University of C
 
 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 AND OTHERS 
 
 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 ELEVENTH SERIES
 
 A New England Group 
 And Others 
 
 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 ELEVENTH SERIES 
 
 By Paul Elmer More 
 
 Lontton 
 CONSTABLE & CO. LIMITED 
 
 / A I
 
 PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON & CO. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 
 
 U. S. A.
 
 Advertisement 
 
 OF the essays in this volume which have already 
 appeared in print Emerson and Jonathan Edwards 
 were published originally in The Cambridge His 
 tory of American Literature; Charles Eliot Norton 
 in the Nation ; Evolution and the Other World in 
 the Harvard Theological Review; Henry Adams, 
 Samuel Butler of Erewhon, Viscount Morley, 
 Economic Ideals, and Oxford, Women, and God 
 in the Unpopular (now the Unpartizan) Review. 
 Some of these essays have been considerably 
 altered and enlarged for the present publication. 
 The Spirit and Poetry of Early New England was 
 delivered at the Johns Hopkins University as 
 one of the Turnbull lectures.
 
 Contents 
 
 The Spirit and Poetry of Early New England I 
 
 Jonathan Edwards 33 
 
 Emerson 67 
 
 Charles Eliot Norton 95 
 
 Henry Adams 115 
 
 Evolution and the Other World 141 
 
 Samuel Butler of Erewhon 167 
 
 Viscount Morley 20 1 
 
 Economic Ideals 233 
 
 Oxford, Women, and God 257 
 
 Index to Shelburne Essays 289 
 
 s
 
 THE SPIRIT AND POETRY OF 
 EARLY NEW ENGLAND
 
 A New England Group 
 and Others 
 
 THE SPIRIT AND POETRY OF EARLY 
 NEW ENGLAND 
 
 THE refuge of the Puritans on this side of the 
 ocean was not exactly a nest of singing birds; but 
 it had a character and self-conscious spirit which 
 sought expression in verse as well as in sermons, 
 and, at least, if not poetical, it resounded with 
 the psalmody of the saints. In judging the 
 strength and weakness of those early poets, to 
 grant them the title by courtesy, we should re 
 member first of all that for the most part they 
 belonged to the class who were leaders in break 
 ing away from the full current of English life, 
 and spoke for a people who brought with them 
 to these lands a civilization rent and shorn by 
 what rightly may be called one of the huge 
 mischances of history. 
 
 It is, I know, the teaching of a certain school 
 of scientific historians that the changes of civili 
 zation are produced by large impersonal laws 
 under whose sway the will of the individual 
 sinks into insignificance. That theory is, perhaps,
 
 4 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 not quite so common now as it was a few years 
 ago. And surely, if any great event can be re 
 ferred to the character of individual men, it was 
 the crime of the seventeenth century in England, 
 with its consequent train of evils. In that month 
 of spring in the year 1603 when James Stuart 
 was riding south to take up his crown in London, 
 a prophetic eye might have foreseen the troubles 
 he and his son were to cause. On the way the so- 
 called Millenary Petition was presented to him 
 by a band of moderate and conforming Puritans, 
 who desired only a few unimportant changes in 
 the service and Prayer Book; one of the first acts 
 of James at Hampton Court was to deny the Pe 
 tition and to abuse the petitioners with a threat 
 to "harry them out of the land." After that the 
 history of England for two generations was a 
 series of ifs, depending on the actions of a small 
 group of men. Thus, if Prince Henry, with his 
 objection to a Catholic marriage, had not im 
 prudently overheated himself on the tennis court, 
 and so left the throne to his brother Charles; if 
 Charles at the beginning of his reign had not 
 been bribed to accept the Petition of Right and 
 so to bind his hands; if Wentworth had been 
 kept in England to raise a standing army, in 
 stead of being called back from Ireland when 
 too late, and if Henrietta Maria by meddling 
 with the soldiers had not brought him to the 
 scaffold; if Charles had married a Protestant in-
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 5 
 
 stead of a Bourbon princess; if he had chosen a 
 wiser prelate than Laud ; if he had not attempted 
 to seize the five members of Parliament, or had 
 planned the attempt more secretly; if the navy 
 had not been wantonly alienated ; If, in a 
 word, James and Charles had not been at once 
 so obstinate and so weak, either they might have 
 succeeded in establishing, for a time at least, a 
 monarchy like that raised in France on the ruin 
 of the Fronde and the Reformation, or they 
 might have guided their people through a blood 
 less and healthy revolution. But for the fanati 
 cism of the King the opposing fanaticism of Pym 
 and Lilburne and Cromwell would never have 
 come to the top, crushing between them the 
 moderate men who were the real strength and, 
 in the end, the salvation of England. And so I, 
 for one, cannot look back upon that period with 
 out shuddering at its passion of violent extremes, 
 and without a feeling of amazement that so much 
 evil in the world can be traced to the temper 
 of a few fanatics who, by the whim of Fortune, 
 had the destiny of the English people in their 
 hands. 
 
 Old England, though her richer and completer 
 development was perhaps forever marred by the 
 harsh divisions of that age, did nevertheless in a 
 manner quickly shake herself into balance. But 
 we must remember that the New England colo 
 nists, driven from their homes by the Laudian
 
 6 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 persecution, came almost exclusively from one of 
 the national factions. They did not bring with 
 them the full temper of the English people, or 
 even that part of its character which has given 
 us Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dryden and 
 Swift and Johnson and Byron and Tennyson. 
 Their poetry therefore must be criticised, not as 
 belonging to the main current of English liter 
 ature, but as a slender branch, so to speak, run 
 ning to one side, and deprived of the broader 
 nourishment of tradition. It is the prolongation 
 of a mood that had been tortured into excess 
 by the goading stings of Accident; nor must we 
 forget that at home under the sway of this same 
 mood the imagination was distrusted, the the 
 atres were closed, the picture collections of 
 Charles dispersed or destroyed, the churches 
 made barren of their beauty, the courtly poets 
 silenced or driven into obscure places that the 
 land was for a time, in the language of Strafford, 
 " frequent in combustions, full of massacres and 
 the tragical ends of princes." 
 
 It would be unjust, of course, to say that 
 with this iconoclasm all the charm of life was 
 banished by the Puritans. Even leaving out of 
 account the supreme achievement of Milton, 
 no one can go through the writings of these men 
 without finding passages that have a grace en 
 tirely their own. One recalls, for instance, the 
 scene in Bunyan's pilgrimage, when Christian,
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 7 
 
 having twice climbed the Hill Difficulty, comes 
 to the Palace Beautiful, and is there entertained 
 by the maidens Piety, Prudence, and Charity. 
 "Thus they discoursed together till late at 
 night," the narrative proceeds, "and after they 
 had committed themselves to their Lord for 
 protection, they betook themselves to rest. The 
 Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber, 
 whose window opened towards the sunrising; the 
 name of the chamber was Peace, where he slept 
 till break of day; and then he awoke and sang." 
 I shall not repeat the words of the Pilgrim's 
 song, for Bunyan, with all his genius, endured 
 the confinement of Bedford Gaol better than the 
 shackles of rhyme; but no candid reader will fail 
 to respond to the peculiar beauty of that chamber 
 of peace. In this chastened loveliness, won by 
 the exclusion of a whole half of life, the Puritan 
 literature is not wanting. One foresees in it much 
 that long afterwards will charm the ear in the 
 poems of Longfellow and Whittier. 
 
 And in one respect the Puritans brought no 
 diminution to the field of art and literature, but 
 effected rather a return to the main line of tra 
 dition from which England for a while had been 
 partially diverted by the seductions of the Re 
 naissance. I mean that sense of something central 
 and formative in man, of character as distin 
 guished from the mere portrayal of unrelated 
 passions, which was so lamentably lacking in
 
 8 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 most of the dramatists, and which since the ad 
 vent of Puritanism has been the chief honour of 
 British letters. With this subject I have already 
 dealt at some length in the preceding series of 
 these essays as in fact I have touched here 
 and there on the various other origins of the 
 New England spirit and need not repeat the 
 argument ; but it is highly important to remem 
 ber this positive side of Puritanism when reck 
 oning up the devastating effects of its rigid and 
 combative morality on the imagination. 
 
 Now the very conditions of existence in New 
 England exaggerated the seclusions of the half- 
 civilization which the people brought over with 
 them in their exile. Not only were the colonists 
 withdrawn from contact with the secular tra 
 dition which makes itself so deeply felt in the 
 art of a Milton, but the inevitable hardships of 
 their state intensified their belief that life is a 
 perpetual battle with the powers of evil, to whom 
 no concession must be granted. In the dark un 
 redeemed forests that surrounded them there 
 lurked tribes of savage people whose appearance 
 and habits were such as to warrant the notion 
 that here indeed Satan was unchained and held 
 undisputed sway. One of the first voyagers to 
 the new continent, William Strachey, carried 
 back this report of devil worship to credulous 
 ears. "There is yet in Virginia," he wrote in 
 1618, "no place discovered so savadge and
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 9 
 
 simple, in which the inhabitants have not a re 
 ligion and the use of bow and arrows. All things 
 they conceive able to do them hurt beyond their 
 prevention, they adore with their kind of divine 
 worship, as the fire, water, lightning, thunder, 
 our ordinaunce pieces, horses, etc.; but their 
 chief god they worship is no other, indeed, than 
 the devill, whom they make presentments of, 
 and shadow under the form of an idol, which 
 they entitle Okeus." Naturally the settlers, 
 looking out into the infinite wilderness, saw 
 visions of dread and heard sounds of preter 
 natural portent. Even the redoubtable Captain 
 John Smith was sufficiently troubled to express 
 his apprehensions in doggerel rhyme: 
 
 But his waking mind in hideous dreams did oft see won 
 drous shapes 
 
 Of bodies strange, and huge in growth, and of stupen 
 dous makes. 
 
 This may have been a passing sentiment in 
 Virginia, but in Massachusetts it became a 
 rooted conviction. It is the excuse, if any excuse 
 be possible, for the wild delusion of witchcraft 
 that for a time drove the leaders of Boston and 
 Salem into a mania of fear and persecution. 
 "The New Englanders," wrote Cotton Mather, 
 "are a people of God settled in those which were 
 once the devil's territories. . . . An army of devils 
 is horribly broke in upon the place which is the
 
 10 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 centre and, after a sort, the first-born of our 
 English settlements; and the houses of the good 
 people there are fill'd with the doleful shrieks of 
 their children and servants, tormented by in 
 visible hands, with tortures altogether preter 
 natural." If we were discussing the prose of 
 America as well as the poetry, we should find in 
 the after-effects of this superstition, this deisi- 
 daimonia in the true sense of the word, turned 
 now from a religious conviction into a kind of 
 haunting mood of the imagination, the sources 
 of Hawthorne's dark psychology and no small 
 part of that awe which Thoreau felt in the 
 presence of the mountains and lonely forests. 
 
 Meanwhile we can see something of its in 
 fluence in contracting the poetry of the colonists 
 within still narrower bounds of religious senti 
 ment. The first volume printed in this country 
 was the Bay Psalm Book, translated from the 
 Hebrew by Richard Mather, Thomas Welde, 
 and John Eliot in 1640. In the preface Mather 
 made this candid statement: "If therefore the 
 verses are not alwaies so smooth and elegant as 
 some may desire or expect, let them consider 
 that God's altar needs not pollishings." And 
 indeed the polishings are conspicuous by their 
 absence, as any specimen of this notable book 
 will show. For instance, the great nineteenth 
 Psalm is thus rendered for the satisfaction of the 
 faithful:
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND II 
 
 The heavens doe declare 
 
 The majesty of God: 
 also the firmament shows forth 
 
 his handy-work abroad. 
 Day speaks to day, knowledge 
 
 night hath to night declar'd. 
 There neither speach nor language is 
 
 where their voyce is not heard. 
 
 It would not be easy outside of Puritanism to 
 find a great religion divesting itself so heroically 
 not only of the smoothness and elegance but of 
 the manifold traditions of life. But if the oracles 
 of God were thus delivered through the nose, 
 they could convey the menace of wrath as well 
 as the upliftings of holiness. Perhaps the best 
 known of the early New England poets is that 
 Michael Wigglesworth who, for one fearless the 
 ological line, has obtained a kind of immortality 
 in obloquy. Possibly a few of my readers will be 
 unacquainted with Master Wigglesworth's pic 
 ture of the terrors of the damned, when God 
 at the Day of Doom has pronounced judgment 
 upon them, and a merciful Christ has begun to 
 consume the universe in fire: 
 
 Then might you hear them rend and tear 
 
 The air with their outcries; 
 The hideous noise of their sad voice 
 
 Ascendeth to the skies. 
 They wring their hands, their caitiff-hands, 
 
 And gnash their teeth for terror; 
 They cry, they roar, for anguish sore, 
 
 And gnaw their tongues for horror.
 
 12 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 But get away without delay; 
 
 Christ pities not your cry: 
 Depart to hell, there you may yell 
 
 And roar eternally. 
 
 With iron bands they bind their hands 
 
 And cursed feet together; 
 And cast them all, both great and small, 
 
 Into that lake forever; 
 Where day and night, without respite, 
 
 They wail and cry and howl, 
 For torturing pain which they sustain, 
 
 In body and in soul. 
 
 For day and night, in their despite, 
 
 Their torment's smoke ascendeth; 
 Their pain and grief have no relief, 
 
 Their anguish never endeth. 
 There must they lie and never die, 
 
 Though dying every day; 
 There must they, dying, ever lie, 
 
 And not consume away. 
 
 Say what one will, there is a grim sincerity in 
 these lines which lifts them out of the common 
 place and gives them something of the ring of 
 poetry; and after all, if you are going to depict 
 an eternal hell, there's no use in being finicky 
 about the benevolence of your deity. It is only 
 when our prophet of the New World vouchsafes 
 to make concessions to human sympathy that he 
 becomes odious. You know the words with which 
 the Almighty Judge is supposed to condemn the 
 little pleading souls of unbaptized infants:
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 13 
 
 You sinners are, and such a share 
 
 As sinners, may expect; 
 Such you shall have, for I do save 
 
 None but mine own elect. 
 Yet to compare your sin with their 
 
 Who lived a longer time, 
 I do confess yours is much less, 
 
 Though every sin 's a crime. 
 
 A crime it is; therefore in bliss 
 You may not hope to dwell; 
 
 But unto you I shall allow 
 The easiest room in hell. 
 
 We shudder at that concession, "the easiest 
 room in hell " ; it really is odious. And yet, again, 
 if we are to permit logic to deal with these mat 
 ters, what possible difference does it make 
 whether those chosen by God of His own free 
 will for eternal damnation pass into this state 
 after a few days of life or after many years? In 
 either case their evil fate was imposed upon 
 them at their birth. The only condemnation we 
 can pronounce upon Wigglesworth is that, hav 
 ing allowed his natural human emotions to enter 
 into the question at all, he stopped short half 
 way and did not revolt from the whole logical 
 scheme of Calvinistic theology. I am disposed 
 to feel a certain respect for this doggerel Dante 
 of the New England meeting-house; though his 
 power of expression was crude, there is in him, 
 as in Jonathan Edwards and others of the line, 
 an appalling energy and straightforwardness of
 
 14 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 the imagination. And if a late New Englander, 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, thought no decent man 
 could really hold the doctrine of free grace and 
 election without going mad, we must remember 
 that Wigglesworth spoke the honest and deep- 
 rooted conviction of his contemporaries and 
 they were not mad. And there is this, too, to be 
 said for his unflinching sense of the awful conse 
 quences of sin, that it bears on the actual prob 
 lems of life. One recalls that story of a farmer of 
 the present day who was asked by a troubled 
 clergyman why the village churches were left 
 empty, and who replied with Yankee candour 
 and shrewdness: "Wall, sir, I callate it is about 
 like this: since you preachers have stopped 
 preaching hell fire, we country folk have made 
 up our minds that we might as well take our 
 chances on t'other world." 
 
 But if the older theological taste had about it 
 a prevailing odour of the pit, we must not infer 
 that life in the colonies, gray in colour though it 
 may have been, was entirely bleak and without 
 those chambers towards the sunrise. Much of 
 the verse produced may have been of the kind 
 described by Captain Edward Johnson: 
 
 From silent night true Register of moans, 
 From saddest soul consum'd in deepest sin, 
 
 From heart quite rent with sighs and heavy groans, 
 My wailing muse her woful work begins, 
 
 And to the world brings tunes of sad lament, 
 
 Sounding naught else but sorrow's sad relent
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 15 
 
 Much of the verse produced was of this nasal 
 quality; but not all. Cotton Mather, he of the 
 witchcraft fame, tells of a certain friend whose 
 custom it was, "when he first arose in the morn 
 ing, to repair into his study: a study well per 
 fumed with the meditations and supplications 
 of an holy soul." Can any scholar to-day hear 
 that sentence without a thrill of envy at the 
 thought of the long uninterrupted hours which 
 those old divines contrived to pass in the earnest 
 and unrepentant searching of mighty books? 
 Ah, that study well perfumed with the medita 
 tions and supplications of an holy soul how 
 many a student of our age, distracted by the 
 multitude of conflicting intellectual interests, 
 disturbed by doubts of the value of learning in 
 itself, when he enters his work-room of a morn 
 ing, can breathe that atmosphere of assured 
 content, as it were the palpable memory greet 
 ing him of similar days past? And this quiet 
 satisfaction of a life devoted to retired scholar 
 ship and public teaching found due expression in 
 literature. Nothing is more characteristic of the 
 prose and poetry of the day than the innumer 
 able eulogies of good men and women, to some 
 of which the pax theologica lends an element of 
 passionate sincerity. One of the best known of 
 these is Urian Oakes's Elegy on the Death of 
 Thomas Shepard, a saintly minister of Charles- 
 town, who died in 1677. A few of the conclud-
 
 16 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 ing stanzas will indicate the quality of the piece: 
 
 If to have solid judgment, pregnant parts, 
 A piercing wit, and comprehensive brain; 
 If to have gone the round of all the arts, 
 Immunity from death could gain; . . . 
 
 If holy life, and deeds of charity, 
 If grace illustrious, and virtue tried, 
 If modest carriage, rare humility, 
 Could have bribed Death, good Shepard had not 
 died.. 
 
 Farewell, dear Shepard ! Thou art gone before, 
 Made free of heaven, where thou shalt sing loud hymns 
 Of high triumphant praises evermore, 
 In the sweet choir of saints and seraphims. . . . 
 
 My dearest, inmost, bosom-friend is gone! 
 Gone is my sweet companion, soul's delight! 
 Now in an huddling crowd I 'm all alone, 
 And almost could bid all the world Good-night. 
 
 Blest be my Rock! God lives; O let him be, 
 
 As He is All, so All in All to me! 
 
 We need not magnify the virtues of such an 
 elegy as this, which would in fact appear poor 
 enough if compared with Milton's superb lines 
 on the reception of Edward King into the 
 
 . . . solemn troops, and sweet societies, 
 That sing, and singing in their glory move, 
 
 or with Cowley's learned lament for his Cam 
 bridge companion in philosophy. Yet we shall 
 miss the truth if we fail to discover in Oakes's
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 17 
 
 less polished muse the charm of a friendship 
 built upon a sure sympathy in the hopes of the 
 spirit. As he himself wrote in one of the Latin 
 verses whose elegance won the applause of his 
 contemporaries, 
 
 Parvum parva decent, sed inest sua gratia parvis. 
 
 From these by-products of the theological 
 laboratory we may turn aside to say something 
 of the first and most ambitious of the profes 
 sional poets of the age, the stupendous Anne 
 Bradstreet, whose volume of verse was heralded 
 to the world with this overwhelming title-page: 
 
 The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America; or 
 Several Poems, compiled with great variety of wit and 
 learning, full of delight ; wherein especially is contained 
 a complete discourse and description of the four ele 
 ments, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the year; 
 together with an exact epitome of the four monarchies, 
 viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, Roman; also, a 
 dialogue between Old England and New concerning 
 the late troubles ; with divers other pleasant and serious 
 poems. By a gentlewoman in those parts. Printed at 
 London, for Stephen Bowtell, at the sign of the Bible, 
 in Pope's Head Alley, 1650. 
 
 Well, Mistress Anne was in sooth a memorable 
 and characteristic figure of the New World. 
 Though born and married in England, she mi 
 grated at the early age of eighteen to this coun 
 try, and through her children became the foun 
 tain head of one of the purest streams of the so-
 
 1 8 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 called Brahminism. One of her descendants was 
 Richard Henry Dana, another Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes. John Norton of Hingham, ancestor of 
 the present Nortons and Adamses, whose line 
 also was to intermarry with the Eliots, gave vent 
 to his admiration of the dead poetess in resound 
 ing couplets: 
 
 Virtue ne'er dies: time will a poet raise, 
 Born under better stars, shall sing thy praise. 
 Praise her who list, yet he shall be a debtor; 
 For Art ne'er feigned nor Nature framed, a better. 
 Her virtues were so great, that they do raise 
 A work to trouble fame, astonish praise. 
 
 I do not know that time has yet raised a poet 
 to celebrate her works to the taste of the pastor 
 of Hingham, but one of his descendants, the late 
 Charles Eliot Norton, edited the poems of the 
 matchless gentlewoman, and in his introduction 
 wrote of her character in his most genial vein. 
 
 All, indeed, that we know of Anne Bradstreet 
 from contemporary sources and from her own 
 autobiographical sketch justifies us in revering 
 her as one of those large-minded women of the 
 seventeenth century who managed somehow, in 
 ways that seem inexplicable to their daughters, 
 to combine the manifold cares of a household 
 with indefatigable study and sober unhurried 
 reflection. But the outpourings of her muse, it 
 must be acknowledged, remind us too forcibly of 
 one of her own aphorisms: "A ship that bears
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 19 
 
 much sail, and little or no ballast, is easily over 
 set." She is seen perhaps at her best in such 
 stanzas as these: 
 
 I heard the merry grasshopper then sing, 
 The black-clad cricket bear a second part, 
 
 They kept one tune, and played on the same string, 
 Seeming to glory in their little art. 
 
 Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise? 
 
 And in their kind resound their Maker's praise: 
 
 Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher lays. 
 
 When I behold the heavens as in their prime, 
 And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, 
 
 The stones and trees, insensible of time, 
 Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen; 
 
 If winter come, and greenness then do fade, 
 
 A spring returns, and they more youthful made; 
 
 But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's 
 laid. 
 
 O Time, the fatal wrack of mortal things, 
 
 That draws oblivion's curtains over kings, 
 Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not, 
 
 Their names without a record are forgot, 
 Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dust, 
 Nor wit, nor gold, nor buildings 'scape time's rust; 
 But he whose name is grav'd in the white stone 
 Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. 
 
 Professor Barrett Wendell, who quotes these 
 stanzas, remarks aptly that in seventeenth-cen 
 tury New England the author "stands alone, 
 without forerunners or followers; and if you 
 compare her poetry with that of the old country,
 
 20 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 you will find it very much like such then anti 
 quated work as the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John 
 Davies, published in 1599, the year which gave 
 us the final version of Romeo and Juliet." The 
 female prodigy of New England, in fact, belongs 
 to that strain of literary Puritanism which is 
 more distinctly British than American, and 
 which was already becoming outworn in the old 
 home. 
 
 The names of Mrs. Bradstreet's more poetical 
 descendants serve to remind us how intimately 
 all this New England society was Icnit together, 
 and how its spirit was handed down from gener 
 ation to generation as a kind of family possession. 
 Her own contemporary fame may call our at 
 tention to the fact that women played no in 
 considerable part in creating the peculiar tone 
 of the New World literature. And their influence 
 was felt in two ways. In the first place that 
 sturdiness and uprightness of character, which 
 was one of the great, the very great, compen 
 sations of Puritanism, not only made itself heard 
 in the eulogies pronounced over those who died in 
 the harness of virtue, but was active in the family 
 relations of the living. Saintliness, I know, does 
 not invariably make for comfort. Sometimes the 
 Puritan hardness of character dominated too 
 tyrannically the softer traits of affection and 
 compliance, bringing what might be called a 
 desolation of sanctity into the home. But there
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 21 
 
 were other households and these I believe the 
 majority in which the tenderness to every 
 duty, the sense of due subordination, the com 
 petence of training, the repose of a clear con 
 science, must have evoked an atmosphere of 
 serene and equitable joy. The very discipline 
 of the passions, the renunciation of the wider 
 sweep of human experience, would put a stamp 
 of sacredness on those chaster pleasures which 
 knit a family together in contented unison. In 
 a way all of New England may be said to have 
 been snow-bound, in creed as well as in climate, 
 but in the shelter of the hearth there was 
 warmth for the body and there was comfort for 
 the soul. Whittier was recalling a true incident 
 of his childhood, and was writing also an al 
 legory of New England's inner life, when he de 
 scribed that night of storm and snow: 
 
 Shut in from all the world without, 
 We sat the clean-winged hearth about, 
 Content to let the north-wind roar 
 In baffled rage at pane and door, 
 While the red logs before us beat 
 The frost-line back with tropic heat. 
 
 One can find in the older literature abundant 
 evidence of these protected comforts of the 
 home. Take for instance Cotton Mather's life 
 of John Eliot. There, if anywhere, you have one 
 of the stalwarts. So diligent was Eliot in study 
 that he took to sleeping in his library, in order
 
 22 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 that he might get to his beloved books at some 
 unearthly hour in the morning without disturb 
 ing the household. So fervid was he in piety 
 that he is described as "perpetually 'jogging the 
 wheel of prayer.' " Now the habit of perpetually 
 jogging the wheel of prayer does not, I admit, 
 sound alluring to our modern unsanctified ears; 
 the appearance of a reverend jogger in our par 
 lour would probably cause a little constraint, 
 but then other times other manners. And of 
 Eliot we are assured by his biographer that "he 
 was indeed sufficiently pleasant and witty in 
 company, and he was affable and facetious in 
 conversation." His affability, I doubt not, was 
 only a part of the large charity of his nature. 
 When an old man he said to one who questioned 
 him about his state: "Alas, I have lost every 
 thing; my understanding leaves me, my memory 
 fails me, my utterance fails me; but, I thank 
 God, my charity holds out still ; I find that rather 
 grows than fails!" And his charity and affabil 
 ity, as well as his prayerfulness, were exercised 
 at home, as sometimes in this strange world they 
 are not. Of his relations with his wife it is said : 
 "His whole conversation with her had that 
 sweetness, and that gravity and modesty beautify 
 ing it, that every one called them Zachary and 
 Elizabeth." The biographer continues: "God 
 made her a rich blessing, not only to her family, 
 but also to her neighborhood; and when she died,
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 23 
 
 I heard and saw her aged husband, who else 
 very rarely wept, yet now with tears over the 
 coffin, before the good people, a vast confluence 
 of which were come to her funeral, say, 'Here 
 lies my dear, faithful, pious, prudent, prayerful 
 wife; I shall go to her, and she not return to me.' " 
 These are the commonplaces of life, you may 
 think, and perhaps they are, although I am not 
 sure that peace and self-control are ever quite 
 commonplace; but it is just these softer aspects 
 of the old New England that we are likely to 
 forget. 
 
 Now in the making of this home spirit the 
 women naturally played an important r61e. 
 Thomas Shepard, for example, he whose own 
 elegy was sung so enthusiastically by Urian 
 Oakes, had written a Character of Mistress 
 Joanna Shepard, his wife, wherein he had por 
 trayed her as "a woman of incomparable meek 
 ness of spirit, toward myself especially, and very 
 loving; of great prudence to take care for and 
 order my family affairs, being neither too lavish 
 nor sordid in anything, so that I knew not what 
 was under her hands. She had an excellency to 
 reprove sin, and discern the evils of men." In 
 comparable meekness of spirit may not be pre 
 cisely the sort of eulogy a modern wife would 
 desire in her epitaph, however some husbands 
 might desire it in her life but, again, other 
 times other manners. And if one is inclined to
 
 24 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 shudder a little at the thought of her excellency 
 to reprove sin and discover the evils of men, one 
 may suspect that this sharp-edged knowledge 
 was useful in protecting her bookish and busy 
 husband from the inroads of fraudulent beggars 
 and evil mischief-makers. At any rate one may 
 be certain that the house of Mistress Joanna 
 Shepard much resembled the Palace Beautiful of 
 Bunyan, where the maidens Piety, Prudence, 
 and Charity kept watch and ward, and where 
 there was a large upper chamber of peace whose 
 window opened towards the sunrising. Certainly 
 also the peaceful affections of home, the cool and 
 quiet places of rest out of the turmoil of the 
 world's contentions, came to be a marked trait of 
 New England literature. There are traces of it 
 in the early poets; in the works of Whittier and 
 Longfellow it was to blossom into something 
 exceedingly precious, however it may lack the 
 more dazzling qualities of the imagination. The 
 other side of this truth is that you will find no 
 love poetry, as the word is commonly under 
 stood, in those primitive days at least I know 
 of none and there is a minimum of it in the 
 later age. That is an extraordinary fact, when 
 you stop to think of it, and to some may seem 
 a sad lack. Let such critics turn elsewhere; 
 heaven knows the erotic Muse has been vocal 
 enough in other sections of the world. For my 
 part I still prefer James Russell Lowell's Under
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 25 
 
 the Willows to the self-advertised passion of a 
 certain living poetess who bears his family name. 
 That was one way in which the influence of 
 women was felt. In another way they brought 
 not peace but conflict into colonial life. The 
 orthodoxy of the New England church was of a 
 hard Calvinistic hue; it was eminently logical 
 and intellectual, the creation and delight of 
 strong men who, however they may have been 
 possessed by a "boiling zeal" for saving souls, 
 yet, like John Cotton, thought twelve hours of 
 continuous study a "scholar's day" and true 
 service to God. Against the virility, and one 
 must add rigidity, of this religious dominion 
 there were inevitably, almost from the begin 
 ning, movements of revolt. And it was natural 
 that the good women of the colony should be 
 conspicuous in rebellion as well as in meekness. 
 Not all the great men of the land were as for 
 tunate in their helpmates as were Thomas 
 Shepard and John Eliot. In Winthrop's History 
 of New England from 1630 to 1649 there is an 
 amusing story of one woman to whom much, 
 and not a little, learning was a dangerous thing. 
 "Mr. Hopkins, the governor of Hartford upon 
 Connecticutt," we there read, "came to Boston, 
 and brought his wife with him (a godly woman, 
 and of special parts), who was fallen into a sad 
 infirmity, the loss of her understanding and rea 
 son, which had been growing upon her divers
 
 26 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 years, by reason of her giving herself wholly to 
 reading and writing, and had written many 
 books. Her husband, being very loving and 
 tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he 
 saw his error, when it was too late. For if she 
 had attended her household affairs, and such 
 things as belong to women, and not gone out of 
 her way and calling to meddle in such things as 
 are proper to men, whose minds are stronger, 
 etc., she had kept her wits." I do not know by 
 what stages this learned lady fell into her sad 
 infirmity, but I suspect she betook herself to 
 her books as a refuge from her spouse, the 
 worthy governor, of whom it is related "that he 
 frequently fell a bleeding at the nose, through 
 the agony of spirit with which he laboured in 
 them [his prayers]." Neither do I know what 
 was in her many books even the all-embracing 
 Tyler does not mention them but my guess 
 is that she wrote verse and tampered with the 
 man-made mysteries of religion. 
 
 At least this second form of audacity was 
 what brought trouble between another "godly 
 woman" and the rulers of the State. The story 
 of the conflict may be read in Thomas Welde's 
 Heresies of Anne Hutchinson, from which it 
 would appear that this strong-minded female 
 had the pious, and in those days obligatory, 
 habit of going regularly to meeting, but added 
 the very bad habit of collecting a company of
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 27 
 
 critical folk after service and of expounding to 
 them the sermon in a spirit of contumely and 
 contradiction. Now the colonists had a high 
 sense of the value of liberty, as was natural in 
 men who had suffered so much in its cause 
 so high a sense that, in the words of Governor 
 Winthrop, they would have it only "maintained 
 and exercised in a way of subjection to author 
 ity." But this was not the view of Anne Hutchin- 
 son and her coterie. Liberty to them meant the 
 freedom of the individual, not to follow the 
 truth, but to choose the truth; it was the kind 
 described by Winthrop as making "men grow 
 more evil, and in time to be worse than brute 
 beasts: omnes sumus licentia deteriores," and as 
 "that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild 
 beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent 
 against, to restrain and subdue it." 
 
 We will not now enter into the question of 
 truth as it lay between the preachers of the 
 Commonwealth and Mistress Hutchinson, but 
 there is no doubt of the fact that her manner of 
 prophesying did not bring peace. The result of 
 her lectures among the women is thus denounced 
 by Thomas Welde : 
 
 Now, oh their boldness, pride, insolency, alienations 
 from their old and dearest friends, the disturbances, 
 divisions, contentions they raised amongst us, both in 
 church and State, and in families, setting division be 
 tween husband and wife! . . .
 
 28 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Now the faithful ministers of Christ must have dung 
 cast on their faces, and be no better than legal preachers, 
 Baal's priests, popish factors, scribes, Pharisees, and 
 opposers of Christ himself. 
 
 And it was not only against the persons of the 
 clergy that Anne Hutchinson lifted her terrible 
 prophetic voice ; she struck at the very dogmatic 
 centre of their authority. She lays a profane 
 hand on the intellectual and traditional basis 
 of theology ; as the horrified author of the 
 Wonder-Working Providence exclaimed: she is a 
 "woman that preaches better than any of your 
 black-coats that have been at the Ninneversity." 
 Her heresy is analysed at length by Thomas 
 Welde, but it is really summed up in the single 
 charge: "This witness of the Spirit is merely im 
 mediate, without any respect to the word, or 
 any concurrence with it." That is to say, she 
 was sent into exile for teaching exactly what 
 two centuries afterwards was to be the doctrine 
 of Emerson's essays and Whittier's most ex 
 quisite work. Her proclamation of the witness 
 speaking in the breast of each man, and requir 
 ing no confirmation from revealed book or 
 ordained interpreter, was a signal of the course 
 to be pursued by her people, starting with re 
 bellion against institutions and rites and ending 
 in rejection of all authority and tradition and 
 the very principle of organization. She was the 
 first, and remains the typical, "come-outer."
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 29 
 
 Lowell remembered these passages at arms 
 when, in his Biglow Papers, he described the 
 troubles caused by the townswomen of the good 
 pastor of Jaalam : 
 
 The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, 
 occasioned by the wild notions of (what Mr. Wilbur, so 
 far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) 
 the unfairer part of creation, put forth by Miss Par- 
 thenia Almira Fitz, are too well known to need 
 more than a passing allusion. It was during these 
 heats, long since happily allayed, that Mr. Wilbur re 
 marked that "the Church had more trouble in dealing 
 with one s/zeresiarch than with twenty Aeresiarchs," 
 and that the men's conscia recti, or certainty of being 
 right, was nothing to the women's. 
 
 . It is a pity, I often think, that Lowell, who 
 could have translated Cotton Mather into puns 
 without depriving him of his Puritan savour, 
 lived too early to try a fling at New England's 
 latest sheresiarch the feminine counterpart 
 of Emerson's refusal to face the reality of evil in 
 the world. 
 
 It remained for Whittier, who as a Quaker 
 found it easier to give free expression to the 
 inner voice which had supplanted the religion of 
 reason, to do justice, or more than justice, to 
 those feminine flails of the man-made church. 
 Often in his ballads Whittier makes use of the 
 heresies that filled the early divines with terror, 
 as if in prospect of the coming dissolution of
 
 30 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 their iron-bound creeds. And it is the women of 
 Boston who are chiefly remembered by him for 
 introducing the leaven of rebellion. Cassandra 
 Southwick, who was threatened with exile and 
 slavery for entertaining Quakers and neglecting 
 divine service, is one of his heroines. Another 
 is Margaret Brewster, who suffered worse than 
 threatenings for coming into the South Church 
 barefoot and in sackcloth, and crying out against 
 the rulers and magistrates of the town. 
 
 She shook the dust from her naked feet, 
 
 And her sackcloth closer drew, 
 And into the porch of the awe-hushed church, 
 
 She passed like a ghost from view. 
 
 They whipped her away at the tail o' the cart - 
 Through half the streets of the town, 
 
 But the words she uttered that day nor fire > 
 Could burn nor water drown. 
 
 And now the aisles of the ancient church 
 
 By equal feet are trod, 
 And the bell that swings in its belfry rings 
 
 Freedom to worship God ! 
 
 So did the spirit and poetry of early New 
 England become an inheritance; out of the 
 strong was to come sweetness, out of the un 
 couth grace. It will be objected, I fear, that in 
 my treatment of the subject I have said much 
 of the spirit and little of the poetry of the age; 
 but in truth poets in those days were something
 
 POETRY OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND 31 
 
 like the historian's snakes in Ireland: there 
 were n't any. As the first satirist, and not the 
 worst, of the colony, Nathaniel Ward, the Simple 
 Cobbler of Agawam, declared: 
 
 Poetry 's a gift wherein but few excel, 
 
 He doth very ill, that doth not passing well. 
 
 Enough has been quoted from the primitive 
 verse-makers to show that none of them did 
 passing well; but enough also has been said, I 
 trust, to show that some acquaintance with their 
 spirit is a profitable, almost a necessary, prep 
 aration for approaching that fine and ephemeral 
 thing, the flowering of New England in the first 
 half of the nineteenth century. 
 
 It is rather the fashion, I am aware, among a 
 certain coterie of enlightened critics to condemn 
 the later poetry of New England as almost 
 equally negligible with that of the men and 
 women we have been considering. And indeed 
 no rightly informed person will rank the out 
 pourings of Concord and Cambridge with the 
 supreme creations of the older centres of civi 
 lization. We are not likely to fall into that error 
 of over-praise; but we may be tempted by the 
 clamour of our emancipated youth, hailing 
 largely from strange lands in the dark map of 
 Europe, to miss the more fragile beauty of what 
 after all is the fairest thing this country has 
 produced. At its best the poetry of New England
 
 32 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 is one of the very desirable possessions of the 
 world, and not to appreciate it is to prove one's 
 self dulled and vulgarized by the strident conceit 
 of modernity. It is limited no doubt, and for 
 reasons which I have tried to set forth. But 
 limitation is not always and altogether a vice. 
 At least out of the limitations fixed by the origin 
 of New England grew the peculiar attitude of 
 the later writers towards nature, the charm of 
 their portrayal of the less passionate affections 
 of the home and the family, the absence of erotic 
 appeal, the depth and sincerity, but the perilous 
 independence also, of their religious intuition, 
 the invincible Tightness of their character. We 
 may laugh as we will at old Wigglesworth and 
 at the asthmatic Muse of the other Puritan di 
 vines; they have been justified of their children.
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 
 I
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS was born at Windsor, Con 
 necticut, in 1703. He belonged, unlike his great 
 contemporary Franklin in this, to the "Brahmin 
 families" of America, his father being a dis 
 tinguished graduate of Harvard and a minister 
 of high standing, his mother being the daughter 
 of Solomon Stoddard, the revered pastor of 
 Northampton, Massachusetts, and a religious 
 author of repute. Jonathan, one of eleven chil 
 dren, showed extraordinary precocity. There is 
 preserved a letter of his, written apparently in 
 his twelfth year, in which he retorts upon the 
 materialistic opinions of his correspondent with 
 an easiness of banter not common to a boy; and 
 another document, from about the same period, 
 an elaborate account of the habits of spiders, 
 displays a keenness of observation and a vivid 
 ness of style uncommon at any age. He who 
 could write such a sentence as the following was 
 already a master in his own right: "In very calm 
 and serene days in the forementioned time of 
 year, standing at some distance behind the end 
 of an house or some other opaque body, so as 
 just to hide the disk of the sun and keep off his 
 dazzling rays, and looking along close by the 
 side of it, I have seen a vast multitude of little
 
 36 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 shining webs, and glistening strings, brightly 
 reflecting the sunbeams, and some of them of 
 great length, and of such a height that one would 
 think they were tacked to the vault of the 
 heavens, and would be burnt like tow in the 
 sun." 
 
 He studied at Yale, receiving his bachelor's 
 degree in 1720, before his seventeenth birthday. 
 While at college he continued his interest in 
 scientific observations, but his main concern was 
 naturally with theology and moral philosophy. 
 As a sophomore he read Locke On the Human 
 Understanding, with the delight of a "greedy 
 miser" in "some newly discovered treasure." 
 Some time after reading Locke and before grad 
 uation he wrote down a series of reflections, pre 
 paratory to a great metaphysical treatise of his 
 own, which can only be compared with the 
 Commonplace Book kept by Berkeley a few years 
 earlier for the same purpose. In the section of 
 Notes on the Mind this entry is found: "Our per 
 ceptions or ideas, that we passively receive by 
 our bodies, are communicated to us immediately 
 by God." Now Berkeley's Principles and his 
 Hylas and Philonous appeared in 1710 and 1713 
 respectively, and the question has been raised, 
 and not answered, whether this Berkeleian senti 
 ment was borrowed from one of these books or 
 was original with Edwards. Possibly the youth 
 ful philosopher was following a line of thought
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 37 
 
 suggested by the English disciples of Male- 
 branche, possibly he reached his point of view 
 directly from Locke ; in any case his life work was 
 to carry on the Lockian philosophy from the 
 point where the Berkeleian idealism left off. 
 
 After graduation Edwards remained for two 
 years at Yale, preparing for the ministry. In 
 1722 he was called to a Presbyterian church in 
 New York. Here he preached acceptably for 
 eight months, returning then to his father's 
 house, and later to New Haven, where he held 
 the position of tutor in the college. In 1727 he 
 went to Northampton as colleague, becoming in 
 due time successor, to his grandfather. Almost 
 immediately after ordination he married Sarah 
 Pierrepont, like himself of the Brahmin caste, 
 whom he' had known as a young girl, and whose 
 beauty of body and soul he had described in a 
 passage of ecstatic wonder. "They say," he be 
 gan, being himself then twenty and the object 
 of his adoration thirteen, "there is a young lady 
 in New Haven who is beloved of that great Be 
 ing who made and rules the world, and that there 
 are certain seasons in which this great Being, in 
 some way or other invisible, comes to her and 
 fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight." 
 The marriage, notwithstanding this romantic 
 rapture, proved eminently wise. Lying on his 
 deathbed at Princeton, while his wife was far 
 away in Northampton, he could, after a life not
 
 38 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 without sore trials and difficulties, send her this 
 message: "Tell her that the uncommon union 
 which has so long subsisted between us, has been 
 of such a nature as I trust is spiritual, and there 
 fore will continue forever." They had eleven 
 children, one of whom married the Reverend 
 Aaron Burr, president of Nassau Hall (now 
 Princeton University), and was the mother of a 
 more famous son of the same name. 
 
 Like a good many other men of his age Ed 
 wards lived his inner life, so to speak, on paper 
 a custom which may seem morbid to a genera 
 tion taught to believe that it is better to look 
 out than to look in, but which has the advantage 
 of counteracting the disruptive work of time and 
 of linking the periods of life together into one 
 conscious whole. There is therefore nothing 
 peculiar or priggish in the fact that at the be 
 ginning of his religious career he should have 
 written out a set of formal resolutions, which he 
 vowed to read over, and did read over, at stated 
 intervals in order to keep watch on his spiritual 
 progress. A number of these resolutions have 
 been printed, as has also a part of the diary kept 
 at about the same time. Neither of these docu 
 ments, the time of their writing considered, con 
 tains anything remarkable, unless our knowledge 
 of the author's life justifies us in attaching un 
 usual significance to such words as the following, 
 which in themselves might have been set down
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 39 
 
 by a thousand other young men of the age: "I 
 have been to God this morning, and told him 
 that I gave myself wholly to him." 
 
