated by a friend. Horrible to think of at best, 
 thrice horrible when the friend s name was Ramler ! The 
 impression thereby made on the friendly heart may be con 
 ceived. A ray of light penetrated the rather opaque substance 
 of Herr Ramler s mind, and revealed to him the dangerous 
 character of Lessing. " I know well," he says, " that Herr 
 Lessing means to speak his own opinion, and" what is the 
 dreadful in r erence? "and, by suppressing others, to gain air, 
 and make room for himself. This disposition is not to be 
 overcome."* Fortunately not, for Lessing s opinion always 
 meant something, and was worth having. Gleim no doubt 
 sympathised deeply with the sufferer by this treason, for he, too, 
 
 * " Ramler," writes Georg Forster, " ist die Ziererei, die Eigenliebe, die 
 Eitelkeit in eigener Person."
 
 283 LESSING. 
 
 had been shocked at some disrespect for La Fontaine, as a 
 disciple of whom he had announced himself. 
 
 Berlin was hardly the place for Lessing, if he could not take 
 a step in any direction without risk of treading on somebody s 
 gouty foot. This was not the last time that he was to have 
 experience of the fact that the critic s pep, the more it has of 
 truth s celestial temper, the more it is apt to reverse the miracle 
 of the archangel s spear, and to bring out whatever is toadlike 
 in the nature of him it touches. We can well understand the 
 sadness with which he said 
 
 " Der Blick des Forscher s fand 
 Nicht selten mehr als er zu flnden wiinschte." 
 
 Here, better than anywhere, we may cite something which 
 he wrote of himself to a friend of Klotz. Lessing, it will 
 be remembered, had literally " suppressed " Klotz. " What 
 do you apprehend, then, from me ? The more faults and 
 errors you point out to me, so much the more I shall learn 
 of you ; the more I learn of you the more thankful 
 shall I be. ... I wish you knew me more thoroughly. If 
 the opinion you have of my learning and genius (Geisf) 
 should perhaps suffer thereby, yet I am sure the idea I 
 would like you to form of my character would gain. I 
 am not the insufferable, unmannerly, proud, slanderous man 
 Herr Klotz proclaims me. It cost me a great deal of trouble 
 and compulsion to be a little bitter against him."* Ramler and 
 the rest had contrived a nice little society for mutual admira 
 tion, much like that described by Goldsmith, if, indeed, he did 
 not convey it from the French, as was not uncommon with him. 
 " What, have you never heard of the admirable Brandellius or 
 the ingenious Mogusius, one the eye and the other the heart of 
 our University, known all over the world ? Never, cried the 
 traveller ; but pray inform me what Brandellius is particularly 
 remarkable for. You must be little acquainted with the 
 republic of letters, said the other, to ask such a question. 
 
 * Lessing to Von Murr, 25th November 1768. The whole letter is well 
 worth reading.
 
 LESSING. 289 
 
 Brandellius has written a most sublime panegyric on Mogusius. : 
 And, prithee, what has Mogusius done to deserve so great a 
 favour? He has written an excellent poem in praise of 
 Brandellius. " Lessing was not the man who could narrow 
 himself to the proportions of a clique ; lifelong he was the 
 terror of ihe Brandellii and Mogusii, and, at the signal given 
 
 by him, 
 
 " They, but now who seemed 
 In bigness to surpass Earth s giant sons, 
 Now less than smallest dwarfs in narrow roeru 
 Throng numberless." 
 
 Besides whatever other reasons Lessing may have had for 
 leaving Berlin, we fancy that his having exhausted whatever 
 means it had of helping his spiritual growth was the chief. 
 Nine years later, he gave as a reason for not wishing to stay 
 long in Brunswick, " Not that I do not like Brunswick, but 
 because nothing comes of being long in a place which one 
 likes."* Whatever the reason, Lessing, in 1760, left Berlin for 
 Breslau, where the post of secretary had been offered him 
 under Frederick s tough old General Tauentzien. " I will spin 
 myself in for a while like an ugly worm, that I may be able to 
 come to light again as a brilliant winged creature," says his 
 diary. Shortly after his leaving Berlin, he was chosen a 
 member of the Academy of Sciences there. Herr Stahr, who 
 has no little fondness for the foot-light style of phrase, says, 
 " It may easily be imagined that he himself regarded his 
 appointment as an insult rather than as an honour." Lessing 
 himself merely says that it was a matter of indifference to him, 
 which is much more in keeping with his character and with the 
 value of the intended honour. 
 
 The Seven Years War began four years before Lessing took 
 up his abode in Breslau, and it may be asked how he, as a 
 Saxon, was affected by it. We might answer, hardly at alii. 
 His position was that of armed neutrality. Long ago at 
 
 * A favourite phrase of his, which Egbert has preserved for us with its 
 Saxon accent, was, Es kommt duck nischt daley lieraus, implying that one 
 might do something butter for a constancy than shearing swine. 
 
 569
 
 2 go LESSING. 
 
 Leipzig he had been accused of Prussian leanings ; now in 
 Berlin he was thought too Saxon. Though he disclaimed any 
 such sentiment as patriotism, and called himself a cosmopolite, 
 it is plain enough that his position was simply that of a 
 German. Love of country, except in a very narrow parochial 
 way, was as impossible in Germany then as in America during 
 the Colonial period. Lessing himself, in the latter years of his 
 life, was librarian of one of those petty princelets who sold their 
 subjects to be shot at in America creatures strong enough to 
 oppress, too weak to protect their people. Whoever would 
 have found a Germany to love must have pieced it together as 
 painfully as Isis did the scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says 
 that "the true patriot is by no means extinguished" in him. 
 It was the noisy ones that he could not abide ; and, writing to 
 Gleim about his " Grenadier " verses, he advises him to soften 
 the tone of them a little, he himself being a " declared enemy 
 of imprecations," which he would leave altogether to the clergy. 
 We think Herr Stahr makes too much of these anti-patriot 
 flings of Lessing, which, with a single exception, occur in his 
 letters to Gleim, and with reference to a kind of verse that could 
 not but be distasteful to him, as needing no more brains than a 
 drum, nor other inspiration than serves a trumpet. Lessing 
 undoubtedly had better uses for his breath than to spend it in 
 shouting for either side in this " bloody lawsuit," as he called 
 it, in which he was not concerned. He showed himself German 
 enough, and in the right way, in his persistent warfare against 
 the tyranny of French taste. 
 
 He remained in Breslau the better part of five years, studying 
 life in new phases, gathering a library, which, as commonly 
 happens, he afterwards sold at great loss, and writing his 
 Minna and Laocoon. He accompanied Tauentzien to the siege 
 of Schweidnitz, where Frederick was present in person. He 
 seems to have lived a rather free-and-easy life during his term 
 of office, kept shockingly late hours, and learned, among other 
 things, to gamble a fact for which Herr Stahr thinks it 
 needful to account in a high philosophical fashion. We prefer 
 to think that there are some motives to which remarkable men
 
 LESSING. 291 
 
 are liable in common with the rest of mankind, and that they 
 may occasionally do a thing merely because it is pleasant, 
 without forethought of medicinal benefit to the mind. Lessing s 
 friends (whose names were no/, as the reader might be tempted 
 to suppose, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) expected him to make 
 something handsome out of his office ; but the pitiful result of 
 those five years of opportunity was nothing more than an 
 immortal book. Unthrifty Lessing, to have been so nice about 
 your fingers (and so near the mint, too), when your general was 
 wise enough to make his fortune ! As if ink-stains were the 
 only ones that would wash out, and no others had ever been 
 covered with white kid from the sight of all reasonable men 1 
 In July 1764 he had a violent fever, which he turned to account 
 in his usual cheerful way " The serious epoch of my life is 
 drawing nigh. I am beginning to become a man, and flatter 
 myself that in this burning fever I have raved away the last 
 remains of my youthful follies. Fortunate illness !" He had 
 never intended to bind himself to an official career. To his 
 father he writes " I have more than once declared that my 
 present engagement could not continue long, that I have not 
 given up my old plan of living, and that I am more than ever 
 resolved to withdraw from any service that is not wholly to my 
 mind. I have passed the middle of my life, and can think of 
 nothing that could compel me to make myself a slave for the 
 poor remainder of it. I write you this, dearest father, and must 
 write you this, in order that you may not be astonished if, before 
 long, you should see me once more very far removed from all 
 hopes of, or claims to, a settled prosperity, as it is called." 
 Before the middle of the next year he was back in Berlin again. 
 
 There he remained for nearly two years, trying the house-top 
 way of life again, but with indifferent success, as we have 
 reason to think. Indeed, when the metaphor resolves itself 
 into the plain fact of living just on the other side of the roof- 
 in the garret, namely and that from hand to mouth, as was 
 Lessing s case, we need not be surprised to find him gradually 
 beginning to see something more agreeable in a fixirtes Gliick 
 than he had once been willing to allow. At any rate, he was
 
 292 LESSfNG. 
 
 willing, and even heartily desirous, that his friends should 
 succeed in getting for him the place of royal librarian. But 
 Frederick, for some unexplained reason, would not appoint 
 him. Herr Stahr thinks it had something to do with the old 
 Srtde manuscript business. But this seems improbable, for 
 Voltaire s wrath was not directed against Lessing ; and even if 
 it had been, the great king could hardly have carried the name 
 of an obscure German author in his memory through all those 
 anxious and warlike years. Whatever the cause, Lessing early 
 in 1767 accepts the position of Theatrical Manager at Ham 
 burg, as usual not too much vexed with disappointment, but 
 quoting gaily 
 
 " Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio." 
 
 Like Burns, he was always " contented wi little and canty wi 
 mair." In connection with his place as Manager he was to 
 write a series of dramatic essays and criticisms. It is to this 
 we owe the Dramaturgic next to the Laocoon the mobt 
 valuable of his works. But Lessing though it is plain that he 
 made his hand as light as he could, and wrapped his lash in 
 velvet soon found that actors had no more taste for truth than 
 authors. He was obliged to drop his remarks on the special 
 merits or demerits of players, and to confine himself to those 
 of the pieces represented. By this his work gained in value ; 
 and the latter part of it, written without reference to a particular 
 stage, and devoted to the discussion of those general principles 
 of dramatic art on which he had meditated long and deeply, is 
 far weightier than the rest. There are few men who can put 
 forth all their muscle in a losing race, and it is characteristic of 
 Lessing that what he wrote under the dispiritment of failure 
 should be the most lively and vigorous. Circumstances might 
 be against him, but he was incapable of believing that a cause 
 could be lost which had once enlisted his conviction. 
 
 The theatrical enterprise did not prosper long ; but Lessing 
 had meanwhile involved himself as partner in a publishing 
 business which harassed him while it lasted, and when it 
 failed, as was inevitable, left him hampered with debt. Help
 
 LESS ING. 293 
 
 came in his appointment (1770) to take charge of the Duke 
 of Brunswick s library at Wolfenbiittel, with a salary of six 
 hundred thalers a-year. This was the more welcome, as he 
 soon after was betrothed with Eva Konig, widow of a rich 
 manufacturer.* Her husband s affairs, however, had been left 
 in confusion, and this, with Lessing s own embarrassments, pre 
 vented their being married till October 1776. Eva Konig was 
 every way worthy of him. Clever, womanly, discreet, with just 
 enough coyness of the will to be charming when it is joined 
 with sweetness and good sense, she was the true helpmate of 
 such a man the serious companion of his mind and the play 
 fellow of his affections. There is something infinitely refreshing 
 to me in the love-letters of these two persons. Without wanting 
 sentiment, there is such a bracing air about them as breathes 
 from the higher levels and strongholds of the soul. They show 
 that self-possession which can alone reserve to love the power of 
 new self-surrender of never cloying, because never wholly 
 possessed. Here is no invasion and conquest of the weaker 
 nature by the stronger, but an equal league of souls, each in its 
 own realm still sovereign. Turn from such letters as these to 
 those of St. Preux and Julie, and you are stifled with the heavy 
 perfume of a demirep s boudoir to those of Herder to his 
 Caroline, and you sniff no doubtful odour of professional unction 
 from the sermon-case. Manly old Dr. Johnson, who could be 
 tender and true to a plain woman, knew very well what he 
 meant when he wrote that single poetic sentence of his "The 
 
 * I find surprisingly little about Lessing in such of the contemporary 
 correspondence of German literary men as I have read. A letter of Boie 
 to Merck (10th April 1775) gives us a glimpse of him. " Do you know 
 that Lessing will probably marry Reiske s widow and come to Dresden in 
 place of Hagedorn ? The restless spirit ! How he will get along with the 
 artists, half of them, too, Italians, is to be seen. . . . Liffert and he have 
 met and parted good friends. He has worn ever since on his finger the 
 ring with the skeleton and butterfly which Liffert gave him. He is 
 reported to be much dissatisfied with the theatrical filibustering of Goethe 
 and Lenz, especially with the remarks on the drama in which so little 
 respect is shown for his Aristotle, and the Leipzig folks are said to be 
 greatly rejoiced at getting such an ally."
 
 294 LESSING. 
 
 shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found 
 him to be a native of the rocks." 
 
 In January 1778 Lessing j s wife died from the effects of a 
 difficult childbirth. The child, a boy, hardly survived its birth. 
 The few words wrung out of Lessing by this double sorrow are 
 to me as deeply moving as anything in tragedy. " I wished for 
 once to be as happy (es so gut haben) as other men. But it has 
 gone ill with me ! " " And I was so loath to lose him, this 
 son ! " " My wife is dead ; and I have had this experience 
 also. I rejoice that I have not many more such experiences 
 left to make, and am quite cheerful." " If you had known her ! 
 But they say that to praise one s wile is self-praise. Well, then, 
 I say no more of her ! But if you had known her ! " Q^ite 
 cheerful! On the loth of August he writes to Elise Reimarus 
 he is writing to a woman now, an old friend of his and 
 his wife, and will be less restrained : " I am left here all 
 alone. I have not a single friend to whom I can wholly confide 
 myself. . . . How often must I curse my ever wishing to be 
 for once as happy as other men ! How often have I wished 
 myself back again in my old, isolated condition to be nothing, 
 to wish nothing, to do nothing, but what the present moment 
 brings with it I ... Yet I am too proud to think myselt 
 unhappy. I just grind my teeth, and let the boat go as pleases 
 wind and waves. Enough that I will not overset it myself." It 
 is plain from this letter that suicide had been in his mind, and, 
 with his antique way of thinking on many subjects, he would 
 hardly have looked on it as a crime. But he was too brave a 
 man to throw up the sponge to fate, and had work to do yet. 
 Within a few days of his wife s death he wrote to Eschenburg : 
 " I am right heartily ashamed if my letter betrayed the least 
 despair. Despair is not nearly so much my failing as levity, 
 which often expresses itself with a little bitterness and misan 
 thropy." A stoic, not from insensibility or cowardice, as so 
 manv are, but from stoutness of heart, he blushes at a moment s 
 abdication of self-command. And he will not roil the clear 
 memory of his love with any tinge of the sentimentality so 
 much the fashion, and to be had so cheap, in that generation.
 
