B E R K E I E Y\ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY Of I 
 
 CALIFORNIA J 
 
 *^~ ^S 
 
THREE LECTURES 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
THREE LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 b 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM S. M'CORMICK, M.A. 
 
 LECTURER ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 IN QUEEN MARGARET COLLEGE, GLASGOW 
 
 ALEXANDER GARDNER 
 
 lUufclt'aijer to 3jer f&ajegtp tf)e 6tueen 
 PAISLEY; AND PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 1889 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE following Lectures formed part of 
 a Series on " The English Poets of the 
 Nineteenth Century," delivered to the 
 students of the classes of English Lan- 
 guage and Literature in Queen Margaret 
 College and in Glasgow University dur- 
 ing the Session 1887-88, 
 
 The first Lecture is mainly (pp. 29-53) 
 an attempt to answer some of the 
 arguments in an article by Professor 
 Freeman in the Contemporary Review of 
 October, 1887. It would not have been 
 published had I seen since then any 
 protest against the usurpation by Philo- 
 
 136 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 logy of the study of Literature in our 
 Universities. 
 
 The Lectures on Wordsworth and 
 Browning are not Essays. Addressed 
 first to students whom it was my 
 province to introduce to the study of 
 these poets, they are still intended for a 
 corresponding class of readers. 
 
 I have selected the poetry of Words- 
 worth and of Browning, as parallel 
 illustrations of the operation of the 
 Contemplative and the Penetrative Ima- 
 gination of our century. The points 
 of affinity in their contrasted genius are 
 suggestive of the influence on art of 
 modern reflection and analysis. These 
 have given to both poets an apposite 
 originality of method and subject. 
 
 The idealizing faculty of each is, as it 
 were, turned in upon itself. The artist 
 is not content to present his creation : 
 he must at the same time analyze and 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 present the very act of creation. A 
 subtle consciousness has usurped the 
 place of instinct. 
 
 4 'The light that never was, on sea or land," 
 
 had, though itself unseen, glorified the 
 vision of Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton. 
 In Wordsworth we find it for the first 
 time the subject of the poet's song. On 
 Lear and Macbeth we look, as we look 
 on Nature. In reading The Ring and 
 the Book we are brought into the labora- 
 tory, and are constrained to admire the 
 chemist's skill. 
 
 In the poetry of Wordsworth and of 
 Browning transcendentalism is fre- 
 quently mingled with, rather than fused 
 in, the barest realism. Each poet seems 
 to take a self-conscious pride in his 
 power of drawing gold out of the 
 most refractory ore. Their creation of 
 fiction out of facts is in constant danger 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 of being artificial. It is difficult to 
 recall the tact, directness, and spon- 
 taneity of the past. In style, as in con- 
 ception, we find in both a remarkable 
 inequality. Their inspiration is broken 
 by level reaches of prose. In each poet 
 we recognize the preacher ; the philo- 
 sopher nay, the optimist of his gener- 
 ation. 
 
 But the essential value as well as 
 originality of both poets lie in the fact, 
 that they have revealed ' worlds un- 
 realized ' in which we * move about ' 
 the one, 
 
 " Deep in the general heart of men," 
 
 the other, hidden beneath 
 
 " This multifarious mass of words and deeds," 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND UNIVERSITY 
 
 EDUCATION, - '- " "''- - ''V '" V " 9 
 
 THE POETRY OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 65 
 THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING, - 125 
 
English Literature 
 and University Education. 
 
Rnglish Literature and 
 University Education. 
 
 I HAVE often wondered, if I were to put 
 the question to each member of my class, 
 "Why do you come to study English 
 literature?" and if it were frankly an- 
 swered, what the answers would be. 
 
 I will pre-suppose in all, to begin with, 
 an honest desire to know more of English 
 literature; to understand and appreciate 
 our English authors more fully and deeply; 
 in short, to get culture for its own sake, 
 for the sake of its influence in the 
 growth of their intelligence and taste. 
 But, while admitting this as their main 
 reason, I think I may further assume, in 
 many, a desire for results more immedi- 
 ately tangible and obvious than self-im- 
 
io ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 provement ; and perhaps the most tan- 
 gible and obvious of these at the present 
 day are, the diploma which is gained by 
 the passing of an examination, and the 
 needful equipment for a place in culti- 
 vated society. 
 
 Both these aims are, in their place, 
 legitimate. Examinations are a necessary 
 test of our qualifications for certain posts 
 or professions : the world, for public use 
 at least, requires such a test. It is 
 innocent and even laudable to desire a 
 knowledge of English literature as a social 
 ornament ; still more, to use it as a 
 means of social refinement and eleva- 
 tion. To raise conversation from the 
 gutter of gossip and lead it brightly and 
 naturally to such subjects as imply at 
 least that we have brains and souls, is 
 surely a worthy aim in the study of 
 literature : an aim which women are 
 specially fitted to achieve, and which, 
 with such aid, they some day may 
 achieve. 
 
 These two views of literature, then, 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 1 1 
 
 as a subject of examination and as a 
 social ornament, are unimpeachable, pro- 
 vided that we do not surrender our first 
 position. 
 
 Montesquieu has said : " The first 
 motive which ought to impel us to study 
 is the desire to augment the excellence 
 of our nature and to render an intelligent 
 being yet more intelligent." 
 
 Now, what I wish especially to point 
 out to-day is the possibility of this 
 primary motive, true culture, being over- 
 shadowed by either of the two secondary 
 motives. And I wish also to consider 
 the disastrous results of such a possibility 
 pedantry and dilettantism : results 
 which neither " augment the excellence 
 of our nature " nor " render an intelligent 
 being yet more intelligent/' but reduce 
 both excellence and intelligence to a 
 lower level than before. 
 
 We will look first at the danger of 
 Dilettantism. 
 
 The excellence of English literature 
 as a subject of study exposes it to 
 
1 2 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 abuse. Of all subjects it is the most 
 generally interesting : it touches more 
 nearly than most studies our nature 
 as men and women our every day 
 life and character. This is a reason, 
 and a good reason, for its popularity; 
 but there is a corollary to it, which 
 is also a reason and not so good a 
 one. English literature, it is thought, 
 is an "easy" subject. There is no ne- 
 cessity for an involved train of reason- 
 ing, or for prolonged application, or for 
 a thorough grounding in its rudiments, 
 as there is, say, in mathematics. It is 
 generally understood to be a subject 
 which can be taken at odd times and in 
 small doses. In studying Algebra or 
 Geometry, we cannot begin in the middle 
 of a text-book and read a sentence or two 
 here and a chapter or two there ; for we 
 cannot understand a part without mas- 
 tering all that has gone before. But in 
 Literature, one can understand so much, 
 can get so much benefit without this drud- 
 gery and difficulty, without any regular 
 
UNI VERSITY ED UCA TION. 1 3 
 
 or consecutive training, and really with- 
 out much intellectual strain to speak of. 
 I need not illustrate this point at length, 
 for we are all familiar with this tendency 
 to play at studying, to avoid the diffi- 
 culties of a subject and choose those 
 parts of it which seem easiest and most 
 entertaining. 
 
 And if dilettantism is especially 
 dangerous in such a subject as English 
 literature, it is all the more dangerous in 
 the special subject we are entering upon 
 this session, the literature of our own 
 century. Chaucer's Nonnes Prestes Tale 
 and Spenser's Epithalamium, Hooker's 
 Ecclesiastical Polity and Milton's Comus, 
 are subjects which we naturally find some 
 difficulty in leading up to at a dinner-table. 
 Even Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, 
 or Pope's Rape of the Lock, or Gold- 
 smith's Bee, is a little out of date. 
 But Browning and Tennyson even 
 Shelley, Lamb, and Wordsworth are 
 topics which a moderate amount of tact 
 may use to advantage. 
 
I 4 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. I do not 
 say that this reason has brought an 
 addition to my class at Queen Margaret 
 College this session; far less do I say, 
 that, if it did, the reason would be quite 
 so consciously realised or crudely stated. 
 All that I wish to suggest is, that 
 considering the tone of dillettantism 
 which pervades our social atmosphere it 
 would be strange if Queen Margaret 
 College were alone untouched by it; and 
 that the best way to escape it is not to 
 flatter ourselves in our own security, but 
 to realize our danger. 
 
 I would have hesitated to choose the 
 literature of our own century for the 
 subject of this session's course of lectures, 
 had not many of you, perhaps the 
 majority, attended already the courses on 
 the literature of preceding centuries, and 
 some, the tutorial class in philology and 
 the history of our language. We cannot 
 understand what is, without some under- 
 standing of what was. To take up the 
 literature of our own time alone is, as it 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 15 
 
 were, to take up the third volume of a 
 novel. The story of literature, as of 
 history or of language, is one story ; if 
 we would read it intelligently, we must 
 begin at the beginning. 
 
 Our older literature has one pre- 
 eminent feature as a means of education, 
 in the difficulty we find in reading it. 
 We cannot read it by sentences. No 
 word may be taken for granted in a loose 
 way, as we treat our modern English. 
 All must pass a thorough scrutiny, de- 
 manding close attention and discrimina- 
 tion. The very differences of form, 
 meaning or idiom, reveal their full signi- 
 ficance. It is in such minute study of 
 some classic work, say Chaucer's Canter- 
 bury Tales, where the words have all the 
 freshness of morning flowers with the 
 dew still on them, that we first begin to 
 discover what words really are, and what 
 reading really means. The study of the 
 history of words, and of the mean- 
 ings with which the masters of our 
 literature have charged them, is scholar- 
 
1 6 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 ship ; and it is a study, perhaps equal 
 to the study of those masters' thoughts, 
 certainly inseparable from it in any Uni- 
 versity curriculum. 
 
 In disciplining our minds, in enlarging 
 our sympathies, in educating our taste, 
 and forming our judgment, our older 
 literature is undoubtedly our better tutor. 
 We go back to the past of Chaucer, 
 Spenser, Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, 
 Johnson, not because it is better than the 
 present, but because it is different from 
 the present The change does us good : 
 we brace our minds in their times, 
 much as we brace our bodies on foreign 
 shores. The atmosphere of the past is 
 larger and freer. There is about every 
 present a narrowness, a provincialism, 
 which can be corrected only by a know- 
 ledge of the past. One who has not lived 
 out of his century is like one who has not 
 lived out of his parish. Travel shows us 
 other countries and other nations : in the 
 study of a past literature we travel 
 through time as well as lands. 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 17 
 
 The past gives us also a surer stand- 
 ard of taste and judgment. I do not 
 say that the masters of our older litera- 
 ture are higher than those of our own 
 time, but that the position of these masters 
 is secure. The history of contemporary 
 criticism is full of instances of its falli- 
 bility ; it shows us how difficult a matter 
 assaying is, and how often the most 
 noted assayers of their age have taken 
 gold for tinsel, and tinsel for gold. Time 
 is the best of all critics : in the end, the only 
 infallible critic. And it is among those 
 works of art which have stood the test 
 of time, that we can best refine our taste 
 and form our judgment. The company 
 of the living cannot but be mixed. The 
 noble company of the dead is our only 
 pure aristocracy. In their society we 
 can best acquire a standard by which to 
 estimate the living. 
 
 But to return to the danger of 
 Dilettantism. No proof is needed, 
 that its prevalence affords science a 
 main point of attack on art at the 
 
i8 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 present day. To say that our age 
 is essentially a critical age, is but 
 another way of putting it ; for more than 
 half our criticism is nothing if it is 
 not dilettantism. It has been part 
 of my duty in preparation for this 
 session's course to read many critical 
 magazine articles of recent years, and I 
 am glad to have this opportunity of 
 revenging myself on their writers for 
 the wasted hours I have spent over 
 them. The vast majority might be 
 characterised by the Scottish word 
 " haverin' " that is, writing with 
 little to say, with no point or a 
 point so minute as to be invisible 
 to all but the writer, drawing distinc- 
 tions and comparisons the import- 
 ance of which is in inverse ratio 
 to their subtlety, talking so long round 
 and round about the subject that they 
 rarely reach it at all. The good 
 such articles in general do is, I 
 think, more than balanced by the evil. 
 First, they encourage us to read about 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 19 
 
 literature, rather than to read it at first 
 hand ; and secondly, they give us often 
 a very false notion of literature, as a 
 study much less widely instructive than 
 it really is. Their terminology is so 
 technical and remote from obvious 
 meaning that, if we have independence 
 enough, we often pause to think whether 
 after all it is our dulness or their want 
 of meaning that is to blame for the haze 
 in which they leave us. 
 
 There is another evidence of dilet- 
 tantism besides the darkening of counsel 
 by jargon. It is a significant fact, 
 which booksellers and librarians can 
 attest, that a great writer's biography 
 or his reminiscences is tenfold more 
 popular than his writings ever were. Un- 
 friendly critics of the study of literature 
 call this, love of gossip. One of those 
 used, the other day, the phrase " chatter 
 about Shelley," which we admit to 
 be a fair description of some of the dis- 
 quisitions of which that poet is the 
 subject; and the same critic adds: "A 
 
20 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 good deal of ' literary ' talk now-a-days 
 seems hardly to rise above personal 
 gossip, sometimes personal scandal, 
 about very modern personages indeed." x 
 Now even personal gossip is not the 
 worst form of dilettantism. It is at 
 least human, natural, not artificial 
 as other forms of dillettantism usually 
 are. It has "a certain veracity " under- 
 lying it. It is not so important that we 
 avoid it as that we avoid its becom- 
 ing bad in tone, that is, avoid scandal. 
 The word " gossip " has undergone 
 changes which, like many in our voca- 
 bulary, tell a tale. From meaning, 
 first of all, a godfather or godmother, 
 it came to mean an intimate or a friend ; 
 afterwards it was applied to light familiar 
 talk between intimate friends or about in- 
 timate friends. How it to-day comes to 
 be usually applied to scandal, I will leave 
 you to infer. But the point of this his- 
 
 i Professor Freeman in Language and Literature,. 
 Cont. Review, Hi. 564. 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA T1ON. 21 
 
 tory is, that gossip was not essentially 
 venomous ; it was passing talk and anec- 
 dote about those whom we knew per- 
 sonally, whom we most probably loved 
 and respected : a most natural outcome 
 of our interest in them, discovering subtle 
 traits and, it might be, faults, confirm- 
 ing or correcting our former judg- 
 ments, which, sympathetically under- 
 stood in the light of our friendship, might 
 be misunderstood if heard by others. 
 And so of literary gossip. Those 
 personally familiar with a great author 
 through his writings have a right to 
 the anecdotes which bring the minor 
 traits of his character in its excellence 
 and defect more vividly before them, 
 which help to complete and illustrate 
 their former conceptions of his genius. 
 Yet to show how such " literary " gossip 
 may, far from revealing, altogether hide 
 the author's true personality and great- 
 ness, we have but to mention the 
 greatest British thinker of this century, 
 Thomas Carlyle,^ whose name has been 
 
22 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 bandied about by those who have never 
 thoroughly understood any page he has 
 written, and who seem to be unaware 
 that the subject of their "chatter" is a 
 man whose shoe-strings they are not 
 worthy to unloose. 
 
 One of the main causes to which we 
 owe this unsystematic, superficial play- 
 ing at studying lies at the door not so 
 much of our universities as of our schools, 
 and is the fault not so much of our 
 school teachers as of our parents, es- 
 pecially our mothers. They, unless they 
 are exceptions, and we are not now 
 dealing with exceptions, do not expend 
 very much thought on the subjects to 
 which they set us. In most cases 
 they follow the usual choice of other 
 fathers and mothers; and in this way we 
 all get a little English, a little history, 
 a little geography, a little arithmetic 
 (usually a very little it is the one sub- 
 ject which requires some thinking), 
 and then, as we grow older, a little 
 French or German, a little playing, and 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 23 
 
 a little singing. All these are good. It is 
 important and beneficial in our education 
 that we should know a little of as many 
 things as possible; but it is admittedly as 
 important and beneficial a part of our 
 education that we should know more 
 than a little about something. I do 
 not insist that on some one subject our 
 education should be so full as if we 
 were preparing ourselves to profess it 
 as a calling or business of life ; but it 
 should at least be thorough enough 
 for us to realize the full difficulties 
 and full meaning of the subject the 
 height and breadth and depth of it as a 
 whole. We should be so firmly based in 
 its rudiments at least, that standing on 
 that pedestal we can look out on a 
 scope beyond our reach, [and follow 
 with our sympathy and appreciation, if 
 not more closely with our understanding, 
 those who have travelled further than 
 we. And this intelligent sympathy once 
 gained would not be confined to one 
 study, but would extend to all. 
 
24 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 This phase of education "everything 
 about something" is not enough in- 
 sisted on ; while the other " something 
 about everything " has too much 
 prominence. Our course of study is 
 thus too much an omnium gatherum^ 
 a collection of odds and ends 
 arranged on no rational system. 
 Even good soup cannot be made in this 
 hap-hazard way. Suppose our cooks 
 to put in a little of this thing, and 
 of that, and of that other thing, just in 
 such quantities as came to hand, and 
 for no reason at all, except that ( likely 
 it will do no harm ' ! If we may ride 
 this remote analogy one stage further, 
 our educational soup is too often with- 
 out * stock/ It is, in short, a general sort 
 of soup, no soup in particular. And 
 the result is that our education leaves 
 us unless by some accident of fortune 
 with no individuality, with no special 
 interest in, or hold on, life, because we 
 have no special interest in any branch of 
 life; prepared to see no deep significance 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 25 
 
 in the world around us, as we have 
 caught glimpse of none in our studies ; 
 not necessarily dull, perhaps even clever, 
 but characterless ; members of that large 
 class of which Thackeray in The Neiv- 
 comes has drawn a fairly representative 
 type in Miss Rosey Mackenzie. 
 
 So far of the danger of Dilettantism. 
 Let us look for a moment at the danger 
 of Pedantry. 
 
 ' Education/ in its derivative sense, 
 means a * drawing out,' a 'development/ 
 of our characteristic powers as men and 
 women our capacities of thought and 
 feeling, our intelligence and taste. 
 Examinations, then, as a test of edu- 
 cation, must be a test of these powers, 
 as exercised in the knowledge of the 
 subject in question. Now, it is well 
 known, that examinations, at least as 
 usually conducted, are a better test of 
 memory than of thought and judgment. 
 If the mere passing of an examination 
 paper is our only end and aim, or even 
 
26 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 our chief end and aim, it is not altogether 
 illogical to reason as follows : 
 
 " Why should we take the trouble of 
 thinking and feeling for ourselves at all, 
 why educate our intelligence and taste, 
 when our thinking and feeling are done 
 for us and we can procure intelligence 
 and taste ready-made? Have we not got 
 text-books and histories and Clarendon 
 Press editions, where some diligent 
 plodding and a good memory will serve 
 our purpose, with the additional advan- 
 tage that they do not vex our brains, if 
 we have them ; and if we have not, who is 
 the wiser ? Why take the highroad of 
 education, of c drawing out* our highest 
 powers, when the shortcut of ' cramming 
 in ' the results of others' powers brings us 
 to our goal?" And if that goal be the 
 mere passing of an examination, I can- 
 not say why we should ! 
 
 Those who uphold the present craze 
 for examination and competition in our 
 studies tell us that these stimulate our 
 application and accuracy. This may be 
 
UNI VERSITY ED UCA TION. 27 
 
 true ; and yet neither may be of much 
 service in education, if our application be 
 misapplied and our accuracy relate to 
 unessential matters. Besides, examination 
 and competition stimulate those qualities 
 in students whose memory and pertinacity 
 are already sufficiently developed, while 
 they dissatisfy those whose intelligence 
 and taste lead them to seek in education 
 a higher aim. Competition the in- 
 satiable ambition to surpass one's neigh- 
 bour rather than oneself is perhaps 
 the worst enemy true education has. 
 Its fruits are, in character vain-glory, 
 and in intellect pedantry. 
 
 But the dangers of examinations are 
 so trite a subject that we need do 
 no more than refer to them. It is 
 enough to indicate, in leaving dilet- 
 tantism and pedantry, that each is what 
 Carlyle would have called ' a missing of 
 the point/ 
 
 It is not only that dilettantism and 
 pedantry do no good. They do positive 
 harm and that, not only to our intellect, 
 
28 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 but to our character. Like other kinds 
 of idolatry, that is, setting up dead 
 things and worshipping them as if they 
 were living things, putting the letter in 
 place of the spirit they are forms of 
 deception ; and intellectual deception is 
 closely allied to moral dishonesty. Those 
 masquerades of true culture are in- 
 humane, or inhuman, to use the older 
 form of the word when neither the 
 meaning nor the spelling was differen- 
 tiated. The Humanities or Humanity 
 used to be the title applied to cul- 
 ture in Latin, when Latin was the 
 language of the literature of Europe, 
 before our nations had evolved each a 
 literary language of its own. Now that 
 we have a literature and language of our 
 own, it would be well that the word were 
 kept if only to remind us that education 
 is not a substitute for our humanity, but 
 a development of it. The seeds which 
 true culture fosters never grow to bloom 
 or fruit in the garden of either dilettante 
 or pedant, for love is not there to tend 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 29 
 
 them, nor modesty and sincerity to 
 prune their branches. 
 