 But it is quite otherwise with the private re 
 flections which he wrote out some twenty years 
 later (about 1743) at Northampton, apparently 
 on some occasion of reading over his youthful 
 diary. In this we have an autobiographical frag 
 ment that, for intensity of absorption in the idea 
 of God and for convincing power of utterance, 
 can be likened to the Confessions of St. Augustine, 
 while it unites to this religious fervour a roman 
 tic feeling for nature foreign to the Bishop of 
 Hippo's mind and prophetic of a movement that 
 was to sweep over the world many years after 
 Edwards' death. A few extracts from this docu 
 ment (not so well known as it would have been 
 if not printed with the works of a thorny meta 
 physician) must be given for their biographical 
 and literary interest: 
 
 From my childhood up, my mind had been full of 
 objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty, 
 in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting 
 whom he pleased; leaving them eternally to perish, and 
 be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear 
 like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the 
 time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and 
 fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God. ... I have 
 often, since that first conviction, had quite another 
 kind of sense of God's sovereignty than I had then. I 
 have often since had not only a conviction, but a de-
 
 40 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 lightful conviction. The doctrine has very often ap 
 peared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet. Ab 
 solute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. 
 But my first conviction was not so. 
 
 The first instance that I remember of that sort of 
 inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I 
 have lived much in since, was on reading those words, 
 Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only 
 wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever, Amen. As 
 I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as 
 it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the 
 Divine Being. 
 
 Not long after I first began to experience these things, 
 I gave an account to my father of some things that had 
 passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the 
 discourse we had together; and when the discourse was 
 ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in 
 my father's pasture, for contemplation. And as I was 
 walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, 
 there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glo 
 rious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to 
 express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunc 
 tion; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a 
 sweet and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic 
 meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and 
 holy gentleness. 
 
 God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, 
 seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, and moon, 
 and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, 
 flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used 
 greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the 
 moon for continuance; and in the day spent much time 
 in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet 
 glory of God in these things; in the mean time, singing 
 forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the 
 Creator and Redeemer.
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 41 
 
 I spent most of my time in thinking of divine things, 
 year after year; often walking alone in the woods, and 
 solitary places, for meditation, soliloquy, and prayer, 
 and converse with God. 
 
 Holiness, as I then wrote down some of my con 
 templations on it, appeared to me to be of a sweet, 
 pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought 
 an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and 
 ravishment to the soul. In other words, that it made 
 the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner 
 of pleasant flowers; all pleasant, delightful, and un 
 disturbed ; enjoying a sweet calm, and the gentle vivify 
 ing beams of the sun. The soul of a true Christian, as I 
 then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little 
 white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and 
 humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive 
 the pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing as it 
 were in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fra- 
 grancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst 
 of other flowers round about. 
 
 This is not the Edwards that is commonly 
 known, and indeed he put little of this personal 
 rapture of holiness into his published works, 
 which were almost exclusively polemical in de 
 sign. Only once, perhaps, did he adequately dis 
 play this aspect of his thought to the public; and 
 that was in the Dissertation on the Nature of 
 Virtue, wherein, starting from the definition of 
 virtue as "the beauty of the qualities and exer 
 cises of the heart," he proceeds to combine 
 ethics and aesthetics in an argument as subtle in 
 reasoning as it is, in places, victorious in ex 
 pression. One cannot avoid the feeling when his
 
 42 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 writings are surveyed as a whole, despite the 
 laxness of his style, that in his service to a par 
 ticular dogma of religion Edwards deliberately 
 threw away the opportunity of making for him 
 self one of the very great names in literature. 
 
 It should seem also that he not only suppressed 
 his personal ecstasy in his works for the press, but 
 waived it largely in his more direct intercourse 
 with men. He who himself, like an earlier and 
 perhaps greater Emerson, was enjoying the 
 sweetness of walking with God in the garden of 
 earth, was much addicted to holding up before his 
 people the "pleasant, bright, and sweet" doc 
 trine of damnation. Nor can it be denied that he 
 had startling ways of impressing this sweetness 
 on others. It is a misfortune, but one for which 
 he is himself responsible, that his memory in the 
 popular mind to-day is almost exclusively asso 
 ciated with certain brimstone sermons and their 
 terrific effect. Best known of these is the dis 
 course on Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 
 delivered at Enfield, Connecticut, in the year 
 1741. His text was taken from Deuteronomy: 
 "Their foot shall slide in due time"; and from 
 these words he proceeded to prove, and "im 
 prove," the truth that "there is nothing that 
 keeps wicked men at any moment out of hell, but 
 the mere pleasure of God." He is said to have 
 had none of the common qualities of the orator. 
 His regular manner of preaching, at least in his
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 43 
 
 earlier years, was to hold his "manuscript vol 
 ume in his left hand, the elbow resting on the 
 cushion or the Bible, his right hand rarely raised 
 but to turn the leaves, and his person almost 
 motionless"; but there needed no gesticulation 
 and no modulation of voice to convey the force 
 of his terrible conviction, when, to an audience 
 already disposed to accept the dogma, he pre 
 sented that dogma in a series of pictures beside 
 which the Inferno of Dante seems like the naivet6 
 of a child : 
 
 How awful are those words, Isaiah Ixiii, 3, which are 
 the words of the great God: "I will tread them in mine 
 anger, and trample them in my fury, and their blood 
 shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain 
 all my raiment." It is perhaps impossible to conceive 
 of words that carry in them greater manifestations of 
 these three things, viz., contempt and hatred, and 
 fierceness of indignation. If you cry to God to pity 
 you, he will be so far from pitying you in your doleful 
 case, or showing you the least regard or favour, that in 
 stead of that he will only tread you under foot: and 
 though he will know that you cannot bear the weight 
 of omnipotence treading upon you, yet he will not re 
 gard that, but he will crush you under his feet without 
 mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, 
 and it shall be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain 
 all his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will 
 have you in the utmost contempt; no place shall be 
 thought fit for you but under his feet, to be trodden 
 down as the mire in the streets. 
 
 There is reason to think, that there are many in 
 this congregation now hearing this discourse, that will
 
 44 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 actually be the subjects of this very misery to all 
 eternity. We know not who they are, or in what seats 
 they sit, or what thoughts they now have. It may be 
 they are now at ease, and hear all these things without 
 much disturbance, and are now flattering themselves 
 that they are not the persons; promising themselves 
 that they shall escape. If we knew that there was one 
 person, and but one, in the whole congregation, that 
 was to be the subject of this misery, what an awful 
 thing it would be to think of! If we knew who it was, 
 what an awful sight it would be to see such a person! 
 How might all the rest of the congregation lift up a 
 lamentable and bitter cry over him! But alas! In 
 stead of one, how many is it likely will remember this 
 discourse in hell! And it would be a wonder, if some 
 that are now present should not be in hell in a very 
 short time, before this year Is out. And it would be no 
 wonder if some persons, that now sit here in some seats 
 of this meeting-house in health, and quiet and secure, 
 should be there before to-morrow morning. 
 
 The congregation of Enfield, we are told, was 
 moved almost to despair; "there was such a 
 breathing of distress and weeping" that the 
 speaker was interrupted and had to plead for 
 silence. Sincerity of vision may amount to 
 cruelty, and something is due to the weakness of 
 human nature. Dr. Allen, the biographer of 
 Edwards, is right in saying that "he was almost 
 too great a man to let loose upon other men in 
 their ordinary condition. He was like some or 
 gan of vast capacity whose strongest stops or 
 combinations should never have been drawn." 
 
 The result was inevitable. Life is made up of
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 45 
 
 ordinary men in their ordinary condition. The 
 people of Northampton listened to Edwards for 
 a time ; were rapt out of themselves ; suffered the 
 relapse of natural indolence; grew resentful un 
 der the efforts to keep them in a state of ex 
 altation; and freed themselves of the burden 
 when it became intolerable. That, in brief, is the 
 explanation of the difference between Edwards 
 and the people of his parish, ending in his dis 
 missal from Northampton. So at least it would 
 be if we judged from the contemporary point of 
 view; from another point of view it may be de 
 scribed as the certain outcome of a combat be 
 tween inhuman logic and common sense. 
 
 At first all went well. Mr. Stoddard, in whose 
 declining years the discipline of the church had 
 been somewhat relaxed, died in 1729, and the 
 fervour of his successor soon began to tell on the 
 people. In 1733, as Edwards notes in his Nar 
 rative of Surprising Conversions, there was a stir 
 ring in the conscience of the young, who had 
 hitherto been prone to the awful sin of "frolick 
 ing." The next year the sudden conversion of a 
 young woman, "who had been one of the greatest 
 company keepers in the whole town," came upon 
 the community "like a flash of lightning"; the 
 Great Awakening was started, which was to run 
 over New England like a burning fire, with con 
 sequences not yet obliterated. The usual accom 
 paniments of moral exaltation and physical con-
 
 46 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 vulsions showed themselves. Edwards relates 
 with entire approbation the morbid conversion 
 of a child of four. The poor little thing was over 
 heard by her mother in her closet wrestling with 
 God in prayer, from which she came out crying 
 aloud and "wreathing her body to and fro like 
 one in anguish of spirit." She was afraid she was 
 going to hell! And so, "she continued thus ear 
 nestly crying and taking on for some time, till 
 at length she suddenly ceased crying and began 
 to smile, and presently said with a smiling coun 
 tenance Mother, the kingdom of heaven is 
 come to me!" This was the beginning of "a 
 very remarkable abiding change in the child"; 
 thereafter she loved "to hear Mr. Edwards 
 preach," delighted in religious conversations, and 
 had "a great concern for the good of other souls." 
 Like saints of an older age she could not always 
 distinguish between rapture and despair: 
 
 At some time about the middle of winter, very late 
 in the night, when all were in bed, her mother perceived 
 that she was awake, and heard her as though she was 
 weeping. She called to her, and asked her what was the 
 matter. She answered with a low voice, so that her 
 mother could not hear what she said; but thinking it 
 might be occasioned by some spiritual affection, said 
 no more to her; but perceived her to lie awake, and to 
 continue in the same frame for a considerable time. 
 The next morning she asked her whether she did not 
 cry the last night: the child answered yes, I did cry a 
 little, for I was thinking about God and Christ, and
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 47 
 
 they loved me. Her mother asked her, whether to 
 think of God and Christ's loving her made her cry: she 
 answered yes, it does sometimes. 
 
 It was inevitable that such a wave of super 
 heated emotion should subside in a short time. 
 In fact the enthusiasm had scarcely reached its 
 height when it began to show signs of indubi 
 table perversion, and decay. Immediately after 
 the story of the young convert Edwards notes 
 that "the Spirit of God was gradually with 
 drawing" and "Satan seemed to be let loose 
 and raged in a dreadful manner." An epidemic 
 of melancholy and suicidal mania swept over the 
 community, and multitudes seemed to hear a 
 voice saying to them: "Cut your own throat, 
 now is a good opportunity." Strange delusions 
 arose and spread, until common sense once more 
 got the upper hand. 
 
 It was an old tale, told in New England with 
 peculiar fury. The saddest thing in the whole 
 affair is the part played by Edwards. Other 
 leaders saw the danger from the first, or were 
 soon aroused to it ; but Edwards never, either at 
 this time or later, wavered in his belief that the 
 Awakening, though marred by the devil, was in 
 itself the work of the Divine Spirit. His Thoughts 
 on the Survival of Religion and his Marks of a 
 Work of the True Spirit are both a thoroughgoing 
 apology for the movement, as they are also an 
 important document in his own psychology. The
 
 48 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 jangling and confusion he admits; he recognizes 
 the elements of hysteria that were almost in 
 extricably mixed up with the moral exaltation of 
 conversion; but his defence is based frankly on 
 the avowal that these things are the universal 
 accompaniments of inspiration they attended 
 the founding of the church in the Apostolic age, 
 they were to be expected at the reinstauration 
 of religion. Often the reader of these treatises is 
 struck by a curious, and by no means accidental, 
 resemblance between the position of Edwards 
 and the position of the apologists of the romantic 
 movement in literature. There is the same direct 
 ness of appeal to the emotions; the same lauda 
 tion of expansiveness, at the cost, if need be, of 
 judgment or measure or any other restraint. 
 Prudence and regularity may be desirable in the 
 service of God, yet it is still true that "the 
 cry of irregularity and imprudence" has been 
 chiefly in the mouths of those who are enemies 
 to the main work of redemption. Perturbation, 
 in truth, is not properly so called when it is the 
 means of rousing the cold and indifferent from 
 their lethargy ; we are bound to suppose that not 
 even the man "of the strongest reason and 
 greatest learning" can remain master of himself 
 if "strongly impressed with a sense of divine and 
 eternal things." And thus the religious apologist 
 rises into the equivalent of "Titanism": "When 
 God is about to bring to pass something great
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 49 
 
 and glorious in the world, nature is in a fer 
 ment and struggle, and the world as it were in 
 travail." It comes in the end to this, that, not 
 withstanding his verbal reservations, Edwards 
 had no critical canon to distinguish between the 
 order and harmony governed by a power higher 
 than the tumultuous sway of the emotions and 
 the order and harmony that are merely stagna 
 tion. 
 
 One factor in his confidence was a belief that 
 the discovery of America, coinciding as it did 
 with the beginning of the Reformation, came by 
 Providence for "the glorious renovation of the 
 world"; nay more, that the humble town in 
 which he was preaching might be the cradle of 
 the new dispensation, from whence it should 
 spread Over the whole earth. His language may 
 even seem to betray a touch of spiritual pride 
 over the part he himself should be called upon to 
 play as the instrument of Grace in this marvellous 
 regeneration. That vice of the saints was indeed 
 a subject much in his meditations, and one of the 
 finest pieces of religious psychology in his works 
 is the passage of the Revival in which he tracks 
 it through the labyrinthine deceits of the human 
 heart. Pride no doubt was a sin against which he 
 had to keep particular ward in these years, but 
 we should not say that he ever, in any proper 
 sense of the word, lapsed from the virtue of 
 Christian humility. If he seemed to set himself
 
 50 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 above other men as an exigent judge, this was 
 rather due to a faulty sympathy, an inability to 
 measure others except by the standard of his 
 own great faculties. Thus, for all his emotional 
 ism, he lived under the control of an iron will, 
 and he could not comprehend how the over- 
 stimulation of terror and joy in a weaker dis 
 position would work moral havoc. Nor from his 
 own constant height could he understand how 
 brief and fitful any mood of exaltation must be 
 among ordinary men in their ordinary condition. 
 Hence he not only failed to see the gravity of the 
 actual evils at the time of the Awakening, but 
 failed also, with more grievous results for him 
 self, to recognize the impossibility of flogging the 
 dead emotion into new life. 
 
 The issue came on a point of church discipline. 
 Edwards believed that religion was essentially a 
 matter of the emotions, or affections. A man 
 might have perfect knowledge of divine things, 
 as indeed the devil had, but unless the love of 
 God was implanted in his heart by the free act of 
 Grace he had no lot with the faithful. To de 
 velop this theme he wrote his great Treatise Con 
 cerning Religious Affections, a work which with 
 out exaggeration may be said to go as far as the 
 human intellect can go in the perilous path of 
 discriminating between the purely spiritual life 
 and the life of worldly morality. The hard ker 
 nel of the argument is stated thus:
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 51 
 
 From these things it is evident, that those gracious 
 influences which the saints are subjects of, and the af 
 fects of God's Spirit which they experience, are entirely 
 above nature, altogether of a different kind from any 
 thing that men find within themselves by nature, or 
 only in the exercise of natural principles; and are things 
 which no improvement of those qualifications, or 
 principles that are natural, no advancing or exalting 
 them to higher degrees, and no kind of composition of 
 them, will ever bring men to; because they not only 
 differ from what is natural, and from every thing that 
 natural men experience, in degree and circumstances, 
 but also in kind; and are of a nature vastly more ex 
 cellent. And this is what I mean, by supernatural, 
 when I say that gracious affections are from those in 
 fluences that are supernatural. 
 
 From hence it follows, that in those gracious exer 
 cises and affections which are wrought in the minds of 
 the saints, through the saving influences of the Spirit 
 of God, there is a new inward perception or sensation 
 of their minds, entirely different in its nature and 
 kind. . . . 
 
 . . . And even in those things that seem to be common, 
 there is something peculiar; both spiritual and natural 
 love cause desires after the object beloved; but they 
 be not the same sort of desires: there is a sensation of 
 soul in the spiritual desires of one that loves God, 
 which is entirely different from all natural desires: 
 both spiritual love and natural love are attended with 
 delight in the object beloved ; but the sensations of de 
 light are not the same, but entirely and exceedingly 
 diverse. Natural men may have conceptions of many 
 things about spiritual affections; but there is some 
 thing in them which is as it were the nucleus, or kernel 
 of them, that they have no more conception of, than 
 one born blind, has of colours.
 
 52 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Now even this simple statement of the differ 
 ence between the condition of Grace and the 
 condition of nature is hard for the natural man 
 to follow; but when Edwards, with the acumen 
 of a genius and the doggedness of a scholar, im 
 posed his distinction on all the intricate feelings 
 of life, the natural man was dazed ; and when he 
 attempted to make it the criterion of admission 
 to the Lord's Table, the natural man who 
 called himself a Christian rebelled. Stoddard 
 had thought it right to admit to communion all 
 those who desired honestly to unite themselves 
 with the church. Edwards protested that only 
 those who had undergone a radical conversion 
 and knew the affections of supernatural love 
 should enjoy this high privilege. His congrega 
 tion sided with their old guide against him. 
 
 The quarrel was further embittered by another 
 issue. It came to light that certain young folk 
 of the church were reading profane books which 
 led to lewd conversation. Edwards called for 
 public discipline of the sinners ; the congregation 
 supported him until investigation showed that 
 the evil was widespread and would bring dis 
 credit on most of the better families of the town, 
 and then they blocked further proceedings. If 
 tradition is correct in naming Pamela as one of 
 the guilty books, we may admire the literary 
 taste of youthful Northampton, yet think that 
 their pastor was justified in condemning such
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 53 
 
 reading as incendiary. However that may be, 
 when, on the 22nd of June, 1750, a public vote 
 was taken whether Mr. Edwards should be dis 
 missed from his pastorate, a large majority was 
 counted against him. Northampton has the 
 distinction of having rejected the greatest the 
 ologian and philosopher yet produced in this 
 country. As Socrates taunted the ancient poli 
 ticians for the injuries they suffered at the hands 
 of those they were supposed to have trained in 
 civic virtue, so perhaps the townsmen of Ed 
 wards might retort upon any accuser that, if 
 they failed in religious duty, it was the business 
 of their pastor to have instructed them more 
 effectively. 
 
 The behaviour of Edwards when the crisis 
 actually came was simple, dignified, and even 
 noble. His Farewell Sermon, with its dispassion 
 ate and submissive appeal from the tribunal of 
 men to that final judgment which shall be given 
 in knowledge and righteousness, cannot be read 
 to-day without a deep stirring of the heart: "And 
 let us all remember, and never forget our future 
 solemn meeting on that great day of the Lord; 
 the day of infallible decision, and of the everlast 
 ing and unalterable sentence. Amen." 
 
 At the age of forty-six Edwards was thrust 
 upon the world, discredited, in broken health, 
 with a large family to support, undaunted. 
 Then befell a strange thing. This philosopher,
 
 54 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 whose thoughts and emotions ranged beyond the 
 ken of most educated men, was sent to the fron 
 tier town of Stockbridge as a missionary to the 
 Indians. There for six years he laboured faithfully 
 and, at least in the practical management of 
 affairs, successfully. It must have been one of 
 the memorable sights of the world to have seen 
 him returning on horseback from a solitary ride 
 into the forest, while there fluttered about him, 
 pinned to his coat, the strips of paper on which 
 he had scribbled the results of his meditations. 
 His days were little troubled, and not over 
 burdened with work, peaceful it is thought; and 
 now it was he wrote the treatise on the Free 
 dom of the Will upon which his fame chiefly de 
 pends. 
 
 In 1757 his son-in-law died, and Edwards was 
 chosen by the Trustees of .the College of New 
 Jersey to succeed him as president. Edwards 
 hesitated, stating frankly to the Trustees his dis 
 abilities of health and learning; but finally ac 
 cepted the offer. He left his family to follow him 
 later, and arrived in Princeton in January of 
 1758. Small-pox was in the town and the new 
 president was soon infected. His death took 
 place on the 22nd of March, in the fifty-fourth 
 year of his age. His last recorded words were: 
 "Trust in God and ye need not fear." 
 
 The child was indeed father of the man, and it 
 was peculiarly fitting that he who from youth
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 55 
 
 upward had been absorbed in the idea of God 
 should have died with the sacred word on his lips. 
 But what shall be said of the fearlessness of one 
 who had made terror the chief instrument of 
 appeal to men and had spent his life in fighting 
 for a dogma which the genial author of The One- 
 Hoss Shay thought no decent man could hold 
 without going crazy? 
 
 Now the Edwardian theology was a part of 
 the great deistic debate which took its root in 
 the everlasting question of the origin of evil in 
 the world. It was a three-cornered contest. The 
 Calvinists and the infidels both believed in a 
 kind of determinism, but differed over the nature 
 of the determining cause. The Calvinists found 
 this cause in a personal Creator, omnipotent and 
 omniscient, to whom they did not scruple to 
 carry up all the evil as well as the good of the 
 universe "c'est que Dieu," as Calvin himself 
 states categorically, "non seulement a preveu 
 la cheute du premier homme, et en icelle la 
 ruine de toute sa posterite, mais qu'il 1'a ainsi 
 voulu." The Deists, who at this time formed 
 the fighting line of the infidels, while verbally 
 acknowledging the existence of God and theo 
 rizing on the nature of evil, virtually regarded the 
 universe as a perfectly working machine in which 
 there was no room for a personal governor or for 
 real sin. To the Arminians, including the bulk 
 of the orthodox Churchmen, the alliance between
 
 $6 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Calvinism and Deism seemed altogether to out 
 weigh the differences. As Daniel Whitby de 
 clares in the preface to his discourses On the Five 
 Points of Calvinism, to hold God responsible for 
 evil is to play directly into the hands of the 
 atheists. And so the age-old dispute between 
 Augustinian and Pelagian, and between Calvin- 
 ist and Arminian, took on a new life from the 
 deistic controversy, and there sprang up a liter 
 ature which undertook to preserve the idea of 
 an omnipotent personal Creator and at the same 
 time to save His face, if the expression may be 
 tolerated, by attributing to man complete free 
 will and accountability for his actions. Dr. 
 Whitby, whose discourses appeared in 1710 (re 
 printed in America), was a man of considerable 
 learning but of no great metaphysical acumen, 
 and a writer, as one of his critics said, of "dis 
 gusting tautology." His argument consists 
 mainly in heaping up quotations from the phi 
 losophers and early Fathers, typical of which are 
 these two, chosen with cunning application to 
 his opponents from St. Augustine himself: "It 
 is the height of madness and injustice to hold 
 any person guilty because he did not that which 
 he could not do," and "Who will not pronounce 
 it folly to command him who is not free to do 
 what is commanded? " The clear moral inference 
 follows: God does punish men, therefore they 
 have in themselves the power to live righteously ;
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 57 
 
 and God does command and exhort men, there 
 fore their will is free to obey or disobey. 
 
 It was in answer to Whitby's book and one or 
 two others of the kind that Edwards composed 
 his Freedom of the Will. His argument has a 
 psychological basis. In the Treatise Concerning 
 Religious Affections he had divided the soul into 
 two faculties: one the understanding, by which 
 it discerns, views, and judges things; the other 
 called the heart or will, being nothing else but 
 the inclination of the soul towards, or the dis 
 inclination from, what is discerned and judged 
 by the understanding. In the Freedom of the Will 
 he starts with Locke's statement that "the Will 
 is perfectly distinguished from Desire, which in 
 the very same action may have a quite contrary 
 tendency from that which our Wills set us upon." 
 This theory Edwards analyses and rejects, and 
 then proceeds to show that a man's desire and 
 will are virtually the same faculty of the soul. It 
 follows from this that the will at any moment is 
 determined by the strongest motive acting upon 
 the soul; we are free in so far as no obstacle is 
 presented to our willing in accordance with our 
 inclination, but our inclination is determined by 
 what at any moment seems to us good. In his 
 attack on the common arguments for the freedom 
 of the will Edwards is magnificently victorious. 
 If the psychology by which the Arminians sought 
 to relieve God of the burden of evil in human life
 
 58 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 is pushed into a corner, it shows itself as nothing 
 more than this: Man's will is a faculty absolutely 
 indeterminate in itself and entirely independent 
 of his inclinations. When, therefore, a man errs, 
 it is because, the choice between evil with its 
 attendant suffering and good with its attendant 
 happiness being presented to him, the man, 
 having full knowledge of the consequences and 
 being impelled by no momentary preponderance 
 of the one or the other from his innate disposi 
 tion, deliberately and freely chooses what is evil 
 and painful. Such an account of human action 
 is monstrous, inconceivable; it offered an easy 
 mark for so sharp a logician as Edwards. 
 
 But whence arise the conditions by which a 
 man's inclination is swayed in one direction or 
 the other ? Edwards carries these unflinchingly up 
 to the first cause, that is, as a Christian, to God. 
 Berkeley had made the world to consist of ideas 
 evoked in the mind of man by the mind of God ; 
 Edwards accepts the logical conclusion, and holds 
 God responsible for the inclination of the human 
 will which depends on these ideas. To the charge 
 that such a theory makes God the author of evil 
 he replies in these terms : 
 
 If, by the author of sin, is meant the perraitter, or 
 not a hinderer of sin; and, at the same time, a disposer 
 of the state of events, in such a manner, for wise, holy, 
 and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it 
 be permitted or not hindered, will most certainly and
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 59 
 
 infallibly follow: I say, if this be all that is meant, by 
 being the author of sin, I do not deny that God is the 
 author of sin (though I dislike and reject the phrase, 
 as that which by use and custom is apt to carry an 
 other sense) This is not to be the actor of sin, but, 
 
 on the contrary, of holiness. 
 
 Calvin, as we have seen, did not hesitate to 
 attribute the source of evil to God's will in 
 franker words than these, but at the same time 
 he warned men against intruding with their 
 finite reason into this "sanctuary of the divine 
 wisdom." The mind of Edwards could not rest 
 while any problem seemed to him unsolved. 
 Confronted with the mystery of the divine will, 
 he undertakes to solve it by applying his psychol 
 ogy of man to the nature of God. (He himself 
 would put it the other way about: "Herein does 
 very much consist that image of God wherein He 
 made man.") The passage in which he most 
 explicitly develops this thesis, though generally 
 overlooked by his critics, is of the first impor 
 tance: 
 
 We must conceive of Him as influenced in the highest 
 degree, by that which, above all others, is properly a 
 moral inducement, viz., the moral good which He sees 
 in such and such things: and therefore He is, in the 
 most proper sense, a moral Agent, the source of all 
 moral ability and Agency, the fountain and rule of all 
 virtue and moral good; though by reason of his being 
 supreme over all, it is not possible He should be under 
 the influence of law or command, promises or threat-
 
 60 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 enings, rewards or punishments, counsels or warnings. 
 The essential qualities of a moral Agent are in God, in 
 the greatest possible perfection; such as understanding, 
 to perceive the difference between moral good and evil ; 
 a capacity of discerning that moral worthiness and de 
 merit, by which some things are praiseworthy, others 
 deserving of blame and punishment; and also a capacity 
 of choice, and choice guided by understanding, and a 
 power of acting according to his choice or pleasure, and 
 being capable of doing those things which are in the 
 highest sense praiseworthy. 
 
 In other words, the will of God is precisely like 
 the will of man; it is merely the inclination, or 
 moral inducement, to act as He is influenced by 
 an external power. The fatal mystery of good 
 and evil, the true cause, lies somewhere above 
 and beyond Him; He is, like ourselves, a chan 
 nel, not the source. The only difference is that 
 God has complete knowledge of the possibilities 
 of being, and therefore is not moved by threats 
 and blind commands, but immediately, by what 
 Edwards elsewhere calls the "moral necessity" 
 of governing in accordance with the best of the 
 "different objects of choice that are proposed to 
 the Divine Understanding." By such a scheme 
 God is really placed in about such a position as 
 in the Leibnitzian continuation of Laurentius 
 Valla's Dialogue on Free Will and Providence, 
 where He is naively portrayed as looking upon 
 an infinite variety of worlds piled up, like cannon 
 balls, in pyramidal form before Him, and se-
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 6l 
 
 lecting for creation that one which combines the 
 greatest possible amount of good with the least 
 possible admixture of evil. 
 
 From this pretty sport of the imagination 
 Edwards would no doubt have drawn back in 
 contempt, and, indeed, in his ordinary language 
 God is merely the supreme Cause, without fur 
 ther speculation. One of the Leibnitzian infer 
 ences, moreover, is utterly excluded from his 
 philosophy. He was no optimist ; was in fact the 
 last man to infer that, because this world is the 
 best possible conceivable, evil is therefore a small 
 and virtually negligible part of existence. On the 
 contrary the whole animus of his teaching springs 
 from a deep and immediate hatred of evil in 
 itself and apart from any consideration of its 
 cause. "The thing," he says, " which makes sin 
 hateful, is that by which it deserves punishment; 
 which is but the expression of hatred. . . . Thus, 
 for instance, ingratitude is hateful and worthy of 
 dispraise, according to common sense ; not because 
 something as bad, or worse than ingratitude, was 
 the cause that produced it ; but because it is hate 
 ful in itself, by its own inherent deformity." 
 
 To the charge of the Arminians that the doc 
 trine of predestination leaves no place for the 
 punishment of sin, this is an adequate reply; 
 but the consequences are, in another way, dis 
 astrous to the Edwardian theology. If we are 
 right, as we indubitably are right, in detesting
 
 62 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 evil in itself and wherever seen, and if we hold 
 with Edwards that the will of God, like the will 
 of man, is merely the inclination towards the 
 best object presented to its choice, and there is 
 no power either in God or in man above the 
 will, in what essential way, then, does the act 
 of God in creating a world mixed with evil dif 
 fer from the act of Judas in betraying God, and 
 how are we relieved from hating God for the 
 evil of His work with the same sort of hatred 
 as that which we feel for Judas? Edwards had 
 terrified the people of Enfield with a picture of 
 God treading down sinners till their blood 
 sprinkled His raiment, and exulting in His 
 wrath. The retort is obvious, and unspeakable. 
 Nor can he, or any other Predestinarian, escape 
 the odium of such a retort by hiding behind 
 the necessity of things which all men must, in 
 one way or another, admit. There is a war be 
 tween the nations, he will say, and suddenly a 
 bomb, dropping upon a group of soldiers, them 
 selves innocent of any crime, horribly rends 
 and mangles them. Here is a hideous thing, and 
 by no twisting of the reason can you or I avoid 
 carrying the responsibility for this evil back to 
 the first great cause of all. Shall I be held im 
 pious for saying metaphorically that the blood 
 of these soldiers is sprinkled on the raiment of 
 that Cause? Aye, but the difference to us 
 morally if we leave that cause in its own vast
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 63 
 
 obscurity, unapproached by our reason, un 
 touched by our pride; or if we make it into an 
 image of ourselves, composed only of under 
 standing and inclination like our own, and sub 
 ject to our reprobation as surely as to our love ! 
 
 Edwards had riddled and forever destroyed 
 the arguments for free will commonly employed 
 by the Arminians ; is there no alternative for the 
 human reason save submission to his theological 
 determinism or to fatalistic atheism? 
 
 One way of escape from that dilemma is ob 
 vious and well known. It is that which Dr. 
 Johnson, with his superb faculty of common 
 sense, seized upon when the Edwardian doctrine 
 came up in conversation before him. "The only 
 relief I had was to forget it," said Boswell, who 
 had read the book; and Johnson closed the dis 
 cussion with his epigram: "All theory is against 
 the freedom of the will, all experience for it." 
 That is sufficient, no doubt, for the conduct of 
 life; yet there is perhaps another way of escape, 
 which, if it does not entirely silence the meta 
 physical difficulties, at least gives them a new 
 ethical turn. Twice in the course of his argument 
 Edwards refers to an unnamed Arminian 1 who 
 
 1 Edwards, it should seem, had immediately in mind the 
 Essay on the Freedom of Will in God and the Creature of 
 Isaac Watts; but the notion had been discussed at length 
 by Locke (Essay II, xxi), and at an earlier date had been 
 touched on with great acumen by John Norris in his cor 
 respondence with Henry More.
 
 64 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 placed the liberty of the soul not in the will itself, 
 but in some power of suspending volition until 
 due time has elapsed for judging properly the 
 various motives to action. His reply is that this 
 suspension of activity, being itself an act of voli 
 tion, merely throws back, without annulling, the 
 difficulty; and as the argument came to him, this 
 refutation is fairly complete. But a fuller con 
 sideration of the point at issue might possibly 
 indicate a way out of the dilemma of free will 
 and determinism into a morally satisfying form 
 of dualism within the soul of man himself. 1 At 
 least it can be said that the looseness of the 
 Arminian reasoning leaves an easier loophole of 
 escape into a human philosophy than does the 
 rigid logic of the Predestinarians. 
 
 Yet for all that, though we may follow Ed 
 wards' logical system to the breaking point, as 
 we can follow every metaphysical system, and 
 though we may feel that, in his revulsion from 
 the optimism of the Deists, he distorted the 
 actual evil of existence into a nightmare of the 
 imagination, yet for all that, he remains one 
 of the giants of the intellect and one of the endur 
 ing masters of religious emotion. He had not the 
 legal and executive brain of Calvin, upon whose 
 Institutes his scheme of theology is manifestly 
 based, but in subtle resourcefulness of reasoning 
 and still more in the scope of his spiritual in- 
 
 1 This argument is developed in my Platonism, 127 ff.
 
 JONATHAN EDWARDS 65 
 
 sight he stands, I think, above his predecessor. 
 Few men have studied Edwards without recog 
 nizing the force and honesty of his genius. To 
 Hazlitt he ranked with Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, 
 Hartley, Hume, and Leibnitz as a metaphy 
 sician. To Crabb Robinson the reading of his 
 book on Original Sin, in early youth, was "an 
 irreparable mischief." Let us take our leave of 
 him with one of his more gracious meditations 
 impressed on our memory: 
 
 All the truly great and good, all the pure and holy and 
 excellent from this world, and it may be from every part 
 of the universe, are constantly tending toward heaven. 
 As the streams tend to the ocean, so all these are tending 
 to the great ocean of infinite purity and bliss. /
 
 EMERSON
 
 EMERSON 
 
 IT becomes more and more apparent that Emer 
 son, judged by an international or even by a 
 true national standard, is the outstanding figure 
 of American letters. As a sfeady force in the 
 transmutation of life into ideas and as an au 
 thority in the direction of life itself he has ob 
 tained a recognition such as no other of his 
 countrymen can claim. And he owes this pre 
 eminence not only to his personal endowment of 
 genius, but to the fact also that, as the most 
 complete exponent of a transient experiment in 
 civilization, he stands for something that the 
 world is not likely to let die. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Boston, 
 May 25, 1803, gathered into himself the very 
 quintessence of what has been called the Brah- 
 minism of New England, as transmitted through 
 the Bulkeleys, the Blisses, the Moodys, and the 
 direct paternal line. Peter Bulkeley, preferring 
 the wilderness of Satan to Laudian conformity, 
 came to this country and, in 1636, founded Con 
 cord. William Emerson, his descendant in the 
 fifth generation, was builder of the Old Manse in 
 the same town, and a sturdy preacher to the 
 minute-men at the beginning of the Revolution; 
 and of many other ministerial ancestors stories
 
 70 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 abound which show how deeply implanted in 
 this stock was the pride of rebellion against tra 
 ditional forms and institutions, united with a 
 determination to force all mankind to worship 
 God in the spirit. With William, son of him of 
 Concord and father of our poet, the fires of zeal 
 began to wane. Though the faithful pastor of the 
 First Church (Unitarian) of Boston, it is recorded 
 of him that he entered the ministry against his 
 will. Yet he too had his unfulfilled dream of 
 "coming out" by establishing a church in Wash 
 ington which should require no sort of profession 
 of faith. He died when the future philosopher 
 was a boy of ten, leaving the family to shift for 
 itself as best it could. Mrs. Emerson cared for 
 the material welfare of the household by taking 
 in boarders. The chief intellectual guidance fell 
 to the aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, of whom her 
 nephew drew a portrait in his Lectures and Bi 
 ographies. "She gave high counsels," he says. 
 Indubitably she did; but a perusal of her letters 
 and the extracts from her journals leaves the im 
 pression that the pure but erratic enthusiasms 
 of her mind served rather to push Emerson in 
 the direction of his weaker inclination than to 
 fortify him against himself. When a balloon is 
 tugging at its moorings there is need of low 
 counsels. 
 
 In 1817, Emerson entered Harvard College, 
 and in due course of time graduated. Then, after
 
 EMERSON 71 
 
 teaching for a while in his brother's school in 
 Boston, he returned to Cambridge to study for 
 the ministry, and was in the autumn of 1826 
 licensed to preach. Three years later he was 
 called to the Second Church of Boston, as 
 assistant to Henry Ware, whom he soon suc 
 ceeded. His ministration there was quietly suc 
 cessful, but brief. In 1832, he gave up his charge 
 on the ground that he could not conscientiously 
 celebrate the Communion, even in the symbolic 
 form customary among the Unitarians. He was 
 for the moment much adrift, his occupation 
 gone, his health broken, his wife lost after a 
 short period of happiness. In this state he went 
 abroad to travel in Italy, France, and England. 
 One memorable incident of the journey must be 
 recorded^ his visit to Carlyle at Craigenputtock, 
 with all that it entailed of friendship and in 
 fluence; but beyond that he returned with little 
 more baggage than he took with him. He now 
 made his residence in Concord, and married a 
 second wife, who was to be a true helpmeet until 
 the end. Thenceforth there was to be no radical 
 change in his life, but only the gradual widening 
 of the circle. The house that he bought, he con 
 tinued to inhabit until it was burned down in 
 1872; and then his friends, in a manner showing 
 exemplary tact, subscribed money for rebuilding 
 it on the same lines. For a number of years he 
 preached in various pulpits, and once even con-
 
 72 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 sidered the call to a settled charge in New Bed 
 ford, but could not overcome his aversion to 
 the ritual of the Lord's Supper and to regular 
 prayers. 
 
 Meanwhile, by the medium of lectures de 
 livered here and there and by printed essays, he 
 was making of himself a kind of lay preacher to 
 the world. His method of working out the more 
 characteristic of these discourses has long been 
 known. He would select a theme, and then ran 
 sack his note-books for pertinent passages which 
 could be strung together with the addition of 
 such developing and connecting material as was 
 necessary. But since the publication of his 
 Journals it has been possible to follow him more 
 precisely in this procedure and to see more clearly 
 how it conforms with the inmost structure of his 
 mind. These remarkable records were begun in 
 early youth and continued, though at the close in 
 the form of brief memoranda, to the end of his 
 life. The first entry preserved (not the first 
 written, for it is from Blotting Book, No. xvn) 
 dates from his junior year at college and con 
 tains notes for a prize dissertation on the Char 
 acter of Socrates. Among the sentences is this : 
 
 What is God? said the disciples, and Plato replied, It 
 is hard to learn and impossible to divulge. 
 
 And the last page of the record, in the twelfth 
 volume, repeats what is really the same thought:
 
 EMERSON 73 
 
 The best part of truth is certainly that which hovers 
 in gleams and suggestions unpossessed before man. His 
 recorded knowledge is dead and cold. But this chorus of 
 thoughts and hopes, these dawning truths, like great 
 stars just lifting themselves into his horizon, they are 
 his future, and console him for the ridiculous brevity 
 and meanness of his civic life. 
 
 There is of course much variety of matter in 
 the Journals shrewd observations on men and 
 books, chronicles of the day's events, etc. but 
 through it all runs this thread of self-communion, 
 the poetry, it might be called, of the New Eng 
 land conscience deprived of its concrete deity 
 and buoying itself on gleams and suggestions of 
 eternal beauty and holiness. Of the same stuff, 
 not seldom indeed in the same words, are those 
 essays of his that have deeply counted; they are 
 but a repetition to the world of fragments of this 
 long inner conversation. Where they fail to reach 
 the reader's heart, it is not so much because they 
 are fundamentally disjointed, as if made up of 
 sentences jostled together like so many mutually 
 repellent particles; as because from the manner 
 of his composition Emerson often missed what 
 is the essence of good rhetoric, that is to say the 
 consciousness of his hearer's mind as well as of 
 his own. We hear him as it were talking to him 
 self, with no attempt to convince by argument 
 or to enlighten by analysis. If our dormant in 
 tuition answers to his, we are profoundly kindled
 
 74 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 and confirmed ; otherwise his sentences may rattle 
 ineffectually about our ears. 
 
 Emerson's first published work was Nature 
 (1836), which contains the gist of his tran 
 scendental attitude towards the phenomenal 
 world, as a kind of beautiful symbol of the inner 
 spiritual life floating dreamlike before the eye, 
 yet, it is to be noted, having discipline as one 
 of its lessons for the attentive soul. The most 
 characteristic and influential of his books are the 
 two volumes of Essays, issued respectively in 
 1841 and 1844. In the former of these are those 
 great discourses on Self-Reliance, Compensation, 
 and the Over-Soul, into which was distilled the 
 very quintessence of the volatile and heady 
 liquid known as Emersonianism. Other volumes 
 followed in due course. The later publications, 
 however, beginning with Letters and Social Aims 
 (1875), are made up mainly of gleanings from 
 the field already harvested, and were even gath 
 ered by hands not his own. 
 
 Two of his addresses (now both included in the 
 volume with Nature) deserve special notice for 
 the attention they attracted at the time. The 
 first of these is the oration before the Phi Beta 
 Kappa Society of Harvard, in 1837, a high 
 but scarcely practical appeal to the American 
 Scholar to raise himself above the dust of 
 pedantries, even out of the routine of what is 
 "decent, indolent, complaisant," and to reach
 
 EMERSON 75 
 
 after the inspiration of "the Divine Soul which 
 also inspires all men." The other lecture was 
 delivered the next year before the senior class in 
 Divinity College, Cambridge, and held up to the 
 prospective preacher about the same ideal as 
 was presented to the scholar. Historical Chris 
 tianity is condemned because "it is not the 
 doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the 
 personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, 
 it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the 
 person of Jesus." The founder of Christianity 
 saw, indeed, "with open eye the mystery of the 
 soul," but what as a man he saw and knew of 
 man's divinity cannot be given to man to-day 
 by instruction, but only on the terms of a like 
 intuition. The Unitarians of Massachusetts had 
 travelled far from the Calvinistic creed of the 
 Pilgrim Fathers, but Emerson's suave displace 
 ment of the person of Jesus for the "chorus of 
 thought and hopes" in any human soul, perhaps 
 even more his implicit rejection of all rites and 
 institutions, raised a good deal of protest among 
 the worshippers of the day. For the most part 
 he answered the criticism by silence, but in a 
 letter replying to one of the more courteous of 
 his opponents he used these significant words: 
 "I could not give an account of myself, if chal 
 lenged. I could not possibly give you one of the 
 'arguments' you cruelly hint at, on which any 
 doctrine of mine stands ; for I do not know what
 
 76 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 arguments are in reference to any expression of 
 a thought." There may be some guile in this 
 pretence to complete intellectual innocence, but 
 it is nevertheless a fair statement of a literary 
 method which seeks, and obtains, its effect by 
 throwing a direct light into the soul of the hearer 
 and bidding him look there and acknowledge 
 what he sees. 
 