 LZSSING. 295 
 
 There is a moderation of sincerity peculiar to Lessing in the 
 epithet of the following sentence : " How dearly must I pay for 
 the single year I have lived with a sensible wife ! " Werther 
 had then been published four years. Lessing s grief has that 
 pathos which he praised in sculpture he may writhe, but he 
 must not scream. Nor is this a new thing with him. On the 
 death of a younger brother, he wrote to his father, fourteen 
 years before : " Why should those who grieve communicate 
 their grief to each other purposely to increase it ? . . . Many 
 mourn in death what they loved not living. I will love in life 
 what Nature bids me love, and after death strive to bewail it as 
 little as I can." 
 
 We think Herr Stahr is on his stilts again when he 
 speaks of Lessing s position at Wolfenbiittell. He calls it 
 an "assuming the chains of feudal service, being buried in 
 a corner, a martyrdom that consumed the best powers of his 
 mind and crushed him in body and spirit forever." To crush 
 forever is rather a strong phrase, Herr Stahr, to apply to 
 the spirit, if one must ever give heed to the sense as well as 
 the sound of what one is writing. But eloquence has no 
 bowels for its victims. We have no doubt the Duke of Bruns 
 wick meant well by Lessing, and the salary he paid him was 
 as large as he would have got from the frugal Frederick. But 
 one whose trade it was to be a Duke could hardly have had 
 much sympathy with his librarian after he had once found 
 out what he really was. For even if he was not, as Herr 
 Stahr affirms, a republican, and we doubt very much if he 
 was, yet he was not a man who could play with ideas in the 
 light French fashion. At the ardent touch of his sincerity, 
 they took fire, and grew dangerous to what is called the social 
 fabric. The logic of wit, with its momentary flash, is a very 
 different thing from that consequent logic of thought, pushing 
 forward its deliberate sap day and night with a fixed object, 
 which belonged to Lessing. The men who attack abuses 
 are not so much to be dreaded by the reigning house of Super 
 stition as those who, as Dante says, syllogise hateful truths. 
 As for " the chains of feudal service," they might serve a
 
 296 LESSfNG. 
 
 Fenian Head-Centre on a pinch, but are wholly out of place 
 here. The slavery that Lessing had really taken on him was 
 that of a great library, an Alcina that could always too easily 
 witch him away from the more serious duty of his genius. 
 That a mind like his could be buried in a corner is mere 
 twaddle, and of a kind that has done great wrong to the 
 dignity of letters. Wherever Lessing sat, was the head of 
 the table. That he suffered at Wolfenbiittel is true ; but was 
 it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and 
 to feel that his fruition of the one must be postponed for 
 uncertain years by his own folly in incurring the other ? If 
 the sparrow-life must end, surely a wee bush is better than 
 nae beild. One cause of Lessing s occasional restlessness 
 and discontent Herr Stahr has failed to notice. It is evident 
 from many passages in his letters that he had his share of 
 the hypochondria which goes with an imaginative tempera 
 ment. But in him it only serves to bring out in stronger 
 relief his deep-rooted manliness. He spent no breath in that 
 melodious whining which, beginning with Rosseau, has hardly 
 yet gone out of fashion. Work of some kind was his medi 
 cine for the blues if not always of the kind he would have 
 chosen, then the best that was to be had ; for the useful, too, 
 had for him a sweetness of its own. Sometimes he found a 
 congenial labour in rescuing, as he called it, the memory 
 of some dead scholar or thinker from the wrongs of ignorance 
 or prejudice or falsehood ; sometimes in fishing a manuscript 
 out of the ooze of oblivion, and giving it, after a critical cleans 
 ing, to the world. Now and then he warmed himself and kept 
 his muscle in trim with buffeting soundly the champions 
 of that shallow artificiality and unctuous wordiness, one of 
 which passed for orthodox in literature, and the other in 
 theology. True religion and creative genius were both so 
 beautiful to him that he could never abide the mediocre 
 counterfeit of either, and he who put so much of his own 
 life into all he wrote could not but hold all scripture 
 sacred in which a divine soul had recorded itself. It would 
 be doing Lessing great wrong to confound his controversial
 
 LESS7NG. 297 
 
 writing with the paltry quarrels of authors. His own 
 personal relations enter into them surprisingly little, for his 
 quarrel was never with men, but with falsehood, cant, and 
 misleading tradition, in whomsoever incarnated. Save for 
 this, they were no longer readable, and might be relegated 
 to that herbarium of Billingsgate gathered by the elder 
 Disraeli. 
 
 So far from being "crushed in spirit" at Wolfenbtittel, the 
 years he spent there were among the most productive of his 
 life. "Emilia Galotti," begun in 1758, was finished there and 
 published in 1771. The controversy with Gotze, by far the 
 most important he was engaged in, and the one in which he 
 put forth his maturest powers, was carried on thence. His 
 "Nathan the Wise" (1779), by which almost alone he is known 
 as a poet outside of Germany, was conceived and composed there. 
 The last few years of his life were darkened by ill-health and 
 the depression which it brings. His " Nathan " had not the 
 success he hoped. It is sad to see the strong, self-sufficing 
 man casting about for a little sympathy, even for a little praise. 
 " It is really needful to me that you should have some small 
 good opinion of it [ Nathan ], in order to make me once more 
 contented with myself," he writes to Elise Reimarus in May 
 1779. That he was weary of polemics, and dissatisfied with 
 himself for letting them distract him from better things, appears 
 from his last pathetic letter to the old friend he loved and 
 valued most Mendelsshon. "And in truth, dear friend, I 
 sorely need a letter like yours from time to time, if I am not to 
 become wholly out of humour. I think you do not know me as 
 a man that has a very hot hunger for praise. But the coldness 
 with which the world is wont to convi: ce certain people that 
 they do not suit it, if not deadly, yet stiffens one with chill. I 
 am not astonished that all I have written lately does not please 
 you. ... At best, a passage here and there may have cheated 
 you by recalling our better days. I, too, was then a sound, 
 slim sapling, and am now such a rotten, gnarled trunk ! " This 
 was written on the rgth of December 1780 ; and on the isth of 
 February 1781 Lessing died, not quite fifty-two years old.
 
 298 LESSING. 
 
 Goethe was then in his thirty-second year, and Schiller ten 
 years younger. 
 
 Of Lessing s relation to metaphysics the reader will find 
 ample discussion in Herr Stahr s volumes. We are not 
 particularly concerned with them, because his interest in such 
 questions was purely speculative, and because he was more 
 concerned to exercise the powers of his mind than to analyse 
 them. His chief business, his master impulse always, was to 
 be a man of letters in the narrower sense of the term. Even 
 into theology he only made occasional raids across the border, 
 as it were, and that not so much with a purpose of reform as in 
 defence of principles which applied equally to the whole domain 
 of thought. He had even less sympathy with heterodoxy than 
 with orthodoxy, and, so far from joining a party or wishing to 
 form one, would have left belief a matter of choice to the 
 individual conscience. " From the bottom of my heart I hate 
 all those people who wish to found sects. For it is not 
 error, but sectarian error, yes, even sectarian truth, that 
 makes men unhappy, or would do so if truth would found 
 a sect."* Again he says, that in his theological controversies 
 he is "much less concerned about theology than about sound 
 common-sense, and only therefore prefer the old orthodox (at 
 bottom tolerant) theology to the new (at bottom intolerant), 
 because the former openly conflicts with sound common-sense, 
 while the latter would fain corrupt it. I reconcile myself with 
 my open enemies in order the better to be on my guard against 
 my secret ones."t At another time he tells his brother that he 
 has a wholly false notion of his (Lessing s) relation to ortho 
 doxy. " Do you suppose I grudge the world that anybody 
 should seek to enlighten it? that I do not heartily wish that 
 every one should think rationally about religion ? I should 
 loathe myself if even in my scribblings I had any other end 
 than to help forward those great views. But let me choose my 
 
 * To his brother Karl, 20th April 1774. 
 t To the same, 20th March 1777.
 
 LESSING, 299 
 
 own way, which I think best for this purpose. And what is 
 simpler than this way? 1 would not have the impure water, 
 which has long been unfit to use, preserved ; but I would not 
 have it thrown away before we know whence to get purer. . . . 
 Orthodox) , thank God, we were pretty well done with ; a par 
 tition-wall had been built between it and Philosophy, behind 
 which each could go her own way without troubling the other. 
 But what are they doing now ? They are tearing down this 
 wall, and, under the pretext of making us rational Christians, 
 are making us very irrational philosophers. . . . We are 
 agreed that our old religious system is false ; but I cannot say 
 with you that it is a patchwork of bunglers and half-philo 
 sophers. I know nothing in the world in which human acute- 
 ness has been more displayed or exercised than in that."* 
 Lessing was always for freedom, never for looseness, of thought, 
 still less for laxity of principle. But it must be a real freedom, 
 and not that vain struggle to become a majority, which, if it 
 succeed, escapes from heresy only to make heretics of the other 
 side. Abire ad p lures would with him have meant, not bodily 
 but spiritual death. He did not love the fanaticism of innova 
 tion a whit better than that of conservatism. To his sane 
 understanding, both were equally hateful, as different masks of 
 the same selfish bully. Coleridge said that toleration was 
 impossible till indifference made it worthless. Lessing did not 
 wish for toleration, because that implies authority, nor could his 
 earnest temper have conceived of indifference. But he thought 
 it as absurd to regulate opinion as the colour of the hair. Here, 
 too, he would have agreed with Selden, that " it is a vain thing 
 to talk of an heretic, for a man for his heart cannot think any 
 otherwise than he does think." Herr Stahr s chapters on this 
 point, bating a little exaltation of tone, are very satisfactory ; 
 though, in his desire to make a leader of Lessing, he almost 
 represents him as being what he shunned the founder of a 
 sect. The fact is, that Lessing only formulated in his own way 
 a general movement of thought, and what mainly interests us is 
 
 * To the same, 2nd February 1774.
 
 3oo LESSING. 
 
 that in him we see a layman, alike indifferent to clerisy and 
 heresy, giving energetic and pointed utterance to those opinions 
 of his class which the clergy are content to ignore so long as 
 they remain esoteric. At present the world has advanced to 
 where Lessing stood, while the Church has done its best to 
 stand stock-still ; and it would be a curious were it not a 
 melancholy spectacle, to see the indifference with which the 
 laity look on while theologians thrash their wheatiess straw, 
 utterly unconscious that there is no longer any common term 
 possible that could bring their creeds again to any point of 
 bearing on the practical life of men. Fielding never made a 
 profounder stroke of satire than in Squire Western s indignant 
 " Art not in the pulpit now ! When art got up there, I never 
 mind what dost say." 
 
 As an author, Lessing began his career at a period when we 
 cannot say that German literature was at its lowest ebb, only 
 because there had not yet been any flood-tide. That may be 
 said to have begun with him. When we say German literature, 
 we mean so much of it as has any interest outside of Germany. 
 That part of the literary histories which treats of the dead waste 
 and middle of the eighteenth century reads like a collection of 
 obituaries, and were better reduced to the conciseness of 
 epitaph, though the authors of them seem to find a melancholy 
 pleasure, much like that of undertakers, in the task by which 
 they live. Gottsched reigned supreme on the legitimate throne 
 of dulness. In Switzerland, Bodmer essayed a more republican 
 form of the same authority. At that time a traveller reports 
 eight hundred authors in Zurich alone ! Young aspirants for 
 lettered fame, in imagination clear away the lichens from their 
 forgotten headstones, and read humbly the "As I am, so thou 
 must be," on all ! Everybody remembers how Goethe, in the 
 seventh book of his autobiography, tells the story of his visit 
 to Gottsched. He enters by mistake an inner room at the 
 moment when a frightened servant brings the discrowned 
 potentate a periwig large enough to reach to the elbows. 
 That awful emblem of pretentious sham seems to be the best 
 type of the literature then predominant. We always fancy it
 
 LESSING. 301 
 
 set upon a pole, like Gessler s hat, with nothing in it that was 
 not wooden, for all men to bow down before. I he periwig 
 style had its natural place in the age of Louis XIV., and there 
 were certainly brains under it. But it had run out in France, 
 as the tie-wig style of Pope had in England. In Germany it 
 was the mere imitation of an imitation. Will it be believed 
 that Gottsched recommends his Art of Poetry to beginners, in 
 preference to Breitinger s, because it " will enable them to pro 
 duce every species of poem in a correct style, while out of that no 
 one can learn to make an ode or a cantata ? " " Whoever," he 
 says, " buys Breitinger s book in order to learn how to make 
 poems, will too late regret his money."* Gottsched, perhaps, 
 did some service even by his advocacy of French models, by 
 calling attention to the fact that there was such a thing as style, 
 and that it was of some consequence. But not one of the 
 authors of that time can be said to survive, nor to be known 
 even by name except to Germans, unless it be Klopstock, 
 Herder, Wieland, and Gellert. And the latter s immortality, 
 such as it is, reminds us somewhat of that Lady Gosling s, 
 whose obituary stated that she was " mentioned by Mrs. 
 Barbauld in her Life of Richardson under the name of Miss 
 M., afterwards Lady G. " Klopstock himself is rather 
 remembered for what he was than what he is an immortality 
 of unreadableness ; and \\e much doubt if many Germans put 
 the " Oberon " in their trunks when they start on a journey. 
 Herder alone survives, if not as a contributor to literature, 
 strictly so called, yet as a thinker and as part of the intellectual 
 impulse of the day. But at the time, though there were two 
 parties, yet within the lines of each there was a loyal reciprocity 
 of what is called on such occasions appreciation. Wig ducked 
 to wig, each blockhead had a brother, and there was a universal 
 apotheosis of the mediocrity of our set. If the greatest happi 
 ness of the greatest number be the true theory, this was all that 
 could be desired. Even Lessing at one time looked up to 
 Hagedorn as the German Horace. If Hagedorn were pleased, 
 
 * Gerein as, iv. 62.
 