 So far of the dangers. Is it possible 
 to avoid them ? Can literature be made 
 a fit subject of University education? 
 Can its study be undertaken so as to 
 become the training of our judgment, in- 
 telligence and taste? 
 
 Most of you are aware that at 
 present the most vexed question in 
 education I should perhaps say, Eng- 
 lish University education turns on 
 the question whether English Literature 
 is or is not to form, along with Classical 
 Literature, a part of the University curri- 
 culum and a subject of examination for 
 University degrees. Professor Freeman 
 has written an article in last month's 
 Contemporary Review? in which he gives 
 an emphatic answer to this question in 
 which he asserts that English Literature 
 is not a subject for University training 
 or examination, and gives his reasons 
 
 i Cont. Review, October, 1887. 
 
30 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 for this assertion. As it was the read- 
 ing of that article which first suggested 
 to me the train of thought underlying 
 my remarks to-day, allow me to say a 
 word or two about it. 
 
 Professor Freeman's article specially 
 relates to the appointment by himself 
 and others, a year or so ago, not of a 
 Professor of Literature, as one would have 
 expected, but of a Professor of Semi- 
 Saxon, to a Chair of English Language 
 and Literature recently founded at 
 Oxford ; in spite of the fact, that there 
 were already in the University one 
 Professor of Comparative Philology, an- 
 other of Sanscrit, and another of Anglo- 
 Saxon. It is not, however, to the policy 
 of this appointment that I wish to draw 
 your attention, but rather to the lines of 
 argument on which the writer bases his 
 assertion that Language is a fit subject 
 of University training, and that Litera- 
 ture is not. 
 
 His argument may be epitomised as 
 follows : 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 3 1 
 
 There is at present in the criticism 
 of English literature and in the affect- 
 ing of it as a study, a shallow unsys- 
 tematic dilettantism, the only outcome 
 of which is the expression of light and 
 capricious opinions regarding one author 
 as against another. For this reason, 
 English literature is not a subject for 
 scholastic examination. It is essentially 
 a mere matter of individual taste, where 
 there are next to no facts to go upon ; 
 where, therefore, it is not 'possible to 
 say of two answers to a question that 
 one is right and the other is wrong. 1 
 Philology, on the other hand, is all facts ; 
 it is a science, and is therefore eminently 
 suitable for purposes of examination, for 
 'if the examined knows the facts of the 
 matter in hand, it ought not to make 
 the difference of a line either way 
 whether his mere taste, his mere opinion, 
 agrees with that of the Examiner or 
 not/ 1 Our alternative lies between a 
 
 i Cont. Review, lii. 563. 
 
32 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 systematic science and a loose dilettan- 
 tism. We must choose, in short, between 
 philology, the history and study of words, 
 and mere aesthetical criticism in which 
 one man's opinion is just as good as 
 another's. Can there be any doubt, 
 therefore, as to which is to be chosen ; 
 that philology is the only interpretation 
 we can give to literature, if it is to be a 
 subject of University training and of 
 examination for degrees ? 
 
 The wise learn more from the criti- 
 cism of enemies than from the flattery of 
 friends. We have had our attention 
 directed to some dangers affecting our 
 study of literature by Professor Free- 
 man's criticism. But we may now be 
 allowed to offer a word or two in its 
 defence. You will have observed, our 
 critic tells us that the perils to which we 
 are exposed are not only possible but 
 inevitable, and that English Literature 
 can never be a worthy subject of Uni- 
 versity study. 
 
 Let us look at this position. And 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 33 
 
 first we may note, he boldly assumes 
 that in matters of taste one man's opinion 
 is as good as another's. 
 
 To support this view the critic takes 
 an example, not from our older classical 
 writers, the judgment on whom has 
 been by a long consensus confirmed, 
 but from a nineteenth century, almost 
 contemporary writer, whose rank time 
 has not yet definitely fixed. " For 
 instance," he says, 1 " I delight in the 
 writings of Lord Macaulay, prose and 
 verse ; I believe it is now thought more 
 * literary ' to call them ' pinchbeck J or 
 some such uncivil name. But I claim 
 no right to pluck the man who calls 
 them 'pinchbeck/ and I deny that he 
 has any right to pluck me. My taste 
 leads me to prefer verse which I can 
 scan and of which I can follow the 
 sense ; it is, I know, more * literary ' to 
 delight in verse of which the metre and 
 the meaning are, to say the least, care- 
 
 i Cont. Review, lii. 563. 
 
34 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 fully hidden," and so on. It does not 
 seem to occur to Professor Freeman 
 that there may be a higher and a 
 lower, a true and a false standard of 
 taste ; that education is possible as well 
 in taste as in facts ; that perhaps even 
 Professor Freeman's own taste might be 
 'educated'; and that if he had had the 
 advantage in his University course of 
 what he contemns as a 'literary 1 train- 
 ing, he might now be able to scan some 
 verses he at present fails to scan, and to 
 follow the sense of writing of which at 
 present the meaning is, from him, care- 
 fully hidden. 
 
 His position is so anomalous that it is 
 difficult to attack it seriously. The false 
 axiom that one man's taste is as good as 
 another's would be paralleled only by the 
 statement that one man's knowledge of 
 a scientific fact is as good as another's. 
 If Professor Freeman had taken for his 
 example an older classic such as Spenser 
 or Shakspeare, his error would have 
 been more obvious. Within certain very 
 
UNI VERSITY ED UCA TION. 35 
 
 well defined limits we may each of 
 course have a certain individual bias 
 corresponding to his individual character- 
 istics, such as one to simplicity, another 
 to grandeur one to grace, another to 
 strength ; but this is not the point at 
 issue. For we at the same time admit 
 an authority, a consensus in which they 
 separately or together tend to meet. 
 His dogmatic assumption can be at 
 once disproved by a reductio ad ab- 
 surdum; for if there be not a lower 
 and a higher standard of taste, where 
 is the essential difference between a 
 boor and a gentleman, between ugli- 
 ness and grace, between the ideals of 
 savagery and those of civilization ? 
 
 Is it not possible that the prevalence 
 of dilettantism which Professor Free- 
 man so severely criticises, with its 
 attendant fallacy of an equality of 
 tastes, is largely due to the very fact 
 that he will not allow the admittance of 
 English literature to the Universities 
 will not allow it the serious study and 
 
36 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 the definite authoritative place which are 
 its due ? 
 
 In one page he says, 1 " One might 
 perhaps think that ' literature ' of all 
 subjects might dispense with any kind 
 of teaching, that in matters of pure taste 
 each man might be his own tutor, his 
 own professor" ; and in another page he 
 cavils at the loose individual criticism 
 of our magazine articles. It seems never 
 to occur to him that the two things may 
 be connected as cause and effect ; that 
 the very men who write those articles 
 are graduates of his University, where 
 in 'literature' they have had to be 
 ' their own tutors, their own professors ' 
 for want of better ; that if science or 
 history were there as neglected as 
 English literature is, we should probably 
 have the same sort of unsystematic 
 unauthoritative articles on them ; and 
 that in matters not only of taste but of 
 
 Cont. Review, Hi. 566. 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 37 
 
 fact, one man's opinion would be thought 
 as good as another's. 
 
 Even if a study of ' literature' were 
 merely a study of taste, of style, it were 
 unfortunate it should be neglected. It 
 is more ; but Professor Freeman does not 
 think so. It is his argument that, if we 
 do not accept the study of literature as a 
 mere phase of philology, there is only 
 one alternative, to make it a mere matter 
 of taste : that there is nothing in literature 
 but the study of words and the study of 
 arranging words. 
 
 There is not a hint from first line 
 to last, that our ' literature/ as under- 
 stood by its advocates, contains such a 
 thing as thought ; far less, that the 
 development of our literature is but 
 another name for the development of 
 its noblest and purest forms, as expressed 
 through the greatest and the wisest of our 
 thinkers. Is Shakspeare a mere phrase- 
 maker, and Bacon a monger of words ? 
 Is Wordsworth but a stylist, and Sartor 
 Resartus&n exampleof German-English? 
 
38 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 To this Professor Freeman would doubt- 
 less answer that 'literature 1 is but the 
 form, and that its matter belongs to the 
 sciences of history and philosophy. But 
 happily such a dissection is not in the 
 power of any scientist. History and 
 philosophy must be included in any 
 worthy study of literature, the matter of 
 which is as inseparable from its form 
 as the thought in painting is from line 
 and colour. It is this crowning integrity 
 of literature which gives to art the 
 immortality that science lacks, which 
 justifies Wordsworth's description of it 
 as "the breath and finer spirit of all 
 knowledge, the impassioned expression 
 which is in the countenance of all 
 science." 1 
 
 Professor Freeman's position is more 
 unfair 2 than specious. " Beowulf and 
 Csedmon are, it seems, not 'literature/ 
 
 1 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 
 
 2 I mean unfair to any sensible advocate of English 
 Literature as a subject of University study. 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 39 
 
 Milton's Paradise Lost is confessedly 
 c literature'; to study it is a 'literary' 
 business. It would seem to be ruled 
 that, if we bring in any reference to 
 Caedmon, the whole business ceases to 
 be 'literary'; it becomes the forbidden 
 study of 'language.'" This maybe the 
 opinion of Professor Freeman's ' man of 
 straw ' : it is not the opinion of any pro- 
 fessor of literature with whom I am 
 acquainted. They would assert as con- 
 fidently as he, that 1 a thorough com- 
 parison of certain poems of Caedmon 
 and Milton, and of their relations to one 
 another, would be a ' literary ' study of 
 a high kind ; they would with him 
 include Virgil also in the comparison, 
 perhaps even Avitus, and they would 
 
 i Cont. Revieiv, lii. 561. "For the matter of certain 
 poems of Avitus, of Csedmon, and of Milton, has 
 much in common. A thorough comparison of the 
 three, and of their relations to one another, would be, 
 one might think, a * literary ' study of the highest 
 kind." 
 
40 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 assuredly add to his list the Bible and 
 Dante. 
 
 Again, " The only things that may 
 not be coupled with * literature ' are, 
 strangely as it seems to some of us, the 
 historical study of the language in which 
 the books taken in hand are written, the 
 comparative study of the languages 
 which are akin to it, and the study of 
 the earliest specimens of the literature 
 of the language itself." 1 This position 
 will seem as strange to the true 
 student of literature as it does to 
 Professor Freeman. And even if this be 
 the view taken by one or two irresponsible 
 litterateurs, is the statement to the pur- 
 pose ? For is not the position which 
 Professor Freeman really advocates 
 somewhat like this? The only things 
 that may be understood as ' liter- 
 ature ' are ' the historical study of the 
 language in which the books taken 
 in hand are written, the comparative 
 
 i Cont. Review, lii. 560-561. 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 41 
 
 study of the languages which are akin to 
 it, and the study of the earliest speci- 
 mens of the literature of the language 
 itself/ 
 
 Professor Freeman sprinkles his argu- 
 ment with irrelevant truisms which 
 any advocate of Literature as a Univer- 
 sity study will freely endorse. That the 
 study of Language should be conjoined 
 with that of Literature, 1 and that a 
 survey of Classical and Mediaeval, might 
 profitably serve as an introduction to 
 Modern Literature in a University 
 course, I have never heard professors of 
 Literature dispute. Something may 
 even be said for the assertion as regards 
 French, " that it is the business of an 
 
 1 It is worth remarking that, while the full under- 
 standing of our great, especially of our early, authors 
 involves a more or less minute appreciation of their 
 language, familiarity with the science of words by no 
 means implies the power to use them artistically. 
 The style of the majority of our philologists is, even 
 when technically grammatical, enough to establish 
 this fact. 
 
 C 
 
42 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 University to teach men the scholarly 
 knowledge of languages, that it is not 
 its business to teach men their practical 
 mastery," 1 were not this and other pas- 
 sages made to imply that the * practical 
 mastery' of his own language should 
 be held of no account in a student's Uni- 
 versity standing. It has never been 
 found inadvisable in the studies of Latin 
 and Greek to teach the writing of Latin 
 and Greek prose. 2 
 
 In speaking of the dangers of dilettan- 
 tism and pedantry, I havealready endorsed 
 much of the criticism which Professor 
 Freeman directs in his article against the 
 study of Literature. Where we differ is 
 
 1 Cont. Review, Hi. 553. 
 
 2 Cont. Review -, lii. 562. "Now I believe that lam 
 right in saying that all the subjects of examination 
 now in use in Oxford, from any survivals that may 
 still abide of the old Litera Humaniores to the last 
 and most * specialised ' thing in natural science, 
 agree in this, that all deal with facts, that in all it is 
 possible to say of two answers to a question that one 
 is right and the other is wrong. As long as this can 
 be done, the subject is a possible one for examination." 
 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 43 
 
 in our conclusions. To him the teaching 
 of English literature in Universities 
 seems impossible for three reasons: that 
 it cannot be taught, that it cannot be 
 examined upon, and that it cannot be 
 * crammed.' 
 
 "All things cannot be taught ; facts may 
 be taught ; but surely the delicacies and 
 elegances of literature cannot be driven 
 into any man : he must learn to appreciate 
 them for himself." 1 True : they cannot 
 be ' driven into ' any one ; and if driving 
 things into students is the definition of 
 ' teaching ' in our Universities, his con- 
 clusion is irrefutable. Had he used the 
 word * educate/ or ' teach/ the premiss 
 would have been fair, and the conclusion 
 refuted. It is evident that no student 
 can appreciate a criticism of poetry 
 or a principle of literary art by simply 
 repeating it. It is the raison d'etre of 
 any great work of art that it is the ex- 
 pression of something that cannot be 
 
 i Cont. Review, Hi. 566. 
 
44 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 translated, far less, * driven into' any man. 
 But the aim of University education is 
 not to foster a state of passive recep- 
 tivity, nor are its main appeals to mere 
 memory the supreme mental power of 
 ' dry-as-dusts.' 
 
 It is a truism that the teacher " cannot 
 hammer into a man so much as an ear 
 for metre and rhythm ; still less can he 
 hammer into him the thousand minute 
 gifts, the endless powers of appreciation, 
 which go to make the literary student 
 in any sense worthy of the name." x Yet, 
 impossible as it is to give any one an ear 
 for harmony, it is possible to educate an 
 ear for harmony when it exists. The 
 teacher can at least examine and illus- 
 trate for the student the principles of 
 harmony, and, by sounding for him 
 chords that are admittedly harmonious, 
 aid and guide the development of his 
 natural gift In short, education and I 
 trust to speak for education in history as 
 
 * Cont. Review, lii. 566. 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 45 
 
 well as literature is not a matter either 
 of " driving in " or of " hammering in." It 
 is a much slower and subtler task, and 
 demands more co-operation on the part of 
 the student, more activity of various intel- 
 lectual powers. It is obvious that the 
 student " must learn to appreciate the 
 delicacies and elegances of literature 
 for himself" as well as more essential 
 qualities which Professor Freeman 
 naturally ignores ; but it is not less 
 obvious, if education is more than a 
 name in our Universities, that the 
 teacher must also guide and train him 
 in * learning to appreciate them for him- 
 self/ 
 
 It is no argument against education in 
 "literature," that the professor of Litera- 
 ture often fails. His function is that 
 of the critic and instructor, to educate 
 what powers he finds in the student ; not 
 that of the Creator, to give him powers. 
 And as a professor of History may 
 occasionally meet with a student whose 
 memory is paralysed, a professor of 
 
46 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 Literature may find a student's intelli- 
 gence and taste so long deadened by 
 mutilation, neglect, or bad example, as 
 to be hopelessly barren for culture. 
 
 I am confident that literature can be 
 made in our Universities a subject, not 
 only of Education but of Examination. 
 I maintain that no competent teacher or 
 examiner ever has much difficulty, even 
 in that department of the study which 
 Professor Freeman superciliously con- 
 temns, aesthetical criticism, in detecting 
 in essays and in written and oral exam- 
 ination the dictated from the original, the 
 false from the true. An examiner in any 
 subject so examines a student as to test, 
 not only his mnemonical attainments, 
 but his qualities of thought and power in 
 dealing with it. 
 
 The assertion that in ' literature ' the 
 temptation to examine unfairly x is 
 greater than in history or in philosophy is 
 courageously absurd ; but it is explained 
 
 * Cont. Revieiv, lii. 563, 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 47 
 
 by the narrow definition and shallow 
 conception of literature as " mere writing, 
 mere style, mere fancy, altogether cut 
 off from the facts of language." * From 
 this contracted view alone we can 
 appreciate the analogy which follows. 
 " An examination," Mr. Freeman says, 
 " in contemporary politics, in which the 
 Home Ruler should be set to examine 
 the Unionist and the Unionist the 
 Home Ruler, would be an easy business 
 by the side of it : " a an analogy which 
 seems more fitted to an examination in 
 history. Surely there may be differ- 
 ences of opinion between examiner and 
 examined without prejudice to either. 3 
 
 1 Cont. Review, lii. 564. 
 
 2 Conf. Review, lii. 563. 
 
 3 Professor Freeman admits this. Cont. Review, lii. 
 563. "Moreover the study of facts, the examination in 
 facts, does not shut out differences of opinion. That 
 is, two scholars may, from the same facts, make dif- 
 ferent inferences, without either having any right to 
 say that the other is wrong. And the knowledge of 
 such differences of opinion about the facts should be 
 part of the student's knowledge of the facts them- 
 
48 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 We must suppose enough magnanimity 
 in the examiner, whether in literature, 
 history or philosophy, to give due value 
 to a student's conclusions at variance 
 with his own. 
 
 The ' facts' with which 'literature' 
 deals are far broader and more extensive 
 than can be grasped or imagined by one 
 who resolutely ignores thought as its 
 master element. What can this critic 
 say of the development of the Drama, of 
 the history of the Sonnet, of the origins 
 of Chaucer's and Shakespeare's plots, 
 or of the sesthetical theories of Plato, Aris- 
 totle, Quintilian, Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, 
 Wordsworth, and Ruskin ? The elements 
 of greatness and defect in the works of 
 Spenser or Burns are as much facts as 
 those in the careers of Cromwell or 
 Chatham. ' Mere opinion ' has no wider 
 
 Delves." Are we to conclude that Professor Freeman 
 holds a theory of the equality of * inferences ' analo- 
 gous to his theory of the equality of tastes, and that 
 he would set the same value on the inference of a 
 scholar as on the inference of an ignoramus ? 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 49 
 
 range in dealing with the former than 
 with the latter, and at least as much 
 intellectual power is necessary to their 
 discrimination. The analysis of the 
 qualities of truth and imagination dis- 
 played in Paradise Lost is an educa- 
 tion more cultivating in its influence 
 on the student than the analysis of the 
 facts which antiquarian ingenuity is con- 
 tent to discover in the De Origine Mundi 
 of Avitus. 
 
 Professor Freeman's last refuge is with 
 the ' crammer/ The study of literature 
 in our Universities does not suit the 
 * crammer.' He would spoil it as a true 
 study. One naturally asks : What true 
 study which he touches does he not spoil ? 
 Professor Freeman fails to recognise that 
 the ' crammer ' will touch it only if he 
 finds it profitable for him to do so, and 
 that the examiner in literature has it in 
 his power, has it for his duty, to make it 
 unprofitable for him. 1 It is the pre-eminent 
 
 1 Cont. Review, lii. 566, 567. "The art of 
 
50 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 and prerogative excellence of ' literature' 
 as a subject of proper education and 
 proper examination, that its study is 
 one in which the * crammer' is useless, 
 nay, in which ' cramming ' is impossible. 
 No one imagines "that there will be a rush 
 of devoted students of English literature, 
 disinterested admirers of great poets and 
 great orators, with their whole works at 
 their ringers' ends," 1 either at Oxford 
 University or at Queen Margaret College; 
 but I am confident that it is as possibie 
 to separate these students from the rest, 
 and to give their powers and application 
 of their powers their due recognition, as it 
 is to discriminate between the real and 
 
 crammer has taken many wonderful forms already ; 
 it will surely be its lowest or highest form of all, if 
 to the endless forms of * tips ' on all matters, new 
 and old, we add the last device of all in the shape of 
 * tips' on 'the Harriet problem.'" This apotheosis is 
 only possible if the examiners by setting such questions 
 make such ' tips ' saleable. 
 