 Of the events of these years there is not much 
 to relate. A journey to Europe, in 1847, resulted 
 in the only two of his books that may be said to 
 have been composed as units : Representative Men 
 (published in 1850, from a series of lectures de 
 livered in London), which displays Emerson's 
 great powers as an ethical critic, and English 
 Traits (1856), which proves that his eyes were 
 observing the world about him with Yankee 
 shrewdness all the while that he seemed to be 
 gazing into transcendental clouds. Into the 
 question of slavery and disunion which was now 
 agitating the country, he entered slowly. It was 
 natural that one to whom the power and mean 
 ing of institutions had little appeal and to whom 
 liberty was the all-including virtue, should have 
 been drawn to the side of the Abolitionists, but 
 at first there was a philosophical aloofness in his 
 attitude. Only after the passing of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law and Webster's defection were his 
 passions deeply engaged. Then he spoke ringing 
 words :
 
 EMERSON 77 
 
 There is infamy in the air. I have a new experience. 
 I awake in the morning with a painful sensation, which I 
 carry about all day, and which, when traced home, is 
 the odious remembrance of that ignominy which has 
 fallen on Massachusetts, which robs the landscape of 
 beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour. 
 
 And the war came to him as a welcome relief 
 from a situation which had grown intolerable. 
 
 A third trip to Europe was made in 1872, when 
 his central will was already relaxing and his facul 
 ties were losing their edge. It was at this time 
 that Charles Eliot Norton talked with Carlyle, 
 and heard the old man, eight years older than 
 Emerson, expatiate on the fundamental differ 
 ence in their tempers. Norton records the con 
 versation in his Journal: 
 
 As we "were sitting together just after my coming in 
 this afternoon, Carlyle spoke of Emerson. "There's a 
 great contrast between Emerson and myself. He seems 
 verra content with life, and takes much satisfaction in 
 the world, especially in your country. One would sup 
 pose to hear him that ye had no troubles there, and no 
 share in the darkness that hangs over these old lands. 
 It's a verra strikin' and curious spectacle to behold a 
 man so confidently cheerful as Emerson in these days. 
 
 "Well, it may be as you say. I 'm not such a verra 
 bloody-minded old villain after all," (here a cordial 
 laugh,) " not quite so horrid an ogre as some good people 
 imagine. But the warld is verra black to me; and I see 
 nothin' to be content with in this brand new, patent 
 society of ours." 
 
 For some time there had been a gradual loosen-
 
 78 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 ing of Emerson's hold on life. Though always an 
 approachable man and fond of conversation, 
 there was in him a certain lack of human warmth, 
 of "bottom," to use his own word, which he 
 recognized and deplored. Commenting in his 
 Journal (May 24, 1864) on the burial of Haw 
 thorne, he notes the statement of James Freeman 
 Clarke that the novelist had "shown a sympathy 
 with the crime in our nature," and adds: "I 
 thought there was a tragic element in the event, 
 that might be more fully rendered, in the 
 painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, 
 could not longer be endured, and he died of it." 
 A touch of this romantic isolation, though never 
 morose or "painful," there was in himself, a 
 failure to knit himself strongly into the bonds of 
 society. "I have felt sure of him," he says of 
 Hawthorne in the same passage, "in his neigh 
 bourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy 
 and intelligence, that I could well wait his 
 time, his unwillingness and caprice, and 
 might one day conquer a friendship. . . . Now it 
 appears that I waited too long." Eighteen years 
 later, standing by the body of Longfellow, he was 
 heard to say: "That gentleman was a sweet, 
 j beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his 
 ; name." Such forgetfulness, like a serene and 
 \ hazy cloud, hovered over Emerson's brain in his 
 closing years. A month afterwards, on the 27th 
 i of April, 1882, he himself faded away peacefully.
 
 EMERSON 79 
 
 He lies buried under the shadow of a tall pine- 
 tree in Sleepy Hollow. 
 
 To one who examines the events of Emerson's 
 quiet life with a view to their spiritual bearing it 
 will appear that his most decisive act was the 
 surrender of his pulpit in 1832. Nearly a century 
 earlier, in 1750, the greatest of American the 
 ologians had suffered what now befell the purest 
 of American seers; and though the manner of 
 their parting was different (Jonathan Edwards 
 had been unwillingly ejected, whereas Emerson 
 left with good will on both sides), yet there is 
 significance in the fact that the cause of separa 
 tion in both cases was the administration of the 
 Lord's Supper. Nor is there less significance in 
 the altered attitude of the later man towards 
 this vital question. Both in a way turned from 
 the ritualistic and traditional use of the Com 
 munion, and in this showed themselves leaders of 
 the spirit which had carried the New England 
 Fathers across the ocean as rebels against the 
 Laudian tyranny of institutions. Edwards had 
 revolted against the practice of Communion as a 
 mere act of acquiescence in the authority of re 
 ligion ; he was determined that only those should 
 approach the Table who could give evidence of a 
 true conversion, by conversion meaning a com 
 plete emotional realization of the dogma of di 
 vine Grace and election. The eucharist was not a 
 rite by conforming with which in humility men
 
 8o A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 were to be made participators in the larger re 
 ligious experience of the race, but a jealously 
 guarded privilege of the few who already knew 
 themselves set apart from the world. He was 
 attempting to push to its logical issue the Puritan 
 notion of religion as a matter of individual and 
 inward experience ; and if he failed it was because 
 life can never be rigidly logical and because the 
 worshippers of his day were already begin 
 ning to lose their intellectual grasp on the Cal- 
 vinistic creed. By Emerson's time, among the 
 Unitarians of Boston, there could be no question 
 of ritualistic grace or absolute conversion, but 
 his act, nevertheless, like that of Edwards, was 
 the intrusion of unyielding consistency among 
 those who were content to rest in habit and com 
 promise. 
 
 Emerson had come to the inevitable conclu 
 sion of New England individualism ; he had, in a 
 word, "come out." Edwards had denied the 
 communal efficacy, so to speak, of rites, but had 
 insisted on inner conformity with an established 
 creed. Emerson disavowed even a conformity in 
 faith, demanding in its stead the entire liberty of 
 each soul to rise on its own spiritual impulse. He 
 was perspicacious and honest enough to acknowl 
 edge to himself the danger of such a stand. "I 
 know very well," he wrote in his journal at the 
 time of his decision, "that it is a bad sign in a 
 man to be too conscientious, and stick at gnats.
 
 EMERSON 81 
 
 The most desperate scoundrels have been the 
 over-refiners. Without accommodation society 
 is impracticable." But, he adds, he could "not 
 go habitually to an institution which they esteem 
 holiest with indifference and dislike"; and again, 
 looking deeper into his heart, "This is the end of 
 my opposition, that I am not interested in it." 
 
 Emerson's act of renunciation was not only 
 important as determining the nature of his ca 
 reer, but significant also of the transition of New 
 England from theological dogmatism to romantic 
 liberty. Much has been written about the influ 
 ences that shaped his thoughts and about the re 
 lation of his transcendentalism to German meta 
 physics. In his later years it is clear that the 
 speculations of Kant and Schelling and Fichte 
 were known to him and occasionally coloured his 
 language, but his Journals prove conclusively 
 enough that the whole stamp of his mind was 
 taken before these sources were open to him. 
 Indirectly, no doubt, something of the German 
 spirit came to him pretty early through Carlyle, 
 and a passage in his Journal for December 13, 
 1829, shows that he was at that time already 
 deeply engaged in the Teutonized rhapsodies of 
 Coleridge. But it would be easy to lay too much 
 stress even on this indirect affiliation. Long be 
 fore that date, as early as his senior year in col 
 lege, he is yearning "to separate the soul for sub 
 lime contemplation till it has lost the sense of cir-
 
 82 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 cumstances," and otherwise giving implicit ex 
 pression to the full circle of transcendental faith. 
 He was in fact the product of a great movement 
 that was sweeping over the world as it listed ; his 
 early reading went back mainly to the Greek 
 philosophers and the poets and preachers of sev 
 enteenth-century England, but they were inter 
 preted by him under the light of the new emanci 
 pation of the emotions. When he declared, in 
 Nature, that "the vision of genius comes by re 
 nouncing the too officious activity of the under 
 standing, and giving leave and amplest privilege 
 to the spontaneous sentiment," he was merely 
 stating in precise terms an idea familiar to Blake 
 and to the romanticists of every land the ele 
 vation of enthusiasm above judgment, of emo 
 tion above reason, of spontaneity above disci 
 pline, and of unlimited expansion above centrip 
 etal control. But there was another element as 
 strongly formative of Emerson's disposition as 
 was the broadening current of rebellion against 
 the reason, and that was his ancestral inheri 
 tance. Romantic spontaneity moved in various 
 directions in accordance with the field in which 
 it worked; in an Emerson, with all the divinity of 
 Massachusetts in his veins, it might move to re 
 pudiate theological dogma and deny Jehovah, 
 but it could not get out of hearing of the ques 
 tion "What is God?" It could not fall into the 
 too common confusion of spiritual aspiration
 
 EMERSON 83 
 
 with the sicklier lusts of the flesh; it could never, 
 for all its centrifugal wandering, overstep the 
 bounds of character. There, I think, we touch 
 the quick of the matter. The course of Puritan 
 emancipation led in the end to an individualism 
 and a trust in sheer unrestrained spontaneity 
 which are in many ways akin to the temper of the 
 European revolt. You will find the marks of this 
 affiliation as far back as in the reveries in which 
 Jonathan Edwards records his isolation from 
 mankind and absorption in inanimate nature; 
 and when German literature reached this land it 
 found in Emerson and Longfellow and others 
 a material ready to its hand. But with all the 
 similarity between the two movements and de 
 spite the influence of German literature, when it 
 came, upon Concord and Cambridge, there re 
 mained this striking and fundamental distinc 
 tion: the spontaneity and individualism of the 
 romantic movement on the Continent went with 
 a dissolution of character against which the 
 Puritan mind, so long as it held true to its origin, 
 was impregnably fortified. Emersonianism may 
 be denned as romanticism rooted in Puritan 
 divinity. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to illustrate this union 
 of religious individualism and stability of charac 
 ter by quotations from Emerson's verse; yet, for 
 the light they throw on his literary method, if for 
 no other reason, I will quote one or two of his
 
 84 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 familiar pieces. The best known expression of 
 the idea of the deity sitting in the breast of each 
 man, yet embracing the world, is found in those 
 stanzas entitled Brahma, which, it is hard to 
 know why, caused such a stir when they first 
 appeared. Even clearer in purport, as showing 
 how this faith in the inner power grew out of the 
 Puritan distrust of traditional rites and institu 
 tions, are the opening lines of The Problem: 
 
 I like a church; I like a cowl; 
 
 I love a prophet of the soul ; 
 
 And on my heart monastic aisles 
 
 Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles: 
 
 Yet not for all his faith can see 
 
 Would I that cowled churchman be. 
 
 Why should the vest on him allure, 
 
 Which I could not on me endure? 
 
 Not from a vein of shallow thought 
 
 His awful Jove young Phidias brought; 
 
 Never from lips of cunning fell 
 
 The thrilling Delphic oracle; 
 
 Out from the heart of nature rolled 
 
 The burdens of the Bible old; 
 
 The litanies of nations came, 
 
 Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
 
 Up from the burning core below, 
 
 The canticles of love and woe: 
 
 The hand that rounded Peter's dome 
 
 And groined the aisles of Christian Rome 
 
 Wrought in a sad sincerity; 
 
 Himself from God he could not free; 
 
 He builded better than he knew; 
 
 The conscious stone to beauty grew. 
 
 .
 
 EMERSON 85 
 
 It is significant of this confidence in individual 
 inspiration that generally in Emerson, as in other 
 poets, it tends to looseness and formless spon 
 taneity of style. When, on the contrary, he turns 
 to the note of character, his language becomes 
 instantly terse and restrained, and falls naturally 
 into symmetrical form. Matthew Arnold has 
 cited for approval the two quatrains in which 
 this note is heard most clearly : 
 
 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
 
 The youth replies, I can 
 
 and this other, 
 
 Though love repine and reason chafe, 
 There came a voice without reply, 
 " 'T is man's perdition to be safe, 
 When for the truth he ought to die." 
 
 (It may be interesting to observe that the two 
 last lines, as we learn from Emerson's Journal, 
 were taken bodily from the sermon of a Puritan 
 divine preached in 1642. That by the way.) Of 
 the two quatrains as a whole Matthew Arnold 
 remarks that they are "exceptional" in our poet. 
 They are that, and something more: they are 
 exceptional in literature. One would have to 
 search far in English to discover anything equal 
 to them in their own kind. They have the clean 
 ness and radiance of the couplets of the Greek 
 Simonides. They may look easy, but as a matter
 
 86 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 of fact the ethical epigram is an extremely dif 
 ficult genre, and to attain this union of gravity 
 and simplicity is one of the supreme accomplish 
 ments of art. Along with absolute sureness of 
 touch there is required an entire balance and con 
 trol of the faculties, a deep respect for the springs 
 of human nature in a word character. 
 
 While speaking of these traits I ought not to 
 pass by the little poem entitled Days, in which 
 the feeling for beauty in itself, superadded to in 
 sight and the note of character, produces a work 
 of exquisite finish and haunting charm: 
 
 Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
 
 Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes. 
 
 And marching single in an endless file, 
 
 Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
 
 To each they offer gifts after his will, 
 
 Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 
 
 I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
 
 Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
 
 Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
 
 Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 
 
 Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 
 
 These, it must be admitted, are rare occur 
 rences in Emerson, the event of what Plato 
 would call a divine chance; if they had come 
 oftener, or had been at his command, he would 
 have been, despite the limitations of his subject- 
 matter, one of the very great poets of the world. 
 But this was not to be. On the contrary, by the 
 side of these poems which are marked by mas-
 
 EMERSON 87 
 
 terly form and restraint you will find others, and 
 these the more numerous, in which he surrenders 
 himself to the shifting breath of inspiration like a 
 rudderless boat, to such a degree, indeed, that 
 over much of his work his own word "whim" 
 might be set as a superscription. 
 
 The philosophy of his prose essays so far as 
 he can be said to have systematized his thoughts 
 at all shows this same light-hearted legerde 
 main. Nor is this philosophy hard to discover; 
 the whole circle of his ideas is likely to be present, 
 explicit or implicit, in any one of his great pas 
 sages : the clear call to self-reliance, announc 
 ing that "a man should learn to detect and watch 
 that gleam of light which flashes across his mind 
 from within"; the firm assurance that, through 
 all the balanced play of circumstance, "there is a 
 deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, 
 its own nature"; the intuition, despite all the 
 mists of illusion, of the Over-Soul which is above 
 us and still ourselves: "We live in succession, in 
 division, in parts, in particles; meanwhile within 
 man is the soul of the whole ; the wise silence ; the 
 universal beauty. . . ; the eternal One." 
 
 Emerson's philosophy is thus a kind of vanish 
 ing dualism, and a man's attitude towards it in 
 the end will be determined by his sense of its 
 sufficiency or insufficiency to meet the facts of 
 experience. One of Emerson's latest biographers 
 has attempted to set forth this philosophy as "a
 
 88 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 synthesis and an anticipation," in that we find in 
 it, as Emerson had already found in Plato and 
 Plotinus, a reconciliation which all men are seek 
 ing of "the many and the one," the everlasting 
 flux and the motionless calm at the heart of 
 things : 
 
 An ample and generous recognition of this transiency 
 and slipperiness both in the nature of things and in 
 man's soul seems more and more a necessary ingredient 
 in any estimate of the universe which shall satisfy the 
 intellect of the coming man. But it seems equally true 
 that the coming man who shall resolve our problems 
 will never content himself with a universe a-tilt, a uni 
 verse in cascade, so to speak; the craving for perma 
 nence in some form cannot be jauntily evaded. Is there 
 any known mind which foreshadows the desired com 
 bination so clearly as Emerson's? Who has felt more 
 profoundly the evanescence and evasiveness of things? 
 . . . Yet Emerson was quite as firm in his insistence on a 
 single unalterable reality as in his refusal to believe that 
 any aspect or estimate of that reality could be final. 1 
 
 The necessity of the dualism that underlies 
 Emerson's philosophy could scarcely be put more 
 neatly, and the kind of synthesis, or reconcilia 
 tion, in which Emerson floated is admirably ex 
 pressed. But I am not so sure that this synthesis 
 anticipates the solution of the troublesome prob 
 lems of life, or that it will afford the kind of spir 
 itual consolation which hitherto mankind has 
 found in religion. There will be those who will 
 
 1 O. W. Firkins, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 364.
 
 EMERSON 89 
 
 ask whether the power of religion for mature 
 minds does not depend after all on its feeling for 
 evil as a tremendous reality? How otherwise, in 
 fact, shall religion meet those harder questions 
 of experience when its aid is most needed? And 
 in like manner they will say that the power of 
 philosophy as the dux vita depends on its ac 
 quaintance with the scope and difficulties of 
 scepticism? Both religion and philosophy would 
 seem, in such a view, to rest not only on a state 
 ment of the dualism of good and evil, knowledge 
 and ignorance, but on a realization of the full 
 meaning and gravity, practical and intellectual, 
 of this dualism. Now Emerson certainly recog 
 nizes the double nature of experience, but it is a 
 fair question whether he realizes its full meaning 
 and fateful seriousness. Ke accepts it a trifle too 
 jauntily; is sometimes too ready to wave aside its 
 consequences, as if a statement of the fact were 
 an escape from its terrible perplexities. To be 
 reconciled so cheerfully to this dark dilemma is 
 not a reconciliation of the dilemma itself, but 
 argues rather some deep-lying limitation of 
 spiritual experience. Carlyle meant something 
 of the sort when he worried over Emerson's in 
 ability to see the hand of the devil in human 
 affairs a strange paradoxical charge to bring 
 against the purest inheritor of the old faith of 
 New England, yet essentially true. 
 A good way to learn what this denial of evil
 
 90 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 led to in practice is to turn from Emerson to some 
 of his weaker-minded followers or friends. For 
 example, Bronson Alcott, one of the Concord il- 
 luminati, chanced to be in England in the year 
 1842, and there, in concert with one or two Eng 
 lishmen who had imbibed his vaporous ideas, con 
 cocted a plan to found in the vicinity of Boston 
 and Concord "a New Eden," where man might 
 live in primitive simplicity and forget the wretched 
 illusion of the existence of sin. So came about the 
 experiment of "Fruitlands," the communal farm 
 of philosophers at the village of Harvard, one of 
 the funniest and, for some of those involved, one 
 of the saddest attempts to disregard the facts of 
 life and human nature. 
 
 Of the group of "consecrated cranks," as a rebel 
 afterwards styled them, one, a mild lunatic named 
 Samuel Brown, believed in salvation by the grace 
 of nakedness. The poor fellow soon became dis 
 contented because, in deference to the ladies of 
 the community, they forced him to restrict his 
 practice of salvation to the hours of night, and 
 even then to mitigate its purity by wearing a 
 single garment. In that garb he used to wander 
 over the hills like a white ghost, until rumours of 
 the unearthly apparition got about among the 
 farming folk and caused a prosaic search for the 
 visitant with a posse comitatis. Meanwhile, as 
 he was confined to his chamber by day, he did 
 not contribute much to the physical well-being
 
 EMERSON QI 
 
 of the settlement. Another of the genial come- 
 outers was a cooper by trade, described in a letter 
 as "an excellent assistant here, very faithful to 
 every work he undertakes, very serious." That 
 sounds promising. But unfortunately there were 
 drawbacks to his full acceptance by the leaders 
 of the band. He "has had rather deep experi 
 ence," continues the writer of the letter, "having 
 been imprisoned in a mad house by his relatives 
 because he had a little property, but still he is not 
 a spiritual being, at least not consciously and wish 
 fully so." Really that is one of the most delicious 
 sentences on record from the pen of a saint 
 imprisoned in a mad house, but still (note the con 
 junction) not a spiritual being. 
 These good people had a double purpose : one, 
 sufficiently humble, to support themselves, that 
 is their unmentionable bodies, on the pure fruits 
 of the earth ; the other, more elevated, to plant "a 
 love colony," as their Eden was called, where the 
 brotherhood of man should reign unpolluted by 
 the lust of property, and by their illustrious ex 
 ample to aid "entire human regeneration." It 
 cannot be said that they succeeded very well in 
 feeding themselves, and when food was bad they 
 took it out, like other mortals, in grumbling at 
 the cooks. The men of the colony were so ab 
 sorbed in the contemplation of the mystery of 
 holiness that the fruits of the field rather lan 
 guished. As Alcott's daughter said, they "were
 
 92 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 so busy discussing and defining great duties that 
 they forgot to perform the small ones." The bar 
 ley crops somehow would not harvest themselves, 
 so they were got in by the women while the mas 
 culine sages were wandering off in the amiable 
 desire of "aiding entire human regeneration." 
 Things grew worse and worse, until it came to a 
 question of leaving or starving. It is very pretty 
 to declare that the body is "all sham"; but you 
 can't feed it by shamming work. 
 
 And as for the spirit, by some unaccountable 
 means the serpent seems to have crept into this 
 Eden, as he did into the original experiment. The 
 "love colony" soon developed into a circle of dis 
 appointed, jealous, fault-finding men and women, 
 who found it to their advantage to seek shelter 
 from one another by scattering in the wicked 
 world. This is one of Father Hecker's memo 
 randa: "Somebody once described 'Fruitlands' 
 as a place where Mr. Alcott looked benign and 
 talked philosophy, while Mrs. Alcott and the 
 children did all the work." It is well to look be 
 nign, but another of the colonists wrote in a dif 
 ferent vein. "All the persons," he complains, 
 "who have joined us during the summer have 
 from some cause or other quitted, they say in 
 consequence of Mr. Alcott's despotic manner, 
 which he interprets as their not being equal to 
 the Spirit's demands." It looks a little as if these 
 spiritual demands were not unaccompanied with
 
 EMERSON 93 
 
 spiritual pride ; and pride, we remember, is some 
 times said to have been the sin that broke up the 
 original Eden. 
 
 Emerson, of course, was too knowing ever to 
 have joined himself in the flesh to these altruistic 
 humbugs; but one cannot forget that he was a 
 patron of Alcott's and for the most part took that 
 dilapidated Platonist with portentous serious 
 ness. For instance, he observes in his Journal for 
 1857: 
 
 Last night in the conversation Alcott appeared to 
 great advantage, and I saw again, as often before, his 
 singular superiority. As pure intellect I have never seen 
 his equal. The people with whom he talks do not ever 
 understand him ; ... do not know that all they have in 
 their baby brains is incoherent and spotty; that all he 
 sees and says is like astronomy, lying there real and 
 vast, every part and fact in eternal connection with the 
 whole. 
 
 The truth is that Alcott is in a way a carica 
 ture of Emerson ; but it is just as a caricature that 
 he shows with startling vividness what Emerso 
 nianism runs to when divested of the common 
 sense and strong character which were ballast to 
 the master's shining optimism. Emerson saw the 
 good and radiated spiritual light as few other men 
 of his century did ; but his blindness to the reality 
 of evil was not of his strength, it was of his weak 
 ness. Hence it is that he often loses value for his 
 admirers in proportion to their maturity and
 
 94 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 experience. He is preeminently the poet of re 
 ligion and philosophy for the young; whereas men 
 as they grow older are inclined to turn from him, 
 in their more serious needs, to those sages who 
 have supplemented insight with a firmer grasp of 
 the whole of human nature. 
 
 That is undoubtedly true ; nevertheless, as time 
 passes the deficiencies of this brief flowering period 
 of New England, of which Emerson was the per 
 fect spokesman, may well be more and more con 
 doned for its rarity and beauty. One of the wings 
 of the spirit is hope, and nowhere is there to be 
 found a purer hope than in the books of our New 
 England sage; rather, it might be said that he 
 went beyond hope to the assurance of present hap 
 piness. The world had never before seen anything 
 quite of this kind, and may not see its like again.
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 ONE of the mottoes prefixed to the second volume 
 of these letters 1 is a sentence from Sainte-Beuve, 
 which would read in English something like this: 
 "The illustrious writers, the great poets, scarcely 
 exist without having about them other men, 
 themselves essential rather than secondary, great 
 in their incompleteness, the equals in the inner life 
 of thought with those whom they love, whom 
 they serve, and who are kings by right of art." 
 The words could not be more fitting if they had 
 been written with Norton in mind, so perfectly 
 do they express his relation to the artists of his 
 generation. We think of him first, perhaps, as the 
 friend of Ruskin and Carlyle, of Longfellow and 
 Lowell, and of the other writers who were giving 
 lustre to the Victorian and may we say? 
 Cantabrigian age, and we recall the epitaph he 
 once playfully suggested for himself: "He had 
 good friends, whom he loved"; but we do his 
 memory wrong if we regard him as a mere para 
 site or shadow, of those greater reputations. He 
 was more than friend and audience ; he was coun 
 sellor and, at times, judge. One of the few notes 
 
 1 Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. With Biographical 
 Comment, by his daughter Sara Norton and M. A. De 
 Wolfe Howe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913.
 
 98 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 of personal resentment in his correspondence is 
 a protest against a passage in Ruskin's Prtzterita 
 which had represented him as seeking unasked 
 the society of the more famous man. Ruskin, 
 indeed, meant to cast no slur, and in the same 
 book adds the most generous praise of his "first 
 tutor": 
 
 Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my nar 
 rownesses, and, from the first, took serenely, and as it 
 seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over 
 me, and a right of guidance though the younger of 
 the two and always admitting my full power in its 
 own kind. 
 
 Something of that "rectorial power" he had 
 with whomsoever he lived, whether individual or 
 community, and from it came his honour and a 
 measure, too, of bitter reproach. His letters, as 
 they are now published in selection, have other 
 claims to attention, but their greatest value is in 
 the clear revelation of the man himself to those 
 who knew him not at all or, like the writer of this 
 essay, knew him but slightly, and of the source of 
 the authority which made him among his more 
 productive contemporaries an Sgal au dedans. 
 The opportunity to set forth the nature of that 
 power brings a peculiar pleasure, not without a 
 sense also of humility, to the present editor of the 
 journal which Norton helped to found and into 
 which so much of his character entered. 1 
 
 1 Written in 1913 when I was editing the Nation.
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 99 
 
 As for the work of the editors of these volumes 
 it is sufficient to say that there is not a word of 
 their own about Norton, nor is there a letter of 
 his included, which would have given offence to 
 his scrupulous taste in such matters; and, on the 
 other hand, there is no evidence that anything 
 has been omitted which is necessary to the un 
 derstanding of the man and his position. Possibly 
 the interest of the volumes would not have been 
 diminished if an even stricter selection had been 
 exercised in the earlier letters. Norton came to 
 maturity rather late, and it is the gravity of his 
 judgment more than any adventitious aids of 
 fancy or cleverness that holds our attention. 
 
 His letters in this respect are curiously unlike 
 those of Lowell, with which one naturally com 
 pares them. After the first crude effervescence 
 of youth Lowell charms us with his grace and 
 dazzles us with the fecundity of his invention; 
 we say that never was there a fellow like this to 
 amuse and entertain. But somehow the interest 
 does not quite hold to the end; we are a little 
 irked to find that he never entirely controlled his 
 own faculties; we never touch bottom with him, 
 not so much because of the depth of his mind as 
 because of the drift of its currents. With Norton 
 it is just the reverse. We begin by thinking him, 
 comparatively at least, a trifle dull; but as we 
 read on we are caught by the sheer integrity of 
 his language ; we are impressed by the feeling that
 
 100 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 here was a man of utter veracity, who never 
 swerved aside to be funny or wise or profound or 
 original, but was concerned to say with unflinch 
 ing precision just what he felt and thought. No 
 doubt these virtues have a negative side and de 
 note a certain slowness of imagination and a cer 
 tain lack of higher spontaneity in the writer, but 
 at the worst we are not annoyed by the attempt 
 to conceal such deficiencies under a sham spright- 
 liness, and at the best we forget them by reason 
 of other positive qualities. There is nothing in 
 this correspondence in any way equivalent to the 
 winged phrases in which Lowell describes to Nor 
 ton the effect of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa ora 
 tion: "It began nowhere and ended everywhere, 
 and yet, as always with that divine man, it left 
 you feeling that something beautiful had passed 
 that way something more beautiful than any 
 thing else, like the rising and setting of stars," 
 etc. Nor was it within the compass of Norton's 
 pen to write any one of a dozen of those improvi 
 sations in which Lowell fairly takes your breath 
 away with the audacity of his wit. But neither 
 was it within the scope of Lowell's intelligence 
 to give finality to one of the commonplaces of 
 experience with just such grave and pondered 
 beauty of expression as that which Norton used 
 to Leslie Stephen on the death of his brother: "It 
 is one of those changes which alter the whole 
 habit and aspect of life, shutting up so many
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 101 
 
 chambers to which nobody else has a key, increas 
 ing the solitary and silent part of life which grows 
 so disproportionate to the rest as we grow old." 
 In the end we suspect that most readers will say, 
 as they close the second of these volumes: Here 
 is the larger man and the deeper nature, and here, 
 after all deductions, are the finer letters. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that Norton was 
 pedantic or priggish in his correspondence, or 
 sent out an epistle with the solemn consideration 
 of a judge handing down a decision. He is familiar 
 and easy enough on occasion, and at times strong 
 and picturesque. Especially during and after his 
 third long visit abroad his letters and journal gain 
 in substance by the occasional portraits of men 
 and reports of conversations. Naturally, Car- 
 lyle is prominent in these, and he is presented as 
 abounding in the kind of humorous exaggeration 
 by virtue of which Norton always defended him 
 against his detractors. 1 One day it is Carlyle dis 
 coursing on Browning: 
 
 1 Haud inexpertus loquor. There lies before me now a 
 letter from Norton, dated 8 April, 1904, which illustrates 
 this point: 
 
 "I am truly obliged to you for sending to me a copy of 
 your interesting paper on The Spirit of Carlyle, which I 
 might not have had the pleasure of seeing had it not been 
 for your kindness 
 
 "You will not be surprised at my thinking that you do 
 Froude more than justice, and that in your estimate of his 
 work you hardly recognize how false an impression Froude 
 conveys of the actual life and relations of Carlyle, for it
 
 - 
 
 So 
 
 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP, 
 
 So he went on till some one asked him if he had seen 
 Browning lately. "Na," said he, with a twinkle in his 
 eye, "but I've read the whole of his new poem, The 
 Ring and the Book, in four volumes, from beginning to 
 end, without omitting a word, and a most extraordinary 
 production it is; a work of great ingenuity and full of 
 verra strikin' sentences. I met Browning, indeed, in 
 Piccadilly the other day, and I told him I'd read his 
 poem from the first word thereof way to the last, and he 
 said to me, quickly, 'Well! Well?' and I replied that I 
 thought it a book of prodigious talent and unparalleled 
 ingenuity; but then, I suppose trusting to the sincerity 
 of my own thoughts, I went on to say that of all the 
 strange books produced on this distracted airth, by any 
 of the sons of Adam, this one was altogether the strang 
 est and the most preposterous in its construction; and 
 where, said I, do ye think to find the eternal harmonies 
 in it? Browning did not seem to be pleased with my 
 speech, and he bade me good morning." 
 
 At another time it is Carlyle's swift judgment 
 of Sumner, whom he defines as "the most corn- 
 ought to be held in mind that whatever tendency to mysti 
 cism may have controlled Carlyle's conception of life, his 
 actual relations to it were of the simplest character. These 
 actual and natural relations have been distorted by Froude 
 to such a degree that the true impression of the man as he 
 lived is hardly to be obtained from his volumes. The in 
 tensity of his domestic affections, the tenderness of his 
 sympathies, his fidelity in the discharge of all duties to his 
 family, were almost as exceptional as his literary genius. 
 He exposed himself to great misapprehensions by his 
 humorous extravagances and by his exaggerated utterances 
 of feeling; but he had one of the simplest and soundest of 
 hearts, and he had a capacity for quick and tender sym 
 pathy such as I have known in few other men. ..."
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 103 
 
 pletely nothin* of a mon that ever crossed my 
 threshold, naught whatsoever in him or of 
 him but wind and vanity." And again it is Car- 
 lyle on Carlyle, expressing a fundamental truth 
 about himself which some of his critics have still 
 to learn: 
 
 While we were sitting by the fireside, before we left 
 the house this afternoon, he said, speaking of himself, 
 " I 've been much misunderstood in my time, and very 
 lately now I was readin' an article on Froude's view of 
 Ireland in the last number of Macmillan, written by a 
 man whom ye may have seen, one , a willow pat 
 tern of a man, very shrill and voluble, but harmless, a 
 pure herbivorous, nay, graminivorous creature, and he 
 says with many terms of compliment that there's 'a 
 great and venerable author' who's done infinite harm to 
 the world by preachin' the gospel that Might makes 
 Right, which is the verra precise contrary to the truth I 
 hold and Have endeavoured to set forth, which is simply 
 that Right makes Might. And I well remember when, in 
 my younger days, the force o' this truth first dawned on 
 me, it was a sort of Theodicee to me, a clew to many 
 facts to which I have held on from that day." 
 
 But it is Norton himself we come to seek in this 
 correspondence, rather than Carlyle or another, 
 and Norton's place as the last representative of a 
 remarkable generation vltimus Novorum An- 
 glicanorum. Some day we shall appreciate New 
 England literature at its true value. But before 
 that day we must learn to distinguish between 
 what is provincial and what is merely local. If 
 anything is provincial it is to incorporate such
 
 104 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 men as the old Scottish poets in the main body 
 of English literature, as is commonly done in man 
 uals of the subject, and to relegate the Massa 
 chusetts writers to an appendix, if they are men 
 tioned at all, as though they were foreign to the 
 spirit of the language in which they wrote. In 
 one of his letters from London, Lowell tells of a 
 Scotsman who "had the ill-manners" to compli 
 ment him on his English: "Why, I shouldn't 
 know you were n't an Englishman. Where did 
 you get it?" Lowell's was the reproof valiant. 
 "Icould n't resist," he says, "and answered with 
 a couple of verses from a Scottish ballad 
 
 I got it in my mither's wame, 
 Whaur ye '11 get never the like! 
 
 He will never compliment me again, I fear." 
 Whatever justification there may be for separat 
 ing off the New England group would lie rather in 
 their facile cosmopolitanism. It is true that they 
 showed symptoms of a weakening at the root 
 by their too ready submission to influences from 
 Germany and Spain and Italy, but in the main 
 they were faithful inheritors of one of the domi 
 nant British traditions. Through all the changes 
 that inevitably came with the passage of two 
 hundred years, they still remembered the voice 
 of Bunyan and Baxter and Marvell and Herbert 
 and Wither and the others to whom their fathers 
 had hearkened at the time of the great exodus.
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 105 
 
 They created no one piece quite of the first rank 
 in the realm of the imagination, but the body 
 of their work, when the final account is made, 
 will stand out honourably in the general produc 
 tion of the Victorian era, and the spirit which 
 directed them and which rises from their books 
 as a kind of fine and fragrant exhalation, will be 
 recognized as one of the very precious things in 
 the history of the world. 
 
 And Norton himself was fully aware of the 
 beauty and meaning of that tradition into which 
 he was born. No doubt, in the course of his long 
 life he said many hard things about America, 
 speaking sometimes not altogether wisely. Like 
 others of his generation, he was caught up by the 
 enthusiasm of the years when the country was 
 moved 'to its depths by a passionate idea, and 
 had it not been for ill health he would have 
 fought in the Civil War with the soldiers of his 
 State. But after the war he was never in sym 
 pathy with certain marked tendencies of democ 
 racy and never hesitated to express his opinion. 
 "I have been too much of an idealist about 
 America," he wrote, near the end of his life, "had 
 set my hopes too high, had formed too fair an 
 image of what she might become. Never had na 
 tion such an opportunity, she was the hope of the 
 world." This disillusion was in part due to his 
 fastidious social sense, sharpened by the con 
 trast of America with the large opportunities he
 
 io6 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 had enjoyed. Society was to him "the very rar 
 est and best thing that the world proper can give 
 us. It is the thing that our modern materialism 
 is largely killing out, that is, in its highest 
 form, the society that bears witness to leisure and 
 culture, and good breeding, made up of men who, 
 though versed in affairs, are still idealists and 
 lovers of poetry." This was the idea he had in 
 mind, no doubt, when he began a lecture on the 
 word "gentleman" before a large class with the 
 grave pleasantry: "None of you, probably, has 
 ever seen a gentleman." Such sentiments and 
 words were not always taken kindly, and when, 
 as at the time of the Spanish War, he did not 
 hesitate to expose publicly the mixture of hy 
 pocrisy and thoughtlessness that entered into 
 the popular furor, resentment against him be 
 came almost a mark of loyalty to the country. 
 Opinions may vary in regard to his tilt with 
 Senator Hoar; there are those who still think he 
 was rightly rebuked for "the habit of bitter and 
 sneering speech"; but these, we may believe, are 
 not many. Reading the letters of Norton and 
 Senator Hoar side by side, most of us to-day will 
 feel that honour and truth are rather on the side 
 of Norton, and his address to the Cambridge 
 Club, which, in a garbled report, called forth the 
 storm of reproach, will seem the memorable ut 
 terance of a calm and virile patriotism. Nor 
 should it be forgotten that the address ended
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 107 
 
 with the strong words, "Nil desperandum de re- 
 pufrlica." Norton himself did, in fact, never de 
 spair. Many times in his letters he expresses his 
 faith in the essential soundness of the people. It 
 is notable that the architecture of the World's 
 Fair at Chicago was to him a magnificent achieve 
 ment and a greater promise, and that from the 
 city itself he could draw happy auguries for the 
 future of America. A Brahmin of New England 
 who can admire Chicago is not quite lost to vir 
 tue. 
 
 But withal, whether for his credit or discredit, 
 it must be admitted that Norton stood before the 
 country and exercised the office of critic as the 
 product of a particular time and place. He was 
 of Cambridge, the earlier Cambridge which was, 
 with Concord, one of the eyes of New England, 
 the Greece of Greece, so to speak; and this posi 
 tion he never forgot. Several times in his letters 
 he refers to the exceptional character of the gen 
 eration in which his own life began. "I believe, 
 indeed," he says once, writing at the end of the 
 century, "that the very pleasantest little oasis of 
 space and time was that of New England from 
 about the beginning of the century to about 1825 
 [he himself was born in 1827]. The spirit of that 
 time was embodied in Emerson, in Longfellow, 
 in Holmes, and in Lowell. It was an inexperi 
 enced and youthful spirit, but it was a happy one ; 
 it had the charm of youth, its hope, its simplicity,
 
 108 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 its sweetness." He might have added, as his 
 reader no doubt added, that he, too, was one of 
 the bearers of that spirit sacra fero ingenti per- 
 cussus amore though, for the hopefulness of 
 youth, he brought other qualities. Innumerable 
 forces of inheritance made him what he was. His 
 ancestor, John Norton, named for his more noted 
 uncle, one of the four famous Johns (Cotton, 
 Norton, Wilson, and Davenport), took charge of 
 the parish of Hingham in 1678. In the same year 
 he published a poem, being nothing other than a 
 Funeral Elegy, Upon that Patron of Virtue, the 
 truly pious, peerless & matchless Gentlewoman, 
 Mrs. Anne Bradstreet. In 1897 our Norton edited 
 the poems of the matchless gentlewoman, and in 
 his introduction wrote of her with more than his 
 usual freedom and intimacy: 
 
 It struck me that there would be something of quaint 
 appropriateness in my writing, at this long interval, in 
 regard to her whose praises he [John Norton] had sung, 
 and that the act would not be without a certain piety 
 toward my ancestor. And, further, I reflected, that as I 
 could trace my descent in one line directly from Gov 
 ernor Thomas Dudley, the father of Mrs. Bradstreet, 
 and as portraits of her brother, Governor Joseph Dud 
 ley, and his wife, looked down on me every day while I 
 sat at breakfast and dinner, she, as my Aunt many 
 times removed, might not unjustly have a claim upon 
 me for such token of respect to her memory as had been 
 asked of me She cherished in herself and in her chil 
 dren the things of the mind and of the spirit; and if such 
 memory as her verses have secured for her depend rather
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 109 
 
 on the circumstance of a woman's writing them at the 
 time when she did, and in the place where she lived, than 
 upon their poetic worth, it is a memory honourable to 
 her, and it happily preserves the name of a good woman, 
 among whose descendants has been more than one poet 
 whose verses reflect lustre on her own. (Through one of 
 her children she is the ancestress of Richard Henry 
 Dana; through another, of Oliver Wendell Holmes.) 
 
 From a daughter of John Norton, married to 
 John Quincy, was descended John Quincy Ad 
 ams. In the direct male line came Andrews Nor 
 ton, who in 1811 was appointed a tutor at Har 
 vard and later professor of sacred literature. In 
 1821 he married Catharine Eliot (whence the 
 relationship with President Eliot), and soon 
 bought the house with some fifty acres of land 
 in Cambridge known as Shady Hill. In that 
 quiet home, which was to welcome so many of 
 the great scholars and writers of the world, and 
 whose gracious courtesies and dignity so many 
 Harvard men still cherish in memory as a pos 
 session equal in value to any learning, Charles 
 Eliot Norton, one of four children who grew to 
 maturity, was born, and there, after many years 
 and many labours, laid down his life. 
 
 By every right of tradition Norton belonged 
 with the group of scholars and poets who just 
 preceded him in birth, and he belonged with 
 them also by virtue of his own accomplishments. 
 When we consider the work of that generation it 
 seems as if we saw the energy of a strong people,
 
 110 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 nourished through long discipline and austere 
 abstentions, now suddenly freed from repression 
 and displaying itself in manifold, and all too 
 brief, expansion. Each man had his particular 
 share in that activity: to one it was the exercise 
 of wit, to another the sentiment of home and 
 hearth, to another the comfort of religion, to an 
 other the re-creation of aboriginal life, to another 
 the critical judgment, to another the symbolism 
 of a brooding imagination, to another the free 
 dom of nature, to another the justification of the 
 untrammelled spirit. Now it must be admitted 
 that in none of these fields was Norton quite pre 
 eminent; even as a critic his writing falls below 
 Whipple's, who was nevertheless in every way a 
 smaller man than he. It is not unlikely that the 
 melancholy which shows itself occasionally in his 
 letters was in some small measure due to the 
 consciousness of these deficiencies. So he writes 
 one day to Lowell: "Except for George [William 
 Curtis], I have been very solitary. From year to 
 year I seem to myself to grow more and more 
 silent, and to express less of what is in my soul. 
 I should like to have the power of expression, 
 at least long enough to give form and utterance 
 to a few of the deepest conceptions of Life and its 
 significance and uses which come to one as one 
 grows old and draws the lessons from his own ex 
 perience." It is true, as he says, that he never 
 embodied his wisdom of experience in literary
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON in 
 
 form, but this wisdom is precisely what he stood 
 for among his contemporaries, and just because 
 we feel this in his letters we shall treasure them. 
 He was, in the best sense of the word, the man of 
 culture, the ripe scholar, to whom the lessons of 
 the past had become a personal experience. To 
 the multiform flowering of the time he brought 
 the note of sound cosmopolitanism. 
 