 302 LESSING. 
 
 what mattered it to Horace ? Worse almost than this was the 
 universal pedantry. The solemn bray of one pedagogue was 
 taken up and prolonged in a thousand echoes. There was not 
 only no originality, but no desire for it perhaps even a dread 
 of it, as something that would break the entente cordiale of 
 placid mutual assurance. No great writer had given that tone 
 of good-breeding to the language which would gain it entrance 
 to the society of European literature. No man of genius had 
 made it a necessity of polite culture. It was still as rudely 
 provincial as the Scotch of Allan Ramsay. Frederick the Great 
 was to be forgiven if, with his practical turn, he gave himself 
 wholly to French, which had replaced Latin as a cosmopolitan 
 tongue. It had lightness, ease, fluency, elegance in short, all 
 the good qualities that German lacked. The study of French 
 models was perhaps the best thing for German literature before 
 it got out of long-clothes. It was bad only when it became 
 a tradition and a tyranny. Lessing did more than any other 
 man to overthrow this foreign usurpation when it had done its 
 work. 
 
 The same battle had to be fought on English soil also, and 
 indeed is hardly over yet. For the renewed outbreak of the 
 old quarrel between Classical and Romantic grew out of 
 nothing more than an attempt of the modern spirit to free 
 itself from laws of taste laid down by the Grand Sihle. But 
 we must not forget the debt which all modern prose literature 
 owes to France. It is true that Machiavelli was the first to 
 write with classic pith and point in a living language ; but he is, 
 for all that, properly an ancient. Montaigne is really the 
 first modern writer the first who assimilated his Greek and 
 Latin, and showed that an author might be original and 
 charming, even classical, if he did not try too hard. He is also 
 the first modern critic, and his judgments of the writers of 
 antiquity are those of an equal. He made the ancients his 
 servants, to help him think in Gascon French ; and, in spite of 
 his endless quotations, began the crusade against pedantry. 
 It was not, however, till a century later that the reform became 
 complete in France, and then crossed the Channel. Milton is
 
 LESSING. 33 
 
 still a pedant in his prose, and not seldom even in his great 
 poem. Dryden was the first Englishman who wrote perfectly 
 easy prose, and he owed his style and turn of thought to his 
 French reading. His learning sits easily on him, and has a 
 modern cut. So far, the French influence was one of unmixed 
 good, for it rescued us from pedantry. It must have done 
 something for Germany in the same direction. For its effect 
 on poetry we cannot say as much ; and its traditions had 
 themselves become pedantry in another shape when Lessing 
 made an end of it. He himself certainly learned to write prose 
 of Diderot ; and whatever Herr Stahr may think of it, his share 
 in the Letters on German Literature got its chief inspiration 
 from France. 
 
 It is in the Dramaturgic that Lessing first properly enters as 
 an influence into European literature. He may be said to have 
 begun the revolt from pseudo-classicism in poetry, and to have 
 been thus unconsciously the founder of romanticism. Wieland s 
 translation of Shakespeare had, it is true, appeared in 1762 ; 
 but Lessing was the first critic whose profound knowledge of 
 the Greek drama and apprehension of its principles gave weight 
 to his judgment, who recognised in what the true greatness of 
 the poet consisted, and found him to be really nearer the 
 Greeks than any other modern. This was because Lessing 
 looked always more to the life than the form because he knew 
 the classics, and did not merely cant about them. But if the 
 authority of Lessing, by making people feel easy in their 
 admiration for Shakespeare, perhaps increased the influence of 
 his works, and if his discussions of Aristotle had given a 
 new starting-point to modern criticism, it may be doubted 
 whether the immediate effect on literature of his own critical 
 essays was so great as Herr Stahr supposes. Surely "Gotz" 
 and "The Robbers" are nothing like what he would have 
 called Shakespearian, and the whole Sturm und Drang 
 tendency would have roused in him nothing but antipathy. 
 Fixed principles in criticism are useful in helping us to form a 
 judgment of works already produced, but it is questionable 
 whether they are not rather a hindrance than a help to living
 
 304 LESSING. 
 
 production. Ben Jonson was a fine critic, intimate with the 
 classics as few men have either the leisure or the strength oi 
 mind to be in this age of many books, and built regular plays 
 long before they were heard of in France. But he continually 
 trips and falls flat over his metewand of classical propriety, his 
 personages are abstractions, and fortunately neither his precepts 
 nor his practice influenced any one of his greater coevals.* In 
 breadth of understanding, and the gravity of purpose that comes 
 of it, he was far above Fletcher or Webster, but how far below 
 either in the subtler, the incalculable, qualities of a dramatic 
 poet ! Yet Ben, with his principles off, could scar and sing 
 with the best of them ; and there are strains in his lyrics which 
 Herrick, the most Catullian of poets since Catullus, could 
 imitate, but never match. A constant reference to the statutes 
 which taste has codified would only bewilder the creative 
 instinct. Criticism can at best teach writers without genius 
 what is to be avoided or imitated. It cannot communicate 
 life ; and its effect, when reduced to rules, has commonly been 
 to produce that correctness which is so praiseworthy and so 
 intolerable. It cannot give taste, it can only demonstrate who 
 has had it. Lessing s essays in this kind were of service to 
 German literature by their manliness of style, whose example 
 was worth a hundred treatises, and by the stimulus there is in 
 all original thinking. Could he have written such a poem as 
 he was capable of conceiving, his influence would have been 
 far greater. It is the living soul, and not the metaphysical 
 abstraction of it, that is genetic in literature. If to do were as 
 easy as to know what were good to be done ! It was out of his 
 
 * It should be considered, by those sagacious persons who think that 
 the most marvellous intellect of which we have any record could not 
 master so much Latin and Greek as would serve a sophomore, that 
 Shakespeare must through conversation have possessed himself of what 
 ever principles of art Ben Jonson and the other university men had been 
 able to deduce from their study of the classics. That they should not 
 have discussed these matters over their sack at the Mermaid is 
 incredible ; that Shakespeare, who left not a drop in auy orange he 
 squeezed, could not also have got all the juice out of this one, is even 
 more so.
 
 LESSWG. 3<>5 
 
 own failures to reach the ideal he saw so clearly, that Lessing 
 drew the wisdom which made him so admirable a critic. 
 Even here, too, genius can profit by no experience but its 
 own. 
 
 For, in spite of Herr Stahr s protest, we must acknowledge 
 the truth of Lessing s own characteristic confession, that he 
 was no poet. A man of genius he unquestionably was, if 
 genius may be claimed no less for force than fineness of mind 
 for the intensity of conviction that inspires the understand 
 ing as much as for that apprehension of beauty which gives 
 energy of will to imagination but a poetic genius he was 
 not. His mind kindled by friction in the process of thinking, 
 not in the flash of conception, and its delight is in demon 
 stration, not in bodying forth. His prose can leap and run, his 
 verse is always thinking of its feet. Yet in his " Minna" and 
 his " Emilia,"* he shows one faculty of the dramatist, that of 
 construction, in a higher degree than any other German. t 
 
 * In "Minna" and "Emilia" Lessing followed the lead of Diderot. 
 In the Preface to the second edition of Diderot s TMAtre, he says : " I am 
 very conscious that my taste, without Diderot s example and teaching, 
 would have taken quite another direction. Perhaps one more my own, yet 
 hardly one with which my understanding would in the long run have been 
 so well content." Diderot s choice of prose was dictated and justified by 
 the accentual poverty of his mother-tongue. Lessing certainly revised his 
 judgment on this point (for it was not equally applicable to German), and 
 wrote his maturer " Nathan" in what he took for blank verse. There was 
 much kindred between the minds of the two men. Diderot always seems 
 to us a kind of deboshed Lessing. Lessing was also indebted to Burke, 
 Hume, the two Wartons, and Hurd, among other English writers. Not 
 that he borrowed anything of them but the quickening of his own thought. 
 It should be remembered that Rousseau was seventeen, Diderot and Sterne 
 sixteen, and Winckelmann twelve years older than Lessing. Wieland was 
 four years younger. 
 
 t Goethe s appreciation of Lessing grew with his years. He writes to 
 Lavater, 18th March 1781: "Lessing s death has greatly depressed me. 
 I had much pleasure in him and much hope of him." This is a little 
 patronising in tone. But in the last year of his life, talking with 
 Eckermaun, he naturally antedates his admiration, as reminiscence is 
 wont to do: "You can conceive what an effect this piece ( Minna ) had 
 
 570
 
 306 LESSING. 
 
 Here his critical deductions served him to some purpose. The 
 action moves rapidly, there is no speechifying, and the parts are 
 coherent. Both plays act better than anything of Goethe or 
 Schiller. But it is the story that interests us, and not the 
 characters. These are not, it is true, the incorporation of 
 certain ideas, or, still worse, of certain dogmas, but they 
 certainly seem something like machines by which the motive of 
 the play is carried on ; and there is nothing of that interplay of 
 plot and character which makes Shakespeare more real in the 
 closet than other dramatists, with all the helps of the theatre. 
 It is a striking illustration at once of the futility of mere critical 
 insight and of Lessing j s want of imagination, that in the 
 "Emilia" he should have thought a Roman motive consistent 
 with modern habits of thought, and that in "Nathan" he should 
 have been guilty of anachronisms which violate not only the 
 accidental truth of fact, but the essential truth of character. 
 Even if we allowed him imagination, it must be only on the 
 lower plane of prose ; for of verse as anything more than so 
 many metrical feet he had not the faintest notion. Of that 
 exquisite sympathy with the movement of the mind, with every 
 swifter or slower pulse of passion, which proves it another 
 species from prose, the very d^podirrj KO.I \vpa of speech, and not 
 merely a higher one, he wanted the fineness of sense to 
 conceive. If we compare the prose of Dante or Milton, though 
 both are eloquent, with their verse, we see at once which was 
 the most congenial to them. Lessing has passages of freer and 
 more harmonious utterance in some of his most careless prose 
 essays, than can be found in his "Nathan" from the first line to 
 the last. In the numeris lege solutis he is often snatched 
 beyond himself, and becomes truly dithyrambic ; in his 
 pentameters the march of the thought is comparatively 
 hampered and irresolute. His best things are not poetically 
 
 upon us young people. It was, iu fact, a shining meteor. It made us 
 aware that something higher existed than anything whereof that feeble 
 literary epoch had a notion. The first two acts are truly a masterpiece of 
 exposition, from which one learned much and can always learn."
 
 LESSING. 307 
 
 delicate, but have the tougher fibre of proverbs. Is it not 
 enough, then, to be a great prose-writer? They are as rare as 
 great poets, and if Lessing have the gift to stir and to dilate 
 that something deeper than the mind which genius only can 
 reach, what matter if it be not done to music? Of his minor 
 poems we need say little. Verse was always more or less 
 mechanical with him, and his epigrams are almost all stiff, as if 
 they were bad translations from the Latin. Many of them are 
 shockingly coarse, and in liveliness are on a level with those of 
 our Elizabethan period. Herr Stahr, of course, cannot bear to 
 give them up, even though Gervinus be willing. The prettiest 
 of his shorter poems (" Die Namen") has been appropriated by 
 Coleridge, who has given it a grace which it wants in the 
 original. His "Nathan," by a poor translation of which he is 
 chiefly known to English readers, is an Essay on Toleration 
 in the form of a dialogue. As a play, it has not the interest of 
 "Minna" or "Emilia," though the Germans, who have a praise 
 worthy national stoicism where one of their great writers is 
 concerned, find in seeing it represented a grave satisfaction, 
 like that of subscribing to a monument. There is a sober 
 lustre of reflection in it that makes it very good reading ; but it 
 wants the molten interfusion of thought and phrase which only 
 imagination can achieve. 
 
 As Lessing s mind was continually advancing always open 
 to new impressions, and capable, as very few are, of apprehend 
 ing the many-sidedness of truth as he had the rare quality of 
 being honest with himself his works seem fragmentary, and 
 give at first an impression of incompleteness. But one learns at 
 length to recognise and value this very incompleteness as char 
 acteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, and to whom 
 the selfish thought that any share of truth could be exclusively 
 his was an impossibility. At the end of the ninety-fifth number 
 of the Dramaturgic he says : " I remind my readers here that 
 these pages are by no means intended to contain a dramatic 
 system. I am accordingly not bound to solve all the difficulties 
 which I raise. I am quite willing that my thoughts should seem 
 to want connection nay, even to contradict each other if only
 
 3<j8 LESSJNG, 
 
 there are thoughts in which they [my readers] find material for 
 thinking themselves. I wish to do nothing more than scatter 
 the fermenta cognitionis? That is Lessing s great praise, and 
 gives its chief value to his works a value, indeed, imperishable, 
 and of the noblest kind. No writer can leave a more precious 
 legacy to posterity than this ; and beside this shining merit all 
 mere literary splendours look pale and cold. There is that life 
 in Lessing s thought which engenders life, and not only thinks 
 for us, but makes us think. Not sceptical, but forever testing 
 and inquiring, it is out of the cloud of his own doubt that the 
 flash comes at last with sudden and vivid illumination. Flashes 
 they indeed are, his finest intuitions, and of very different 
 quality from the equable north-light of the artist. He felt it, 
 and said it of himself, " Ever so many flashes of lightning do 
 not make daylight." We speak now of those more remember- 
 able passages where his highest individuality reveals itself in 
 what may truly be called a passion of thought. In the Laocoon 
 there is daylight of the serenest temper, and never was there a 
 better example of the discourse of reason, though even that is 
 also a fragment. 
 