 1 Cont. Revieiv, Hi., 566. 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 51 
 
 the perfunctory students of history or of 
 philosophy. No worthy teaching is an 
 easy matter ; and one of the true 
 teacher's hardest tasks is to keep at 
 their due distance " mere mechanicals." 
 The ' crammer ' will attempt to in- 
 vade the study of literature as he has 
 " rushed in " upon other studies. But 
 that we should therefore exclude the 
 most widely educative, refining, and use- 
 ful of all our studies from our Universities, 
 is the counsel of despair. Professor Free- 
 man gives that counsel with equanimity ; 
 it would almost seem, with satisfaction. 
 We cannot find in it any source of 
 satisfaction ; we cannot with equanimity 
 see our seats of learned culture become 
 the mills of a learned pedantry ; for 
 we believe that when our Universities 
 confess their inability to educate their 
 students in subjects that cannot be 
 4 crammed,' they will have failed to per- 
 form their proper function and will have 
 forfeited their birth-right to the confi- 
 dence of the nation. 
 
52 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 I have occupied so much of your 
 time in this discussion with a special 
 purpose. For we are contending, not 
 with an eccentrically dogmatic indi- 
 vidual, but with a general tendency 
 throughout education at the present 
 time, pervading our Schools and 
 School Boards as well as our Universi- 
 ties. The views which Professor Free- 
 man assumes so confidently and ex- 
 presses so explicitly in his article are 
 the views which such men as Carlyle and 
 Ruskin and Arnold have spent their 
 lives in refuting the views of those who 
 would give us mere knowledge of facts 
 instead of education, who would cover 
 us with dry twigs instead of nourishing 
 us as a living tree, who when we ask for 
 bread give us a stone. 
 
 Knowledge of facts, nay, even know- 
 ledge of isolated scientific laws, is not an 
 end : it is a worthy, an indispensable 
 means. But, apart from our intelligence 
 and sympathies, from our life and charac- 
 ter, from our humanity, it is superficial, 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 53 
 
 skin-deep ; mechanical, not organic. It is 
 not what we know, or how much we know, 
 but how we know, how we have di- 
 gested and assimilated our knowledge 
 not what facts we have accumulated, 
 but what they have taught us, what 
 powers they have developed in us that 
 distinguishes an ennobling education 
 from a learned ignorance. 
 
 Utilitarianism is certainly not yet 
 the sole aim of University training. 
 It is not the function of an ' Arts ' 
 course to fit men for special branches 
 of practical life. 1 Yet there is surely a 
 noble, as well as an ignoble utilitarianism. 
 
 The question of education I mean, 
 of course, culture, apart from technical 
 or professional equipment is as much 
 a question of character as of mere 
 intellect : true education is the organic 
 
 * " The University has nothing to do with the 
 diplomatic service or with any service ; it has, at the 
 stage marked by its Arts examination, nothing to do 
 with any profession or calling of any kind. " Cont. 
 Review ', lii. 559. 
 
54 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 growth of the whole, not the mechanical 
 exercise of a part. A common answer, 
 I believe, among young ladies, when 
 asked why they do not attend Queen 
 Margaret College, is that they are 
 ' not clever enough ' : the question is 
 rather as to their tastes and sympathies. 
 If these are in the right place, "brains 
 will be provided." The difference be- 
 tween the cultured and the vulgar is not 
 so much a difference in their quantity as 
 in their quality. It is not in the amount, 
 but in its direction, its attitude to such 
 interests as our College offers, in short, 
 it is in character where the fault lies. 
 
 If there has been any unity of design 
 in the remarks I have offered you to-day, 
 it is to this conclusion they have been 
 tending. See that the attitude to study 
 be right, 
 
 " And it must follow, as the night the day, 
 Thou canst not then be false to any " study. 
 
 What that attitude is not, you will have 
 gathered from what I have already said. 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 5 5 
 
 It is impossible for me now to do more 
 than hint at what it is. In closing, I 
 may indicate two qualities, characteristic 
 of the true student of literature a love 
 of the subject, and a love of truth : on 
 the one hand, reverence, on the other, 
 open-mindedness. 
 
 " One grand, invaluable secret there 
 is," says Carlyle, 1 "which includes all 
 the rest, and, what is comfortable, lies 
 clearly in every man's power: To 
 have an open loving heart, and what 
 folloivs from the possession of such. 
 Truly, it has been said, emphatically 
 in these days ought it to be repeated : 
 A loving Heart is the beginning of all 
 Knowledge. This it is that opens the 
 whole mind, quickens every faculty 
 of the intellect to do its fit work, that 
 of knowing. . . . Hereby, indeed, 
 is the whole man made a living mirror, 
 wherein the wonders of this ever-won- 
 derful Universe are in their true light 
 
 i Miscellaneous Essays Biography. 
 
56 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 represented, and reflected back on us. It 
 has been said, 'the heart sees farther 
 than the head:' but, indeed, without the 
 seeing heart, there is no true seeing for 
 the head so much as possible ; all is 
 mere over-sight^ hallucination and vain 
 superficial phantasmagoria, which can 
 permanently profit no one." 
 Wordsworth's assertion, 
 
 " We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love," 
 
 applies to study as to the rest of life. 
 If we rise from the reading of a great 
 book with a due appreciation of its 
 greatness, we have added to the chords 
 of life and found one of the very best 
 reasons for thinking it worth living : we 
 have made a good beginning in our edu- 
 cation, for system and application are 
 obedient slaves of love. It has been said, 
 * It is the sign of a mediocre mind to 
 praise moderately. 1 Those who always 
 think the last book they have read the 
 best book they have ever read, are often 
 laughed at : their enthusiasm, if crude, 
 
 
UNIVERSITY ED UCA TION. 57 
 
 is hopeful. It may show immaturity, 
 want of judgment and balance ; but it is 
 a far stage in advance of those who iden- 
 tify criticism with faultfinding, or fancy 
 they have understood Shakspeare by 
 turning him into an exercise on Eliza- 
 bethan English. 
 
 And this attitude of reverence carries 
 with it the reflex virtue of modesty, 
 which distinguishes the true student from 
 the dilettante and the pedant. The 
 feeling of self-abasement may come 
 upon us so forcibly as to be for the time 
 enervating. One rises from catching a 
 glimpse of the greatness of Milton or 
 Wordsworth with a sense of mingled 
 awe and shame. * If such beings walk 
 the earth, what the use of us worms 
 crawling!' But this depression need not 
 endure. Our natural buoyancy asserts 
 itself ; and the memory of the mountain 
 tops re-invigorates the inhabitants of the 
 plains. 
 
 Open-mindednesss, the other charac- 
 teristic we have chosen of the true atti- 
 D 
 
$8 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND 
 
 tude of study, is but a corollary of the 
 former. The reason why so few under- 
 stand a great author is not want of 
 brains, but narrowness of sympathies. 
 The saddest sign of our times, the 
 most hopeless of progress among those 
 who are otherwise good and honest, is 
 their frequent weariness or terror of 
 thinking ; as if our intelligence were the 
 one among all the talents God has given 
 us, to be hid away in a napkin and 
 never put to usury ; as if the love of 
 truth were a prompting of the devil, and 
 the noblest way to worship the great 
 Intelligence were to worship our own 
 prejudices. 1 
 
 i " But so it is, the name of the light of nature is 
 made hateful with men; the 'star of reason and 
 learning,' and all other such like helps, beginneth no 
 otherwise to be thought of than if it were an unlucky 
 comet ; or as if God had so accursed it, that it should 
 never shine or give light in things concerning our duty 
 any way towards Him, but be esteemed as that star 
 in the Revelation called Wormwood, which being 
 fallen from heaven, maketh rivers and waters in which 
 it falleth so bitter, that men tasting them die thereof." 
 Ecclesiastical Polity \ book iii., chap. 8. 
 
UNI VERSITY ED UCA TION. 59 
 
 We cannot do both; yet many try. 
 How common a practice, to compro- 
 mise matters by thinking with a side 
 of our mind and never letting the one 
 half know what the other is doing. 
 Illustrations readily come to each 
 of us of this dualism, this playing at 
 blindman's buff inside our brains. Is 
 not education, that is, true culture, but 
 the solving of this dualism being 
 honest with ourselves, taking off the 
 bandage and boldly using our eyes ? 
 
 " There is a Wallachian legend," says 
 Mr. Lowell, 1 "which, like most of the 
 figments of popular fancy, has a moral 
 in it. One Bakdla, a good-for-nothing 
 kind of fellow in his way, having had the 
 luck to offer a sacrifice especially well 
 pleasing to God, is taken up into heaven. 
 He finds the Almighty sitting in some- 
 thing like the best room of a Wallachian 
 peasant's cottage there is always a 
 profound pathos in the homeliness of the 
 
 * Democracy, and other Essays, p. 116. 
 
60 ENGLISH LITER A TURE AND 
 
 popular imagination, forced, like the 
 princess in the fairy tale, to weave its 
 semblance of gold tissue out of straw. 
 On being asked what reward he desires 
 for the good service he has done, Bakala, 
 who had always passionately longed to 
 be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half 
 worn-out one lying among some rubbish 
 in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that 
 it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, 
 with a smile of pity at the meanness of 
 his choice, grants him his boon, and 
 Bakala goes back to earth delighted with 
 his prize. With an infinite possibility 
 within his reach, with the choice of 
 wisdom, of power, of beauty at his 
 tongue's end, he asked according to his 
 kind, and his sordid wish is answered 
 with a gift as sordid." 
 
 Britain has crowned the great 
 names which form the subject of this 
 session's course, has nominally crowned 
 them as the source of wisdom, power, 
 and beauty ; but in noisy, bustling, self- 
 
UNIVERSITY EDUCA TION. 61 
 
 assertive times, it is hard to hear them 
 above the screeching of bagpipes. 
 
 '* There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins ; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. " 
 
 I might apologise, for the warnings 
 I have given you to-day, by saying 
 that it is better we should criticise 
 ourselves within our College, than that 
 our enemies should criticise us from 
 without. But I am sure no apology is 
 needed, for I fear I have offended none. 
 If there be anyone present who might 
 profit by either of the cautions I have 
 given, she will probably have passed it 
 to her neighbour. 
 
Wordsworth. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 65 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Mendelssohn, being asked the meaning 
 of one of his Lieder ohne Worte, played 
 it, and said, " That is what I mean." 
 
 Whether conscious interpretations of 
 art are more often useful than perni- 
 cious, it is important that we bear in 
 mind their limitations. The duty of the 
 expositor is to introduce us to the poet 
 and then withdraw. 
 
 Poetry is emotion inspired : philosophy 
 is a system. The poet has no more need 
 of reasoning to plead for his verse than 
 a friend of arguments to establish his 
 character. In either case the truth is 
 living. It cannot be explained. Its 
 power is its proof. The interpreter can 
 
66 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 bring us to a point of view from which 
 to look at it : the susceptibility must be 
 our own. 
 
 Wordsworth has suffered more than 
 most poets from a translation of his 
 poetry into philosophy ; but the fault is 
 largely Wordsworth's. His poetry all 
 clusters round a few leading thoughts. 
 The philosophic reader therefore sees in 
 it the careful elaboration of a system, 
 rather than the emotional expression of 
 a great character. 
 
 Again, owing perhaps to this pre- 
 ponderance of thought, perhaps more to 
 his solitariness and independence of cri- 
 ticism, Wordsworth was a conspicuously 
 fallible judge of his own work. He con- 
 tinually wrote in verse what would have 
 been better expressed in prose. There 
 is much in his poems, especially in his 
 longer poems, that is simply philosophy 
 in more or less effective rhythm 
 thought which has not been fused in the 
 alembic. This defect has the same root 
 as the excellence which gives Words- 
 
WORDSWORTH. 67 
 
 worth's poetry its individuality. The 
 essential quality in Wordsworth's poetry 
 is reflection. In his Preface of 1800, 
 which was a defence of his own poetry 
 an exposition of his theory of poetry, 
 the poet describes this quality. Of his 
 own poems he says : " Each of them has 
 a worthy purpose. Not that I always 
 began to write with a distinct purpose 
 formally conceived, but habits of medi- 
 tation have, I trust, so prompted and 
 regulated my feelings, that my descrip- 
 tions of such objects as strongly excite 
 those feelings will be found to carry 
 along with them a purpose. If this 
 opinion be erroneous, I can have little 
 right to the name of a Poet. For all 
 good poetry is the spontaneous overflow 
 of powerful feelings : and though this be 
 true, Poems to which any value can be 
 attached were never produced on any 
 variety of subjects but by a man who, 
 being possessed of more than usual 
 organic sensibility, had also thought 
 long and deeply." 
 
68 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 It is Wordsworth's excellence that his 
 best poetry is the spontaneous overflow 
 of the powerful feelings of one who has 
 thought long and deeply : it is the de- 
 fect of many of his poems that this 
 spontaneity of life is absent and the 
 thought left cold. 
 
 With this caveat, let us first look at 
 the thought underlying and modifying 
 his inspiration. Reduced to didactic 
 prose, his main "purpose" may be shortly 
 summarised : Between man and Nature 
 there is, or should be, an intimate com- 
 munion. Nature is man's heaven-sent 
 surrounding, in whose silent influences 
 he finds the truest development of emo- 
 tion, thought, and character. We are 
 born to love her. The child and mother- 
 Earth are foreordained for each other ; 
 but we become part of the world almost 
 before we have inhaled our first uncon- 
 scious breath of her generous power 
 and joy. And what would have become 
 in the reflection of after years the inspir- 
 ing and guiding memory of our lives, 
 
 
WORDSWORTH. 69 
 
 becomes a void. The close artificiality 
 of over-civilization breeds meanness, 
 selfish cares, and transitory joys. 
 
 "The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not." 
 
 Nature is no mere inert accumulation 
 of matter without meaning, but is the 
 complement of man. Her infinite forms, 
 her commonest phenomena of changing 
 beauty or still grandeur speak not only 
 to man's senses, but to his soul. The 
 imagination, if duly fostered by a " wise 
 passiveness," may read the "open secret " 
 of earth, air, and sky. From the first 
 indefinite and subtle influence, as that 
 of a mother's lullaby, to the more ex- 
 plicit and reflective influence of after 
 years, Nature is there to mould the char- 
 
70 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 acter of man in a life of deep human 
 sympathy and " vital joy." 
 
 With such a text, it is not strange that 
 his singing robes should often hang too 
 loosely round the poet, and reveal the 
 preacher. It is still less strange that 
 the interpreter should find in the poet 
 who sings 
 
 " On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," 
 
 the founder of a philosophy, or the 
 prophet of a natural religion. 
 
 It will be seen how Wordsworth 
 differs from previous poets of Nature. 
 It is not that he excludes the views of 
 those before him, but that he goes be- 
 yond them. Chaucer's joys of sense in 
 nature Shakspeare's analogies of fancy 
 and imagination between human and 
 outward nature Thomson's deduction 
 of the existence of a Divine intelli- 
 gence from the laws and beauties 
 of natural phenomena Cowper's pre- 
 ference of a simple life : these views 
 are all contained in Wordsworth. But 
 
WORDSWORTH. 71 
 
 ne reaches further to a foundation 
 and explanation of them all : he attains 
 a creed compared to which these were 
 but stumblings on the way to a conscious 
 faith. 1 
 
 One of Wordsworth's earliest poems 
 illustrates the thought underlying his in- 
 spiration. 
 
 In the Lines composed a few miles 
 above ~ Tintern Abbey included in the 
 Lyrical Ballads of 1798 the poet first 
 disclosed his essential originality. Pub- 
 lished at the end of the volume which 
 contained many of his worst failures, it 
 was then little read and less understood. 
 
 1 The poet's pantheism belongs especially to the 
 period of his highest activity. In the Ecclesiastical 
 Sonnets (1821) he becomes the verger of the Church 
 of England. Wordsworth the man and Wordsworth 
 the poet seem at times two beings. The one was in 
 the habit of explaining away the inspirations of the 
 other, as in the case of the great Ode. " It seemed," 
 said one who heard him reading his own poems, 
 " almost as if he was awed by the greatness of his 
 own power." 
 
72 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Read carefully now in the light of 
 Wordsworth's after poetic work, we see 
 in it the epitome and prospectus of his 
 later poetry. 
 
 He is revisiting the banks of the Wye 
 after an absence of five years. The 
 poem opens with a description of the 
 sweet inland murmur of the river the 
 steep and lofty cliffs which connect the 
 landscape with the quiet of the sky, the 
 plots of cottage-ground and orchard- 
 tufts which, clad in one green hue, lose 
 themselves among the woods and copses, 
 the hedge-rows and pastoral farms and 
 wreaths of smoke sent up in silence from 
 among the trees. 
 
 There is nothing bizarre or even pic- 
 turesque in this quiet picture. Indeed, 
 in the best work of our poet of 
 nature we find little * scene-painting ' 
 few descriptions of fine effects or subtle 
 skies. 2 He is not, as the professional 
 
 2 In his later work, from Memorials of a Tour on 
 the Continent (1820) and The River Duddon Sonnets, 
 
WORDSWORTH. 73 
 
 artist or tourist, on the look-out for 
 * views. 1 He lives with Nature ; he does 
 not visit her. He takes Nature as 
 she is in her retired and simple phases : 
 he loves her for herself, not for her 
 out-of-the-way graces. He is not fas- 
 tidious. The picturesque tourist,' like 
 the sensation-novel reader, has so little 
 imagination, such feeble power of sen- 
 sation of his own, that it must be stirred 
 
 we find, a conscious lapse into description, coincident 
 with his poetic decline. From Knight's Life of 
 Wordsworth, Vol. III., p. 61, I take the following 
 characteristic passage in a letter to Richard Sharp, 
 written in April, 1822 : " You recollect that Gray, 
 in one of his letters, affirms that Description he 
 means of natural scenery and the operations of Nature 
 though an admirable ornament, ought never to be 
 the subject of Poetry. How many exclusive dogmas 
 have been laid down, which genius from age to age 
 has triumphantly refuted ! and grossly should I be 
 deceived if, speaking freely to you as an old friend, 
 these local poems do not contain many proofs that 
 Gray was as much in the wrong in this interdict, as 
 any critical brother, who may have framed his canons 
 without a spark of inspiration or poetry to guide 
 him." 
 
 E 
 
74 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 exceptionally to be awakened into life. 
 Wordsworth, with strong powers of 
 vitality within himself, requires but a 
 healthy sustenance. In his poems, Na- 
 ture is presented in her simple and essen- 
 tial forms.3 
 
 K To return to our poem. We come 
 immediately upon one of the main- 
 springs of Wordsworth's inspiration, 
 memory, and the thoughts which 
 memory brings : 
 
 " These beauteous Forms, 
 Through a long absence, have not been to me 
 
 3 ' ' ' And would he, ' I asked, ' tell you as you 
 jogged along in the cart, which mountain he was 
 fondest of, or bid you look at the sunset ?' 
 
 * Ay, ay,' times he would say, * Now isn't that 
 beautiful ? ' and times he would hum on to himself. 
 But he wasn't a man as would give a judgment again' 
 ony mountain. I've heard girt folks 'at come to the 
 Mount say, c Now, Mr. Wudsworth, we want to see 
 finest mountain in t' country,' and he would say, 
 ' Every mountain is finest.' Ay, that's what he would 
 say." Rev. H. D. Rawnsley's Reminiscences of the 
 Westmoreland Peasantry. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 75 
 
 As is a landscape to a blind man's eye : 
 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din 
 Of towns and cities, I have owed to them 
 In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, 
 Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart ; 
 And passing even into my purer mind, 
 With tranquil restoration." * 
 
 Not only does he trace the influence of 
 the past in conscious memories. As our 
 present character is the result of even 
 our idlest actions, our present feeling is 
 the unconscious development of sensa- 
 tions, themselves now lost to mind : 
 
 "feelings too 
 
 Of unremembered pleasure : such, perhaps, 
 As have no slight or trivial influence 
 On that best portion of a good man's life, 
 His little, nameless, unremembered, acts 
 Of kindness and of love." 2 
 
 1 It is unnecessary to remind even the casual reader 
 of Wordsworth, that this note recurs throughout his 
 poetry. As explicit examples, we may mention "/ 
 wandered lonely as a Cloud" and The Solitary 
 Reaper. 
 