 But he brought also with that culture, and 
 this was his largest gift, a peculiar virtue of 
 inheritance. More than any other man of his 
 group, he represented the naked New England 
 conscience and its tenacity of character. It may 
 seem that his powers were manifested chiefly 
 in negation. To the individual, and particularly 
 to the young student who showed promise of 
 achievement, he could be generous of help and 
 encouragement. But in relation to the commu 
 nity at large he stood undeniably as critic and 
 check; and this attitude was often deeply re 
 sented. What has this man done, people would 
 ask in a tone of cavilling rebellion, that he should 
 set himself up as judge over others? Well, the 
 question was not unnatural ; yet is not character 
 always in some way negative? Is it not of its 
 very essence to act as a check upon the impulsive 
 temperament, and even upon the ranging en 
 thusiasms of the soul? And especially in the hour 
 of expansive liberty that came to New England 
 when it had broken from the bondage of religion,
 
 112 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 it was desirable that the principle of restraint, 
 broadened indeed by contact with the world, but 
 not weakened or clouded, should have had its 
 voice and embodiment. On the ship which 
 brought Norton home from Europe in May of 
 1873 Emerson also sailed, and we have in Nor 
 ton's journal a record of his wonderful conversa 
 tion, with the journalist's comment and criti 
 cism. For one who reflects on the later course of 
 New England and America these are memorable 
 pages: 
 
 Emerson was the greatest talker in the ship's com 
 pany. He talked with all men, and yet was fresh and 
 zealous for talk at night. His serene sweetness, the pure 
 whiteness of his soul, the reflection of his soul in his face, 
 were never more apparent to me; but never before in 
 intercourse with him had I been so impressed with the 
 limits of his mind. His optimistic philosophy has hard 
 ened into a creed, with the usual effects of a creed in 
 closing the avenues of truth. . . . He refuses to believe in 
 disorder or evil. Order is the absolute law; disorder is 
 but a phenomenon. . . . 
 
 But such inveterate and persistent optimism, though 
 it may show only its pleasant side in such a character as 
 Emerson's, is dangerous doctrine for a people. It de 
 generates into fatalistic indifference to moral considera 
 tions, and to personal responsibilities; it is at the root of 
 much of the irrational sentimentalism in our American 
 politics. . . . 
 
 Never were truer words put on paper. The 
 pure whiteness of Emerson's soul is, when all has 
 been reckoned up, the finest thing that New Eng-
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 113 
 
 land has given to the world ; but in the society for 
 which he ministered as a high priest of ecstatic 
 vision, there was a place also, an indispensable 
 place, for the questioner who stood for the tradi 
 tional New England conscience and sense of evil. 
 We shall do well to honour Norton in our mem 
 ory as one who through all spiritual temptations 
 kept his feet firmly planted on the bedrock of 
 character. 
 
 The winds of folly blew about him as they 
 blow about us, the dust of pedantries smote his 
 eyes, cant and sentimentalism fouled his air, but 
 he held to his course unmoved, cherishing always 
 in his heart what is lovely and of good report, a 
 faithful teacher, to whom were well applied the 
 words of the poet who had been the chief study 
 of his life : 
 
 Felice te, che si parli a tua posta.
 
 HENRY ADAMS
 
 HENRY ADAMS 
 
 THE display of a copy of The Education of Henry 
 Adams has been a kind of hall-mark of distinc 
 tion for any private library, ever since the book 
 was printed and distributed to a few friends of 
 the author in 1907. Even to have read its jeal 
 ously guarded pages was something to boast of, 
 and the initiated were wont to wag their heads 
 over its revelations as over some exotic drink 
 which they were expected to admire, but which 
 teased their palate by its strange flavour. And 
 now the volume is published to the world, and 
 one wonders what the world will make of it 
 perhaps nothing. Yet simply as the record of an 
 unusual life it is certainly entertaining above the 
 average, and would be doubly so were it half as 
 long. The virtue of cynicism is its point, and 
 Only the genial can afford to be diffuse. Mr. 
 Adams was nothing if not cynical; had he learned 
 the rare art of compression, he might have pro 
 duced a work worthy of a place beside the auto 
 biographies of Gibbon and Franklin. 
 
 No other man of this country, save his broth 
 ers, one of whom, the late Charles Francis Ad 
 ams, has followed his example, had quite such 
 material at his disposal. Son of the elder Charles 
 Francis Adams, grandson of a President, and
 
 Il8 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 great-grandson of the mighty John of Revolu 
 tionary fame, his conscience was a kind of his 
 torical epitome. As private secretary of his 
 father at the British court during the Civil War, 
 he saw the inside of that society and government 
 towards whose public manifestation his family 
 had lived in a state of hereditary feud. As a 
 member of the Harvard faculty for seven years, 
 he is said to have introduced the first historical 
 seminary into an American college. As an au 
 thor, not to mention his privately printed Mont- 
 Saint-Michel and Chartres (recently republished 
 by the authority of the American Institute of 
 Architects) and his unacknowledged novels 
 Esther and Democracy, he produced a history of 
 the United States under Jefferson and Madison 
 notable for its original and broad use of sources, 
 for its judicious characterizations, and its sus 
 tained interest. As a citizen of Washington, 
 where his later and some of his earlier years were 
 spent, he saw familiarly the working of a govern 
 ment which he admired no more than he did that 
 of London. As a friend, he was close to John Hay 
 and Clarence King, great men in this field, the 
 latter especially, though little known to the 
 world, yet by the few idolized as the deus prcesens 
 of social joy and wisdom. 
 
 Not many men of the past generation enjoyed 
 such opportunities of watching the drama of life, 
 and perhaps none of them excelled him in the
 
 HENRY ADAMS 119 
 
 power of penetrating beneath the surface of 
 things; and this power is none the less amazing 
 when, as often happened with him, the lifted cur 
 tain, behind which we looked for the revelation 
 of some well-staged scene of history, exhibited 
 only the disarray of planless confusion. That 
 indeed is the moral of the book if moral it may 
 be called the baffled sense of mystery behind 
 the veil of apparent design. " King and Hay and 
 Adams could neither of them escape floundering 
 through the corridors of chaos," he says, with 
 an ungrammatical reminiscence of Longfellow, 
 "that opened as they passed to the end." 
 
 But this is to anticipate. What we have to note 
 now is the pungent interest of Adams's comments 
 on the figures thrown up in flashes of light beside 
 him as he journeyed through these shadowy cor 
 ridors. Sometimes it is a whole society that fur 
 nished him with a discharge of epigrams. First 
 it is the people among whom he was born, and 
 who stamped their traits upon his own soul : 
 
 Resistance to something was the law of New England 
 nature; the boy looked out on the world with the in 
 stinct of resistance; for numberless generations his 
 predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to 
 be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and 
 they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly 
 succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. 
 That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred 
 of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and 
 generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether
 
 120 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 (boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile 
 universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; 
 his joys were few. 
 
 Beside this one might set his summary char 
 acterization of the opposite type as he came into 
 contact with it as a Harvard undergraduate: 
 "Strictly, the southerner had no mind; he had 
 temperament^ He~was not a scholar; he had no 
 intellectual training ; he could not analyse an idea, 
 and he could not even conceive of admitting two ; 
 
 I but in life one could get along very well without 
 ideas, if one had only the social instinct." To com 
 plete the gallery I may quote his report of a na 
 tional trait which had exercised the wit of Shake 
 speare and Swift and Horace Walpole and a long 
 succession of observers of human nature as 
 minted in Great Britain. 
 
 The English themselves [he remarks while in London] 
 hardly conceived that their mind was either economi 
 cal, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck 
 an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. 
 Americans needed and used their whole energy, and ap 
 plied it with close economy; but English society was 
 eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself. 
 The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or 
 dinner-table was that so-and-so " is quite mad." It was 
 no offense to so-and-so; it hardly distinguished him 
 from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, like 
 Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forci 
 ble. Eccentricity was so general as to become heredi 
 tary distinction. It made the chief charm of English 
 society as well as its chief terror.
 
 HENRY ADAMS 121 
 
 The epigrammatic flavour is sufficient to lend 
 some freshness to a truism as old as Hamlet's 
 clown, but Adams's Further query whether this 
 eccentricity is a sign of strength or weakness, and 
 his remarks on its working when brought into 
 conflict with the plainer methods of his father 
 and Thurlow and William Evarts, add a quality 
 of reflection that is not at all trite. Nor did his 
 keen understanding forsake him when dealing 
 with individuals, as might be instanced by his 
 characterizations of the men just named, or of 
 such other politicians as Grant and McKinley 
 and their Cabinets. Of mere anecdote the pages 
 contain comparatively little, although here and 
 there a good story gets entangled in his web of 
 comment. Those who have some knowledge of 
 Henry Reeve, the solemn, bulky, busy, doc 
 trinaire editor of the Edinburgh Review, and of 
 the Grotes, will be amused by this rencontre. 
 "Every one," says Adams, "had heard of Mrs. 
 Grote as 'the origin of the word grotesque.' 
 Every one had laughed at the story of Reeve ap 
 proaching Mrs. Grote, with his usual somewhat 
 florid manner, asking in his literary dialect how 
 her husband the historian was: 'And how is 
 the learned Grotius?' 'Pretty well, thank you, 
 Puffendorf !' One winced at the word, as though 
 it were a drawing of Forain." Best of all, best of 
 all at least for the lover of literature who tempers 
 his enthusiasms with a grain of hard-headed cyni-
 
 122 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 cism, is Adams's account of meeting with Swin 
 burne at the home of Lord Houghton, and this 
 pendant to it of a later date: 
 
 Ten years afterwards Adams met him [Swinburne] at 
 the Geneva Conference, fresh from Paris, bubbling with 
 delight at a call he had made on Hugo: "I was shown 
 into a large room," he said, "with women and men 
 seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end 
 throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice 
 solemnly, and uttered the words: 'Quant a moi, je 
 crois en Dieu!' Silence followed. Then a woman re 
 sponded as if in deep meditation: 'Chose sublime! un 
 Dieirqui croit en Dieu!'" 
 
 But it is not as a gallery of character etchings 
 or as a repertory of stories that Mr. Adams's 
 book mainly interests us ; it is always the observer 
 more than the observed that holds our attention, 
 the effect being much the same as if we were read 
 ing a novel of Henry James, in which we are less 
 concerned with the narrated acts of a group of 
 men and women than with the colour these ac 
 tions will take in the mind of some outside spec 
 tator, revealed or half-revealed. With both the 
 novelist and the biographer the impelling motive 
 is curiosity rather than sympathy ; but with a dif 
 ference. In James we feel more the detachment 
 of a mere psychological experimenter, the uncon 
 cern of one who creates a world of complex emo 
 tions and wills for the somewhat chilly pleasure 
 of taking apart what he has so carefully put to 
 gether; whereas in Adams there is always present
 
 HENRY ADAMS 123 
 
 the eager desire to discover in the drama some 
 elusive truth which, if found, would give a 
 meaning to its unfolding scenes. The autobiog 
 raphy is well named The Education of Henry 
 Adams, though we surmise from the beginning 
 tKat no lesson will ever be learned, and that the 
 learner has set himself to decipher a text in a 
 foreign tongue without grammar or lexicon in his 
 hands. 
 
 In a way the text before him was not one of his 
 own choice, but forced on him by birth and in 
 heritance. This breed of New England, of whom 
 he was so consciously a titled representative, had 
 once come out from the world for the sake of a 
 religious and political affirmation the two were 
 originally one to confirm which they were 
 ready to deny all the other values of life. For the 
 liberty to follow this affirmation they would dis 
 card tradition and authority and form and sym 
 bol and all that ordinarily binds men together 
 in the bonds of habit. But the liberty of denying 
 may itself become a habit. The intellectual his 
 tory of New England is in fact the record of the 
 encroachment of this liberty on the very affirma 
 tion for which it was at first the bulwark. By a 
 gradual elimination of its positive content the 
 faith of the people had passed from Calvinism to 
 Unitarianism, and from this to free thinking, 
 until in the days of our Adams there was little 
 left to the intellect but a great denial :
 
 124 
 
 vr CT 
 
 ^ DUZzl 
 
 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards 
 puzzled the grown up man, this disappearance of religion 
 puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every 
 Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned 
 religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild Deism; 
 he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to 
 him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even 
 the mild discipline of the Unitarian church was so irk 
 some that they all threw it off at the first possible mo 
 ment, and never afterwards entered a church. The re 
 ligious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, 
 although one made in later life many efforts to recover 
 it. That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the 
 sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of 
 his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the 
 most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he 
 ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the 
 universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making 
 itself anxious about past or future, and should have per 
 suaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed 
 human thought from earliest recorded time, were not 
 worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social 
 phenomenon he had to account for in a long life. 
 
 So the original affirmation had been swallowed 
 up in its own defences, while the negative im 
 pulse grew "to a degree that in the long run be 
 came positive and hostile." But with this intel 
 lectual negation there remained almost in full 
 force the moral impulse which from the first had 
 been so intimately associated with a negative 
 separatism. This is the key we must hold in our 
 hands if we would enter into the inner life of 
 Henry Adams and the other New Englanders of
 
 HENRY ADAMS 125 
 
 his generation, taking the word broadly we 
 must, if possible, put ourselves into the state of 
 men whose conscience was moving, so to speak, 
 in vacua, like a dispossessed ghost seeking a sub 
 stantial habitation. Adams "tended towards 
 negation on his own account, as one side of the 
 New" England mind had always done." In this 
 vacuum various minds sought relief in various 
 ways, connecting themselves naturally with the 
 contemporary currents of European thought. 
 Emerson, as the purest spirit of them all, would 
 rest in the bare liberty of prophesying, in the se 
 curity of an intuition content in itself and care 
 less of all preceding experience as formulated in 
 law and custom. He was par excellence the pure 
 Romantic, yet withal a New Englander at heart, 
 not a German. John Fiske, if we may extend the 
 limits of a genera ti6h~sb far, looked to the new 
 discoveries of ssientific evolution to give sub 
 stance to the vague cosmic deity which had swum 
 into the place of the Christian Jehovah. Most 
 significant of all in some respects for our pres 
 ent subject is the case of Charles Eliot Norton. 
 With him New England scepticism merges into 
 the contented agnosticism of his British friends, 
 particularly of Leslie Stephen, while the sting of 
 conscience takes the form of distress at the licence 
 of an agnostic society. So he writes, in one vein 
 
 to Goldwin Smith : 
 
 f 
 
 Possibly I regret less than you do the giving up of the
 
 126 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 old faith, and the being compelled to renounce as hope 
 less every attempt to solve the problems which excite 
 our curiosity. The position toward the universe in which 
 we find ourselves seems to me on the whole the manliest 
 which has been attained. We are thrown back on our 
 own resources to make the best of our lives. A new 
 sense of responsibility is aroused in us, and, by the nar 
 rowing of the limits of our hopes and expectations, we 
 find ourselves more capable of using our faculties for 
 legitimate and rational ends. 
 
 But when the conscience of Norton is speaking we 
 hear words very different from those of his reason 
 just quoted. So, for instance, he writes to Leslie 
 Stephen : 
 
 ^r It looks as if the world were entering on a new stage of 
 experience, unlike anything heretofore, in which there 
 must be a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the 
 new conditions. I fear that America is beginning a long 
 course of error and of wrong, and is likely to become 
 more and more a power for disturbance and for bar 
 barism. The worst sign is the lack of seriousness in the 
 body of the people; its triviality, and its indifference to 
 moral principle. 
 
 S Norton was not consistent, you will say; and 
 rightly. There is a question to ask of a man who 
 finds a new source of responsibility in a creed 
 destructive of the very principle of authority, 
 yet laments the lack of responsibility in a world 
 that acts in accordance with such a creed ; there is 
 a beautiful inconsistency in the heart of one who 
 professes complete agnosticism, yet spends his 
 life in the devoted study of Dante. It is the in-
 
 HENRY ADAMS 127 
 
 consistency of a conscience that has outlived faith 
 and not found philosophy, the will of New Eng 
 land working out in its own peculiar manner the 
 problem of the nineteenth century. To Adams 
 the question of meaning in the world came with a 
 somewhat different emphasis. Norton was the 
 product of a long line of theologians, and doubt, 
 when it crept in, took primarily the form of philo 
 sophical scepticism. But Adams was not born 
 into the Brahmin caste. From the beginning, as 
 seen in his great-grandfather and in his ancestral 
 cousin, the revolt against traditional authority 
 had been rather in the field of politics, and it was 
 in his blood, so to speak, that his agnosticism 
 should strike first upon the belief in a providen 
 tial purpose in history. That indeed is the stimu 
 lus of what he calls his education. His inquiry 
 was to branch out into a wider sphere, and in the 
 end was to make its return to a medieval mysti 
 cism, as Norton's did to a medieval aestheticism ; 
 but in his earlier years he was sufficiently ab 
 sorbed in seeking some theory to explain the se 
 quence of historical events. What was the mean 
 ing of this opposition which his forbears and his 
 father had maintained against the settled in 
 stitutions of government? To whose profit did it 
 accrue, or was there any profit to be found any 
 where? In what way had the world grown wiser 
 and truer from this struggle and from all the 
 struggles of men since the beginning of time?
 
 128 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Where should he put his finger on the thread of 
 progress in the terrible tangle of human misad 
 venture? 
 
 He began his inquiry at least in old age, 
 looking back over his experience, he seemed to 
 himself to have begun it when as a boy he 
 watched the political manoeuvres of the Aboli 
 tionists. At home he "lived in the atmosphere of 
 the Stamp Act, the Tea Tax, and the Boston 
 Massacre"; only now "the Slave Power took the 
 place of Stuart Kings and Roman Popes." He 
 observed his father and Charles Sumner and their 
 clique play the game of politics against the en 
 trenched aristocracy of Boston ; he saw from the 
 inside the working of the coalition which sent 
 Sumner to the Senate and made George Boutwell 
 the Democratic governor of Massachusetts; he 
 thought their ends noble, such as his great 
 grandfather would have approved, but he knew 
 that their means were ignoble ; and he wondered. 
 "Thus before he was fifteen years old, he had 
 
 ! managed to get himself into a state of moral con 
 fusion from which he never escaped." 
 Formal instruction gave him no clue to the 
 labyrinth. "Four years of Harvard College, if 
 successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, 
 a mind on which only a water-mark had been 
 stamped." He got no wisdom from his teachers, 
 none from his fellow students, though these in 
 cluded such promising names as Alexander Agas-
 
 HENRY ADAMS 1 29 
 
 siz, Phillips Brooks, H. H. Richardson, and O. W. 
 Holmes. "The chief wonder of education," he 
 remarks, "is that it does not ruin everybody con 
 nected with it, teachers and taught." That is 
 the world-old ingratitude of the scholar, com 
 monly pronounced most vigorously by those 
 who have profited most from instruction; it falls 
 naturally from the lips of Henry Adams, and per 
 haps with him means something. At any rate he ! 
 left college still "watching vaguely for a path and > 
 a direction." Travel might bestow what the < 
 class-room had withheld. He travelled. In Rome, 
 more than once, he sat at sunset on the steps of , 
 the church of Santa Maria di Ara Cceli there 
 where Gibbon had mused on the fall of empire | 
 sat, and reflected, and concluded nothing: f 
 
 Rome was a bewildering complex of ideas, experi 
 ments, ambitions, energies; without her, the Western 
 world was pointless and fragmentary; she gave heart 
 and unity to it all; yet Gibbon might have gone on for 
 the whole century, sitting among the ruins of the Capi 
 tol, and no one would have passed, capable of telling him 
 what it meant. Perhaps it meant nothing. 
 
 We need not follow Adams through all the 
 stages of his historical education. One great 
 lesson in negative wisdom he was to learn in 
 London, while helping his father to unravel the 
 machinations of Palmerston and Lord John Rus 
 sell and Gladstone against the government of the 
 United States. He was to observe men sensitive
 
 130 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 to any imputation of untruth and otherwise 
 highly moral, yet in public speaking one thing 
 while in private acting another, men whose cour 
 age, as it seemed to him, lay in subterfuge and 
 whose honour went no further than indignation. 
 
 , " If one could not believe them, Truth in politics 
 might be ignored as a delusion "; and he had ample 
 grounds for not believing any word of Gladstone 
 at least, the most righteous of them all. What was 
 to be made out of such a contradiction in terms 
 by a student of life who "liked lofty moral 
 
 I principles and cared little for political tactics"? 
 "Here, then, appeared in its fullest force, the prac 
 tical difficulty in education which a mere student 
 could never overcome ; a difficulty not in theory, 
 or knowledge, or even want of experience, but in 
 the sheer chaos of human nature." 
 
 That difficulty was not diminished when he 
 returned to Washington and saw a blunt plain 
 soldier like Grant entangled in the most question 
 able business. For one moment, indeed, at the 
 time of our Spanish War, he felt a sense of pos 
 sible purpose working itself out in history. To 
 him, if to no one else, "still living in the atmos 
 phere of Palmerston and John Russell, the sud 
 den appearance of Germany as the grizzly terror 
 which, in twenty years, effected what Adamses 
 had tried for two hundred in vain, frightened 
 England into America's arms, seemed as melo 
 dramatic as any plot of Napoleon the Great." But
 
 HENRY ADAMS 131 
 
 his satisfaction was more temperamental than in 
 tellectual than intelligent, one might say and 
 in the embroglio of foreign intrigue that followed, 
 and that wrecked the health of his dearest friend, 
 John Hay, he was forced to see again only the 
 conflict of blind wills and the shifting combina 
 tions of chance. 
 
 If Adams's observation of history in the mak 
 ing, supplemented by his study of history in the 
 past, led to these sceptical conclusions, a sudden 
 event of a more personal sort seemed, as it were, 
 to rend the veil of cosmic charity and to show 
 him that the foolishness of human affairs was but 
 a little centre of chaos encompassed by a vast and 
 malignant chaos of nature. Called from London 
 to Italy by a telegram, he found his beloved sister, 
 a woman of forty, for whom life had been gay and 
 brilliant, dying in extreme torture from a miser 
 able accident. As he sat by her bedside and 
 watched the agony of her dissolution, while out 
 of doors the world was glowing with the sensuous 
 joys of an Italian summer, it seemed to him that 
 now for the first time he beheld Nature face to 
 face; and what he saw in that vision was to haunt 
 him for the rest of his years: 
 
 Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued 
 in the mind ; they are felt as part of violent emotion ; and 
 the mind that feels them is a different one from that 
 which reasons; it is thought of a different power and a 
 different person. The first serious consciousness of Na 
 ture's gesture her attitude towards life took form
 
 
 132 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 then as a fantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. 
 For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses col 
 lapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vi 
 brating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless 
 mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying what 
 these same energies had created and laboured from eter 
 nity to perfect. Society became fantastic, a vision of 
 pantomime with a mechanical motion ; and its so-called 
 thought merged in the mere sense of life, and pleasure in 
 the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine be 
 came evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best; 
 religion was the most human; but the idea that any 
 personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a 
 poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known 
 to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, 
 could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it 
 made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the 
 Church said, a Substance, but he could not be a Person. 
 
 In those hours of biting agony, while the indi 
 vidual life so dear to him was wrestling unequally 
 with the unsympathetic powers of death, Adams 
 r saw the destiny of mankind merged into the 
 . destiny of the sum of things. At an early pe- 
 l riod he had added to his reading of history a faith 
 ful study of science, and as he had sought for a 
 thread of providential guidance in the one, so, 
 under the influence of the newly based theory of 
 
 I evolution, he looked for signs of design and pro 
 gress in the non-human order of creation. At 
 first the two fields of inquiry had lain apart, but 
 now, as I say, they appeared as phases only of 
 the one problem which engaged his passionate 
 attention. But the search baffled him, baffled him
 
 HENRY ADAMS 133 
 
 the more as it became more complex. As in his 
 tory he thought he saw the evil persisting un 
 changed along with the good, so in the field of 
 science he beheld the lower order of existence 
 continuing on with the higher and throwing an 
 element of stable confusion into progressive mu 
 tation. More than that. When he went beyond 
 the material of biology into the dark background 
 of inorganic forces he learned that the physicists 
 themselves acknowledged only an inexpressible 
 mystery. In Germany he heard Haeckel avowing 
 that "the proper essence of substance appeared 
 to him more and more marvellous and enigmatic 
 as he penetrated further into the knowledge of 
 its attributes, matter and energy, and as he 
 learned to know their innumerable phenomena 
 and their evolution." In France he heard the 
 clearer and more authoritative voice of Poincar6 
 making the same confession of ignorance: "[in 
 science] we are led to act as though a simple law, 
 when other things were equal, must be more 
 probable than a complicated law. Half a cen 
 tury ago one frankly confessed it, and proclaimed 
 that nature loves simplicity. She has since given 
 us too often the lie. To-day this tendency is no 
 longer avowed, and only so much of it is preserved 
 as is indispensable so that science shall not be 
 come impossible." Then, turning to England, 
 he read such words as these: "In the chaos be 
 hind sensation, in the 'beyond' of sense-impres-
 
 134 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 sions, we cannot infer necessity, order, or routine, 
 for these are concepts formed by the mind of man 
 on this side of sense-impressions. . . . Briefly, chaos 
 is all that science can logically assert of the super- 
 sensuous." Thus as the "unknowable" came 
 nearer to man's inquiry it seemed to put on posi 
 tive and menacing hues; the pronouncements of 
 the most advanced physical thinkers echoed to 
 Adams what he had learnt from his own study 
 in history chaos in the background here and 
 there. And if he went to the pseudo-science of 
 psychology he was faced with another "sub-con 
 scious chaos below the mind"; man's "normal 
 thought," he learned, "was dispersion, sleep, 
 dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action 
 of different thought-centres without central con 
 trol. His artificial balance was acquired habit. 
 He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, 
 crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and commonly 
 breaking his neck." Here was a question that 
 sprang from something very far from idle curi 
 osity. Had Adams not witnessed the terror of the 
 mystery, when this thing called chaos had sud 
 denly lurched forward out of its background of 
 mystery and enveloped his little oasis of well- 
 loved order? 
 
 What was the proper attitude towards this 
 enigma? Was it that no one can reach beyond 
 himself? "All that Henry Adams ever saw in 
 man was a reflection of his own ignorance"
 
 HENRY ADAMS 135 
 
 such was his political discernment far back in his 
 London days; should that be the final verdict of 
 all his seeing? In a way he had acquired what 
 ages ago had been proclaimed by Socrates as the 
 beginning of wisdom : not to think we know what 
 we do not know. Into this sea of negation he had 
 sailed from the ancient moorings of his people; 
 but not even the New Englander of the nine 
 teenth century could rest in pure negation. 
 Emerson, like Socrates, had found no difficulty 
 in combining scepticism with an intuition of 
 pure spirituality, though, unlike Socrates, to 
 maintain his inner vision intact he shut his eyes 
 resolutely on the darker facts of nature. That 
 serene indifference to evil was the last thing 
 possible to Adams. Another New Englander, 
 nearer to Adams in date, John Fiske, had ac 
 cepted the most rigid deductions of biological 
 evolution, and then on Darwin's law of natural 
 selection, which for humanly felt good and evil 
 substituted a conception of blind unfeeling mech 
 anism, had superimposed the conception of a cos 
 mic deity unfolding the world to 
 
 one far-off divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves. 
 
 Whatever may be said of such a philosophy, it 
 was meaningless to Henry Adams; he could not 
 marry the faith in a benignant pantheistic will 
 with the sort of chaos that lurked for him behind 
 every door of our ignorance. Still another New
 
 136 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Englander, Charles Eliot Norton, as we have 
 seen, was content to profess a complete agnosti 
 cism of theory along with an unswerving belief 
 in human responsibility to what? Alas, that 
 
 I "what" was the little irksome word that Adams 
 could not get out of his mind. 
 The answer, or the direction towards an an 
 swer, came to him as he walked the halls of the 
 Paris Exposition of 1900. There, at least, under 
 the guidance of his scientific friend, Langley, if 
 he saw nothing that pointed to a rational design 
 at the end of things, he beheld in the great gallery 
 of machines a symbol of what science had substi 
 tuted for design. "The planet itself seemed less 
 impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, an 
 nual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, 
 revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous 
 speed, and barely murmuring, scarcely hum 
 ming an audible warning to stand a hair's- 
 breadth further for respect of power, while it 
 would not wake the baby lying close against its 
 frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; 
 inherited instinct taught the natural expression 
 of man before silent and infinite force. Among 
 the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the 
 dynamo was not so human as some, but it was 
 the most expressive." Force, he would say, blind 
 whirling force, strapped and bound in iron, is 
 supreme over all : 
 
 Dinos has driven out Zeus and rules as king.
 
 HENRY ADAMS 137 
 
 We should need, in fact, a living Aristophanes to 
 celebrate this step of a New Englander's educa 
 tion. Other men of the century had discovered 
 this same god, but their worship had taken 
 strangely different forms. ''Power is power," 
 says Tolstoy, reading for himself the lesson of 
 history at the conclusion of his War and Peace, 
 "that is Power is a word, the true meaning of 
 which is to us incomprehensible"; and then, as a 
 good humanitarian, he personifies this Unknow 
 able in the instinctive soul of the People. Nietz 
 sche, too, had found only Macht at the heart of 
 the world, but he worshipped this Power not at 
 all in the impulse of the People quite the con 
 trary; and some of his interpreters have deified 
 a Schrecklichkeit very different from the pity of 
 Tolstoy; Perhaps the true lesson of our age 
 would be to learn why and how this modern 
 Janus of Power has tricked us into believing that 
 he has only one face. But Adams was too know 
 ing to bow the knee with Tolstoy, and too timid 
 to salute with Nietzsche. He took another way. 
 Norton, as we have seen, had found agnosti 
 cism compatible with devotion to Dante, being 
 able at least to sympathize with the energetic 
 moral sense and the aesthetic vision of that poet ; 
 and Adams, like him, turned at last for consola 
 tion to the age of Dante, if not to Dante himself, 
 though with a difference. From the Exposition, 
 "caring but little for the name, and fixed only on
 
 138 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 tracing Force, Adams had gone straight to the 
 Virgin at Chartres, and asked her to show him 
 God, face to face, as she did for St. Bernard." 
 What the Virgin revealed to him is told clearly 
 enough in the autobiography, but for its fullest 
 elucidation one should read that extraordinary 
 disquisition on the art and poetry and philosophy 
 and religion of the twelfth and thirteenth cen 
 turies which he entitles Mont-Saint-Michel and 
 Chartres. In the Virgin Mother of God, to whose 
 honour the cathedrals pointed their arches 
 towards heaven, before whose throne the win 
 dows were made to glow like the jewels of a 
 queen, for whose delight romance wove its shim 
 mering web of words, to whom great scholars 
 sacrificed their learning, our far-travelled New 
 Englander saw at last the one symbol of Force 
 comprehensible to the human heart, if not to the 
 human brain. "The Puritans," he says, "aban 
 doned the New Testament and the Virgin in 
 order to go back to the beginning, and renew the 
 quarrel with Eve"; our latest Puritan rediscov 
 ers woman on her medieval throne, and chants to 
 her in modern speech the ancient paean to Alma 
 Venus Genetrix. It would be a pretty business to 
 unravel the various motives that had impelled 
 him on this devious way from the sturdy, if un 
 loving, protestantism of his race. He himself 
 makes much of the motive of love as the aspect 
 of infinite power which man can understand.
 
 HENRY ADAMS 139 
 
 That may be ; but I suspect that another attri 
 bute of the Virgin meant even more to his mind. 
 Read, if you will, his charming pages on her in 
 terventions and miracles; you will observe that 
 they were almost without exception performed 
 to override the course of law and justice, and you 
 will learn that behind her woman's pity there was 
 another quality which Adams, at any rate, does 
 not hesitate to glorify as equally feminine : 
 
 The fact, conspicuous above all other historical cer 
 tainties about religion, that the Virgin was by essence 
 illogical, unreasonable, and feminine, is the only fact of 
 any ultimate value worth studying, and starts a number 
 of questions that history has shown itself clearly afraid to 
 
 touch She was imposed unanimously by all classes, 
 
 because what man wanted most in the Middle Ages was 
 not merely law or equity, but also and particularly 
 favour. . . . The individual rebelled against restraint; so 
 ciety wanted to do what it pleased ; all disliked the laws 
 which Church and State were trying to fasten on them. 
 ... If the Trinity was in its essence Unity, the Mother 
 alone could represent whatever was not Unity; what 
 ever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was 
 the whole human race. 
 
 Conscience was the last tie of New England to 
 its past. Was it the perfect irresponsibility of the 
 Virgin, human no doubt, feminine perhaps, cer 
 tainly not Puritan, that gave to our tired sceptic 
 the illusion of having reached a comfortable goal 
 after his long voyage of education? There is a 
 fateful analogy between the irresponsibility of 
 unreasoning Force and unreasoning love ; and the
 
 140 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 gods of Nietzsche and of Tolstoy are but the two 
 faces of one god. To change the metaphor, if it 
 may be done without disrespect, the image in the 
 cathedral of Chartres looks perilously like the 
 ancient idol of Dinos decked out in petticoats. 
 
 If we regard Adams's scholarship, his imagina 
 tion, his verbal dexterity, his candour, his cynical 
 vivacity, his range of reflection, we must give 
 him a high place in the American literature of the 
 past generation, a higher place probably than his 
 present limited popularity would indicate. But 
 one winces a little at acknowledging that the 
 latest spokesman of the Adamses and of New 
 England ends his career in sentimental nihilism. 
 From Harvard College, which to Adams had 
 been only one stage in the way of disillusion, the 
 boy John Fiske had written: "When we come to 
 a true philosophy, and make that our stand-point, 
 all things become clear. We know what things to 
 learn, and what, in the infinite mass of things, to 
 leave unlearned ; and then the Universe becomes 
 clear and harmonious." The tragedy of Adams's 
 education is that of a man who could not rest 
 easy in negation, yet could find no positive faith 
 to take its place. From one point of view he may 
 appear to be the most honest and typical mind 
 of New England in its last condition ; yet withal 
 some manlier voice, some word of deeper insight 
 that yet faces the facts of life, we must still 
 expect to hear from the people of Mather and 
 Edwards and Channing and Emerson. j
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 
 
 WHAT special students of so-called psychic phe 
 nomena will think of Mr. Henry Holt's two gen 
 erous volumes 1 1 do not know, but to me, and no 
 doubt to many like me, they are quite the most 
 important and significant, as they are the most 
 entertaining, exposition of the subject. This is 
 indeed something more than a dead book; it is a 
 life as it were the voice of a friend confiding 
 to us through the hours of a long winter night the 
 lessons, still mingled with hesitations and ques 
 tions, of his ripe experience. The publicity of 
 high spirits may abound; but there are pages 
 also which will reveal their full meaning only to 
 those who know the author as a friend in the lit 
 eral sense of the word, passages, for those who 
 understand, of almost sacred privacy. So, for 
 instance, the minute account of the spectacle un 
 folding at sunrise to the eyes of the watcher at 
 the author's summer home has its place and 
 weight for all readers as an argument that, as 
 these lovely things are far beyond "our ancestors' 
 universe of darkness and silence," so there may be 
 infinite ranges of perception still to be discovered 
 
 1 On the Cosmic Relations. By Henry Holt. Boston: 
 Houghton Mifflin Co., 1914; second edition, 1919, title 
 changed to The Cosmic Relations and Immortality.
 
 144 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 by mankind; but to one who has entered that 
 hospitable "gate, open to all who care to come," 
 and with the kindly guidance of his host has seen 
 the sunlight falling from mountain top to valley 
 and from valley to lake, the printed words will 
 be something more than the speech of a book to 
 its unseen audience. These matters I should like 
 to dwell on for their pleasantness and their wis 
 dom ; but, like a bad talker, I must use all my time 
 in contradiction. For I need not defer saying 
 that Mr. Holt's work seems to me to consist of 
 two elements strangely compounded. Besides the 
 appealing sagacity of the man of the world, in 
 quisitive, sceptical of dogma, tolerant of all things 
 except impertinence, resting finally in balance 
 and measure besides this sagacity of experience 
 to which I bow, there is also in the book a phi 
 losophy of a more formal sort, to which, from the 
 deepest knowledge of my heart, I am bound to 
 demur. 
 
 Mr. Holt is avowedly of the school of "Lyell, 
 Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and their friends," who 
 swept away "the flood of associations on which 
 the old faiths depended"; he is a Spencerian d 
 entrance. Such a state of mind might be set down 
 as merely belated ; but Mr. Holt is anything rather 
 than tardy in his views. My quarrel with him is 
 because, while adhering to the letter of evolution 
 in its strict mechanical form, he would open his 
 mind to the flood of spiritual associations with
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 145 
 
 no sense of the incongruity of such a position. I 
 do not mean to imply that there is any thing singu 
 lar in this procedure, unless it be in the peculiar 
 frankness and honesty of Mr. Holt's ideas. On 
 the contrary, however individual some of his con 
 clusions may appear, he has been borne onward 
 on one of the great tides of the intellect. In the 
 exaltation and lust of conquest that came with 
 the Victorian demonstration of evolution, men's 
 heads were a little turned, and whatever reserva 
 tions they might make in deference to the Un 
 knowable and the outlying realms of mystery, 
 they were really and pugnaciously convinced 
 that here was the word of truth which should 
 silence the riddling questions of man's soul, as 
 certainly as the Copernican system had led to 
 the untangling of the orbits of the planets. The 
 comparison of Darwin or Spencer with Copernicus 
 became in fact one of the commonplaces of the 
 wise and the unwise. 
 
 But this assurance of science was bought at a 
 terrible price. It meant that every appearance of 
 spontaneity in the universe must be subdued to a 
 law of inflexible regularity, and that the soul of 
 man was held to be no more than a momentary 
 centre of molecular force in the vast abyss of 
 matter. Naturally, the imagination of endless 
 space and of the infinite mechanism of time, when 
 the first enthusiasm of assertion calmed down, 
 seemed to the human spirit a chill substitute for
 
 146 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 its intuitions of independent existence. In many 
 thoughtful minds it even awoke a kind of horror, 
 and the supreme word of Spencer himself, the cod 
 icil, so to speak, to his evolutionary testament, is 
 an ever memorable confession of that feeling: 
 
 The thought of this blank form of existence which, 
 explored in all directions as far as imagination can reach, 
 has, beyond that, an unexplored region compared with 
 which the part which imagination has traversed is but 
 infinitesimal the thought of a Space compared with 
 which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles to a 
 point, is a thought too overwhelming to be dwelt upon. 
 Of late years the consciousness that without origin or 
 cause infinite Space has ever existed and must ever exist, 
 produces in me a feeling from which I shrink. 
 
 Now it is nothing to our purpose here to say 
 that the notion of infinite space or of any cosmic 
 mechanism is as purely a piece of self-engender 
 ing logic as was Anselm's or any other School 
 man's ontologicai proof of the being of God. The 
 point is that the hearts of men are never very 
 brave before the truth, or what they deem the 
 truth, when their own deeper desires are thwarted. 
 "The chief component of mind," as Spencer ob 
 serves, "is feeling," and it is an "enormous er 
 ror" to suppose that reason, whether right or 
 wrong, will long endure the attack of our emo 
 tions. And so the revulsion from the cruder 
 dogmas of Victorian materialism has been swift 
 and sure. In many ways, whether in open rebel 
 lion against science or ostentatiously under its
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 147 
 
 banner, men have turned their eyes once more to 
 
 that true world within the world we see, 
 Whereof our world is but the bounding shore 
 
 calling it "true," perhaps, because faith is greater 
 than perception. 
 
 Now, outrageous as such a statement may 
 sound, I confess that the conversion of the pro 
 fessional student of science, as, for example, that 
 of Sir Oliver Lodge, has little meaning for me; 
 the very character of his work in investigation 
 seems to have a restricting effect on his mind, so 
 that his sense of the relative value of evidence 
 in other than his own narrow field is likely to be 
 feeble or distorted. But there is deep meaning in 
 the fact that a wary man of the world, who has 
 been imbued with the mechanical theorems of 
 evolution, should yet find this philosophy inade 
 quate to his inner life, and should devote the 
 dearly purchased leisure of his later years to the 
 study of phenomena which, if genuine, must 
 break asunder all the links of Huxley's causal 
 chain and shatter into bits the steadfast cosmic 
 machine of Spencer. For what have cause or cal 
 culation to do there where Mr. Holt would take 
 us, even beyond "the region of congruities"? If 
 any one paragraph may be selected as giving the 
 central motive of Mr. Holt's book, it is, I take 
 it, this: 
 
 Certain it is that without an abiding consciousness 
 that the known mass of phenomena is not all, and that
 
 148 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 behind them is a cause transcending our imaginations, 
 life loses some of its best emotions, the imagination 
 grows arid, and the moral impulses shrink. While what 
 we know, and the increasing of it, can more than occupy 
 all our working powers, they work all the better for an 
 occasional dream of greater and less troubled things. 
 
 These two bulky volumes, in fact, are essen 
 tially the confession of a strong inquisitive mind 
 seeking, under compulsion, to reach some assur 
 ance in that "dream of greater and less troubled 
 things." Mr. Holt is one of those who admit that 
 wisdom has come to them by way of sudden con 
 version. The first warning fell when he was still 
 a young man : " It came," he says, "with the blaze 
 of light, but the light was from the natural sun 
 set which, however, seemed that evening not con 
 fined to the far-off clouds, but to pervade the 
 whole atmosphere and all other things, including 
 me, and to be pervaded by energy and mind and 
 sympathy." This, if I interpret his story correctly, 
 was of the preliminary and general sort not un 
 known in conversions of the more orthodox kind, 
 and needed to be fixed and directed by a later 
 experience. He was turned finally to the new way 
 by a figure and admonition, as he firmly believes, 
 from the other world an epiphany so dear 
 that he can only hint at it in pious reticence. He 
 had already seen a little of what the commoner 
 sort of mediums can do in furniture-smashing and 
 mind-reading, but now he who I cannot for-
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 149 
 
 bear the gentle reproach can find small time 
 for Plato, is impelled to give year upon year to 
 the forty-one volumes of the Proceedings and 
 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 
 It is not strange that, after this long confinement 
 and the completion of his great work, his "desire 
 to get back to the studies of our usual life is like 
 the desire to get from the fog into the sunlight"; 
 but to some of us his report from that realm of 
 fog is strange indeed, passing strange. 
 