 But it is as a nobly original man, even more than as an 
 original thinker, that Lessing is precious to us, and that he is so 
 considerable in German literature. In a higher sense, but in 
 the same kind, he is to Germans what Dr. Johnson is to us 
 admirable for what he was. Like Johnson s, too, but still from 
 a loftier plane, a great deal of his thought has a direct bearing 
 on the immediate life and interests of men. His genius was 
 not a St. Elmo s fire, as it so often is with mere poets as it was 
 in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the 
 points of his thought but was interfused with his whole nature 
 and made a part of his very being. To the Germans, with their 
 weak nerve of sentimentalism, his brave common-sense is a far 
 wholesomer tonic than the cynicism of Heine, which is, after all, 
 only sentimentalism soured. His jealousy for maintaining the 
 just boundaries, whether of art or speculation, may warn them to 
 check with timely dikes the tendency of their thought to diffuse 
 inundation. Their fondness in assthetic discussion for a nomen-
 
 LESSING. 309 
 
 clature subtile enough to split a hair at which even a Thomist 
 would have despaired, is rebuked by the clear simplicity of his 
 style.* But he is no exclusive property of Germany. As a 
 complete man, constant, generous, full of honest courage, as a 
 hardy follower of Thought wherever she might lead him ; above 
 all, as a confessor of that Truth which is forever revealing itself 
 to the seeker, and is the more loved because never wholly 
 revealable, he is an ennobling possession of mankind. Let his 
 own striking words characterise him : 
 
 " Not the truth of which anyone is, or supposes himself to be, 
 possessed, but the upright endeavour he has made to arrive at 
 truth, makes the worth of the man. For not by the possession, 
 but by the investigation, of truth are the powers expanded, 
 wherein alone his ever-growing perfection consists. Possession 
 makes us easy, indolent, proud. 
 
 "If God held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left 
 nothing but the ever-restless instinct for truth, though with the 
 condition of for ever and ever erring, and should say to me, 
 Choose I I should bow humbly to his left hand, and say, Father, 
 give ! pure truth is for Thee alone ! " 
 
 It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after 
 death. The dust-cloud of notoriety which follows and envelops 
 the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary 
 judgment. Lessing, while he lived, had little reward for his 
 labour but the satisfaction inherent in all work faithfully done ; 
 the highest, no doubt, of which human nature is capable, and 
 yet, perhaps, not so sweet as that sympathy of which the 
 world s praise is but an index. But if to perpetuate herself 
 beyond the grave in healthy and ennobling influences be the 
 noblest aspiration of the mind, and its fruition the only reward 
 she would have deemed worthy of herself, then is Lessing to be 
 counted thrice fortunate. Every year since he was laid prema 
 turely in the earth has seen his power for good increase, and 
 made him more precious to the hearts and intellects of men, 
 
 * Nothing can be droller than the occasional translation by Vischer of a 
 sentence of Lessing into his own jargon.
 
 3 io LESSING, 
 
 "Lessing," said Goethe, " would have declined the lofty title of 
 a Genius ; but his enduring influence testifies against himself. 
 On the other hand, we have in literature other and indeed 
 important names of men who, while they lived, were esteemed 
 great geniuses, but whose influence ended with their lives, and 
 who, accordingly, were less than they and others thought. For, 
 as I have said, there is no genius without a productive power 
 that continues forever operative "* 
 
 * Eckermann. (iesprache mit Gcethc, iii., 2 2i*.
 
 ROUSSEAU 
 AND THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 
 
 M VVTE have had the great professor and founder of the 
 W philosophy of Vanity in England. As I had good 
 opportunities of knowing his proceedings almost from day to 
 day, he left no doubt in my mind that he entertained no 
 principle either to influence his heart or to guide his under 
 standing but vanity ; with this vice he was possessed to a 
 degree little short of madness. Benevolence to the whole 
 species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the 
 professors come in contact, form the character of the new 
 philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this 
 their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labour, 
 as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and 
 which, when paid, honours the giver and the receiver, and then 
 pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with 
 tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest 
 relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a 
 sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, 
 and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The 
 bear loves, licks, and forms her young ; but bears are not 
 philosophers." 
 
 This was Burke s opinion of the only contemporary who can 
 be said to rival him in fervid and sustained eloquence, to 
 surpass him in grace and persuasiveness of style. Perhaps we 
 should have been more thankful to him if he had left us instead 
 
 * Histoire des Idees Morales et Folitiques en France au XVIIIme Sticle. 
 Par M. JULES BARNI, Professeur & 1 Academie de Geneve. Tome ii. 
 Paris, 1867.
 
 3 ia ROUSSEAU. 
 
 a record of those "proceedings almost from day to day" which 
 he had such " good opportunities of knowing," but it probably 
 never entered his head that posterity might care as much about 
 the doings of the citizen of Geneva as about the sayings of even 
 a British Right Honourable. Vanity eludes recognition by its 
 victims in more shapes, and more pleasing, than any other 
 passion, and perhaps had Mr. Burke been able imaginatively 
 to translate Swiss Jean Jacques into Irish Edmund, he would 
 have found no juster equivalent for the obnoxious trisyllable 
 than " righteous self-esteem." For Burke was himself also, in 
 the subtler sense of the word, a sentimentalist, that is, a man 
 who took what would now be called an aesthetic view of morals 
 and politics. No man who ever wrote English, except perhaps 
 Mr. Ruskin, more habitually mistook his own personal likes 
 and dislikes, tastes and distastes, for general principles, and 
 this, it may be suspected, is the secret of all merely eloquent 
 writing. He hints at madness as an explanation of Rousseau, 
 and it is curious enough that Mr. Buckle was fain to explain 
 him in the same way. It is not, we confess, a solution that we 
 find very satisfactory in this latter case. Burke s fury against 
 the French Revolution was nothing more than was natural to a 
 desperate man in self-defence. It was his own life, or, at least, 
 all that made life dear to him, that was in danger. He had all 
 that abstract political wisdom which may be naturally secreted 
 by a magnanimous nature and a sensitive temperament, 
 absolutely none of that rough-and-tumble kind which is so 
 needful for the conduct of affairs. Fastidiousness is only 
 another form of egotism ; and all men who know not where to 
 look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own 
 image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking. 
 Burke s hatred of Rousseau was genuine and instinctive. It 
 was so genuine and so instinctive as no hatred can be but that 
 of self, of our own weaknesses as we see them in another man. 
 But there was also something deeper in it than this. There 
 was mixed with it the natural dread in the political diviner of 
 the political logician in the empirical, of the theoretic states 
 man. Burke, confounding the idea of society with the form of
 
 ROUSSEAU. 313 
 
 it then existing, would have preserved that as the only specific 
 against anarchy. Rousseau, assuming that society as it then 
 existed was but another name for anarchy, would have recon 
 stituted it on an ideal basis. The one has left behind him some 
 of the profoundest aphorisms of political wisdom ; the other, 
 some of the clearest principles of political science. The one, 
 clinging to Divine right, found in the fact that things were, a 
 reason that they ought to be ; the other, aiming to solve the 
 problem of the Divine order, would deduce from that ab 
 straction alone the claim of anything to be at all. There seems 
 a mere oppugnancy of nature between the two, and yet both 
 were, in different ways, the dupes of their own imaginations. 
 
 Now let us hear the opinion of a philosopher who was a bear, 
 whether bears be philosophers or not. Boswell had a genuine 
 relish for what was superior in any way, from genius to claret, 
 and of course he did not let Rousseau escape him. " One 
 evening at the Mitre, Johnson said sarcastically to me, It 
 seems, sir, you have kept very good company abroad 
 Rousseau and Wilkes ! I answered with a smile, My dear sir, 
 you don t call Rousseau bad company ; do you really think him 
 a bad man? JOHNSON. Sir, if you are talking jestingly of 
 this, I don t talk with you. If you mean to be serious, I think 
 him one of the worst of men, a rascal who ought to be hunted 
 out of society, as he has been. Three or four nations have 
 expelled him, and it is a shame that he is protected in this 
 country. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner 
 sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon 
 who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I 
 should like to have him work in the plantations. " We were 
 the plantations then, and Rousseau was destined to work there 
 in another and much more wonderful fashion than the gruff old 
 Ursa Major imagined. However, there is always a refreshing 
 heartiness in his growl, a masculine bass with no snarl in it 
 The Doctor s logic is of that fine old crusted Port sort, the 
 native manufacture of the British conservative mind. Three or 
 four nations have, therefore England ought. A few years later, 
 had the Doctor been living, if three or four nations had treated
 
 3i4 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 their k ; ngs as France did hers, would he have thought the ergo 
 a very stringent one for England ? 
 
 Mr. Burke, who could speak with studied respect of the 
 Prince of Wales, and of his vices with that charity which 
 thinketh no evil and can afford to think no evil of so important 
 a living member of the British Constitution, surely could 
 have had no unmixed moral repugnance for Rousseau s 
 " disgustful amours." It was because they were his that 
 they were so loathsome. Mr. Burke was a snob, though an 
 inspired one. Dr. Johnson, the friend of that wretchedest of 
 lewd fellows, Richard Savage, and of that gay man about 
 town, Topham Beauclerk himself sprung from an amour 
 that would have been disgustful had it not been royal 
 must also have felt something more in respect of Rousseau 
 than the mere repugnance of virtue for vice. We must some 
 times allow to personal temperament its right of peremptory 
 challenge. Johnson had not that fine sensitiveness to the 
 political atmosphere which made Burke presageful of com 
 ing tempest, but both of them felt that there was something 
 dangerous in this man. Their dislike has in it somewhat of the 
 energy of fear. Neither of them had the same feeling toward 
 Voltaire, the man of supreme talent, but both felt that what 
 Rousseau was possessed by was genius, with its terrible force 
 either to attract or repel. 
 
 " By the pricking of my thumbs, 
 Something wicked this way comes." 
 
 Burke and Johnson were both of them sincere men, both of 
 them men of character as well as of intellectual force ; and we 
 cite their opinions of Rousseau with the respect which is due to 
 an honest conviction which has apparent grounds for its adop 
 tion, whether we agree with it or no. But it strikes us as a 
 little singular that one whose life was so full of moral incon 
 sistency, whose character is so contemptible in many ways, in 
 some we might almost say so revolting, should yet have 
 exercised so deep and lasting an influence, and on minds 
 so various, should still be an object of minute and earnest
 
 ROUSSEAU. 315 
 
 discussion that.be should have had such vigour in his intellec 
 tual loins as to have been the father of Chateaubriand, Byron, 
 Lamartine, George Sand, and many more in literature, in 
 politics of Jefferson and Thomas Paine- that the spots he had 
 haunted should draw pilgrims so unlike as Gibbon and Napo 
 leon, nay, should draw them still, after the lapse of near a 
 century. Surely there must have been a basis of sincerity in 
 this man seldom matched, if it can prevail against so many 
 reasons for repugnance, aversion, and even disgust. He could 
 not have been the mere sentimentalist and rhetorician for 
 which the rough-and-ready understanding would at first glance 
 be inclined to condemn him. In a certain sense he was both of 
 these, but he was something more. It will bring us a little 
 nearer the point we are aiming at if we quote one other and 
 more recent English opinion of him. 
 
 Mr. Thomas Moore, returning pleasantly in a travelling-car 
 riage from a trip to Italy, in which he had never forgotten the 
 poetical shop at home, but had carefully noted down all the 
 pretty images that occurred to him for future use Mr. Thomas 
 Moore, on his way back from a visit to his noble friend Byron, 
 at Venice, who had there been leading a life so gross as to be 
 talked about, even amid the crash of Napoleon s fall, and who 
 was just writing " Don Juan " for the improvement of the world 
 Mr. Thomas Moore, fresh from the reading of Byron s 
 Memoirs, which were so scandalous that, by some hocus-pocus, 
 three thousand guineas afterward found their way into his own 
 pocket for consenting to suppress them Mr. Thomas Moore, 
 the ci-devant friend of the Prince Regent, and the author of 
 Little s Poems, among other objects of pilgrimage visits Les 
 Charmettes, where Rousseau had lived with Madame de 
 Warens. So good an opportunity for occasional verses was 
 not to be lost, so good a text for a little virtuous moralising not 
 to be thrown away ; and accordingly Mr. Moore pours out 
 several pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensuality of the 
 dead man of genius. There was no horror for Byron. Toward 
 him all was suavity and decorous biense"ance. That lively sense 
 of benefits to be received made the Irish Anacreon wink with
 
 316 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 both his little eyes. In the judgment of a liberal like Mr, 
 Moore, were not the errors of a lord excusable ? But with poor 
 Rousseau the case was very different. The son of a watch 
 maker, an outcast from boyhood up, always on the perilous 
 edge of poverty what right had he to indulge himself in any 
 immoralities? So it is always with the sentimentalists. It is 
 never the thing in itself that is bad or good, but the thing in its 
 relation to some conventional and mostly selfish standard. 
 Moore could be a moralist, in this case, without any trouble, 
 and with the advantage of winning Lord Lansdowne s approval; 
 he could write some graceful verses which everybody would 
 buy, and for the rest it is not hard to be a stoic in eight-syllable 
 measure and a travelling-carriage. The next dinner at Bowood 
 will taste none the worse. Accordingly he speaks of 
 
 " The mire, the strife 
 And vanities of this man s life, 
 Who more than all that e er have glowed 
 With fancy s flame (and it was his 
 In fullest warmth and radiance) showed 
 What an impostor Genius is ; 
 How, with that strong mimetic art 
 Which forms its life and soul, it takes 
 All shapes of thought, all hues of heart, 
 Nor feels itself one throb it wakes ; 
 How, like a gem, its light may shine, 
 O er the dark path by mortals trod, 
 Itself as mean a worm the while 
 As crawls at midnight o er the sod ; 
 
 How, with the pencil hardly dry 
 
 From colouring up such scenes of love 
 
 And beauty as make young hearts sigh, 
 
 And dream and think through heaven they rove," etc., etc. 
 