 2 Compare the further elaboration of this idea in 
 the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, where the 
 
And these memories of emotion under 
 the influence of nature's harmony may, 
 if used aright, so dilate all our after 
 thought and feeling, that we can at 
 times hear the harmony of a world in 
 which the worldling finds but discord 
 and ennui : 
 
 " Near less, I trust, 
 
 To them I may have owed another gift, 
 Of aspect more sublime ; that blessed mood, 
 In which the burthen of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world, 
 Is lightened : that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on, 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body, and become a living soul : 
 \Vhile with an eye made quiet by the powtf 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things,** 
 
 poet accentuates the influence of the " unremembered 
 pleasures >* of childhood on the character of our later 
 years. And compare: "our thoughts are indeed 
 the representatives of all our past feelings," 
 
WORDSWORTH. 77 
 
 An answer follows to those who may 
 think these experiences a mere hallucina- 
 tion. The joy and comfort they have 
 given him are their own proof. 
 
 "If this 
 
 Be but a vain belief, yet, oh ! how oft 
 In darkness and amid the many shapes 
 Of joyless daylight ; when the fretful stir 
 Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 
 Have hung upon the beatings of my heart 
 How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, 
 O sylvan Wye ! " 
 
 And now the poet breaks into a fresh 
 train of thought, though intimately con- 
 nected with the last. He recalls the 
 past : his education under nature's in- 
 fluence ; " the coarser pleasures " of his 
 boyish days and " their glad animal 
 movements " ; then his youth when 
 nature was to him 
 
 " A feeling and a love, 
 That had no need of a remoter charm, 
 By thought supplied, or any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye." 
 
 These " raptures " all are gone ; yet he 
 
78 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 neither mourns nor murmurs. Other 
 gifts have followed, " for such loss, 
 abundant recompense." 
 
 " For I have learned 
 To look on nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
 The still, sad music of humanity, 
 Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
 To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels \ 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
 A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
 And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
 From this green earlh ; of all the mighty world 
 Of eye and ear, both what they half create, 
 And what perceive." 
 
 These lofty lines are the climax of this 
 poem. They are perhaps the most ex- 
 plicit and complete expression in Words- 
 worth's verse of the central thought from 
 
WORDSWORTH. 79 
 
 which his inspiration flowed ; that faith, 
 called by some his * natural religion/ by 
 others his ' Christian pantheism,' which 
 sees in the Universe not only the 
 external work of God, but God himself 
 the divine spirit informing all and 
 working slowly to a perfect end. 
 
 The conclusion of the poem is an 
 address to his sister. There is, besides 
 nature, another source of solace and 
 joy, humanity, especially the humanity 
 of the domestic circle. This also is 
 man's natural surrounding, the sphere of 
 the activity and education of his vital 
 powers. 
 
 " Nor perchance, 
 
 If I were not thus taught, should I the more 
 Suffer my genial spirits to decay : 
 For thou art with me here upon the banks 
 Of this fair river ; Thou, my dearest Friend." 
 
 But it is in communion with nature 
 that human love can best breathe ; 
 
 ' ' for she can so inform 
 The mind that is within us, so impress 
 
80 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
 With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
 The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
 Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
 Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
 Is full of blessings." 
 
 So, 
 
 "when thy mind 
 
 Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, 
 Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 
 For all sweet sounds and harmonies ; oh ! then, 
 If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, 
 Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts 
 Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, 
 And these my exhortations ! " 
 
 There are perhaps too many * ex- 
 hortations ' throughout this poem for it 
 to be ranked among the most perfect 
 examples of the author's genius ; but I 
 have chosen it for its ' exhortations/ My 
 purpose is to show you the philosopher 
 that you may be able to appreciate 
 the poet for yourselves. If we have 
 once firmly grasped the ideas in this 
 
WORDSWORTH. 81 
 
 poem, we have the key to the rest. 
 We have here Wordsworth's point of 
 view ; and he had but one. His poetry 
 from first to last is the expression of 
 what we might almost call a stationary 
 personality. Among our English classics 
 Milton is likest him in this quality. 
 Shakespeare is of all farthest from him : 
 he does not look at life again and again 
 from the same standpoint : he rarely re- 
 peats himself. While Shakespeare sub- 
 merges his individuality in his work, 
 Wordsworth submerges his work in his 
 individuality. Thus it is, that we may 
 delight in Falstaff and Beatrice without 
 understanding Jaques or Lear ; but 
 that if we comprehend any great poem 
 of Wordsworth, we comprehend all. Thus 
 also it is, that the one poet is popular* 
 while the other never will be popular ; 
 for all may find some level according to 
 their taste and ability in Shakespeare's 
 world, but only those who are prepared 
 to rise to Wordsworth's level appreciate 
 
82 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 any of his poems, 1 and those will always 
 be the few. 
 
 There is evidence that Wordsworth 
 took more than usual pains in the con- 
 struction of the Ode on Intimations of 
 Immortality from Recollections of Early 
 Childhood. He was engaged in its com- 
 position for at least three years (1803- 
 1806); and its importance in the estima- 
 tion either of Wordsworth's poetry or of 
 his teaching can scarcely be overstated. 
 Like the early part of the Prelude^ its 
 
 i Wordsworth said, in a conversation with Klop- 
 stock, "that it was the province of a great poet to 
 raise people up to his own level, not to descend to 
 theirs." SatyranJs Letters, III. In Knight's Life, 
 Vol. I., 176, we find Wordsworth's own notes of the 
 interview. 
 
 " It is not enough for me as a Poet, to delineate 
 merely such feelings as all men do sympathise with ; 
 but it is also highly desirable to add to these others, 
 such as all men may sympathise with, and such as 
 there is reason to believe they would be better and 
 more moral beings if they did sympathise." From a 
 letter to Christopher North (1802). Knight's Life, 
 Vol. I., p. 404. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 83 
 
 subject is the memories of childhood and 
 their influence in the moulding of our 
 later years, the close connection of the 
 instincts and half-conscious delights 
 of the morning of life with the more 
 mature and reflective imagination of its 
 later day. .Its argument is summed in 
 the three lines originally prefixed to the 
 Ode: 
 
 " The Child is Father of the Man ; 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety." i 
 
 The idea of the pre-existence of the 
 soul before birth is of course Platonic ; 
 but Wordsworth's use of it in this Ode 
 differs from Plato's. While Plato thought 
 of man gradually through life working 
 to the ideal which he had left at birth, 
 Wordsworth opens with the plaint that 
 man's conventional life is a forgetting of 
 it. 
 
 i The last lines of My Heart leaps up, a lyric which 
 contains in embryo the idea which the Ode more im- 
 pressively elaborates. 
 
84 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 " Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 Upon the growing Boy ; " 
 
 until 
 
 "At length the Man perceives it die away, 
 And fade into the light of common day." 
 
 The first eight stanzas however con- 
 tain but half the argument of the poem. 
 Were these all, the poem would bear 
 no richer moral than Herrick's ' Gather 
 ye rosebuds while ye may/ or than is to 
 be derived from the despair of 'have 
 beens.' 1 It is Wordsworth's * purpose' 
 
 i Mr. Leslie Stephen {Hours in a Library. 
 Third Series, p. 194,) aptly contrasts Byron's and 
 Shelley's passionate lamentation over the departure 
 of the "spirit of delight," with that of Wordsworth. 
 Byron fails to recognise the higher uses to which the 
 fading memories may be put. 
 
 " There's not a joy the world can give like that it 
 
 takes away." 
 
 And, though Shelley still clings to the hope that his 
 "dead thoughts" may be driven over the universe, 
 
 " Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth," 
 he yet bows before an inexorable fate that has cramped 
 his energies : 
 
 "A heavy weight of years has chained and bowed 
 One too like thee ; tameless and swift and proud." 
 
WORDSWORTH. 85 
 
 to show that the instinctive joys of child- 
 hood may become more than a regret- 
 ful memory, that they need not be lost, 
 but may develope into something more 
 permanent in the imaginative reflection 
 of maturity : 
 
 " Hence, in a season of calm weather 
 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither, 
 
 Can in a moment travel thither, 
 And see the Children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 
 
 The two concluding stanzas of the 
 Ode carry on this thought of the con- 
 tinuity of childhood and age, and break 
 away from the region of regrets into a 
 paean of hope and faith in life's later as 
 well as earlier years : 
 
 What though the radiance which was once so bright 
 Be now for ever taken from my sight, 
 
 Though nothing can bring back the hour 
 Of splendours in the grass, of glory in the flower ; 
 
 Neither " can see any satisfactory solution, and there- 
 fore neither can reach a perfect harmony of thought 
 and feeling." 
 
86 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 We will grieve not, rather find 
 Strength in what remains behind ; 
 In the primal sympathy 
 Which having been must ever be ; 
 In the soothing thoughts that spring 
 Out of human suffering ; 
 In the faith that looks through death, 
 In years that bring the philosophic mind." 
 
 Mr. Arnold makes the following criti- 
 cism on this Ode : 
 
 "Even the 'intimations 1 of the fam- 
 ous Ode, those corner-stones of the 
 supposed philosophic system of Words- 
 worth, the idea of the high in- 
 stincts and affections coming out in 
 childhood, testifying of a divine home 
 recently left, and fading away as our life 
 proceeds, this idea, of undeniable 
 beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not 
 the character of poetic truth of the best 
 kind ; it has no real solidity. The 
 instinct of delight in Nature and her 
 beauty had no doubt extraordinary 
 strength in Wordsworth himself as a 
 child. But to say that universally this 
 
WORDSWORTH. 87 
 
 instinct is mighty in childhood, and 
 tends to die away afterwards, is to say 
 what is extremely doubtful. In many 
 people, perhaps with the majority of 
 educated persons, the love of nature is 
 nearly imperceptible at ten years old, 
 but strong and operative at thirty. In 
 general we may say of these high 
 instincts of early childhood, the base of 
 the alleged systematic philosophy of 
 Wordsworth, what Thucydides says of 
 the early achievements of the Greek 
 race : ' It is impossible to speak with 
 certainty of what is so remote ; but from 
 all that we can really investigate, I 
 should say that they were no very great 
 things.'" 
 
 Such a criticism betrays a misconcep- 
 tion of the central idea of the Ode. 
 
 Wordsworth does not deny that " the 
 love of Nature is nearly imperceptible at 
 ten years old, and strong and operative 
 at thirty," any more than that the love 
 of a son for a mother is the same. 
 Wordsworth's belief that the impressions 
 
88 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 of Nature during childhood are latent, 
 for the most part not only unexpressed 
 but unrealized, could be exhibited by 
 many quotations from his verse. 1 Percep- 
 tibility implies reflection, and comes with 
 
 1 The following may serve, from the well-known 
 Sonnet Composed upon the Beach near Calais : 
 " Dear Child ! dear Girl ! that walkest with me here, 
 If thou appear'st untouched by solemn thought, 
 Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 
 Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year ; 
 And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
 God being with thee when we know it not." 
 This revelation of the unconscious sympathies 
 "That steal upon the meditative mind, 
 
 And grow with thought," 
 
 constitutes Wordsworth's essential originality. It 
 occurs passim in the early books of the Prelude^ e.g., 
 
 " By intercourse of touch 
 
 He held mute dialogues with his Mother's heart, 
 Whereby this infant sensibility, 
 Great birthright of our being, was in him 
 Augmented and sustained." 
 Or, 
 
 " He held unconscious intercourse with Beauty 
 Old as creation, drinking in a pure 
 Organic pleasure." 
 
WORDSWORTH. 89 
 
 later years when the latent stores of 
 childhood develop as a memory 
 
 " those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day." 
 
 As it is not Wordsworth's purpose in 
 making us feel the joys " of all the 
 mighty world of eye and ear " to distin- 
 guish between " what they half create 
 and what perceive," so it is not here his 
 purpose to separate Dichtung from 
 Wahrheit. Our own idealised memo- 
 ries, not our nurses' or tutors* memories 
 of facts, are his subject. " No very great 
 things," these impressions of childhood, 
 like " the early achievements 1 of the 
 Greek race": all will admit this. Yet 
 surely both, the germ and making of 
 great things ! 
 
 The two representative poems which 
 I have chosen give us Wordsworth's 
 
 1 The word " achievements " renders the analogy 
 quite inappropriate. 
 
 F 
 
90 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 point of view regarding Nature and 
 Man. We see in them the strands of 
 thought running through his poetry and 
 teaching. To illustrate these by refer- 
 ence to The Excursion would take us 
 beyond our limits. I must, therefore, 
 be content to note how they express 
 themselves in a few of the poems of the 
 best period (1798-1808) of Wordsworth's 
 activity. 
 
 We may range these poems in two 
 classes : one, of Ballad and Narrative 
 poetry in which the poet makes other 
 characters and their portraiture or story 
 the vehicle of his inspiration ; and the 
 other, of Autobiographical, Lyrical and 
 Reflective poems, and Sonnets, which 
 are the more direct expression of his 
 own thought and emotion. Yet this 
 division is not more than one of form ; 
 for Wordsworth's genius is essen- 
 tially undramatic, 1 and his creations 
 
 i "In my treatment of the intellectual instincts, 
 affections, and passions of mankind, I am nobly dis- 
 
WORDSWORTH. 91 
 
 are little more than representations of 
 his ideal or of himself in various circum- 
 stances of life. Matthew in The Two 
 April Mornings and The Fountain, 
 Leonard in The Brothers, the old 
 Leech-Gatherer in Resolution and Inde- 
 pendence ', Lord Clifford in the Song at 
 the Feast of Brougham Castle are as 
 evidently the poet in a thin disguise, as 
 the Wanderer or the Parson in The 
 Excursion ; and the Solitary seems to 
 us to-day a Wordsworthian atheist. 1 
 
 tinguished by having drawn out into notice the points 
 in which they resemble each other, in preference to 
 dwelling (as dramatic authors must do) upon those in 
 which they differ. If my writings are to last, it will, 
 I myself believe, be mainly owing to this characteristic. 
 They will please for the single cause, ' That we have 
 all of us one human heart.' " From a letter to Crabb 
 Robinson (1835). Knight's Life. Vol. III., p. 250. 
 i Compare Wordsworth's opinion of Voltaire's 
 work - 
 
 " Dull product of a scoffer's pen," 
 
 with Cowper's picture in Truth of the aged cottager 
 who 
 
 " Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true 
 A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew." 
 
92 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Even in that exotic masterpiece of the 
 poet's genius, Laodameia, Protesilaos 
 preaches from the gospel according to 
 Wordsworth ; while the noble Character 
 of the Happy Warrior is as confessedly 
 didactic as the Ode to Duty. 
 
 Perhaps the loveliest of his por- 
 traitures are those of another sex. Yet 
 
 Wordsworth's general indebtedness to Cowper has 
 not been fully illustrated. Evidence of his intimate 
 acquaintance with Cowper's poems is given in 
 Knight's Life. 
 
 1 he following passage from Haydon's account of 
 "an immortal dinner" which he gave in 1817 is 
 worth insertion here. " Lamb's fun in the midst of 
 Wordsworth's solemn intonations of oratory was like 
 the sarcasm and wit of the fool in the intervals of 
 Lear's passion. He made a speech, and voted me 
 absent, and made them drink my health. ' Now,' 
 said Lamb, 'you old lake poet, you rascally poet, 
 why do you call Voltaire dull ? ' We all defended 
 Wordsworth, and affirmed there was a state of mind 
 when Voltaire would be dull. ' Well,' said Lamb, 
 ' here's Voltaire the Messiah of the French nation, 
 and a very proper one too.' ... It was delight- 
 ful to see the good humour of Wordsworth in giving 
 in to all our frolics without affectation, and laughing 
 as heartily as the best of us." 
 
WORDSWORTH. 93 
 
 they also belong to Wordsworth's 
 family, " through whom a kindred like- 
 ness prevails, as well of minds as of 
 persons." 1 The value of these portraits 
 lies, not as in Browning's in their 
 insight into character, but in their 
 imagination of a high and pure ideal. 
 
 Of these, the " Lucy " poems 2 are the 
 first. Who the subject of them was, 
 remains untold ; but that she was the 
 heroine of some love episode in Words- 
 worth's life, can scarcely be doubted by 
 any who have read the pathetic lines 
 which close the shortest of them : 
 
 * " Vicar of Wakefield," chap. I. 
 
 a Mr. Arnold has happily placed the five poems to- 
 gether in his Selections : a volume which includes 
 little that the lover of poetry will reject, and excludes 
 less that the lover of Wordsworth will miss. 
 
 The latter may regret the absence of To the Daisy 
 (second poem) and The Kitten and Falling Leaves as 
 interesting exceptions to the poet's characteristic 
 solemnity. Another example of his playful mood is 
 the doggerel lines quoted by Professor Knight. Life t 
 Vol. II., p. 273. 
 
94 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 " She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
 The difference to me ! " 
 
 I cannot refrain from quoting the 
 longest of this group which Mr. Pal- 
 grave in his Golden Treasury has 
 appropriated entitled : The Education 
 of Nature. To those who are familiar 
 with Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies it must 
 be well known ; yet, as one of the 
 most perfect examples of the simple 
 and natural dignity of Wordsworth's 
 ideal, it cannot be over-cherished. 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
 Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 
 On earth was never sown ; 
 This Child I to myself will take ; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A Lady of my own. 
 
 * Myself will to my darling be 
 Both law and impulse : and with me 
 The Girl, in rock and plain, 
 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
 Shall feel an overseeing power 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 95 
 
 * She shall be sportive as the Fawn 
 That wild with glee across the lawn, 
 Or up the mountain springs ; 
 
 And her's shall be the breathing balm, 
 And her's the silence andthe calm 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 * The floating Clouds their state shall lend 
 To her ; for her the willow bend ; 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 
 Even in the motions of the Storm 
 
 Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
 ' The Stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her ; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place 
 Where Rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 ' And vital feelings of delight 
 Shall rear her form to stately height, 
 Her virgin bosom swell ; 
 Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
 While she and I together live 
 Here in this happy Dell.' " 
 
 Those who are not thorough-going 
 ' Wordsworthians ' will recognise, it 
 may be, too acutely, the serious defect 
 
96 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 in even such a beautiful ideal as this 
 the lack in it of that other side of our 
 nature, the social side ; a lack which is 
 the result of Wordsworth's character of 
 half-ascetic solitariness. Yet no one 
 who has once felt the thrilling charm of 
 these verses can recall them without a 
 feeling akin to ' exaltation ' ; without a 
 renewed feeling of repugnance to those 
 commoner ideals which err so far the 
 other way, for whom midnight has no 
 stars and rivulets dance in vain, where 
 sportive freedom has been exchanged 
 for conventional prudery, in whom there 
 is politeness without sympathy, pretti- 
 ness but no beauty, and elegance wanting 
 in dignity or grace. 
 
 We naturally connect this series of 
 poems with the lyric She was a Phantom 
 of Delight, in which the poet has drawn 
 from his own home the picture of the 
 child, the maiden, and the wife. First, 
 
 " A lovely Apparition, sent 
 To be a moment's ornament ; 
 
WORDSWORTH. 97 
 
 A dancing Shape, an Image gay. 
 To haunt, to startle, and waylay." 
 
 " I saw her upon nearer view, 
 A Spirit, yet a Woman too ! 
 Her household motions light and free, 
 And steps of virgin liberty ; 
 A countenance in which did meet 
 Sweet records, promises as sweet ; 
 A Creature not too bright or good 
 For human nature's daily food ; 
 For transient sorrows, simple wiles, 
 Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles." 
 
 And then, at last, 
 
 " A perfect Woman, nobly planned, 
 To warn, to comfort, and command ; 
 And yet a Spirit still, and bright 
 With something of an angel light," 
 
 It is this homeliness of ideal this 
 constant insistence on the fulfilment of 
 the natural primary duties and affections 
 within the reach of all, as the only 
 source of man's true joy and dignity 
 which is the basis of Wordsworth's moral 
 teaching. In his Sonnet, 1 he calls on 
 Milton to raise England from her selfish- 
 
 1 Sonnet IX. London, 1802. 
 
98 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 ness and restore her " manners, virtue, 
 freedom, power," because he travelled 
 " on life's common way in cheerful godli- 
 ness, and yet his heart the lowliest duties 
 on herself did lay." As in outward nature, 
 so in human nature, it is her simple and 
 common excellences which are the 
 favourite food of Wordsworth's inspira- 
 tion. This homeliness of ideal or more 
 correctly, the qualities of character which 
 were the source of this homeliness of 
 ideal led Wordsworth into theories of 
 poetry which we may best understand 
 by considering the criticisms which have 
 been made against them. 
 