 A considerable part of his book consists of ex 
 tracts from the publications of the S.P.R., sup 
 plemented by a few hitherto unprinted documents 
 and furnished with a running comment. For the 
 form in which this material is given us we are 
 bound to be grateful. The selection includes mat 
 ter of a. later date than that in the Human Per 
 sonality of Mr. Frederic Myers, and is con 
 structed in such a spirit of freedom and fairness 
 as to justify the reader in feeling that he should 
 gain little by wading through the enormous mass 
 of the sources. Nor is Mr. Holt's tone repellently 
 dogmatic. He admits that he himself is still 
 groping in these obscure regions, and he does not 
 hesitate to point out the paradoxical and often 
 contradictory nature of the evidence. The r61e 
 of fraud and collusion in the manifestations he 
 does reject as insignificant and impertinent; and 
 in this most of us are ready to follow him. No 
 doubt there has been a vast amount of deliberate
 
 ISO A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 deception in the table-turning and other so- 
 called mediumistic phenomena, but the residue 
 of facts which cannot be accounted for by the 
 ordinary faculties of man is large and presses for 
 explanation. What shall we do with them? 
 
 Now a complete Spencerian, and indeed any 
 one who marches under the exclusive flag of 
 science, is bound to hold that these phenomena 
 have their proper place in the scheme of evolu 
 tion, and so Mr. Holt is at great pains to connect 
 them with the development of man's perceptive 
 powers. I have referred to his eloquent account 
 of the joy of our larger contact with the visible 
 world as compared with the dark and limited 
 horizon of the amceba, from whom man is sup 
 posed to be descended. And so analogy suggests 
 to him, as it has suggested to others, that our 
 sensitiveness to "super-usual" phenomena is 
 but the beginning of a new faculty, comparable 
 to the spot on the tegument of the primitive or 
 ganisms which reacted to a ray of light, and that 
 in time this faculty will be trained to respond to 
 the fulness of the spiritual world as the human 
 eye has grown to embrace the wonders of material 
 vision. The dimness and confusion of psychic 
 perception now are due to our inexperience, and 
 all our knowledge of evolution warrants the hope 
 that some day our children's children shall see 
 with a wide-open inner eye, and shall be able veras 
 audire et reddere voces.
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 151 
 
 Meanwhile not all is darkness. Beyond the in 
 cidents of telepathy and telekinesis, which many 
 of the most sceptical of us are beginning to accept, 
 there are those not the sentimentalists of the 
 old sort, but highly educated men and women 
 who believe that we already have abundant 
 evidence of true communication with denizens of 
 the other world. Mr. Holt wavers a little when 
 he comes to theorize on these things, but at bot 
 tom his conviction is pretty firm that in some 
 way, sometimes obscurely and deceptively, some 
 times clearly and commandingly, the dead speak 
 to us through what material mediums they can 
 employ. The "subliminal self" he rejects as a 
 meaningless fiction. In its place he assumes what 
 he calls the Cosmic Soul the great reservoir 
 from which our mind or spirit emanates, gathers 
 strength and personality by the discipline of life, 
 and then in due time returns to its source, re 
 maining at once a part of the whole and a sepa 
 rate individuality. I can best set forth his views 
 of this delicate matter by quoting three short 
 paragraphs from different parts of the book: 
 
 . . . Indications of a consciousness aware of everything 
 that is going on or has gone on, at least within the 
 sphere of its activity, and which includes and reaches 
 far outside of our activity and our knowledge. All indi 
 vidual consciousnesses seem to be, in some mysterious 
 way, not only themselves, but part of that universal 
 consciousness; for we get from it not only wondrous 
 dream-images of all kinds, but mysterious impressions
 
 i$2 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 from individual consciousnesses other than our own, 
 which with our own are part of it. 
 
 But though perhaps we flow back into this constantly 
 increasing aggregate of mind the Cosmic Soul it 
 seems much more obviously to flow into us, at times and 
 in degrees that vary enormously, as we vary. Into the 
 least sensitive or receptive it does not go perceptibly 
 beyond the ordinary psychoses of daily life; into others 
 it seems to penetrate in ways to which we hardly know 
 how to assign limits. Will it not presumably, as evolu 
 tion goes on, flow more and more into all of us? 
 
 It looks too as if these possibilities might be the su 
 preme justification for the evolution of the universe. 
 There may be justification enough in birds and flowers, 
 in the play of lambs and children, in sex, in love, in the 
 maternity around which so much of the world's worship 
 has centred, in knowledge, in wisdom, even as they have 
 been ordinarily understood; but a new significance, a 
 new joy, a new glory over and beyond them all some 
 times seems to have been lately promised by that as yet 
 dim conception of the Cosmic Soul. 
 
 In my small reading in this field I know of no 
 other expression so clear and persuasive of the 
 "dream of greater and less troubled things" 
 which may come to a strong mind from spiritual 
 ism. Nothing certainly in Frederic Myers's ele 
 gant and learned exposition of the subject has 
 ever given me the same shock, so to speak, of 
 veracious experience. Now in one way there is 
 nothing new in these conclusions. It would be 
 hard to distinguish between this Cosmic Soul and 
 that all-embracing Mind with which the Stoic 
 sought to think in common, as we breathe with
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 153 
 
 the circumambient air; hard to see how it dif 
 fers essentially from the anima mundi of certain 
 medieval philosophers, or from the Deity of cer 
 tain half-pantheistic divines and indeed Mr. 
 Holt does not shrink from calling it by the sacred 
 name of God. Even the attempt to furnish such 
 a belief with a scientific sanction is not altogether 
 unknown, for the Stoic creed was the direct out 
 growth of an age of science ; but the peculiar kind 
 of confirmation which the devotees of psychical 
 research claim for their hopes from the analo 
 gies of evolution is emphatically a new thing. I 
 suspect that the adherence of many "tough- 
 minded" men (as William James would call 
 them), so different from the credulity of the ear 
 lier spiritualists, is due in large measure to the 
 illusion of these analogies. 
 
 Illusion, I say, for I cannot see one particle of 
 justification for these claims. The publications 
 of the S.P.R. are sufficient evidence that psychic 
 phenomena in these latter years have received a 
 kind of study unknown in the past, and mani 
 festly they have been dislocated into what may 
 seem to be the region of science by the imposition 
 of a classification decked out with the proper fur 
 nishing of Greek names. But in essential mat 
 ters I cannot see the slightest proof of advance 
 in our communication with the other world since 
 the remotest records of history. I can only hint 
 at one or two reasons for my belief, and leave the
 
 154 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 argument to the reader to fill out as he may. 
 Mr. Holt gives several cases of supposed levita- 
 tion, but is rather doubtful of the facts. Well, if 
 one will turn to the ancient religious books of 
 India, one will find that the power of raising the 
 body into the air is universally taken for granted 
 as an everyday event. A saint who could not 
 practise levitation was a mere novice in the 
 higher life. Did the holy men of India really float 
 before the eyes of innumerable observers in this 
 uncanny fashion, and did some of the medieval 
 mystics enjoy the same sort of privilege? I do 
 not know; but I am sure that the evidence for the 
 tradition is as good as most of the tales accepted 
 by the S.P.R. Again, the trance life was developed 
 by the ancient Buddhists to a degree, and its 
 various stages were analysed by them with an 
 apparatus of scientific terminology, which make 
 the modern stance seem in comparison the amuse 
 ment of a spiritual kindergarten. So too the 
 knowledge of the other world obtained by these 
 reputable gentlemen was incomparably superior 
 in scope and precision to any light of recent years. 
 It would be idle to refer to the records of similar 
 powers through the classical and middle ages 
 and in later times, without filling these pages 
 with examples. 1 Those who are looking for enter- 
 
 1 A quotation from Lactantius (Inst. vn, 13) is suffi 
 cient: "Qui [Democritus and the other materialists] pro- 
 fecto non auderent de interitu animarum mago aliquo
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 155 
 
 tainment from this subject may be directed to 
 Defoe's Duncan Campbell, where, by the way, 
 they will learn that when English was still a liv 
 ing speech, telepathy was merely "a sympathy 
 with souls." And as there is no warrant for as 
 serting any progress in these psychic phenomena, 
 so the hope that some faculty of the soul, now 
 in its primitive state, will develop to wondrous 
 capabilities, is a pure assumption, and cannot be 
 confirmed by analogy with physical evolution. 
 Myers virtually conceded this when he said that 
 the "actual possession and control of human or 
 ganisms by departed spirits . . . carries us back to 
 the most outrageously savage group among the 
 superstitions of the early world." Yet with that 
 sublime indifference to consistency which is the 
 universal mark of pseudo-science, he is ready al 
 most in the same breath to base the certainty of 
 religious faith on our presumed evolution in this 
 direction: "Assuredly this deepening response of 
 man's spirit to the Cosmos deepening round him 
 must be affected by all the signals which now are 
 glimmering out of night to tell him of his inmost 
 nature and his endless fate. Who can think that 
 either Science or Revelation has spoken as yet 
 more than a first half-comprehended word? But 
 if in truth souls departed call to us, it is to them 
 
 prsesente disserere, qui sciret certis carminibus ciere ab 
 inferis animas et adesse et praebere se humanis oculis vi- 
 dendas et loqui et futura praedicere."
 
 i$6 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 that we shall listen most of all." Alas for the 
 blind hopes and the dark minds of men! How 
 long ago the great evolutionary poet of Rome ut 
 tered those words, and these: 
 
 Denique si vocem rerum natura repente 
 mittat et hoc alicui nostrum sic increpet ipsa, 
 "quid tibi tanto operest, mortalis, quod nimis aegris 
 luctibus indulges? quid mortem congemis ac fles?" 
 
 That was, and still shall be, the only true consola 
 tion, not ignoble indeed, from Nature's voice in 
 the law of evolution. No, these phenomena that 
 transcend the scheme of calculable physical 
 forces, wherever they belong, do not fall within 
 the province of science, and Huxley, though he 
 may have gone too far in denouncing them as 
 gross imposture, was entirely justified as the 
 apostle of evolution in declaring that, even if 
 proved true, they would have no interest for him. 
 Nor, with the best will in the world, can I see 
 that in themselves they offer any hope of less 
 troubled things in the future. After balancing 
 the evidence with open mind I am bound to say 
 that, in my judgment, it seems to weigh strongly, 
 overwhelmingly, against the hypothesis of com 
 munication with the dead. The bulk of the sup 
 posed messages from spiritual "controls" are 
 palpably within the natural powers of the me 
 dium. Of the few that show knowledge beyond 
 the reach of the medium the majority are easily 
 explained by chance or telepathy, and those
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 157 
 
 that seem to evade this kind of explanation are so 
 extremely rare as scarcely to count at all against 
 the mass of negative arguments; the only safe 
 logic in these exceptional cases is to assume that 
 we are ignorant of some of the circumstances. It 
 is obviously impossible within the compass of 
 an essay to marshal the negative arguments, but 
 one or two of them may be indicated. 
 
 In the first place, then, the prearranged tests 
 of a crucial character have failed. "Myers shows 
 lack of memory of languages," says Mr. Holt, 
 "but apparently only where his medium does n't 
 know them; but there's that envelope which he 
 left with Sir Oliver Lodge for the express purpose 
 of giving its contents, and he gave something 
 else! It seems a hopeless muddle of contradic 
 tions." 'I should rather call it a very clear argu 
 ment. The muddle of contradictions is in the 
 stories which the spirits of wise men and women 
 are believed to send us of life beyond the grave. 
 They say one thing to-day and the very opposite 
 thing to-morrow. When they do not talk non 
 sense, they commonly talk platitudes. So far as 
 my reading goes, there has never come one sin 
 gle word about the future state, though it be a 
 George Eliot or a Walter Scott who speaks, which 
 goes beyond the imagination of a commonplace 
 or vulgar medium, though, as a matter of fact, 
 some of the unprofessional mediums are refined, 
 intelligent people, when their minds are awake.
 
 158 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 This, for instance, is the kind of education that 
 follows us into the other world (George Eliot 
 loquitur) : 
 
 I being fond, very fond of writers of ancient history, 
 etc., felt a strong desire to see Dante, Aristotle, and 
 several others; Shakespeare, if such a spirit existed. As 
 I stood thinking of him, a spirit instantly appeared, who 
 speaking said, "I am Bacon." ... As Bacon neared me, 
 he began to speak, and quoted to me the following 
 words, "You have questioned my reality. Question it 
 no more. I am Shakespeare." 
 
 Nor can I at all follow Mr. Holt in finding an 
 argument for direct possession in the dramatic 
 power of a Mrs. Piper "more exact and com 
 prehensive," he thinks, "(not more poetic, of 
 course) than that of Shakespeare or Sophocles." 
 I simply cannot see that this power of speaking 
 for various persons surpasses what should be ex 
 pected from such a medium in the trance state; 
 there seems to me nothing at all miraculous or 
 "super-usual" in it. 
 
 Even if it were left a matter of taste, and as 
 such non disputandum, to me belief in the genu 
 ineness of these "controls" would simply add a 
 new terror to death. Shall there be no escape in 
 this broad universe from folly and ignorance? 
 The believers apologize for the prevalence of 
 these qualities by appealing to the difficulty of 
 establishing communication between those in the 
 spirit and those in the body. 1 I cannot see that 
 
 1 It is interesting to observe that Plutarch (De Pythia
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 159 
 
 the defence applies. If the communication is es 
 tablished, as they say it is, why should it be 
 harder to give us a bit of real information about 
 the new life than to utter contradictory plati 
 tudes? Charles Eliot Norton once had a sitting 
 with Mrs. Piper in the home of William James, 
 and this was the conclusion of his report: "As to 
 the origin of many of the phantasmagorias of her 
 trance dreams, I formed a very distinct opinion, 
 but many experiments would be required to test 
 its correctness, and these I shall never make.'" I 
 hold Mr. Norton's taste to be a deeper wisdom 
 than the unregulated " open-mindedness " of his 
 friend. When the last balance is made up, I even 
 suspect that Mr. James will have been found 
 among the disintegrating and deteriorating 
 forces "of the age. 
 
 For in its sum this movement, to which Mr. 
 James lent the prestige of his great name, seems 
 to me to lie in a backward direction towards dis 
 integration. As it is not science, so it is not re 
 ligion. Here is the significant fact. The physical 
 phenomena produced by mediums and "sensi 
 tives " are invariably, whether genuine or fraudu 
 lent, the work of disorganization and destruc 
 tion. I have yet to hear of anything constructed 
 or brought into order by the forces of telekinesis, 
 
 Oraculis, 21) uses the same apology for the defective wis 
 dom of the oracles given by the daemon through the organs 
 and incorporated soul of the Pythian medium.
 
 160 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 or what not; but I hear of tables foolishly rising 
 into the air, of bells inanely ringing, of guitars 
 smashed, and furniture generally hurled about 
 the room. The literature of the subject has a 
 capital name for the perpetrator of these absurd 
 freaks, the Poltergeist or demon of confusion 
 and certainly if there is any god of this world, 
 it is he. Nor does his sway end with material ob 
 jects, but so far as there is anything super-normal 
 in the spiritual phenomena, here too his mis 
 chievous will would seem to be displayed. I do 
 not mean by this that the human soul is chained 
 to a dull mechanic exercise; the word "normal" 
 is not necessarily synonymous with creeping 
 routine. It is possible that in the dream-state 
 there may come to the liberated soul intimations 
 and visions that in one sense quite surpass its 
 normal range, and in deep slumber we may enjoy 
 a foretaste of a divine repose that is by no means 
 the same as sluggish death. I have gone far 
 enough in the old Hindu mysticism to hold my 
 mind open to such beliefs without waiting for 
 confirmation from the reports of modern in 
 stances. And these images of the beloved dead 
 that appear to men privately and in secret utter 
 warnings and exhortations of a kind 
 
 to shake our dispositions 
 With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls . 
 
 these, though they be called the creation of fan-
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 161 
 
 tasy, may yet speak from the deeper wisdom 
 of the heart, piercing with magic voice through 
 the crust of diurnal circumstance. Nevertheless, 
 even here is danger. The critic of literature is 
 bound to protest against identifying the inspira 
 tion of genius too closely with the automatic 
 creations of the dream-state. That leads straight 
 to the super-romantic exaltation of Coleridge's 
 Kubla Khan as the supreme type of poetry, and 
 to a belittlement of the higher organizing imagi 
 nation and of the reflective use of experience in 
 art. Of this sort of criticism we have seen vastly 
 too much for a hundred years and more. In like 
 manner we know how the ready hearkening to 
 "airy tongues that syllable men's names" has 
 in the past brought many a sturdy mind to cre 
 dulity" and dilapidation. These things we may say 
 with no lack of deference to those admired names 
 that have thought, and still think, otherwise. 
 
 If I might add another conjecture to the many 
 that have been thrown out to explain these mys 
 teries, I should say that there may well exist a 
 great reservoir of free mental and spiritual en 
 ergy out of which some selective agency within 
 us has drawn together the stuff of its being and 
 created what we call our personality, and that in 
 the same way the universe has its centripetal 
 will a deity, a God, men name it which 
 shapes about itself a sphere of order and har 
 mony and divine purpose, amid the purposeless
 
 1 62 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 fluctuations of what Plato called the undefined 
 material of dvay/o/, necessity. If this were so, 
 then the strangely haphazard and insignificant 
 communications that reach the mind in the 
 trance state, would be no divine intimations 
 passing between our soul and the Cosmic Soul, or 
 World Soul, properly speaking, but would be the 
 result of suspending the inhibitive force of per 
 sonality and opening the soul to the influx of 
 those uncontrolled and unassimilated influences 
 which stray, as it were, from the fringe and loose 
 ends of the unseen realm. Glimpses of beauty 
 may come to the soul by chance in those mo 
 ments, and miraculous divinations from the 
 ragged edge of things, but the outcome at last, if 
 the mind becomes inured to the medium it works 
 in, is mental disorganization and spiritual con 
 fusion. I remember many years ago hearing a 
 Presbyterian evangelist, who had once been a 
 professional spiritualist, discourse on the experi 
 ences of his unreformed days. Most of the super 
 natural phenomena he denounced as pure impos 
 ture ; but with great earnestness he declared that 
 there was a residue of mystery which the medi 
 ums themselves could not explain, and he warned 
 his hearers to keep their eyes and ears from med 
 dling with what was manifestly the direct work 
 of the devil. Well, let us cry peace to the devil. 
 That august personage is probably too busily 
 engaged in graver pursuits to be diverted to the
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 163 
 
 amusements of the stance. But if mythology is 
 to be called in, let us ask rather in wonder why a 
 scholar such as Frederic Myers, who had drunk 
 so deep of the well of Hippocrene, should have 
 turned his attention from Apollo to the Polter 
 geist? Not here, in the close atmosphere of trance 
 and convulsion 
 
 Not here, O Apollo! 
 Are haunts meet for thee; 
 But where Helicon breaks down 
 In cliff to the sea. 
 
 How then, we ask, has a scholar like Myers or 
 an experienced man of the world like Mr. Holt 
 brought himself to seek comfort in looking at 
 what one of them at least does not hesitate to 
 describe as "a photograph of chaos and old 
 night " ? I suspect it is largely through the glam 
 our of a word, the much-repeating of the mystic 
 syllables of "science." The specious analogy 
 with evolution has a power, like charity, to cover 
 the evils of many an inconsistency; and it is 
 probable also that the grandiose achievements of 
 science in the sphere of material motion and 
 change have confirmed the modern mind in a re 
 volt from everything in religion that bears a true 
 or fancied resemblance to quietism. It is, in fact, 
 perilously easy to infer from a philosophy of 
 natural selection that repose and stability are the 
 marks of death and that life and growth are the 
 product of purposeless activity. Hence, in part,
 
 164 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 the widespread tendency to honour the tumult 
 rather than the strength of the soul ; and hence, 
 perhaps, the readiness of men of great intellec 
 tual ability to put the Poltergeist in the place 
 of the old-fashioned God of Providence, whose 
 commands came to us so persistently in the form 
 of prohibitions. It is a strange obsession, a stran 
 ger faith! If there is any divinity to be learned 
 from these conclusions of pseudo-science, it 
 should seem to be the admonition to close the 
 ears of the spirit to those random calls, whence- 
 soever they come, and to listen once more for 
 the still small voice, that was heard thousands of 
 years ago and is the same to-day as yesterday. 
 The whisper of the Cosmic Soul so heard may be 
 only our own soul speaking in the silences of the 
 flesh I am not concerned to explain these 
 things but its message is clear and certain. 
 "God," it says, as the great teacher of the Acad 
 emy declared, "is a being simple and true both 
 in act and in word; neither doth He Himself 
 suffer change nor doth He deceive others by 
 fantasies or messages or by the sending of signs 
 whether to the waking or to the sleeping." This 
 is the same voice that bids us seek the hope of 
 immortality in the presence of that within us 
 which amid birth and decay knows itself inde 
 pendent of these and a partaker of the divine 
 nature; that announces the final grace of happi 
 ness in a peace that passes understanding; and
 
 EVOLUTION AND THE OTHER WORLD 165 
 
 speaks in the life of Socrates and Jesus and ten 
 thousand other witnesses but if there, then 
 not in the words of Spencer or William James. 
 Why, if a man needs the consolations of religion, 
 should he seek further than that? Why, if he be 
 lieves that a verbal revelation is possible, should 
 he discard the sacred books of mankind for the 
 fumbling reports of the Society for Psychical Re 
 search? And why, in the name of conscience, 
 why, if a living medium is demanded, is it more 
 reasonable to suppose that the mystery of life 
 speaks through Mrs. Piper than through the 
 Bishop of Rome? 
 
 And so, "having laid hands on father Par- 
 menides," I recoil at my own temerity. The 
 truth is, in whatever spirit you may take up this 
 book on the Cosmic Relations, its arguments will 
 impose themselves on you in one way or another 
 by the sheer weight of the personality behind 
 them. At least I am sure that, in the very act of 
 criticising, ignorantly perhaps, its avowedly ten 
 tative explanations of psychic phenomena and 
 the Cosmic Soul, I have felt myself fortified in 
 my position by a something within the book that 
 is not tentative at all, but spoken with the au 
 thority of certain experience. There are pages 
 here that any attentive reader will mark for their 
 pungent expression of knowledge accumulated 
 from many phases of life; for the privileged few 
 there are passages of intimate, almost sacred self-
 
 166 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 revelation ; and then there are other pages for the 
 world in which the S.P.R. is forgotten and the 
 author speaks of immortality and the reasonable 
 ness of faith in a way that must arrest the mind 
 of the sceptical materialist and bring courage to 
 the timid believer. If, as I am bound to think, 
 much of the specific theory of the book is drawn 
 from the false usurpations of science, the real 
 motive power behind the arguments is a well- 
 fortified assurance of those greater and less trou 
 bled things for which we used to look in places 
 and minds withdrawn from the world. Not many 
 things of recent years are of more significance 
 than that deep intuitions of religion should reach 
 us unmistakably from this source and in the 
 manner of this book. It is not a new thing that a 
 sound intuition should be supported by an un 
 tenable theory.
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 
 
 IT cannot be said that Samuel Butler, the author 
 of Erewhon (which is English for Utopia, spelt 
 backwards), was particularly modest as a man or 
 reticent as a writer. Indeed a good part of his 
 published writings are in the form of note-books 
 in which he relates how he acquired his peculiar 
 views on the great questions of the day and how 
 he came to be at loggerheads with the various 
 leaders of contemporary thought. Yet with all 
 that he said little about his personal life, or, 
 rather, he said enough but veiled his confessions 
 in baffling circumlocutions and allegories. From 
 reading his works one got the impression of an 
 impish boy crouching perdu behind a stone fence, 
 from which he pelted the citizens on the highway 
 with pebbles and bad words. The situation was 
 made the more piquant by the fact that the good 
 men who were going about their work seemed 
 utterly to disregard the missiles. Now Mr. Fes- 
 ting Jones, the boy's silent partner in mischief, 
 has jerked his comrade into the air, so to speak, 
 and set him up on the wall, as on a pedestal, gri 
 macing visibly there to all the world. Mr. Jones's 
 biography of his friend is no great work of art, 
 but it is an interesting document. 
 
 Our Erewhonian's grandfather, another Sam-
 
 170 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 uel Butler, was the famous headmaster of Shrews 
 bury and Bishop of Lichfield, a scholar of some 
 repute in the good old days when lawn sleeves 
 i were regarded as the natural prize for editing a 
 Greek tragedy. As a grandfather the grandson 
 instinctively detested him, until on going through 
 his ancestor's correspondence for the sake of com 
 posing a biography, this feeling was changed to 
 admiration and fondness. It is a significant fact 
 that this same biography is the only dull book 
 he ever wrote; he was a good hater, but a bad 
 lover. The bishop's son, Thomas, was a solid, 
 perhaps rather stodgy, clergyman, Rector of 
 Langar-with-Bramston and Canon of Lincoln, 
 about whom his Erewhonian son felt no doubt at 
 all and underwent no conversion. Samuel's por 
 trait of his father in The Way of All Flesh is one 
 of the most elaborately offensive caricatures ever 
 drawn, and he was capable of writing in a letter: 
 "My mother is ill very ill. It is not likely that 
 she will recover. 
 
 I had rather 
 
 It had been my father." 
 
 Which did not mean that he was particularly de 
 voted to his mother. It must be admitted that 
 Samuel was never dull when he spoke of his 
 father. 
 
 Our Erewhonian, the third of the Butlers whom 
 we have to mention, was born in 1835. He passed
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 171 
 
 a wretchedly unhappy childhood at home : if we 
 may believe him and his biographer, because his 
 father was endued with the antiquated Victorian 
 faith in parental authority and with the hateful 
 vices of priestcraft ; if we may read between the 
 lines of the record, because Samuel desired from 
 the beginning to be a law unto himself. From 
 home he went to school, first under the Reverend 
 E. Gibson at Allesbey, where he appears to have 
 been equally wretched. At least all we know of 
 him in these days is from a note written in old 
 age on the tedium of divine service. 
 
 When I was at school at Allesbey [he says] the boy 
 who knelt opposite me at morning prayers, with his face 
 not more than a yard away from mine, used to blow 
 pretty little bubbles with his saliva which he would send 
 sailing off the tip of his tongue like miniature soap bub 
 bles; they very soon broke, but they had a career of a 
 foot or two. I never saw any one else able to get saliva 
 bubbles right away from him; and though I have en 
 deavoured for some five and fifty years to acquire the 
 art, I never yet could start the bubble off my tongue 
 without its bursting. Now things like this really do re 
 lieve the tedium of church. 
 
 The story, characteristic in its way of Butler, 
 reminds me of a quip which I once received, 
 written on a postcard, from that exquisite poet, 
 the late Father Tabb : 
 
 "Among your many playmates here, 
 Why is it that you all prefer 
 Your little friend, my dear?"
 
 172 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 " Because, mamma, tho' hard we try, 
 'j Not one of us can spit so high, 
 And catch it in his ear." 
 
 Whatever may have been the state of Butler 
 at Allesbey, we have ample evidence of his misery 
 under Dr. Kennedy, his grandfather's successor 
 at Shrewsbury, whither he was sent at the age of 
 twelve. It is enough to say that the school and 
 its master appear in The Way of All Flesh as 
 Roughborough and Dr. Skinner. 
 
 From Shrewsbury Butler went to St. John's 
 College, Cambridge, where he was happy in a 
 fashion, until he got religion and then again 
 his troubles began. One may guess from certain 
 passages in The Way of All Flesh that he be 
 came more deeply involved in the evangelical 
 revival going on among the so-called Johnians 
 than he or his biographer liked to admit in later 
 years. At any rate his purpose at this time was to 
 take orders, and after his graduation he lived for a 
 while as lay assistant to a curate in St. James's 
 Parish, Piccadilly. His work passed among the 
 poor, and was valuable to him no doubt; but 
 Butler at the altar is not conceivable in rerum 
 natura, and he soon decided to give up the idea of 
 ordination. His father, of course, threatened to 
 cut off his allowance, and after some correspond 
 ence of an unedifying sort it was decided that the 
 son should go out to New Zealand and try his 
 hand at sheep-farming. There his homestead,
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 173 
 
 called Mesopotamia from its position between 
 two rivers, "was built upon a little plateau 
 on the edge of the downs, approached by a cut 
 ting from the flat, and was most comfortably 
 situated and sheltered." With books about him 
 and his piano, he passed several years in which 
 active duties were pleasantly combined with con 
 templation. 
 
 It is scarcely too much to say that all the pro 
 duct of his later life was the fruit of this period of 
 quiet incubation. Here he saturated his imagina 
 tion with that large majestic scenery which he 
 was to describe with such splendid effect in 
 Erewhon. Here he read Darwin's Origin of 
 Species, and got the idea of the evolution of ma 
 chines which was the germ of so much of his con 
 troversial writing. As for his religious beliefs, we 
 find him reading Gibbon on the outward voyage, 
 and sending this report to his uncle in England : 
 "Much as there is in Gibbon which we should 
 alike condemn for, however we may admire 
 his sarcasms, it is impossible not at times to feel 
 that he would have acted more nobly in suppres 
 sing them he is a grand historian and the im 
 press of a mighty intellect is upon his work." 
 
 This from the master of irresponsible sarcasm, 
 whose talent might almost be said to have been 
 employed in "sapping a solemn creed with solemn 
 sneer." A few months later Butler was writing to 
 a friend: "I think I am a Unitarian now, but
 
 174 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 (don't know and won't say. As for the Trinity I 
 cannot make head or tail of it, and feel inclined to 
 agree with a negro who was heard in church here 
 the other day repeating the Athanasian creed: 
 "The Father impossible, the Son impossible, and 
 the Holy Ghost impossible ; and yet there are not 
 three impossibles, but one impossible." Butler, 
 we learn from an actual witness, was wrong, for 
 the coloured preacher's word for the Athanasian 
 "incomprehensible" was "uncomfortable," not 
 "impossible"; but accuracy in a jest, Aristotle 
 would assure us, is not essential to its force as an 
 argument. The next year Butler was writing, not 
 in jest but in earnest, that he had renounced 
 Christianity altogether, being led to that conclu 
 sion by difficulties over the Resurrection. Such 
 at least was his profession at the time; what he 
 really believed then or at any other time, I should 
 hesitate to guess, and I doubt if he quite knew 
 himself. 
 
 In 1864 Butler returned to England, with a 
 mysterious friend named Pauli, whom he sup 
 ported out of a scanty income, and who swindled 
 him outrageously. He settled in chambers in 
 Clifford's Inn, where he lived in a strange isolated 
 way until his death in 1902. For a number of 
 years he studied diligently to be an artist, al 
 though his" talent in that direction was mediocre 
 if not less. He practised and composed music also, 
 being a passionate and jealous lover of Handel. 
 I "
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 175 
 
 His recreation was travelling in Italy, where he 
 seems to have shown a genial sociability utterly 
 unlike his manners in London. 
 
 It is one of the paradoxes of Butler's character 
 that he who theoretically made amiability and 
 charity the chief of virtues and regarded good 
 breeding as the summum bonum, who identified 
 the saint with the gentleman and thought the 
 "swell" was the ideal towards which all nature 
 had ; been groaning and travailing together, 
 it is a pretty paradox that with such a theory 
 Butler should have been in practice, as he says of 
 himself, "an Ishmaelite by instinct," incapable 
 from the first of adjusting himself to family life, 
 equally incapable of accommodating his habits 
 and temperament to the ordinary demands of 
 society. It may be a nice point in social casuistry 
 whether an Ishmaelite can be a gentleman; ap 
 parently Butler proved the combination possible, 
 for with all his cantankerousness and cantank 
 erous he was with most men and women one 
 gathers that he bore about him that peculiar 
 stamp of self-respect and directness of manner 
 which mark the gentleman. After all his grand 
 father was the great doctor of Shrewsbury. Per 
 haps we should say that the true Englishman 
 alone can combine the qualities of an "original" 
 Anglice for eccentric curmudgeon and a man 
 of the world ; and Butler in every drop of his blood 
 and every fibre of his brain was English.
 
 176 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 This is not to say that Butler lived in Clifford's 
 Inn as a bear in his den, entirely without friends. 
 One woman at least broke through the outer 
 barriers of his self-will, though the inner citadel 
 she could not take. At Heatherley's art school 
 Butler became acquainted with a Miss Savage 
 who was painting there in an amateurish way, a 
 plain, sickly, rather dowdy, lonely young woman 
 of his own age. Some congeniality of mind 
 quickly brought them together, and the notes of 
 personal comment and literary criticism that 
 passed between them form the most interesting 
 pages of the biography. Miss Savage may have 
 been physically unattractive, but she was en 
 dowed with a wit that approached the diabolical ; 
 her letters are a real contribution to English 
 literature. Whether her influence on Butler was 
 entirely beneficial is another question. She gave 
 him the intellectual sympathy and stimulus he 
 needed when all the world was conspiring to 
 neglect him; her advice in matters of detail was 
 shrewd and generally sound; but she flattered 
 outrageously, and her flattery was directed al 
 most exclusively to the side of his work which 
 certainly did not require forcing. The truth is 
 that she understood only the sceptical and sarcas 
 tic traits of his mind, while to the deeper vein of 
 poetry in the man and to his spiritual insight for 
 there was this too in his soul, though much over 
 laid she appears to have been quite blind. So
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 177 
 
 long as, to use his own words, he was "heaving 
 bricks into the middle of them," she helped him 
 with ammunition and encouraged him with ap 
 plause; and if Butler was accoutred to be, as again 
 he says of himself," the enfant terrible of literature 
 and science" and nothing more, he certainly got 
 from her what he needed. But I wonder. 
 
 However, if her influence was deleterious, she 
 paid the price. She gave him all, and in return re 
 ceived only a cold friendship of the intelligence. 
 After her death Butler felt something like re 
 morse for this unequal exchange, and docketed 
 and annotated their correspondence in a manner 
 that reminds one of Carlyle's marital repentance. 
 This Butler did, evidently expecting that the 
 letters would one day be published. But he wrote 
 also a "couple of terrible sonnets about the poor 
 woman which one hopes he never intended for 
 any other eye than his own. As they are now 
 public, I may quote them for whatever light they 
 throw on the writer's character, and as a speci 
 men of what he might have accomplished in 
 verse. 
 
 She was too kind, wooed too persistently, 
 Wrote moving letters to me day by day; 
 The more she wrote, the more unmoved was I, 
 The more she gave, the less could I repay. 
 Therefore I grieve not that I was not loved, 
 But that, being loved, I could not love again. 
 I liked ; but like and love are far removed ; 
 Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain.
 
 178 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 For she was plain and lame and fat and short, 
 
 Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell 
 
 That, though I loved her in a certain sort, 
 
 Yet did I love too wisely but not well. 
 
 Ah ! had she been more beauteous or less kind 
 She might have found me of another mind. 
 
 And now, though twenty years are come and gone, 
 
 That little lame lady's face is with me still; 
 
 Never a day but what, on every one, 
 
 She dwells with me as dwell she ever will. 
 
 She said she wished I knew not wrong from right; 
 
 It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen 
 
 Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite, 
 
 Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen. 
 
 'T is said that if a woman woo, no man 
 
 Should leave her till she have prevailed ; and, true, 
 
 A man will yield for pity if he can, 
 
 But if the flesh rebels what can he do? 
 
 I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long 
 The wrong I did in that I did no wrong. 
 
 Among the few male companions of Butler the 
 primacy must be given to the inimitable Alfred 
 Cathie, his valet, clerk, guide, philosopher, and 
 friend. How Alfred happened in real life I do not 
 know. The creator of Caleb Balderstone might 
 have made him, or the creator of Sancho Panza 
 he is in brief a Caleb and a Sancho combined 
 and translated into broad Cockney ; but how the 
 good Lord conceived him, I do not know. To 
 describe him is impossible; I can only transcribe 
 some of his sayings. Thus, writing to Mr. Jones 
 he tells of a visit with his master to the Exhibition :
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON r 179 
 
 " I enticed Mr. Butler to have a ride with me on 
 it [the Switchback Railway], which he did, but 
 he said when he came off 'it was damnable.' I 
 soothed him by saying the motion was ridiculous 
 but the sensation was grand." But Alfred did not 
 confine his epistolary talents to absent friends; 
 here, for example, is one of his daily notes of 
 warning and advice to his master: 
 
 This is the last notice from Alfred to the effect that 
 Samuel Butler, Esqr. is to buy himself a new Hat on 
 Wednesday morning the 8th of November 1893. Failing 
 to do so there will be an awful scene on his return to 
 Clifford's Inn. ALFRED. 
 
 Of Alfred's autocratic wisdom Butler himself 
 tells this story in a letter : 
 
 We have had Venus and Jupiter very bright and very 
 close. One evening they shone clear and near the moon, 
 no other stars being visible. Alfred did not like it, so he 
 said: 
 
 "Do you think, Sir, that that is quite right?" 
 
 I said I thought it was ; but next night the moon was 
 a long way off, so he complained to me and said it was 
 not right. 
 
 I said : " But you know, Alfred, the moon rises an hour 
 later every night, so it will be an hour yet before it is in 
 the same place." 
 
 "Very well, Sir," he answered, finding my explana 
 tion a little tedious, "I forgive you this once, but never 
 allude to the subject again in my presence." 
 
 But I think the story that pleases me most 
 it would have brought tears of joy to the eyes of
 
 l8o A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Charles Lamb and that best displays Alfred as 
 a human as well as a celestial philosopher, is this 
 from Butler's Note-Books: 
 
 The first time that Dr. Creighton asked me to come 
 down to Peterborough, in 1894, before he became Bishop 
 of London, I was a little doubtful whether to go or not. 
 As usual, I consulted my good clerk, Alfred, who said: 
 
 "Let me have a look at his letter, Sir " 
 
 I gave him the letter, and he said: 
 
 "I see, Sir, there is a crumb of tobacco in it; I think 
 you may go." 
 
 I went and enjoyed myself very much. 
 
 The proverb tells us that no man is a hero to 
 his valet; what shall we say then of a man to 
 whom his valet is a hero? There must have been 
 a vein of geniality in Butler somewhere, and he 
 was, of course, on good terms with one or two 
 other gentlemen besides his valet and his Boswell 
 and the Bishop of London ; but to society in gen 
 eral he bore himself, I fear, as the well-crusted 
 curmudgeon I have described him to be. His 
 silences at a dinner could be awful, and his re 
 marks to a new acquaintance might be atrocious. 
 That is the paradox of his nature, that he who 
 made Mrs. Humdrum the arbitress of manners 
 and morals, as he did in Erewhon Revisited, 
 should have been utterly incapable of the hum 
 drum of social life. 
 
 And as Butler was in social intercourse, so he 
 was in matters of taste. Theoretically his ideal is
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 181 
 
 the gentleman who has achieved a "charitable 
 inconsistency" and an "amiable indifferent- 
 ism"; practically he may have been inconsistent, 
 but for charity and amiability and indifferentism 
 you might as well look for such qualities in 
 Jonathan Swift. To take his obiter dicta in liter 
 ature alone, with the exception of Homer and 
 Shakespeare, whom he admires so far as one can 
 see for the sake of establishing his inconsistency, 
 he rails against almost every settled reputation 
 of past and present times. Dickens's novels are 
 "literary garbage." In Rossetti he can feel only 
 "self-conceit" and "sultry reticence." If brought 
 to book for his opinions he could be as whim 
 sical as he was prejudiced. "No, I don't like 
 Lamb," he used to protest; "you see, Canon 
 Ainger writes about him, and Canon Ainger goes 
 to tea with my sisters." Or he could justify his 
 distaste by means of a sorites' that would have 
 made the reputation of ten Aristotelian logicians. 
 Thus: "Blake was no good because he learnt 
 Italian at over 60 in order to read Dante, and we 
 know Dante was no good because he was so fond 
 of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tenny 
 son ran him, and as for Tennyson well, Tenny 
 son goes without saying." He, like other bitter 
 critics, disapproved of criticism and would have 
 nought to do with reviewing, feeling towards that 
 "gay science" much as Dallas did. Yet he pos 
 sessed one trait which all honest critics will admit
 
 1 82 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 to be the goal of their endeavour, the acme of their 
 art, the haven of peace where their weary labour 
 ends he could condemn without reading. You 
 have heard his pronouncement on Dante; it is 
 printed in the Life on the same page with this 
 beautifully candid admission: "I see Gladstone 
 says he owes all the fine qualities of his mind to 
 the study of Dante. I believe I owe whatever 
 I have to the fact that no earthly power has in 
 duced, or ever can induce me to read him." And 
 on another page he swears he never has read, and 
 never will read, Keats or Shelley or Coleridge or 
 Wordsworth; why should he read what he criti 
 cizes as bad? This, I take it, is that last refine 
 ment of intuition which gives a man a secure 
 place among those unmakers of renown whom 
 Butler's great namesake of Hudibras called "the 
 fierce inquisitors of wit." 
 
 These are only a few of Butler's dislikes. Nor 
 was his spirit of opposition confined to the winged 
 words of light talk or narrowed to individual 
 reputations. In a moment of candour he declares 
 that he had " never written on any subject unless 
 [he] believed that the authorities on it were hope 
 lessly wrong " ; and the authorities happen to have 
 included the philologians entrenched in the uni 
 versities, the most eminent names in science, and 
 in religion both the orthodox theologians of the 
 Church and the sceptics of the higher criticism. 
 It is not wonderful that he should have exclaimed
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 183 
 
 with a sad pride: "In that I write at all I am 
 among the damned." 
 
 His bout with the philologians took place in 
 the lists of Homeric and Shakespearian criticism. 
 To supplant the "nightmares of Homeric extrava 
 gance," as he calls them, rightly enough, "which 
 German professors have evolved out of their 
 inner consciousness," he evolved for his part a 
 delicious fancy that the Odyssey was composed 
 by a young woman, and that the palace of Odys 
 seus was set by her in her own home in the Si 
 cilian Trapani. I have never met a Greek scholar 
 who would confess that he had even read Butler's 
 work on The Authoress of the Odyssey; they prefer 
 the Butlerian canon of condemning without read 
 ing. Well, I have perused the book, but I shall 
 neither accept nor condemn. It is uncommonly 
 clever, and the part at least which deals with the 
 question of authorship is amusingly plausible; 
 but the argument, of course, is all based on in 
 ference, and does not amount to much more than 
 a jeu d' esprit. His other contention in philology, 
 in which he rearranges the order of Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets and builds up a new story of the events 
 underlying them, should, I feel, be taken rather 
 more seriously. I would not say that, in my 
 judgment, he has made out his case; for here 
 again the evidence is too inferential, too evasive, 
 to be thoroughly conclusive. But I do think that 
 he has demolished the flimsy theories of Sidney
 
 1 84 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Lee and certain other so-called authorities, and 
 that his own constructive criticism is worthy of 
 attention. 
 
 But these tilts with the entrenched philology 
 of the universities were mere skirmishes, so to 
 speak ; the real battle was with the authorities in 
 science and theology. These were the gentle 
 men, "hopelessly wrong," whom Butler under 
 took to set right by the genial art of "heaving 
 bricks." In science the great enemy was none 
 other than Darwin himself, with all those who 
 swore by the name of Darwin. The dispute did 
 not touch the fact of evolution itself, for Butler 
 to the end was a staunch evolutionist; nor did it 
 concern the Darwinian theory of the survival of 
 the fit, for here again Butler was thoroughly or 
 thodox. The question at issue was the cause of 
 those variations out of which the more fit were 
 selected for survival and this, I take it, is still 
 the casus belli which renders the resounding war 
 fare of the biologists so amusing a spectacle to one 
 who has set his feet in the serene temples of scep 
 ticism, whence, as the old Roman poet says, who 
 was yet himself so deeply engaged in the fray 
 
 Despicere unde queas alios passimque videre 
 Errare atque viam palantis quserere vitse. 
 