 Very spirited, is it not ? One has only to overlook a little 
 threadbareness in the similes, and it is very good oratorical 
 verse. But would we believe in it, we must never read Mr. 
 Moore s own journal, and find out how thin a piece of veneering 
 his own life was how he lived in sham till his very nature had 
 become subdued to it, till he could persuade himself that a
 
 ROUSSEAU, 31? 
 
 sham could be written into a reality, and actually made 
 experiment thereof in his Diary. 
 
 One verse in this diatribe deserves a special comment 
 
 " What an impostor Genius is ! 
 
 In two respects there is nothing to be objected to in it. It is of 
 eight syllables, and "is" rhymes unexceptionably with "his." 
 L5ut is there the least filament of truth in it ? We venture to 
 assert, not the least. It was not Rousseau s genius that was an 
 impostor. It was the one thing in him that was always true. 
 We grant that, in allowing that a man has genius. Talent is 
 that which is in a man s power ; genius is that in whose power 
 a man is. That is the very difference between them. We 
 might turn the tables on Moore, the man of talent, and say 
 truly enough, What an impostor talent is ! Moore talks of the 
 mimetic power with a total misapprehension of what it really is. 
 The mimetic power had nothing whatever to do with the affair. 
 Rousseau had none of it ; Shakespeare had it in excess ; but 
 what difference would it make in our judgment of Hamlet or 
 Othello if a manuscript of Shakespeare s memoirs should turn 
 up, and we should find out that he had been a pitiful fellow ? 
 None in the world ; for he is not a professed moralist, and his 
 life does not give the warrant to his words. But if Demosthenes, 
 after all his Philippics, throws away his shield and runs, we feel 
 the contemptibleness ol the contradiction. With genius itself we 
 never find any fault. It would be an over-nicety that would do 
 that. We do not get invited to nectar and ambrosia so often 
 that we think of grumbling and saying we have better at home. 
 No ; the same genius that mastered him who wrote the poem 
 masters us in reading it, and we care for nothing outside the 
 poem itself. How the author lived, what he wore, how he 
 looked all that is mere gossip, about which we need not 
 trouble ourselves. Whatever he was or did, somehow or 
 other God let him be worthy to write this, and that is 
 enough for us. We forgive everything to the genius ; we 
 are inexorable to the man. Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns 
 what have their biographies to do with us ? Genius is not a
 
 31 8 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 question of character. It may be sordid, like the lamp ci 
 Aladdin, in its externals ; what care we, while the touch of 
 it builds palaces for us, makes us rich as only men in dream 
 land are rich, and lords to the utmost bound of imagination ? 
 So, when people talk of the ungrateful way in which the 
 world treats its geniuses, they speak unwisely. There is no 
 work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, 
 no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have 
 not, sooner or later, responded. But the man whom the genius 
 takes possession of for its pen, for its trowel, for its pencil, 
 for its chisel, him the world treats according to his deserts. 
 Does Burns drink? It sets him to gauging casks of gin. 
 For, remember, it is not to the practical world that the genius 
 appeals ; it is the practical world which judges of the man s 
 fitness for its uses, and has a right so to judge. No amount 
 of patronage could have made distilled liquors less tooth 
 some to Robbie Burns, as no amount of them could make 
 a Burns of the Ettrick Shepherd. 
 
 There is an old story in the Gesta Romanorum of a priest 
 who was found fault with by one of his parishioners because 
 his life was in painful discordance with his teaching. So one 
 day he takes his critic out to a stream, and, giving him to 
 drink of it, asks him if he does not find it sweet and pure 
 water. The patishioner, having answered that it was, is taken 
 to the source, and finds that what had so refreshed him flowed 
 from between the jaws of a dead dog. " Let this teach thee," 
 said the priest, " that the very best doctrine may take its 
 rise in a very impure and disgustful spring, and that excellent 
 morals may be taught by a man who has no morals at all." 
 It is easy enough to see the fallacy here. Had the man 
 known beforehand from what a carrion fountain-head the 
 stream issued, he could not have drunk of it without loathing. 
 Had the priest merely bidden him to look at the stream and 
 see how beautiful it was, instead of tasting it, it would have 
 been quite another matter. And this is precisely the difference 
 between what appeals to our aesthetic and to our moral sense, 
 between what is judged of by the taste and the conscience.
 
 ROUSSEAU. 319 
 
 It is when the sentimentalist turns preacher of morals that 
 we investigate his character, and are justified in so doing. 
 He may express as many and as delicate shades of feeling 
 as he likes for this the sensibility of his organisation perfectly 
 fits him, no other person could d it so well but the moment 
 he undertakes to establish his feeling as a rule of conduct 
 we ask at once how far are his own life and deeds in accordance 
 with what he preaches ? For every man feels instinctively 
 that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than 
 a single lovely action ; and that while tenderness of feeling 
 and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of tem 
 perament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality 
 of the life. Fine words, says our homely old proverb, butter 
 no parsnips ; and if the question be how to render those 
 vegetables palatable, an ounce of butter would be worth 
 more than all the orations of Cicero. The only conclusive 
 evidence of a man s sincerity is that he give himself for a 
 principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively 
 easy to give away ; but when a man makes a gift of his daily 
 life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may 
 be, has taken possession of him. From that sincerity his 
 words gain the force and pertinency of deeds, and his money 
 is no longer the pale drudge twixt man and man, but, by 
 a beautiful magic, what erewhile bore the image and super 
 scription of Caesar seems now to bear the image and 
 superscription of God. It is thus that there is a genius for 
 goodness, for magnanimity, for self-sacrifce, as well as for 
 creative art ; and it is thus that by a more refined sort of 
 Platonism the Infinite Beauty dwells in and shapes to its own 
 likeness the soul which gives it body and individuality. But 
 when Moore charges genius with being an impostor, the con 
 fusion of his ideas is pitiable. There is nothing so true, so 
 sincere, so downright and forthright, as genius. It is always 
 truer than the man himself is, greater than he. If Shakespeare 
 the man had been as marvellous a creature as the genius that 
 wrote his plays, that genius so comprehensive in its intelligence, 
 so wise even in its play, that its clowns are moralists and
 
 3ae XOUSSEAU. 
 
 philosophers, so penetrative that a single one of its phrases 
 reveals to us the secret of our own character, would his contem 
 poraries have left us so wholly without record of him as they 
 have done, distinguishing him in no wise from his fellow- 
 players ? 
 
 Rousseau, no doubt, was weak, nay, more than that, was 
 sometimes despicable, but yet is not fairly to be reckoned 
 among the herd of sentimentalists. It is shocking that a man 
 whose preaching made it fashionable for women of rank to nurse 
 their own children should have sent his own, as soon as born, 
 to the foundling hospital, still more shocking that, in a note to 
 his Discours sur FIntgaliti, he should speak of this crime as 
 one of the consequences of our social system. But for all that 
 there was a faith and an ardour of conviction in him that distin 
 guish him from most of the writers of his time. Nor were his 
 practice and his preaching always inconsistent. He contrived 
 to pay regularly, whatever his own circumstances were, a 
 pension of one hundred livres a-year to a maternal aunt who 
 had been kind to him in childhood. Nor was his asceticism a 
 sham. He might have turned his gift into laced coats and 
 chateaux as easily as Voltaire, had he not held it too sacred to 
 be bartered away in any such losing exchange. 
 
 But what is worthy of especial remark is this that in nearly 
 all that he wrote his leading object was the good of his kind, 
 and that through all the vicissitudes of a life which illness, 
 sensibility of temperament, and the approaches of insanity 
 rendered wretched the associate of infidels, the foundling 
 child, as it were, of an age without belief, least of all in itself 
 he professed and evidenty felt deeply a faith in the goodness 
 both of man and of God. There is no such thing as scoffing in 
 his writings. On the other hand, there is no stereotyped 
 morality. He does not ignore the existence of scepticism ; he 
 recognises its existence in his own nature, meets it frankly face 
 to face, and makes it confess that there are things in the 
 teaching of Christ that are deeper than its doubt. The influence 
 of his early education at Geneva is apparent here. An intellect 
 so acute as his, trained in the school of Calvin in a republic
 
 ROUSSEAU. 321 
 
 where theological discussion was as much the amusement of the 
 people as the opera was at Paris, could not fail to be a good 
 logician. He had the fortitude to follow his logic wherever it 
 led him. If the very impressibility of character which quickened 
 his perception of the beauties of nature, and made him alive to 
 the charm of music and musical expression, prevented him from 
 being in the highest sense an original writer, and if his ideas 
 were mostly suggested to him by books, yet the clearness, con- 
 secutiveness, and eloquence with which he stated and enforced 
 them made them his own. There was at least that original fire 
 in him which could fuse them and run them in a novel mould. 
 His power lay in this very ability of manipulating the thoughts 
 of others. Fond of paradox he doubtless was, but he had a way 
 of putting things that arrested attention and excited thought. 
 
 It was, perhaps, this very sensibility of the surrounding 
 atmosphere of feeling and speculation, which made Rousseau 
 more directly influential on contemporary thought (or perhaps 
 we should say sentiment) than any writer of his time. And this 
 is rarely consistent with enduring greatness in literature. It 
 forces us to remember, against our will, the oratorical character 
 of his works. They were all pleas, and he a great advocate, 
 with Europe in the jury-box. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, 
 eloquence produces conviction for the moment, but it is only by 
 truth to nature and the everlasting intuitions of mankind that 
 those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation 
 to generation. Rousseau was in many respects as great 
 pleaders always are a man of the day, who must needs become 
 a mere name to posterity, yet he could not but have had in him 
 some not inconsiderable share of that principle by which man 
 eternises himself. For it is only to such that the night cometh 
 not in which no man shall work, and he is still operative both 
 in politics and literature by the principles he formulated or 
 the emotions to which he gave a voice so piercing and so 
 sympathetic. 
 
 In judging Rousseau, it would be unfair not to take note of 
 the malarious atmosphere in which he grew up. The con 
 stitution of his mind was thus early infected with a feverish 
 
 571
 
 322 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 taint that made him shiveringly sensitive to a temperature 
 which hardier natures found bracing. To him this rough world 
 was but too literally a rack. Good-humoured Mother Nature 
 commonly imbeds the nerves of her children in a pr.dding of 
 self-conceit that serves as a buffer against the ordinary shocks 
 to which even a life of routine is liable, and it would seem at 
 first sight as if Rousseau had been better cared for than usual 
 in this regard. But as his self-conceit was enormous, so was 
 the reaction from it proportionate, and the frelt ng suspicious- 
 ness of temper, sure mark of an unsound mind, which rendered 
 him incapab e of intimate friendship, while passionately longing 
 for it, became inevitably, when turned inward, a tormenting 
 self-distrust To dwell in unrealities is the doom of the senti 
 mentalist ; but it should not be forgotten that the same fitful 
 intensity of emotion which makes them real as the means of 
 elation, gives them substance also for torture. Too irritably 
 jealous to endure the rude society of men, he s .eeped his senses 
 in the enervating incense that women are only too ready to 
 burn. If their friendship be a safeguard to the other sex, their 
 homage is fatal to all but the strongest, and Rousseau was 
 weak both by inheritance and early training. His father was 
 one of those feeble creatures for whom a fine phrase could 
 always satisfactorily fill the void that non-performance leaves 
 behind it. If he neglected duty, he made up for it by that 
 cultivation of the finer sentiments of our common nature which 
 waters flowers of speech with the brineless tears of a flabby 
 remorse, without one fibre of resolve in it, and which im 
 poverishes the character in proportion as it enriches tho 
 vocabulary. He was a very Apicius in that digestible kind of 
 woe which makes no man leaner, and had a favourite receipt 
 for cooking you up a sorrow d la douleur inassouvie that had 
 just enough delicious sharpness in it to bring tears into the eyes 
 by tickling the palate. " When he said to me, Jean Jacques, 
 let us speak of thy mother, I said to him, Well, father, we are 
 going to weep, then, and this word alone drew tears from him. 
 Ah ! said he, groaning, give her back to me, console me for 
 her, fill the void she has left in my soul 1 " Alas! in such cases.
 
 ROUSSEAU. 323 
 
 the void she leaves is only thai she found. The grief that seeks 
 any other than its own society will ere long want an object. 
 This admirable parent allowed his son to become an outcast at 
 sixteen, without any attempt to reclaim him, in order to enjoy 
 unmolested a petty inheritance to which the boy was entitled in 
 right of his mother. "This conduct," Rousseau tells us, "of a 
 father whose tenderness and virtue were so well known to me 
 caused me to make reflections on myself which have not a little 
 contributed to make my heart sound. I drew from it this great 
 maxim of morals, the only one perhaps serviceable in practice, 
 to avoid situations which put our duties in opposition to our 
 interest, and which show us our own advantage in the wrong of 
 another, sure that in such situations, however sincere may be 
 one s love of virtue, it sooner or later grows weak without our 
 perceiving it, and that we become unjust and wicked in action 
 without having ceased to be just and good in soul." 
 
 This maxim may do for that " fugitive and cloistered virtue, 
 unexercised and unbrcathed, that never sallies out and seeks its 
 adversary," which Milton could not praise that is, for a man 
 hood whose distinction it is not to be manly but it is chiefly 
 worth notice as being the characteristic doctrine of senti- 
 mentalism. This disjoining of deed from will, of practice from 
 theory, is to put asunder what God has joined by an indissoluble 
 sacrament. The soul must be tainted before the action become 
 corrupt ; and there is no self-delusion more fatal than that 
 which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty 
 sentiments, while the life is grovelling and sensual witness 
 Coleridge. In his case we feel something like disgust. But 
 where, as in his son Hartley, there is hereditary infirmity, 
 where the man sees the principle that might rescue him slip 
 from the clutch of a nerveless will, like a rope through the 
 fingers of a drowning man, and the confession of faith is the 
 moan of despair, there is room for no harsher feeling than pity. 
 Rousseau showed through life a singular proneness for being 
 convinced by his own eloquence ; he was always his own first 
 convert ; and this reconciles his power as a writer with his 
 weakness as a man. He and all like him mistake emotion for
 
 324 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of sentiment for 
 the mid-current of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws to 
 itself all the affluents of conscience and will, and gives con 
 tinuity of purpose to life. They are like men who love the 
 stimulus of being under conviction, as it is called, who, forever 
 getting religion, never get capital enough to retire upon and 
 spend for their own need and the common service. 
 