 I do not mean to enter now on a con- 
 sideration of Wordsworth's much dis- 
 cussed dictum " that there neither is, nor 
 can be, any essential difference between 
 the language of prose and metrical 
 composition." z If by ' language ' 
 
 * Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Bal- 
 lads" (1800). The word " essential " eliminates such 
 exceptions as the occasional use of archaisms, etc. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 99 
 
 Wordsworth means * words/ it is to-day 
 a truism; 1 if he means 'the use of 
 words ' it is entirely false, as he himself 
 shows in a later Preface. 2 It is not 
 
 1 To Coleridge this interpretation seemed too axio- 
 matic for argument {Biographia Literaria, passim) ; 
 yet Wordsworth in his Preface does not explicitly 
 commit himself to the other. The assertion was, in 
 any case, an inadequate defence of his ballad poetry, 
 and a rather involved method of attacking the 
 41 poetic diction" of the Eighteenth Century. For 
 Pope and Wordsworth would doubtless each have 
 held the other's poetic diction to be prosaic. 
 
 The value of Wordsworth's Prefaces has been too 
 long hidden by discussions on the polemic validity of 
 this and kindred sentences. Apart from these, the 
 Preface of 1800 marks an epoch in poetic criticism, 
 and, with the Essay^ Supplementary to the Preface, 
 the Preface to the Edition of 1815, and Coleridge's 
 Biographia Literaria, is the best introduction we have 
 to the study of our century's poetry. 
 
 Wordsworth wrote opposite a passage from Bio- 
 graphia Literaria that he " never cared a straw about 
 the theory." Knight's Life, Vol. II., p. 329. 
 
 2 Preface to the (first collected) Edition of Words- 
 worth's Poems (1815), where he distinguishes between 
 and illustrates the literal, the fanciful, and the ima- 
 ginative use of such words as " hang." 
 
ioo WORDSWORTH. 
 
 strange that even his friend Coleridge 
 misunderstood the dictum, for the poet 
 himself, in putting his theory into 
 practice, has occasionally followed the 
 erroneous, not the true, interpretation. 
 In such poems as Alice Fell, The Idiot 
 Boy, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, and 
 Peter Bell, Wordsworth's critics have 
 found the best argument both for their 
 interpretation and for their refutation of 
 his theory : in these the poet's attempt 
 to use the language of prose in poetry 
 has resulted in the prosaic use of language 
 in poetry, and his attempt to be simple 
 and natural has seduced him into an un- 
 natural simplicity. 
 
 A verse or two of The Idiot Boy will 
 prove this better than argument. Betty 
 Foy has a neighbour, Susan Gale, who 
 has taken suddenly unwell ; and, as 
 there is no one else at home, has to send 
 her idiot son on a pony for the doctor : 
 
 " And Betty's most especial charge 
 Was, * Johnny ! Johnny ! mind that you 
 Come home again, nor stop at all, 
 
WORDSWORTH. 101 
 
 Come home again, whate'er befall, 
 My Johnny, do, I pray you do." 
 
 But after about thirty verses we find that 
 Johnny has not come home again, nor 
 has he reached his destination. The dis- 
 tress of poor Betty at the non-appearance 
 of Johnny or doctor is then minutely de- 
 scribed : 
 
 "And Susan's growing worse and worse, 
 And Betty's in a sad quandary ; 
 And then there's nobody to say 
 If she must go, or she must stay ! 
 She's in a sad quandary" 
 
 She at last resolves to leave poor Susan 
 and to start off in search : 
 
 " 'What can I do?' says Betty, going, 
 ' What can I do to ease your pain ? 
 Good Susan, tell me, and I'll stay ; 
 I fear you're in a dreadful way, 
 But I shall soon be back again. ' " 
 
 1 So, through the moonlight lane she goes, 
 And far into the moonlight dale ; 
 And how she ran, and how she walked, 
 And all that to herself she talked, 
 Would surely be a tedious tale." 
 
102 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 She ultimately arrives at the doctor's ; 
 but no word of Johnny 
 
 " O Reader ! now that I might tell 
 What Johnny and his Horse are doing, 
 What they've been doing all this time, 
 O could I put it into rhyme, 
 A most delightful tale pursuing ! " 
 
 We prefer to pursue it no further. 
 Suffice it to say that in the remaining 
 thirty verses or so, we find that Betty at 
 last finds her idiot boy astride the pony 
 that was so " mild and good/' and that 
 to Betty's questions as to what he has 
 been doing in the moonlight "from eight 
 o'clock till five," he 
 
 " Made answer, like a traveller bold, 
 (His very words I give to you,) 
 'The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, 
 And the sun did shine so cold ! ' 
 Thus answered Johnny in his glory, 
 And that was all his travel's story." 
 
 The poet meant this poem to be 
 pathetic. The subject of our pathos is, 
 not its hero, but its author. 1 
 
 i " Thus, when he tells the tale of Betty Foy, 
 The idiot mother of * t an idiot boy ; ' 
 
WORDSWORTH. 103 
 
 Wordsworth writes that Burns' light, 
 . " breaking forth as nature's own " 
 
 " Showed my youth 
 How verse may build a princely throne 
 On humble truth." 
 
 We find in Burns the homeliest subjects 
 and the homeliest language ; but we 
 look in vain for futilities comparable to 
 those so frequent in Wordsworth's bal- 
 lads. Neither the success of The Border 
 Widow's Lament, nor the failure of The 
 Idiot Boy is to be traced to the words 
 contained. Their difference is only su- 
 perficially explained by even the contrast 
 of the use of words ; for the root of Words- 
 worth's defect reaches deeper, to the im- 
 aginative conception. The materials of 
 
 A moon-struck, silly lad, who lost his way, 
 And, like his bard, confounded night with day ; 
 So close on each pathetic part he dwells, 
 And each adventure so sublimely tells, 
 That all who view the ' idiot in his glory,' 
 Conceive the bard the hero of the story." 
 
 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 
 
104 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 the poem have pathetic elements, which 
 may therefore be made poetic. Words- 
 worth failed to make them poetic; and 
 his failure is due to faults of com- 
 mission as well as of omission. By 
 emphasizing the vulgar accidents of 
 morbid idiocy and maternal incapacity, 
 he has obliterated the essential pathos 
 in the workings of a mother's affections 
 for her witless offspring. Wordsworth 
 has given us an incongruous picture 
 which from his lack of humour he did 
 not recognize as burlesque. 1 
 
 1 Mr. Lowell expresses this succinctly: "Words- 
 worth never quite learned the distinction between 
 Fact, which suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which 
 is the very breath of her nostrils." Among My Books. 
 Second Series, p. 226. 
 
 In Crabb Robinson's Diary, he says: "On my 
 gently alluding to the line * three feet long by two 
 feet wide,' and confessing that I dared not read them 
 aloud in company, he said, ' They ought to be liked !'" 
 
 His titles of his poems and constant references to 
 the facts on which they were founded, are illustrations 
 of the mixture of transcendentalism and realism 
 which we find in his verse. 
 
 A few lines further on in his diary Crabb Robinson 
 
WORDSWORTH. 105 
 
 Wordsworth's purpose in these 
 "simple" poems was far from simple. 
 All had a deep philosophic, if not 
 poetic, intention ; though in most it is 
 obscured, and in some hardly sug- 
 gested. 1 Wordsworth's defence is in 
 most of them more or less explicit. In 
 Simon Lee he says : 
 
 " O Reader ! had you in your mind 
 
 Such stores as silent thought can bring, 
 O gentle Reader ! you'wc-iild find 
 A tale in everything. " 2 
 
 remarks : "Wordsworth, as Hazlitt has well observed, 
 has a pride in deriving no aid from his subject. It is 
 the mere power, which he is conscious of exerting, in 
 which he delights. ... In this as in other 
 peculiarities of Wordsworth, there*is a German bent 
 in his mind." 
 
 1 Lucy Gray, beautiful as well as /'simple," is 
 successful. But it also has this esoteric quality. 
 
 2 Wordsworth's latest interpreter is evidently among 
 those readers of Wordsworth who have failed to 
 "find a tale in everything." Mr. John Mori ey, in 
 his Introduction to The Complete Poetical Works of 
 William Wordsworth (Macmillan, 1888), says: "It 
 is best to be entirely sceptical as to the existence of 
 system and ordered philosophy in Wordsworth. When 
 
io6 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 But the poet's function is to tell the 
 " tale " for the reader who is not a 
 Wordsworth. Were every man a poet 
 there would be little need of poetry, for 
 each " would find a tale in everything " 
 for himself. The last verse of the 
 A necdote for Fathers 
 
 ' ' O dearest, dearest Boy ! my heart 
 . For better love would seldom yearn, 
 
 Could I but teach the hundredth part 
 
 Of what from thee I learn, " 
 
 is the poet's apology for leaving the 
 reader with a conundrum which, though 
 
 he tells us that * one impulse from a vernal wood may 
 teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good, 
 than all the sages can,' such a proposition cannot be 
 seriously taken as more than a half-playful sally for 
 the benefit of some too bookish friend. No impulse 
 from a vernal wood can teach us anything at all of 
 moral evil and of good " ! Scepticism as to the exis- 
 tence of a system does not preclude belief in the exis- 
 tence of thought in Wordsworth's poetry, still less of 
 the deliberate thought which is part of the essence of 
 Wordsworth's life and poetry ; and that the least 
 playful of English poets treated it as no more than 
 " a half-playful sally," is incredible. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 107 
 
 soluble, is not solved by the prosaic sub- 
 title, Showing how the Practice of Lying 
 may be Taught. These poems are 
 failures in so far as their " tale " is 
 untold. The best of them contain 
 materials for a poem ; some, materials 
 for a sermon. The reader has to agree 
 with Coleridge that "the Anecdote for 
 Fathers, Simon Lee, Alice Fell, the 
 Beggars, and the Sailors Mother, not- 
 withstanding the beauties which are to 
 be found in each of them where the poet 
 interposes the music of his own thoughts, 
 would have been more delightful to me 
 in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. 
 Wordsworth they would have been in a 
 moral essay or pedestrian tour." 1 
 
 Putting aside this class of poems, we 
 may now consider the criticisms that 
 have been made on Wordsworth's 
 pastorals and longer narrative pieces, 
 and on the principle which guided him 
 in their creation : that among the 
 
 1 Biographia Liter aria, chap. 18. 
 
io8 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 rustic and peasant classes we find the 
 full development of the " essential 
 passions " of mankind. 
 
 Wordsworth, in his tendency to what 
 has been called " matter-of-factness," x 
 has no doubt been too apt to regard 
 his Michael, and Leech-Gatherer and 
 Pedlar as portraits from life. And 
 as a universal theory his statement is 
 open to the objection which Coleridge 
 makes : " I am convinced that for the 
 human soul to prosper in rustic life a 
 certain vantage-ground is pre-requisite. 
 It is not every man that is likely to be 
 improved by a country life or by 
 country labours. Education, or original 
 sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if 
 the changes, forms, and incidents of 
 nature are to prove a sufficient stimu- 
 lant." 2 Yet, as ideal pictures of what is 
 natural and possible if the heart and 
 intellect were duly trained under 
 
 1 B'w^raphia Literaria, chap. 22. 
 
 2 Biographia Literaria, chap. 17. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 109 
 
 Nature's influence apart from social 
 culture and convention, the pastorals 
 remain among the most essentially true 
 and beautiful, as well as the most 
 characteristic, of Wordsworth's poems. 
 It is no argument against them to say 
 that not one in a thousand of those from 
 whom their characters are taken would 
 appreciate a line of them, for the time 
 may come when those ideals shall be 
 facts, when our country-folk shall find in 
 Nature, and perhaps in Wordsworth's 
 poetry, a source of vital power and joy. 
 
 The valid objection against Words- 
 worth in this case lies in his limitation 
 of his ideals to a single class in his as- 
 sumption that under the cultivating and 
 refining influences of society we may not 
 attain a still higher development of even 
 " the essential passions " than is possible 
 to rustic folk. The lady who has pre- 
 served her essential womanhood amid 
 conventional restrictions, and developed 
 it in a congenial and appropriate social 
 atmosphere, is surely a more deeply 
 
I io WORDSWORTH. 
 
 natural product of humanity than is 
 possible among the maids of even an 
 ideal farmyard. The "essential passions" 
 are not the monopoly of a class, though 
 the narrow conventions of city life may 
 do much to warp and dwarf them. The 
 very temptations of refinement, educa- 
 tion, and society, call out new powers of 
 resistance ; and in the moral equipoise 
 of these we find an ideal with as much 
 naturalness, and with much greater 
 capability and play of " essential pas- 
 sions." 
 
 Esmond says : " 'Tis an error, surely, 
 to talk of the simplicity of youth. We 
 get to understand truth better and there- 
 fore grow simpler as we grow older." 
 Might we not transfer this saying to a 
 comparison between the simplicity of 
 Hodge and that of Dr. Johnson. We 
 grow simpler and more natural as we 
 grow wiser : 
 
 " For nature is made better by no mean, 
 
 But nature makes that mean. So over that art, 
 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 
WORDSWORTH. in 
 
 That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry 
 
 A gentler scion to the wildest stock : 
 
 And make conceive a bark of baser kind 
 
 By bud of nobler race. This is an art 
 
 Which does mend nature change it rather ; but 
 
 The art itself is nature." 
 
 Wordsworth's mental exclusiveness as 
 a poet may be traced to his limitations 
 as a man. We recall that scene of 
 his youth, when, on his return from 
 a country ball, as " magnificent the 
 morning rose in memorable pomp," 
 his "dedicated Spirit" found matter 
 for reproach in the innocent enjoy- 
 ment of " love-likings " ; we recall his 
 sonnets on Personal Talk; we realise 
 the entire absence of humour, of dra- 
 matic power, of the more sensuous and 
 tempestuous " essential passions," which 
 makes so strongly against him in the 
 affections of many. We think of what 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare were, of what 
 Goethe was, and are reminded of what 
 Wordsworth was not. 
 
 Yet, after all, this limitation of Words- 
 
112 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 worth's sympathies does not detract from 
 the truth and beauty of his best poetry. 
 It has a grandeur of its own, flowing from 
 the same springs as its defects. To set be- 
 fore us an ideal which might be possible 
 to all, is its " worthy purpose " : a pur- 
 pose for which the poet's individuality 
 was supremely fitted, and which has not 
 been achieved so perfectly by any poet 
 before or since. Wordsworth reminds 
 us of Milton in the solitary grandeur of 
 his verse, as in that of his character. * 
 To him, with even less reservation than 
 to Milton, might be applied his own line : 
 
 " Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." 
 
 The moral and religious ideal is the in- 
 spiration of both. But Wordsworth is a 
 Milton of the nineteenth, not the seven- 
 teenth century. In place of a theological, 
 he has found a natural religion. Its re- 
 velation comes to him not so much from 
 above as from below and around. 
 
 " Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 
WORDSWORTH. 113 
 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills, "i 
 
 The natural has become for him the 
 supernatural. The wayside flowers, the 
 clouds, the common joys, sorrows, and 
 duties of every-day humanity, are trans- 
 figured in his verse, like the daffodils in 
 his after-dream. In these he reads life's 
 meaning, and to these he gives a fresh- 
 ness and a glory never given before. " He 
 gives the charm of novelty to things of 
 every day, and excites a feeling ana- 
 logous to the supernatural, by awaken- 
 ing the mind's attention from the lethargy 
 of custom, and directing it to the loveli- 
 ness and the wonders of the world before 
 us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for 
 which, in consequence of the film of 
 familiarity and selfish solicitude, we 
 have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear 
 
 i Coleridge is reported to have remarked of Words- 
 worth : " He is a man of whom it might have been 
 said, c It is good for him to be alone.' " 
 
114 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 not, and hearts that neither feel nor un- 
 derstand." * 
 
 We cannot leave Wordsworth without 
 a word on his poetic style. I do not 
 refer to the theory on which he built his 
 failures, but to the style in which his 
 noblest poems were composed. Words- 
 worth, it may be, fell into a false, at 
 times absurd, simplicity ; but the charac- 
 teristic of his supreme work also is sim- 
 plicity a truer simplicity, in that it is the 
 most natural possible to the poet and to 
 
 i Biographia Literaria, chap. 14. Compare Rus- 
 kin's words: "Wordsworth's distinctive work was 
 a war with pomp and pretence, and a display of 
 the majesty of simple feelings and humble hearts." 
 Modern Painter s> iii. 293. And Arnold's : " The 
 cause of its greatness is simple, and may be told 
 quite simply. Wordsworth's poetry is great be- 
 cause of the extraordinary power with which Words- 
 worth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy 
 offered to us in the simple, primary affections and 
 duties ; and because of the extraordinary power with 
 which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and 
 renders it so as to make us share it." Preface to the 
 Selections, p. 21. 
 
WORDSWORTH. 115 
 
 his subject. Wordsworth's art may be 
 best compared to that of Nature. 
 " Nature herself seems," as Arnold says, 
 " to take the pen out of his hand, and 
 to write for him with her own bare, 
 sheer, penetrating power. . . . His 
 expression may often be called bald ; 
 . . . but it is bald as the bare mountain- 
 tops are bald, with a baldness which is 
 full of grandeur." 1 We look in vain 
 through his poems for anything that is 
 tricky or merely pretty. All is beauty, 
 unadorned by artifice. To illustrate 
 this simple, natural sublimity of Words- 
 worth's style, we may take his Sonnet 
 Composed upon Westminster Bridge ', Sept. 
 J, 1803. 
 
 " Earth has not anything to show more fair : 
 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
 A sight so touching in its majesty : 
 This City now doth, like a garment, wear 
 The beauty of the morning ; silent, bare, 
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 
 Open unto the fields, and to the sky ; 
 
 i Preface to the Selections, p. 24. 
 
1 16 WORDS IVOR TH. 
 
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. 
 Never did sun more beautifully steep 
 In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill ; 
 Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! 
 The river glideth at his own sweet will : 
 Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; 
 And all that mighty heart is lying still ! " 
 
 JL .single heightening effect, not a 
 single fanciful turn, to attract us or dis- 
 tract us : we are with Wordsworth on 
 Westminster Bridge in the stillness of 
 that autumn dawn and feel the solemnity 
 he feels in the sight of the silent city 
 lying all around. 
 
 Let us take leave of him listening to 
 the singing of his country girl at work in 
 one of our lonely Scottish glens : 
 
 " Behold her, single in the field, 
 Yon solitary Highland Lass ! 
 Reaping and singing by herself; 
 Stop here, or gently pass ! 
 Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
 And sings a melancholy strain ; 
 O listen ! for the Vale profound 
 Is overflowing with the sound. 
 
 " No Nightingale did ever chaunt 
 So sweetly to reposing bands 
 
WORDSWORTH. 117 
 
 Of Travellers in some shady haunt, 
 Among Arabian sands : 
 A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard 
 In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides. 
 
 " Will no one tell me what she sings? 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 And battles long ago : 
 Or is it some more humble lay, 
 Familiar matter of to-day ? 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
 That has been, and may be again ? 
 
 " Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang 
 As if her song could have no ending ; 
 I saw her singing at her work, 
 And o'er the sickle bending ; 
 I listened till I had my fill, 
 And when I mounted up the hill, 
 The music in my heart I bore, 
 Long after it was heard no more." 
 
 Yet Wordsworth is not popular. Per- 
 haps it is besides his limitations, which 
 I have already emphasized enough that 
 we do not become intimate either with 
 our best poets or with our best friends 
 at a first or second meeting. The most 
 
1 1 8 WORDS WOR TH. 
 
 genuine and sincere do not flaunt their 
 best qualities in our faces, and often fail 
 to attract us at first sight. They make 
 no advances. They are reserved. To 
 know them, to become intimate with 
 them, is difficult ; but the difficulty is 
 usually proportionate to the value of their 
 acquaintance. Wordsworth has said of 
 another, 
 
 " You must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love ; " 
 
 but the lines are most appropriate of all 
 to himself. 
 
 ~ Wordsworth is not easy reading ; for 
 he does not accentuate his points or make 
 a show of his emotions for the running 
 reader. The difficulty lies in his sim- 
 plicity. We have to dismiss our clever- 
 ness, and read him " like a little child." 
 After all, we should not be too sure we 
 understand him fully, for he addresses 
 the understanding through the heart, 1 
 
 i Compare his own account in The Prelude^ book 
 xi., of the influence of Nature and of his Sister, which 
 
WORDSWORTH. 119 
 
 and is thus in danger of being misunder- 
 stood alike by the vulgar and by the 
 learned. 
 