 On the one side stood in array the host of Dar 
 winians or ultra-Darwinians, for Darwin him 
 self was provokingly muddled and inconsistent
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 185 
 
 in his statements who held that the via vita 
 was a path of incalculable hazard, to whom life 
 was pure mechanism and evolution meant a 
 transference to biology of the mathematical law 
 of probability. On the other side, in which for 
 some time Butler was almost the sole champion 
 in England, stood those who believed that the 
 significant variations arose from the purposeful 
 striving of individual creatures to adapt them 
 selves to their surroundings, and that the selec 
 tive power of fitness was part of a grand design 
 working itself out consciously in the evolution of 
 life. 
 
 Now it is not my business to pronounce judg 
 ment in so learned a dispute; the non-scientific 
 critic who should presume to come between such 
 quarrelsome kinsfolk would probably fare like the 
 proverbial peacemaker between man and wife. 
 I can only say that to Butler the dignity of sci 
 ence and the very issues of life seemed to be in 
 volved in the debate: "To state this doctrine [of 
 the Darwinians]," he declares, "is to arouse in 
 stinctive loathing; it is my fortunate task to 
 maintain that such a nightmare of waste and 
 death is as baseless as it is repulsive." Butler's 
 particular contribution to the Lamarckian side 
 was what he called "unconscious memory," the 
 theory, that is, that the acquired experience of 
 the parent was passed on to the embryo and car 
 ried by the offspring into life as an instinctive
 
 1 86 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 propensity. Later he learned that the same 
 theory had been propounded by an Austrian 
 biologist named Hering, and thereafter he was 
 careful to ascribe full credit to his predecessor. 
 
 The contest unfortunately was embittered at 
 an early stage 1 by a blunder on the part of Charles 
 Darwin and a misunderstanding on the part of 
 Butler. In February of 1879 Ernst Krause, a 
 German scholar, published in Kosmos an article 
 on Erasmus Darwin and his Lamarckian brand of 
 evolution. In May of the same year appeared 
 Butler's Evolution Old and New. Then, in No 
 vember, Murray issued a translation of Krause's 
 monograph, under the title of Erasmus Darwin, 
 with a preliminary notice by Charles Darwin. 
 Now between the printing of Krause's original 
 essay in February and the publishing of the trans 
 lation in November, Darwin had sent the author 
 a copy of Butler's book, with the advice that he, 
 Krause, in revising his work, need "not expend 
 much powder and shot on Mr. Butler, for he really 
 is not worthy of it." Accordingly, in reworking 
 his essay for the English translation, Krause 
 made a contemptuous allusion to Butler without 
 naming him. Then for his preface to the transla 
 tion Darwin first wrote a paragraph beginning 
 with the words: "Dr. Krause has taken great 
 pains and has largely added to his essay since it 
 appeared in Kosmos." But, finding this para 
 graph otherwise irrelevant, Darwin struck it out,
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 187 
 
 without inserting anywhere else a notice of 
 Krause's revision of the work. Hence to Butler, 
 comparing the original German text with the 
 English, it appeared that the version of an article 
 written before the publication of his book con 
 tained an insulting reference to that book. Nat 
 urally he was incensed, believing that the trans 
 lator and Darwin had dishonestly insinuated this 
 reference into the work they were pretending to 
 translate literally. To make matters worse, Dar 
 win, on the advice of Huxley and against the ad 
 vice of his sons, refused to issue any public recti 
 fication of the error. In this way a note of per 
 sonal acrimony entered into Butler's part in the 
 controversy ; and this was not mollified by his be 
 lief that the Darwinians tried to discredit him by 
 a cpnspiracy of silence, which extended to sup 
 pressing in the reviews any notice even of works 
 foreign to the actual controversy. It may be said 
 for Butler that at least some of the later biolo 
 gists adopted his views while contemptuously re 
 fraining from naming him. Such petty jealousies, 
 it is sad to admit, do perturb the quiet walks of 
 professional scholarship. 
 
 But I hasten to descend from the aerial heights 
 of pure science to a region where the critic of let 
 ters may feel that he is walking with his feet on 
 the ground. The notable fact is that Butler's 
 whole literary career took its start from his in 
 terest, at first merely amateurish, in the Darwin-
 
 1 88 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 ian theory of evolution. Readers of Erewhon 
 will remember the three chapters of that Utopian 
 romance entitled The Book of the Machines. 
 These chapters stand out as the most brilliant 
 section of the romance ; they are furthermore the 
 germ out of which the whole narrative grew, and 
 in a way strike the key-note of much of his later 
 writing. No one, I think, can read this Book of 
 the Machines without feeling that it is the work of 
 a powerful and original intellect, but one is likely 
 also to lay it down with a sense of bewilderment. 
 There is insight here, the insight of a mind brood 
 ing on the course of human history and speaking 
 with apparent sincerity of a terrible danger to be 
 avoided. Yet there is withal a note of biting 
 irony; and what precisely the object of this irony 
 may be, or how this irony is to be reconciled with 
 the tone of sincerity, the book itself gives one no 
 clue to determine. 
 
 Nor do the author's direct allusions to his pur 
 pose give us much ease. In a letter to Darwin 
 accompanying a present of the first edition of 
 Erewhon, in 1872, Butler disclaims any intention 
 of being "disrespectful" to the Origin of Species, 
 and avows that the chapters on Machines, writ 
 ten primarily as a bit of pure fun, were rewritten 
 and inserted in Erewhon as a satire on the pseudo- 
 scientific method of Bishop Butler's Analogy. 
 Again, in the preface to the second edition of the 
 book published a few months after the first, he
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 189 
 
 expresses his "regret that reviewers have in some 
 cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Ma 
 chines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin's 
 theory to an absurdity." He is surprised that the 
 specious misuse of analogy really aimed at should 
 not have occurred to any reviewer. Evidently he 
 is alluding again to Bishop Butler, yet if one 
 turns to page 84 of the narrative itself, one sees 
 that Paley's famous analogy of the watch, and 
 not Bishop Butler at all, was in the author's 
 mind when he wrote the book. This is already 
 a little confusing, but confusion is worse con 
 founded by the statement in a letter written 
 shortly before our Erewhonian's death. Now, 
 looking back at the matter through the bitterness 
 engendered by what he regarded as a long perse 
 cution', he says: "With Erewhon Charles Darwin 
 smelt danger from afar. I knew him personally; 
 he was one of my grandfather's pupils. He knew 
 very well that the machine chapters in Erewhon 
 would not end there, and the Darwin circle was 
 then the most important literary power in Eng 
 land." 
 
 Here is a beautiful case for genetic criticism 
 if the word "genetic " has any meaning outside 
 of the dictionary and the laboratory and by 
 following the development of Butler's ideas one 
 may learn perhaps how the baffling mixture of 
 irony and sincerity got into the famous chapters 
 on Machines and became a kind of fixed habit
 
 IQO A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 with him. Darwin's Origin of Species reached 
 Butler in New Zealand soon after its publication, 
 and evidently quite carried him off his feet. Un 
 der the first spell of admiration he composed a 
 little essay on Darwin Among the Machines, 
 which was printed in the Press of Canterbury, 
 New Zealand, in 1863. Years later, commenting 
 in one of his scientific books on this article, he 
 admits that he had taken Darwin at his face 
 value without much reflection; "there was one 
 evolution" for him then, and "Darwin was its 
 prophet." And the article itself fully bears out 
 this statement. Caught by the plausible sim 
 plicity of evolution as an extension of purely in 
 organic law into the organic world, Butler carried 
 the mechanical analogy a step further and under 
 took to show what would happen when machines 
 had progressed to the stage of independent racial 
 existence and had surpassed man, just as the ani 
 mal kingdom had been evolved out of the vege 
 table, and the vegetable from the mineral. His 
 conclusion is "that war to the death should be 
 instantly proclaimed against them. Every ma 
 chine of every sort should be destroyed by the 
 well-wisher of his species. . . . Let us at once go 
 back to the primeval condition of the race." 
 
 It must be remembered that Butler wrote this 
 essay while living in the free primitive uplands of 
 New Zealand, during the happiest period of his 
 life, and that the note of primitivism in his per-
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 191 
 
 oration is probably in large measure sincere. At 
 the same time there is a word in his later com 
 ment which points to another trait in his intel 
 lectual make-up which was active from the be 
 ginning. He started, he says, with the hypothesis 
 of man as a mechanism, because that was the 
 easiest strand to pick up, and because "there was 
 plenty of amusement" to be got out of it. Now 
 one may amuse one's self with a theory which 
 one holds in all sincerity ; but fun of that sort has 
 a way of running into irony or sarcasm, and so 
 one may detect in this first essay the germ of 
 Butler's later manner. He was ever prone to 
 make fun, and sometimes a very strange sort of 
 fun, when he was most in earnest. 
 
 It is clear that Butler was both attracted and 
 teased by Darwin's great work, and that he did 
 not rest with his first impression. Two years 
 later, having meanwhile returned to England, he 
 sent another letter to the Canterbury Press, which 
 he entitled Lucubratio Ebria and signed with a 
 different name. " It is a mistake, then," he says 
 in this second letter, "to take the view adopted 
 by a previous correspondent of this paper." His 
 thesis now is that machines are really an exten 
 sion, so to speak, of a man's limbs, of the tools, 
 that is to say, which the mind invents in its pro 
 gress towards a higher organization ; as such the 
 development of machinery is the measure of an 
 inner growth and need not be feared.
 
 1 92 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 As yet, apparently, the fun of the thing was 
 still uppermost in Butler's mind. He put the two 
 essays together as The Book of the Machines and 
 wrote his Utopian romance about them without 
 feeling any serious discordance in the points of 
 view, and could even send the volume to Darwin 
 with an assurance of his loyalty. But the rift was 
 already there. As he continued to reflect on the 
 matter, the significance of the second point of 
 view took on more importance and he began to 
 see its scientific implications. Out of these reflec 
 tions grew his book on Life and Habit (1877), in 
 which he first, frankly arid definitely, announced 
 himself as a champion of the teleological theory 
 of evolution against the mechanistic principles of 
 the ultra-Darwinians. 
 
 But our concern now is with the fact that in 
 the latest, revised edition of Erewhon the two es 
 says on machines, though much enriched and 
 enlarged in the process of revision, still lie side by 
 side, with no word to tell the reader which of the 
 two represents the author's real views. The re 
 sult is piquant to say the least. In one chapter 
 the dread of machines, as they have been devel 
 oped to a state of almost independent conscious 
 ness, is expressed with a depth of conviction that 
 can leave no doubt of the author's sincerity. Here 
 he speaks as a Darwinian a entrance, but as a Dar-> 
 winian filled with loathing for the spectres con 
 jured up by his own science. Yet turn a few pages,
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 193 
 
 and you will find machines glorified "as a part of 
 man's own physical nature," the instruments by 
 which alone he advances in "all those habits of 
 mind which most elevate [him] above the lower 
 animals": 
 
 Thus civilization and mechanical progress advanced 
 hand in hand , each developing and being developed by the 
 other, the earliest accidental use of the stick having set 
 the ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it 
 in motion. In fact, machines ought to be regarded as the 
 mode of development by which human organism is now 
 especially advancing, every past invention being an addi 
 tion to the resources of the human body. 
 
 What is one to make of this flagrant contradic 
 tion? I might answer by asking what one is to 
 make of the contradictions of life. It is true that 
 the progress of civilization seems to be coincident 
 with mechanical invention. We believe that; and 
 yet can any one look at the state of the world to 
 day, at the monotony of lives that have been en 
 slaved to machinery, at the distaste for work and 
 the unrest of the worker that have arisen partly 
 as a consequence of this subservience, can any 
 one seriously contemplate the growing material 
 ism of modern life, its dependence for pleasure on 
 the whirl of wheels and the dance of images, with 
 its physical distraction and its lessening care for 
 the quiet and ideal delights of the intellect can 
 any one see these things and not feel a stirring of 
 something like terror in the soul at the tyranny of
 
 IQ4 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 the creatures we have evoked from the soulless 
 forces of nature? Life is a dilemma, and only the 
 fool thinks it is simple. In The Book of the Ma 
 chines one of its enigmas is presented with a keen 
 ness of observation and a cogency of style that 
 must give the author a high place among the phil 
 osophical writers of the age. 
 
 However Butler may have been disposed to 
 wards the evolution of machines, the Erewhonians 
 themselves chose to see in them a menace to hu 
 manity, and decreed that they should be ruth 
 lessly destroyed. Erewhon is thus the story of a 
 people who are living backwards, so to speak, of 
 a country seen through the looking-glass and con 
 ceived in the spirit of irony. There is no doubt of 
 this intention, you will feel it on every page of 
 the romance; only, and this is the tantalizing spell 
 of the book, it is not always easy to guess against 
 whom the irony is directed. We know from But 
 ler's statement elsewhere, not from the book itself, 
 that the account of the Erewhonian treatment of 
 crime as a disease to be cured in hospitals and of 
 disease as a crime to be punished in prisons was 
 meant to be taken au pied de la lettre, and that the 
 law of Erewhon was commended by way of satir 
 izing the law of England. But no sooner has the 
 reader adjusted his mind to this form of attack 
 than he finds himself engaged in that terrible 
 arraignment of the Church as working through 
 the so-called Musical Banks, where the Ere-
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 195 
 
 whonians themselves become the object of irony. 
 And so the satire sways this way and that from 
 chapter to chapter. It is all good fun, but it is 
 mighty bewildering unless one comes to the book 
 with a knowledge of Butler's ideas derived from 
 other sources ; and even then one does not always 
 know on which side of the mouth to laugh 
 though of the laughter there is never any doubt. 
 The fact is that irony had become a habit with 
 Butler, and of its application he little recked. He 
 could even believe he was ironical when in truth 
 he was perfectly sincere; which is still more de 
 lightfully puzzling than his ambiguous applica 
 tion of irony. 
 
 This trait comes out in his treatment of Chris 
 tianity. He had early become interested in the 
 problem of the Resurrection of Christ as the 
 corner-stone of the whole dogmatic edifice, his 
 own sober conclusion apparently being that 
 Christ did not die on the Cross, but was buried 
 while in a trance, and afterwards appeared ac 
 tually in the flesh to the disciples. His first 
 thoughts on the question were published in a 
 pamphlet, now quite forgotten; and late in life 
 he wrote his Erewhon Revisited, which is nothing 
 less than an elaborate and vicious satire, in rather 
 bad taste, on the miraculous birth and the Ascen 
 sion. But between these two publications comes 
 The Fair Haven, as enigmatical a work as ever 
 was penned. Here the problem of the Resurrec-
 
 I g6 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 tion is discussed by a priest, who, having fallen 
 into scepticism, finds for himself at last a haven 
 of peace in the solution of every doubt. Now, for 
 all that one can learn from Butler's life, the solu 
 tion offered by his fictitious hero was intended to 
 be taken ironically, and the whole treatise should 
 be regarded as a diatribe against Christian dogma. 
 To his friend, Miss Savage, it is "sanglant sat 
 ire," and so apparently it appeared to Mr. Jones. 
 Very well; but what really happened? The book 
 was reviewed in several of the Evangelical peri 
 odicals of the day as perfectly orthodox, and so 
 alert a critic as Canon Ainger sent it to a friend 
 whom he wished to convert. And to-day a can 
 did reader, even with full knowledge of Butler's 
 avowed intention, is likely to close the book with 
 an impression that, despite a note of irony that 
 breaks through the language here and there, the 
 argument as a whole forms a singularly powerful 
 and convincing plea for Christianity. The hallu 
 cination theory of the Resurrection propounded 
 by Strauss is analysed and refuted with remorse 
 less logic. Even the trance theory, which Butler 
 himself was inclined to accept, is answered, briefly 
 indeed, but plausibly. On the other side Dean 
 Alford's half-hearted attempt to reconcile the 
 discordant Gospel narratives of the Resurrection 
 undergoes the same deadly analysis. But the 
 truth of the Resurrection, Butler then argues, is 
 dependent on no such reconciliation of the rec-
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 197 
 
 ords; in fact a divine revelation, he maintains, 
 designed for the needs of all sorts and conditions 
 of men, ought, in the nature of the case, to pre 
 sent the truth in a variety of manners. Here at 
 last one begins to feel that the satire of Chris 
 tianity itself is coming out into the open, and in 
 the Life a bit of conversation is recorded which 
 would seem to confirm such a view. Butler is 
 talking with the Rev. Edwin A. Abbott: 
 
 He said to me: "And did you really mean none of 
 that part seriously?" 
 
 I said: "Certainly not; I intended it as an example 
 of the kind of rubbish which would go down with the 
 Spectator. 11 
 
 Abbott said: "Well, I can only say you would have 
 found a great many to sympathize with you, if you had 
 meant it seriously." 
 
 I said, rather drily: "That, I think, is exceedingly 
 probable," meaning that there was no lack of silly in 
 sincere gushers. 
 
 That has a categorical ring; yet in an article 
 (Essays on Life, Art, and Science, p. 137) pub 
 lished in the Universal Review four years after the 
 date of this conversation, where there can be no 
 possible suspicion of irony, Butler is repeating as 
 his own this same argument for the adaptability 
 of revelation and of the Christ-Ideal. 
 
 What can we make of all this? The key to the 
 difficulty may be found, I think, in a sentence of 
 his preface to The Fair Haven: "I was justified," 
 he says, "in calling the book a defence ; both as
 
 198 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 against impugners and defenders," i.e., of Chris 
 tianity. Butler held it his mission to "heave 
 bricks" at two groups of eminent men: he was 
 himself deeply immersed in science, but he nursed 
 a magnificent grudge against the professional 
 scientists of his day both for their bigotry and for 
 personal reasons; and in like manner he was in 
 terested in religion and indeed always called him 
 self a churchman of a sort, but he hated any one 
 else who assumed that name. And so in The Fair 
 Haven he was having his fun and powerful 
 good fun it is with Strauss and the scientific 
 impugners on the one side, and with Dean Alford 
 and his tribe of puzzled defenders on the other; 
 he enjoyed the sport so much that he persuaded 
 his friend and almost made himself believe that 
 he was having fun also with the object impugned 
 and defended by them. But besides the faculty of 
 irony Butler possessed in equal measure the fac 
 ulty of hard logic. And so it happened that when 
 he came to present the case in support of Chris 
 tianity any lurking intention of irony was soon 
 swallowed up in the pure delight of building up a 
 constructive argument such as the professional 
 champions of the Church, in his opinion, had 
 quite failed to offer. He was helped in this by his 
 firm belief that of the two the professors of science 
 were a more bigoted and dangerous class than 
 the professors of religion. 
 
 In this union of logic with irony Butler belongs
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER OF EREWHON 199 
 
 with Huxley and Matthew Arnold, as he is their 
 peer in the mastery of a superbly clear and idio 
 matic English style. He differs from them in that 
 he possessed also a certain gnome-like impudence 
 of fancy which led him into strange ambiguities 
 and throws a veil of seeming irresponsibility over 
 much, not all, of his writing. Readers who are 
 not made uneasy by this remarkable combina 
 tion of qualities, and who have no fear for their 
 own heads where brickbats are flying, will find in 
 him one of the most fascinating authors of the 
 Victorian age. Only, perhaps, a word of caution 
 should be uttered in regard to Butler's one regu 
 lar novel, The Way of All Flesh. There is no 
 irony here, but the bludgeoning of a direct and 
 brutal sarcasm; he is no longer our Victorian 
 Swift of A Tale of a Tub or of Laputa, but a voy 
 ager to the land of the Yahoos. It is a powerful 
 book, even a great book in a way ; out it is bit 
 ter, malignant, base, dishonourable, and dishon 
 est. Unfortunately, to the smudged and smeared 
 minds of 'a Bernard Shaw and a Gilbert Cannan 
 it appeals as Butler's masterpiece, and much of 
 his fame, so far as he is known to the general pub 
 lic, derives from Shaw's eulogy of this one work. 
 That is a pity, in my judgment; for the true But 
 ler, perhaps I should say the finer Butler, is not 
 there, but in the books where irony plays way- 
 wardly backwards and forwards through a net 
 work of subtle logic.
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 
 
 "THE world," says Lord Morley in the introduc 
 tion to his Recollections, "is travelling under for 
 midable omens into a new era, very unlike the 
 times in which my lot was cast." And, indeed, 
 those of us who had our beginnings in the Vic 
 torian age seem, as we read his pages, to hear a 
 voice out of our own youth, speaking to us almost 
 as strangers so hard is it for a man in the 
 season of harvest to recall the days of his sowing. 
 That is the deeper meaning of the book. Of the 
 ordinary intimacies of biography it contains small 
 measure. Save for a few sentences about his 
 parents in the first chapter, and the casual men 
 tion of "my wife," the writer might be regarded 
 as a modern Melchisedec, "without father, with 
 out mother, without descent." Nor has he much 
 to say of his own more private emotions, of the 
 sweet and bitter currents of self-approval and 
 self-distrust that flow through the heart when 
 the world is shut out. In that respect we may call 
 his taste impeccable or his intellect cold, as our 
 judgment inclines. But of the other ingredients 
 of good biography there is abundance. Every 
 where there is felt the charm of a writer who has 
 borne a great r61e among great men, and who
 
 204 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 knows how to wield all the necromantic devices 
 of literary art. 
 
 No small part of the record is purely bookish, 
 the reflections of a man who began life as an 
 author and through all the distractions of a public 
 career never forgot the seclusions of his library. 
 There was in Morley the making, perhaps the 
 actuality, of a first-rate critic, in the narrower 
 sense of the word, and the interest of these critical 
 comments is enhanced by the fact that much of 
 it relates to writers whom he knew personally, 
 often intimately. No finer tribute to the over 
 flowing courage of Meredith, "his spaciousness of 
 mind and outlook," will be found anywhere than 
 in these pages. What, for instance, could be more 
 significant than this extract from a letter of Mere 
 dith's written after Morley had called his atten 
 tion to Goethe's psalm of life, Das Gottliche? 
 "Anything grander than the days and nights at 
 my porch, you will not find away from the Alps, 
 for the dark line of my hill runs up to the stars, 
 the valley below is a soundless gulf. There I pace 
 like a shipman before turning in. In the day, 
 with a S.W. blowing, I have a brilliant universe 
 rolling up to me ; after midnight I sat and thought 
 of Goethe, and of the sage in him and the youth." 
 That, as Morley adds, is Meredith as he lived, 
 and at his best. Yet, as a critic, Morley was not 
 blind to the strain of contortion in Meredith's 
 genius, and to what such contortion means. "It
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 205 
 
 is of no avail," he says, "for any writer to con 
 tend that he is not obscure. . . . The truth is 
 that Meredith often missed ease. Yet ease in 
 words and artistic form has been a mark of more 
 than one of his contemporaries, who amid the 
 world's riddles saw deepest and felt warmest. 
 Even into his best talks there came now and 
 again a sense of strain ; if a new-comer joined the 
 little circle of intimates, he was transformed, forc 
 ing himself without provocation into a wrestle for 
 violent effects." It would be well if the implica 
 tion of these words were remembered not only 
 by the over-zealous partisans of Meredith, par 
 ticularly of Meredith the poet, but by all those 
 would-be "intellectuals" who measure the wis 
 dom of an author by his difficulty. 
 
 Space would fail if I undertook to recall the 
 judgments of like clarity passed on R. L. Steven 
 son and Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen and 
 Browning and other lights of the Victorian age. 
 Only one of the greater names is conspicuous by 
 its absence ; Thackeray is nowhere even named. 
 I have inquired whether there was any personal 
 reason for this strange silence, but no one has 
 been able to explain it on such grounds. And so I 
 can only fall back on the suggestion of a very wise 
 friend, that Morley may have been repelled by 
 the novelist's insight into the vanities of the hu 
 man heart, and made uneasy by the realism of the 
 social ideas expressed in the conversation between
 
 206 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Pendennis and Warrington. That is mere con 
 jecture, but there are, in fact, sentences in the 
 talk of those observers of the Upper Temple 
 which might strike as a chilling wind on the il 
 lusions of a sentimental Liberal. 
 
 But the literature of the Recollections is not con 
 fined to contemporary writers. To the end, Mor- 
 ley carries on the love of the Classics which came 
 to him, we may suppose, by right of his Oxford 
 training. Late in life, when released for a while 
 from business, he finds more refreshment from a 
 treatise of Cicero than from the daily press. And 
 one of the best of his chapters is really an inde 
 pendent essay in little on Lucretius, to whom, as 
 to the greatest of those who have "denied di 
 vinely the divine," he was peculiarly drawn. It is 
 even characteristic of his reserve that nowhere 
 else do we seem to get so near a glimpse into his 
 own more intimate thoughts as in his lingering 
 reflections on the lines of the De Rerum Natura 
 which describe the inroad of death upon the 
 pleasant customs of life : 
 
 It was impossible that our own glorious literature 
 should not contain, in prose and verse alike, a thousand 
 things of superlative beauty about this universal theme, 
 from Raleigh's "0 eloquent, just, and mighty death," or 
 the thrilling dialogues in Claudio's prison, down to the 
 most melting and melodious single verse in all the exer 
 cises of our English tongue, "After life's fitful fever he 
 sleeps well," the tender summary of it all. Still, the 
 famous passage of Lucretius at the close of his third
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 207 
 
 book is of such quality that I hardly find in my heart to 
 quarrel with the accomplished critic of to-day who sug 
 gests that "its lofty passion, its piercing tenderness, the 
 stately roll of its cadences, is perhaps unmatched in 
 human speech." 
 
 Death is the tritest of events save only birth, 
 and the world, it should seem, has agreed to de 
 bar it from further exploitation in literature, as a 
 theme long ago exhausted. Yet in this same chap 
 ter the record of an Easter holiday spent in 
 turning over a volume of collectanea on les grands 
 homines qui sont marts en plaisantant Lord 
 Morley has prefaced his criticism of Lucretius 
 with a sheaf of quotations from English sources 
 which might make the act of dying appear as a 
 new experience to each of us. I will not apolo 
 gize for .writing out two of these extracts ; for the 
 more personal flavour of Lord Morley's book is 
 in these things, and still, despite our modern con 
 vention of silence, death is closer to our minds 
 than any man. 
 
 QUEEN ELIZABETH. (Philosophy of the man of action.) 
 As for me, I see no such great reason why I should 
 either be proud to live, or fear to die. I have had good 
 experience of this world. I have known what it is to be 
 a subject, and I now know what it is to be a sovereign. 
 Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; 
 and in trust, I have found treason. I have bestowed 
 benefits on ill deservers; and where I have done well, I 
 have been ill reputed and spoken of. When I call to mind 
 things past, behold things present, and look forward 
 to things to come, I count them happiest that go hence
 
 208 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 soonest. Nevertheless ... I am armed with better cour 
 age than is common in my sex, so that whatsoever be 
 falls me, death shall never find me unprepared. 
 
 LEIGHTON. (The Scotch divine of the time of the Restora 
 tion, indifferently episcopal and presbyterian, the friend of 
 Bishop Burnet -who reports this of him.} There were two 
 remarkable circumstances in his death. He used often 
 to say that if he were to choose a place to die in, it should 
 be an inn, it looking like a pilgrim's going home, to 
 whom this world was all an inn, and who was weary of 
 the noise and confusion of it. He added that the officious 
 tenderness of his friends was an entanglement to a dying 
 man, and that the unconcerned attendance of those that 
 could be procured in such a place would give less dis 
 turbance. He had his wish. 
 
 In comparison with the point and variety of the 
 literary comments the narrative of Lord Morley's 
 political career is, it must be admitted, rather 
 monotonous. I do not mean that these chapters 
 are wholly without interest. Here and there they 
 are enlivened by sprightly anecdote, as when he 
 tells the story of the Irish peasant in the dock 
 for a violent assault. Prisoner, puzzled by the 
 legal jargon of the indictment: "What's all that 
 he says?" Warder: "He says ye hit Pat Curry 
 with yer spade on the side of his head." Prisoner: 
 "Bedad, an' I did." Warder: "Then plade not 
 guilty." All this aloud and in full hearing of the 
 court. We may be grateful to an Irish Secre 
 tary for assuring us that one of the ancient phan 
 toms of Hibernian humour was a real creature of
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 209 
 
 flesh and blood ; it is in a small way a footnote to 
 the veracity of history. There are also in these 
 political chapters several set character sketches 
 of statesmen notably of Harcourt, Rosebery, 
 Chamberlain, and Lord Spencer which are 
 scarcely less elaborately drawn than the liter 
 ary portraits. Nevertheless, the main narrative, 
 when it gets caught in the backwash of Home 
 Rule and Indian administration, moves with a 
 provokingly sluggish tide. Here Lord Morley 
 contrives to be almost as dull about himself as he 
 was about Gladstone in that biography of which 
 he has been heard to say that no one ever read it 
 through. 
 
 Yet, withal, it is true that the main, or at least 
 the final, interest of the Recollections is drawn 
 from this political background. In telling his 
 story Lord Morley makes rather a sharp division 
 between his hours in Parliament and the hours 
 spent among his books. Such an arrangement 
 would suggest rather an incompatibility between 
 the two parts of his life than their harmony. And 
 so, in fact, after relating his election to Parlia 
 ment, he pauses a moment to reckon up the diffi 
 culties that have beset the literary man in poli 
 tics, beginning with Cicero, who came to a blood 
 stained end on the Italian seashore, and closing 
 with Thiers, who used to say that "he would 
 willingly give the writing of ten successful his 
 tories for a single happy session in the Assembly
 
 210 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 or a single fortunate campaign in arms." But 
 certainly the reader of Lord Morley's life feels no 
 such difficulties; on the contrary, he is charmed 
 by the apparently easy blending of fine culture 
 with practical success. Perhaps we are the more 
 sensitive to the beauty of this delicate adjustment 
 for the reason that in its perfection it is not likely 
 soon to appear again. We shall, no doubt, con 
 tinue to see literary men engaged in politics, but 
 scarcely of Lord Morley's type; and even if such 
 appear, their literature will be a thing rather held 
 apart, easily forgotten when they stand in Par 
 liament before the representatives of the people, 
 or when they are talking business in private with 
 their colleagues. At least the habit of the Clas 
 sics, linking the senate with the schoolroom and 
 associating the problems of to-day with the long 
 tradition of experience, is passing, or has passed, 
 away. 
 
 Somewhere Lord Morley tells of a conversa 
 tion with Harcourt when it was a question of let 
 ting Home Rule fall into the limbo of pious opin 
 ions or of pressing it to a quick and perhaps haz 
 ardous issue. Harcourt was for postponement, 
 and one of the strongest incentives Morley could 
 bring for action was the appeal of three lines 
 of Virgil. "Harcourt," he observes, "could be 
 trusted in passing to forgive desperate politics for 
 the sake of a classic quotation." In another 
 place he imagines a debate between Harcourt and
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 211 
 
 Fox, in which the elder statesman expounds his 
 well-known theory that if a man's aim is public 
 speaking, Euripides ought to be his constant 
 study, scarcely less than Homer himself. (Ah, if 
 one could have been present at such a meeting, 
 and could have been allowed to put in a word for 
 Thucydides as the master statesman of them all !) 
 And the reply is that Homer and Euripides alike 
 have long followed the power of the Crown. 
 "Never again," adds the recorder of the imag 
 inary scene " never again will either House 
 hear a Minister declaim the solemn hexameters 
 of Lucretius, among the noblest in all poetry ; or 
 the verses where Virgil describes the husbandman 
 turning up with rake and plow the rusty javelins, 
 empty helms, and mighty bones of a forgotten 
 battle-field of long ago ; or like Pitt in his glorious 
 speech against the Slave Trade, inspired by the 
 shooting of a beam of the rising sun through the 
 windows of the House to the most beautiful and 
 apt of recorded parliamentary impromptus in the 
 two Latin lines: 
 
 Nos . . . primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis, 
 Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper." 
 
 These are but pretty customs, the practical 
 man may say, the frippery and baubles of politi 
 cal life, which only the dilettante will regret much 
 to see stripped off. Does human welfare depend 
 on the memory of a few scraps of Latin? The
 
 212 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 matter is not so simple as that. The disappear 
 ance of the ancient habit, as Lord Morley himself 
 acknowledges, is "significant of a great many 
 more important things than a casual change in 
 literary taste "; it means a new kind of men in the 
 seats of authority, a new sort of life as the aim of 
 government, a new standard of morality, other 
 hopes and other prizes, a world set free from its 
 moorings. The change began with the Reform 
 Bill of 1832; it was a revolution by the time the 
 century closed ; its fruits, whether bitter or sweet, 
 our children shall eat. Lord Morley speaks of 
 Harcourt as the last of the line of orators and law 
 makers, great from Somers and Sir Robert Wai- 
 pole onwards, who, one might add, like the riders 
 seen by Socrates in the Piraeus, carried lighted 
 torches which they passed from one to another as 
 they raced through the night. The reader of these 
 memoirs will probably think of Lord Morley 
 himself as the last of the bearers of the torch. 
 When that light has flickered out, will the dawn 
 have come, or will it be only darkness? 
 
 Of this revolution which has been going on 
 under our eyes Lord Morley was sufficiently 
 aware, as may be known from the sentence of his 
 Introduction already quoted in this essay. But 
 it is not clear and this is the question that has 
 constantly intrigued us while reading the Recol 
 lections whether he really ever stopped to re 
 flect on his own ambiguous position in the move-
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 213 
 
 ment. That absorption in the great literary tra 
 dition, especially the vivid reality of the Classics 
 which has formed so large a part of the consola 
 tion and dignity of his life, and has made him a 
 citizen of the world of Ideas whilst engaged in 
 the pursuits of time what is this but the fine 
 flower of his Oxford training? And it is incontro 
 vertible that Oxford, whatever the disadvan 
 tages or virtues of its discipline, is, and was to a 
 much greater degree when Morley went up, a cre 
 ation of the Church. Take away the influence of 
 those priests, whose semi-seclusion from present 
 affairs threw them back upon the past, and whose 
 study of the Christian Fathers was curiously 
 blended with reverence for the earlier antiquity 
 of paganism, and you have taken away the very 
 spirit of the place. I am not unaware of the par 
 adox inherent in the age-long coordination of 
 Aristotle with Saint Paul, nor do I believe that 
 a truly classical education is necessarily depend 
 ent on the maintenance of such a paradox ; but it 
 is a fact nevertheless that the culture of Oxford 
 was, and essentially still is, of this sort, a working 
 compromise between the authority of the Church 
 and the liberty of ancient literature; to discredit 
 the one has been to weaken the other. Now if 
 Morley had seen the intricacy of this compromise 
 and had sought to justify it or with tender touch 
 to readjust its members, or if he had cast away 
 both elements together as rubbish, one could un-
 
 214 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 derstand his motives, whether one approved or 
 disapproved. But he nowhere hints that he was 
 even conscious of such a problem, and one is left 
 to feel in his attitude towards his intellectual 
 nurse something that smacks of mere disloyalty. 
 The few paragraphs on his undergraduate days 
 are the shabbiest thing in the book. He does not 
 deny the spell of "antique halls and gray time- 
 worn towers" his whole autobiography would 
 prove his sensitiveness to such a spell, had he not 
 expressly acknowledged it but at the close of 
 his career, as he looks back on those days, it 
 seems as if the only intellectual matter that seri 
 ously concerned him then was the spread of 
 Liberal principles as they percolated into the 
 university from the writings of John Stuart Mill. 
 His scant gratitude to the real genius loci has 
 not even the dignity of Gibbon's outspoken con 
 tempt. And after that, if one stops to think, 
 there is something disquieting in the cold and 
 calculating purpose of his life to undermine the 
 religious faith of Oxford while continuing to in 
 dulge himself in the glamour of her hoarded liter 
 ary faith. It were better to feel the power of 
 Lucretius and still to believe in God, as the Ox 
 ford priests had been content to do, than to be 
 blind, as Morley seems to be, to the subtle com 
 plexity of the forces that moulded his taste. A 
 positivist who loves Plato, after the manner of 
 Mill and Morley, is a harsher paradox than
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 215 
 
 ever held the heart of the charmed city by the 
 Isis. 
 
 And Morley's acceptance of the finer pleasures 
 of society is of a piece with his ingratitude to 
 wards the source of his culture. It would be hard 
 to name a recent book that brings us into higher 
 company than do these Recollections. Consider 
 ing the humbleness of the author's origin he 
 was the son of an insignificant Lancashire sur 
 geon one might be tempted to regard his relish 
 of noble names as a sign of snobbishness. But it 
 is nothing of the sort. He moved among the best 
 of the land because by taste and character and 
 achievement he was one of them. His easy fa 
 miliarity with men born into the ruling caste, if 
 any criticism is to be pronounced, is rather an 
 apology for the existence of such a caste than an 
 indication of subservience on his part. But that 
 is a question beside the point. We are only con 
 cerned with his unconcealed delight in the inher 
 ited manners of great families and in the decorum 
 of great houses. No Tory of them all could show 
 a franker appreciation of the political advan 
 tages coming by natural right to a man like Lord 
 Houghton, now Lord Crewe, from a father "of 
 singular literary and social mark." With such 
 a colleague he admits that he found it easy to 
 work harmoniously. And he is equally sensitive 
 to the grace of noble surroundings. He was 
 never, we may suppose, much attracted to Dis-
 
 216 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 raeli's tinselled splendours, but there is no note of 
 disapprobation when to the account of an eve 
 ning in the magnificent library of Al thorpe he adds : 
 "Like a scene from one of Dizzy's novels, and all 
 the actors men with parts to play." Still more 
 characteristic perhaps is his record of two visits 
 to Lord Rosebery. "Meanwhile," he says of one 
 of these, "the upshot of our various talks as we 
 drove, or strolled about Epsom Downs, or chatted 
 in the library, was something of this kind: 
 The triple alliance (Harcourt, himself, and me) 
 so much more really important, as I said, 
 laughing, than that of the Central Powers to 
 remain on its proposed footing." From the ac 
 count of the second visit I may quote at greater 
 length : 
 
 Later and after tea we had an hour's drive, and then at 
 8:30 we had dinner served under the verandah in the 
 garden. Reminded me of a dinner I once had at Bercht- 
 esgaden with Chamberlain years ago. Only we had 
 now a perfect service, instead of two German waiters 
 attending on twenty miscellaneous people, screaming 
 and being screamed at by an overdriven cook. After 
 dinner we walked for an hour in the woods, the sil 
 ver moon gleaming through the branches. R. a charm 
 ing companion. Before going to bed, he showed me a 
 truly deep and beautiful page in one of Newman's Ser 
 mons. When I can get the proper volume, I shall like 
 to transcribe it. [Would that he had transcribed it in 
 this book !] Among other things, he wondered how it was 
 that members of Parliament came to see me so much, 
 and to talk so freely to me. "They never come to me,"
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 217 
 
 he said. J. M. "You're too big a man for one thing, 
 and for another you are uncertain not always to be 
 found. I am always there, you see." R. "Oh, that's 
 not it. When I was in every morning at Lansdowne 
 House, 't was just the same. No, you are sympathetic." 
 This comparison paid me an undeserved compliment, 
 for nobody surpassed him in that inner humanity 
 which is the root of good manners and good feeling and 
 other things lying at the core of character. 
 
 A triple alliance in Parliament, a sermon of 
 Newman's, perfect service and the glamour of 
 moonlight, sympathy and the core of character 
 it was of such strands as these that the cord of 
 politics and society was twisted ; and all the while 
 he who helps in the spinning is standing with the 
 fatal shears ready, if he may, to cut the thin-spun 
 thread. Liberalism may bring with it the prom 
 ise of many blessings to mankind, it may even 
 be preparing the world for a society intrinsically 
 finer than the old I do not know but for the 
 privileged graces of aristocracy it certainly has 
 little heed ; and Morley was the very type of the 
 Liberal who relishes all the pleasures of privilege 
 while advocating every measure of reform which 
 would make them no longer possible. It is of the 
 essence of his whole life that, having at the close 
 of his active career accepted, or rather chosen for 
 himself, a seat in the House of Lords, he immedi 
 ately set himself to carry through a bill which 
 should deprive that body of its power and pre 
 rogative. Say what one will and making allow-
 
 21 8 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 ance for any necessity of the move, there is a 
 taint of ingratitude, of unconscious duplicity one 
 might say, in such a procedure. There is this 
 paradox, if you will call it so, in Morley's attitude 
 towards society, comparable to that of his atti 
 tude towards Oxford. 
 
 Perhaps thoughtlessness is a more appropriate 
 word than ingratitude, unless, indeed, the two 
 epithets come in the end to the same thing. The 
 fact is that Morley, save in matters of taste, is 
 not a man of originality, nor even of steady re 
 flection ; he never quite came to terms with him 
 self in regard to the ideas which he took over 
 from his teachers. In religion and politics he was 
 a professed follower of John Stuart Mill, a utili 
 tarian agnostic and Liberal ; yet one cannot read 
 together the biographical works of Mill and the 
 Recollections of Morley without feeling the pro 
 found difference between the mind of the master, 
 who, to some degree at least, felt the deeper com 
 plexities of life beneath the system he was cre 
 ating, and the mind of the pupil, who took the 
 system as a finished formula and carried it on 
 ruthlessly. Read Morley's three essays on Mill. 
 There is something almost amusing in the change 
 of tone from the first two, in which he celebrates 
 his master as "one of those high and most 
 worthy spirits" who never falter or compromise 
 in their pursuit of pure truth, to the third essay, 
 written as a reply to Mill's posthumous volume
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 219 
 
 on religion. Lord Morley tells us in his Recollec 
 tions with what consternation he learned that the 
 thinker and complete agnostic of his reverence 
 had fallen back at the last upon the belief, shad 
 owy indeed yet almost orthodox, in a wise and ; 
 beneficent Creator and upon the hope of immor 
 tality. Let us admit a strain of inconsistency in ' 
 Mill's mental make-up. I have said elsewhere 
 that he is the example par excellence of a philoso 
 pher who combines the most lucid powers of ex 
 position with an incapacity of clear thinking, and 
 I believe this could be demonstrated not only 
 from the incompatibility between his earlier 
 positivism and his later sentimentalism (or intui 
 tion, if you prefer), but from his position at any 
 given moment of his life. Yet, after all, if incon 
 sistency must be reckoned lower than the con 
 sistency of clear insight, it still has its virtue 
 when compared with a consistency bought at the 
 price of spiritual blindness. And in Mill the con 
 fession that seemed to his disciple only a weak 
 retraction was really the final utterance of a deep 
 uneasiness with his own rational theories, which 
 at a moment in his youth had thrown him into a 
 mood of dark despair like Coleridge's Dejection, 
 and which, though generally concealed, contin 
 ued always to lie beneath his heart. There were 
 in Mill stirrings of doubt, of wise scepticism, 
 which the Oxford scholar, in his consistent hos 
 tility to the spirit of Oxford, never fathomed.
 
 220 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 His only substitute for these would appear to be 
 the art of commenting prettily on the universal 
 ity of death. 
 