 The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochondriac, with whom 
 fancies become facts, while facts are a discomfort because they 
 will not be evaporated into fancy. In his eyes, Theory is too 
 fine a dame to confess even a country-cousinship with coarse- 
 handed Practice, whose homely ways would disconcert her 
 artificial world. The very susceptibility that makes him quick 
 to feel, makes him also incapable of deep and durable feeling. 
 He loves to think he suffers, and keeps a pet sorrow, a blue- 
 devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere, like Paracelsus s 
 black dog. He takes good care, however, that it shall not be 
 the true sulphurous article that sometimes takes a fancy to fly 
 away with his conjurer. Rene says : " In my madness I had 
 gone so far as even to wish I might experience a misfortune, 
 so that my suffering might at least have a real object." 
 But no ; selfishness is only active egotism, and there is 
 nothing and nobody, with a single exception, which this sort 
 of creature will not sacrifice, rather than give any other 
 than an imaginary pang to his idol. Vicarious pain he is not 
 unwilling to endure, nay, will even commit suicide by proxy, 
 like the German poet who let his wife kill herself to give him n 
 sensation. Had young Jerusalem been anything like Goethe s 
 portrait of him in Wertker, he would have taken very good care 
 not to blow out the brains which he would have thought only 
 too precious. Real sorrows are uncomfortable things, but 
 purely aesthetic ones are by no means unpleasant, and I have 
 always fancied the handsome young Wolfgang writing those 
 distracted letters to Auguste Stolberg with a looking-glass in 
 front of him to give back an image of his desolation, and finding 
 it rather pleasant than otherwise to shed the tear of sympathy 
 with self that would seem so bitter to his fair correspondent
 
 ROUSSEAU. 325 
 
 The tears that have real salt in them will keep ; they are the 
 difficult, manly tears that are shed in secret ; but the pathos 
 soon evaporates from that fresh-water with which a man can 
 bedew a dead donkey in public, while his wife is having a good 
 cry over his neglect of her at home. We do not think the 
 worse of Goethe for hypothetically desolating himself in the 
 fashion aforesaid, for with many constitutions it is as purely 
 natural a crisis as dentition, which the stronger worry through, 
 and turn out very sensible, agreeable fellows. But where there 
 is an arrest of development, and the heartbreak of the patient 
 is audibly prolonged through life, we have a spectacle which 
 the toughest heart would wish to get as far away from as 
 possible. 
 
 We would not be supposed to overlook the distinction, too 
 often lost sight of, between sentimentalism and sentiment, the 
 latter being a very excellent thing in its way, as genuine things 
 are apt to be. Sentiment is intellectualised emotion, emotion 
 precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy. This is 
 the delightful staple of the poets of social life like Horace and 
 Beranger, or Thackerary, when he too rarely played with verse. 
 It puts into words for us that decorous average of feeling to the 
 expression of which society can consent without danger of being 
 indiscreetly moved. It is excellent for people who are willing 
 to save their souls alive to any extent that shall not be 
 discomposing. It is even satisfying till some deeper experience 
 has given us a hunger which what we so glibly call " the world " 
 cannot sate, just as a water-ice is nourishment enough to a man 
 who has had his dinner. It is the sufficing lyrical interpreter 
 of those lighter hours that should make part of every healthy 
 man s day, and is noxious only when it palls men s appetite for 
 the truly profound poetry which is very passion of very soul 
 sobered by afterthought and embodied in eternal types by 
 imagination. True sentiment is emotion ripened by a slow 
 ferment of the mind and qualified to an agreeable temperance 
 by that taste which is the conscience of polite society. But the 
 sentimentalist always insists on taking his emotion neat, and, 
 as his sense gradually deadens to the stimulus, increases his
 
 326 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 dose till he ends in a kind of moral deliquium. At first the 
 debaucher, he becomes at last the victim of his sensations. 
 
 Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimentalism. 
 Their masculine mood both of body and mind left no room for 
 it, and hence the bracing quality of their literature compared 
 with that of recent times, its tonic property, that seems almost 
 too astringent to palates relaxed by a daintier diet. The first 
 great example of the degenerate modern tendency \vas Petrarch, 
 who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. A 
 more perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An 
 intellectual voluptuary, a moral dilettante, the first instance 
 of that character, since too common, the gentleman in search 
 of a sensation, seeking a solitude at Vaucluse because it made 
 him more likely to be in demand at Avignon, praising 
 philosophic poverty with a sharp eye to the next rich benefice 
 in the gift of his patron, commending a good life but careful 
 first of a good living, happy only in seclusion but making a 
 dangercus journey to enjoy the theatrical show of a coronation 
 in the Capitol, cherishing a fruitless passion which broke his 
 heart three or four times a year, and yet could not make an end 
 of him till he had reached the ripe age of seventy and survived 
 his mistress a quarter of a century surely a more exquisite 
 perfection of inconsistency would be hard to find. 
 
 When Petrarch returned from his journey into the North of 
 Europe in 1332, he balanced the books of his unrequited 
 passion, and, finding that he had now been in love seven years, 
 thought the time had at last come to call deliberately on Death. 
 Had Death taken him at his word, he would have protested that 
 he was only in fun. For we find him always taking good care of 
 an excellent constitution, avoiding the plague with commend 
 able assiduity, and in the very year when he declares it 
 absolutely essential to his peace of mind to die for good and 
 all, taking refuge in the fortress of Capranica, from a whole 
 some dread of having his throat cut by robbers. There is such 
 a difference between dying in a sonnet with a cambric handker 
 chief at one s eyes, and the prosaic reality of demise certified in 
 the parish register ! Practically it is inconvenient to be dead.
 
 ROUSSEAU. 327 
 
 Among other things, it puts an end to the manufacture of 
 sonnets. But there seems to have been an excellent under 
 standing between Petrarch and Death, for he was brought to 
 that grisly monarch s door so often, that, otherwise, nothing 
 short of a miracle or the nine lives of that animal whom love 
 also makes lyrical could have saved him. "I consent," he 
 cries, " to live and die in Africa among its serpents, upon 
 Caucasus, or Atlas, if, while I live, to breathe a pure air, and 
 after my death a little corner of earth where to bestow my 
 body, may be -allowed me. This is all I ask, but this I cannot 
 obtain. Doomed always to wander, and to be a stranger 
 everywhere, O Fortune, Fortune, fix me at last to some one 
 spot ! I do not covet thy favours. Let me enjoy a tranquil 
 poverty, let me pass in this retreat the few days that remain to 
 me ! " The pathetic stop of Petrarch s poetical organ was one 
 he could pull out at pleasure and indeed we soon learn to 
 distrust literary tears, as the cheap subterfuge for want of real 
 feeling with natures of this quality. Solitude with him was but 
 the pseudonyme of notoriety. Poverty was the archdeaconry 
 of Parma, with other ecclesiastical pickings. During his retreat 
 at Vaucluse, in the very height of that divine sonneteering love 
 of Laura, of that sensitive purity which called Avignon 
 Babylon, and rebuked the sinfulness of Clement, he was 
 himself begetting that kind of children which we spell with a 
 b. We believe that, if Messer Francesco had been present 
 when the woman was taken in adultery, he would have flung 
 the first stone wiihout the slightest feeling of inconsistency, 
 nay, with a sublime sense of virtue. The truth is, that it made 
 very little difference to him what sort of proper sentiment he 
 expressed, provided he could do it elegantly and with unction. 
 
 Would any one feel the difference between his faint 
 abstractions and the Platonism of a powerful nature fitted 
 alike for the withdrawal of ideal contemplation and for breast 
 ing the storms of life would any one know how wide a depth 
 divides a noble friendship based on sympathy of pursuit and 
 aspiration, on that mutual help which souls capable of self- 
 sustainment are the readiest to give or to take, and a simulated
 
 328 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 passion, true neither to the spiritual nor the sensual part of 
 man let him compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those 
 which Michel Angelo addressed to Vittoria Colonna. In 
 them the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and speculation are 
 buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, and of an actual, 
 not fancied, experience, and the depth of feeling is measured 
 by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch s 
 all ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are 
 cold, but the coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the 
 other chills with pretence of warmth. In Michel Angelo s, you 
 feel the great architect ; in Petrarch s, the artist who can best 
 realise his conception in the limits of a cherry-stone. And yet 
 this man influenced literature longer and more widely than 
 almost any other in modern times. So great is the charm 
 of elegance, so unreal is the larger part of what is written ! 
 
 Certainly I do not mean to say that a work of art should be 
 looked at by the light of the artist s biography, or measured 
 by our standard of his character. Nor do I reckon what was 
 genuine in Petrarch his love of letters, his refinement, his skill 
 in the superficial graces of language, that rhetorical art by 
 which the music of words supplants their meaning, and the 
 verse moulds the thought instead of being plastic to it after 
 any such fashion. I have no ambition for that character of 
 valet de chambre which is said to disenchant the most heroic 
 figures into mere everyday personages, for it implies a mean 
 soul no less than a servile condition. But we have a right to 
 demand a certain amount of reality, however small, in the 
 emotion of a man who makes it his business to endeavour at 
 exciting our own. We have a privilege of nature to shiver 
 before a painted flame, how cunningly soever the colours be 
 laid on. Yet our love of minute biographical detail, our desire 
 to make ourselves spies upon the men of the past, seems so 
 much of an instinct in us, that we must look for the spring of 
 it in human nature, and that somewhat deeper than mere 
 curiosity or love of gossip. It should seem to arise from what 
 must be considered on the whole a creditable feeling namely, 
 that we value character more than any amount of talent the
 
 ROUSSEAU., 329 
 
 skill to be something, above that of doing anything but the best 
 of its kind. The highest creative genius, and that only, is 
 privileged from arrest by this personality, for there the thing 
 produced is altogether disengaged from the producer. But in 
 natures incapable of this escape from themselves, the author is 
 inevitably mixed with his work, and we have a feeling that the 
 amount of his sterling character is the security for the notes he 
 issues. Especially we feel so when truth to self, which is 
 always self-forgetful, and not truth to nature, makes an essential 
 part of the value of what is offered us ; as where a man 
 undertakes to narrate personal experience or to enforce a 
 dogma. This is particularly true as respects sentimentalists, 
 because of their intrusive self-consciousness ; for there is no 
 more universal characteristic of human nature than the instinct 
 of men to apologise to themselves for themselves, and to justify 
 personal failings by generalising them into universal laws. A 
 man would be the keenest devil s advocate against himself, 
 were it not that he has always taken a retaining fee for the 
 defence ; for we think that the indirect and mostly unconscious 
 pleas in abatement which we read between the lines in the 
 works of many authors are oftener written to set themselves 
 right in their own eyes than in those of the world. And in the 
 real life of the sentimentalist it is the same. He is under the 
 wretched necessity of keeping up, at least in public, the 
 character he has assumed, till he at last reaches that last shift 
 of. bankrupt self-respect, to play the hypocrite with himself. 
 Lamartine, after passing round the hat in Europe and America, 
 takes to his bed from wounded pride when the French senate 
 votes him a subsidy, and sheds tears of humiliation. Ideally 
 he resents it ; in practical coin, he will accept the shame 
 without a wry face. 
 
 George Sand speaking of Rousseau s Confessions, says that an 
 autobiographer always makes himself the hero of his own novel, 
 and cannot help idealising, even if he would. But the weak point 
 of all sentimentalists is that they always have been, and always 
 continue under every conceivable circumstance to be, their own 
 ideals, whether they are writing their own lives or no. Rousseau
 
 330 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 opens his book with the statement : " I am not made like any of 
 those I have seen ; I venture to believe myself unlike any that 
 exists. If I am not worth more, at least I am different." O 
 exquisite cunning of self-flattery ! It is this very imagined 
 difference that makes us worth more in our own foolish sight. 
 For while all men are apt to think, or to persuade themselves that 
 they think, all other men their accomplices in vice or weakness, 
 they are not difficult of belief that they are singular in any quality 
 or talent on which they hug themselves. More than this ; people 
 who are truly original are the last to find it out, for the moment 
 we become conscious of a virtue it has left us or is getting 
 ready to go. Originality does not consist in a fidgety assertion 
 of selfhood, but in the faculty of getting rid of it altogether, that 
 the truer genius of the man, which commerces with universal 
 nature and with other souls through a common sympathy with 
 that, may take all his powers wholly to itself and the truly 
 original man could no more be jealous of his peculiar gift, than 
 the grass could take credit to itself for being green. What is 
 the reason that all children are geniuses (though they contrive 
 so soon to outgrow that dangerous quality), except that they 
 never cross-examine themselves on the subject 1 The moment 
 that process begins, their speech loses its gift of unexpectedness, 
 and they become as tediously impertinent as the rest of us. 
 
 If there never was anyone like him, if he constituted a genius 
 in himself, to what end write confessions in which no other 
 human being could ever be in a condition to take the least 
 possible interest ? All men are interested in Montaigne in 
 proportion as all men find more of themselves in him, and all 
 men see but one image in the glass which the greatest of poets 
 holds up to nature, an image which at once startles and charms 
 them with its familiarity. Fabulists always endow their 
 animals with the passions and desires of men. But if an ox 
 could dictate his confessions, what glimmer of understanding 
 should we find in those bovine confidences, unless on some 
 theory of pre-existence, some blank misgiving of a creature 
 moving about in worlds not realised? The truth is, that we 
 recognise the common humanity of Rousseau in the very
 
 ROUSSEAU. 331 
 
 weakness that betrayed him into this conceit of himself; we 
 find he is just like the rest of us in this very assumption of 
 essential difference, for among all animals man is the only one 
 who tries to pass for more than he is, and so involves himself in 
 the condemnation of seeming less. 
 