 For this reason, an appreciation of 
 Wordsworth is likelier to afford a sure 
 foundation of taste than that of any other 
 of our modern poets. Quite apart from 
 his greatness in comparison with others, 
 an appreciation of his work among those 
 of us who are forming our poetical taste 
 is preferable, as a beginning, to an ap- 
 preciation of Byron, or of Shelley, or of 
 Browning : it is preferable because it is 
 less likely to be false to be an appre- 
 ciation merely of what is accidental. 
 
 The splendid revolt of Shelley, or the 
 somewhat bizarre melancholy of Byron, 
 finds a sympathetic chord in young 
 readers, quite apart from the real mean- 
 ing of either the cause or purpose of 
 
 " led him back through opening day 
 To those sweet counsels between head and heart 
 Whence grew that genuine knowledge, fraught with 
 peace." 
 
120 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 either which is the essential part of it. 
 Or again, our cleverness gets a proper 
 field for its display in making grammar 
 and sense out of Browning, quite apart 
 from the question whether the sense 
 found were worth our ingenuity. Not 
 that there is no more than revolt, 
 and melancholy, and obscurity in these 
 poets. But we may easily rest satisfied 
 with the accidental trappings or phases 
 which first take our fancy, and never 
 reach the vital ideas underlying these 
 in each. Because we are melancholy 
 and we find Byron is melancholy, we 
 may fancy we have a thorough under- 
 standing of Byron, when our melancholy 
 and his may be entirely different in 
 cause and meaning. And so with 
 Browning's cleverness and ours. Are 
 we certain that we do not frequently 
 mistake obscurity for depth, and that, 
 while we think we are plumbing an 
 ocean, we are not puddling among 
 grammatical and psychological shallows? 
 An even ardent appreciation of these 
 
WORDSWORTH. 121 
 
 poets may not be the true one ; for it 
 may be an understanding of, and sym- 
 pathy with, accidentals, rather than with 
 essentials. 
 
 But in reading Wordsworth, such a 
 self-deception is unlikely ; for his poetry 
 has no accidental attractions to allure us 
 by superficial sympathies. Indeed, any 
 evident qualities his poetry possesses are 
 at first rather repellant than attractive : 
 they make not for him but against him 
 in his way to our appreciation. And, 
 therefore, what taste we do form by study 
 of him is sure to be thorough, a perma- 
 nent possession. 
 
 The self-centred calm of Wordsworth 
 is not the atmosphere of youth's generous 
 and adventurous aspirations. The mature 
 flavour of reflective cheerfulness which 
 seasons his poetry, and his austere plain- 
 ness of subject, of thought and of style, 
 are tasteless alike to the uninitiated and 
 to the jaded appetite. Not a subject of 
 his that is not at first view common- 
 place ; not a phrase that at first hearing 
 
 H 
 
122 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 titillates our passing fancy by its clever- 
 ness or high - strung passion. Yet 
 Wordsworth's simplicity, his common- 
 place,, like Nature's, has a depth and a 
 beauty of its own ; and if we love it, we 
 love it for itself. "Type of the wise who 
 soar, but never roam ; true to the kin- 
 dred points of heaven and home," he 
 sings to us " of joy in widest commonalty 
 spread " ; and, if we can but attune our 
 ears, we will feel " Wordsworth's healing 
 power." 
 
Browning. 
 
BROWNING. 125 
 
 Browning. 
 
 MODESTY is a characteristic of neither 
 travellers nor critics. There are few things 
 which the former have not seen, or which 
 the latter have not understood. Yet our 
 mediaeval traveller, Mandeville, was not 
 more despairing when he came to talk 
 of Paradise, than were the critics of last 
 generation when their subject was the 
 poetry of Robert Browning. Some of 
 you may remember Mandeville's des- 
 cription of the obstacles that barred 
 " man that is mortal " from a sight of 
 Paradise, which, " as I have heard say of 
 wise men," " is far beyond." " For by 
 land no man may go for wild beasts, that 
 are in the deserts, and for the high 
 
126 BROWNING. 
 
 mountains, and great huge rocks that no 
 man may pass by for the dark places that 
 are there ; and by the rivers may no man 
 go. Many died for weariness of rowing 
 against the strong waves ; and many be- 
 came blind, and many deaf, for the noise 
 of the water ; and some perished and were 
 lost in the waves ; so that no mortal may 
 approach to that place without special 
 grace of God ; so that of that place I 
 can tell you no more." Twenty years 
 ago this might have been an alle- 
 gory of most criticisms of Browning's 
 poetry. To-day all is changed. Patience 
 and science have done much. Moun- 
 tains have become plains, rocks have 
 been blasted, electric light has dispelled 
 the darkness, and the deserts have burst 
 into flower and fruit. For one weary 
 pilgrim there are a thousand jaunty 
 travellers. Fifty societies are plying 
 excursion-parties up the formerly im- 
 passable streams. 
 
 Yet, if one difficulty has been solved, 
 another has taken its place. Critics 
 
BROWNING. 127 
 
 now pause not so much before the 
 obscurity and harshness of Browning's 
 poetry, as before its amount. In 1868 
 his works filled six volumes ; to-day, 
 they are about to be published in 
 sixteen. As the garrulity of age is a 
 common-place as well of genius as of 
 mediocrity, the number in the final 
 edition remains indefinite. At present 
 he is the most prolific of modern English 
 poets. 
 
 It is clear that the interpretation of 
 Browning must be suggestive rather 
 than exhaustive. I will attempt merely 
 to indicate the main features of his 
 genius by a few examples. 
 
 " Mr. Browning's paternal grandfather 
 was an Englishman of a west country 
 stock ; his paternal grandmother a 
 Creole. The maternal grandfather was 
 a German from Hamburg named 
 Wiedemann, an accomplished draughts- 
 man and musician. The maternal 
 grandmother was completely Scotch." 
 
 These hereditary influences, and a 
 
128 BROWNING. 
 
 long residence in Italy, partly explain 
 the luxurious and vigorous growth of the 
 poet's genius. With independent means, 
 he was from the first free to devote his 
 time and energies to poetry. Pauline 
 was published when he was a boy of 
 twenty ; Paracelsus followed within two, 
 Sordello within seven years. These 
 works display, more or less, immaturity. 
 They are written "according to a scheme 
 too extravagant and scale too impracti- 
 cable " for poetic art. The method is, as 
 in all his poetry, introspective ; but the 
 introspection is as much that of autobio- 
 graphy as that of drama. " The thing/ 1 
 says Browning of Pauline^ " was my 
 earliest attempt at 'poetry always 
 dramatic in principle, and so many 
 utterances of so many imaginary 
 persons, not mine.'" Yet the reader 
 recognises in the three poems the over- 
 ambition and impatience of a genius 
 whose enthusiasm has not yet been 
 tempered into judgment by experience. 
 They are partly "confessions" of the 
 
BROWNING. 129 
 
 self-consciousness, at times almost mor- 
 bidity, of youth, before the soul has 
 realised and adjusted itself to limits. 
 In this respect they contrast with the 
 work of the author's genial maturity. 
 Save in occasional passages in Sordello, 
 the author's characteristic humour is 
 absent ; yet the germs of his genius may 
 be traced : his appetite for belief, his 
 devotion to art, and his analytic insight 
 into character. All his after-works, as 
 Sordello, treat of " incidents in the de- 
 velopment of a human soul." He trans- 
 lates and exalts 
 
 " The proper study of mankind is man." 
 
 Browning's Dramas, extending from 
 Strafford, three years before Sordello, to 
 Luria and A Soul's Tragedy, in 1846, 
 and interrupted by the publication of 
 his Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, 
 mark the second period in the develop- 
 ment of his genius. Some have been 
 successfully produced : none has kept 
 the stage. Yet they are neither obscure, 
 
130 BROWNING. 
 
 nor wanting in incident even sensa- 
 tional incident They are not generally 
 popular, because they lack scenic situa- 
 tion, and fail to appeal to the ordinary 
 interests of our theatre-going public. 
 Of the dramas, Colombe's Birthday is the 
 most pleasant and simple reading ; A 
 Blot on the 'Scutcheon is the best fitted 
 for dramatic representation. 
 
 For illustration, Pippa Passes may be 
 chosen, as the most characteristic and 
 most varied. 
 
 Pippa is a young factory girl who 
 works in the silk-mills of Asolo. It is 
 New Year's Day, her only holiday. In 
 the opening scene, she springs from bed 
 at sunrise, resolved to enjoy herself to 
 the full : she will not " squander a wave- 
 let," not " a mite of her twelve hours' 
 treasure." She has but this one day. 
 Others in Asolo may be happy the 
 whole year through. Ottima, her em- 
 ployer's wife, with her lover Sebald's 
 homage : Jules, the artist this is his 
 wedding-day : Luigi, the young revolu- 
 
 
BROWNING. 131 
 
 tionary enthusiast, who has a mother's 
 devotion : and the great Monsignor who 
 has just arrived from Rome to say 
 masses for his brother's soul : these 
 "Four Happiest Ones" she thinks of 
 and envies for a moment. Yet she re- 
 flects that after all God's love is best. 
 
 " Now wait ! even I already seem to share 
 In God's love : what does New-year's hymn declare? 
 What other meaning do these verses bear ? 
 All service ranks the same with God: 
 If now, as formerly he trod 
 Paradise, his presence Jills 
 Our earth, each only as God wills 
 Can work God's puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we ; there is no last nor first. 
 
 And more of it, and more of it ! oh yes 
 
 I will pass each, and see their happiness, 
 
 And envy none being just as great, no doubt, 
 
 Useful to men, and dear to God, as they ! 
 
 A pretty thing to care about 
 
 So mightily, this single holiday ! 
 
 But let the sun shine ! wherefore repine ? 
 
 With thee to lead me, O Day of mine, 
 
 Down the grass path grey with dew, 
 
 Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs, 
 
 Where the swallow never flew 
 
 Nor yet cicala dared carouse 
 
 No, dared carouse ! \_She enters the street" 
 
132 BROWNING. 
 
 Pippa's hymn is the text of the drama ; 
 her singing, as she passes Asolo's Four 
 Happiest Ones is the connecting thread 
 of the following Parts, which are little 
 more than independent Scenes, each re- 
 vealing an intense and critical moment 
 in a life. 
 
 In the first Part, Ottima, the silk- 
 spinner's wife, is with her lover, Sebald, 
 on the morning after her husband's 
 murder. With ' the blood-red beam 
 through the shutter's chink,' there come 
 to Sebald remembrance and remorse. 
 
 " Morning? 
 
 It seems to me a night with a sun added. 
 Where's dew, where's freshness? That bruised 
 
 plant, I bruised 
 
 In getting through the lattice yestereve, 
 Droops as it did. See, here's my elbow's mark 
 I' the dust o' the sill. 
 
 Ottima. Oh, shut the lattice, pray ! 
 
 Sebald. Let me lean out. I cannot scent 
 
 blood here, 
 Foul as the morn be. 
 
 There, shut the world out ! 
 How do you feel now, Ottima ? There, curse 
 The world and all outside ! Let us throw off 
 
BROWNING. 133 
 
 This mask : how do you bear yourself ? Let's out 
 With all of it." 
 
 Ottima, absorbed in her passion, tries to 
 drown his thought with wine, with 
 diversion to other themes, with remin- 
 iscences of their passionate past. For a 
 moment she succeeds. 
 
 Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect ; 
 Swift ran the scorching tempest overhead ; 
 And ever and anon some bright white shaft 
 Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and 
 
 there, 
 
 As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen 
 Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, 
 Feeling for guilty thee and me : then broke 
 The thunder like a whole sea overhead 
 
 Sebald. Yes ! 
 
 I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now \ 
 This way ? Will you forgive me be once more 
 My great queen ? 
 
 Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow ; 
 
 Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress, 
 Magnificent in sin. Say that ! 
 
 Sebald. I crown you 
 
 My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, 
 Magnificent . . 
 [From without is heard the voice 0/TiPPA, singing 
 
134 BROWNING. 
 
 The year's at the spring 
 And day's at the morn ; 
 Morning's at seven ; 
 The hill-side's de^v-pearled ; 
 The lark's on the wing ; 
 The snail's on the thorn : 
 God's in his heaven 
 All's right with the world! 
 
 [PiPPA passes. 
 Sebald. God's in his heaven ! Do you hear 
 
 that ? Who spoke ? 
 You, you spoke ! 
 
 Ottima. Oh that little ragged girl ! 
 
 She must have rested on the step : we give them 
 But this one holiday the whole year round. 
 Did you ever see our silk-mills their inside ? 
 There are ten silk-mills now belong to you. 
 She stoops to pick my double heartsease . . . Sh !" 
 
 But passion and guilt have lost the field. 
 
 Sebald. " My God, and she is emptied of it 
 
 now ! 
 
 Outright now ! how miraculously gone 
 All of the grace had she not strange grace once ? " 
 
 In the end the conscience of the man, 
 and the heart of the woman, are vic- 
 torious over death. 
 
 The second Part presents us with 
 
BROWNING. 135 
 
 " another way of love." Jules is the 
 victim of a plot devised by his brother 
 artists. They have led him to marry a 
 peasant girl whom he believes from a 
 feigned correspondence to be a cultured 
 lady ; and he is leaving her with revenge 
 on his enemies in his heart, when Pippa 
 passes and her singing again solves a 
 crisis. Her song, of " Kate the Queen " 
 who was beloved by her page, lures his 
 thoughts into a fresh channel. 
 
 "If whoever loves 
 
 Must be, in some sort, god or worshipper, 
 The blessing or the blest one, queen or page, 
 Why should we always choose the page's part ? 
 Here is a woman with utter need of me, 
 I find myself queen here, it seems ! 
 
 How strange ! 
 
 Look at the woman here with the new soul, 
 Like my own Psyche, fresh upon her lips 
 Alit, the visionary butterfly, 
 Waiting my word to enter and make bright, 
 Or flutter off and leave all blank as first . . .. ] ' 
 Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff 
 Be Art and further, to evoke a soul 
 From form be nothing ? This new soul is mine !" 
 
 Pygmalion finds a soul in himself as 
 
136 BROWNING. 
 
 well as in his bride. A spark from 
 Pippa's song reveals the egotism of his 
 life and work. He breaks his "paltry 
 models up to begin Art afresh," and 
 plans a nobler revenge for his enemy, 
 Lutwyche, in 
 
 " Some unsuspected isle in the far seas ! " 
 
 Patriotic passion is the subject of the 
 third Part ; and its moral is one of the 
 author's favourite texts, 
 
 " The unlit lamp and the ungirt loin ! " i 
 
 A mother is reasoning with her son at 
 sunset in the Turret on the Hill, and 
 has almost persuaded him to relinquish 
 for a personal love, a noble, because 
 nobly meant, self-sacrifice in his coun- 
 try's cause, when the chords of Pippa's 
 song rouse the political enthusiast from 
 his infirmity, and he rushes off to achieve 
 his end and save his honour. 
 
 The fourth and last Part introduces 
 
 i The Statue and the Bust. 
 
BROWNING. 137 
 
 the meagre plot that holds the play 
 together. The great Monsignor and 
 his Intendant are discovered conversing 
 in the Palace by the Duomo. Unknown 
 to Pippa, the man whom she has revered 
 and envied as " the holy and beloved 
 priest " is her wicked uncle. She is the 
 only child of an elder brother at whose 
 death Monsignor has connived. Pippa 
 is the one obstacle to his enjoyment of 
 her father's wealth ; and a plan is being 
 laid before him by the Intendant for her 
 ruin, when Pippa passes. Again some 
 note in her pure song converts a soul. 
 Springing up, he has summoned his 
 people to " gag this villain tie him 
 hand and foot " before the curtain falls 
 on his " Miserere met, Domine" 
 
 The play concludes, as it opened, 
 with a scene in Pippa's chamber, where 
 we find her, home again at sunset, 
 thoughtful over her day's experiences. 
 
 Now, one thing I should really like to know : 
 How near I ever might approach all these 
 I only fancied being, this long day : 
 I 
 
138 BROWNING. 
 
 Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so 
 As to ... in some way . . . move them 
 
 if you please, 
 
 Do good or evil to them some slight way. 
 For instance, if I wind 
 Silk to-morrow, my silk may bind 
 
 {Sitting on the bedside. 
 And border Ottima's cloak's hem. 
 Ah me, and my important part with them, 
 This morning's hymn half promised when I rose ! 
 True in some sense or other, I suppose. 
 
 [As she lies down. 
 
 God bless me ! I can pray no more to-night, 
 No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right. 
 
 All service ranks the same with God 
 
 With God, whose puppets ', best and worst. 
 
 Are we : there is no last nor first. 
 
 [She sleeps. 
 
 I have left unnoticed the Scene be- 
 tween each part the two first in verse, 
 the third in prose which admirably il- 
 lustrate the author's power of pathos and 
 of half-grotesque humour, and which 
 serve to cement the parts together. 
 
 Enough has been given, to show 
 that this work is not a drama in 
 the orthodox sense. It is built, not 
 woven : the intermediate scenes are but 
 
BROWNING. 139 
 
 mortar between the stones of a parti- 
 coloured column. The Parts are essen- 
 tially independent dramatic studies, 
 bound together by a series of applica- 
 tions of a text. 
 
 As another illustration of the drift of 
 Browning's method in his maturer work, 
 we might take A SouVs Tragedy, in 
 which the interest is almost entirely 
 centred in soliloquy. A shorter piece 
 will serve our purpose. In a Balcony, in 
 which the dramatist himself has recog- 
 nised that the part is better than the 
 whole, has a unity which many of his com- 
 plete dramas lack. There are but three 
 characters and one Scene. The lovers, 
 Norbert and Constance, are together on 
 the balcony of the Palace : the one, a 
 successful statesman, the other, a cousin 
 and dependant, of the Queen who is 
 this night holding a royal reception in 
 honour of Norbert's political success. 
 The lover wishes to claim his bride from 
 the Queen, as the reward of his service. 
 But Constance, from her knowledge of 
 
140 BROWNING. 
 
 her cousin, fears for the result, and at 
 last with difficulty persuades him to ask 
 the favour indirectly as a subtle flattery. 
 The solitary, heart-starved Queen has re- 
 ceived and mistaken Norbert's proposal 
 as one for her own hand, when she 
 enters to tell Constance of her joy. Con- 
 stance realises gradually her situation, 
 and with woman-like self-sacrifice braces 
 herself to resign her lover to one who 
 loves him with the passion of a long- 
 thwarted nature. When Norbert enters 
 to claim his reward, we are able to 
 realise the intensity of the climax which 
 the dramatist has chosen for one of his 
 subtlest revelations of character. 
 
 The method in this "Fragment" is 
 characteristic. 1 The purpose of con- 
 structing a unity out of diverse elements, 
 or of presenting the development of the 
 characters of his dramatis persona 
 
 1 From first to last, his dramas are studies "of 
 Action in Character, rather than Character in Action/ 
 Preface to Strafford (1837). 
 
BROWNING. 141 
 
 through scenic situation, is sacrificed 
 more and more to his main intention 
 of revealing the secret recesses of 
 individual souls. The critical moment 
 in which the soul is seen at its fullest is 
 of supreme interest to him ; the rest is 
 subsidiary. Pippa Passes is but four 
 moments chosen for the microscopic re- 
 velation of five " human souls" : In a 
 Balcony^ a scene in which the dramatist 
 catches three souls at their intensest life. 
 Thus it is but a step from Browning's 
 dramas to his dramatic lyrics and 
 romances. To the reader of his dramas 
 the question constantly occurs : What 
 the need of accessories at all, or of bind- 
 ing independent scenes together by 
 comparatively irrelevant details? "Why 
 such long prolusion and display?'* 
 Four years before the last of his dramas 
 the author himself had answered the 
 question by the publication of Dramatic 
 Lyrics (1842). This volume was followed 
 by Dramatic Romances and Lyrics ( 1 845), 
 Men and Women (1855), and Dramatis 
 
142 BROWNING. 
 
 Persona (1864), the similarity of method 
 in which marks the third period in his 
 genius. This method was more or less 
 a return from his attempts at 
 
 *' The simulation of the painted scene, 
 
 Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume " 
 
 to that in Paracelsus. But the author 
 has matured his dramatic treatment by 
 realizing its essential limitations. As in 
 Paracelsus, " instead of having recourse 
 to an external machinery of incidents to 
 create and evolve the crisis," he has 
 " suffered the agency by which it is 
 influenced and determined, to be gener- 
 ally discernible in its effects alone, and 
 subordinate throughout, if not altogether 
 excluded." But in his Dramatic Lyrics 
 the dramatist has found it expedient to 
 reduce his canvas, and to attempt the 
 " minute display " notr of a series of 
 pictures, but of one. In these four 
 volumes the microscopic lens of Brown- 
 ing's imagination has found its focus. It 
 is needless to take them separately ; it 
 
BROWNING. 143 
 
 would be idle to classify poems of such 
 varied subject and purpose. 1 Yet it is 
 well to illustrate their most marked 
 variations of form and conception. 
 