 Nor does Morley give any sign that he ever in 
 his active years felt Mill's hesitations in regard 
 to the ulterior consequences of social reform. 
 There is a problem that has lain heavily upon the 
 conscience of the more philosophic Radicals, a 
 problem that Mill faced honestly in his treatise 
 on Liberty the natural antagonism between 
 the equality to which progress looks as its practi 
 cal end and that freedom of the individual the 
 benefit and necessity of which might seem to 
 be recognized in the very name of Liberalism. 
 Were it not for a habit of obstinate forgetfulness 
 in human nature we should think it needless 
 to recall the great passages wherein Morley's 
 acknowledged teacher dilates on "the tyranny of 
 opinion" almost inevitable in a State governed 
 by the immediate will of the majority a tyr 
 anny more far-reaching in its grasp than the arbi 
 trary despotism of any single man or group of 
 men. And Mill, the progressive Radical, was not 
 blind to the peculiar tendency of this tyranny to 
 produce a condition of dead mediocrity. "All the 
 political changes of the age," he declares, "pro 
 mote it [this level of mediocrity], since they all 
 tend to raise the low and to lower the high. 
 Every extension of education promotes it, be 
 cause education brings people under common in-
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 221 
 
 fluences, and gives them access to the general 
 stock of facts and sentiments. Improvement in 
 the means of communication promotes it, by 
 bringing the inhabitants of distant places into 
 personal contact, and keeping up a rapid flow of 
 changes of residence between one place and an 
 other. The increase of commerce and manufac 
 tures promotes it, by diffusing more widely the 
 advantages of easy circumstances, and opening 
 all objects of ambition, even the highest, to gen 
 eral competition, whereby the desire of rising 
 becomes no longer the character of a particular 
 class, but of all classes. A more powerful agency 
 than even all these, in bringing about a general 
 similarity among mankind, is the complete estab 
 lishment, in this and other free countries, of the 
 ascendency of public opinion in the State. As the 
 various social eminences which enabled persons 
 entrenched on them to disregard the opinion of 
 the multitude gradually become leveled; as the 
 very idea of resisting the will of the public, when 
 it is positively known that they have a will, dis 
 appears more and more from the minds of prac 
 tical politicians; there ceases to be any social 
 support for non-conformity any substantive 
 power in society, which, itself opposed to the 
 ascendency of numbers, is interested in taking 
 under its protection opinions and tendencies at 
 variance with those of the public." 
 
 And so we have, as Mill would say, this clam-
 
 222 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 orous paradox: an equalitarian Liberalism is 
 based on and justified by the doctrine of pro 
 gress, yet by its own weight tends to depress that 
 variety of situations and that liberty of the indi 
 vidual which are the efficient causes of progress. 
 Mill's own solution of this difficulty depends on 
 the feasibility of training the better endowed few 
 to a consciousness of the obligations of self-de 
 velopment and public leadership, and on faith in 
 the natural instinct of the masses of mankind to 
 follow a true guide; he would give to education 
 the place in society which Burke gave to preroga 
 tive. But I do not raise these perplexing ques 
 tions for the sake of criticising Liberalism or for 
 the purpose of considering plausible remedies. 
 My aim is entirely the more modest one of point 
 ing to a certain thoughtlessness, a certain un 
 heeding straightforwardness, in the mind of a 
 man like Morley who, while enjoying and frankly 
 eulogizing the distinctions of a society based on 
 the higher individualism, yet never hesitated in 
 carrying through measures which, as he himself 
 knew, were laying the axe at the roots of such 
 a society. Though he knew this, you will find, 
 at least within the compass of the Recollections, 
 no regret for the ambiguity of his position, no 
 anxious self -questioning such as troubled Mill. 
 This difference between Mill and Morley is 
 significant of much, but we are brought even 
 closer, I think, to the heart of Morley 's Liberal-
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 223 
 
 ism by considering his relation to two earlier 
 writers Burke and Rousseau. Now if there be 
 two names in' the history of sociology more an 
 tipodal to each other than these, I do not know 
 them; and it is extraordinary, to say the least, 
 that throughout his life Morley has professed 
 himself an admirer and, to a certain extent, a 
 follower of both of these men. This is verily a 
 compromise worthy of a new chapter in his 
 treatise on that subject, a compromise indicative 
 of some dulness of the mind to the law of mutual 
 exclusions, possible only to one who has never 
 really assimilated what is essential to one or both 
 of the terms included. As for Burke, Morley's 
 attitude towards that enemy of destructive in 
 novation is more than extraordinary. One of his 
 earliest- ventures in literature was an essay, in 
 large measure eulogistic, on the author of the 
 Reflections on the French Revolution, and in 1907 
 Burke is still, he assures a correspondent, "a 
 high idol of mine." That is consistent enough, 
 but the remarkable thing is the grounds of this 
 continued admiration. More than once in the 
 Recollections he avows that what he learnt from 
 Burke was the "practical principles in the strat 
 egy and tactics of public life," and for this lesson 
 he accepts Macaulay's estimation of Burke as 
 "the greatest man since Milton." Such praise 
 for such a benefit is rather startling, but surprise 
 turns to amazement when we find that this
 
 224 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 teacher of practical politics was, according to the 
 statement of Lord Lansdowne quoted with ap 
 proval in Morley's life of Burke, "so violent, so 
 overbearing, so arrogant, so intractable, that to 
 have got on with him in a cabinet would have 
 been utterly and absolutely impossible." And if 
 Morley acquired from Burke a virtue for of 
 practical politics of the more honourable sort 
 Morley was a past master of which Burke 
 himself was the doubtful possessor, he quite 
 failed, on the other hand, to take from him the 
 one quality of imaginative perception which 
 gives meaning to the whole of Burkt's career. 
 Of this quality, to be sure, Morley's critical in 
 telligence was fully aware when he wrote his 
 monograph. He saw its positive aspect: Burke, 
 he says, "was using no idle epithet, when he de 
 scribed the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, 
 'moulding together the great mysterious incor 
 poration of the human race.'" And he saw also 
 its negative aspect, the inhibition exercised by 
 the higher centripetal imagination upon the 
 egotistic expansiveness of the individual. This, 
 he avers, was with Burke "the cardinal truth for 
 men, namely, that if you encourage every indi 
 vidual to let the imagination loose upon all sub 
 jects, without any restraint from a sense of his 
 own weakness, and his subordinate rank in the 
 long scheme of things, then there is nothing of all 
 that the opinion of ages has agreed to regard as
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 225 
 
 excellent and venerable, which would not be ex 
 posed to destruction at the hands of rationalistic 
 criticism." The strange thing is that one who 
 could analyse Burke's political creed so fairly 
 and express it so sympathetically should per 
 sistently profess himself a follower of Burke for 
 qualities which Burke possessed superficially, if 
 he possessed them at all. The simple fact is, I 
 suspect, that Morley appreciates Burke by the 
 contact of what may be called a purely literary 
 imagination, and by a certain sympathy of char 
 acter, whereas in the higher imagination as an 
 actual controlling element of statesmanship, or 
 in that deeper wisdom of the human heart which 
 goes with it, he is profoundly deficient. So it is I 
 explain to myself his almost callous indifference, 
 so far as the records show, to the destructive 
 hazard in a rationalistic programme, which even 
 a Mill could perceive. 
 
 In the case of the other great leader to whom 
 Morley remains addicted throughout life, the 
 procedure is of a reverse order. With Burke our 
 statesman feels himself in sympathy, whatever 
 he may say of Parliamentary strategy, chiefly by 
 reason of the British tradition of sturdy charac 
 ter, while he rejects the principle upon which 
 that character is really based. To Rousseau he is 
 drawn in a contrary manner. Here it is the cen 
 tral impulse of the heart, the generating principle 
 of conduct, that holds his loyalty. Early in the
 
 226 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Recollections he quotes, as justifying his own ad 
 diction to Rousseau, a passage from a letter of 
 George Eliot, that throws a flood of light on the 
 nature of his Liberalism. "I wish you to under 
 stand," the novelist had written, "that the writ 
 ers who have most profoundly interested me 
 who have rolled away the waters from their bed, 
 raised new mountains and spread delicious val 
 leys for me are not in the least oracles to me. 
 It is just possible that I may not embrace one of 
 their opinions that I may wish my life to be 
 shaped quite differently from theirs. For in 
 stance it would signify nothing to me if a very 
 wise person were to stun me with proofs that 
 Rousseau's views of life, religion, and govern 
 ment are miserably erroneous. ... I might admit 
 all this, and it would be not the less true that 
 Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill 
 through my intellectual and moral frame which 
 has awakened me to new perceptions which 
 has made man and nature a world of freer thought 
 and feeling to me; and this not by teaching me 
 any new belief." 
 
 Now a plain man might be inclined to ask by 
 what right a practical statesman, however it may 
 be with a maker of fiction, dare avow his adhe 
 rence to a philosopher who kindles a relentless 
 flame of passion, yet whose "views of life, religion, 
 and government are miserably erroneous." It 
 might be in order to observe that this reckless sur-
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 227 
 
 render to emotion, without conscientious scruples 
 for the direction the emotion was taking, has been 
 one of the causes which have brought the world 
 to its present dolorous pass. But at bottom Mor- 
 ley has taken from Rousseau something more 
 than the mere shock of feeling. As one may learn 
 from many passages of the Recollections, there 
 are involved with this emotionalism two leading 
 ideas, or views of life, distinct in expression, 
 though springing from the same head. One of 
 these is what he calls "Rousseau's resplendent 
 commonplace," and is directly political: '"Tis 
 the people that compose the human race; what 
 is not people is so small a concern that it is 
 not worth the trouble of counting." The other 
 idea is rather the philosophical, or psychological, 
 basis of Rousseauism. It is what Morley in vari 
 ous places upholds as the law of "bold free ex 
 pansion," "the gospel of free intellectual and so 
 cial expansion"; it is the "belief in Progress" as 
 the mechanical result of this expansive instinct, 
 which he insistently preaches as a substitute for 
 the belief in God and providence. It might be 
 remarked in passing that these two Rousseauistic 
 ideas are in violent opposition to the doctrine of 
 Morley 's other acknowledged master. To con 
 ceive society as composed of the people alone 
 (the masses, that is, as contrasted with the privi 
 leged classes) is certainly, whatever else may be 
 said of it, to deny any meaning to Burke 's notion
 
 228 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 of the hierarchy of orders forming together "the 
 great mysterious incorporation of the human 
 race"; it is even to forget the reservations of 
 leadership demanded by so complete a Liberal as 
 Mill. And, again, to trust for progress to an in 
 stinctive desire of expansion in human nature is 
 certainly to encourage that letting loose of the 
 individual imagination, without any restraint 
 from the sense of a man's own weakness, about 
 which Burke would throw the bulwark of the 
 restrictive social imagination. 
 
 But that is by the way. The striking fact is 
 that no one could be more sensitive than Morley 
 to the actual outcome of these principles in char 
 acter, yet that he should so entirely overlook the 
 nexus of cause and effect. Of Rousseau's per 
 sonal weaknesses he was an unsparing critic; he 
 has written of them in the spirit of Burke and 
 of an English gentleman. Theoretically, too, he 
 knows that such fine emotional words as "truth, 
 right, and general good," if allowed to usurp the 
 place of plain thinking, may be nothing more 
 than a cloak for factious malignity ; he can praise 
 Bishop Butler for "the solid distinction of never 
 shutting his eyes to dark facts in human life and 
 history." Yet one might suppose, for anything 
 said in the Recollections, that there is no connec 
 tion between Rousseau's theory of natural good 
 ness and that lack of personal reticence in speech 
 and conduct which make his character so repul-
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 229 
 
 sive. And in his political course, again as re 
 flected in the Recollections, Morley is content to 
 reiterate his confidence in the British workman 
 as a being whose desires will instinctively limit 
 themselves without any outer control, as if here 
 the "dark facts" of selfishness did not exist. 
 "My faith," he writes in a letter after the Kai 
 ser's visit to London, "in the political prudence 
 of our democracy is unshaken, and I don't won 
 der that the German Emperor should have 
 wished that his men of that kidney were half as 
 sensible." It is probable that Lord Morley, in 
 his present retirement, has changed his opinion 
 somewhat in respect to William, and does not 
 now, as he did in 1907, when cajoled by that 
 Monarch's table talk, regard the Imperial Gov 
 ernment as solely intent on preserving "a little 
 decent calm all over Europe." One wonders 
 whether he has seen a light also in respect to the 
 possible greed of a class of men who find the way 
 open to grasp at unlimited political power. Will 
 it occur to him that in the one case as in the 
 other, in the Pan-Germanism of Berlin as in the 
 programme of British Radicalism, there is at 
 work the same law of untrammelled expansive- 
 ness, and that there may be some peril in follow 
 ing the electric thrill of freer feeling as a force 
 beautiful and ennobling in itself, whatever may 
 be the accompanying views of life, religion, and 
 government? Long ago the first Marquess of
 
 230 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Halifax, who had learnt much in the hard school 
 oFrevolution, discovered that "the greatest part 
 of the business of the world is the effect of not 
 thinking." How far is the business of the world 
 to-day the result of feeling without thinking? 
 
 I must say again, and emphatically, that I am 
 not writing a political treatise, nor am I attempt 
 ing to weigh the good and evil of Radicalism in 
 general. My task is the humbler one of trying 
 to analyse the character of a particular Radical. 
 Here before us lies his autobiography: it is a life 
 replete with charm, most of what was best in the 
 literature of the day is reflected in it, and much 
 of the culture of antiquity ; the traditional graces 
 of society give it lustre, and it is actuated by a 
 steady and unselfish purpose ; yet what is the con 
 clusion? At the end of the record, as a kind of 
 epilogue, the statesman who had played a part in 
 the social changes of an epoch, describes a walk 
 in a Surrey upland with little Eileen, a four- 
 footed favourite, and these are the closing words : 
 
 A painful interrogatory, I must confess, emerges. 
 Has not your school the Darwins, Spencers, Kenans, 
 and the rest held the civilized world, both old and 
 new alike, European and transatlantic, in the hollow of 
 their hand for two long generations past? Is it quite 
 clear that their influence has been so much more potent 
 than the gospel of the various churches? Circumspice. 
 Is not diplomacy, unkindly called by Voltaire the field of 
 lies, as able as it ever was to dupe governments and gov 
 erned by grand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY 231 
 
 inexplicable purposes, and turning the whole world over 
 with blood and tears to a strange Witches' Sabbath? 
 These were queries of pith and moment indeed, but for 
 something better weighed and more deliberative than an 
 autumn reverie. 
 
 Now and then I paused as I sauntered slow over the 
 fading heather. My little humble friend squat on her 
 haunches, looking wistfully up, eager to resume her end 
 less hunt after she knows not what, just like the char 
 tered metaphysicians. So to my home in the falling day 
 light. 
 
 I am not wrong, I think, in being disconcerted 
 by such a conclusion to such a record. Is all our 
 intelligence and all our aspiration after the truth 
 no more than the wistful and aimless searching of 
 a dog? I believe that no man is justified in laying 
 his hand on the complicated fabric of society un 
 til he has a surer sense of direction than this ; and 
 I am tempted to ask whether the Witches' Sab 
 bath into which we had reeled (this was the time 
 of the war) may not have been the natural goal 
 of a world divided between those who follow the 
 instinct of expansion without feeling, and those 
 who follow the same instinct without thinking. 
 If British statesmen like Lord Morley and Sir 
 Edward Grey and British scholars like Gilbert 
 Murray had not been so steeped in the illusion of 
 human righteousness as to discredit the possibil 
 ity of war, would the war have occurred? It may 
 be unfair to drag in these stupendous issues when 
 criticising the work of one who was, after all, a
 
 232 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 minor figure in the politics of the day; but Lord 
 Morley is a type. And waiving these considera 
 tions, there is still the uncomfortable fact that 
 Lord Morley seems never to have reflected seri 
 ously never, at least, until too late - on the 
 ambiguous position of a statesman who accepted 
 the ungrudged gifts of a culture and a society 
 which all the while he was deliberately under 
 mining. Such action bears at least the semblance 
 of ingratitude. And if it is the ingratitude born 
 of magnanimous sympathy for the less fortunate, 
 one must still ask whether sympathy, unbal 
 anced by clear understanding of human nature 
 and uncontrolled by the larger imagination, may 
 not be found in the end on the side of the de 
 structive rather than the constructive forces of 
 civilization. These disturbing doubts, despite 
 our admiration for Lord Morley, will arise in re 
 gard to the special form of utilitarian Liberalism 
 which he took from Mill, without Mill's anxiety; 
 they bring to mind the strong words of Leopardi : 
 
 Stolta, che 1'util chiede, 
 
 E inutile la vita 
 
 Quindi piu sempre divenir non vede. 1 
 
 1 // Pensiero Dominante: " Blind! that demands the use 
 ful, and sees not that ever thence life becomes more use 
 less."
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 
 
 ON the slip-cover of Mr. Ernest Poole's story of 
 The Harbour, which I have read rather belatedly, 
 the publishers have printed this legend: "The 
 central character is a young man who, through 
 his intimate contact with people and particu 
 larly through his study of humanity as it ebbs 
 and flows in the great harbour, comes finally to 
 see the inner meaning of things." And we learn 
 that the book is regarded by one at least of our 
 great newspapers as "the best American novel 
 that has appeared in many a long day." Of the 
 literary merit of Mr Poole's work I am not con 
 cerned to speak. As a mere piece of fiction it will 
 be outbid by some noisier competitor to-morrow, 
 if it is not already forgotten; but as an honest 
 and forcible presentation of a vital problem it has 
 more than passing interest. Not that the author 
 has brought any new thoughts to bear on the 
 vexing questions he propounds, or has reached to 
 "the inner meaning of things." It would be truer 
 to say that he has not thought at all ; and indeed 
 the value of his book lies in the clarity with which 
 the current ideas and emotions of the hour find 
 expression in his pages, without taking any colour 
 from their passage through his mind or suffering 
 any distortion from an original imagination.
 
 236 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 The plot of the story may be recalled. A 
 young man, who develops into a writer, has been 
 brought up in peculiarly intimate relations with 
 the shipping of New York Harbour, and a good 
 deal of the book is given up to vivid pictures of 
 the multiform life about the shores of the North 
 and East Rivers. At college Princetonians 
 have not been slow to recognize their alma mater 
 in the unflattering scenes he discovers the 
 emptiness and dull conventionality of academic 
 tradition; one can t scarcely say academic ed 
 ucation, for apparently he learns nothing in 
 chapel or lecture room. But here he becomes 
 acquainted with a rebellious youth from the Mid 
 dle West, a certain Joe Kramer, who distinguishes 
 himself by doing a little independent thinking, 
 as his creator understands thinking, and who is 
 destined later on to exert a decisive influence on 
 the hero. "Do you know who 's to blame for this 
 stuff?" queries our indignant young philosopher. 
 "It's not the profs, I've nothing against them, 
 all they need is to be kicked out. No. It's us, 
 because we stand for their line of drule. If we 
 got right up on our honkeys and howled, all of 
 us, for a real education, we'd get it by next Sat 
 urday night. But we don't care a damn" an 
 observation which is not without a measure of 
 truth. One is not surprised to learn that Joe had 
 as little reverence for the tradition of literature as 
 for its teachers: "This darned library shut its
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 237 
 
 doors," he would growl to himself, "just as the 
 real dope was coming along. But there's been 
 such a flood of it ever since that some leaked in in 
 spite of 'em." 
 
 Owing to his good fortune in meeting Joe, our 
 hero came out of college with some "enlight 
 enment" despite his professors. But at first, 
 through his love for a girl he had known as a 
 child, and now sees again in the plenitude of 
 her charms, he is thrown much with an engineer 
 named Dillon, her father, a dreamer absorbed in 
 schemes for making New York the great organ 
 ized centre of the world's trade. The quiet assur 
 ance of the man captivates him, and he is carried 
 away by the stupendous vision of a society regen 
 erated and controlled by the hand of scientific 
 efficiency working in harmony with the beneficent 
 powers of capital. With a reminiscence, one im 
 agines, of the Temptation in the Wilderness, the 
 author conveys us, with his hero, into Dillon's 
 offices high up in the tower of the Woolworth 
 Building, from whence we look down upon the 
 panorama of the city and the bay, as upon the 
 kingdoms of the world, lying now in haphazard 
 confusion as things have grown up by chance. 
 And then the engineer displays his charts of the 
 harbour as it is to be, with its continuous docks 
 and vast organization of machinery. Along the 
 heavy roofs of steel are drawn wide ocean boule 
 vards, with trees and shrubs and flowers to shut
 
 238 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 out the clamorous business below; and the port 
 itself is no longer a mere body of water, but has 
 beneath it a whole region of tunnels, through 
 which is flowing the endless traffic, unseen and 
 unheard. All this the city was to build, and as 
 landlord was to invite the shipping and railway 
 lords and the manufacturers to come in and "get 
 together," and work with one another and the 
 city in the mighty plan. "That 's what we mean 
 nowadays by a port, "explains the deviser of the 
 great project, "a complicated industrial organ, 
 the heart of a country's circulation, pumping in 
 and out its millions of tons of traffic as quickly 
 and cheaply as possible. That 's efficiency, scien 
 tific management, or just plain engineering, what 
 ever you want to call it. But it's got to be done 
 for us all in a plan, instead of each for himself in 
 a blind struggling chaos." Later, as a writer of 
 "glory stories," the inquisitive young man gains 
 the intimacy of the financial magnate who, from 
 his office in Wall Street, is controlling all these 
 new forces of reconstruction. And as the money- 
 lord talks, and lays bare the tremendous schemes 
 of promotion that find their centre there in those 
 quiet rooms, our hero beholds again the vision 
 he had beheld in the tower; he feels the daz 
 zling future, as it were rushing upon the world, a 
 future of plenty and power, governed by the keen 
 minds and wide outlook of the strong men at 
 the top.
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 239 
 
 Then comes what a Greek tragedian would call 
 the peripeteia. Suddenly Joe Kramer reappears 
 upon the scene, and the supposedly blind uncon 
 scious instruments of the vast reconstruction, the 
 labourers who supplied the physical energy for 
 the moving traffic of the harbour, are united in 
 a strike against their masters a strike which in 
 the eyes of their leaders is merely the beginning 
 of a universal revolt against an age-long condi 
 tion of servitude. At first our hero is on the side 
 of the employers. "What's your main idea," he 
 exclaims to Joe, "in stirring up millions of igno 
 rant men ? Your stokers and dock labourers are 
 about as fit to build up a new world as they are to 
 build a Brooklyn Bridge. Can't you see you're 
 all just floundering in a perfect swamp of igno 
 rance?" But he is carried by Joe down into the 
 stoke-hole of a vessel and made to see the terri 
 ble existence (in itself overdrawn, if this were a 
 question of truth) of the slaves to the demon of 
 fire and to the god of efficiency ; he is admitted to 
 meetings of the strikers in which the feeling of 
 participation in a common cause breaks down 
 the barriers between workers from every part of 
 the globe. Gradually he is transformed by a 
 clearer perception of what it all means. These 
 tragic people gripped him hard. The crippled 
 dockers in their homes with their women and 
 children, their agony, and the fear of starvation 
 looming up before them brought a tightening
 
 240 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 at his throat. But it was not only sympathy that 
 moved him; doubts of his former creed were 
 awakened within him, and admiration for the 
 power of this new ideal that was teaching multi 
 tudes of men to act as if impelled by a single pur 
 pose. Far to the south, high over all the squalid 
 tenement dwellings, rose that tower of lights he 
 had known so well, the airy palace where Dillon 
 had dreamed and planned his clean vigorous 
 world. He saw its lights gleaming above the city 
 as though nothing was happening here on the 
 water front. He thought of the men about him. 
 How crassly ignorant they seemed. And yet in 
 a few brief hours they had paralyzed all that the 
 tower had planned, reduced it all to silence, noth 
 ing. Could it be, he asked himself, that such up 
 heavals as these meant an end to the rule of the 
 world from above, by the keen minds at the top? 
 Was that great idol which he had worshipped for 
 so many years, that last of his gods, Efficiency, 
 beginning to rock a little now upon its deep 
 foundations? 
 
 Outwardly the strike fails, under the combined 
 conspiracy of capital, the press, and the govern 
 ment; but to our hero it is no failure, rather it is 
 the mere skirmishing preparatory to the great 
 battle that is to alter the whole course of civiliza 
 tion. Nor is it a question of labour only, a tem 
 porary dispute over dollars and cents; it is the 
 fermentation of a new philosophy that is to sup-
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 241 
 
 plant all the old beliefs a philosophy of sheer 
 change, involving a perfect trust in the undi 
 rected will of the universe, whether manifesting 
 itself in the unreasoned instincts of mankind or in 
 the dumb forces of inanimate nature, to move 
 ever of its own accord on and on to better des 
 tinies. "I believe," says an English novelist to 
 our hero one day, putting into words what has 
 long been gathering in his mind "I believe the 
 age we live in is changing so much faster than any 
 age before it, that a man if he 's to be vital at all 
 must give up the idea of any fixed creed in his 
 office, his church, or his home that if he does 
 not he will only wear himself out butting his in 
 dignant head against what is stronger and prob 
 ably better than he. But if he does, if he holds 
 himself open to change and knows that change is 
 his very life, then he can get a serenity which is as 
 much better than that of the monk as living is 
 better than dying." Thus the idol of Efficiency, 
 whose devotees dreamed of a world managed 
 and made beautiful by the hands of science and 
 money, is shattered before his eyes, while in its 
 place rises the image of the People, as themselves, 
 moving by the blind centripetal force of sym 
 pathy and by obedience to their changing in 
 stincts, securely onward to happiness and peace. 
 As the publishers of his history proclaim, some 
 what grandiosely, he is brought to know "the 
 inner meaning of things."
 
 242 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 No one, we think, will read this book without 
 feeling that it is a faithful echo of the currents of 
 thought sweeping over a large portion of the 
 world. Mr. Poole has spoken the truth as the 
 majority of his contemporaries see it, but it is still 
 possible to ask whether he has spoken the whole 
 truth, even the truth as it is. What if there is a 
 terrible omission in our perception of the facts of 
 life as he gives it back to us in this allegory? What 
 if the fluctuation of our minds between the ideals 
 of scientific control and socialistic combination 
 should prove to be a sign that we have lost the 
 clear steady conception of anything really worth 
 while to be gained by controlling or combining? 
 Is there no conceivable excellence of the soul 
 itself but efficiency on the one side, with the con 
 fidence in progress wrung from the increasing 
 mastery of material forces, or, on the other side, 
 sympathy with the instinctive thrust of masses of 
 men pressing for their close-seen advantage? Or, 
 even granting the possibility, unrecognized by 
 Mr. Poole, of reconciling the control from above 
 of scientific knowledge with the clamour from 
 below of immediate wants, where is the promise 
 of happiness in such a world unless something 
 else is added? 
 
 This is just what strikes us in the philosophy 
 of Mr. Poole's book, what indeed sends us with 
 a feeling of contraction and depression from al 
 most all the sociological books we read, whether
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 243 
 
 they take the form of fiction or "science" 
 this naive ignorance of individual life as a thing 
 possibly valuable in itself and worthy of cultiva 
 tion. The complete lack of any such idea is 
 apparently unconscious, but the effect is felt. 
 Through all the clamour for life, pure life, liber 
 ated from the mouldy grip of antiquity, if you 
 listen attentively you will hear the troubled, be 
 wildered voice of men who, like gearless ships, 
 are desperately signalling for aid. You need not 
 be deceived; this joy which is promised to men if 
 they will abandon their allegiance to any fixed 
 law, is a pure illusion. 
 
 Suppose we took the crude antithesis pre 
 sented to us. Is it true that he who throws him 
 self unreservedly open to the stream of change 
 will attain to a serenity which is as much better 
 than that of the monk, as living is better than 
 dying? History would scarcely admit it. I sus 
 pect that a Saint Bernard, in the seclusion of his 
 convent at Clairvaux after one of his expeditions 
 into the world, won from his absorbed contem 
 plation of a God who knows no shadow of turn 
 ing, a peace and a strength of which there is no 
 intimation in the fretful literature of change. It 
 was not the love of nature as we understand it 
 which caused him to say to his friends, in his 
 gracious manner of jesting, that his wisdom 
 came less from books than from meditation in 
 the woods and fields ; it was rather his conviction
 
 244 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 that power is gained in the silences of the soul. 
 And he was a powerful man. From his cell he 
 spoke words that shook the governments of the 
 world ; there has probably never been a man who 
 exercised more practical authority over his con 
 temporaries than this monk whose life was but 
 a dying. 
 
 But this criticism is only in the interest of his 
 toric truth, and has slight bearing on the prob 
 lems of the present. We certainly are not plead 
 ing now for the monkish ideal of life. The ques 
 tion comes closer to us when we apply the test to 
 those men who, to Joe Kramer and his like, are 
 the drones of our own civilization. Now, in con 
 sidering Mr. Poole's diatribe against the uni 
 versities, we ought to remember that, with his 
 narrowly and typically contemporaneous view, 
 he is looking at these institutions strictly as they 
 are at the moment. We must recollect the degree 
 to which the academic aim has been modified 
 under pressure from without, and how largely 
 instruction has become scientific and economic, 
 dominated by the future interest of the student 
 in material efficiency and social reform. The 
 keynote of education is given by that maleficent 
 phrase of ex-President Eliot : For power and serv 
 ice. One need only examine the statistics of 
 courses elected, or hear the talk and public dis 
 sertations of undergraduates, to learn how prev 
 alent is this ideal. At the same time the college
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 245 
 
 has retained a certain tincture of tradition, and 
 still professes, however meekly, to impart in 
 struction in the humanities. It has so far lagged 
 behind in the march of progress that it has 
 become neither unrepentantly an engineering 
 school, nor frankly an experimental station for 
 applied sociology, nor yet exclusively a combina 
 tion of these two. A certain amount of "drule" 
 is still thrust down the throat of recalcitrant 
 youth in the form of "cultural" and useless 
 learning. 
 
 Now what is the consequence of this indolent 
 compromise? The instructors for the most part 
 feel themselves to be lecturing, so to speak, in 
 vacua. "The faculty, as a whole," says Mr. 
 Poole's honest young collegian, "appeared to me 
 no less fatigued ; most of them lectured as though 
 getting tired, the others as though tired out." 
 Alas, these " poor dry devils" were not so much 
 tired as baffled. Those who were carrying large 
 classes through the acceptable courses in science 
 and sociology might be jaunty and, in the pres 
 ence of their less favoured colleagues, a trifle 
 supercilious; but most of them probably felt the 
 unreality of their work in the class-room, in com 
 parison with the vitality of similar interests in 
 the practical world. As for the others, those who 
 were clinging to the shreds of the humanities left 
 them, they no doubt talked with the desperation 
 of men beaten in the race, and, like as not, could
 
 246 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 give no articulate reason why they should not be 
 beaten. Too often, the college professor is a man 
 who has been deprived of the opportunity of 
 dulling consciousness in dem Strom der Welt, and 
 has gained in return no strong conviction of the 
 privilege of scholarship in itself and for its re 
 wards to the scholar himself. 
 
 A glance at the academic literature of the past 
 hundred years would show a remarkable change 
 in this respect. In the early part of the nine 
 teenth century an earnest man who gained a fel 
 lowship at Oxford or Cambridge was congratu 
 lated as if one of the prizes of life had fallen to 
 him. Now, take up any book of the present day, 
 and if it touches on the universities, it will prob 
 ably affect the mocking tone of The Harbour, or, 
 with more dignity, will smile away the scholar's 
 pretensions to serious consideration, in the man 
 ner of Hugh Walpole in The Prelude to Adventure. 
 The Englishman's gentle irony is really worthy 
 of quotation at some length : 
 
 There are those who adopt Cambridge as their abid 
 ing home, and it is for these that real life is impossible. 
 Beneath these gray walls as the years pass slowly the 
 illusions grow. Closer and closer creep the walls of ex 
 perience, softer and thicker are the garments worn to 
 keep out the cold, gentler and gentler are the specula 
 tions born of a good old Port and a knowledge of the 
 Greek language. About the High Tables voices softly 
 dispute the turning of a phrase, eyes mildly salute the 
 careful dishes of a wisely chosen cook, gentle patronage
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 247 
 
 is bestowed upon the wild ruffian of the outer world. 
 Many bells ring, many fires are burning, many lamps are 
 lit, many leaves of many books are turned busily, 
 busily hands are raising walls of self-defence; the world 
 at first regretted, then patronized, is now forgotten . . . 
 hush, he sleeps, his feet in slippers, his head upon the 
 softest cushion, his hand still covering the broad page 
 of his dictionary. . . . Nothing, not birth nor love, nor 
 death must disturb his repose. 
 
 That is the English university from the out 
 side, just as Mr. Poole gave an American college 
 from the outside, but the voice of the scholar 
 from within is not so very different. I was struck 
 the other day by a passage in the catalogue of 
 Blackwell, the Oxford book-seller, copied from 
 L. R. Farnell's obituary of the late Ingram By- 
 water. After drawing a portrait of the learned 
 Aristotelian as a "perfect example of the votary 
 of the life intellectual," a man of noble presence 
 and distinguished manners, fond of his peers and 
 capable of shining in such society, Mr. Farnell 
 concludes thus: "Such a life and such a type may 
 not be thought to be the highest; but if Acade 
 mies are still to continue and to flourish, we must 
 hope that such types will continue to be pro 
 duced and to be valued; and that life is to be 
 counted happy which pursues a spiritual ideal 
 and preserves it undimmed to the end." Hand 
 some words you will say. They are ; but why this 
 deprecatory comparison with a career in the 
 world? why this deference to opinion? It is.
 
 248 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 I fear, because the Oxford don, like the rest of us, 
 has grown a little doubtful of the value of life 
 itself as it may be developed in the privileged leis 
 ure of learning. We are half apologetic for the 
 man who, primarily for himself and secondarily 
 for others, esteems it a thing worth while to raise 
 his thoughts into communion with the great 
 minds of the past, and honours the labour of the 
 spirit so to purify itself that it may be at home in 
 the world of Ideas. Only those scholars are quite 
 free of this kind of distrust who, as practical 
 scientists or sociologists, turn the college into a 
 laboratory for the mill or the legislature. The 
 much decried vanity of the vita umbratilis is in 
 fact only one phase of the general doubt of any 
 positive value in life, with the added disadvan 
 tage that he who lives in the shadow of intellec 
 tual studies is deprived of the narcotic of un- 
 reflective action. If the emptiness is clearer to the 
 college man than to his brother in the world, it 
 is because, after all, he still has some opportunity 
 for reflection, and retains a vestige of the habit 
 of self-examination. 
 
 Without subscribing to the Nietzschean reme 
 dies, one may point to the accuracy with which 
 Nietzsche has touched the two sources underly 
 ing this state of "nihilism," as he names it. "A 
 'scientific' interpretation of the world as you 
 understand it," he says, "might consequently 
 still be one of the stupidest, that is to say, the
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 249 
 
 most destitute of significance, of all possible 
 world interpretations. . . . An essentially mechan 
 ical world would be an essentially meaningless 
 world." The corollary to this saying is headed, 
 The Moral Fashion of a Commercial Community, 
 and runs thus: 
 
 Behind the principle of the present moral fashion 
 " Moral actions are actions performed out of sympathy 
 for others" I see the social instinct of fear, which thus 
 
 assumes an intellectual disguise. How little joy must 
 
 men now have in themselves when such a tyranny of fear 
 prescribes their supreme moral law. 
 
 These are the two bases of the critical phase 
 which is also the sound phase of Nietzsche's 
 philosophy, and no one, I think, will fail to be 
 struck by their correspondence with the two 
 aspects of life as presented in The Harbour. As 
 we contemplate the world converted into a huge 
 machine and managed by engineers, we gradually 
 grow aware of its lack of meaning, of its empti 
 ness of human value; the soul is stifled in this 
 glorification of mechanical efficiency. And then 
 we begin to feel the weakness of such a creed 
 when confronted by the real problems of life; we 
 discover its inability to impose any restraint on 
 the passions of men, or to supply any government 
 which can appeal to the loyalty of the spirit. And 
 seeing these things we understand the fear that is 
 gnawing at the vitals of society. If you do not at 
 first see how this social instinct of fear may enter
 
 250 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 into the scientific interpretation of the world, 
 consider Mr. Poole's parting retort upon the 
 governments which for the time suppressed his 
 revolutionary friends: 
 
 Your civilization is crashing down. For a hundred 
 years, in all our strikes and risings, you preached against 
 our violence you talked of your law and order, your 
 clear deliberate thinking. In you lay the hope of the 
 world, you said. You were Civilization. You were 
 Mind and Science, in you was all Efficiency, in you was 
 Art, Religion; and you kept the Public Peace. But now 
 you have broken all your vows. The world's treasures of 
 Art are as safe with you as they were in the Dark Ages. 
 Your Prince of Peace you have trampled down. And all 
 your Science you have turned to the efficient slaughter 
 of men. In a week of your boasted calmness you have 
 plunged the world into a violence beside which all the 
 bloodshed in our strikes and revolutions seems like a 
 pool beside the sea. And so you have failed, you powers 
 above, blindly and stupidly you have failed. For you 
 have let loose a violence where you are weak and we 
 are strong. We are these armies that you have called 
 out 
 
 There you have it. You cannot escape it. 
 Germany has been the most scientifically efficient 
 country of the world; it has approached most 
 nearly to the ideal of the Harbour as this was 
 seen in the dreams of a Dillon ; and Germany has 
 not only been unable to prevent the catastrophe 
 of the most hideous war in history, but has been 
 the prime cause of that war. Scientific evolution 
 without a corresponding moral evolution, scien-
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 251 
 
 tific evolution absorbing the thoughts of men to 
 the exclusion of other considerations, has not 
 brought greater control of the savage passions of 
 men, but has simply created more efficient instru 
 ments for the use of those passions. We pretend, 
 of course, to be shocked by this uprush of bar 
 barism through our civilization, but in reality we 
 are not much surprised. Deep down in our con 
 sciousness all the while we have known the fear 
 of this amid all our boasted optimism. Fear 
 there has been, and is, a great fear at the heart 
 of the world. Among the proletariat it is the fear, 
 not wholly unjustified, of being exploited as mere 
 inhuman cogs in a machine ; for what, they have 
 asked themselves, has scientific evolution to do 
 with the heart and spirit or with human hopes 
 and joys and regrets? And so the proletariat has 
 banded itself together as a fighting army against 
 its exploiters. Mr. Poole exalts this uniting bond 
 as sympathy, but it is sympathy which derives its 
 holding power from a community of fear and 
 hatred, and is therefore purely destructive in its 
 nature. It may ruin society; it can build up noth 
 ing. On the other side, among the intelligent and 
 successful, this fear has taken the form of hu 
 manitarian repentance; it has reared a moral 
 ity of sympathy and sops in place of obligation 
 and command. Humanitarianism, as Nietzsche 
 showed, is merely an intellectual disguise for the 
 social instinct of fear; the attempt to keep men
 
 252 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 in subordination by kind words. There is no 
 doubt of the fact. This instinctive fear has been 
 troubling the organizers and masters of society 
 for many years. They have betrayed its presence 
 by their charities, by their hatreds, their absti 
 nences, their restless pursuit of amusement. 
 Beneath their bravado they have had an uneasy 
 consciousness that not all was well with their 
 programme of scientific efficiency, and that some 
 day the whole complicated fabric might come 
 toppling down about their ears ; and now the hide 
 ous confusion of war has risen like a spectre to 
 leave them with no defence against the question 
 ing of a society to which they had made them 
 selves responsible. 1 
 
 Those who regard the present war as essen 
 tially social in its character are right. It is, at 
 bottom, not so much a conflict of governments as 
 the outburst of passions which have long been 
 seething in the breast of mankind, the outburst 
 of fear most of all, the fear of man for man. And 
 that fear we shall not eliminate by more scientific 
 efficiency ; we shall not eliminate it by any means, 
 but we may possibly change its direction and its 
 object. 
 
 Fear, I suspect, has always been a stronger 
 motive in human conduct than we like to admit, 
 
 1 Mr. Poole's book was published and this essay was 
 written during the war. It has not seemed worth while to 
 change the tenses of my verbs.
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 253 
 
 however the world at large may seem to pursue 
 its even and stolid course. We live by allowance, 
 so to speak, and have no security in our tenure. 
 Everywhere about us are unseen forces which, at 
 a moment and without warning, may leap upon 
 us out of the darkness. A little chance, and our 
 means of support may be rent away from us ; an 
 infinitesimal organism floating in the air we 
 breathe may suddenly turn our vital powers into 
 torment; at the best we are but debtors to the 
 grave. For two thousand years each generation of 
 mankind has been repeating to itself the Virgilian 
 felicitation of the rare man who has put under 
 his feet all the fears of life and inexorable fate. 
 
 Among the Greeks and Romans this lubricity 
 of fortune was symbolized in the so-called envy 
 of the gods; with the Christians it was trans 
 formed into the jealousy of the Lord. But it 
 corresponded with the same feeling in either 
 case, the haunting suspicion that there is some 
 where a Power jealous of man's autonomy, and 
 certain, though by methods often strangely in 
 comprehensible, to take vengeance upon arro 
 gant self-assertion or overweening confidence in 
 the favour of fortune. Man cannot imagine him 
 self in a world of immoral chance or unmeaning 
 change ; if he reflects at all he is driven to trans 
 late the devious work of fate into a law of retribu 
 tive justice. The spectre is of a Power that can 
 not be escaped. Man has fled
 
 254 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 
 
 From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. 
 But with unhurrying chase, 
 And unperturbed pace, 
 Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
 They beat and a Voice beat 
 More instant than the Feet 
 "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 
 
 Is not our position to-day something like that? 
 The wrath of a celestial Judge we may have rea 
 soned or laughed away, but it does not follow 
 that we have argued ourselves out of the ancient 
 dread; we have merely brought down fear from 
 heaven to earth, giving to sociology what we 
 have taken from religion. Having made the 
 People our judge, we have attempted to appease 
 our deity by a service of sympathy, only to dis 
 cover that we have put into its hands an instru 
 ment of revenge. Sympathy has been grasped by 
 the People as a law of combination for them 
 selves and in defiance of their rulers. The result 
 is not harmony, but a division of society such as 
 we see it portrayed in The Harbour. 
 
 And so, if fear is an inevitable factor of human 
 conduct, it is reasonable to ask whether the old 
 religious dread may not be a sounder starting- 
 point than social sympathy, whether there may 
 not be some truth in the discarded saying that 
 the beginning of wisdom is to fear God and keep 
 his commandments; or, at least, whether we
 
 ECONOMIC IDEALS 255 
 
 should not be advised to acknowledge once more 
 the existence of a Nemesis, or power that makes 
 for righteousness, or whatever we may choose to 
 call the law that speaks to the heart of a man and 
 holds him individually responsible for his acts. 
 Possibly, if we had listened less to the voice of 
 society, and more to the voice of duty command 
 ing us to make ourselves right with our own 
 higher nature, we might be walking in safer paths 
 than those into which the social instinct of fear 
 has led us. Possibly, if we thought less, or made 
 less pretence to think, of the material prosperity 
 of our neighbour and more of the health of our 
 own souls, we might ourselves be a little less lia 
 ble to the temptations of material success at any 
 price. Our scientific efficiency might be directed 
 for the real welfare of society, and we might be in 
 better place to demand the orderly conduct and 
 allegiance of others. 
 