 But it would be sheer waste of time to hunt Rousseau 
 through all his doublings of inconsistency, and run him to 
 earth in every new paradox. His first two books attacked, one 
 of them literature, and the other society. But this did not 
 prevent him from being diligent with "his pen, nor from availing 
 himself of his credit with persons who enjoyed all the 
 advantages of that inequality whose evils he had so pointedly 
 exposed. Indeed, it is curious how little practical communism 
 there has been, how few professors it has had who would not 
 have gained by a general dividend. It is perhaps no frantic 
 effort of generosity in a philosopher with ten crowns in his 
 pocket when he offers to make common stock with a neighbour 
 who has ten thousand of yearly income, nor is it an uncommon 
 thing to see such theories knocked clean out of a man s head by 
 the descent of a thumping legacy. But, consistent or not, 
 Rousseau remains permanently interesting as the highest and 
 most perfect type of the sentimentalist of genius. His was 
 perhaps the acutest mind that was ever mated with an organisa 
 tion so diseased, the brain most far-reaching in speculation that 
 ever kept itself steady and worked out its problems amid such 
 disordered tumult of the nerves.* His letter to the Archbishop 
 of Paris, admirable for its lucid power and soberness of tone, 
 and his Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques, which no man can read 
 and believe him to have been sane, show him to us in his 
 strength and weakness, and give us a more charitable, let us 
 hope therefore a truer, notion of him than his own apology for 
 himself. That he was a man of genius appears unmistakably in 
 his impressibility by the deeper meaning of the epoch in which 
 he lived. Before an eruption, clouds steeped through and 
 through with electric life gather over the crater, as if in 
 
 * Perhaps we should except Newton.
 
 332 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 sympathy and expectation. As the mountain heaves and cracks, 
 these vapoury masses are seamed with fire, as if they felt and 
 answered the dumb agony that is struggling for utterance below. 
 Just such flashes of eager sympathetic fire break continually 
 from the cloudy volumes of Rousseau, the result at once and the 
 warning of that convulsion of which Paris was to be the crater 
 and all Europe to feel the spasm. There are symptoms enough 
 elsewhere of that want of faith in the existing order which made 
 the Revolution inevitable even so shallow an observer as 
 Horace Walpole could forebode it so early as 1765 but 
 Rousseau more than all others is the unconscious expression 
 of the groping after something radically new, the instinct for a 
 change that should be organic and pervade every fibre of the 
 social and political body. Freedom of thought owes far more to 
 the jester Voltaire, who also had his solid kernel of earnest, than 
 to the sombre Genevese, whose earnestness is of the deadly 
 kind. Yet, for good or evil, the latter was the father of 
 modern democracy, and without him our Declaration of 
 Independence would have wanted some of those sentences 
 in which the immemorial longings of the poor and the 
 dreams of solitary enthusiasts were at last affirmed as 
 axioms in the manifesto of a nation, so that all the world 
 might hear. 
 
 Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had a remarkable 
 vein of common-sense in him (witness his remarks on duelling, 
 on landscape-gardening, on French poetry, and much of his 
 thought on education), we cannot trace many practical results to 
 his teaching, least of all in politics. For the great difficulty 
 with his system, if system it may be called, is, that, while it 
 professes to follow nature, it not only assumes as a starting- 
 point that the individual man may be made over again, but 
 proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that human 
 nature, must be made over again, and governments remodelled 
 on a purely theoretic basis. But when something like an 
 experiment in this direction was made in 1789, not only did 
 it fail as regarded man in general, but even as regards the 
 particular variety of man that inhabited France. The Revolution
 
 ROUSSEAU. 333 
 
 accomplished many changes, and beneficent ones, yet it left 
 France peopled, not by a new race without traditions, but by 
 Frenchmen. Still, there could not but be a wonderful force in 
 the words of a man who, above all others, had the secret of 
 making abstractions glow with his own fervour ; and his ideas 
 dispersed now in the atmosphere of thought have influenced, 
 perhaps still continue to influence, speculative minds, which 
 prefer swift and sure generalisation to hesitating and doubtful 
 experience. 
 
 Rousseau has, in one respect, been utterly misrepresented and 
 misunderstood. Even Chateaubriand most unfilially classes 
 him and Voltaire together. It appears to me that the inmost 
 core- of his being was religious. Had he remained in the 
 Catholic Church he might have been a saint. Had he come 
 earlier, he might have founded an order. His was precisely 
 the nature on which religious enthusiasm takes the strongest 
 hold a temperament which finds a sensuous delight in spiritual 
 things, and satisfies its craving for excitement with celestial 
 debauch. He had not the iron temper of a great reformer and 
 organiser like Knox, who, true Scotchman that he was, found a 
 way to weld this world and the other together in a cast-iron 
 creed ; but he had as much as any man ever had that gift of a 
 great preacher to make the oratorical fervour which persuades 
 himself while it lasts into the abiding conviction of his hearers. 
 That very persuasion of his, that the soul could remain pure 
 while he life was corrupt, is not unexampled among men who 
 have left holier names than he. His Confessions, also, would 
 assign him to that class with whom the religious sentiment is 
 strong, and the moral nature weak. They are apt to believe 
 that they may, as special pleaders say, confess and avoid. 
 Hawthorne has admirably illustrated this in the penance of Mr. 
 Dimmesdale. With all the soil that is upon Rousseau, I cannot 
 help looking on him as one capable beyond any in his gener 
 ation of being divinely possessed ; and if it happened otherwise, 
 when we remember the much that hindered and the little that 
 helped in a life and time like his, we shall be much readier 
 to pity than to condemn. It was his very fitness for being
 
 334 ROUSSEAU, 
 
 something better that makes him able to shock us so with what in 
 too many respects he unhappily was. Less gifted, he had been 
 less hardly judged. More than any other of the sentimentalists, 
 except possibly Sterne, he had in him a staple of sincerity. 
 Compared with Chateaubriand, he is honesty, compared with 
 Lamartine, he is manliness itself. His nearest congener in our 
 own tongue is Co \ per. 
 
 In the whole school there is a sickly taint. The strongest 
 mark which Rousseau has left upon literature is a sensibility to 
 the picturesque in Nature, not with Nature as a strengthener 
 and consoler, a wholesome tonic for a mind ill at ease with 
 itself, but with Nature as a kind of feminine echo to the mood, 
 flattering it with sympathy rather than correcting it with rebuke 
 or lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in the whole 
 some r fellow-feeling of Wordsworth. They seek in her an 
 accessory, and not a reproof. It is less a sympathy with 
 Nature than a sympathy with ourselves as we compel her to 
 reflect us. It is solitude, Nature for her estrangement from 
 man, not for her companionship with him it is desolation and 
 ruin, Nature as she has triumphed over man with which this 
 order of mind seeks communion, and in which it finds solace. 
 It is with the hostile and destructive power of matter, and not 
 with the spirit of life and renewal that dwells in it, that they ally 
 themselves. And in human character it is the same. St. 
 Preux, Rene, Wcrther, Manfred, Quasimodo they are all 
 anomalies, distortions, ruins ; so much easier is it to carica 
 ture life from our own sickly conception of it, than to paint 
 it in its noble simplicity ; so much cheaper is unreality than 
 truth. 
 
 Every man is conscious that he leads two lives the one 
 trivial and ordinary, the other sacred and recluse ; one which 
 he carries to society and the dinner-table, the other in which his 
 youth and aspiration survive for him, and which is a confidence 
 between himself and God. Both may be equally sincere, and 
 there need be no contradiction between them, any more than 
 in a healthy man between soul and body. If the higher life be 
 real and earnest, its result, whether in literature or affairs, will
 
 ROUSSEAU. 335 
 
 be real and earnest too. But no man can produce great things 
 who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who 
 would not exchange the finest show for the poorest reality, who 
 does not so love his work that he is not only glad to give him 
 self for it, but finds rather a gain than a sacrifice in the sur 
 render. The sentimentalist does not think of what he does 
 so much as of what the world will think of what he docs. He 
 translates should into would, looks upon the spheres of duty 
 and beau .y as alien to each other, and can never learn how life 
 rounds itself to a noble completeness between these two opposite 
 but mutually sustaining poles of what we long for and what we 
 must. 
 
 Did Rousseau, then, lead a life of this quality ? Perhaps, 
 when we consider the contrast which every man who looks 
 backward must feel between the life he planned and the life 
 which circumstance within him and without him has made for 
 him, we should rather ask, Was this the life he meant to lead? 
 Perhaps, when we take into account his faculty of self-deception 
 it may be no greater than our own we should ask, Was this 
 ihe life he believed he led ? Have we any right to judge this 
 man after our blunt English fashion, and condemn him, as we 
 are wont to do, on the finding of a jury of average house 
 holders? Is French reality precisely our reality? Could we 
 tolerate tragedy in rhymed alexandrines, instead of blank verse? 
 The whole life of Rousseau is pitched on this heroic key, and 
 for the most trivial occasion he must be ready with the sublime 
 sentiments that are supposed to suit him rather than it. It is 
 one of the most curious features of the sentimental ailment, 
 that, while it shuns the contact of men, it courts publicity. In 
 proportion as solitude and communion with self lead the 
 sentimentalist to exaggerate the importance of his own person 
 ality, he comes to think that the least event connected with it is 
 of consequence to his fellow-men. If he change his shirt, he 
 would have mankind aware of it. Victor Hugo, the greatest 
 living representative of the class, considers it necessary to let 
 the world know by letter from time to time his opinions on 
 every conceivable subject about which it is not asked nor is of
 
 336 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 the least value unless we concede to him an immediate 
 inspiration. We men of colder blood, in whom self-conscious 
 ness takes the form of pride, and who have deified mauvaise 
 honte as if our defect were our virtue, find it especially hard to 
 understand that artistic impulse of more southern races to pose 
 themselves properly on every occasion, and not even to die 
 without some tribute of deference to the taste of the world they 
 are leaving. Was not even mighty Caesar s last thought of his 
 drapery? Let us not condemn Rousseau for what seems to us 
 the indecent exposure of himself in his Confessions. 
 
 Those who allow an oratorical and purely conventional side 
 disconnected with our private understanding of the facts, and 
 with life, in which everything has a wholly parliamentary 
 sense where truth is made subservient to the momentary 
 exigencies of eloquence, should be charitable to Rousseau. 
 While we encourage a distinction which establishes two kinds 
 of truth, one for the world, and another for the conscience, 
 while we take pleasure in a kind of speech that has no relation 
 to the real thought of speaker or hearer, but to the rostrum 
 only, we must not be hasty to condemn a sent unentalism which 
 we do our best to foster. We listen in public with the gravity 
 of augurs to what we smile at when we meet a brother adept. 
 France is the native land of eulogy, of truth padded out to the 
 size and shape demanded by comme-tl-faui. The French 
 Academy has, perhaps, done more harm by the vogue it has 
 given to this style, than it has done good by its literary purism ; 
 for the best purity of a language depends on the limpidity of its 
 source in veracity of thought. Rousseau was in many respects 
 a typical Frenchman, and it is not to be wondered at if he too 
 often fell in with the fashion of saying what was expected of 
 him, and what he thought due to the situation, rather than 
 what would have been true to his inmost consciousness. 
 Perhaps we should allow something also to the influence of a 
 Calvinistic training, which certainly helps men who have the 
 least natural tendency towards it to set faith above works, and 
 to persuade themselves of the efficacy of an inward grace to 
 offset an outward and visible defection from it.
 
 ROUSSEAU. 337 
 
 As the sentimentalist always takes a fanciful, sometimes an 
 unreal, life for an ideal one, it would be too much to say that 
 Rousseau was a man of earnest convictions. But he was a man 
 of fitfully intense ones, as suited so mobile a temperament, and 
 his writings, more than those of any other of his tribe, carry 
 with them that persuasion that was in him while he wrote. In 
 them at least he is as consistent as a man who admits new 
 ideas can ever be. The children of his brain he never aban 
 doned, but clung to them with paternal fidelity. Intellectually 
 he was true and fearless ; constitutionally, timid, contradictory, 
 and weak ; but never, if we understand him rightly, false. He 
 was a little too credulous of sonorous sentiment, but he was 
 never, like Chateaubriand or Lamartine, the lackey of fine 
 phrases. If, as some fanciful physiologists have assumed, 
 there be a masculine and feminine lobe of the brain, it would 
 seem that in men of sentimental turn the masculine half fell in 
 love with and made an idol of the other, obeying and admiring 
 all the pretty whims of this folle du logis. In Rousseau the 
 mistress had some noble elements of character, and less taint 
 of the demi-monde than is visible in more recent cases of the 
 same illicit relation. 
 
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 Introductory Note, by S. L. Gwynn. 
 
 64 CORAL REEFS. BY CHARLES DARWIN. EDITED, 
 
 with an Introduction, by Dr. J. W. Williams. 
 
 65 SHERIDAN S PLAYS. EDITED, WITH AN INTRO- 
 
 duction, by Rudolf Dircks. 
 
 London : WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, Paternoster Square.
 
 THE SCOTT LIBRARY-continued. 
 
 66 OUR VILLAGE. BY MISS MITFORD. EDITED, WITH 
 
 an Introduction, by Ernest Rhys. 
 
 67 MASTER HUMPHREY S CLOCK, AND OTHER STORIES. 
 
 By Charles Dickens. With Introduction by Frank T. Marzials. 
 
 68 TALES FROM WONDERLAND. BY RUDOLPH 
 
 Baumbach. Translated by Helen B. Dole. 
 
 69 ESSAYS AND PAPERS BY DOUGLAS JERROLD. EDITED 
 
 by Walter Jerrold. 
 
 70 VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN. BY 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraft. Introduction by Mrs. E. Robins Pennell. 
 
 71 "THE ATHENIAN ORACLE." A SELECTION. EDITED 
 
 by John Underbill, with Prefatory Note by Walter Besant. 
 
 72 ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE. TRANSLATED AND 
 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by Elizabeth Lee. 
 
 73 SELECTIONS FROM PLATO. FROM THE TRANS- 
 
 lation of Sydenham and Taylor. Edited by T. W. Rolleston. 
 
 74 HEINE S ITALIAN TRAVEL SKETCHES, ETC. TRANS- 
 
 lated by Elizabeth A. Sharp. With an Introduction from the French of 
 Theophile Gautier. 
 
 75 SCHILLER S MAID OF ORLEANS. TRANSLATED, 
 
 with an Introduction, by Major-General Patrick Maxwell. 
 
 76 SELECTIONS FROM SYDNEY SMITH. EDITED, WITH 
 
 an Introduction, by Ernest Rhys. 
 