 My Last Duchess is the first of the 
 author's " monologues " : though eclipsed 
 by some, such as Fra Lippo Lippi and 
 Andrea del Sarto y in interest and scope 
 of subject, it is typical of all. Like the 
 separate scenes of his former work, 
 this piece is a momentary study which 
 has yet brought every minute trait into 
 a strong relief. But it is set alone, a unity 
 within itself ; preliminary introduction to 
 the person or the situation is dispensed 
 with ; and the actor is left to reveal 
 himself. Dramatic action and accessory 
 are reduced to their barest limits. Who 
 is the speaker, and what are the cir- 
 cumstances, are questions the answer 
 
 i The vagueness of the distinction between Lyric 
 and Romance is evident from the fact that the author 
 himself has in later editions transferred pieces from 
 one class to the other. 
 
144 BROWNING. 
 
 to which must be gathered from the 
 speech. A first reading will reveal that 
 " A widowed Duke of Ferrara is exhibit- 
 ing the portrait of his former wife, to the 
 envoy of some nobleman, whose daughter 
 he proposes to marry." A deeper reading 
 will be requisite to realize that it is a 
 minute and masterly creation of "a 
 typical autocrat of the Renaissance, 
 with his serene self-composure of selfish- 
 ness, quiet, uncompromising cruelty, and 
 genuine devotion to art." 
 
 Of the author's originality of dramatic 
 conception and method in these volumes, 
 this example is but a general type. 
 Every piece is a variation, ranging 
 from passion to reflection, from argu- 
 ment to narrative. Some are soliloquies 
 rather than speeches ; some, songs 
 rather than soliloquies ; others, simple 
 stories simply told. The monologue 
 serves in one to recall a drama, in 
 another to discuss a problem, in a third 
 to catch a mood. Yet, however varied 
 the process, each contains a soul " under 
 
 
 \. 
 
BROWNING. 145 
 
 lock and key " ; each is, as it were, the 
 plate of a camera, which developes to 
 its minutest detail, before our eyes. The 
 variety in subject of these poems is as 
 marvellous as that in their conception ; 
 and each piece has a rhythm and 
 rhyme of its own. Love is a pro- 
 vince in every recess of which Brown- 
 ing has asserted supremacy. The 
 reader turns from the measured cadence 
 of Evelyn Hope to the warble of My 
 Star, from, the half-humourous, half- 
 pathetic rhymes of Youth and A rt to the 
 grave melody of The Worst of It. The 
 ferocity of the Soliloquy of the Spanish 
 Cloister and The Confessional 'are equally 
 within the poet's compass, with the mis- 
 understandings of A Lover's Quarrel 
 and the reflective calm of By the Fireside. 
 The characteristic of all is that they are 
 dramatic. Each is the minute imagina- 
 tive transcript, not of an abstract feeling, 
 but of an individual mood. 
 
 Many of the shorter lyrics, as Home 
 Thoughts from Abroad and The Eng- 
 
146 BROWNING. 
 
 lishman in Italy, are little more than 
 pictures of nature ; yet the description is 
 always made to reflect the mood ; it 
 never loses its dramatic quality. The 
 scene in Love among the Ruins : 
 
 " Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, 
 
 Miles and miles 
 On the solitary pastures where our sheep 
 
 Half-asleep 
 
 Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop 
 As they crop " 
 
 is not a mere setting, but an essential 
 part of the portrait. Or take for another 
 example the following passage from 
 Saul, where David blends his spirit and 
 the fields around him into music 
 
 " Then I tuned my harp, took off the lilies we twine 
 
 round its chords 
 Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide those 
 
 sunbeams like swords ! 
 And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one 
 
 after one, 
 So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be 
 
 done. 
 They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they 
 
 have fed 
 Where the long grasses stifle the water within the 
 
 stream's bed ; 
 
BROWNING. 147 
 
 And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star 
 
 follows star 
 Into eve and the blue far above us, so blue and so 
 
 far ! " 
 
 This dramatic method was adapted to 
 other purposes than individual portraiture; 
 purposes which, though for the most part 
 secondary in those four volumes, have in 
 his later work a more and more prominent 
 place, viz., the presentation of historical 
 pictures and of philosophic and didactic 
 argument. Even the first of the poet's 
 shorter pieces My Last Duchess, Count 
 Gismond y and the Soliloquy of the 
 Spanish Cloister are each a picture not 
 only of an individual or a mood, but of 
 an age and nation. These were fol- 
 lowed by a series of historical studies, 
 taken from almost every nationality 
 and period of importance in the past, 
 and extending from the first Hebrew 
 king to a Catholic bishop of our time. 
 Of mediaeval Florence we have Fra 
 Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto ; of 
 Venice in her decline, A Toccata 
 
I 4 8 BROWNING. 
 
 of Galuppi's ; of the first Christian 
 century, Clean, An Epistle of Kar- 
 shish and A Death on the Desert ; 
 of the Middle-Ages and Renaissance, 
 The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. 
 Praxed's Church, A Grammarian's 
 Funeral, and Holy Cross Day. In some 
 the interest is in the character, in others 
 it is centred in the history, in all 
 we discover the exceptional scope and 
 accuracy of the scholar's learning as of 
 the poet's imagination. In many of the 
 above poems, the conception is not only 
 historical but philosophical. 
 
 From Pauline to Parley ings with 
 Certain People,\he metaphysics of religion 
 and art has had over the poet an equal 
 fascination with that of history. The 
 subject of Sordello and Paracelsus is more 
 philosophical than dramatic. In the work 
 of his maturer years we find the author 
 applying more and more frequently his 
 monologue to dramatic exposition of 
 problems. The first two volumes of his 
 Lyrics and Romances do not reveal 
 
BROWNING. 149 
 
 this ; but Christmas Eve and Easter 
 Day, published in 1850, is an avowed 
 study in the philosophy of religion. 
 Men and Women, which followed five 
 years after, contains one or two pieces, 
 such as The Statue and the Bust, A 
 Grammarians Funeral, Popularity, and 
 Transcendentalism, which are openly 
 didactic, a few which are each a study in 
 character, history, and philosophy in one, 
 as An Epistle of Karshish, Cleon, and 
 Saul. In Dramatis Persona (1864), the 
 majority of the pieces are critical and 
 metaphysical. Mr. Sludge the Medium 
 is a companion study in casuistry to 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology ; Abt Vogler, 
 Rabbi ben Ezra, A Death in the Desert, 
 and Caliban upon Setebos, are philosophy 
 dramatically presented ; and each narra- 
 tive piece has a moral, though not always 
 expressed. 
 
 The later volumes of the poet' s shorter 
 pieces, Pacchiarotto, with f other Poems 
 (1876), Dramatic Idyls (1880), Jocoseria 
 (1883), Ferishtatts Fancies (1884), and 
 
150 BROWNING. 
 
 Parleyings with Certain People (1887), 
 are evidence of the poet's lyric and dra- 
 matic fertility ; but in variety of subject 
 and method they differ only slightly 
 from the specimens already named ; and 
 there may be traced in their dramatic 
 treatment an increasing tendency to 
 sacrifice the study of character to that of 
 artistic, philosophic, or religious prob- 
 lems. In his two last volumes, the dra- 
 matist is swallowed up in the scholiast : 
 the one is a collection of allegories in 
 Persian dress with lyrical interpretations, 
 the other a series of metaphysical dis- 
 cussions on religion, science, and art. 
 
 Since The Ring and the Book (1868), 
 Browning has published other longer 
 works. Balaustioris Adventure (1871), 
 Aristophanes' Apology (1875), and The 
 Agamemnon (1877), are studies from the 
 Greek of Euripides and ^Eschylus, and 
 contain translations which are astonish- 
 ing for their literal perfection. The Inn 
 Album (1875), The Two Poets of Croisic 
 ( 1 878), Prince Hohenstiel - Schwangau 
 
BROWNING. 151 
 
 (1871), Fifine at the Fair (1872), and 
 Red Cotton Night-cap Country (1873), 
 are studies in narrative based on facts, 
 characteristic of Browning's involved 
 and subtle treatment ; the first two are 
 comparatively simple reading. La Sai- 
 siaz (1878), which has an even slighter 
 dramatic setting than Christmas Eve, 
 and is a purely philosophic poem on 
 immortality, exhausts the catalogue of 
 the poet's works, since the publication of 
 his masterpiece. 
 
 The Ring and the Book marks the 
 crest of the wave of Browning's genius. 
 It is the crowning evidence of the drama- 
 tist's originality of style. He has here 
 found a subject for a larger canvas than 
 that of his former monologues, yet 
 demanding essentially the same treat- 
 ment. A critical analysis is outside our 
 purpose which will be served by an 
 indication of the plan of the work. The 
 first of the twelve Books tells the story, 
 " a mere Roman murder case," in full 
 detail, showing clearly the bearing and 
 
152 BROWNING. 
 
 consequence of each event, as well as 
 the right and wrong of each dramatis 
 persona. The poet thus shows us at the 
 outset that his purpose is not to tell a 
 story. Here are the bare facts : 
 
 "Count Guido Franceschini the Aretine, 
 Descended of an ancient house, though poor, 
 A beak-nosed, bushy-bearded, black-haired lord, 
 Lean, pallid, low of stature yet robust, 
 Fifty years old, having four years ago 
 Married Pompilia Comparini, young, 
 Good, beautiful, at Rome, where she was born, 
 And brought her to Arezzo, where they lived 
 Unhappy lives, whatever curse the cause, 
 This husband, taking four accomplices, 
 Followed this wife to Rome, where she was fled 
 From their Arezzo to find peace again, 
 In convoy, eight months earlier, of a priest, 
 Aretine also, of still nobler birth, 
 Giuseppe Caponsacchi, caught her there 
 Quiet in a villa on a Christmas night, 
 With only Pietro and Violante by, 
 Both her putative parents ; killed the three, 
 Aged, they, seventy each, and she, seventeen, 
 And, two weeks since, the mother of his babe 
 First born and heir to what the style was worth 
 O' the Guido who determined, dared and did 
 This deed just as he purposed point by point. 
 Then, bent upon escape, but hotly pressed, 
 
BROWNING. 153 
 
 And captured with his co-mates that same night, 
 
 He, brought to trial, stood on this defence 
 
 Injury to his honour caused the act ; 
 
 And since his wife was false, (as manifest 
 
 By flight from home in such companionship,) 
 
 Death, punishment deserved of the false wife 
 
 And faithless parents who abetted her 
 
 I' the flight aforesaid, wronged nor God nor man. 
 
 ' Nor false she, nor yet faithless they,' replied 
 
 The accuser ; 'cloaked and masked this murder glooms ; 
 
 * True was Pompilia, loyal too the pair ; 
 
 * Out of the man's own heart a monster curled 
 
 ' Which crime coiled with connivancy at crime 
 ' His victim's breast, he tells you, hatched and reared ; 
 ' Uncoil we and stretch stark the worm of hell ! ' 
 A month the trial swayed this way and that 
 Ere judgment settled down on Guide's guilt ; 
 Then was the Pope, that good Twelfth Innocent, 
 Appealed to : who well weighed what went before, 
 Affirmed the guilt and gave the guilty doom." 
 
 This narrative is but a key by which 
 the dramatist proposes to unlock the 
 recesses of nine souls ; and he proceeds 
 to do this by ten monologues, in each 
 of which a character tells his version 
 of the story. The second, third, and 
 fourth books represent the views of the 
 public of Rome : two of them, " Half- 
 K 
 
154 BROWNING. 
 
 Rome" and "The Other Half-Rome," 
 taking opposite sides, equally inconclu- 
 sive, and the third, " Tertium Quid," re- 
 presenting the aristocratic impartiality 
 of indifference. In the next three mono- 
 logues, the persons of the drama bear 
 witness of themselves, Count Guido and 
 Caponsacchi before the court, Pompilia 
 on her deathbed. The two following 
 books reveal the lawyers on each side, 
 engaged in the composition of their re- 
 spective statements of the case. Then 
 comes the memorable soliloquy of the 
 Pope, to whom the case has been referred 
 for judgment ; next we listen to Guido's 
 second monologue on the night before 
 his death. The last book, like the first, 
 contains the author's narrative, which 
 completes the whole by gathering up 
 the different threads and relating Guido's 
 execution. The poet adds to this, as to 
 the first book, a lyric addressed to his 
 wife, over whom the grave had closed. 
 
 This is a bare statement of the plan of 
 Browning's masterpiece, which marshals 
 
BROWNING. 155 
 
 in a splendid phalanx all the great 
 qualities scattered throughout his pre- 
 ceding work, yet a masterpiece marred 
 by the appearance of a FalstafTs "ragged 
 regiment " of quaint puerilities, ingeni- 
 ously stupid conceits, and unfathomable 
 nonsense. The stream of Browning's 
 genius is constantly overflowing its banks 
 and stagnating in marshes. Of his ten- 
 dency to grotesqueness we saw an indi- 
 cation as far back as Pippa Passes ; but 
 the pranks which his supersubtlety plays 
 through the mouths of the two lawyers, 
 with their rudimentary Latin and nonde- 
 script inanities, come upon us with a 
 shock. As Landor pointed out fifty years 
 ago, the poet's lynx-eyed vision sees 
 every possible aspect of the human pro- 
 blem which it views. His characteristic 
 error is in attempting to see too much, 
 in peering and botanizing, or in imagin- 
 ing impossible fourth dimensions. This 
 is the genesis of that grotesqueness, 
 which, like the "canker in the fairest 
 
156 BROWNING. 
 
 bud," takes most definite shape in his 
 greatest work. 
 
 In the work of an artist like Tennyson, 
 we see the picture, and the picture alone. 
 In that of Browning, we see each stroke 
 of the brush and mark of the thumb, the 
 very net-work of his canvas. He inserts 
 everything : he puts all his notes into the 
 text. In the Idylls of the King we have 
 the wine of the grapes ; in The Ring and 
 the Book, twelve baskets-full of leaves 
 and fruit. 
 
 Browning's interest in everything is as 
 intense as Nature's ; and, when inspired, 
 he works like Nature herself. His three 
 greatest exhibitions of this power are 
 Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and the Pope. 
 It is scarcely less manifest in the presen- 
 tation of Count Guido Franceschini, a 
 villain with the cunning of lago, the 
 cowardness and meanness of Jonas 
 Chuzzlewit. To find a parallel for Pom- 
 pilia we must go beyond fiction. More 
 than the devout Catholic imagines of 
 goodness, of womanhood, of tenderness 
 
BROWNING. 157 
 
 made divine by sorrow, in the Virgin 
 Mother, is realized in her. Of Capon- 
 sacchi, Pompilia's " soldier-saint," with 
 " the broad brow that reverberates the 
 truth," what praise is needed more than 
 this, that she would have sprung to his 
 " great heart " and " strong hand," 
 
 ' * beckoning across 
 Murder and hell gigantic and distinct 
 O' the threshold, posted to exclude me heaven." 
 
 In the Pope, the old man who stands 
 awestruck and trembling, but faithful 
 and strong, between heaven and hell, to 
 whom every moment is the Judgment- 
 Day, who looks upon himself as the con- 
 science of the world, we have the most 
 complete revelation of Browning's genius. 
 All the resources of his learning are with 
 apparent spontaneity brought to the ser- 
 vice of his fancy. The blank verse peals 
 and lightens : the poet wields it like Thor 
 smiting icebergs with his hammer. His 
 analytic power is here transformed into 
 intuition. No soul that has communed 
 
158 BROWNING. 
 
 with destiny since Shakspeare's spirit 
 brooded on the world, has so divided 
 light from darkness, distilled evil from 
 good, and u vindicated the ways of God 
 to man," as Browning has in the greatest 
 poem of the twelve that make up The 
 Ring and the Book. 
 
 *' I stood at Naples once, a night so dark 
 
 I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 
 Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : 
 But the night's black was burst through by a blaze 
 Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and 
 
 bore, 
 
 Through her whole length of mountain visible : 
 There lay the city thick and plain with spires, 
 And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
 So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, 
 And Guido see, one instant, and be saved. 
 Else I avert my face, nor follow him 
 Into that sad obscure sequestered state 
 Where God unmakes but to remake the soul 
 He else made first in vain ; which must not be. 
 Enough, for I may die this very night 
 And how should I dare die, this man let live ? 
 
 Carry this forthwith to the Governor ! " 
 
 Introduction to the uninitiated reader is 
 in this work less called for than in the 
 
BROWNING. 159 
 
 shorter pieces; for the poet himself sup- 
 plies it. Many, therefore, to whom his 
 Dramatic Lyrics are mere perplexities, 
 will find here little difficulty. 
 
 It is difficult to give any adequate 
 idea of Browning's style ; for he has all 
 styles. In variety of rhythm and fertility 
 of rhyme he is among English poets un- 
 surpassed. The metre of each poem is an 
 essential part of its conception ; he turns 
 with almost provoking rapidity from lyric 
 to narrative, from passion to reflection, 
 from the swiftness of a crisis to the 
 casuistry of an argument. 
 
 As an illustration of the lyrist's melody, 
 take Mertoun's song z : 
 
 " There's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer 
 
 than the purest ; 
 And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her 
 
 sure faith's the surest : 
 And her eyes are dark and humid, like the depth 
 
 on depth of lustre 
 Hid i' the harebell, while her tresses, sunnier than 
 
 the wild-grape cluster, 
 
 1 A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, Act I., Scene 3. 
 
160 BROWNING. 
 
 Gush in golden-tinted plenty down her neck's rose- 
 misted marble ; 
 
 Then her voice's music . . . call it the well's 
 bubbling, the bird's warble I 
 
 And this woman says, ' My days were sunless and 
 
 my nights were moonless, 
 ' Parched the pleasant April herbage, and the lark's 
 
 heart's outbreak tuneless, 
 * If you loved me not ! ' And I who (ah, for words 
 
 of flame !) adore her, 
 Who am mad to lay my spirit prostrate palpably 
 
 before her 
 I may enter at her portal soon, as now her lattice 
 
 takes me, 
 And by noontide as by midnight make her mine, 
 
 as hers she makes me ! " 
 
 Or turn to these lines in James Lee's 
 Wife, which the lapping sea sets to its 
 music : 
 
 " Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth, 
 This autumn morning ! How he sets his bones 
 To bask i } the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet 
 For the ripple to run over in its mirth ; 
 
 Listening the while, where on the heap of stones 
 The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet. " 
 
 The reader of either volume of the 
 poet's Selections will find a fresh accent 
 
BROWNING. 161 
 
 in every poem. The organ-notes of Abt 
 Vogler^ the march of the Cavalier Tunes, 
 the hand-gallop of Through the Metidja 
 to Abd-el-Kadr, show a mastery over 
 metre as remarkable as the variety in the 
 blank verse of Fra Lippo Lippi, of 
 Andrea del Sarto, of Bishop Blougram, 
 and of Sludge. 1 In his pride of strength 
 the poet at times seems to make his task 
 purposely difficult. Like a Japanese 
 acrobat he dances under a heavy weight. 
 In many pieces his grotesque humour 
 finds vent in the double jingle of eccen- 
 tric, sometimes preposterous rhymes, as 
 in Youth and Art 
 
 " We studied hard in our styles, 
 
 Chipped each a crust like Hindoos, 
 For air looked out on the tiles, 
 For fun watched each other's windows. . . 
 
 " No harm ! It was not my fault 
 
 If you never turned your eye's tail up 
 As I shook upon E in alt, 
 
 Or ran the chromatic scale up : . . . 
 
 i Compare also the varieties in the blank verse of 
 the different monologues of The Ring and the Book. 
 
162 BROWNING. 
 
 " But I think I gave you as good ! 
 
 * That foreign fellow who can know 
 * How she pays, in a playful mood, 
 
 * For his tuning her that piano ? ' 
 
 " Could you say so, and never say 
 
 * Suppose we join hands and fortunes, 
 ' And I fetch her from over the way, 
 
 ' Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes ? ' " 
 
 Browning's emotion in turning the 
 leaves of the Book he found in Florence, 
 the reader of Master Hugues of Saxe- 
 Gotha might suppose him to feel in 
 turning the leaves of an English 
 Dictionary. 
 