 All this is not meant as a plea for inefficiency 
 or for idle revery; nor is it a call to shirk the 
 pressing problems of organization and labour. 
 There is a truth of human nature as there is a 
 science of material forces, and the better effi 
 ciency is that of a soul which has first come to 
 terms with itself. Even he who, to those ab 
 sorbed in business, seems to have withdrawn into 
 the contemplation of ideas as into a harbour of 
 refuge, may have found a certain value in life 
 itself which it were good for the world to under-
 
 256 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 stand. But at least, whether for the scholar or 
 for the man of affairs, it looks as if, first of all, we 
 needed somehow or other to get the fear of God 
 back into society.
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARD has the unenviable por 
 tion of a reformer who wrought manfully 
 should we say womanfully? to lead England 
 out of the Cimmerian bogs of Victorianism, yet 
 somehow is heartily despised by the younger 
 generation which walks the sunlit ways of our 
 peaceful, spacious Georgian world. It would be 
 an instructive pastime, with her autobiography 
 in hand, to study the causes of this cruel injus 
 tice ; but that is another story. My present inter 
 est in her autobiography * has been centred not 
 so much on her own career as on her account of 
 life in Oxford during the sixties and seventies. 
 The four chapters in which she collects her remi 
 niscences of these years are quite the most enter 
 taining of the record ; are, in fact, the only part 
 that offers much entertainment of any sort ; and 
 if this were my theme, I might suggest that it was 
 the spell of Oxford, however reformed an Oxford, 
 still haunting her mind that makes her so unac 
 ceptable to the very much otherwise reformed 
 young wits now gasping their discontent in Lon 
 don. Her first novel, Miss Bretherton, was a tale 
 
 1 A Writer's Recollections. By Mrs. Humphry Ward. 
 New York: Harper & Brothers. 1918. This essay, it 
 need scarcely be noted, was written while Mrs. Ward was 
 living.
 
 260 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 of the university, and Lady Connie, her latest 
 novel written before her autobiography, returns 
 to the same scenes ; and these, with the chapters 
 of her Recollections, might give the lie to Andrew 
 Lang's pleasant witticism that there are no good 
 books about Oxford because they are all com 
 posed by women who have spent one day in 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Jowett and Mark Pattison are her heroes, the 
 Master of Balliol in his triumphant days of edu 
 cational supremacy, and the Rector of Lincoln 
 socially tamed by the restless, keen, very aestheti- 
 cal "Mrs. Pat.," yet otherwise savage enough 
 with his gibes at the unteutonized scholarship of 
 Balliol and the persistent priestcraft of Christ 
 Church. But other figures, denizens and visitors, 
 flit through her pages Swinburne, Renan, 
 George Eliot, Mandell Creighton, Taine, Green 
 each the subject of an anecdote or the occa 
 sion for moralizing. Perhaps the most memora 
 ble of these stories is that which reports a con 
 versation with Walter Pater in the days when 
 the critic had yielded something of his earlier 
 paganism and was lapsing into a kind of artistic 
 dalliance with the charms of Christianity. Mrs. 
 Ward had been proclaiming the near downfall 
 of orthodoxy and the impossibility of its main 
 taining itself long against the attacks from the 
 historical and literary camps. To her surprise, 
 Pater shook his head and looked rather troubled.
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 261 
 
 '"I don't think so,' he said. Then with hesita 
 tion: 'And we don't altogether agree. You think 
 it's all plain. But I can't. There are such mys 
 terious things. Take that saying, "Come unto 
 me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden." 
 How can you explain that? There is a mystery 
 in it a something supernatural.' " 
 
 It was the spirit of the place that would not be 
 exorcised from Pater's thought, and it is curious 
 to observe how this same shadow from the past 
 lay over Mrs. Ward's mind, despite her absorp 
 tion in modern tendencies and her expressed sur 
 prise. She was thinking more of her own young 
 life than of her heroine's when she wrote, in Lady 
 Connie, that "in those days Oxford was still 
 praising ' famous men and the fathers who begat ' 
 her; their shades still walked her streets." Only 
 Mrs. Ward was rebellious under the spell, while 
 Pater was gently acquiescent. Again she is 
 speaking for herself through the mouth of her 
 heroine: "We who are alive must always fight 
 the past, though we owe it all we have. Oxford 
 has been to me often a witch a dangerous 
 almost an evil witch. I seemed to see her be 
 numbing the young forces of the present. And 
 the scientific and practical men, who would like 
 to scrap her, have sometimes seemed to me 
 right." It is, in fact, just this mingling of the 
 past and the present in her mood that piques our 
 interest; and involuntarily, as we see her picture
 
 262 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 of Oxford under Jowett and Pattison, another 
 picture arises of the city as it was a generation 
 earlier under Newman and Pusey, and her anec 
 dotes of contemporaries recall a host of stories of 
 the men who preceded or were lingering on as 
 ghosts of themselves. It is all so much the same, 
 yet so different. What change has come over the 
 place so reluctant to change? 
 
 If it were my vein to attempt the smart style 
 now in fashion, I should think it enough to de 
 scribe the change as consisting in the banishment 
 of God and the admission of woman. At any 
 rate, whatever else was happening in Mrs. Ward's 
 time, the gods were going and women were com 
 ing; and of one, at least, of these events she is 
 fully aware, and might even boast that she was 
 pars magna. In her maiden days, she says, Ox 
 ford was a city of young men, "it was not also a 
 city of young women, as it is to-day." But they 
 were already creeping in, and before she left had 
 conquered the right of domicile, much after the 
 manner of the fabled camel ; in fact the encroach 
 ment of the feminine into a society so archaically 
 masculine is the real theme of her university 
 novels, and her Recollections show how much her 
 own activities as writer and talker helped on the 
 invasion. But it was not only the presence of the 
 undergraduate in petticoats that marked the 
 revolution; wives, too, were multiplying, and 
 with them came a great alteration in the habits
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 263 
 
 of the faculty. In the generation preceding none 
 of the tutors were married and very few of the 
 professors; Oxford was still under the old con 
 ventual rule, though, with the disappearance of 
 the religious ideal and purpose of celibacy, the 
 peculiarly monkish traits of character had van 
 ished and left behind only the bare "character," 
 as that word used to be understood. This indeed 
 is the chief impression one gets from the memoirs 
 of the age. There was purpose enough in the 
 lives of Newman and his group, but all about 
 them was a society of happy egotists whom isola 
 tion from the shaping contacts with the world 
 had allowed to develop each as whim or passion 
 guided him. Even the throngs of boys, who were 
 so conspicuous to Mrs. Ward at her first coming, 
 seem somehow to have been pushed into the 
 background of the picture by these crusty bach 
 elors. Of a certain "Mo." Griffith, Senior Fellow 
 of Merton, who used to fly from Oxford in term- 
 time to avoid the Philistines, as he called the 
 undergraduates, the story is told that once in 
 vacation, when dining alone in Hall, he was con 
 fronted with the sight of a single scholar who had 
 not gone down. "Fetch a screen, Manciple!" he 
 cried. It is the Fellows' side of the screen we see 
 in the annals of that age. 
 
 And one can imagine what went on there on 
 this occasion, if our Don was faithful to his creed. 
 It is related that a physician, having dined with
 
 264 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 him and eaten too sparingly, excused his absti 
 nence by pleading the maxim, "Eat and leave off 
 hungry." Mo. threw up his hands: "Eat and 
 leave off hungry! Why not wash and leave off 
 dirty?" No doubt, too, he would have been 
 ready, with most of his contemporaries, to ex 
 claim in the same manner over the command to 
 drink and leave off thirsty sober their fore 
 fathers would have said. For, if the Logic of 
 Dean Aldrich of Christ Church was still after a 
 century and a half the textbook of Oxford, it is to 
 be feared that some of the logicians of the day 
 had not forgotten the Dean's practical example 
 of the art of ratiocination : 
 
 Si bene quid memini, sunt causae quinque bibendi: 
 Hospitis adventus, praesens sitis atque futura, 
 Aut vini bonitas, aut quaelibet altera causa 
 
 which may be translated for a less genial and less 
 erudite generation : 
 
 If I remember well, these be the sum 
 Fivefold of drink's occasions and its laws: 
 A guest arrived, thirst present or to come, 
 Virtue of wine, or any other cause. 1 
 
 The same Moses (or Edward as he chose to call 
 himself) Griffith was one day walking round 
 
 1 The old, freer translation is well known: 
 
 If on my theme I rightly think. 
 There are five reasons why men drink: 
 Good wine, a friend, because I'm dry. 
 Or lest I should be by and by, 
 Or any other reason why.
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 265 
 
 Christ Church Meadow with a brother Fellow 
 named Frowd, who began, as laudator temporis 
 acti, to lament the disappearance from Oxford 
 of the strange originals of their younger days. 
 "Does it not occur to you, Dr. Frowd," was the 
 reply, "that you and I are the 'characters' of to 
 day?" I ask my reader: Does our world, of 
 which we sometimes boast, possess such nai've 
 sublimity of assurance? But Mo. and his friend 
 flattered themselves, if they thought their origi 
 nality outlawed and peculiar at that date. As I 
 stand in the corner of my library in which the 
 Oxford memoirs of the day are gathered, and as I 
 turn over the pages of book after book looking 
 for examples, I am embarrassed by the need of 
 selection among so many doughty heroes and so 
 many combats of wit. Like /Eneas, I see 
 
 Battles through all the world made known to fame. 
 
 The easiest way out of the difficulty, were it 
 permissible, would be to copy off a chapter of the 
 Reverend W. Tuckwell's Reminiscences, and per 
 haps the best of permissible ways is to direct any 
 reader not already acquainted therewith to that 
 storehouse of entertainment. If there is any 
 more exhilarating book of the sort in English, I 
 do not know it; and if there is a more captivat 
 ing group of oddities than the scholars who con 
 gregated by the Isis before the advent of Mrs. 
 Ward's petticoats, and who live again in Mr.
 
 266 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 Tuckwell's memory, I have not met them in my 
 literary pilgrimage. Whatever Oxford may not 
 have been, it was vastly amusing. If our friend 
 Mo. left the impression of a rather gluttonous 
 and bibulous curmudgeon, it is not to be inferred 
 that the story of that society is a mere "gastrol- 
 ogy," like the work of the ancient Epicurean 
 who, as Athenaeus says, "made a voyage round 
 the inhabited earth for his belly's sake" (I omi't 
 the rest of the quotation), and wrote up his ad 
 ventures in epic form. No, these Dons were true 
 deipnosophists, dinner-philosophers, whose talk 
 was as much wittier than their successors' as 
 their appetites were more capacious. Mr. Tuck- 
 well draws the comparison neatly: 
 
 The Common Rooms to-day, as I am informed, are 
 swamped by shop; while general society, infinitely ex 
 tended by the abolition of College celibacy, is corre 
 spondingly diluted. Tutors and Professors are choked 
 with distinctions and redundant with educational activ 
 ity ; they lecture, they write, they edit, they investigate, 
 they athleticise, they are scientific or theological or his 
 torical or linguistic; they fulfil presumably some wise 
 end or ends. But one accomplishment of their fore 
 fathers has perished from among them they no longer 
 talk: the Ciceronian ideal of conversation, <rirovalov 
 ouSev, <tAoAoya multa, " Not a word on shop, much on 
 literature, " has perished from among them. In the 
 Thirties, conversation was a fine art, a claim to social 
 distinction: choice sprouts of the brain, epigram, anec 
 dote, metaphor, now nursed carefully for the printer, 
 were joyously lavished on one another by the men and
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 267 
 
 women of those bibulous, pleasant days, who equipped 
 themselves at leisure for the wit combats each late 
 supper-party provoked. 
 
 That is well put, and is in the main true ; but I 
 should like to discourse on one of Mr. Tuck- 
 well's points his unreserved condemnation of 
 "shop," which he connects with rather an unfair 
 translation of Cicero's Greek. The comparative 
 dulness of conversation in the modern Hall, or in 
 the American equivalent, is not to be laid to the 
 intrusion of shop, but to the wrong kind of shop. 
 The minute specializing of studies has brought 
 about such a division of interests among scholars 
 that you will scarcely find any body of men, 
 nominally united, who have less in common in 
 tellectually than the faculty of a university. 
 Only the other day I heard a biologist girding at 
 a teacher of Greek for his concern with a remote 
 and outworn civilization. It was easy for the 
 Grecian to retort that after all the polity of the 
 coral insect represented a stage of evolution im 
 mensely more antique than the constitution of 
 Athens two thousand years ago, and that the art 
 of Sophocles and the philosophy of Aristotle were 
 closer to the business and bosoms of mankind 
 than the skeleton deposits of the Anthozoan 
 polyp. (Which last heavy-loaded phrase, how 
 ever, I got from the encyclopaedia, not from the 
 professor's lips.) The retort was effective, but it 
 did not bring the two gentlemen closer together.
 
 268 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 And so, in the absence of any intellectual meet 
 ing-ground, except that of mere transient curios 
 ity, college men are driven to the interchange of 
 personalities and the discussion of departmental 
 wire-pulling, from which their only escape is the 
 political news of the morning paper. Their shop 
 is no better, for conversational purposes, than a 
 department store. But it was not so when schol 
 ars were interested in the same group of subjects, 
 with, of course, a human variety of views. Even 
 the personal gossip of such a society took colour 
 from their more serious pursuits; even malice 
 and backbiting spoke the dialect of the Muses, 
 as any one may discover for himself if he will 
 read the memoirs of the day. Mr. Tuckwell, for 
 instance, has a good deal to say of a certain 
 "Horse" Kett, of Trinity, as he was called by 
 reason of a long face dominated by a straight 
 bony nose an estimable gentleman withal, 
 and not without critical acumen of a sort that 
 won the respect of De Quincey. But his aca 
 demic renown was owing to that equine counte 
 nance and to its power of "inspiring from the 
 seniors jokes in every learned language, and prac 
 tical impertinences from the less erudite young 
 sters." This Kett put out a rival to Aldrich's 
 book, which he entitled Logic Made Easy. It was 
 a feeble and blundering thing, but provocative of 
 high mirth, when Copleston of Oriel reviewed it 
 in a scathing pamphlet, with the motto
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 269 
 
 \ AHqtris latet error; Equo ne credite, Teucri! p 
 
 Mr. Tuckwell would have come closer to the 
 mark if, instead of contrasting shop and litera 
 ture, he had said that the two were then one 
 thing. We sometimes speak slightingly of the 
 erudition of those cloistered Dons, and use their 
 idleness to point a moral or adorn ourselves; yet 
 as a matter of fact many of them were prodi 
 giously learned only with a difference. What 
 they knew, they knew. Perhaps the long-forgot 
 ten name of James Endell Tyler may be recalled 
 as a type. "He was not a reformer of Churches 
 and creeds," we read of him in Mozley's Remi 
 niscences, "but he was an able and effective lec 
 turer. He was no genius, it used to be said of 
 him, but he could construe Thucydides ' through 
 a deal board.' " No doubt their reading was cir 
 cumscribed, but that very circumscription had 
 its advantages, in so far as it made learning a 
 bond of sympathy rather than a dyke of separa 
 tion. 1 The great masters of human experience 
 
 1 One may find an amusing illustration in Mark Patti- 
 son's Memoirs of the common confusion of mind on this 
 matter of scholarship. On page 237 he says: "Probably 
 there was no period of our history during which, I do not 
 say science and learning, but the ordinary study of the 
 classics was so profitless or at so low an ebb as during the 
 period of the Tractarian controversy. By the secession of 
 1845 this was extinguished in a moment, and from that 
 moment dates the regeneration of the University." This is 
 the voice of the anti-theologian. Hear now the words of the
 
 270 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 were in their blood; they knew them by heart; 
 thought as they thought; spoke their language, 
 with perfect assurance that the most recondite 
 play of wit or wisdom would be caught up im 
 mediately and answered in kind. Some of them 
 may have quoted with the awful profusion of a 
 Person, who, as Byron declared, "used to recite, 
 or rather vomit, pages of all languages, and could 
 hiccup Greek like a Helot"; but Person was a 
 Cantabrigian, and a beast; and all good things 
 may be abused even temperance. And to the 
 drunkenness of Porson we owe, it must be 
 granted, the profoundest utterance of pessimism 
 that has ever fallen from mortal lips. He was in 
 his customary state one night. Wishing to blow 
 out his candle, and seeing, as is said to be the 
 way of the inebriated, two flames side by side 
 where there was only one, he three times directed 
 his swaying steps to the wrong image, and three 
 times blew, with no effect, for the non-existent 
 cannot be extinguished. Whereupon he drew 
 
 educator on what is really one aspect of the extinction of 
 the hated movement (p. 240): "The sudden withdrawal of 
 all reverence for the past has generated a type of intellect 
 which is not only offensive to taste but is unsound as train 
 ing. The young Oxford, which our present system tends to 
 turn out, is a mental form which cannot be regarded with 
 complacency by any one who judges an education, not by 
 its programme, but by its eleves. Our young men are not 
 trained; they are only filled with propositions, of which they 
 have never learned the inductive basis." Might not this 
 second passage have come straight from Newman's Idea of 
 a University?
 
 271 
 
 back, balanced himself, and gave verdict: 
 "Damn the nature of things!" l 
 
 It may be objected that all this erudition was 
 sterile; it produced few books, and some of these 
 were bad. The charge is fair, but there are allevi 
 ations. The barrenness is attributable in part to 
 the kind of scholarship in vogue; it was not the 
 business of these men to decipher manuscripts 
 and investigate sources, and when they did turn 
 to such work they were capable of making a mess 
 of it. But if they had been better editors, does it 
 follow necessarily that they would have been 
 more interesting men? And there was another 
 cause, a tradition that still lingers at Oxford 
 through all the changes of the past fifty years. 
 I remember not long ago talking with an Oxo 
 nian, of all places in a New York elevated train, 
 about these matters. Somehow we had got to the 
 question of the best model for the writing of 
 Greek prose, and he appealed to the opinion of 
 one of his teachers in favour of the simpler narra 
 tive style of Thucydides. I had never heard the 
 scholar's name nor do I now recall it and 
 inquired about him. "Why," said my friend, 
 "he is probably the most learned man in Oxford, 
 
 1 So the story was once told me on a memorable occasion 
 by a friend, now one of the editors of the Weekly Review, 
 and so I repeat it. But my genial authority is only a mathe 
 matician after all; for another and I fear truer version the 
 reader must be referred to the Porsoniana at the end of the 
 Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers.
 
 272 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 so nearly omniscient that his colleagues live in 
 constant terror of his criticism." I still expressed 
 my surprise that a pundit of such renown should 
 be unknown to me. "That is not strange," was 
 the reply, "for he has never published anything." 
 My surprise was increased, and I asked the rea 
 sons. "Well, you know," said my friend, who to 
 his other charms adds a slight impediment of 
 speech, "it is n't quite g-good form in Oxford to 
 p-print." A foolish tradition, I dare say; yet I 
 challenge any one familiar with the growing cus 
 tom among us to appraise a man's academic 
 standing by the quantity of his output often 
 enough in the form of petty source-hunting I 
 challenge him to deny that such a tradition has 
 its good side. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that the scholarship of 
 Oxford passed without comment at the time. 
 Critics were ready then as now, though with less 
 immediate effect, to denounce the narrow exclu 
 sive spirit of the place; and one series of criti 
 cisms in particular, appearing in the Edinburgh 
 Review, drew out apologies from Copleston, pub 
 lished in 1810 and u, which contain paragraphs 
 still readable to-day with profit and interest. To 
 the reviewer's charge that classical studies are 
 frivolous because they do not tend directly to 
 what is called practical good, Copleston replies 
 finely with a plea for "cultivation of mind which 
 is itself a good, a good of the highest order, with-
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 273 
 
 out any immediate reference to bodily appetites 
 or wants of any kind," and then appeals to what 
 the Oxford tradition had done for the formation 
 of character, and specially for character under 
 the testing strain of war. " If classical education 
 be regarded in this light," he says, "there is none 
 in which it will be found more faultless. A high 
 sense of honour, a disdain of death in a good 
 cause, a passionate devotion to the welfare of 
 one's country, a love of enterprise, and a love of 
 glory, are among the first sentiments which those 
 studies communicate to the mind. And as their 
 efficacy is undoubted in correcting the narrow 
 habits and prejudices to which the separation of 
 the professions gives birth, so in the rough school 
 of war is it more especially exemplified in mitigat 
 ing the' tone of that severe instructor and in soft 
 ening some of his harshest features." Can any 
 one read the letters of Arthur Heath and of other 
 Oxonians who went out the other day into the 
 battle line and did not return, without feeling 
 that even the remnant of the old tradition has 
 not lost the power claimed for it by the Provost 
 of Oriel? 
 
 God rest you, happy gentlemen, 
 Who laid your good lives down, 
 
 Who took the khaki and the gun 
 Instead of cap and gown. 
 
 God bring you to a fairer place 
 Than even Oxford town.
 
 274 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 I wish there were space to quote the striking 
 words of Copleston on the mischief, even then 
 threatening, of the undue predominance of Po 
 litical Economy in education and among "the 
 clamorous sciolists of the day"; what was once 
 prophecy is now fact; but this is not my present 
 theme. It is more to the point to show how the 
 old tradition, with all its exclusions, perhaps on 
 account of them, caught the abler youths of the 
 day and they are the only ones who count 
 in its spell and stimulated their ambition. Pu- 
 sey's mother, who as an old woman loved to talk 
 of her famous son, used to tell how he had asked 
 his father for a complete set of the Fathers as his 
 reward for gaining a First Class; "and how in the 
 Long Vacation he used to carry his folios to a 
 shady corner in the garden which she pointed 
 out, and sit there reading with a tub of cold water 
 close at hand, into which he plunged his curly 
 head whenever study made it ache." Quite as 
 significant is the account of the excitement 
 roused by the success of Jowett, Pusey's lifelong 
 rival, when he won a Balliol Fellowship in 1839. 
 In the candidate's home there is an outburst of 
 joy as great as if he had been appointed Lord 
 Chancellor, and in the university, as one of his 
 friends writes, "nothing has been talked about 
 here so much for a long time. . . . ' Little Jowett ' 
 was nearly pulled to pieces." Frankly, do we 
 think so highly of getting a fellowship to-day?
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 275 
 
 Is the business of education quite so serious an 
 affair or so enthralling? 
 
 Part of that ancient enthusiasm may be ex 
 plained by the fact that success in the schools was 
 an open door to the great prizes of State and 
 Church ; it was still true that knowledge of Greek 
 seemed a proper claim to a bishopric. (I heard 
 one of our bishops the other day derive "disci 
 ple" from the Greek didasko, "to teach"!) And 
 this truth a Winchester lad of the day expressed 
 with delightful na'ivet6 in the closing lines of an 
 Address to Learning: 
 
 Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen, 
 A Bishop, or at least a Dean. 
 
 What prize, if any, his school bestowed on the 
 poet I do not know, but he ended his well- 
 planned career as Warden of New College and 
 Bishop of Chichester. Nor was it the young 
 visionary alone who beheld Learning as the pa 
 tron of success. In one of his Christmas sermons 
 the redoubtable Gaisford (to whom as an under 
 graduate his Dean had observed, "You will 
 never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with 
 certainty as a scholar" and become yourself a 
 Dean, he might have added) stated the same 
 truth with prosaic candour: "Nor can I do bet 
 ter, in conclusion, than impress upon you the 
 study of Greek literature, which not only ele 
 vates above the vulgar herd, but leads not in-
 
 276 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 frequently to positions of considerable emolu 
 ment." 
 
 It sounds a little queer and mercenary, put 
 that way, though we can wish that the emolu 
 ments of scholarship were rather more considera 
 ble to-day; but there is another version of Gais- 
 ford's words I do not know which of the two 
 is verbatim correct which sets the matter in a 
 different light. According to this report his ex 
 hortation to the study of Greek was on the 
 ground that it would enable a man "not only to 
 read the oracles of God in the original, but also to 
 look down with contempt upon the vulgar herd." 
 And on the whole this second version is the fairer 
 representation of the spirit of the age. Lawn 
 sleeves may have been a pleasant, and quite 
 legitimate, incentive to the young student poring 
 on his Aristotle and Origen, but I think he went 
 to those great philosophers and theologians seek 
 ing first the oracles of God. I have said much of 
 the more eccentric, even the coarser, habits of 
 these cloistered scholars. We must take the good 
 with the bad, and I fear that the old charge made 
 in the time of Charles II might still be repeated 
 of a certain Oxford set: "At a dingy, horrid, 
 scandalous ale-house over against the college, 
 Balliol men by perpetual 'bubbeing' added art 
 to their natural stupidity to make themselves 
 perfect sots." Yet there was another side even to 
 the indulgence in Port.
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 277 
 
 " Narratur et prisci Catonis 
 
 Ssepe mero caluisse virtus, 
 
 with all its faults there is something generous 
 about it, and if the Latin proverb says right, it is 
 at least no enemy to truth," was the reply of 
 Copleston to the Edinburgh reviewer who had 
 scourged the university for its guzzling. Though 
 a sprinkling of "bubbeing" sots was to be reck 
 oned with, nevertheless the real mark of this so 
 ciety was its conviction that it held a place set 
 apart amid a world of indifference, as guardian 
 of the truth ; it still believed that scholarship was 
 primarily concerned with the oracles of God. If 
 we look below the surface, we shall find the very 
 zest of those quaint characters that move through 
 the memoirs of the day in their extraordinary 
 mingling "of personal eccentricity with religious 
 regularity. Nor must we forget that the Oxford 
 of Mo. Griffith and his brother oddity was also 
 the home of Newman and Keble and Pusey, in 
 whom, however we may be disposed towards 
 thei-r particular dogmas, we must acknowledge 
 that the zeal of God burned with a steady, al 
 most a devouring, flame. 
 
 But perhaps the best type of the Oxford I have 
 in mind is not one of those eagles of the faith, but 
 their servant and drudge in the intellectual bat 
 tle, if I may so designate Charles Marriott with 
 out injustice to his noble simplicity. Eccentric he 
 was, almost beyond credence. In the street his
 
 278 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 strange figure could be recognized afar by its in 
 volved mufflings of cloak and wrapper and veil. 
 Indoors he wore a black silk skull-cap, which, 
 from his habit of slumbering in public places, 
 might often be seen nodding, with the drollest 
 effect yet somehow he contrived to hear more 
 in his sleep, and remember better, than other 
 men who listened with head erect. His somno 
 lence, apparently, was only a deeper lapse in his 
 normal state of absent-mindedness. If accosted 
 suddenly in the street he would start and stare at 
 you for a moment in utter silence, as though he 
 had been walking awake in some other world, as 
 no doubt he had been. And like the man were his 
 rooms. In a biographical sketch, aptly entitled 
 The Man of Saintly Life, Dean Burgon gives a 
 vivid account of one of Marriott's breakfasts, to 
 which, as usual, the careless host had invited 
 guest after guest at random with no thought of 
 their number. What happened may be told in 
 Burgon's own words: 
 
 On entering the dear man's rooms next morning, 
 whereas breakfast had been laid for ten, [we found] fif 
 teen guests had already assembled. While we were se 
 cretly counting the teacups, another rap was heard, and 
 in came two University Professors. All laughed: but it 
 was no laughing matter, for still another and another 
 person presented himself. The bell was again and again 
 rung: more and more tea and coffee, muffins and dry 
 toast, butter and bread, cream and eggs, chops 
 and steaks, were ordered ; and " Richard " was begged 
 to "spread my other table-cloth on my other table."
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 279 
 
 The consequence was that our Host's violoncello, 
 fiddle-strings and music-books, printers' proofs and 
 postage stamps, medicine-bottles and pill-boxes, 
 respirator and veil, gray wrapper for his throat and 
 green shade for his eyes, pamphlets and letters in 
 numerable, all were discharged in a volley on to the 
 huge sofa. At last, by half-past nine (thanks to Rich 
 ard's superhuman exertions) twenty of us (more or less) 
 
 sat down to breakfast I am bound to say that the 
 
 meal was an entire success, as far as the strangers 
 were concerned. They were greatly entertained, in 
 more senses than one. 
 
 Yet this same absentee from the world was a 
 scholar of indefatigable industry, to whom New 
 man and Pusey could always turn for any oner 
 ous task of editing or translating in their paper 
 warfare with rationalism. Nor would it be easy 
 to say where, with such a man, scholarship ended 
 and saintship began, so thoroughly were heart 
 and brain in accord. He was one in whom the 
 thought of self was lost in uninterrupted con 
 templation of God, one in whom the consumma 
 tion of Aristotle's theoria might seem to have 
 been realized in Christian worship. " There was," 
 says one who knew him well, "something un 
 speakably sweet and pure and simple, in the out 
 come of his habitual inner life. . . . To me he 
 seemed habitually to walk with God. . . . He was 
 of a kindred nature to the Saint who said, 'When 
 I am in heaviness I will think upon God'; and 
 who habitually spoke of God as 'his stronghold
 
 280 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 whereunto he might always resort, his house of 
 defence and his castle.'" 
 
 Now what strikes one in the Oxford of Mrs. 
 Ward, as it would strike one still more in the Ox 
 ford of to-day, is the impossibility of meeting 
 with such a character as that of Marriott: the 
 eccentricity is gone, vanished with the last relics 
 of medieval isolation; gone, too, the spiritual 
 sense of an actual presence of the Deity. As for 
 the eccentricity, its disappearance, Mrs. Ward 
 herself would probably admit, was caused in no 
 small measure by the influx of women into a 
 society of bachelors. With petticoats came the 
 world and the conventions of the world ; manners 
 were softened, the tongue was filed, angles of 
 originality were ironed out; the drawing-room 
 conquered the cloister. As for the second change, 
 whether the intrusion of women had anything to 
 do with the synchronous extrusion of God, you 
 will not hear from me ; even if I believed in such 
 a causal relation, I have too many misoneistic 
 quarrels already in hand to risk the charge of 
 misogyny. But I can tell you what Mrs. Ward 
 would say: she would simply deny the fact of 
 extrusion. That the religiosity of Newman and 
 Pusey had been expelled, she would grant, and 
 would boast, with reason, that her own pen had 
 been one of the effective instruments of the ex 
 pulsion ; but she would uphold her sincere convic 
 tion that the idea of God had been merely puri-
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 281 
 
 fied by the process. For such a tenet she does 
 actually argue vehemently in a dialogue on The 
 New Reformation contributed to the Nineteenth 
 Century for March, 1889, as part of the acrid de 
 bate then waging between Huxley and the ene 
 mies of agnosticism. "The point is," she de 
 clares, in reply to the fears of orthodoxy "the 
 point is, What religion is possible to men, for 
 whom God is the only reality, and Jesus that 
 friend of God and man, in whom, through all 
 human and necessary imperfection, they see the 
 natural leader of their inmost life?" And, more 
 succinctly, she adds: "God though I can find 
 no names for Him is more real, more present 
 to me than ever before." In like manner, with 
 tacit reference to the criticisms that still ema 
 nated from the unreformed stronghold of Christ 
 Church, she dwells in her Recollections on the 
 deep religious spirit of her beloved heretic, 
 Jowett: 
 
 If ever a man was Gottbetrunken, it was the Master, 
 many of whose meditations and passing thoughts, with 
 drawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet written 
 down in thirty or forty volumes! for his own dis 
 cipline and remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his 
 biographers, in the pages of his Life. They are extraor 
 dinarily frank and simple; startling, often, in their bare 
 ness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of 
 a mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and inti 
 mate friend of the Master's once said to me that he 
 believed "Jowett's inner mind, especially towards the
 
 282 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 end of his life, was always in an attitude of Prayer. One 
 would go and talk to him on University or College busi 
 ness in his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, 
 slightly and silently, and know what it meant." 
 
 Now that there is an element of truth in what 
 Mrs. Ward maintains, I would not deny; yet as I 
 read the life of Jowett I cannot divest myself of 
 the feeling that his religion is a kind of reverbera 
 tion from forces which have ceased to operate 
 like the prolonged intonation of a bell after the 
 last stroke of the hammer. It was Jowett who 
 avowed that "Voltaire has done more good than 
 all the Fathers of the Church put together"; and 
 as he grew older his faith took on more and more 
 the form of a belief with nothing to believe. 
 "Litanies should have no creeds"; all dogmas, 
 including belief in a personal God and in immor 
 tality, should be surrendered, and in their place 
 religion should be steadied on what he under 
 stood erroneously, it must be added as 
 Buddhistic nihilism. The "Divine presence" 
 with him was "mystic"; what, one asks, was 
 actually present? No doubt Jowett continued in 
 the habit of inner worship, but the shrine before 
 which his lips moved in meditation was empty, 
 and what vitality his faith possessed was drawn, 
 vampire-like, from the heart of the men whose 
 creed he had shattered. No doubt the idea of 
 Deity, as Mark Pattison declared, misapplying a 
 phrase of Coleridge's, had been "defaecated to a
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 283 
 
 pure transparency " ; would it be unfair to reply 
 that a pure transparency, so far as our corporeal 
 or spiritual vision is concerned, means only a 
 vacuum? The Oxford of Newman may have 
 been superstitious ; the Oxford of Jowett, despite 
 Mrs. Ward's protests, was rapidly becoming 
 Godless. The new scholarship is busied with in 
 vestigation of sources and scientific phenomena, 
 and has no need of the hypothesis of a divine 
 presence. So far as religion prevails, it is the re 
 ligion of humanity, such as that for which Mrs. 
 Ward pleaded in Robert Elsmere, not Newman's 
 religion of God and the individual human soul. 
 Worship has been transferred from the pulpit of 
 Saint Mary's to the recreation room of the Pass- 
 more Edwards Settlement. 
 
 What this change means to education I have 
 found curiously intimated in one of the smart 
 sayings of Stephen McKenna's Sonia. He has 
 been describing his experience in an East End 
 university mission, where, as he says, thirty per 
 cent of his Oxford generation worked for longer 
 or shorter periods, and he concludes: "I doubted, 
 and still doubt, the possibility of friendship be 
 tween a Shadwell stevedore and the angular, re 
 pellent product of an English public school and 
 university ; this is not to put one above the other, 
 but merely to disbelieve the existence of a com 
 mon intellectual currency." Not to put one 
 above the other: can you imagine a scholar of
 
 284 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP , 
 
 Gaisford's generation doubting in his mind 
 whether the product of Winchester and Oxford, 
 ceteris paribus, is higher than the product of the 
 Shad well docks? Yet just such a query, in less 
 paradoxical terms, you may find in almost every 
 recent book that reveals what is going on inside 
 the minds of serious university men. Even Jow- 
 ett could exclaim over his college as "a bad 
 school for character," where a "sort of weak 
 cleverness" is fostered and "manliness" is im 
 paired. If the modern report of university life is 
 true, I wonder why we go on spending millions 
 of dollars and pounds to maintain institutions 
 which make men no better than stevedores, and 
 why, on the other hand, we waste so much sym 
 pathy on life at the docks which makes men no 
 worse than professors. Our ears have grown too 
 squeamish to endure Gaisford's blunt association 
 of the oracles of God with contempt for the vul 
 gar herd, nor do I think his a happy or a true 
 definition of the aims of education ; but one thing 
 is certain : if the college as an institution is to re 
 tain any value above the shop and the market 
 place, if the pursuit of scholarship as an end in 
 itself is to offer any satisfaction for the finer 
 spirits of men, then, in some way, those studies 
 must be restored to authority which give zest 
 and significance to the inner life of the soul ; and 
 at the centre of that life, binding all its interests 
 into one, lifting them above the grosser forms of
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 285 
 
 utility, irradiating them with joy, must be the 
 idea of God. 
 
 I did not intend, when I began this account of 
 Oxford before and after the reforms of the mid- 
 nineteenth century, to end on so solemn an argu 
 ment. What impressed me most while going 
 through Mrs. Ward's Recollections and recalling 
 the reminiscences of the preceding generation, 
 was the simple fact that college society as por 
 trayed in these books had grown in a few years 
 comparatively less amusing to read about and 
 distinctly less interesting to itself. I do not mean 
 that Mrs. Ward's chapters are without enter 
 tainment I have said they were the most en 
 tertaining part of her memoir but the college 
 life she depicts has lost much of its peculiar tang 
 and proud independence; already its main sig 
 nificance is in the comparison it evokes. The 
 change, I think, will scarcely be disputed by any 
 one conversant with the literature, though some 
 may contend that the loss of interest is more than 
 compensated by the suppression of quaint or 
 ludicrous eccentricities. For my part I would 
 not hold a brief for mere eccentricity, however 
 fond I may be of the well-crusted "character." 
 But that is only half the story. The waning of 
 interest, in its deeper aspect, is typical of an in 
 tellectual revolution which has grown more and 
 more evident with the passing of the years, until 
 now the ancient pride of the scholar and the self-
 
 286 A NEW ENGLAND GROUP 
 
 content of the scholar's career seem to have been 
 swallowed up in the one prevailing note of dis 
 taste and dissatisfaction and apology. Professor 
 Gilbert Murray, who is qualified to speak for the 
 Oxford of to-day, complains of the satiety that 
 pervades college life, and attributes it to the very 
 liberation of mind and the enriching of the means 
 of personal satisfaction. "Whatever gifts Oxford 
 may bring her children," he says, "she is apt to 
 bring steeped in the one poison that is fatal to 
 poetry, the poison of satiety. A spirit of satiety 
 broods over the rich meadows and the slow 
 streams, over streets and towers and quadrangles 
 and playing-grounds. Do you wish for games? 
 There they are waiting for you, laid on like water 
 or electric light, all the games that exist. If you 
 can think of another it shall be brought; there 
 shall be no trouble to you in the preparing of it, 
 and no time for your hunger to grow. Do you 
 wish for books? There they are, old and new, in 
 convenient libraries and magnificent bookshops, 
 more than you can ever read or look at ; so many 
 that the sight wearies you, and suggests, not a 
 desire to be richly gratified, but an ever-mount 
 ing and fastidious duty." This is no doubt a true 
 account of the matter, true in a way; but going 
 back to an earlier day, and studying the transi 
 tion from the Oxford of Newman to the Oxford of 
 Mrs. Ward, I seem to see other causes at work 
 than that heaping up of material resources which
 
 OXFORD, WOMEN, AND GOD 287 
 
 has turned the delight of scholarship into a fas 
 tidious duty. At least one can safely say that a 
 unique interest was lost to learning with the ad 
 mission of women into Oxford's cloistered society 
 and the banishment of God. 
 
 THE END
 
 INDEX TO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
 
 Index to Shelburne Essays 
 
 ELEVEN VOLUMES 
 
 VOL. PAGE 
 
 Academic Leadership IX 39 
 
 Adams, Henry XI 115 
 
 Aldrich, T. B VII 138 
 
 Anthology, Greek V I 
 
 Aristocracy, Natural IX I 
 
 Arnold, Matthew VII 213 
 
 Augustine, St VI 65 
 
 Beaumont, Francis X I 
 
 Beckford, William VIII I 
 
 Behn, Mrs. Aphra X 67 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop X 187 
 
 Bhagavad Gita VI 43 
 
 Blake IV 212 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas VI 154 
 
 Browning, Robert Ill 143 
 
 Bunyan VI 187 
 
 Burney, Fanny IV 35 
 
 Butler, Samuel, of Erewhon XI 167 
 
 Byron ("Don Juan") Ill 166 
 
 Carlyle I 85 
 
 Change, Philosophy of VII 245 
 
 Chesterfield V 196 
 
 Conservatism IX 149 
 
 Cowper Ill I
 
 2Q2 INDEX 
 
 VOL. PAGE 
 
 Crabbe II 126 
 
 Crisp, Samuel IV 6 1 
 
 Criticism VII 213 
 
 Delphi and Greek Literature II 188 
 
 Dickens V 22 
 
 Dickinson, G. Lowes VII 170 
 
 Disraeli IX 149 
 
 Dualism, Definitions of VIII 245 
 
 Economic Ideals XI 233 
 
 Edwards, Jonathan XI 33 
 
 Elizabethan Sonnets II I 
 
 Emerson I 71 
 
 Emerson XI 67 
 
 Evolution and the Other World XI 141 
 
 FitzGerald, Edward II 104 
 
 Fletcher, John X 1 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin IV 129 
 
 Freneau V 86 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs V 66 
 
 Gissing, George V 45 
 
 Gray's Letters X 253 
 
 Halifax, Marquis of X 41 
 
 Hawker, R. S IV I 
 
 Hawthorne I 22 
 
 Hawthorne I 51 
 
 Hawthorne II 173 
 
 Hazlitt II 73
 
 INDEX 293 
 
 VOL. PAGE 
 
 Hearn, Lafcadio II 46 
 
 Herbert, George IV 66 
 
 Holt, Henry XI 141 
 
 Hood VII 49 
 
 Humanitarianism I 225 
 
 Huxley VIII 191 
 
 Illusions, The Two I 122 
 
 India, Forest Philosophy of VI I 
 
 Ireland, Epic of I 147 
 
 Irish Movement I 177 
 
 James, William VII 195 
 
 Johnson, Lionel I 177 
 
 Justice IX 101 
 
 Keats IV 99 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard II 104 
 
 Lamb II 87 
 
 Lamb IV 156 
 
 Law, Property and IX 125 
 
 Longfellow V 132 
 
 Macleod, Fiona VIII 117 
 
 Meredith, George II 145 
 
 Milton (" Paradise Lost") IV 239 
 
 Mitchell, Donald G V 158 
 
 Montagu, Mary Wortley X 151 
 
 Morality, The New IX 191 
 
 Morley, Viscount XI 201 
 
 Morris, William VII 95
 
 294 INDEX 
 
 VOL. PAGE 
 
 Nemesis II 219 
 
 New England, Spirit and Poetry of 
 
 Early XI i 
 
 Newman, Cardinal VIII 37 
 
 Nietzsche VIII 145 
 
 Norton, Charles Eliot XI 95 
 
 Oxford, Paradox of IX 69 
 
 Oxford, Women, and God XI 257 
 
 Pascal VI 101 
 
 Pater, Walter VIII 81 
 
 Plato VI 321 
 
 Poe I 51 
 
 Poole, Ernest XI 233 
 
 Pope X 123 
 
 Pragmatism VII 195 
 
 Property and Law IX 125 
 
 Quest of a Century Ill 244 
 
 Rossetti, Christina Ill 124 
 
 Rousseau VI 214 
 
 Sainte-Beuve Ill 54 
 
 Scott Ill 82 
 
 Shakespeare (Sonnets) II 20 
 
 Shelley VII I 
 
 Shore, Louisa VII 1 19 
 
 Shorthouse, J. H Ill 213 
 
 Socialism VII 170 
 
 Socrates VI 242
 
 INDEX 295 
 
 VOL. PAGE 
 
 Socrates (Apology) VI 274 
 
 Sterne Ill 177 
 
 Swift X 99 
 
 Swinburne Ill 100 
 
 Symons, Arthur I 122 
 
 Tennyson VII 64 
 
 Thompson, Francis VII 153 
 
 Thomson, James ("B.V.") V 170 
 
 Thoreau I I 
 
 Thoreau ("Journal") V 106 
 
 Tolstoy I 193 
 
 Verse, English I 103 
 
 Victorian Literature VII 245 
 
 Walpole, Horace IV 254 
 
 War, Philosophy of the IX 219 
 
 Wharton, Duke of X 223 
 
 Whitman, Walt IV 180 
 
 Whittier Ill 28 
 
 Wit, Decadent X 277 
 
 Wordsworth VII 27 
 
 Wotton, Sir Henry V 228 
 
 Yeats, W. B I 177
 
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