 77 THE NEW SPIRIT. BY HAVELOCK ELLIS. 
 
 78 THE BOOK OF MARVELLOUS ADVENTURES. FROM 
 
 the "Morte d Arthur." Edited by Ernest Rhys. [This, together with 
 No. 1, forms the complete " Morte d Arthur."] 
 
 79 ESSAYS AND APHORISMS. BY SIR ARTHUR HELPS. 
 
 With an Introduction by E. A. Helps. 
 
 50 ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE. SELECTED, WITH A 
 
 Prefatory Note, by Percival Chubb. 
 
 51 THE LUCK OF BARRY LYNDON. BY W. M. 
 
 Thackeray. Edited by F. T. Marzials. 
 
 82 SCHILLER S WILLIAM TELL. TRANSLATED, WITH 
 an Introduction, by Major-General Patrick Maxwell. 
 
 London: WALTER SCOTT, LIMITKD, Paternoster Square.
 
 THE SCOTT LIBRARY continued. 
 
 83 CARLYLE S ESSAYS ON GERMAN LITERATURE. 
 
 With an Introduction by Ernest Rhys. 
 
 84 PLAYS AND DRAMATIC ESSAYS OF CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by Rudolf Dirck-s. 
 
 85 THE PROSE OF WORDSWORTH. SELECTED AND 
 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by Professor William Knight. 
 
 86 ESSAYS, DIALOGUES, AND THOUGHTS OF COUNT 
 
 Giacomo Leopardi. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by 
 Major-General Patrick Maxwell. 
 
 87 THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL. A RUSSIAN COMEDY. 
 
 By Nikolai V. Gogol. Translated from the original, with an Introduction 
 and Notes, by Arthur A. Sykes. 
 
 88 ESSAYS AND APOTHEGMS OF FRANCIS, LORD BACON. 
 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by John Buchan. 
 
 89 PROSE OF MILTON. SELECTED AND EDITED, WITH 
 
 an Introduction, by Richard Garnett, LL.D. 
 
 90 THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO. TRANSLATED BY 
 
 Thomas Taylor, with an Introduction by Theodore Wratislaw. 
 
 91 PASSAGES FROM FROISSART. WITH AN INTRO- 
 
 duction by Frank T. Marzials. 
 
 92 THE PROSE AND TABLE TALK OF COLERIDGE. 
 
 Edited by Will H. Dircks. 
 
 93 HEINE IN ART AND LETTERS. TRANSLATED BY 
 
 Elizabeth A. Sharp. 
 
 94 SELECTED ESSAYS OF DE QUINCEY. WITH AX 
 
 Introduction by Sir George Douglas, Bart. 
 
 95 YASARI S LIVES OF ITALIAN PAINTERS. SELECTED 
 
 and Prefaced by Havelock Ellis. 
 
 96 LAOCOON, AND OTHER PROSF, WRITINGS OF 
 
 LES.SING. A new Translation by W. B. Ronnfeldt. 
 
 97 PELLEAS AND MELISANDA, AND THE SIGHTLESS. 
 
 Two Plays by Maurice Maeterlinck. Translated from the French by 
 Laurence Alma Tadema. 
 
 98 THE COMPLETE ANGLER OF WALTON AND COTTON. 
 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by Charles Hill Dick. 
 
 London : WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, Paternoster Square.
 
 THE SCOTT LIBRARY-continued. 
 
 99 LESSING S NATHAN THE WISE. TRANSLATED BY 
 Mujor-General Patrick Maxwell. 
 
 100 THE POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES, AND OTHER 
 
 Essays of Ernest Renan. Translated by W. G. Hutchison. 
 
 101 CRITICISMS, REFLECTIONS, ANDMAXIMSOFGOETHE. 
 
 Translated, with an Introduction, by W. B. Ronnfeldt. 
 
 102 ESSAYS OF SCHOPENHAUER. TRANSLATED BY 
 
 Mrs. Rudolf Dircks. With an Introduction. 
 
 103 RENAN S LIFE OF JESUS. TRANSLATED, WITH AN 
 
 Introduction, by William G. Hutchison. 
 
 104 THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE. EDITED, 
 
 with an Introduction, by Arthur Synons. 
 
 105 THE PRINCIPLES OF SUCCESS IN LITERATURE. 
 
 lly George Henry Lewes. Edited, with an Introduction, by T. Sharper 
 Kno>vlson.
 
 LIBRARY OF HUMOUR 
 
 Cloth Elegant^ Large Crown Svo, Price 3/6 per vol. 
 
 VOLUMES ALREADY ISSUED. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF FRANCE. Translated, with an 
 Introduction and Notes, by Elizabeth Lee. With 
 numerous Illustrations by Paul Frenzeny. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY. Translated, with an 
 Introduction and Notes, by Hans Miiller-Casenov. 
 With numerous Illustrations by C. E. Brock. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF ITALY. Translated, with an In 
 troduction and Notes, by A. Werner. With 50 Illustra 
 tions and a Frontispiece by Arturo Faldi. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF AMERICA. Selected with a 
 copious Biographical Index of American Humorists, by 
 James Barr. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF HOLLAND. Translated, with 
 an Introduction and Notes, by A. Werner. With 
 numerous Illustrations by Dudley Hardy. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF IRELAND. Selected by D. J. 
 O Donoghue. With numerous Illustrations by Oliver 
 Paque. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF SPAIN. Translated, with an Intro 
 duction and Notes, by S. Taylor. With numerous 
 Illustrations by H. R. Millar. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF RUSSIA Translated, with Notes, 
 by E. L. Boole, and an Introduction by Stepniak. 
 With 50 Illustrations by Paul Frenzeny. 
 
 THE HUMOUR OF JAPAN. Translated, with an 
 Introduction, by A. M. With Illustrations by George 
 Bigot (from Drawings made in Japan). \Inpreparation. 
 
 London: WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, Paternoster Square.
 
 IBSEN S PROSE DRAMAS. 
 
 EDITED BY WILLIAM ARCHER. 
 
 Complete in Five Vols. Crown 8vo, Cloth, Price 3/6 each. 
 Set of Five Vols., in Case, 17/6: in Half Morocco, in Case, 32/6. 
 
 " We seem at last to be shoivn men and women as they are ; and at first it 
 is more than -we can endure. ... All Ibsen s chat acters speak and act as if 
 they were hypnotised, and under their creator s imperious demand to reveal 
 themselves. There never was such a mirt or- held up to nature before : it is 
 too terrible. . . . Yet we must ret^trn to Ibsen, with his remorseless surgery, 
 his remorseless electric-light, until we, too, have grown strong and learned to 
 face the naked if necessary* the flayed and bleeding reality. SPEAKER 
 (London). 
 
 VOL. I. "A DOLL S HOUSE," "THE LEAGUE OF 
 YOUTH," and "THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY." With 
 Portrait of the Author, and Biographical Introduction by 
 WILLIAM ARCHER. 
 
 VOL. II. "GHOSTS," "AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE," 
 and "THE WILD DUCK." With an Introductory Note. 
 
 VOL. III. "LADY INGER OF OSTRAT," "THE VIKINGS 
 AT HELGELAND," "THE PRETENDERS." With an 
 Introductory Note and Portrait of Ibsen. 
 
 VOL. IV. "EMPEROR AND GALILEAN." With an 
 Introductory Note by WILLIAM ARCHER. 
 
 VOL. V. " ROSMERSHOLM," "THE LADY FROM THE 
 SEA," "HEDDA GABLER." Translated by WILLIAM 
 ARCHER. With an Introductory Note. 
 
 The sequence of the plays in each volume is chronological ; the complete 
 set of volumes comprising the dramas thus presents them in chronological 
 order. 
 
 "The art of prose translation does not perhaps enjoy a very high literary 
 status in England, but we have no hesitation in numbering the present 
 version of Ibsen, so far as it has gone (Vols. I. and II.), among the very 
 best achievements, in that kind, of our generation." Academy. 
 
 "We have seldom, if ever, met with a translation so absolutely 
 idiomatic." Glasgow Herald. 
 
 London: WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, Paternoster Square.
 
 COMPACT AND PRACTICAL. 
 
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 A RUSSIAN PROPRIETOR. 
 
 THE COSSACKS. 
 
 IVAN ILYITCH, AND OTHER 
 
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 MY RELIGION. 
 LIFE. 
 
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 ANNA KARENINA. 3/6. 
 
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 THE LONG EXILE, ETC. 
 
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 WITHIN YOU. 
 WORK WHILE YE HAVE THE 
 
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 WHERE LOVE IS, THERE GOD 
 
 IS ALSO. 
 
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 IS ALSO. 
 THE GODSON. 
 
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 WHAT MEN LIVE BY. 
 WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT A 
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 TANGLEWOOD TALES. 
 
 TWICE-TOLD TALES. 
 
 A WONDER-BOOK FOR GIRLS AND BOYS. 
 
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 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. 
 
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 TRUE STORIES FROM HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. 
 
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 ELSIE VENNER. 
 
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 PHYSIOGNOMY AND EXPRESSION. By P. MANTEGAZZA. 
 EVOLUTION AND DISEASE. By J. B. SUTTON. 
 THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. By G. L. GOMME. 
 THE CRIMINAL. By HAVELOCK ELLIS. 
 SANITY AND INSANITY. By Dr. C. MERCIER. 
 HYPNOTISM. By Dr. ALBERT MOLL (Berlin). 
 MANUAL TRAINING. By Dr. WOODWARD (St. Louis). 
 SCIENCE OF FAIRY TALES. By E. S. HARTLAND. 
 PRIMITIVE FOLK. By ELIE RECLUS 
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 PROPERTY: ITS ORIGIN. By CH. LETOURNEAU. 
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 CHRISTIAN YEAR. With Portrait of John Keble. 
 LONGFELLOW. With Portrait of Longfellow. 
 KHELLEY. With Portrait of Shelley. 
 WORDSWORTH. With Portrait of Wordsworth. 
 WHITTIER. With Portrait of Whittier. 
 
 BURNS. Songs > With Portrait of Burns, and View of "Th3 
 BURNS. Poems/ Auld Brig o Doon." 
 
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 EMERSON. With Portrait of Emerson. 
 
 SONNETS OF THIS CENTURY. Portrait of D. G. Rossetti. 
 WHITMAN. With Portrait of Whitman. 
 
 LOVE LETTERS OF A VIOLINIST. Portrait of Eric Mackay. 
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 SCOTT. Marmion, etc. J Strand, Loch Katrine." 
 CHILDREN OF THE POETS. With an Engraving of "The 
 
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 SONNETS OF EUROPE. With Portrait of J. A. Symonds. 
 ^^fiYDNEY DOBELL. With Portrait of Sydney Dobell. 
 HERRICK. With Portrait of Herrick. 
 BALLADS AND RONDEAUS. Portrait of W. E. Henley. 
 IRISH MINSTRELSY. With Portrait of Thomas Davis. 
 PARADISE LOST. With Portrait of Milton. 
 FAIRY MUSIC. Engraving from Drawing by C. E. Brock. 
 GOLDEN TREASURY. With Engraving of Virgin Mother. 
 AMERICAN SONNETS. With Portrait of J. R. Lowell. 
 IMITATION OF CHRIST. With Engraving, "Ecce Homo." 
 PAINTER POETS. With Portrait of Walter Crane. 
 WOMEN POETS. With Portrait of Mrs. Browning. 
 POEMS OF HON. RODEN NOEL. Portrait of Hon. R. NoeL 
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 SONGS OF FREEDOM. With Portrait of William Morris. 
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 CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH VERSE. With Portrait i.f 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
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 CAVALIER POETS. With Portrait of Suckling. 
 HUMOROUS POEMS. With Portrait of Hood. 
 HERBERT. With Portrait of Herbert 
 POE. With Portrait of Poe. 
 OWEN MEREDITH. With Portrait of late Lord LyttoB.
 
 LOVE LYRICS. With Portrait of Raleigh. 
 
 GERMAN BALLADS. With Portrait of Schiller. 
 
 CAMPBELL. With Portrait of Campbell. 
 
 CANADIAN POEMS. With View of Mount Stephen. 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH POETRY. With Portrait of Earl of Surrey. 
 
 ALLAN RAMSAY. With Portrait of Ramsay. 
 
 SPENSER. With Portrait of Spenser. 
 
 CHATTERTON. With Engraving, " The Death of Chatterton." 
 
 COWPER. With Portrait of Cowper. 
 
 < H AUCER. With Portrait of Chaucer. 
 
 COLERIDGE. With Portrait of Coleridge. 
 
 POPE. With Portrait of Pope. 
 
 BYRON. Miscellaneous j witfa Portrait8 of 
 
 BYRON. Don Juan / 
 
 JACOBITE SONGS. With Portrait of Prince Charlie. 
 
 BORDER BALLADS. With View of Neidpath Castle. 
 
 AUSTRALIAN BALLADS. With Portrait of A. L. Gordon. 
 
 HOGG. With Portrait of Hogg. 
 
 GOLDSMITH. With Portrait of Goldsmith. 
 
 MOORE. With Portrait of Moore. 
 
 DORA GREENWELL. With Portrait of Dora Greenwell. 
 
 BLAKE. With Portrait of Blake. 
 
 POEMS OF NATURE. With Portrait of Andrew Lang 
 
 PRAED. With Portrait. 
 
 SOUTHEY. With Portrait. 
 
 HUGO. With Portrait. 
 
 GOETHE. With Portrait 
 
 BERANGER. With Portrait. 
 
 HEINE. With Portrait 
 
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 SONG-TIDE. With Portrait of Philip Bourke Marston, 
 
 LADY OF LYONS. With Portrait of Bulwer Lytton. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE : Songs and Sonnets. With Portrait. 
 
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 BALLADS OF SPORT. Do. do. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. With Portrait 
 
 AUSTIN S DAYS OF THE YEAR. With Portrait. 
 
 CLOUGH S BOTHIE, and other Poems With View. 
 
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 LYRA NICOTIAN A. With Portrait. 
 
 AL RORA LEIGH. With Portrait of E. B. Browning.
 
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 A NEW SERIES OF CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES. 
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 Longfellow By Professor Eric S. Robertson 
 
 Coleridge 
 
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 Library Edition of " Great Writers," Demy Svo, 2/6. 
 
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