 " A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb, 
 And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair, 
 Letting me have my will again with these." J 
 
 Strength, sweetness, discord and melody 
 are jostled together in his pages ; but even 
 amid the distracting metaphysics of his 
 later volumes, we are constantly arrested 
 by strains which prove that the philoso- 
 pher has not absorbed the poet. 
 
 i The Ring and the Book, I., 776-778. 
 
BROWNING. 163 
 
 The harshness of much of Browning's 
 verse is undeniable. The author him- 
 self admits it. Yet he holds, as his 
 defence, that harshness also has its uses. 
 
 " * Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke : 
 Soil so quick receptive, not one feather-seed, 
 Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke 
 Vitalizing virtue : song would song succeed 
 Sudden and spontaneous prove a poet-soul ! * 
 
 Indeed? 
 
 Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare : 
 Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their 
 
 rage 
 
 Vainly both expend, few flowers awaken there : 
 Quiet in its cleft broods what the after age 
 Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage." 
 
 Each class of poetic as of natural 
 creation has its own laws. The drama, 
 of necessity, cannot have the lyric's 
 " linked sweetness " ; and Browning's 
 dramatic pieces demand, by reason of 
 their subject and treatment, a soil even 
 more rocky than that of the ordinary 
 drama. His choice of subject is the 
 root of his " perverse harshness." The 
 question is, whether the discussion of 
 
1 64 BROWNING. 
 
 religious and artistic metaphysics, or 
 the making of a lawyer's Latin speech, is 
 a soil possible for poetic growth. The 
 products which have forced their way to 
 light amid these rocks, we must leave 
 to an " after age " to " know and name." 
 Boldness has been the poet's advocate 
 from first to last. He has entered the 
 first doors of Busyrane, although he has 
 sometimes forgotten the inscription on 
 the last door. x " Sense above sound " 
 has been his timely motto for the present 
 day. 2 Yet Beauty is the only elixir of 
 
 i " And, as she lookt about, she did behold 
 
 How over that same dore was likewise writ, 
 
 Be bolde, be bolde, and every where, Be bold ; 
 
 That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it 
 
 By any ridling skill, or commune wit. 
 
 At last she spyde at that rowmes upper end 
 
 Another yron dore, on which was writ, 
 
 Be not too bold ; whereto though she did bend 
 
 Her earnest minde, yet wist not what it might 
 
 intend." 
 The Faerie Queene, book iii., canto xi., 54. 
 
 2 " The admiration of ancient authors, the hate of 
 the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, . . . 
 
BROWNING. 165 
 
 of Wisdom. In Browning's latest works 
 as in those of Wordsworth, of Carlyle, 
 and even of Goethe, we see the tendency 
 of artists past their maturity to grow im- 
 patient of restrictions, to prefer didactic 
 themes, and more and more to neglect, 
 both in conception and in style, the vital 
 principles of artistic creation. 
 
 Browning's " obscurity" is almost in- 
 separable from his " harshness." In the 
 one case as in the other, we must under- 
 stand before we censure. The difficulty 
 of any great thinker's poetry is constantly 
 magnified by those who have seen little 
 of it. Sordello, Fifine at the Fair, Prince 
 
 did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and 
 copie of speech. . . . This grew speedily to an 
 excess ; for men began to hunt more after words than 
 matter ; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and 
 the round and clean composition of the sentence, and 
 the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and 
 illustration of their works with tropes and figures, 
 than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, 
 soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of 
 judgement." Of the Advancement of Learning. 
 Book I. 
 
166 BROWNING. 
 
 Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and Red Cotton 
 Night-Cap Country ', one or two of our 
 author's lyrics and romances, as Childe 
 Roland^ and many of his latest meta- 
 physical and critical pieces are certainly 
 hard reading. With a few exceptions, 
 none of his poems can be called simple. 
 But their author " never pretended to 
 offer such literature as should be a sub- 
 stitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes 
 to an idle man." 1 There is a passage in 
 Carlyle's Essay on Goethe's Helena 
 which is so appropriate a defence of the 
 so-called " obscurity " of Browning's 
 best poems, as to justify my adaptation 
 of some sentences : 
 
 " If an artist has conceived his subject 
 in the secret shrine of his own mind, and 
 knows, with a knowledge beyond all 
 power of cavil, that it is true and pure, 
 he may choose his own manner of ex- 
 hibiting it, and will generally be the 
 fittest to choose it well. One degree of 
 
 i From one of Browning's letters. 
 
BROWNING. 167 
 
 light, he may find, will beseem one 
 delineation ; quite a different degree of 
 light another. The face of Agamemnon 
 was not painted but hidden in the old 
 picture : the Veiled Figure at Sais was 
 the most expressive in the Temple. 
 . . . Under Goethe's management, 
 this style of composition has often 
 a singular charm. The reader is kept 
 on the alert, ever conscious of his own 
 active co-operation : light breaks on him, 
 and clearer and clearer vision, by 
 degrees ; till at last the whole lovely 
 Shape comes forth, definite, it may be, 
 and bright with heavenly radiance, or 
 fading, on this side and that, into vague 
 expressive mystery, but true in both 
 cases, and beautiful with nameless en- 
 chantments, as the poet's own eye may 
 have beheld it. We love it the more for 
 the labour it has given us : we almost 
 feel as if we ourselves had assisted in its 
 creation. ... A reposing state, in 
 which the Hill of Vision were brought 
 under us, not we obliged to mount it, 
 
1 68 BROWNING. 
 
 might indeed for the present be more 
 convenient ; but, in the end, it could not 
 be equally satisfying. Continuance of 
 passive pleasure, it should never be 
 forgotten, is here, as under all conditions 
 of mortal existence, an impossibility. . 
 . . It is not what we receive, but what 
 we are made to give, that chiefly con- 
 tents and profits us. True, the mass of 
 readers will object ; because, like the 
 mass of men, they are too indolent. But 
 if any one affect, not the active and 
 watchful, but the passive and somnolent 
 line of study, are there not writers 
 expressly fashioned for him, enough and 
 to spare ? It is but the smaller number 
 of books that become more instructive 
 by a second perusal : the great majority 
 are as perfectly plain as perfect triteness 
 can make them." 
 
 The difficulties which meet the stu- 
 dent of Browning's poetry are, not only 
 over-stated but often mis-stated. It is 
 instructive to trace them to their sources. 
 
 In Browning's style there is less verbal 
 
BROWNING. 169 
 
 or grammatical difficulty than is com- 
 monly supposed. A few mannerisms 
 such as " i' the," and " o' the," an occa- 
 sional involved or clumsy sentence, more 
 often the persistent tracking of some 
 conceit, or a pedantic and obscure 
 allusion, are the main superficial per- 
 plexities in his poems. Steeped in 
 Greek, Rabbinical and Mediaeval his- 
 tory and art, the most learned of our 
 living poets, he refuses to realise that 
 the majority of his readers are ignorant. 
 But the essential "obscurity" of the 
 poet's style is inherent in the originality 
 of his conceptions. His subjects are 
 often not only profound, but rare ; 
 they demand from the student an exer- 
 cise not only of his metaphysical; but of 
 his practically analytic powers. Accu- 
 racy and precision are, as a rule, 
 more fairly rated than sympathy of 
 thought. Though In Memoriam is 
 in many respects a more difficult 
 poem than The Ring and the Book> 
 it appeals to faculties usually better 
 
170 BROWNING. 
 
 trained. For one reader who can 
 track in a drama the undercurrents of 
 an individual mood, a hundred will 
 be found who can enjoy a poem of 
 reflective sentiment. The difficulty is 
 thus primarily one of subject and concep- 
 tion. In the microscopic subtlety neces- 
 sary to Browning's purpose, terseness and 
 diffuseness are alike unavoidable ; but 
 neither commissions nor omissions are 
 so much of words as of thoughts. If 
 by " obscurity " is meant a looseness of 
 grasp or haziness of expression, Brown- 
 ing is guiltless. " He is something too 
 much the reverse of obscure ; he is too 
 brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of 
 a ready writer to follow with any certainty 
 the track of an intelligence which moves 
 with such incessant rapidity, or even to 
 realise with what spider-like swiftness 
 and sagacity his building spirit leaps and 
 lightens to and fro and backward and 
 forward, as it lives along the animated 
 line of its labour, springs from thread to 
 thread, and darts from centre to circum- 
 
BROWNING. 171 
 
 ference of the glittering and quivering 
 web of living thought, woven from the 
 inexhaustible stores of his perception 
 and kindled from the inexhaustible fire 
 of his imagination." x 
 
 This spiderlike method in his dramatic 
 pieces is the essential difficulty in read- 
 ing Browning. His Lyrics, Romances, 
 Men and Women, and Dramatis Personcz 
 are, as it were, cocoons, which can only 
 be unravelled, as they were spun, from 
 within. 
 
 In his own age it is impossible to 
 determine the place of an original poet ; 
 for the very fact of his originality places 
 him, if not beyond, at least outside of 
 comparison. Yet to reach a true estimate 
 of his originality it is serviceable to con- 
 trast him with his predecessors. Much has 
 been written to indicate and illustrate the 
 distinction between Shakespeare's and 
 Browning's art. The difference, apart from 
 
 1 George Chapman : a Critical Essay, by A. C. 
 Swinburne. 
 
i;2 BROWNING. 
 
 the question as to their relative greatness, 
 is characteristic of the difference between 
 their times. The common statement 
 that Shakespeare reveals his characters 
 acting, while Browning reveals them 
 thinking, suggests, but does not define, 
 the contrast ; for the contrast is not only 
 one of method, but of subject and 
 purpose. To the author of Hamlet the 
 drama was the creation of a world 
 of deed and speech, of character as it 
 expressed itself through the action and 
 interaction of circumstance. Even in 
 that play in which the thought and 
 treatment are most akin to those of 
 modern times, the inner world is never 
 bared before us: the dramatist refuses to 
 analyse. The currents of the soul, if 
 they must be shown, are physically re- 
 presented, as in the appearance of the 
 Ghost. We catch the tone of irony in 
 Hamlet's conversations with the King, 
 Polonius, and the courtiers ; we note his 
 conflicting shame and pity for his 
 mother ; we observe his confidence in 
 
BROWNING. 173 
 
 his friend, and justify his distrust of his 
 love. But the current of outward action 
 moves on ; save for a half-conscious re- 
 velation in soliloquy, the unseen world of 
 thought remains, as in life, "an open 
 secret." A half-conscious revelation of a 
 mood in soliloquy. " The rest is silence," 
 which the dramatist has left for the 
 analysts of after times to break. 
 
 Browning is creator and analyst in 
 one. Even in his " dramas," the ordinary 
 method of presentation is reversed. The 
 evolution of incident is sacrificed to the re- 
 velation of character ; and he is ever leav- 
 ing and interrupting the progress of the 
 action for the minute display of shifting 
 moods and motives. Art is a compromise ; 
 and in making this choice, the artist had 
 to make sacrifices. This concentra- 
 tion of focus led him, as we have seen, 
 to a smaller canvas in his dramatic 
 " studies." Under the microscope sec- 
 tions alone can be seen. What has been 
 gained in intensity, has been lost in ex- 
 tension. 
 
174 BROWNING. 
 
 It is needless to demand from this 
 modern dramatic method, the archi- 
 tectonic power of Shakspeare's con- 
 ception which, in the very moment of 
 creation, selects and moulds the di- 
 verse scenes and characters into a 
 unity, in which each reflects and sup- 
 plies what is wanting in the rest. To 
 Browning a monologue, or at most a 
 dialogue, is adequate. A moment or 
 an incident is all that can be brought 
 within his focus. The form of presen- 
 tation may be varied by dramatic 
 narrative. The studies may even, as in 
 The Ring and the -Book, be ranged 
 together as a series. But every work of 
 Browning's derives its essential unity (or 
 series of unities) from the creation of a 
 character or a mood. Shakspeare's men 
 and women are a world ; Browning's 
 world is a collection of Men and Women. 
 
 Yet the sacrifice of synthetic unity is 
 balanced by qualities which are to us 
 eminently serviceable.- This new dra- 
 matic method is especially fitted for the 
 
BROWNING. 175 
 
 " minute display," not only of subtle 
 currents of emotion and of modern ap- 
 paritions of character, but of the infinite 
 complexities of life and thought which 
 this fresh consciousness has brought 
 along with it. In his works the horizon 
 of history has been illumined, and by 
 the interpretation of a past age he has 
 interpreted his own. From the problems 
 of psychology he has turned to those of 
 justice and expediency, of religion and 
 art, and in each he has sought the 
 solution, not by abstract analysis of 
 principles, but by the dramatic creation 
 of individual instances. 
 
 The poet's defence of this application 
 of his art is to be found throughout his 
 works. We choose the short poem 
 which opens his volume Men and 
 Women as the most succinct and 
 explicit Transcendentalism may be 
 called Browning's Apologia pro Arte 
 Sua. The author interrupts the sup- 
 posed writer of a poem in Twelve Books 
 entitled " Transcendentalism." 
 
j 76 BROWNING. 
 
 " Stop playing, poet ! May a brother speak ? 
 
 'Tis you speak, that's your error. Song's our art : 
 Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts 
 Instead of draping them in sights and sounds. 
 True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to 
 
 treasure up ! 
 
 But why such long prolusion and display, 
 Such tuning and adjustment of the harp, 
 And taking it upon your breast, at length, 
 Only to speak dry words across its strings ? 
 Stark-naked thought is in request enough : 
 Speak prose, and hollo it till Europe hears ! . . . 
 
 "But here's your fault; grown men want thought, 
 
 you think ; 
 Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in 
 
 verse ? 
 
 Boys seek for images and melody, 
 Men must have reason so, you aim at men. 
 Quite otherwise ! Objects throng our youth, 'tis 
 
 true ; 
 
 We see and hear and do not wonder much : 
 If you could tell us what they mean, indeed ! " 
 
 This, concludes Browning, is the 
 end of art. Take the musty Boehme 
 and his thought-lore. What has his 
 volume of mystical abstraction regarding 
 plants done for us ? 
 
BROWNING. 177 
 
 " We shut the clasps and find life's summer past. 
 Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss ? " 
 
 Is it not the poet, the " makar," 
 
 " Who made things Boehme wrote thoughts 
 about ? 
 
 He with a * look you ! ' vents a brace of rhymes, 
 And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, 
 Over us, under, round us every side, 
 Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs 
 And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all 
 Buries us with a glory, young once more, 
 Pouring heaven into this shut house of life. 
 
 " So come, the harp back to your heart again ! 
 You are a poem, though your poem's naught ! " . . 
 
 We have here the raison d'etre^ not only 
 of the poet but of the dramatist, as 
 the interpreter. Not in criticisms or 
 theories, but in creations, are the 
 thoughts of our age to be re- 
 presented. To realise life to any pur- 
 pose, we must see it in living men and 
 women. Their thoughts and passions 
 must become " incidents in the develop- 
 ment of a human soul." 
 
178 BROWNING. 
 
 This poem is not the defence only of 
 the dramatist's analytic, but of his 
 " realistic " method. The realism of our 
 present art has taken many phases : 
 all can be ranged under two classes. 
 There is the realism which pictures for 
 us the the most trivial or the most 
 repulsive details of life, with no ob- 
 ject save to satisfy the craving of un- 
 imaginative minds for the sensation 
 of stupidity or of horror, for no reason 
 except that they are more or less accu- 
 rate photographs of what exists. This 
 realism through which we see no imagi- 
 native light or spiritual meaning, we do 
 not find in Browning's work. There is 
 much minute detail of what in life seems 
 insignificant or unpleasant. But his 
 purpose is to " tell us what they mean,' 1 
 to " pour heaven into this shut house 
 of life. Pippa passing through the 
 streets of Asolo in itself a " small 
 event " sings and proves, " there is no 
 last nor first." The passion of Ottima 
 and the villainy of Guido are ugly facts ; 
 
BROWNING. 179 
 
 but the wreck they work is not final. 
 Their setting is not a melodrama, but a 
 tragedy. 
 
 Browning is the optimist of our age ; 
 and his optimism is that of a fear- 
 less imagination. The dramatist has 
 not hesitated to strike the discords 
 of the individual life, but he has resolved 
 them into fresh harmonies : 
 
 " The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth 
 
 too hard, 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in 
 
 the sky, 
 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the 
 bard." i 
 
 Tennyson soothes with a melody of 
 doubt and hope : firowning inspires 
 with a strong and living faith. Tenny- 
 son enlarges our horizon : Browning 
 braces us with mountain air. The one 
 strains his eyes for the infinite vision : 
 the other exults in man's present imper- 
 fection, and sees " the Christ that is to 
 be," " a god though in the germ." 
 
 i Alt Vogler. 
 
i8o BROWNING. 
 
 " 'Tis a clay cast, the perfect thing." i 
 
 Andrea del Sarto, called " the faultless 
 painter/' failed and recognised his 
 failure. 
 
 " Not on the vulgar mass 
 Called 'work,' must sentence pass, 
 
 Things done, that took the eye and had the price ; 
 O'er which, from level stand, 
 The low world laid its hand, 
 
 Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice. 
 
 " But all, the world's coarse thumb 
 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main account ; 
 All instincts immature, 
 All purposes unsure, 
 
 That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
 amount. 
 
 " Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act, 
 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 
 All I could never be, 
 All, men ignored in me, 
 
 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
 shaped." 2 
 
 1 James Lee's Wife. 
 
 2 Rabbi ben Ezra. 
 
BROWNING. 181 
 
 Life's success is not in attainment but 
 in endeavour. 
 
 " It is but to keep the nerves at strain, 
 To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, 
 
 And, baffled, get up and begin again, 
 
 So the chace takes up one's life, that's all ... 
 
 No sooner the old hope goes to ground 
 
 Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, 
 
 I shape me 
 
 Ever 
 
 Removed ! " i 
 
 The unpardonable sin in this eternal 
 imperfection and eternal progress is to 
 think we have attained the goal. 
 
 " Nothing can be as it hath been before ; 
 
 Better, so call it, only not the same. 
 To draw one beauty into our hearts' core, 
 
 And keep it changeless ! such our claim ; 
 So answered, Never more ! 
 
 " Simple? Why this is the old woe o' the world, 
 
 Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die. 
 
 Rise with il, then ! Rejoice that man is hurled 
 
 From change to change unceasingly, 
 His soul's wings never furled." 2 
 
 1 Life in a Love. 
 
 2 fames Lee's Wife* 
 
1 82 BROWNING. 
 
 This is the dominant note of Browning's 
 work ; the key to his interpretation of 
 the world's " apparent failures;" the 
 central principle by which he reads and 
 re-creates in his gallery the story of 
 life, religion, and art. These three are 
 one in his poetry. " Out of the three 
 sounds he frames not a fourth sound, 
 but a star." Devotee and artist both see 
 
 * ' On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a 
 perfect round." 
 
 But while the one turns his eyes beyond, 
 the imagination of the other rejoices in 
 earth's joys and promises : 
 
 " For pleasant is this flesh ; 
 
 Our soul, in its rose mesh 
 Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest ; 
 
 Would we some prize might hold 
 
 To match those manifold 
 Possessions of the brute, gain most, as we did best ! 
 
 Let us not always say, 
 * Spite of this flesh to-day 
 
 ' I strove, made head, gained ground upon the 
 whole ! ' 
 
BROWNING. 183 
 
 As the bird wings and sings 
 Let us cry ' All good things 
 
 ' Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh 
 helps soul ! ' "* 
 
 Evil, suffering, and sorrow have their 
 uses. Norbert counts 
 
 " Life just a stuff 
 To try the soul's strength on, to educe the man. " 
 
 Sebald is "proud to feel such torments ;" 
 Pompilia's woes have wrought a sweet- 
 ness in her soul. 
 
 ' ' Then, welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
 Be our joys three parts pain ! 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
 Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the 
 throe ! . . . 
 
 What is he but a brute 
 
 Whose flesh has soul to suit, 
 Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play ? 
 
 To man, propose this test 
 
 Thy body at its best, 
 How far can that project thy soul on its lone way ? 
 
 i Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
184 BROWNING. 
 
 Yet gifts should prove their use : 
 
 I own the Past profuse 
 Of power each side, perfection every turn : 
 
 Eyes, ears took in their dole, 
 
 Brain treasured up the whole ; 
 
 Should not the heart beat once, ' How good to live 
 and learn ? ' 
 
 Not once beat ' Praise be Thine ! 
 ' I see the whole design, 
 ' I, who saw power, see new love perfect too : 
 4 Perfect I call Thy plan : 
 * Thanks that I was a man ! 
 
 'Maker, remake, complete, I trust what Thou shalt 
 do!'" 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
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 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley