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. 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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. 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