REESE LIBRARY 
 
 in: 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 . 7 
 
 / 
 
 Class Not 
 

 
GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ETC. 
 
LITERARY STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH JACOBS 
 
 Shall ive say : ' Let the ages judge the 
 spirits I' Why, we are the beginning 
 oj the ages. GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1896 
 
TO 
 
 FREDERICK RYLAND 
 
 IN MEMORY OF OLD TIMES 
 AT CAMBRIDGE 
 
 UNI 
 
PREFACE 
 
 / have explained in the Introduction why I have 
 thought it worth while to reprint these f eloges' of 
 four of the chief English writers who died in the 
 last decade and to add certain reviews of books by or 
 about them. I desire here to emphasise the fact that 
 these obituaries were in every case written within 
 the two or three days that elapsed between the death 
 of their subjects and the appearance of the ensuing 
 issue of the e Athenceum.' I have nothing to say 
 against the practice of others, but I cannot myself 
 anticipate the Great Destroyer. 
 
 I have to thank the Publisher and Editor of the 
 ' Athenaum ' for their kind and ready permission to 
 reprint these articles from its pages. j j 
 
 P.S. To the present re-issue I have added articles 
 on Tennyson, Stevenson, and Seeley, which appeared 
 immediately after their death. I have to thank the 
 Editors of the Academy and Athenaeum for per- 
 mission to reproduce these. 
 
 CF THE 
 
 E 
 
 ,*- * 
 0HIVERSn 
 
:' : 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Necrologe (ist Jan. 1881) ... 3 
 
 ' Theophrastus Such ' (jth June 1879) . 17 
 
 ' Essays' (z$d Feb. -L%&4) . . .31 
 
 Cross's 'Life' (31^ Jan., ?tk Feb. 1885) . 49 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Necrologe (v\st April 1888) ... 77 
 1 Discourses in America ' (27 1 'A June 1885) . 87 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 Necrologe (zist Dec. 1889) ... 97 
 
 NEWMAN 
 
 Necrologe (\&th Aug. 1890) . . .119 
 
 Huttoris 'Newman' (i8fti Oct. 1890) . 130 
 
 Letters, etc. (ztfh Jan. iSigi) . . .137 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 Necrologe (Academy, is/A Oct. 1892) 155 
 
 STEVENSON 
 
 Necrologe (zznd Dec. 1894) . . . *75 
 
 SEELEY 
 
 Necrologe (izth fan. 1895) . . 189 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE first few days after a great writer's death 
 are critical for his reputation. Then for the first 
 time we realise all that he has been to us, all that 
 he has done for us. We can for the first time 
 speak of his whole work with little fear of the 
 surprises that genius has often in store for the 
 critic who dares to be prophetic. We can speak 
 out our full thought of him, if for no other reason, 
 because what we say cannot by any chance come 
 before him. Above all, he has ceased to be a 
 person, and we can treat more simply and directly 
 of his spiritual influence. At the same time we 
 that speak are those who have come under his 
 spell in his lifetime and express the feelings of his 
 contemporaries without any of the disturbing 
 influences which later revelations or the modifica- 
 tion of the Zeitgeist produce on the appeal he may 
 have for after-times. We alone can say what he 
 has been to us whom he addressed. 
 
 It has chanced during the past ten years that I 
 have been called upon to give on behalf of the 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 Athenaeum an estimate of the loss English Letters 
 have sustained by the death of the four chief 
 writers who left us during the decade. These 
 essays differed, I believe, in at least two respects 
 from the obituary notices which swarm from the 
 press on such occasions. They were estimates, 
 not obituaries; they dealt rather with the work 
 than with the life of each author. And they were 
 written immediately on hearing of the death of the 
 writer concerned, whereas it is well known that 
 every newspaper has obituaries of all the nota- 
 bilities of the time pigeon-holed for production on 
 the morrow of the death. Whatever then the 
 merits of these essays, they were written under the 
 influence of the feelings I have indicated above, 
 and were in each case, I may perhaps say, the 
 first critical estimate of contemporary England on 
 the lifework of these great writers. That they 
 appeared in the foremost literary journal of the 
 English-speaking peoples gives them an impor- 
 tance that I could not claim for any personal utter- 
 ances. I have for these reasons thought them 
 worthy of being put in more permanent form as 
 documents f documents' is a favourite word and 
 thing just now in the history of English opinion 
 about the writers treated in this volume. At the 
 same time I have thought it right to leave them in 
 substantially the same form as that in which they 
 first appeared, only removing a few traces of neces- 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 sarily hasty writing. ' Documents' must not be 
 falsified. I may perhaps venture to add, in fairness 
 to myself, that there are some few things in them 
 which I would have put differently if I had been 
 writing over my own name in the first instance. 
 
 To make this little volume more worthy ot 
 acceptance, I have added a few reviews of works 
 written by or about the authors treated. These 
 also appeared in the Athenceum for the most part 
 after the death of the subjects of my eloges. They 
 were more detailed estimates of parts of the authors' 
 works, or they dealt more at large with their lives, 
 or in other ways they seemed to me to supplement 
 the more general eloges written for a special occasion 
 from a special point of view. 
 
 Looking back on these memorial essays, I can 
 now discern the general method on which they 
 were formed, though I was not conscious of it at 
 the time of writing. At the moment of an author's 
 death, we think primarily of the man we have lost. 
 But we mourn the man for the sake of his works, 
 hence it is those of his qualities that are shown in 
 his works which naturally engage our attention at 
 the moment of his death. These essays are there- 
 fore appropriately devoted to the literary qualities 
 of their subjects' minds. They are of the psycho- 
 logical, not of the aesthetic order of criticism. 
 
 ' There are,' to quote myself elsewhere, f two 
 ' methods of studying literary productions, which 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 ' may be roughly described as the aesthetic and 
 f the psychological. The former goes straight to 
 * the literary products themselves, and seeks to 
 ' determine their aptitude for exerting the specific 
 t literary emotions often reflecting the critic's own 
 ' feelings in the rhythm and beauty of his language. 
 s This is the method of Lamb and Mr. Swinburne, 
 ' and (in his best moments) Mr. Matthew Arnold. 
 e The other or psychological method looks rather 
 ' to the literary producer, and endeavours to ascer- 
 ' tain those qualities of the author's mind that 
 ' would produce such and such results. Mr. Leslie 
 ' Stephen pursued this method during his Hours 
 e in a Library, and Mr. Morley and Mr. Hutton 
 f afford other instances of its use.' I need scarcely 
 say to which of these two methods the present 
 essays belong. By natural bent, by training I 
 have some claims to be an expert in psychology I 
 belong to the psychological school. To be of the 
 aesthetic school is only given to those who are 
 something more than critics. They are the artists 
 in criticism ; nous autres must be content with 
 being scientific, though even we may attempt to 
 give such artistic form to our work as science 
 allows. Each school has its province. I have 
 tried to show above that the psychological method 
 has a fit application at moments when we are 
 thinking of the literary qualities of an author's 
 mind rather than the literary effect of his works. 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 In making my estimates of George Eliot, 
 Matthew Arnold, Browning, and Newman, I have 
 had the critical advantage, though the personal 
 loss, of not being personally acquainted with the 
 subjects of my essays except in one case. Of 
 George Eliot I may say at least vidi tantum. I can 
 still recall the feelings of ardent reverence with 
 which I approached the Priory, North Bank, one 
 Sunday afternoon in 1877. I had written an 
 enthusiastic I fear I must add gushing defence 
 of Daniel Deronda, from a Jewish point of view, 
 in the June number of Macmillans Magazine of 
 that year, and George Henry Lewes had expressed 
 a wish that I should call upon them. I went with 
 all the feelings of the neophyte at the shrine for 
 the first time. Need I say that I was disap- 
 pointed? Authors give of their best in their 
 works under the consciousness of addressing the 
 whole world. We ought not to expect them to 
 live up to that best at all times and before all 
 onlookers : but we do. 
 
 I have few Boswellisms to offer. I remember 
 being struck even at that early stage of my social 
 discernment by the contrast between the boisterous 
 Bohemian bonhomie of George Lewes and the almost 
 old-maidenish refinement of his life's companion. 
 I had tried to lead her talk to my own criticism, but 
 was met by the quiet parry, f I never read criticisms 
 of my own works/ I could not help thinking at 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 the time ' quefais-je done dans cette galere ? ' but she 
 was obviously in the right. Others were present 
 and the topics had to be general. We got upon 
 songs for singing, and I was attempting to con- 
 tend that the sweetest songs for vocal purposes 
 were nowadays not those of the poets of the day. 
 She pointed out that even Tennyson's in the 
 Princess were unsuitable for that purpose, whereas 
 the Elizabethans produced songs that were gems of 
 literary art, yet trilled forth as naturally as a bird's 
 carol. 
 
 I saw her but once more after Lewes's death. I 
 had sent her something I had published in the 
 Nineteenth Century, and she had written asking me 
 to call. I did so, and found the house in gloom 
 and herself in depression. On this occasion I was 
 struck by the massiveness of the head as contrasted 
 with the frailty of the body. When she was 
 seated one thought her tall : such a head should 
 have been propped up by a larger frame. The 
 long thin sensitive hands were those of a musician. 
 The exquisite modulations of the voice told of 
 refinement in every well-chosen phrase. She had 
 at least one of the qualifications one expects in 
 an author ; she did indeed f talk like a book/ She 
 spoke of one of her favourite themes, the appeal of 
 the circle in which one is born even if one has in 
 certain ways grown beyond or outside it. Before I 
 left she asked me to find out for her the meaning 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 of a Hebrew inscription on a seal which an old 
 Russian Jew had given Tourgenief : he had sent 
 her an impression, which she intrusted to me. 
 1 You will be careful of it,' she said, ' I prize it as 
 coming from him/ I thought of old Kalonymos 
 and his similar caution as he hands the key of his 
 family archives to Daniel Deronda. We parted, 
 and I soon returned the impression with an explan- 
 ation of the inscription. She sent a few words 
 of kindly thanks, and that was all till I received 
 the final summons to Highgate Cemetery. 
 
 I do not think that my critical estimate of 
 George Eliot's work was at all affected by this 
 slight personal intercourse with her. My venera- 
 tion for her work in those days may have led me 
 to some extent, however, to that curious kind of 
 injustice, when we guard against too high praise 
 of those we know or like just because we know and 
 like them. My personal estimate of her work when 
 I wrote about it was certainly higher than my writ- 
 ten words would imply. Judged by the result I 
 was justified in this critical caution. In the ten 
 years or so that have elapsed since her death, George 
 Eliot's reputation has not risen, her influence has 
 been on the decline. It seems worth while seek- 
 ing for the causes of this. 
 
 It is of course a general law that literary reputa- 
 tions do decline for a time at least after an 
 author's death. While he lives there is always the 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 halo and attraction of the unknown about what 
 may still come from him : this fades away with his 
 death. Then again his friends have no longer the 
 same motives for keeping his reputation at the 
 highest pitch. Friends, too, die away. London 
 again is the fount of literary reputation, and 
 Londoners, like all inhabitants of great cities, are 
 always eager for some new thing. Old writers 
 compete with the new ones, it is true, but the 
 competition of the novelty is still more efficacious. 
 
 All these causes have co-operated to lessen 
 George Eliot's influence and reputation. But 
 there are other more special causes that have 
 tended in the same direction. Mr. Cross's Life was 
 a disappointment: his extreme reticence about 
 personal details and careful excision of all human- 
 ising touches made the book dull, and the total 
 impression of George Eliot's personality unattrac- 
 tive. Her last books, Daniel Deronda, Theophrastus 
 Such, and the collected Essays, were a progressive 
 series of anti-climaxes, and it is the latest works 
 that give the final impression in more senses than 
 one. Their didactic tone was too obvious, and the 
 British public resents nothing more than being 
 preached at too obviously. 
 
 But above and beyond all these reasons there 
 has been a subtle and gradual change in the public 
 mind which has told against George Eliot's work 
 in two directions. There is a fashion in the art of 
 
INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 the novel, as in other arts, and for some time 
 the vogue has been growing for the conte as 
 against the novel, and for the romantic novel of 
 incident as against the realistic novel of character. 
 Amid the problems and perplexities of the present 
 we fly for relaxation to the Something-other-than- 
 Here-and-Now, and we like to take it short. Both 
 tendencies tell against George Eliot. There is 
 a general tendency nowadays against taking intel- 
 lectual nourishment in anything but small doses. 
 The enormous growth of the magazines is at once 
 a result and a cause of this. Tit-Bits completes 
 what the Fortnightly Review began. It is indeed 
 an Age of Tit-bits. The strenuous attention which 
 the works of George Eliot demand is too much for 
 minds accustomed to such intellectual food as the 
 magazines now supply. The high seriousness of 
 her art displeases the frivolous, and the tone of 
 English Letters just now is distinctly frivolous. 
 
 George Eliot aimed and claimed to be a teacher. 
 Her works were a conscious criticism of life. 
 They gave the new feeling about life that seemed to 
 be rendered necessary by the triumph of Darwin- 
 ism in English speculation. During the ' seventies ' 
 there was a confident feeling, among those of us 
 who came to our intellectual majority in those 
 years, that Darwinism was to solve all the pro- 
 blems. This was doubtless due to the triumph- 
 ant tone in which certain eminent professors of 
 
xx INTRODUCTION 
 
 science notably Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and 
 Clifford spoke of what science was going to do for 
 the spiritual life when the older theological 
 trammels had been removed. What they promised 
 George Eliot was currently supposed to have 
 attained, and her words were scanned for the secret 
 message. She was to all of us what she seemed to 
 Mr. F. W. Myers in that fine description of his 
 interview with her in the Fellows' Garden at 
 Trinity; she was 'a Sibyl in the gloom/ She 
 alone, we thought, possessed the message of the 
 New Spirit that Darwinism was to breathe into the 
 inner life of man. 
 
 Well, Darwinism has come, and has conquered, 
 and, as a vital influence in the spiritual life, has 
 gone. Instead of solving all the problems, it has 
 raised only too many fresh ones. It has thrown 
 light on origins, or to speak more accurately, 
 it has set us on the search for origins. But the 
 undeveloped germ which we call origin has in it 
 ex hypothesi all the problems which the developed 
 product offers, and presents these in more concen- 
 trated form. And the something that develops 
 is obviously different from its own development, 
 which is all that Darwinism even professes to 
 explain. To put it technically, origins are not 
 essences, and it is the essence of the matter, the 
 thing as in itself it really is, that we seek for. 
 Hence Darwinism, which merely touches origins and 
 
INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 leaves essences alone, only disappoints. The pretty 
 quarrel, too, that is going on among the experts 
 about the fundamentals of Darwinism has helped 
 to discredit it. And with this discredit George 
 Eliot, the literary voice of Darwinism, suffers too. 
 The danger which I foresaw in 1879 f the risk 
 of subordinating the eternal truths of art to what 
 may be the temporary opinions of science* has 
 proved to be no illusory one. 
 
 Again our interests have turned from speculation, 
 even from the bases of conduct, and are almost 
 exclusively social. ' We are all socialists now ' 
 since the Redistribution Act and George Eliot has 
 little to say on the Condition of England Question. 
 And what little she does say, in Felix Holt for 
 example, is not much in consonance with the feel- 
 ing of to-day. Her dearest memories were of a 
 time when old Leisure was still alive and social 
 changes took place but slowly. Felix Holt the 
 Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative ; he 
 is not even a Tory-Democrat. But the ineffective- 
 ness of her social utterances was a sign that her 
 heart was not in the social part of her work ; we 
 have no heart for anything else. 
 
 For all these reasons then the reputation of 
 George Eliot is undergoing a kind of eclipse in 
 this last decade of the nineteenth century. It is 
 becoming safe to indulge in cheap sneers at the 
 ineffectiveness of her heroes, at the want of elan in 
 
xxii INTRODUCTION 
 
 the movement of her stories, at the too obvious 
 preachments of her rather overspun comments. 
 Her heroes are perhaps rather apt to be muffs ; it 
 is the way with heroes of novels generally. Her 
 plots might develop at greater speed ; your novel 
 of character rarely travels express. 'Here the 
 story halts a little ' might be written over many a 
 page of Richardson and Fielding, of Miss Austen 
 and Thackeray, but it is a part of their method and 
 a necessary part. And the comments and discussion 
 which cause these frequent halts, have they not 
 a special appeal of their own, even if the appeal 
 be somewhat alien to the art of the novel ? And 
 if George Eliot preaches, what admirable sermons 
 she writes ! The realistic writer cannot describe 
 the life around him or her without indicating the 
 attitude they take towards it. That very attitude 
 is a preachment: Zola in L'Assommoir, Flaubert 
 in Madame Bovary, are as powerful sermons as I 
 know. 
 
 That part then of George Eliot's work which ap- 
 pealed more especially to the Zeitgeist is ineffective 
 now that the Zeitgeist has changed. But how 
 much remains that can never lose its effectiveness 
 because it appeals to the ewige Geist of humanity. 
 Her admirable peasants and parsons, her charming 
 children, her scenery and her interiors, her wit 
 and her wisdom, these are surely a possession for 
 aye in the realm of English fiction. Whatever 
 
INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 view we take of her art, we must recognise that she 
 has added as many living personalities to the com- 
 mon acquaintance of English-speaking people as 
 almost any other English novelist, and this after 
 all is the final criterion. And in the difficult 
 sphere of the aphorism, her works are more 
 copiously studded with suhtle truths aptly ex- 
 pressed than those of any novelist who has ever 
 written in English. The enemy will say this has 
 nothing to do with the novel : but the enemy can 
 always complain of any form of art that it is not 
 another, so we may let him sneer. 
 
 It has seemed worth while devoting some atten- 
 tion to the after-history of George Eliot's reputa- 
 tion, as so much of this volume happens already to 
 be taken up by a consideration of George Eliot's 
 art from various points of view, and I have here 
 attempted to complete the survey. With the other 
 authors considered, there is no occasion to deal 
 in such detail, as their loss is so recent that any 
 attempt to distinguish the permanent elements of 
 their art would be impracticable. 
 
 I may add that I have found a difficulty in giving 
 an appropriate name to these studies, so far as they 
 are not reviews. ( Obituaries ' of the authors they 
 are not, for I do not profess to give any details of 
 their lives, or even of their works. ( Necrologe ' 
 does not sound English, and besides savours of 
 Woking. jfiloge comes nearest, but that on the 
 
 ^^jTese LIBRA. 
 
xxiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 face of it is not English. A wicked wag among 
 my friends suggests Post Mortems, but I trust I 
 have not been quite so cruel as that would imply. 
 
 One more word and I have done. There seems 
 something of ingratitude, almost of irreverence, in 
 subjecting to cool criticism writers to whom one 
 owes so much of one's best self. I need not refute 
 the fallacy, that in presuming to criticise one 
 assumes any superiority : if that were so, there 
 would scarcely be any place for criticism, and 
 certainly none at all for critics pur sang. The 
 author appeals to his generation : the critic answers 
 the appeal. In the present case the thing had 
 to be done and I was called upon to do it. I can 
 only say I tried to do my work as honestly and 
 conscientiously as was in my power. 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 December 22, 1880 
 
IVEHS 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 EVENTEEN years ago the Christ- 
 mas week was darkened by the 
 death of Thackeray. Once again 
 the festive season has been sad- 
 dened in many a household by 
 the knowledge that George Eliot was no 
 more. It is not too much to say that with 
 many her works have been far more than 
 novels ; they have formed an animating prin- 
 ciple co-operating with some of the most 
 powerful spiritual influences of the time. It 
 appears, therefore, to be an appropriate 
 occasion to pass in critical review the works 
 she has left behind her and to estimate their 
 importance. 
 
 As is well known, her earlier productions 
 were translations of German works on the 
 metaphysics of religion. Strauss's Life of 
 Jesus appeared in an English form in 1846, 
 and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 
 1853. As translations they were excellent, 
 but it cannot be said that they have had any 
 
4 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 influence on English speculation. Their chief 
 interest consists in the evidence they give of 
 George Eliot's early devotion to c advanced ' 
 thinking and absorbing interest in the philo- 
 sophy of religion. 
 
 Her importance in the history of English 
 literature rests upon the series of fictions 
 commenced in 1857 with the Scenes of Clerical 
 Life, and concluded in 1876 by Daniel 
 Deronda. It is not difficult to discern in 
 these works two widely varying sets of artistic 
 motives. The Scenes, Adam Bede (1859), 
 The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, 
 and Middlemarch are all clearly connected by 
 their subject-matter, and, in large measure, by 
 their style of treatment. In them she went 
 back to the scenes and days of her child- 
 hood. It has been often remarked that the 
 plastic period of the literary artist, when 
 impressions are retained with that minute 
 observation necessary for the novel, ceases at 
 an extremely early age. Dickens was only at 
 home in the England of coaches and among 
 the lower classes. George Eliot was most 
 happy when recalling mid-England in the 
 days before the Reform Bill. Her father was 
 a land surveyor, and she thus came in contact 
 with all classes of provincial society, so that 
 her pictures are far more complete than either 
 Dickens's or Thackeray's accounts of London 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 5 
 
 life. Both George Eliot and George Sand 
 had learned that provincial life is more 
 intense, if more monotonous and simple, than 
 the busy life of towns. Amid the turmoil of 
 cities, existence passes through a series of 
 shallows, as it were ; whereas in the country 
 the emotions are collected into one deep 
 pool, which pours forth tumultuously if once 
 disturbed. Throughout these novels of 
 memory, as they may be termed, the inci- 
 dents and tone have a tragic ring about 
 them which is wanting in the majority of 
 novels dealing with London life. Only in 
 the Brontes, and perhaps in Mrs. Gaskell, do 
 we find anything like the depth of earnest- 
 ness displayed in these novels of George 
 Eliot. Much of their piquancy depends on 
 the contrast between the subject-matter and 
 the manifold reflections to which it gives rise. 
 While the subject is entirely obsolete, the re- 
 flections are in accord with the most advanced 
 thought of the day. Every one knows some- 
 thing of the scenery and the characters amid 
 which these novels are placed. The rich 
 fields of Loamshire and their owners and 
 cultivators in the early years of this cen- 
 tury form the common background of these 
 tragedies of human life. Generally speaking, 
 they treat of the influence of adverse cir- 
 cumstance on the inner life of the actors. 
 
6 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 It is essentially the spiritual life of her heroep 
 and heroines which interests the writer. It 
 is characteristic that she has introduced the 
 religious life as a leading motive of the novel. 
 Dinah Morris's spiritual experiences and ex- 
 hortations, Maggie Tulliver's conversion by 
 Thomas a Kempis, even Mr. Bulstrode's 
 wrestlings of the spirit, are themes which 
 only the deepest spiritual sympathy could 
 have handled adequately. Not that she is 
 deficient in the lighter qualities of the 
 novelist's art. No one has described English 
 scenery with more accurate touch or displayed 
 a more Shakespearean sense of humour. Mrs. 
 Poyser and Bartle Massey are unequalled 
 creations. In the delineation of children's 
 character she stands almost on a level with 
 Victor Hugo. Altogether, in range of sym- 
 pathy, in nobility of tone, in fertility of 
 reflection, and in subtlety of insight these 
 novels of memory are unique in the history 
 of fiction. Opinion will differ as to their 
 comparative merits, and each has its distinc- 
 tive qualities. Yet it is probable that Adam 
 Bede will always retain a certain supremacy ; 
 there is a freshness of tone as if the writer 
 were luxuriating in new-found powers. The 
 unsavoury motif of Felix Holt places it out of 
 competition ; Silas Marner, finished as it is, is 
 on a smaller scale ; and the concluding part 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 7 
 
 of The Mill on the Floss destroys the almost 
 perfect 'artistry* of the story of Tom and 
 Maggie Tulliver. Middlemarch remains, and 
 as ' a study in provincial life ' is complete ; yet 
 the deficiencies in the plot and a certain 
 undercurrent of social protest counterbalance 
 its other advantages., and the palm is left to 
 George Eliot's first and probably greatest 
 work. The subject of Adam Bede required 
 extreme delicacy of treatment; but all such 
 requirements are satisfied. The shallowness 
 of Hetty's character removes from her that 
 sympathy which would otherwise render her 
 fate too sad for the imagination ; but her 
 history illustrates the lesson which all these 
 novels were consciously made to teach. They 
 aided the great work of Wordsworth in 
 educating the emotions to sympathise with 
 the fundamental joys and sorrows of human 
 life in all social spheres. And in the fine 
 words of Wordsworth about his own works, 
 f They will co-operate with the benign ten- 
 ' dencies in nature and society, and will, in 
 ' their degree, be efficacious in making men 
 < wiser, better, and happier.' 
 
 The remaining novels, Romola, The Spanish 
 Gypsy (apart from its unfortunate form), and 
 Daniel Deronda, deal with an entirely different 
 range of interests. They are romances of the 
 historic imagination, consciously creative in- 
 
8 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 stead of being, as in the other novels, un- 
 consciously reproductive. The first two dealt 
 with the history of the past, and one cannot 
 help thinking that The Spanish Gypsy would 
 have been almost as successful a reproduction 
 as Romola if it had been written in a congenial 
 medium. In these laborious research did the 
 work that loving memory effected in the other 
 novels. As the artist went to work more 
 consciously, so the motive principle of her 
 work came more to the surface. The leading 
 conception of modern science as applied to 
 man, the influence of hereditary transmission, 
 was transmuted into the moral principle of 
 the claims of race. In the novels of memory 
 this had been disguised under the simpler 
 form of family love. Maggie Tulliver's action 
 at the end of The Mill on the Floss is entirely 
 based on the claims of family as opposed to 
 personal affection for Stephen Guest. ' Love 
 is not enough ' is the refrain, and this comes 
 out still more strongly on the broader historic 
 canvas of Romola and The Spanish Gypsy. 
 The point of Tito Melema's treachery is the 
 absence of hereditary connection with Floren- 
 tine politics. Fedalma sacrifices everything 
 to the claims of race. In Daniel Deronda the 
 difficult task was attempted of raising contem- 
 porary events to a ^wa-yz-historic level. By 
 the mere force of genius George Eliot strove 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 9 
 
 to create a personality which she deliberately 
 asserted to be on a level with the great 
 spiritual leaders of mankind. We have 
 reasons for saying that the identification of 
 the Jewish prophet of Daniel Deronda with 
 a philosophic Jew described by Mr. G. H. 
 Lewes in the Fortnightly Review is erroneous. 
 The Jews give the greatest example in modern 
 times of fidelity to the claims of race, and it 
 was natural that George Eliot should have 
 sympathised with Jewish aspirations. In The 
 Spanish Gypsy she had already portrayed a 
 fine figure in the Jew Sephardo. In Mordecai 
 Cohen she attempted to idealise the history 
 of this remarkable race, and by so doing 
 destroyed the chances of success for her most 
 elaborate production. Want of knowledge 
 and want of sympathy with the Jewish ideal 
 will probably always be an effectual bar to the 
 appreciation of Daniel Deronda, and the hero 
 plays the difficult part of irradiating sympathy 
 instead of doing noble deeds. Yet it would 
 be rash to assert that, if the Jewish race again 
 became prominent as a nationality, Daniel 
 Deronda may not ultimately figure as one of 
 the favourite books of the Chosen People. 
 Even as it is, it must be recognised that the 
 conception of such a character as the principal 
 Jew of the book shows singuLr rtistic 
 daring. 
 
10 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 While Romola and Daniel Deronda are of a 
 different genre from the other novels,, they 
 have a share of their excellences of style and 
 characterisation. Since attention was first 
 drawn to the point, too much stress has been 
 laid on the ' scientific technicalities ' of her 
 style of late years. She would not have been 
 the foremost woman of her age if she had not 
 been influenced by one of its greatest move- 
 ments. Yet the evidences of this are as clear 
 in her earliest as in her latest works. In 
 Janet's Repentance we read that 'the idea of 
 ' duty ... is to the moral life what the 
 < addition of a great central ganglion is to 
 ' animal life.' In the second page of Adam 
 Bede, Seth's ' coronal arch ' becomes a pro- 
 minent feature in his portrait. In The Mill 
 on the Floss George Eliot cannot let us know 
 the ingenious trick by which Bob Jakin gains 
 a couple of inches in measuring out his flannel 
 without referring to his thumb as the ' mark of 
 difference between the man and the monkey.' 
 It is not quite correct to say that her style 
 became more scientific in her last two novels ; 
 it would be more exact to say that it became 
 more complex. As her thoughts became 
 more subtle, her sentences naturally became 
 more complex, and it would be difficult to 
 determine the limits beyond which subtlety 
 and complexity become inartistic. Allied to 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 11 
 
 this error is the statement, frequently repeated 
 in the obituary notices of the newspapers, 
 that George Eliot was essentially an analytic 
 genius, and that she constructed her charac- 
 ters out of analytic materials. The idea imme- 
 diately suggested by this curiously uncritical 
 assertion is that the perusal of Mr. Bain's 
 works is the best propaedeutic for the crea- 
 tion of a character like Dolly Winthrop. It 
 would be far more correct to say that George 
 Eliot's genius was essentially constructive, and 
 that her analytic comments are the results of 
 her training and experience. Like all great 
 moderns, George Eliot possessed the power 
 of feeling deeply and of simultaneously intel- 
 lectualising her feelings; this is the most 
 characteristic note of the modern mind. In 
 this regard it is interesting to notice her 
 accuracy and completeness, which at first 
 sight appear peculiarly scientific. Yet it is 
 the selective accuracy of the artist, not the 
 exhaustive exactness of the savant, that she 
 displays. When Cabel Garth's eyebrows 
 ' make their pathetic angle ' we have this 
 trait alone given, and not a paragraph from 
 Mr. Darwin's Expression of the Emotions. It 
 would perhaps be more appropriate to point 
 to her stern adherence to the fact of human 
 nature as answering to the accuracy and im- 
 partiality of the scientific mind. Maggie 
 
12 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Tulliver's sudden love for a dandy like Stephen 
 Guest may grate against Mr. Swinburne's 
 critical feelings, but is, no doubt, true to 
 human nature. It is this fidelity to the 
 facts of life that gives the prominent sad- 
 ness to her works. She has chosen tragic 
 themes, and tragic events are apt to be 
 sad. Perhaps the most dominant idea of 
 her Weltanschauung is the conception of law 
 in human character. 
 
 Our deeds still travel with us from afar, 
 
 And what we have been makes us what we are, 
 
 might stand as a motto to all her works. 
 
 It is character in process of change that 
 engages all her interest. Hence there is less 
 of the conventional, less of the worldly, in 
 her work than in most great novelists. We 
 have soul speaking to soul : Dinah to Hetty, 
 Savonarola to Romola, Felix to Esther, Doro- 
 thea to Ladislaw, Mordecai to Deronda. When 
 the conventional is introduced it is chiefly for 
 humorous purposes; the humour of the im- 
 mortal scene at the Rainbow Inn in Silas 
 Marner consists in its archaic conventionality. 
 Interest of character is, however, the pre- 
 dominant interest of George Eliot's work. 
 Nearly one-half of Adam Bede is taken up 
 by the first week of the action, during which 
 we learn to know the chief characters. The 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 13 
 
 rest of the book hurries through nearly two 
 years before Adam is united to Dinah. This 
 attention to characterisation has exercised a 
 somewhat deleterious effect on her plots; so 
 long as we know what her characters are and 
 have become,, it does not so much matter 
 what becomes of them. Hence the frequent 
 resource to the Deus ex machind of sudden 
 death ; it is astonishing how many of her 
 characters are snatched from our view in this 
 way. Death by drowning seems to be the 
 favourite method: Dunstan Cass, Tom and 
 Maggie Tulliver, Tito Melema, Grandcourt, 
 all disappear in this abrupt way. It would 
 be unjust to pass from this aspect of her work 
 without a word of praise to her admirable 
 range of power, and to the marvellous ability 
 she possessed of giving life to her minor 
 characters. The moral earnestness of her 
 work is another prominent f note/ With her 
 the novel was morality teaching by example. 
 And the teaching was of an unusually lofty 
 character. Renunciation of self, subordina- 
 tion to the social life, were the great texts. 
 Egoism is the canker of the soul: Hetty, 
 Tito Melema, Grandcourt, are prominent 
 examples. Still more noteworthy is the ter- 
 rible example of the crippling of another's 
 life by one's egoism, . s in Rosamund Vincy 
 
 and Lydgate, to whom Casaubon and Doro- 
 
 >< ^ 
 
 STIVERS:.. 
 
14 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 thea form so fine a parallel and contrast. The 
 moral of The Spanish Gypsy lies in the ruin 
 wrought to the great schemes of Zarca by 
 the egoistic loves of Silva and Fedalma. The 
 whole aim of the novel as George Eliot wrote 
 it might be summed up in the words, /caflapons 
 of egoism. 
 
 The whole artistic career was dominated 
 by these ethical aims ; in her last work. The 
 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, she applied 
 herself consciously to direct ethical teaching. 
 The book consists of disconnected examples 
 of popular moral errors from which George 
 Eliot would free the world, 'debasing the 
 moral currency/ ' the modern Hep ! Hep ! 
 Hep ! ' and so on. As a consequence, the 
 artistic merits of Theophrastus Suck were far 
 below those of her other books, and it will 
 never have much more than a pathological 
 interest for the student of her works. 
 
 It remains to speak of her attempts in 
 verse. George Eliot will always afford a 
 striking example of the truth that the essen- 
 tial quality of the poet is the gift of song. 
 All the other qualities required for poetry 
 were possessed by her in high measure, yet 
 it is granted on all sides that her poetical 
 attempts were failures. The 'brother and 
 sister ' sonnets and the Comtean hymn, ' O 
 may I join the choir invisible ! ' in the Jubal 
 
GEORGE ELIOT 15 
 
 volume, a speech of Zarca's ('Nay, never 
 falter'), and a fine description of Truth by 
 Sephardo in The Spanish Gypsy, with, per- 
 haps, Ladislaw's song, ' Oh me, oh me, what 
 frugal cheer my love doth feed upon ! ' 
 these may find a place in anthologies, but 
 that is all. 
 
 Writing now with the sense of her loss 
 still fresh, it is impossible to forget that, for 
 those who knew her personally, she herself 
 was her greatest work. By her own training 
 she made herself probably the most accom- 
 plished woman the century has seen. She 
 brought to the world of art a greater extent 
 of culture than any predecessor, with the 
 possible exception of Goethe. Not alone was 
 she a veritable pundit in languages, with mas- 
 tery of French, German, and Italian, and 
 serviceable knowledge of Latin, Greek, Span- 
 ish, and Hebrew ; she was widely learned in 
 science and philosophy, and deeply read in 
 history ; her works teem with evidence of her 
 intimate knowledge of music and painting. 
 Add to all these accomplishments a width of 
 sympathy and acuteness of observation seldom 
 equalled, and one can form some idea of the 
 rich nature just taken from us. She could 
 draw such characters as Maggie Tulliver and 
 Dorothea Brooke, Mary Garth and Gwendolen 
 Harleth, Fedalma and Romola, because she 
 
16 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 herself had much that was present in them. 
 She has done a great deal for the cause of 
 woman by direct teaching, but she has done 
 most by giving the world assurance of the 
 possibilities of woman's excellence. 
 
THEOPHRASTUS SUCH 1 
 
 NY new book of George Eliot has 
 to encounter the formidable 
 rivalry of her earlier produc- 
 tions. In this age of competi- 
 tive examinations it is inevitable 
 that some attempt should be made to ' place ' 
 the new work in its ( order of merit/ Such a 
 test, however, tells with crushing force against 
 the Impressions of Theophrastus Such, which is 
 slighter in conception, less finished in execu- 
 tion, and altogether of less artistic value than 
 any other work that has appeared under her 
 name. In it are seen all the characteristics 
 of her later ' manner ' which critics have had 
 to deprecate. The scientific interest and tone 
 of her second period culminate in these 
 studies of mental pathology. The consummate 
 literary artist has degenerated into the student 
 of social psychology. 
 
 George Eliot's literary development falls 
 clearly and sharply into two stages. In the 
 earlier period, from the Scenes of Clerical Life 
 to Felix Holt (with the exception of Romola, 
 which stands apart in a sphere of its own, 
 
 B 
 
18 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 where The Spanish Gypsy, had it been written 
 in a natural medium, might have joined it), 
 she went back with loving memory to the 
 days and scenes of her childhood. In that 
 wonderful series of works she produced living 
 pictures of mid-England in the pre-Reform 
 days before old Leisure was dead, and while 
 the modern spirit was unborn. For width of 
 conception, for accuracy of touch, for nobil- 
 ity of tone, those works have a place apart 
 in English fiction. The next two novels, 
 Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, displayed a 
 new set of literary motives in their composi- 
 tion. The loving interest of the artist in 
 human nature was fused with the intellectual 
 interest of the scientific observer of the social 
 organism. The tales moved in a larger sphere, 
 had a wider scope, and also a deeper back- 
 ground than the earlier works. A new view 
 of the relations of man and society, and with 
 it a new philosophy of history, informed every 
 page and set every incident in a new light. 
 Along with this change or development of 
 tone there went a noticeable change of 
 manner. Dealing with conceptions novel to 
 her readers, George Eliot had to put them 
 directly before their eyes in passages only 
 interesting from a speculative point of view. 
 But this very need of explanation argued in- 
 complete f artistry ' (to use a word of Mr. 
 
1 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH ' 19 
 
 Browning's); there was evidently not that 
 direct rapport with her audience which is a 
 necessary pre-requisite of all great literary 
 art. However well suited Comtean concep- 
 tions may be for appeals to the literary 
 emotions, such appeals cannot fail to be less 
 telling when accompanied by elaborate ex- 
 planations of the conceptions upon which 
 their efficacy depends. This reflective or 
 scientific side of her later works has seriously 
 diminished their effectiveness, and the attempt 
 to rouse an interest in the history of modern 
 Judaism in Daniel Deronda was, with the 
 ordinary reader, a complete failure. And it 
 must be remembered that in really great 
 works of art the decision rests with the 
 ' ordinary reader ' ; success is here the real 
 test of merit. No poem is great if only a 
 small coterie admire it. What is to be the 
 decision on George Eliot's last two great 
 works depends upon the future of the specula- 
 tive system with which they are connected. 
 If the social philosophy there taught be that 
 of the future, then Middlemarch and Daniel 
 Deronda may become as gospels. But the 
 risk has been run of subordinating the eternal 
 truths of art to what may be the temporary 
 opinions of science ; and, in any case, the 
 presence of the purely analytical element in 
 her later works must necessarily detract from 
 
20 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 their artistic value as indicating a certain 
 spiritual divergence of George Eliot from her 
 readers. As a matter of fact, the intellectual 
 or scientific element in the last two works 
 did alienate her audience's sympathy, and 
 thus frustrated the artist's function, to ' arrest, 
 arouse, and excite.' 
 
 This scientific element comes to a head in 
 Theophrastus Such. Instead of a new novel, 
 George Eliot has given us some careful but 
 unsympathetic analyses of certain phases of 
 human character: admirable dissections, no 
 doubt; but life has fled under the scalpel. Our 
 emotions refuse to be moved by a description 
 of Aliquis or Quispiam ; and, what is more, the 
 author herself fails to feel the artist's sympathy 
 with her creations. The pathos of Merman's 
 struggle against the errors of Grampus, in the 
 section entitled ' How we encourage Research/ 
 is nullified by a certain kindly contempt which 
 finds expression in some rather Teutonic or 
 f cetacean ' witticisms. And throughout there 
 is a tendency to harshness in censure which is 
 not to be found in the writer's more extended 
 works. The whole book is devoted to the 
 foibles and failings of man, and thus leaves an 
 unpleasant feeling. The head, not the heart, 
 has produced this book, the reader feels, and 
 his heart fails to respond to pure intellect. It 
 is worthy of note that most of the sketches 
 
'THEOPHRASTUS SUCH' 21 
 
 deal with phases of literary life which have 
 been the object of George Eliot's mature and 
 conscious observation. It would seem that 
 the novelist's plastic period closes at an early 
 age : Dickens was never at home with railways, 
 George Eliot as an artist feels strange after 
 the Reform Bill is passed. Of later London 
 life she has, no doubt, been an observant 
 spectator, but there is the greatest possible 
 difference shown in the reproductions in her 
 earliest and latest work : spontaneous art in 
 the Scenes of Clerical Life, conscious effort in 
 these Sketches of Literary Life. And in her 
 latest book the nearest approach to the manner 
 of her first period is displayed in the supposed 
 autobiographical recollections of Mr. Such 
 when he is f looking back ' to ' the time when 
 ' the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show 
 1 me my own shadow as that of a small boy on 
 ' a small pony, riding by the side of a larger 
 ' cob-mounted shadow over the breezy up- 
 ' lands which we used to dignify with the 
 ' name of hills, or along by-roads with broad 
 ( grassy borders and hedgerows reckless of 
 1 utility, on our way to outlying hamlets, 
 ' whose groups of inhabitants were as distinct 
 ' to my imagination as if they had belonged 
 ' to different regions of the globe/ 
 
 The passages descriptive of earlier England 
 in the same section are in her very best style, 
 
22 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 and contrast markedly with the first section, 
 'Looking Inward/ where the pseudonymous 
 writer analyses with subtle skill his claims as 
 a scientific observer and describer of other 
 men's failings. The following quotation shows 
 the old manner : 
 
 'Our rural tracts where no Babel- 
 chimney scales the heavens are without 
 ' mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense 
 ' of an outer world unconquerably aloof from 
 ' our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds 
 ' (and let us try to keep them such for the 
 ' children's children who will inherit no other 
 
 * sort of demesne) ; the grasses and reeds nod 
 ' to each other over the river, but we have 
 ' cut a canal close by ; the very heights laugh 
 
 * with corn in August or lift the plough-team 
 ' against the sky in September. Then comes 
 ' a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and 
 
 * barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made 
 ' in the fading mother's face or a new curve 
 ' of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are 
 ' cut through or the breaches between them 
 ' spanned, we choose our level, and the white 
 f steam-pennon flies along it. But because 
 ' our land shows this readiness to be changed, 
 s all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender 
 ' attachment instead of awe : some of us, at 
 ' least, love the scanty relics of our forests, 
 ' and are thankful if a bush is left of the old 
 
' THEOPHRASTUS SUCH ' 23 
 
 1 hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where 
 ' the delicate ivy-leafed toad-flax hangs its 
 ' light branches, or a bit of grey thatch with 
 ( patches of dark moss on its shoulder and 
 ( a troop of grass-stems on its ridge, is a 
 ' thing to visit. And then the tiled roof of 
 f cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed 
 ' where generations of the milky mothers 
 f have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered 
 e barns where the old-fashioned flail once made 
 ' resonant music, while the watch-dog barked 
 f at the timidly venturesome fowls making 
 ' pecking raids on the outflying grain the 
 ' roofs that have looked out from among the 
 e elms and walnut-trees, or beside the yearly 
 ' group of hay and corn stacks, or below the 
 e square stone steeple, gathering their grey 
 ' or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green 
 c mosses under all ministries, let us praise 
 ' the sober harmonies they give to our land- 
 ( scape, helping to unite us pleasantly with 
 ' the elder generations who tilled the soil for 
 c us before we were born, and paid heavier 
 1 and heavier taxes, with much grumbling, 
 ' but without that deepest root of corruption 
 1 the self-indulgent despair which cuts down 
 ' and consumes and never plants/ 
 
 The next quotation illustrates the new 
 style : 
 
 ' Introspection which starts with the pur- 
 
24 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 * pose of finding out one's own absurdities is not 
 ' likely to be very mischievous, yet of course 
 ' it is not free from dangers any more than 
 ' breathing is, or the other functions that keep 
 ' us alive and active. To judge of others by 
 ' one's-self is in its most innocent meaning 
 ' the briefest expression for our only method 
 ' of knowing mankind ; yet we perceive it has 
 ' come to mean in many cases either the 
 ' vulgar mistake which reduces every man's 
 ' value to the very low figure at which the 
 ' valuer himself happens to stand ; or else, the 
 e amiable illusion of the higher nature misled 
 ' by a too generous construction of the lower. 
 ' One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment : 
 ' it resembles appropriate muscular action, 
 ' which is attained by the myriad lessons in 
 ' nicety of balance and of aim that only 
 1 practice can give. The danger of the in- 
 ' verse procedure, judging of self by what one 
 ' observes in others, if it is carried on with 
 ' much impartiality and keenness of discern- 
 ' ment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeeb- 
 ' ling the energies of indignation and scorn, 
 ' which are the proper scourges of wrong-doing 
 ' and meanness, and which should continually 
 ' feed the wholesome restraining power of 
 ' public opinion.' 
 
 In terming these Impressions scientific, we 
 do not mean to say that they are written 
 
' THEOPHRASTUS SUCH ' 25 
 
 in any scientific jargon ; indeed, we have less 
 of sesquipedalian technicalities than in Daniel 
 Deronda; but the whole tone is scientific. 
 Without indulging in any such elaborate 
 antitheses as are the glory of the schoolboy's 
 essay, it may be said that the artistic and 
 scientific modes of treating human nature 
 differ in this, that science seeks to find general 
 analogies, while art aims at individual real- 
 ities. The sketchy character of these studies 
 no doubt brings into greater prominence their 
 want of artistic reality. If the author had 
 elaborated any of them into novels or even 
 into ' scenes,' the artist instinct would have 
 given life to the dead bones of scientific 
 analysis. And what is more, the reader would 
 have been spared that unsympathy with her 
 own puppets which may be scientific impar- 
 tiality, but is certainly inartistic harshness. 
 Humour would then have dealt tenderly with 
 those deficiencies which wit, and that of a 
 somewhat lumbering character, now mercilessly 
 exposes. One of the sections deals with the 
 habit of scoffing and parody as ' debasing the 
 moral currency/ yet what is it but debasing 
 the artistic currency to ring the changes on 
 Grampus, Lord Narwhal, Prof. Sperm N. 
 Whale, Dugong, and Butzkopf (=Delphinus 
 orca) ? The name^Merman brings into humor- 
 ous contrast his more human qualities ; but is 
 
26 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 not the ' ancient and fish-like smell' with 
 which Teutonic erudition is, by implication, 
 connected in these appellatives, just a case of 
 ' debasing the moral currency ' in its depreci- 
 ation of the minute accuracy and unselfish 
 devotion of German scholarship ? Indeed, the 
 names throughout throw much light on the 
 characters of the book. In most cases they 
 represent exactly that particular phase of a 
 character which is brought forward, the limb 
 which is to represent the whole figure. We 
 can all guess beforehand to what sort of char- 
 acters names like Touchwood, Mordax, and 
 Scintilla will be applied. The more individual 
 the name the more of the uncertainty of real 
 life about the character: that will be found 
 to be a good working test. Thus Pummel, 
 who serves in some inexplicable way as a 
 ' watchdog of knowledge/ stands out well de- 
 fined. 'What is the cause of the tides, 
 ' Pummel ? ' ' Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. 
 ' Many gives their opinion, but if I was to 
 ' give mine, it 'ud be different.' That is a touch 
 worthy of the hand that drew Mrs. Poyser 
 and Dolly Winthrop. 
 
 And as the scientific spirit shows itself in 
 these unreal abstractions of truncated char- 
 acters, so we have it again in the manner of 
 their presentation. The inordinate length of 
 the sentences and the frequent obscurity of 
 
. 
 
 'THEOPHRASTUS SUCH' 27 
 
 sense are other symptoms of the same char- 
 acteristic. Science abhors the epigram ; its 
 half-truth^ though it may be the better half of 
 truth, is repugnant to the exactness of science. 
 For purposes of science we must have all 
 the amplifications and exceptions necessary for 
 accuracy, and consequently we must have long 
 and unwieldy sentences. In Theophrastus Such 
 we have noticed one sentence dragging its 
 laborious length over twenty- two lines, and we 
 reckon the average length at about eight lines. 
 In one place it takes two whole pages (pp. 288, 
 289) to complete four sentences. Another 
 f note ' of the scientific style is its tendency 
 to draw out all the attenuated meaning of a 
 sentence. We have many instances of sen- 
 tences which contain truths that are tolerably 
 obvious, in phraseology by no means obvious 
 to a first reading. The book throughout is 
 hard reading, and the style at times harsh 
 in the extreme ; what a falling off from the 
 limpid truths of her earlier books ! Even in 
 Daniel Deronda the reader comes across such 
 fine things as c Those who trust us educate us ' 
 a noble truth, nobly expressed. He will 
 have difficulty in finding a single sentence in 
 this book which is worthy to be put by its side. 
 The artistic value of the book is further 
 spoiled by its evident didactic purpose. If 
 the characters here delineated do not ' adorn 
 
28 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 a tale/ they are certainly intended to ' point 
 a moral.' Throughout George Eliot's literary 
 career ethical interests have been predominant. 
 With her the novel has been morality teaching 
 by example. But hitherto she has been content 
 with the subtle insinuation of the artist, and 
 has left alone the direct assault of the preacher ; 
 she has given texts, not sermons. But in her 
 last book there is rather too much direct 
 preaching; it might be a little hard, but it 
 would not be altogether untrue, to call the 
 Impressions skeleton sermons. Even from 
 the ethical point of view the result is unsatis- 
 factory; how much less effective a lesson is 
 taught by Mixtus than by Lydgate in Middle- 
 march, though this is partly due to neces- 
 sarily lighter treatment. With the character 
 of her teaching every one is now familiar. 
 Subordinate yourself to the social organism, 
 suppress self; this is her ever-recurring cry. 
 All honour to the nobleness and purity of the 
 teaching. After all, that is the characteristic 
 which raises this book above all other descrip- 
 tions of 'characters/ from the second book 
 of Aristotle's Rhetoric to La Bruyere; but 
 it comes too often to the surface, is pressed 
 too markedly upon our notice. 
 
 Nowhere does the inferior effectiveness of 
 the intellectual as compared with the artistic 
 treatment of a subject come into greater 
 
'THEOPHRASTUS SUCH' 20 
 
 prominence than in the last chapter of the 
 book 'The Modern Hep! Hep ! Hep !' (the 
 rallying cry of the persecutions of the Jews by 
 the Crusaders). That George Eliot should 
 feel tempted to defend her choice of a subject 
 in Daniel Deronda is only natural; but the 
 striking thing is how far inferior is this 
 defence, appealing to the intellect, when 
 compared with exactly the same arguments as 
 urged by the passionate rhetoric of Mordecai 
 in the book itself. Ignorance of, and want of 
 sympathy with, modern Judaism may blind 
 the reader to the extraordinary power of 
 Mordecai's orations, perhaps the greatest tour 
 de force of their author ; but any one can see 
 how much more effective, even from an argu- 
 mentative point of view, are the passionate 
 utterances of the latest prophet than the calm 
 reasoning of his creator. 
 
 We have dealt with Impressions of Theo- 
 phrastus Such in comparison with its author's 
 other works, and it is clear that it cannot, in 
 conception, style, or effectiveness, stand the 
 test. It may consequently appear somewhat 
 unfair to upbraid the book for failing to be 
 what it does not profess to be. But a great 
 artist owes duties to the world as much as 
 deserves gratitude from it. When one who 
 has it in her power to add to the world's 
 wealth of beauty turns aside from the arduous 
 
30 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 conception of a great work to execute pre- 
 paratory sketches not worthy of mention by 
 the side of her other works, it is impossible to 
 refrain from deploring the loss to the world. 
 Let others take upon themselves to compare 
 these 'characters' with similar literary pro- 
 ductions ; for us none but herself can be her 
 parallel. Others may take up the half-disguised 
 challenge of the motto from Phaedrus (3 Prol. 
 45-50); we do not care to discuss whether 
 Pepin is Mr. Gladstone or Dugong Du Bois- 
 Reymond. 
 
 For us,, the chief interest in George Eliot's 
 new work has been that which we are confident 
 will be its chief interest to the future students 
 of her works. The light thrown by it on the 
 scientific strain in her literary character, the 
 light thrown upon the workmanship of her 
 second period, give the book a sort of patho- 
 logical interest to the student of literature. 
 The choice of the autobiographical form (used 
 only once before, in the remarkable sketch a la 
 E. A. Poe, The Lifted Veil) may have its 
 significance for the next generation. But, 
 apart from these points of view, the studies 
 are but chips from the workshop, which might 
 well have been left on the ground, only to be 
 lifted thence at the time when everything of 
 the author shall become precious. 
 
'ESSAYS' 
 
 iHESE essays will not add to the 
 reputation of their author. Re- 
 printed chiefly from the West- 
 minster Review, it would be diffi- 
 cult to say that they stand promi- 
 nently above the general average of such essays. 
 Each of the quarterlies has created for itself a 
 type, and these reviews are of the type familiar 
 to us in such writers as the late W. R. Greg. 
 They date from the period before Mr. Mat- 
 thew Arnold had imported the method of 
 Sainte-Beuve into English criticism, and in con- 
 sequence they suffer by comparison with later 
 work of a more subtle and artistic character. 
 George Eliot's essays have not sufficient in- 
 dividuality to deserve new life for their own 
 sake ; on the other hand, they throw valuable 
 light on certain problems connected with her 
 art, and on this account merit republication. 
 
 The collection inevitably raises what must 
 be the chief critical problem in connection 
 with the literary career of George Eliot. 
 How is it, the reader is impelled to ask, that 
 a mind which produced these essays chiefly 
 
 31 
 
32 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 during the years 1855 and 1856 could have 
 given the Scenes of Clerical Life to the world 
 a year later? What was the determining 
 motive which changed the translator of Strauss 
 and Feuerbach and the writer of these essays 
 into the loving creator of Mr. Gilfil, of Bartle 
 Massey, and of Dinah Morris? It is not so 
 much the late flowering of her genius that is 
 noteworthy. The end of the ' thirties ' seems 
 the appropriate period for a novelist's debut. 
 Both Thackeray and Miss Austen were thirty- 
 seven (the same age as George Eliot in 1857) 
 when Vanity Fair and Sense and Sensibility 
 respectively appeared ; Trollope was thirty- 
 nine when The Warden was published; and 
 Walter Scott was as old as forty-three when 
 Waverley first delighted the world. But all 
 these had given indication in one way or 
 another of their powers, and had certainly not 
 given indication of ability of quite a different 
 calibre and in quite an opposite tendency of 
 mind; whereas George Eliot up to her first 
 appearance as a novelist had shown marked 
 capacity for abstract thought, the very an- 
 tithesis of the concrete imagination essential 
 for the novelist. 
 
 Up to the age of thirty-seven what do we 
 find in George Eliot's writings? A vivid 
 appreciation of the course of religious thought, 
 a considerable power of social generalisation, 
 
'ESSAYS' S3 
 
 and, above all, a deep interest in the scientific 
 and philosophic speculations of her time. If 
 any one had ventured a prophecy of her 
 future career, he would surely have anticipated 
 some incursion into the region of religious 
 reconstruction, as was the case with her friend 
 Miss Hennell. He might have foreseen in 
 her another Harriet Martineau, with a deeper 
 ethical basis, but with the same tendency to 
 pure reason. The last thought that would 
 have entered the minds of her most intimate 
 friends up to that date would have been that 
 Marian Evans would revive in the enduring 
 form of art the reminiscences of her early 
 days, which she seemed to have left so far 
 behind her. 
 
 Certainly the essays before us indicated no 
 such future. One of them, indeed, dealing 
 with the Natural History of German Life, 
 proves that George Eliot had observed as 
 closely the English peasant as her author 
 Riehl had studied the German species. Take 
 the following picture : 
 
 ( Observe a company of haymakers. When 
 ' you see them at a distance, tossing up the 
 f forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the 
 ' waggon creeps slowly with its increasing 
 ' burthen over the meadow, and the bright 
 ' green space which tells of work done gets 
 f larger and larger, you pronounce the scene 
 c 
 
34 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' " smiling," and you think these companions 
 ' in labour must be as bright and cheerful as 
 ' the picture to which they give animation. 
 ' Approach nearer, and you will certainly find 
 ' that haymaking time is a time for joking, 
 ' especially if there are women among the 
 ' labourers ; but the coarse laugh that bursts 
 ' out every now and then, and expresses the 
 ' triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from 
 ' your conception of idyllic merriment. That 
 ' delicious effervescence of the mind which we 
 ' call fun has no equivalent for the northern 
 ' peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm 
 ' of fancy and imagination for the English 
 ' clown exists at the bottom of the third 
 ( quart-pot.' 
 
 This passage certainly shows observation, 
 but for all one can tell it may merely be the 
 scientific observation of the psychologist, not 
 the sympathetic reproduction of the artist. 
 As yet it lacks the concretising touch. 
 Similarly, when the writer goes on to remark, 
 ' It is quite true that a thresher is likely to 
 ' be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheat- 
 ' ing, but he is not the less likely to carry 
 ' home his master's corn in his shoes and 
 ' pocket,' we have no warranty that this could 
 be expanded into the Ben Tholoway of Adam 
 Bede. And even when George Eliot notices 
 the custom of distinguishing cousins by refer- 
 
'ESSAYS' 35 
 
 ring them to their father's name, we cannot de- 
 duce the figure of Timothy's Bess's Ben in the 
 same novel. Observation is, indeed, needed 
 for the novel, but some kinds of observation 
 are destructive of all individualising. Tell a 
 painter to observe his hand as he paints and 
 the result will be disastrous. Similarly, if a 
 writer consciously notices the processes which 
 make up his creations, they are doomed as 
 artistic presentations. Observation must have 
 become unconscious and ingrained in the 
 artist's mind before it can aid in giving the 
 realistic details of the novel. 
 
 And further, the novelist requires some- 
 thing more than keen observation of the 
 workings of human nature; this is useless 
 without the power and the love of story-tell- 
 ing. Nothing in these essays, nothing in the 
 impression George Eliot made on her friends, 
 indicated her possession of the faculty that 
 builds up incident and character into a story. 
 To the last she was somewhat deficient in 
 this, as is shown by the fact that she displays 
 none of the worker's joy in her own produc- 
 tion. To tell a story requires that one should 
 have lived a story. And it was probably the 
 exceptional nature of her relations with 
 George Henry Lewes, which commenced in 
 1854, that brought about the change in 
 George Eliot which we have been attempting 
 
36 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 to point out. Without going into the merits 
 of the case, for which there are at present no 
 trustworthy data, it is clear that to George 
 Eliot the anti-social attitude which circum- 
 stances caused her to take up brought a 
 complete revolution in her whole moral being, 
 which was shaken to the depths. The modern 
 novel is one of problem, not of action, and her 
 own problematic position rendered her the 
 more sensitive to the artistic side of this form 
 of the novel. 
 
 These remarks may serve to illustrate a 
 remarkable passage in the same essay from 
 which the previous quotations were taken. 
 George Eliot's theory of the function of the 
 novel is there given, as well as her view of 
 Dickens's art, which was developed by George 
 Henry Lewes in the Fortnightly Review after 
 Dickens's death. The whole passage deserves 
 quotation : 
 
 ' The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, 
 * whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the ex- 
 ' tension of our sympathies. Appeals founded 
 c on generalisations and statistics require a 
 ' sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment 
 1 already in activity ; but a picture of human 
 1 life such as a great artist can give surprises 
 ' even the trivial and the selfish into that 
 c attention to what is apart from themselves, 
 ( which may be called the raw material of 
 
'ESSAYS' 37 
 
 f moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into 
 ' Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the 
 f story of The Two Drovers, when Words- 
 ' worth sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan, 
 ' when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing 
 ' yearningly over the gate which leads from 
 ' the highway into the first wood he ever saw, 
 ' when Hornung paints a group of chimney- 
 ( sweepers, more is done towards linking the 
 f higher classes with the lower, towards ob- 
 ' literating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than 
 1 by hundreds of sermons and philosophical 
 ' dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to 
 1 life ; it is a mode of amplifying experience 
 ' and extending our contact with our fellow- 
 ' men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. 
 ' All the more sacred is the task of the artist 
 ' when he undertakes to paint the life of the 
 ' People. Falsification here is far more per- 
 ' nicious than in the more artificial aspects of 
 ' life. It is not so very serious that we should 
 ' have false ideas about evanescent fashions 
 f about the manners and conversations of 
 ' beaux and duchesses ; but it is serious that 
 ' our sympathy with the perennial joys and 
 ( struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the 
 ' humour in the life of our more heavily laden 
 ' fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned 
 ( towards a false object instead of the true one. 
 ' This perversion is not the less fatal because 
 
38 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' the misrepresentation which gives rise to it 
 ' has what the artist considers a moral end. 
 ' The thing for mankind to know is, not what 
 ' are the motives and influences which the 
 ' moralist thinks ought to act on the labourer 
 ' or the artisan, but what are the motives and 
 
 influences which do act on him. We want 
 
 to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan 
 ' or the sentimental peasant, but for the 
 ' peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the 
 
 artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. We 
 ' have one great novelist who is gifted with 
 ' the utmost power of rendering the external 
 ' traits of our town population ; and if he 
 ' could give us their psychological character 
 f their conceptions of life, and their emotions 
 ' with the same truth as their idiom and 
 f manners, his books would be the greatest 
 < contribution Art has ever made to the 
 ' awakening of social sympathies. But while 
 
 he can copy Mrs. Flemish's colloquial style 
 : with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, 
 
 while there is the same startling inspiration 
 ' in his description of the gestures and phrases 
 ' of " Boots," as in the speeches of Shake- 
 ' speare's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever 
 ' passes from the humorous and external to 
 ' the emotional and tragic, without becoming 
 ' as transcendent in his unreality as he was a 
 ' moment before in his artistic truthfulness. 
 
'ESSAYS' 39 
 
 ' But for the precious salt of his humour, 
 ' which compels him to reproduce external 
 ' traits that serve, in some degree, as a cor- 
 ' rective to his frequently false psychology, his 
 ' preternaturally virtuous poor children and 
 ( artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and 
 ' courtesans, would be as noxious as Eugene 
 ' Sue's idealised proletaires in encouraging the 
 ' miserable fallacy that high morality and re- 
 ( fined sentiment can grow out of harsh social 
 e relations, ignorance, and want ; or that the 
 1 working classes are in a condition to enter 
 f at once into a millennial state of altruism, 
 ( wherein every one is caring for every one 
 ' else, and no one for himself.' 
 
 The frequent reference to psychology in 
 this passage is significant, and indicates the 
 dangerous tendency in George Eliot's own art 
 which led to the psychological strain in Middle- 
 march and Daniel Deronda, and finally resulted 
 in the psychological scarecrows of Theo- 
 phrastus Such. To the novelist f the curtain 
 is the picture/ and if he turns to the psycho- 
 logist to analyse the painting, only the canvas 
 and frame remain intact. There is too great 
 a tendency for the psychological novelist to 
 regard his characters as so many corpora vilia 
 for his scientific theories. Luckily for George 
 Eliot her interests were ethical rather than 
 psychological, and if she ever does violence to 
 
40 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 art, it is in the interest of morality rather than 
 of science. 
 
 And this leads us to discuss for a moment 
 the need of culture for the novelist. Obviously 
 intellectual training is not alone sufficient. 
 George Henry Lewes was exactly on a par 
 with George Eliot in this regard, yet his 
 Ranthorpe was deservedly a failure. Nor is 
 culture combined with observation a complete 
 equipment for the novelist. Riehl is allowed 
 by George Eliot herself to have had a com- 
 plete knowledge of the German peasant, and 
 was besides a man of great culture ; yet his 
 Culturgeschichtliche Novellen, though republished 
 by the Pitt Press, can scarcely rank as classic. 
 On the other hand, Auerbach and George 
 Eliot show that wide culture is no necessary 
 bar to sympathetic delineation of the life 
 furthest removed from culture. In so far as 
 culture is real and has become instinctive and 
 unconscious, it undoubtedly tends to give a 
 wider background to the artistic picture and 
 to affect us at more various points of contact. 
 But observation, psychology, and culture can 
 only increase the artistic value of the novel in 
 so far as they are unconsciously applied and 
 subordinated to the interest of character and 
 incident. The selective principle with re- 
 gard to the latter cannot be of an intellectual, 
 conscious kind at all : it must clearly be 
 
' ESSAYS' 41 
 
 of an emotional nature akin to the moral 
 faculty. 
 
 It is at this point that we touch the secret 
 spring of George Eliot's art : her whole work 
 is imbued with ethical notions. The novel is, 
 no less than the poem, a criticism of life ; and 
 the remarkable influence of George Eliot's 
 novels has been mainly due to the consistent 
 application of moral ideas to the problems set 
 by each novel. Their stimulative effect was 
 due to the fact that her ethical views were in 
 consonance with some of the most advanced 
 ideas of the age. The three chief principles 
 which dominated her thinking were the reign 
 of law in human affairs, the solidarity of 
 society, and the constitution of society as 
 incarnate history (the phrase is Riehl's). 
 Flowing from these were the ethical laws 
 which rule the world of her novels, the 
 principle summed up in Novalis's words, 
 ( Character is Fate,' the radiation of good 
 and evil deeds throughout society, and the 
 supreme claims of family or race. Add to 
 these the scientific tone of impartiality, with 
 its moral analogue, the extension of sympathy 
 to all, and we have exhausted the idees meres 
 of George Eliot's ethical system, which differ- 
 entiates her novels from all others of the age. 
 
 These general remarks on George Eliot's 
 art have been suggested by the essay on 
 
42 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Riehl's studies of the natural history of 
 German life, in which the author gives at 
 once her theory of the function of the 
 novelist and her general agreement with 
 Riehl on the psychology of the peasants who 
 were to form the main subjects of her novels. 
 Other essays in this volume are similarly 
 interesting,, owing to the light they throw on 
 her religious views. Two of them on the 
 poet Young and on Dr. Gumming deal with 
 the chief moral defects she had found in the 
 religion in which she had been brought up. 
 In the former she deals with the Divine 
 Policeman theory of virtue, which was so 
 favoured by Voltaire and was the chief argu- 
 ment formerly used to defend the immortality 
 of the soul. It is impossible to mistake the 
 personal tone of the following protest against 
 this theory : 
 
 ( We can imagine the man who ' ' denies his 
 1 soul immortal " replying, " It is quite possible 
 ' that you would be a knave, and love yourself 
 ' alone, if it were not for your belief in immor- 
 f tality ; but you are not to force upon me 
 ' what would result from your own utter want 
 ' of moral emotion. I am just and honest, not 
 ' because I expect to live in another world, 
 ' but because, having felt the pain of injustice 
 ' and dishonesty towards myself, I have a 
 ' fellow-feeling with other men, who would 
 f suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dis- 
 
< ESSAYS' 48 
 
 ' honest towards them. Why should I give 
 1 my neighbour short weight in this world, 
 ' because there is not another world in which 
 ' I should have nothing to weigh out to him ? 
 ' I am honest because I don't like to inflict 
 e evil on others in this life, not because I 'm 
 ' afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact 
 ' is, I do not love myself alone, whatever logi- 
 ' cal necessity there may be for that conclusion 
 ' in your mind. I have a tender love for my 
 ' wife, and children, and friends, and through 
 e that love I sympathise with like affections in 
 ' other men. It is a pang to me to witness 
 ' the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his 
 ' suffering the more acutely because he is 
 { mortal because his life is so short, and I 
 ' would have it, if possible, filled with happi- 
 ' ness and not misery. Through my union 
 ' and fellowship with the men and women I 
 ' have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, 
 ' sympathy with those I have not seen ; and I 
 ' am able so to live in imagination with the 
 ' generations to come that their good is not 
 ' alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labour 
 ' for ends which may not benefit myself, but 
 ' will benefit them. It is possible that you 
 ' might prefer to ' live the brute/ to sell 
 ' your country, or to slay your father, if 
 * you were not afraid of some disagreeable 
 ' consequences from the criminal laws of 
 ' another world ; but even if I could con- 
 
44 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' ceive no motive but by my own worldly 
 ' interest or the gratification of my animal 
 ' desires, I have not observed that beastliness, 
 ' treachery, and parricide are the direct way 
 * to happiness and comfort on earth." ' 
 
 Again, in the scathing review of Dr. Cam- 
 ming' s sermons, George Eliot protests with 
 equal energy against the older Evangelical 
 teaching that all virtue is useless unless done 
 ad majorem Dei gloriam (p. 192). We thus see 
 that it was disagreement with the ethical 
 foundations of the current theology of her 
 time which caused her revolt from it. Again, 
 the chief interest of a somewhat unsym- 
 pathetic review of Mr. Lecky's History of 
 Rationalism consists in a passage at the end, in 
 which she calls attention to 'the supremely 
 important fact' that science had brought 
 about a conception of the orderly action of 
 law on human nature, a conception which, as 
 has been seen, dominated her whole thought. 
 
 The only paper of purely literary interest 
 in this volume is one on Heine, which is for 
 the most part made up of translations of auto- 
 biographic fragments. It contains, indeed, an 
 elaborate contrast of wit and humour, which 
 is hardly more successful than the many other 
 attempts in the same direction, and an antithe- 
 sis of French wit and German humour, which 
 is merely an expansion of a popular prejudice. 
 
'ESSAYS' 46 
 
 One fine illustration redeems the essay, how- 
 ever ; George Eliot gives as a specimen of a 
 Heinesque lyric Wordsworth's She dwelt among 
 the untrodden ways, the last line of which is 
 exactly in the manner of Heine. For the rest 
 one is surprised at the very ordinary and ex- 
 ternal character of her criticism. Her mind 
 was clearly constructive, not critical, and it is 
 a fundamental error to suppose that her genius 
 was analytical. 
 
 An Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt, 
 and an account of a three-months' stay at 
 Weimar complete the essays. The former re- 
 peats at some length the political harangues 
 in the novel. When Mr. Lowe said, ' Come, 
 let us educate our new masters,' George Eliot, 
 in the character of a working man, said, 
 ' Come, let us educate ourselves.' Her in- 
 tensely conservative feeling comes out strongly 
 in her appeals for the preservation of social 
 order; the notion that society is incamate 
 history was sufficient to condemn with her 
 any sudden alteration in social relations. The 
 chief point of practical advice in the address 
 is, however, the recognition of the need of 
 culture and opportunities for culture by the 
 masses. Of the account of Weimar it is suffi- 
 cient to say that it might have been written 
 by any English lady of education. 
 
 Attached to these essays are a few Leaves 
 f ^ 
 TTNIV 
 
46 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 from a Note-Book that might very well have 
 been omitted. They are of the period and 
 the type of Theophrastus Such, and their style 
 is of the same harsh character, as may be 
 judged by the opening sentence : 
 
 * To lay down in the shape of practical moral 
 f rules courses of conduct only to be made real 
 ' by the rarest states of motive and disposi- 
 c tion, tends not to elevate but to degrade the 
 ' general standard, by turning that rare attain- 
 ' ment from an object of admiration into an 
 1 impossible prescription, against which the 
 1 average nature first rebels and then flings 
 ' out ridicule/ 
 
 Of course a mind of the power of George 
 Eliot's could not have been occupied with 
 such varied subjects without hitting upon 
 some novel points of view or felicitous phrases. 
 Of the latter we may pick out the reference 
 of Young's faults to a ' pedagogic fallacy/ 
 akin to Mr. Ruskin's 'pathetic fallacy.' Again, 
 the following points are well put : 
 
 ' Virtue, with Young, must always squint 
 ' must never look straight towards the im- 
 ' mediate object of its emotion and effort. 
 ' Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow 
 ( himself rather than forsake a weaker com- 
 ' rade, he must either do this because his 
 ' hopes and fears are directed to another 
 < world, or because he desires to applaud 
 
'ESSAYS' 47 
 
 ' himself afterwards ! Young, if we may be- 
 ' lieve him, would despise the action as folly, 
 ' unless it had these motives. Let us hope 
 ' he was not so bad as he pretended to be ! 
 ' The tides of the divine life in man move 
 ' under the thickest ice of theory. 5 
 
 ' Love does not say, " I ought to love " 
 ' it loves. Pity does not say, " It is right to 
 1 be pitiful " it pities. Justice does not say, 
 ( "I am bound to be just" it feels justly. 
 ' It is only where moral emotion is compara- 
 ' tively weak that the contemplation of a rule 
 ' or theory habitually mingles with its action ; 
 ' and in accordance with this, we think ex- 
 ( perience, both in literature and life, has 
 ' shown that the minds which are predomi- 
 ' nantly didactic are deficient in sympathetic 
 ' emotion. A man who is perpetually thinking 
 ' in monitory apophthegms, who has an unin- 
 * termittent flux of rebuke, can have little 
 e energy left for simple feeling.' 
 
 ' The deepest curse of wrong-doing, whether 
 ' of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its 
 ' effects are difficult to be undone. I suppose 
 ' there is hardly anything more to be shud- 
 4 dered at than that part of the history of 
 ' disease which shows how, when a man in- 
 ' jures his constitution by a life of vicious 
 ' excess, his children and grandchildren inherit 
 ' diseased bodies and minds, and how the 
 
48 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' effects of that unhappy inheritance continue 
 ' to spread beyond our calculation. This is 
 ' only one example of the law by which human 
 ' lives are linked together : another example 
 ' of what we complain of when we point to 
 ' our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of 
 ' multitudes among our fellow-countrymen, to 
 1 the weight of taxation laid on us by blame- 
 
 able wars, to the wasteful channels made 
 
 for the public money, to the expense and 
 ' trouble of getting justice, and call these the 
 c effects of bad rule. This is the law that 
 ' we all bear the yoke of, the law of no man's 
 ' making, and which no man can undo.' 
 
 But such passages are few and far between, 
 and the general impression is left, how much 
 the hack-work of genius resembles that of 
 ordinary mortals. And though not all signs 
 of genius are wanting, these articles are 
 essentially unfinished studies and give no 
 foreshadowing of the finished product. Their 
 interest is purely relative to the light they 
 throw on George Eliot's mental develop- 
 ment. 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE'* 
 
 JHESE long-expected volumes 
 have been compiled with great 
 tact. Mr. Cross has aimed at 
 making them a self-revelation 
 of his wife's career and char- 
 acter, and he has been for the most part 
 successful in the discharge of this difficult 
 undertaking. Some slight confusion may be 
 at times caused by the uninterrupted printing 
 of extracts of diverse tone, date, and subject ; 
 this might have been obviated by judicious 
 ' spacing' between the successive entries. 
 There are obviously many omissions, and some 
 of the materials already utilised in Miss Blind's 
 little book would have borne repetition. At 
 times, too, the reader may feel the need of 
 comment or illustration, while the continental 
 descriptions might have been curtailed. But, 
 these slight deductions made, the book is 
 remarkably satisfactory in tone, and is especi- 
 ally noteworthy for a rigid abstinence from 
 anything that could pander to mere curiosity. 
 
 * George Eliot s Life, as related in her Letters and 
 Journals. Arranged and edited by her Husband, 
 J. W. Cross. 3 vols. (Blackwood Sons.) 
 
 D 
 
50 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 The novel method of extracts arranged in 
 order of time tells the tale spontaneously, and 
 George Eliot the woman stands forth revealed 
 to the world in all the strength and refine- 
 ment of her intellect, in all the clinging 
 trustfulness of her moral and emotional nature. 
 And as regards George Eliot the writer we 
 learn as much as it is needful to know about 
 the motives and processes of her art and the 
 outward circumstances of her activity as author. 
 The interest of the work naturally divides 
 into the personal and the artistic sides of her 
 life. By a kind of coincidence these are 
 chiefly represented in the first and third 
 volumes respectively, while the intermediate 
 one is a sort of glorified Baedeker, giving 
 George Eliot's impressions of her foreign 
 travels between I860 and 1870. The modern 
 interest in development causes us in the first 
 instance to concentrate our attention on the 
 first volume, dealing with the life up to the 
 production of the first book, Scenes of Clerical 
 Life, including the difficult problem of her 
 relations with George Henry Lewes. We see 
 there a drama of religious development which 
 is peculiarly significant, a display of intel- 
 lectual precocity and progress, and, above all, 
 a peculiarly sensitive affectionateness, which 
 rules throughout the life and forms its most 
 distinctive as well as most novel feature. 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 51 
 
 The peculiarity of the religious development 
 which strikes one most prominently in reading 
 the earlier letters is that, in advancing towards 
 wider views than her earlier Calvinism, George 
 Eliot still found objects for the religious 
 emotion that moved her so strongly in her 
 young days. She ' found religion/ as the 
 ascetics say, in the later forms of her belief as 
 in the earlier, and consecrated her life to the 
 highest and the best equally in the days of 
 Comtism and of Calvinism. This predomi- 
 nantly religious tone gives an emotional unity 
 to her life which might be easily missed, but is 
 really the key to its various seeming fluctua- 
 tions. Beginning with the conventional ex- 
 pressions of self-conscious humility, ' Oh that 
 ' I might be made as useful in my lowly and 
 1 obscure station ! ' (i. 43) it is seen throughout 
 life in her high ideal of her artistic mission, 
 and finds a final utterance in her character- 
 istic hymn., ' O may I join the choir in- 
 visible ! ' Even in the first revulsion from 
 the old faith she felt the connection between 
 that and the new, as the following passage 
 shows : 
 
 ' For my part, I wish to be among the 
 f ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking 
 ' to set Truth's Holy Sepulchre free from a 
 ( usurped domination. We shall then see her 
 ' resurrection ! Meanwhile, although I cannot 
 
52 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' rank among my principles of action a fear of 
 ' vengeance eternal, gratitude for predestined 
 ' salvation, or a revelation of future glories as 
 1 a reward,, I fully participate in the belief 
 c that the only heaven here, or hereafter, is 
 ' to be found in conformity with the will of 
 f the Supreme ; a continual aiming at the at- 
 ( tainment of the perfect ideal , the true logos 
 ' that dwells in the bosom of the one Father/ 
 And in a very remarkable essay on conformity 
 and compromise, written when she was only 
 twenty-three, the reason of the connection is 
 fully grasped and explained : 
 
 ' Agreement between intellects seems un- 
 ' attainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling 
 ' as the only universal bond of union. We 
 ' find that the intellectual errors which we 
 ' once fancied were a mere incrustation have 
 ' grown into the living body, and that we 
 ' cannot in the majority of cases wrench them 
 1 away without destroying vitality. We begin 
 ' to find that with individuals, as with nations, 
 ' the only safe revolution is one arising out of 
 ' the wants which their own progress has 
 ' generated. It is the quackery of infidelity 
 ' to suppose that it has a nostrum for all 
 ' mankind, and to say to all and singular, 
 ' " Swallow my opinions and you shall be 
 ' whole." If, then, we are debarred by such 
 ' considerations from trying to reorganise 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 53 
 
 ' opinions, are we to remain aloof from our 
 ' fellow-creatures on occasions when we may 
 ( fully sympathise with the feelings exercised, 
 ' although our own have been melted into 
 ' another mould ? Ought we not on every 
 ' opportunity to seek to have our feelings in 
 ' harmony, though not in union, with those 
 ' who are often richer in the fruits of faith, 
 ( though not in reason, than ourselves ? ' 
 
 One thing is clear and instructive. The 
 transition, brought about in the main by the 
 Hennells, took a grievous weight from off her 
 spirits. Whereas before the change we find 
 her saying, f l am aweary, aweary longing 
 for rest/ and speaking of herself as ' alone 
 in the world,' so soon as the change comes, 
 'I can rejoice,' she says, f in all the joys of 
 humanity'; and she soon speaks of the duty 
 of finding happiness and of learning how to 
 be happy in a most satisfactory way. She is 
 speaking from experience when in 1847 she 
 suggests as a subject she should like to work 
 out, 'the superiority of the consolations of philo- 
 ' sophy to those of (so-called) religion.' It is 
 curious to contrast all this with the totally 
 dissimilar behaviour of Carlyle, who became 
 the more morose the more widely he departed 
 from ancestral faith. And there is plenty of 
 evidence in these volumes that George Eliot's 
 bodily sufferings began as early and were 
 
54 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 probably as acute as Carlyle's. Before she is 
 nineteen we hear of sick-headaches, and these 
 follow any unusual exertion throughout life. 
 Her gentle heroism under this infliction con- 
 trasts favourably with Carlyle's apostrophes 
 to gods and men on the ills of dyspepsia. 
 
 Of equal interest is it in this first volume 
 to follow the rapid growth of George Eliot's 
 intellectual power. Very few details are 
 given here of the actual character of her 
 studies in early days. But here and there 
 her thirst for knowledge makes itself seen 
 even in the days of Calvinistic strictness. At 
 times we catch glimpses of the artistic pre- 
 paration. A world of her own creation is 
 referred to opprobriously, and her imagination 
 is her enemy in the days when all fiction was 
 pernicious, as is stated in one of the first 
 letters to Miss Lewis an amusing bit of irony, 
 in the old Greek sense. Very soon the ten- 
 dency to scientific illustration comes, and the 
 following passage shows the power of descrip- 
 tion as early as 1841 : 
 
 ' The birds are consulting about their migra- 
 ' tions, the trees are putting on the hectic or 
 ' the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew 
 ' the ground, that one's very footsteps may 
 ' not disturb the repose of earth and air, 
 ( while they give us a scent that is a perfect 
 ' anodyne to the restless spirit.' 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 55 
 
 And somewhat later there is a fine passage 
 descriptive of fireworks seen on the Lake of 
 Geneva, with 'the pale moon looking at it 
 all with a sort of grave surprise.' We may 
 notice the strain of ethical reflection so char- 
 acteristic of the novels in the recognition of 
 the purgative effect of war, in the. maxim, 
 ' Live and teach/ proposed as a substitute for 
 the proverbial 'Live and learn/ in her esti- 
 mate of trouble as being a deepened gaze into 
 life. Among the chief intellectual influences 
 before her father's death in 1849, which formed 
 the first great crisis in her life, we can trace 
 George Sand, Carlyle, Rousseau, and Spinoza, 
 and, above all, the converse with the Hennells 
 and the work at Strauss which resulted from 
 this. But perhaps the chief impression of 
 power is left by a few brief but weighty 
 remarks on the men she came in contact 
 with, even before she left the provincial circles. 
 George Dawson she estimates at once as ' not 
 a great man/ whereas Emerson is appreciated 
 as the first man she had known. The same 
 with men known through their writings. 
 Disraeli has f good veins, as Bacon would 
 say, but there is not enough blood in them.' 
 Hannah More was that most disagreeable of 
 all monsters, a blue-stocking. Somewhat later, 
 when on the Westminster staff, she rated J. S. 
 Mill at something more nearly his true value 
 
56 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 than most of her contemporaries, and was 
 among the first to welcome the promise of 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer. Of all the chief gifts 
 of intellect displayed in her works we find 
 adumbrations before she left Coventry. We 
 miss., however, every indication of wit or 
 humour till the life of the capitals is reached 
 in Geneva and London. The spirit of ob- 
 servation becomes self-conscious,, and Lewes 
 is hit off as a ( sort of miniature Mirabeau/ 
 Alboni as ' a very fat siren/ Combe as ' an 
 apostle with a front and back drawing-room/ 
 Leroux ' disagrees with all but Pierre Leroux.' 
 In short, we have all the indications of George 
 Eliot the novel-writer except the novels. And 
 even about these there is a remarkable quota- 
 tion from a letter of Mrs. Bray to her sister 
 on September 25th, 1846, exactly ten years 
 before Amos Barton : f Miss Evans looks very 
 ' brilliant just now. We fancy she must be 
 ' writing her novel.' Yet this must have only 
 been an Ahnung as Mr. Cross is fond of saying 
 for no people were more surprised at the 
 revelation of George Eliot's abilities as a 
 novelist than the Brays a dozen years after. 
 
 Her relation to the Brays is in many re- 
 spects decisive and typical. We come to the 
 secret recesses of her being, to the key of all 
 that is problematic in her career and character, 
 when we encounter the remarkable union of 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 57 
 
 hard-headed intellect and impetuous affection, 
 such as we see in her letters to the Brays. 
 Nor does this die away with youth : the same 
 gushing tone there is no other word for it 
 is kept up with Miss Hennell to the last, and 
 is even adopted with friends gained in the 
 decline of life. This stern independence of 
 intellect combined with a complete depend- 
 ence on others for the emotional life, gives 
 the characteristic tone throughout her life, 
 and we are continually coming across a severe 
 philosophical disquisition side by side with an 
 outburst of uncontrollable affection or longing. 
 She has doubtless portrayed this side of her 
 nature in Maggie Tulliver with her impulsive 
 affection, her emotional dependence on others. 
 But she had recognised it much earlier when 
 speaking of herself as ' ivy-like as I am by 
 nature,' and in this peculiarly womanly 
 quality she remained a very woman to the last. 
 Manly intellect and girlish heart were united 
 in her to an unusual degree. 
 
 This problematic nature serves to explain 
 so far as it bears explanation the crux of 
 her life her union with George Henry Lewes. 
 Mr. Cross, with much tact and wisdom, refuses 
 to discuss the question. The only contribu- 
 tion he gives to its solution is a letter addressed 
 to Mrs. Bray a year after the ' union' was 
 entered upon. Here the question is made 
 
58 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 to turn on a difference of opinion as to the 
 marriage laws, and George Eliot's only defence, 
 if any, is that she has not entered on ' light 
 and easily broken ties.' But as a matter of 
 fact she would have herself owned that this 
 was no defence against setting herself at 
 variance with the moral instincts of ail whom 
 she held dear. It is true that six years before 
 she had said, a propos of Jane Eyre : 
 
 'All self-sacrifice is good, but one would 
 * like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause 
 ( than that of a diabolical law which chains a 
 ' man soul and body to a putrefying carcass/ 
 
 But that would be at best an excuse for 
 Lewes, not for herself. As a matter of fact 
 there was no excuse, and in a very significant 
 letter to Mrs. Taylor she practically surrenders 
 any pleas as regards the iniquity of the mar- 
 riage laws, and desires the legal title she 
 should theoretically have despised : 
 
 ' For the last six years I have ceased to 
 f be {f Miss Evans " for any one who has 
 ' personal relations with me having held 
 ' myself under all the responsibilities of a 
 ' married woman. I wish this to be distinctly 
 ' understood ; and when I tell you that we 
 ' have a great boy of eighteen at home who 
 ' calls me "mother," as well as two other 
 ' boys, almost as tall, who write to me under 
 f the same name, you will understand that the 
 
CROSS'S ' LIFE ' 59 
 
 ' point is not one of mere egoism or personal 
 ' dignity, when I request that any one who 
 ' has a regard for me will cease to speak of 
 f me by my maiden name.' 
 
 In reality, however, the clue to her conduct 
 is to be sought in the girlish impulsiveness of 
 her affectionate nature, which seems so hard 
 to connect with her accuracy and independence 
 of thought. She speaks of Lewes having 
 s quite won my liking in spite of myself ' a 
 year before their flight, and her hurried letter 
 to the Brays at the last moment shows that 
 the momentous decision was the work of im- 
 pulse. She had evidently found in him some 
 one to cling to amid the dreary solitude of 
 life in London lodgings, and Lewes took the 
 responsibility of accepting her sacrifice. 
 
 In justice to Lewes it must be remembered 
 that he could have had no idea of the trans- 
 cendent nature of the woman whose life he 
 was accepting. Mr. F. W. Myers tells a story 
 of some impudent ass who wrote to George 
 Eliot after Middlemarch condoling with her 
 for being mated to a Casaubon. There would 
 have been less incongruity if Lewes had been 
 compared to Ladislaw, who was, one feels, 
 almost equally unworthy of Dorothea. Lewes 
 is gradually being rated at his true worth : a 
 philosopher among journalists, a journalist 
 among philosophers, he has left behind him 
 
60 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 nothing that will live, not even the overrated 
 Life of Goethe, the critical portions of which 
 are very thin. But George Eliot was herself 
 one of the first to protest against the habit 
 of mind which requires equality of gifts 
 in husband and wife, and we cannot hope 
 that every Elizabeth Barrett will find her 
 Robert Browning. 
 
 And it must be owned that, once the lapse 
 committed, Lewes did all in his power to keep 
 at a distance every bad influence He en- 
 couraged her first writing, and checked by 
 his vivacity the tendency to over-seriousness 
 which came to her with the knowledge of her 
 powers and responsibilities. All the petty 
 details of life were warded off from her by 
 Lewes with watchful care. The somewhat 
 unreasoning sensibility to adverse criticism 
 was carefully considered by Lewes, who acted 
 as her private secretary. And all this was 
 effected through long years often filled with 
 illness of his own. He may have encouraged 
 in later years the psychological strain of her 
 work to its detriment, and whatever glimpses 
 we have of his critical influence in early years 
 seem by no means fortunate : it was through 
 him, e.g., that Dinah was made to marry Adam 
 Bede. 
 
 And, above all, the lapse must be forgiven 
 or forgotten which led to that fusion of the 
 
CROSS'S < LIFE ' 61 
 
 intellect and the emotions necessary to the 
 artistic impulse. Everything seems to show 
 that George Eliot's memories of her home 
 life would have slumbered for ever but for 
 this moral crisis in her own life, which stirred 
 her to the depths of her being and withdrew 
 her from the conventions of society. There 
 is not the slightest indication throughout the 
 biography, except the chance shot of Mrs. 
 Bray mentioned above, which could lead her 
 friends to imagine any other future for George 
 Eliot than one similar to that of her friend 
 Miss Sara Hennell. Her attitude of moral 
 defiance to the world threw her back on the 
 resources of her own life and gave birth to the 
 peculiarities of her art. What those peculi- 
 arities are, and the light thrown upon them 
 by the book before us, must now demand 
 our attention. 
 
 The problem of George Eliot's life is to 
 explain how a mind of so eminently a specu- 
 lative turn should have shown the artistic 
 impulse for creation so late in life and should 
 have succeeded so eminently. The charac- 
 teristics of her art show us the reverse of this 
 difficulty. We have to reconcile her distinct 
 power of realising her characters with her 
 equally marked capacity for what we may 
 term moralising them. A well-known ex- 
 ample will illustrate the union, in this case 
 
62 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 the fusion, of the two modes of work. In 
 the catastrophe of The Mill on the Floss the 
 novelist describes the mass of broken timber 
 bearing down upon the brother and sister 
 (physicists say the boat would always keep 
 ahead). Tom sees it, cries, f lt is coming, 
 Maggie ! ' clasps her, and they meet their fate. 
 For the artist who only wished to realise the 
 scene this would suffice. But with George 
 Eliot there is the equal need to ' moralise ' it, 
 and so she continues : ' The boat reappeared 
 c but brother and sister had gone down in an 
 ' embrace never to be parted : living through 
 ' again in one supreme moment the days when 
 ' they had clasped their little hands in love and 
 ' roamed the daisied fields together.' The 
 beauty of this passage must not blind us to 
 its inartistic, or rather extra-artistic, character. 
 The emotions, aesthetic or moral, which the 
 artist desired to produce by this reference to 
 childhood's days ought to have been produced 
 spontaneously by the catastrophe itself if the 
 previous presentation of their childhood had 
 been artistically effective. But it is George 
 Eliot's peculiarity that she tries to bring into 
 consciousness those feelings which her narra- 
 tive ought to have produced by itself. She 
 makes two attempts to produce her effect 
 by artistic presentation and by philosophic 
 reflection. By so endeavouring she practically 
 
CROSS'S f LIFE 63 
 
 confesses the failure of her art to do its work 
 unaided. But much of that failure consists in 
 the nature of the work which she wished to 
 do with her novels. 
 
 Before she had written any work of imagina- 
 tion, Lewes expressed his doubts whether 
 she had the power of dramatic presentation, 
 though she might have ' wit, description, and 
 philosophy/ As it turned out, she possessed 
 the power of dramatic presentation in a very 
 high degree ; the breakfast at which Arthur 
 Donnithorne did not confess to Parson Irwine, 
 the last meeting between Dorothea and 
 Rosamund, Tulliver's inscription in the family 
 Bible, the appearance of Silas Marner at the 
 Rainbow. Klesmer's visit to the Meyricks, may 
 be instanced as examples of this. But the 
 power of imaginative presentation, though it 
 must have always existed, came to her late in 
 life. It was most probably aroused by the 
 attitude of moral defiance toward the world 
 which her relations to Lewes had brought 
 about. But there is also evidence in these 
 volumes that the process of artistic assimila- 
 tion was with her unusually slow, as she re- 
 cognised in an interesting letter to Madame 
 Bodichon : 
 
 ' I do wish much to see more of human life 
 ' how can one see enough in the short years 
 ' one has to stay in the world ? But I meant 
 
64 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' that at present my mind works with the 
 ' most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry 
 ' in my remotest past, and there are many strata 
 ' to be worked through before I can begin to 
 ( use, artistically, any material I may gather in 
 1 the present. Curiously enough, a propos of 
 1 your remark about Adam Bede, there is much 
 1 less "out of my own life" in that book i.e. 
 ' the materials are much more a combination 
 ' from imperfectly-known and widely-sundered 
 ' elements than the Clerical Scenes.' 
 
 But while her imagination was thus ruminat- 
 ing, as it were, her whole spiritual life was 
 taken up with an entirely different order of 
 interests. Beginning with that thirst of 
 knowledge for its own sake which goes to 
 make the great scholar, it was soon diverted 
 into the two chief channels of intellectual in- 
 terest which characterised her age the decay 
 of the older religious ideals and the growth 
 of a scientific conception of the universe, in- 
 cluding man. And with her these two branches 
 of speculation were reconciled by her recogni- 
 tion of the facts of human emotion underlying 
 both. The following passage from an instruc- 
 tive note on The Spanish Gypsy, unfortunately 
 too long to quote in its entirety, puts the germ 
 of George Eliot's reconciliation of religion and 
 science : 
 
 ' There is really no moral " sanction " but 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 65 
 
 ' this inward impulse. The will of God is 
 ' the same thing as the will of other men, com- 
 ' pelling us to work and avoid what they have 
 ' seen to be harmful to social existence. Dis 
 ' joined from any perceived good, the divine 
 ' will is simply so much as we have ascer- 
 ( tained of the facts of existence which com- 
 ' pel obedience at our peril/ 
 
 These facts which compel obedience are 
 declared to be 'the part which is played in 
 ' the general human lot by hereditary condi- 
 ' tions in the largest sense and the fact that 
 ' what we call duty is entirely made up of such 
 ' conditions/ The scientific conception of law 
 in human nature was combined by her with 
 the moral or religious fact of duty. Besides 
 this the Comtist view of society as an organism 
 was translated into the ethical consideration of 
 the radiation of good and evil deeds through- 
 out society. The moral progress of the world 
 would depend, according to her, upon the 
 degree in which men's minds were trained to 
 see the consequences of their egoistic impulses. 
 In an interesting correspondence with the Hon. 
 Mrs. Ponsonby, where she sharply distinguishes 
 her theory from the physical Positivism of 
 Professor Tyndall and others, she clearly 
 puts this aspiration :-% 
 
 e With regard to the pains and limitations of 
 ' one's personal lot, I suppose there is not a 
 
66 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 ' single man, or woman, who has not more or less 
 ' need of that stoical resignation which is often 
 ' a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his 
 ' or her past history, is not aware that it has 
 ' been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish 
 
 action of some fellow-being in a more or less 
 1 close relation of life. And to my mind, 
 ( there can be no stronger motive, than this 
 
 * perception, to an energetic effort that the 
 ' lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like 
 ' manner from tis.' 
 
 It is impossible to say with what success she 
 would have handled these views in the con- 
 nected exposition of a philosophical work. As 
 all the world now knows, she chose to expound 
 them in the form of fiction, and determined to 
 make the novel what history is said to be 
 philosophy teaching by example. At first she 
 was not conscious of any such aim. When the 
 Scenes were completed she felt only ' a deep 
 ' satisfaction in having done a piece of faithful 
 ' work that will perhaps remain like a primrose 
 ' root in the hedgerow and gladden and chasten 
 ' human hearts in years to come.' Nor is there 
 any hint of conscious motive in Adam Bede 
 and The Mill on the Floss, her two greatest 
 works. But immediately after the great suc- 
 cess of Adam Bede the sense of her re- 
 sponsibilities settled upon her with only too 
 heavy pressure. She feels it her ( vocation to 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 67 
 
 speak to one's fellow-men ' and make her work 
 ' an instrument of culture/ And henceforward 
 this motive was conscious with her, and in each 
 of her creations she looks round for some idea 
 which the fiction shall embody. The process 
 begins with Silas Marner, which grew from f the 
 merest millet-seed of thought.' Of this she 
 says: f lt sets or is intended to set in a 
 ' strong light the remedial influences of pure, 
 1 natural human relations/ And in Silas Marner 
 the balance between artistic creation and 
 philosophic construction is most evenly held 
 of all her books, of which it is in a way the 
 quintessence. Henceforth, however, the phi- 
 losophic interest is predominant, and her words 
 are intended more to point a moral than to 
 adorn a tale. Romola has its moral summed 
 up in the last words of the book, and in an 
 elaborate letter to Mr. R. H. Hutton she avows 
 her intention of expressing certain truths 
 by the relations of Baldo and Baldassare, of 
 Tito and his patrons, and seems to be chiefly 
 interested in Romola herself as presenting a 
 moral problem. The elaborate note on The 
 Spanish Gypsy before referred to gives the motif 
 of the work as the clashing of individual desires 
 and hereditary claims. Middlemarch, as its 
 Proem states, is a contribution towards the 
 woman question, though its scale happily 
 caused it to overflow into a study of provincial 
 
68 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 life. Deronda was intended to ennoble Judaism 
 in the estimation of Christians and of Jews, 
 and it would almost seem from a letter to Pro- 
 fessor Kaufmann, couched in extravagant terms, 
 that the only object in introducing Grandcourt 
 and Gwendolen was to contrast Christian 
 society with Jewish family life, to the dis- 
 advantage of the former. In all these later 
 works the novel in George Eliot's hand had 
 become the Tendenz-roman, not alone the 
 philosophic novel, as Mr. Shorthouse, for ex- 
 ample, conceives it, but philosophy in the 
 form of the novel. 
 
 It is not our intention to discuss here the 
 artistic value of the Tendenz-roman. The 
 function of criticism is to classify and analyse 
 much more than to judge. Its artistic limita- 
 tions are obvious : with the whole field of life 
 before it, the Tendenz-roman has to confine 
 itself to its Tendenz. Its artistic value is 
 dependent in large measure on its philosophic 
 truth. The temptation to philosophise formally 
 has its dangers, as George Eliot recognised 
 when she wrote to Mr. Blackwood that she is 
 in danger of refining where novel-readers only 
 think of skipping. But the point that comes 
 out with most fulness in this Life is the 
 high function which such writing must claim 
 for itself, ' the high responsibilities of litera- 
 ture that undertakes to represent life.' The 
 following catena of passages from the book 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 69 
 
 before us will show the sacredness which 
 attached to George Eliot's calling as she 
 viewed its functions : 
 
 e My function is that of the aesthetic, not the 
 ' doctrinal teacher the rousing of the nobler 
 f emotions, which make mankind desire the 
 ' social right, not the prescribing of special 
 c measures, concerning which the artistic mind, 
 ' however strongly moved by social sympathy, 
 f is often not the best judge. It is one thing 
 ' to feel keenly for one's fellow-being ; another 
 ' to say, " This step, and this alone, will be the 
 ' best to take for the removal of particular 
 ' calamities." ' 
 
 ' The things you tell me are just such as I 
 c need to know I mean about the help my 
 ' book is to the people who read it. The 
 f weight of my future life, the self-question- 
 ( ing whether my nature will be able to meet 
 ' the heavy demands upon it, both of personal 
 ' duty and intellectual production, presses 
 ' upon me almost continually in a way that 
 ' prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy 
 ' I might have in the work done.' 
 
 f I think aesthetic teaching is the highest 
 ' of all teaching, because it deals with life in 
 f its highest complexity. But if it ceases to 
 ( be purely aesthetic if it lapses anywhere 
 ' from the picture to the diagram it becomes 
 4 the most offensive of all teaching.' 
 
 This lofty sense of the sacredness of her 
 
70 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 calling may in some measure account for the 
 sensitiveness which she showed towards adverse 
 criticism. When a writer is advocating a 
 doctrine it is natural that he should be 
 disappointed if his views are not even seen. 
 And certainly by couching her opinions in the 
 form of novels George Eliot did her best to 
 withhold them from all but the most thoughtful. 
 Hence a continual feeling often expressed in 
 her diary that her efforts had been vain, a 
 * horrible scepticism ' as to the effectiveness of 
 her work. Lewes used to keep from her all 
 critical notices except those that were favour- 
 able. The Athenceum is considered to have 
 given f the best literary critique ' of The Spanish 
 Gypsy, while, on the other hand, certain expres- 
 sions in a letter to Mr. Charles Lewes show that 
 our review of Theophrastus Such displeased her. 
 And, indeed, as was but natural, she got to 
 know of most unfavourable criticisms, notwith- 
 standing all her contempt for ' damnatory 
 praise from ignorant journalists.' Her answers 
 to those criticisms are often of interest ; thus 
 she informs one of her correspondents that 
 there is not one thing put into Mr. Peyser's 
 mouth that is due to memory. If so, it is 
 curious that she should make Parson Irwine 
 say of one of them that it is as good as a fable 
 of jEsop. So, too, we learn that there is not 
 a single portrait in Adam Bede a statement 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 71 
 
 that depends very much on the exact meaning 
 to be attached to the term * portrait.' This 
 excessive sensibility is seen at its maximum 
 intensity in connection with the imposture 
 attempted by Mr. Liggins of Nuneaton. One 
 would have thought that a woman possessed 
 of such powers of humour would have been 
 more impressed by the ridiculous than by the 
 serious aspect of the incident. But George 
 Eliot returns again and again to the subject 
 in a tone of sincere annoyance. 
 
 And finally, the predominance of the philo- 
 sophic over the artistic spirit in George Eliot 
 has tended to make these volumes, containing 
 the record of her private life, rather dull and 
 dare we say it? commonplace. She was a 
 great woman, but this is not a great book. 
 Like all thinkers, she tended to weave a web 
 of theory between herself and life, and seemed 
 to reserve all her humour and liveliness for 
 her books. It is possible that Mr. Cross has 
 created this impression by an ill-judged ex- 
 cision of anything that does not display his 
 wife on the stilts of philosophy and ethics. 
 But as he claims vivacity as one of her 
 prominent qualities, it is more likely that it 
 did not display itself in her letter-writing. 
 And the tendency to abstract theorising has 
 removed from these volumes almost all personal 
 traits of the many distinguished men and 
 
72 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 women with whom George Eliot came in 
 contact. Even the personal details of her own 
 life had, for the most part, been discounted in 
 the articles that appeared after her death. 
 What we chiefly notice are some of her literary 
 opinions and prejudices. Byron was the most 
 vulgar-minded genius that ever lived, the Iliad 
 is a semi- savage poem, Pere Goriot a hateful 
 book (i.e. has no Tendenz), the Origin of Species 
 will not produce much effect because ill 
 arranged, but expresses the adhesion of a well- 
 known naturalist (this on the appearance of 
 the book). Before the Vie de Jesus she felt 
 more kinship with Renan than with any other 
 contemporary writer, but afterwards she gives 
 up her high estimate of Renan. At times we 
 may see bits of the novels in the making. 
 Overbeck at Rome clearly suggested Neumann 
 in Middlemarch, Mr. Frederic Harrison seems 
 to have suggested the Legend of Jubal and 
 supplied the legal technicalities of Felix Holt. 
 We may catch the origin of the opening scene 
 of Deronda in the girl gambler described here 
 (iii. 171). A sensible letter to Mrs. Beecher 
 Stowe on spiritualism may be recommended to 
 the notice of the Society for Psychical Research. 
 Mr. Cross has given with admirable taste a few 
 Boswellisms. His wife told him that Romola 
 found her young and left her old. The inter- 
 view between Dorothea and Rosamund was 
 
CROSS'S 'LIFE' 73 
 
 written off in a fever of excitement,, and stands 
 now as at first written. But these items of 
 interest are few and far between, and the book 
 as a whole might more easily be the record of 
 a savant than of a literary artist. In every 
 way the total impression is sad and sombre. 
 And so we lay down these volumes with the 
 impression of a life disfigured by one great 
 lapse that overshadowed it to the end, but 
 ennobled by high gifts devoted with self- 
 denying thoroughness to a lofty conception 
 of the function of the depicter of human 
 life. The novelist's art has never been made 
 so sacramental as by George Eliot. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 April 15, 1888 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 (HE terribly sudden death of 
 Matthew Arnold has deprived 
 England of an intellectual force 
 of a high order. A striking 
 and influential individuality is 
 lost to English thought and letters. Matthew 
 Arnold was the poet and critic of the age 
 of transition which separates so widely the 
 England of to-day from the England of the 
 Reform Bill, or, to come down even later, 
 from the England of the Great Exhibition. 
 The changes in taste, in feeling, in the general 
 attitude towards the fundamental problems of 
 religion, of society, and of politics, have been 
 enormous, and in all of them, except, perhaps, 
 the last, Matthew Arnold has been an abiding 
 influence. We shall never, perhaps, fully 
 appreciate the way in which he softened the 
 asperities of the conflicts which raged round 
 him by his imperturbable good humour, and 
 even by the mannerisms which diverted the 
 stress of feeling. The solvent of his criticism 
 
 was diluted to the exact strength where it 
 
 77 
 
78 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 could effect its purpose while giving least 
 pain. 
 
 He began life as a poet, and in a measure 
 remained one always, if we can divorce the 
 poet from the technique of his art. His was 
 a poetic force, a uniform recognition of the 
 permanent power and reality of the ideal 
 element in human character. His appeal was 
 always to that, whether he were discussing 
 Heine or Tolstoi, Irish aifairs or Board schools. 
 So far he was a poetic force in English thought 
 and affairs. But in things specifically poetic 
 he touched his readers less than any other 
 Victorian poet of the first rank. Yet he is 
 among the masters, his diction is unrivalled 
 for purity and dignity, he strikes his notes 
 with no faltering hand. Why then, is he not 
 impressive? Because his problems and his 
 moods are not poetic problems or poetic 
 moods. Intellectual doubt has found its 
 voice in Matthew Arnold's most sincere 
 utterances, and doubt can never touch a 
 wide circle. Obermann Once More or The 
 Scholar Gypsy will answer to some moods of 
 some men as few poems answer to the inmost 
 depths. But the moods are rare among men, 
 and the appeal of the poems must be as rare. 
 Strangely enough, while Matthew Arnold 
 deals most powerfully with one aspect of the 
 inward conflict, he has been almost equally 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 79 
 
 successful in the most objective form of 
 poems, the heroic narrative. When he was 
 urging with all his command of paradox that 
 the English hexameter the existence of 
 which still remains to be proved was the 
 best medium into which to translate Homer, 
 he himself was giving in his Sohrab and 
 Rustum the nearest analogue in English to 
 the rapidity of action, plainness of thought, 
 plainness of diction, and the nobleness of 
 Homer. Yet even here we felt that some- 
 thing was wanting, as we feel in almost all 
 attempts at reproduction of the Romance 
 temper: it is not sincere, and cannot, there- 
 fore, be great. Where Matthew Arnold is 
 sincere in his poetic work is when he gives 
 expression to his f yearning for the light/ and 
 summons the spirit of renunciation to support 
 him through the days of gloom. 
 
 These moods he reserved for expression in 
 verse. In prose no one is less gloomy than 
 he. If we might define him as a happy 
 Heine, we should give the best point of view 
 from which to survey his prose work, his 
 criticism of life that underlies and involves all 
 his criticism of books, of faiths, and of institu- 
 tions. Like the German poet, he was armed 
 with all the culture of his time science does 
 not count in such matters and like him he 
 played off the one side of his nature against 
 
80 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 the other. But the circumstances of his life 
 saved him from the bitterness of Heine, 
 while they intensified that tendency to good- 
 humoured tolerance which gave to his work 
 much power in some directions and robbed it 
 of much in others. 
 
 It is usual to speak of Matthew Arnold as 
 having revolutionised English criticism, by 
 which is usually meant book-criticism. As a 
 matter of fact he did very little in the way of 
 'judging' books, and what he did in this way 
 was by no means always instructive or trust- 
 worthy. His celebrated slip about Shelley's 
 letters, the selections he made from Byron, 
 may be recalled as instances of uncertain vision 
 or imperfect appreciation. In introducing the 
 methods of Sainte-Beuve into England, he 
 transferred the interest in criticism from the 
 books to the man. What he did in criticism 
 was to introduce the causerie, and with it the 
 personal element. Instead of the * we ' of the 
 older regime, the critic, even if he use the 
 plural pronoun, professes to give no more than 
 the manner in which a new work strikes his 
 individuality. If this method has been the 
 cause or occasion of much affectation in con- 
 temporary criticism, it has raised criticism into 
 the sphere of literary art by giving it the 
 personal element. The personality of Matthew- 
 Arnold was, with all its affectations and 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 81 
 
 mannerisms, so attractive that a causerie with 
 him charmed not so much by adding to our 
 information about the author or his book, as 
 because it added to our knowledge of Matthew 
 Arnold. 
 
 His criticism of books, we have said, was a 
 criticism of life, and here his work touched the 
 deepest problems of his time, problems social 
 and problems theological. We all know his 
 method of exposition. A view being taken, a 
 phrase, more or less felicitous, is selected to 
 express the view, and henceforth the changes 
 are rung upon the phrase till the dullest of 
 readers cannot fail to grasp the particular view 
 which it was desired to impress on him. The 
 trick of iteration, exasperating as it was, 
 effected its purpose, and the formulae ' sweet- 
 1 ness and light,' f criticism of life/ c barbarians, 
 ' Philistines, and populace/ f the need of ex- 
 < pression, the need of manners, the need of 
 ' intellect, the need of beauty, and the need 
 f of conduct/ have bitten the more deeply 
 into the contemporary consciousness because 
 they were formulae, and could be easily re- 
 called. This effect was mainly mechanical; 
 not so the discussions which led up to them, 
 were summarised in them, or were deduced 
 from them. Therein Arnold showed his 
 powers of social analysis, and his powers were 
 great. His summary of < needs ' given above 
 
82 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 is a remarkable description of man as a social 
 being. Again, the cultus of ( culture/ to 
 which he gave the vogue, was in his hands 
 something precise. Civilisation is a big thing 
 to analyse or to talk about, yet we felt, when 
 he was talking about it, that it was something 
 real and definite that he was discussing, and 
 not the vague abstractions of the sophist. 
 
 This power of analysis showed itself in the 
 series of theological studies beginning with 
 Literature and Dogma. As regards his own 
 solution of the religious problem, if solution 
 it can be called, little need here be said. His 
 very formula, purposely vague and indefinite 
 as it was, is its own condemnation. But it has 
 not been sufficiently recognised how the intro- 
 duction of his literary tone, his many-sided- 
 ness, and the gentle irony with which he 
 treated all extremes helped to prevent an 
 explosion of theological or anti-theological 
 polemics. Mr. Morley has recently been 
 confessing that the tone of the Fortnightly 
 was needlessly aggressive. But for Matthew 
 Arnold's intervention the struggle would have 
 been a outrance. He brought into it the 
 spirit of an ' honest broker/ and had effect 
 with both parties, because each felt that he 
 was in sympathy with its best self. 
 
 Yes, that is even so with the Philistines 
 and the Nonconformists. Amid all his wit or 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 83 
 
 rather because his wit was so mild and free 
 from caustic the Puritan part of the nation 
 felt that he too was on the side of the angels. 
 He was so respectable, after all. Herein 
 comes the great difference between him and 
 Heine, who was not respectable at all ; and 
 Renan, who always shows a hankering after 
 the life of les gais. But Matthew Arnold was 
 intensely sensitive and scrupulous in this 
 regard, almost to the point of Podsnappery. 
 Therefore the British public would allow him 
 a hearing on the problems of life. 
 
 There was no affectation in all this. The 
 Puritan in him came near the self-restraint of 
 his father's Romans, or the artistic balance of 
 life which he respected in the best Greeks. 
 He was too much at ease in Zion to be of the 
 stuff of which prophets are made, yet there 
 was something in him akin to the spirit of the 
 old prophets. Hence it was that he was so 
 influential with the Philistines; he was in a 
 measure of them, though he saw their faults 
 and narrownesses. Half humorously he re- 
 cognised this in one of his books, and there 
 can be little doubt of its truth and of its 
 influence. Because he was of them, the Philis- 
 tines, i.e. Nonconformists and Low Church- 
 men, listened to him, with the result that the 
 Low Church is no more ; and Nonconformity 
 is Broad Church. 
 
84 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 We have laid stress on the theological 
 activity of Arnold because its importance is 
 apt to be obscured by the fact that his par- 
 ticular way of putting his solution of theologi- 
 cal difficulties is not likely to gain disciples. 
 But for all that, the discussions have had as 
 much effect on English theology as anything 
 of the past quarter of a century, and he him- 
 self was in the right in laying stress upon his 
 theological activity and its results as the most 
 influential and most abiding part of his work. 
 
 A word or two may here be added on his 
 general attitude towards politics. His appeal 
 for detachment from party politics is part of 
 a general tendency which seems to be dis- 
 severing everywhere the thinking part of the 
 nations from active share in the politics of the 
 democracy. The formation of a party of In- 
 dependents, advocated by Mr. Lowell in the 
 United States, is an instance of what we mean. 
 By adopting this attitude Matthew Arnold 
 showed less than his usual insight and sagacity. 
 His influence in this direction cannot be said 
 to have been for good. 
 
 He that is gone would not have been satis- 
 fied with any estimate of his life-work which 
 did not take account of his strivings for educa- 
 tional reform, especially as regards middle- 
 class schools. In English social arrangements 
 he saw one great blot, the separation of classes 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 85 
 
 which could be traced to school-days, and he 
 argued, justly enough, that it would never 
 cease till the enormous difference in the tone 
 of boys' schools for the upper classes and of 
 boys' schools for the middle classes was done 
 away with. It cannot be said that his insist- 
 ence on this point was effectual, though the 
 improved tone of schools for middle-class girls 
 may possibly be connected with it. But there 
 can be little doubt of the brilliant suggestive- 
 ness of many of his interesting reports on 
 education, which we trust will be now brought 
 together in book form. Rarely have Blue- 
 bpoks been made so enjoyable as those which 
 contained Matthew Arnold's racy comments 
 on things in general, and school things in 
 particular. 
 
 He was a poet throughout, we have said, 
 and he himself has denned a poet as a critic 
 of life. Would that all poets were critics so 
 genial ! In that respect the style was the 
 man, and no man was so charming to his 
 intimates as Matthew Arnold. It may be 
 suspected that when we come to know the 
 private lives of the men of letters of this, or 
 rather of the preceding generation, few will 
 leave so pleasant an impression, few will seem 
 so livable with as he. That easy temper 
 which perhaps prevented him from giving 
 his message in a more assured tone, or from 
 
86 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 giving a more assured message, made him a 
 delightful companion. And a delightful com- 
 panion he is, too, in his books, with their sub- 
 acid egotisms, their easy flow of keen-sighted 
 analysis; their sympathy with the ideal, and, 
 above all, that determination to see things as 
 in themselves they really are, which gives 
 the virile strength that would otherwise be 
 wanting. His books and he have done their 
 work so well that they can never appeal to 
 any later age with so much force as they have 
 to this. But because they have had so direct 
 an appeal to this, they must live as typical of 
 our age and representative of it. 
 
DISCOURSES IN AMERICA'* 
 
 VERY one will welcome another 
 volume of causeries from the 
 hand of our only English mas- 
 ter in this branch of literature, 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold. Not- 
 withstanding the attempts of many would-be 
 imitators, he alone possesses the lightness of 
 touch, width of view, sanity of criticism, and 
 individuality of style which are needed to give 
 permanent value to what seems at first sight 
 to be merely a form of the higher journalism. 
 The combination of these qualities is rare 
 enough to account for the influence possessed 
 by the men in whom they occur. Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold in England, M. Renan and 
 M. Scherer in France, and Mr. Lowell in 
 America, almost exhaust the list; and of all 
 the masters of the causerie Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold is in some respects the most influential 
 in England, for reasons which may well engage 
 our attention after we have made a few re- 
 marks on the present instalment of his work. 
 
 * Discourses in America. By Matthew Arnold. 
 (Macmillan & Co. ) 
 
 87 
 
88 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 This consists of only three discourses the 
 Rede Lecture adapted to American audiences 
 and the specially American lectures on 
 Numbers and Emerson. With the aid of wide 
 margins and a liberal amount of ( fat,' as the 
 printers call it, the text is doled out in pages 
 of but nineteen lines each, and thus the three 
 articles are successfully expanded into a book- 
 let of over two hundred pages. Small as it is, 
 the volume differs favourably from some of the 
 recent republications of Mr. Arnold's utter- 
 ances in that it contains only specimens of his 
 best work, and we may perhaps add that in 
 it he dismounts from his over-ridden hobby 
 State schools for the middle classes. Each of 
 the three essays attracted attention when 
 first delivered readers will remember the 
 ludicrous blunders made by the American 
 reporters with the goddess Lubricity in 
 Numbers and they were as eagerly read when 
 republished in magazines. Now collected in 
 a volume, they will be as popular as any in the 
 series in which they are published, and have a 
 good chance of being revived in the far distant 
 day when their copyright shall have run out 
 the most practical test that occurs to us to 
 determine whether a book really belongs to 
 English literature. 
 
 Much comment on essays so much com- 
 mented on at the time of their appearance 
 
'DISCOURSES IN AMERICA* 89 
 
 were perhaps needless. We may remark, 
 however, that the lecture on literature and 
 science has lost somewhat in its passage across 
 the Atlantic. There was a peculiar aptitude 
 in its delivery in the Senate House at Cam- 
 bridge., where everything seems to be telling 
 for science rather than literature. And 
 there was a specially interesting passage in 
 the original, now omitted, which dealt with 
 the difference of the two universities 
 Oxford the home of great movements, Cam- 
 bridge of great men. On the general merits 
 of the great question literature or science as 
 training for life Mr. Arnold is clearly on the 
 right side, and even Professor Huxley scarcely 
 attempts to deny this. But it is curious that 
 Mr. Arnold omits to notice that there is a side 
 of literary work which tends to give all, or 
 nearly all, the educational advantages claimed 
 for science. A work like Munro's Lucretius is 
 in reality as scientific as Roscoe and Schorlem- 
 mer's Chemistry. In Germany both would be 
 included under the comprehensive ' Wissen- 
 schaft.' Observation, induction, hypothesis, 
 verification, quantitative analysis, and even to 
 some extent experiment, are all applicable to 
 Homer or the ' Nibelungenlied ' as to the 
 triassic strata. Indeed, a good case might be 
 made out for showing that Mr. Arnold, in his 
 discourse on Numbers, is simply applying the 
 
90 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 ordinary scientific law of error the principle 
 of deviations from an average so admirably 
 applied in Mr. Galton's Hereditary Genius. 
 His comfortable doctrine of the remnant is in 
 reality based on a similar assumption, and 
 much of it is seen to be untrustworthy when 
 one remembers that the curve of error may 
 take different forms, and the remnant be 
 smaller though the numbers be larger. As a 
 matter of fact, is it not the universal ex- 
 perience that the saving remnant, even in 
 America, is small in proportion to the mass of 
 self-seeking Philistinism ? And if we turn to 
 China or India, the doctrine of the remnant 
 has very little comfort left for us. Opinions, 
 too, might differ as to the extent to which the 
 worship of the goddess Aselgeia is corrupting 
 French culture. The success of a mediocre 
 master like M. Ohnet, simply because he does 
 not bow to the ruling goddess, is sufficient to 
 show the strength of the protest against the 
 worship of Lubricity. 
 
 Here, probably, Mr. Matthew Arnold would 
 agree with us, the only difference of opinion 
 being as to the extent of the evil. On this 
 it may be remarked that it has been long 
 existent without producing any widely ap- 
 parent ill effects, and that it is in large 
 measure counteracted by the intense family 
 love of the Frenchman and the more robust 
 
' DISCOURSES IN AMERICA' 91 
 
 life of the provinces. But we prefer not to 
 parade differences where there is so much 
 with which we can agree and from which we 
 can learn. The analysis of the French char- 
 acter and its threefold strain Gallic, Latin, 
 and Germanic recalls some of the best 
 parts of the Celtic Literature. The admirable 
 quotations from Newman, Carlyle, Goethe, 
 and Emerson, in the opening passage of the 
 essay on the last, together with the remarks 
 on each author often but a word, but what 
 an instructive word ! exhibit Mr. Arnold at 
 one of his best moments; as, indeed, the whole 
 discourse on Emerson shows him to us in 
 one of his happiest hours of inspiration, and 
 might be selected as giving an admirable 
 specimen of his peculiar qualities as a critic 
 of letters and of life ; or, as Mr. Arnold would 
 say, it gives us his method and his secret. 
 
 There is an apt phrase we believe, of 
 Professor Huxley's which exactly expresses 
 the differentia of Mr. Arnold's studies : they 
 are lay sermons. The object of the sermon 
 may be assumed to be the moral regeneration 
 of the hearers. This is clearly and avowedly 
 the object of most of Mr. Arnold's utterances. 
 Notice how he invariably picks out the 
 favourite sin of his audience. At the Royal 
 Institution, in the midst of the London 
 season, he lectures on equality. At Cam- 
 
92 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 bridge he avers that with the majority of 
 mankind a little of mathematics goes a long 
 way, and that science cannot satisfy the soul 
 of man. He crosses to America, and there he 
 chooses as his special topic Numbers, preach- 
 ing to the text, ' The majority are bad/ For 
 every one will recognise that Mr. Arnold's 
 lectures have the note of the sermon method 
 in this at least, that they start from a text 
 it may be from the Bible, it may be from 
 Menander to which the discourse returns time 
 after time, with a reiteration which some may 
 find wearisome, but which clearly effects the 
 purpose of impressing itself on the method. 
 
 His method, then, is that of the lay sermon. 
 Would that clerical sermons were ever as 
 good ! His secret is his subacid reasonableness 
 and his serious levity or frivolous seriousness. 
 What strikes one in his criticisms of life even 
 more than their penetration is their sanity and 
 completeness. Many a controversial victory 
 he has won in discussions about letters or life, 
 or sometimes even in politics, by attending to 
 the one question, What are the actual and 
 complete facts of the case ? He takes human 
 nature all round, and sees how far a proposed 
 remedy answers to all its needs. Herein he 
 is really penetrated by the scientific spirit in 
 its best aspect, and he has been no insufficient 
 teacher of the higher anthropology. That in 
 
'DISCOURSES IN AMERICA' 93 
 
 part is the secret of his influence. Men see 
 that what he says tallies in the main with what 
 they know,, and at the same time they are half 
 attracted half repelled by the tone in which 
 he says it. If we may so put it, he pretends 
 not to be serious, and by the very pretence 
 convinces one of his seriousness. It is, in 
 fact, this seriousness, the conviction his 
 words convey that his deepest concern is 
 with the things of moral import, that gives 
 such authority to his word among Englishmen. 
 The things of conduct are, after all, what both 
 he and they have most at heart, and they 
 listen to him as he discourses on things of 
 sweetness and light now, alas ! becoming 
 rarer and rarer with him because they know 
 that in his hands they have intimate bearing 
 on conduct. Hence Mr. Matthew Arnold may 
 say things in a tone which would be censured 
 in another. There is a passage in these dis- 
 courses about M. Blowitz and the Eternal 
 which, even in Mr. Arnold, is as near want of 
 taste as it is possible to go. But one knows 
 that Mr. Arnold, after all, is not really lacking * 
 in reverence, and so the lapse is overlooked. 
 Reflecting on this, one cannot help thinking 
 what a force Mr. Arnold would be if he 
 dropped his cloak of levity. He has given a 
 clever sermon on Gray ; text : ' He never spoke 
 out/ One feels that Mr. Arnold has never 
 
94 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 spoken out the faith that is in him. He began 
 life as an Hellene of the Hellenes, and was as 
 one of those who are at ease in Zion. He 
 has gradually become more Hebraic than the 
 Hebrews, but yet retains the easy manner of 
 the sons of light. What a motive force he 
 might be if he adapted his style to his matter ! 
 Mr. Arnold has some admirable words on 
 Carlyle here in the pages before us. Carlyle 
 is weighed in the balance and found wanting ; 
 but if we may deplore the want of sweetness 
 in Carlyle, might we not regret its overabun- 
 dance in Mr. Arnold's nature ? His best friends 
 might wish to see him they would cer- 
 tainly be curious to see him lose his temper 
 for once in a way over some subject that 
 deserves to rouse his ire. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 December 12, 1889 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 NE by one the Dii majores are 
 leaving us : Carlyle, George 
 Eliot,, Matthew Arnold; and 
 now Robert Browning, a greater 
 name than all these, has passed 
 into silence. It is almost startling to notice 
 how their death radically alters their relation 
 to us. Not only is their work rounded off, 
 finished in a double sense, completed into a 
 system, informed with a new life, as if, indeed, 
 the poet's soul had passed at once from the 
 body to the works. The poet has gone ; his 
 works at once group themselves into an organic 
 whole, and become his work. Yet a still more 
 vital change comes over our relations to the 
 imaginative creator when his bodily presence 
 is withdrawn. He ceases to be ours alone; 
 Robert Browning no longer speaks only for 
 and to Victorian England. He becomes part 
 of England of the past and of the future part 
 of the spiritual heritage for which Englishmen 
 have in the past shown themselves willing to 
 die part of the English ideal, towards which 
 the best of Englishmen aim to live. One 
 advantage immediately accrues from the ces- 
 
98 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 sation of all personal intercourse between the 
 world and the poet. The idle chatter of 
 relative merit, f ls he greater than A?' f ls 
 he better than B?' dies away with his 
 death. Not how great he was, but what he 
 was, engages our attention, and the searching 
 demand that the soul of Robert Browning 
 makes upon each and all of us who care for 
 the higher life of our nation is, ' What I have 
 done for England, say.' 
 
 The kingdom of poesy hath many mansions. 
 That on whose portals Robert Browning's 
 name is inscribed is distinguished from its 
 neighbours both by its huge size and by its 
 massive strength. The style is Gothic with a 
 curious infusion of Italian Renaissance. Notice, 
 before we enter, the quaint gargoyles that 
 in part adorn, in part disfigure, every por- 
 tion of the architecture that is susceptible of 
 ornamentation. Gaining entrance with some 
 difficulty for the porter is somewhat gruff 
 and scant of speech, giving but slight guid- 
 ance to the visitor we are at first struck by 
 the obscurity that reigns in the interior, only 
 lit up here and there by lurid splashes of 
 splendour at spots which are in direct contact 
 with the outer sunshine. But one's eyes 
 soon get accustomed to the dim religious 
 light, and if we have to strain our attention to 
 catch the scheme of ornamentation, our satis- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 99 
 
 faction is the greater when we have caught it. 
 The decoration is elaborate and masterly, but 
 it almost always gives one the impression of 
 being unfinished, owing to its over-elaboration. 
 The subjects, again, are often on a grand scale, 
 and often in the grand style, but many of 
 them claim only to be quaint grotesques. The 
 fertility of design is, however, extraordinary, 
 and the mansion is abundantly spacious, each 
 room and each cranny having its own indivi- 
 duality, marring somewhat the unity of design 
 of the whole. Two or three of the tapestries 
 strike us as of clearer outline and more finished 
 design than the rest; one in particular in 
 which the chief figure is a gaunt musician 
 followed by a crowd of joyous children. An- 
 other, too, of three horsemen takes us, as it 
 were, out into the open, and we seem to feel 
 the air rush past us as they ride. But there 
 is no need to complain of the atmosphere any. 
 where ; the air is fresh and sweet throughout ; 
 no closeness, no clouds of incense or whiffs of 
 stifling perfume offend the nostril. One suite 
 of rooms entrances our attention by its original 
 scheme of ornament. In each the same 
 design, in itself somewhat repulsive, is re- 
 peated in mirrors of different shape, parabolic, 
 elliptical, concave, and the rest, distorting the 
 image in each case, but giving, on the whole, 
 a curious impression of reality. Altogether 
 
 TKIVEI 
 
 N^C* 
 
100 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 we leave the mansion with a feeling of having 
 seen one of the great masterpieces of poetic 
 architecture, and with an abiding sense of the 
 high achievement and higher aspirations of 
 the master builder. 
 
 But enough of allegory, though the one we 
 give may serve as well as another to suggest 
 the total impression made by Browning's 
 work. The extent of his achievements is 
 the most striking quality. Seventeen volumes 
 represent the poet's legacy to his countrymen. 
 And what volumes ! Crammed with thought, 
 suffused with imagination, crowded with 
 figures with life more real than half the 
 people we meet, filled with suggestion, 
 historic, ethical, artistic, and contemporary, 
 they represent at least fifty volumes, if their 
 full meaning were drawn out and displayed. 
 Nor has this huge bulk been attained by 
 harping on a limited set of themes. On the 
 contrary, his topics are bewildering in their 
 variety. The players in Hamlet had not a more 
 varied repertoire. No one could ever guess 
 what a new volume of Browning would con- 
 tain whether it would be sportive or melo- 
 dramatic, speculative or soul-searching. And 
 the range of treatment was as extensive as 
 that of subject. He was not a great metrical 
 artist, but he at least utilised the metrical 
 themes open to the English poet, with the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 101 
 
 exception only of the more recent impor- 
 tations from France, the rondeau and the rest. 
 His remarkable versatility is, perhaps, best 
 shown by the fact that his most popular pro- 
 ductions were descriptive pieces of pure action 
 the themes of Hamelin and Ghent which 
 were outside his ordinary range of interest, 
 wide as that was. 
 
 'My stress lay on the incidents in the 
 ' development of a soul ; little else is worth 
 ' study.' These words from the dedication to 
 the reprint of Sordello itself the key to all 
 Browning's more serious side sum up his 
 method. Spiritual dynamics, the influence of 
 soul on soul, this is what his mind fixes upon 
 amidst all the plexuses of things. Not action, 
 but character, and not character formed, but 
 in the forming there is the staple of Brown- 
 ing's art. And in that direction his power is 
 unique in the world's literature. Comparisons 
 have been made with Shakespeare in this 
 regard, but here the superiority is with 
 Browning without a doubt, and a moment's 
 reflection will show why it must be so. The 
 business of the true dramatist is with action 
 with character too, but character formed, and 
 only so far as action brings out the character 
 that is already there. The conditions of Shake- 
 speare's art prevented him from dealing with 
 character formation, modification, elevation, 
 
102 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 development, or degradation, to the extent 
 that Browning deals with them. Here, too, 
 is the secret of Browning's failure as a drama- 
 tist, for failure it was for a man of Browning's 
 calibre not to excel pre-eminently. Who 
 would not prefer to have Colombe's Birthday or 
 A Blot in the 'Scutcheon as a dramatic idyll ? 
 And the reason is that the dramatic side of 
 these dramas the action is not the thing for 
 which the poet cares or makes his audience 
 care. Two acts of Colombe pass without any 
 action whatever. Browning had a quick eye 
 for a dramatic situation ; he was dramatic in 
 that sense, if you will. But of the power of 
 connecting such situations together into one 
 organic whole, in which each should add force 
 to each of this, the true dramatic power, he 
 had singularly little. Even Pippa Passes has, 
 with all its grace and effectiveness, no real 
 dramatic unity. Pippa passes through a series 
 of dramatic situations, and so strings them 
 together; but it is from the outside. Con- 
 trast the far more effective way in which a 
 poet of infinitely less poetic force, but yet of 
 keener dramatic instinct, M. Fra^ois Coppee, 
 has dealt with a kindred theme in Le Passant. 
 No, Browning was no born dramatist, and was 
 wisely advised by his own instinct to turn to 
 ' Dramatic Idyls ' or f Dramatis Personae,' or in 
 other words, dramatic situations instead of 
 dramas. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 103 
 
 This interest in characterisation led him 
 to one of the most original of his themes 
 the self-portrayal of the humbug, religious 
 (Blougram), political (Schwangau), or social 
 (Sludge). These are, undoubtedly, tours de 
 force of a remarkable kind so remarkable,, 
 indeed, that they condemn themselves as unfit 
 topics for poetry. To be poetical about the 
 very antithesis of poetry ; to present the hum- 
 bug and the materialist and sympathetically, 
 for that is one of the conditions of the pro- 
 blem in a medium which presupposes sin- 
 cerity and idealism as essentials, such was 
 the task Browning set himself in these studies. 
 The failure was magnificent, but it was a 
 failure ; the pieces are rhetoric, ingenious and 
 subtle rhetoric, not poetry in any sense of the 
 term that regards its essence as well as its form. 
 
 Akin to these studies of problematische 
 Naturen "humours' Ben Jonson called them 
 is his portrait-gallery of historical celebrities, 
 or rather obscurities, his Parleyings with Certain 
 People of Importance in their Day, a title of 
 one of his works that would cover a large 
 section of them. It is characteristic of his 
 method that his subjects are, in almost every 
 case, nonentities. No literary artist who has 
 had anything like his power of projecting him- 
 self into the past has refrained so rigidly from 
 dealing with the great ones, the successes of 
 
104 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 history. His interest is with the failures; 
 why they failed, how often their seeming 
 failure is the highest success, the battling of 
 the brave but weak soul with the might of 
 circumstance these are the favourite themes 
 of his historic imagination. Hence a some- 
 what exaggerated impression of the extent of 
 his learning. By the very exigencies of the 
 case his dramatis personce had to be obscurities, 
 and, owing to his intimate relations with Italy, 
 these were mostly Italian obscurities, of whom 
 Englishmen had no knowledge. Hence the 
 impression, ' If he knows the obscurities so 
 ' well, how well must he know the greater 
 ( lights of history ! ' Put thus, one sees the 
 non sequitur. He sought for the curiosities of 
 history, and found them in volumes of me- 
 moirs, causes celebres, and books like Wanley's 
 Wonders of the Little World. He revived in 
 this one of the favourite topics of the Middle 
 Ages, the Fall of Princes, the Mirror for 
 Magistrates, and his portraits recall the exempla 
 of the mediaeval moralists and sermonisers. 
 In this again he was on the search for dra- 
 matic situations, and he was chiefly interested 
 in the pathos of disappointment. 
 
 It is here that his spiritual influence has 
 been most profound. No English poet has 
 felt like Browning the pathos of the battle of 
 life. Yet keenly as he felt it, he did not 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 105 
 
 despair nor bid the world despair. ' We bid 
 ye be of good hope' was his message to 
 the seeming failures in life, a class of ever- 
 growing importance in this self-conscious age. 
 His philosophy of life was eminently manly, 
 and has brought cheer to many a despairing 
 soul. If we could condense it into a formula, 
 the maxim would run, ' Aspiration is achieve- 
 ' ment.' Herein his philosophy approached 
 closely one of the implicit assumptions of 
 the worldly life. The man of the world 
 regards every experience as such as a gain, 
 apart from its moral implications. It is better 
 to have sinned and lived than never to have 
 lived at all never, that is, to have developed 
 one's own personality. Much of Browning's 
 thought comes perilously near this, and is 
 only redeemed from it by his acute sense of 
 the mordant poignancy of the conscience-pang. 
 On the whole, his influence is of the very 
 highest kind in this part of his work. It acts 
 as a moral tonic to be brought in contact with 
 such a manly, cheery soul, that does not faintly 
 trust the larger hope, but is confidently sure 
 that in aiming at the highest we are doing 
 the best for our best selves. 
 
 Nowhere is his influence higher in this 
 regard than in his love poems, the highest 
 test of a poet's powers. The world is right 
 in thinking that the chief business of the 
 
106 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 poet is to express love and to teach how to 
 love. Browning's love poems are equally 
 remarkable for their range and for their in- 
 tensity. Nowhere in English literature does 
 this passion of love burn higher or burn 
 purer. The passion that pulsates through In 
 a Balcony or In a Gondola is as intense as 
 anything in Heine., and yet it is purged of all 
 fleshly dross. Not by any sacrifice of body 
 to spirit, nor by any lapse into sickly senti- 
 mentalism, does Browning reach this result. 
 The claims of the whole being, body and 
 spirit, are admitted to the utmost, and as a 
 consequence those of the former die away in 
 the serener glow of the spiritual passion. As 
 Browning regarding the struggle of life the 
 contest of soul with soul or against all souls 
 is eminently a man, so in his depicting of love 
 the union of soul with soul he is pre- 
 eminently the gentleman. Refinement is of 
 the very soul of him, and that without, as so 
 often happens, any loss of virile strength. 
 Here more than anywhere we trace the in- 
 fluence of his marriage, that ideal union of 
 two equally gifted souls which is unique in 
 the world's history. How abiding was this 
 influence was shown but a few months before 
 his death in the Fitzgerald incident. It was 
 clear enough to the dispassionate observer 
 that Fitzgerald was speaking of Mrs. Browning 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 107 
 
 the writer, not Mrs. Browning the woman. 
 But Browning could be no dispassionate ob- 
 server of the slightest aspersion on his wife, 
 and in a spirit of almost boyish gallantry 
 struck out on behalf of the wife who had 
 been taken from his side more than a quarter 
 of a century. 
 
 This is,, perhaps,, the place to treat of 
 Browning's humour a necessary side of a 
 complete poetic nature., indeed of any com- 
 plete man. Browning's gift in this direction 
 was large, as witness the Piper, The Two 
 Poets of Croisic, and the whole series of 
 studies of humbugs and nonentities to which 
 we have referred. But it is somewhat one- 
 sided, allied to his interest in the pathetic, 
 and thus somewhat grim. But it is never 
 cynical, except when dealing with cynics; 
 and though it is rarely hearty or a direct 
 object of his art, it is always refined and 
 manly. Mr. Ruskin, in a passage remarkable 
 for its insight and for the quarter whence it 
 comes, notices how inevitably the strongest 
 English poetic force tends to degenerate into 
 coarseness. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, 
 Byron, are instances of what he means. 
 Browning is the exception to the rule he 
 has the strength of these, but he has not 
 their coarseness and here again we probably 
 have to thank the influence of the Lyric Love 
 
108 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 that interpenetrated his whole being during 
 the greater part of his life. 
 
 All the qualities we have been noticing 
 his virile strength, his humour, his refinement, 
 his interest in the pathetic, the pureness and 
 intensity of his passion, his interest in the 
 obscurities of history, his fertility and many- 
 sidedness, his eye for the dramatic situation, 
 but want of the true dramatic instinct all 
 these qualities culminate in The Ring and 
 the Book, his greatest work in point of size 
 and in the sense it gives us of his sustained 
 power. But the whole impression is one of 
 power misdirected. Not to speak of the 
 irritating bizarreries of the advocates and of 
 the fractions of Rome, the whole method of 
 the book is anti-poetical. Poetic truth does 
 not consist in displaying the facets of truth 
 disconnectedly : the poet sees life singly and 
 sees it whole, and should enable us so to see 
 it. But if the experiment of trying to give 
 the totality of truth by presenting its dislo- 
 cated parts in small doses is a failure, what 
 gigantic powers are displayed in the failure ! 
 The Titan piles Pelion on Ossa, and if he 
 fails to reach the all-commanding heights of 
 Olympus, the massy pile remains as an en- 
 during monument of his strength ; and the 
 incidental successes on the way to the failure 
 would be sufficient to found a dozen poetic 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 109 
 
 reputations. The contrast of Guide's two 
 soliloquies, Pompilia's purity, the Pope's placid 
 objectivity these and a thousand other points 
 betray the master's hand. It has been said 
 that the whole concentrated energy of Vanity 
 Fair finds a vent through Colonel Crawley's 
 knuckles as he stretches the marquis at his 
 wife's feet. So the whole pathos and tragedy 
 of The Ring and the Book finds utterance in 
 Guido's last words : 
 
 Abate Cardinal Christ Maria God, . . . 
 Pompilia, will you let them murder me ? 
 
 but the highest order of poet one that con- 
 trols his faculties instead of being controlled 
 by them would not have been led astray 
 from such effects as these by over-refinements 
 of intellectual subtlety. 
 
 There we reach the last quality of Brown- 
 ing's mind of which we need take explicit 
 notice, and this intellectual subtlety is the 
 disturbing element in his art. He is both 
 too intellectual and too subtle. These are 
 qualities the reverse of poetical. Not that 
 a poet need be a fool or dense. But the 
 things of the intellect must be subordinate to 
 the purposes of his art, not objects of inde- 
 pendent interest. The intellect analyses and 
 abstracts, poetry synthesises and concretes. 
 In consequence of Browning's interest in the 
 
110 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 gambollings of the human intellect, and espe- 
 cially of his own intellect, much of his work 
 reads like so many exercises in forensic dia- 
 lectics. ( What a grand Q.C. the world has 
 lost!' is our thought, but that is not a 
 thought that a great poet should arouse. 
 The Browningites, with the perverse ingenuity 
 of the uncritical worshipper, lay stress upon 
 this side of the poet's characteristics as if it 
 were his most desirable quality. ' He is 
 so subtle/ say they^ and think they have 
 thereby pronounced his greatest praise. Pro- 
 found a poet should be, but hardly subtle. 
 All art is at root selective ; the poet's art con- 
 sists in selecting out of the mass of thoughts 
 and feelings which a poetic subject arouses in 
 his soul those streams of thought and emotion 
 that are essential to the subject. But Brown- 
 ing too often did not select, but gave, or 
 attempted to give, the whole mass. The 
 outcome has its interest the interest of the 
 riddle and the puzzle, which have their at- 
 traction for the uncultivated or the immature 
 mind. But it is a vital mistake to confuse 
 this interest, as the Browningites do, with the 
 poetic effect which the poet qua poet alone 
 arrives at. ' How clever I am to have solved 
 that ! ' is the feeling produced by the solu- 
 tion of the riddle. We have no quarrel with 
 the feeling, but it is vastly different from the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 111 
 
 proper ejaculation after being moved by the 
 poet, * How noble to have felt that !' 
 
 Akin to this is the error of placing in the 
 forefront of his work the argumentative dis- 
 quisitions on theological subjects, which form 
 no inconsiderable portion of his poetical ac- 
 tivity. There is no reason why a poet should 
 not be a theologian; in these days, which 
 have seen more theological disquisition than 
 any period since the Council of Trent, there 
 is every reason why a poet should share in 
 such an absorbing interest of the audience he 
 addresses. But he has not to display the 
 processes of his thoughts on theology ; he has 
 only to give results in imaginative form. 
 Browning has shown how to do this in Rabbi 
 ben Ezra, but he has also shown us how not to 
 do it in La Saisiaz. The poet may be nay, 
 he must be very sure of God and of an 
 eternal soul, but he is to convince us by his 
 very sureness, not by process of reasoning. 
 
 We have now touched on all the sides of 
 the poetic activity of Browning which need 
 touching upon for the purpose of indicating 
 the poetic force of the man, the large stores 
 of spiritual energy which are contained in 
 his works. But poetry has form as well as 
 force, and we know but half of a poet's art 
 when we have measured his poetic force. 
 And in judging of Browning's poetic form 
 
112 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 there can be no hesitation about the verdict. 
 He was faulty in form almost always fault- 
 less scarcely ever. Often, indeed, his choice 
 of metre struck a false note from the start; 
 he wrote argument in jerky trochaics, he ex- 
 pressed lyric emotion in blank verse. Such 
 lapses in a man of sure touch in matters of 
 this sort point to some inherent defect in the 
 poet's method. Worse even than this was 
 the over-subtlety of intellect to which we 
 have already referred, and which is at the 
 root of his so-called obscurity. He attempted 
 not only to give the emotive iridescence of 
 the poetic afflatus, but also at the same time 
 to suggest the accompanying inrush of cluster- 
 ing thoughts. The psychology of the poetic 
 afflatus is obscure, but one thing is at least 
 certain about it. Under the inrush of the 
 emotive impulse the poet remains master of 
 his passion, directing it into artistic channels. 
 Browning had this power to the highest, and 
 misused it. He attempted the impossible 
 task of setting forth in verse the totality of 
 impressions, emotional, aesthetic, and intel- 
 lectual, which his object made upon him. 
 When one reflects on what the totality of 
 impressions on such a nature as Browning's 
 must mean, one recognises the impossibility 
 of the task. To make even an approach to 
 it he had to write in a kind of lyric shorthand, 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 113 
 
 and his sentences become congested with 
 suggestion. Hence their stimulating effect,, 
 but it is not a poetical one. The poet's art 
 consists in selecting one particular order of 
 impressions out of the totality which 'inspires' 
 him. To attempt to give the whole is, we 
 will not say inartistic, but extra-artistic. The 
 poetic influence is diffracted and dispersed 
 among the conflicting orders of interest that 
 are aroused. It is much the same effect, to 
 use a homely illustration, as is produced by 
 the attempt to watch Barnum's five per- 
 formances all at once. Only one art is 
 capable of producing unity amid such com- 
 plexity; not poetry, but music, was the art 
 in which Browning's method was possible. 
 His whole conception of poetic form was 
 consequently false, and goes far to mar the 
 greatest poetic force England has seen for 
 centuries. Perhaps the secret of the matter 
 was that his imagination was less intense 
 than that of most poets of anything like his 
 power. With them the vivid mental picture 
 enables them to concentrate attention on it, 
 and to inhibit, as the psychologists say, the 
 crowd of surging thoughts that accompany it. 
 That Browning had less of this visual insight 
 than most poets is shown by the comparative 
 infrequency of descriptive passages as well as 
 by a certain lack of minute observation of 
 H 
 
114 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 externals. His insight was into the soul of 
 things. His translations from the Greek 
 brought out his imperfect form in a most 
 instructive way. While he reproduced their 
 spirit very effectually, he was hopelessly in- 
 adequate in representing their form. It was 
 as if Greek temples had been transformed 
 into Gothic cathedrals. The sense of rugged 
 power is always with us, rarely or never the 
 impression of god-like grace. He was of 
 the Titans, not of the Gods. 
 
 Standing by his open grave, we give the 
 last thought to the man we have lost as well 
 as the poet. His warm geniality made him 
 a universal favourite in society. If to some it 
 seems incongruous to think of the vates sacer 
 at the five o'clock tea-table, it must be re- 
 membered that the spiritual influence of such 
 a nature would radiate through the very class 
 that needs idealising. With him has gone a 
 spiritual force of the first magnitude. The 
 firm friend, the free giver, the sympathiser 
 in all the higher forms of the nation's life, the 
 inspirer of painting, music, and the higher 
 criticism all these are gone in Robert 
 Browning the man. And notwithstanding 
 all deductions of faulty form, of infelicitous 
 choice of subject and medium, a large body 
 of work remains of Browning the poet in 
 which these imperfections were reduced to a 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 115 
 
 minimum. If aspiration were indeed achieve- 
 ment, Robert Browning would have been 
 the greatest name in the roll of English 
 poets ; and even as it is, his work will 
 rank among the greatest spiritual forces of 
 England. 
 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 August 11, 1890 
 
CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 GREAT leader of men, an in- 
 fluential ecclesiastic, a man of 
 saintly life, a spiritual force of 
 great power, a master of Eng- 
 lish prose, has passed away from 
 us with John Henry Newman. To modern 
 England he has been as one of the dead from 
 the night Father Dominic, the Passionist, 
 passed over his threshold at Littlemore, and 
 he has himself written the biography of that 
 dead self in one of the masterpieces of English 
 literature. What Father Newman did in life 
 and letters is of quite subordinate interest to 
 the spiritual career of the Fellow of Oriel, who 
 exercised so much influence on the Church of 
 England and might have exercised more. It 
 is only so far as that career has affected the 
 inner life of England and its manifestations 
 in English letters that it can be considered 
 in this place. 
 
 It seems almost a paradox to say of the 
 author of forty volumes that his true sphere 
 was in action, not thought or literature. Yet 
 it is a paradox that contains more than the 
 
 119 
 
120 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 usual fraction of truth. He was born to lead 
 men; the very modesty that caused him at 
 times to deny this concealed his dissatisfaction 
 even with the enormous mastery over men's 
 souls and fates that he wielded for so many 
 years. It was by personal intercourse that he 
 sought to move the world, and did move it. 
 The tenacity with which he clung to old 
 friendships was significant of much. His 
 whole life was a sermon, the text of which 
 might well be the title of his epoch-making 
 discourse, Personal Intercourse the Means of Pro- 
 pagating the Truth the sermon that really 
 started the Tractarian Movement,, and not 
 Keble's on National Apostasy. Throughout 
 his Anglican period the ecclesiastical things 
 which touched him most nearly were not 
 things of dogma, but lay in the sphere of 
 almost practical politics. At every point of 
 his career it was some problem in the rela- 
 tions of Church and State that affected him 
 most strongly. The abolition of the Irish 
 bishoprics, the miserable muddle of the 
 Jerusalem bishopric, the alliance of O'Con- 
 nell and the Whigs these things, and things 
 like these, are the turning-points of his 
 career. Even the diplomatic reserve and 
 ' economy of truth' with which the world 
 credited him for so many years were marks 
 of the ecclesiastical statesman, not of the 
 religious thinker. 
 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 121 
 
 It bears out this classification of him as a 
 man of action, not of thought, that almost 
 every one of the forty volumes of which we 
 have spoken is what might be termed occa- 
 sional. His sermons, fine as they are, are 
 occasional on the face of them. f Tract No. 
 xc/ is a tract for immediate consumption. 
 The magnificent Apologia is but a pamphlet 
 writ large. His Verses are, as their title-page 
 informs us, f on Various Occasions.' Even 
 when he engaged in works that might seem 
 to imply a purely theoretic interest, like his 
 Essay on Development, they were written with 
 a practical aim, even though it were a per- 
 sonal one of working the subject out to 
 ' quiet him/ as he said, somewhat after the 
 principle of K<0a/oo-is, familiar to the Greeks 
 and to Goethe. His was not the writer's 
 nature that is irresistibly impelled to writing 
 and thinking for their own sakes. He 
 thought, he wrote, that he might influence 
 the actions of men. He did influence their 
 actions, but, as a consequence, most of what 
 he wrote has in reality died away with its 
 practical effect, and of his forty volumes but 
 a few sermons, ' Lead, kindly Light ' the one 
 hymn of our language the Apologia, and 
 perhaps The Idea of a University, will form 
 .permanent additions to English literature. 
 His histories are unhistorical, his criticism 
 
122 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 uncritical, and much of his theology is founded 
 on his history and his criticism. His Arians 
 and his Via Media, his Anglican Difficulties, 
 even his Grammar of Assent, have mainly a 
 personal interest to commend them. 
 
 And yet what literary powers were those 
 that thus seem to have been squandered 
 away on temporary objects ! Bizarre as his 
 reasoning seemed to most of us, how subtly 
 he weaved the weft of it ! Dealing for the 
 most part with subjects remote from human 
 interest, he would so order his argument 
 that it would have the attraction of a plot 
 for us. Topics that seemed forbidding both 
 for their theological technicalities and their 
 repulse of reason were presented by him 
 with such skill that they appeared as in- 
 evitable as Euclid and as attractive as Plato. 
 All the resources of a master of English style 
 except, perhaps, one, description were at 
 his command; pure diction, clear arrange- 
 ment, irony, dignity, a copious command of 
 words combined with a reserve in the use of 
 them all these qualities went to make up 
 the charm of Newman's style, the finest flower 
 that the earlier system of a purely classical 
 education has produced. It is curious, by the 
 way, that the only two men of our time who 
 have written on theology and possessed a 
 style, Dr. Martineau and Newman, have had 
 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 123 
 
 Huguenot blood in their veins. And with 
 Newman all this was informed with the 
 attraction of a personality so rare and a 
 nature so rich that the appeal is irresistible 
 even to those who care little for his topics. 
 
 Yes, that was an exceptionally rich nature 
 which has just been removed from the world. 
 He moved many men, because he had within 
 him the making of many men. He had 
 points of contact with nearly all the currents 
 of thought and feeling which were to trans- 
 form the higher England in Queen Victoria's 
 reign. That revolt of his against f Liberalism/ 
 as he called it, was prophetic of nearly all the 
 deeper movements of our time. The resort 
 to history for spiritual nourishment, which led 
 him from the Evangelicalism of Simeon to 
 Rome herself, has become a source of inspira- 
 tion for the higher politics and economics of 
 our time. There was something, too, of the 
 romantic temper in him that return to the 
 mystic glow and imaginative colouring of the 
 Middle Ages that has done so much for our 
 literature and our art. Even the method of 
 evolution appears to have operated on New- 
 man's mind in the doctrine of development 
 that finally led him to Rome. And that 
 absorbing interest of Newman in dogmatic 
 theology was but a foreshadowing of what 
 has befallen most of England's higher minds 
 
124 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 during the past half-century, even when it 
 has led them to agnosticism. England is the 
 only European country that cares for theology, 
 say continental observers, and its passionate 
 interest in theology begins in this century 
 with the movement with which Newman's 
 name will for ever be connected. Even the 
 rise of the interest in art and music seems to 
 be foreshadowed in Newman's own personal 
 fondness for them. Newmanism, as we may 
 call it, included all these things, and thus 
 touched the national life in the early decades 
 of Queen Victoria's reign in far more points 
 than might seem at first sight to be the case. 
 
 But it was chiefly and mainly in his passion 
 for theology that he came nearest to the 
 higher strivings of his countrymen. In no 
 one of his time was manifested more strongly 
 the wish to believe which some of his dis- 
 ciples have ranked so high above the desire 
 to know. His whole life was dominated by 
 this wish, and it is this that gives such dra- 
 matic unity to the Apologia. No other auto- 
 biography certainly not that of St. Augus- 
 tine, its nearest prototype in literature is 
 so intensely theological. It is not the life of 
 a man we read, it is the drama of a soul, and 
 of a soul entirely occupied with the relations 
 of itself to God. Surely few men have 
 always lived their life so completely in the 
 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 125 
 
 great Taskmaster's eye. He seems to have 
 ever lived in the spirit of that childish fancy 
 of his, that the men around him were angels 
 disguised in human form in other words, 
 that God and he were the only noumenal 
 realities of the world. It was characteristic 
 of his whole tone of thought that in dealing 
 with what seemed to be a purely logical 
 problem in his Grammar of Assent, he postulated 
 a new sense the Illative Sense clearly for 
 the one purpose of giving validity to faith. 
 Logician as he was, he subordinated here, as 
 elsewhere, the claims of logic to the claims of 
 theology. 
 
 What was it, then, that caused c Newman- 
 ism' to be ultimately ineffective and led 
 Newman further and further away from the 
 main currents of English thought and feeling ? 
 All these rich forces of his spiritual nature 
 were tyrannised over by a subtle intellect 
 and a passion for logical consequence which 
 is furthest removed from English habits of 
 mind, and may, perhaps, be traced to his 
 Huguenot mother, as it has been equally ex- 
 emplified, though in an opposite direction, 
 by Professor Newman, the Cardinal's brother. 
 No Frenchman could be more consequent in 
 following logic to an absurdity than Newman. 
 Now English institutions, whether of State 
 or Church, are founded on compromise, or 
 
126 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 the renunciation of logical consistency. 
 Hence the aloofness of Newman from the 
 practical course of English politics, ecclesias- 
 tical or constitutional. There is something 
 foreign about his whole tone of thinking, 
 which has found a natural and logical outcome 
 in his death as a cardinal of the Roman 
 Church. The same attitude of mind accounts 
 for his deficiency in the essentially English 
 feeling of humour, which is intimately con- 
 nected with the spirit of compromise. Irony 
 he possessed in all its efficacy, but the 
 attempts at humour in his so-called novels, 
 Loss and Gain and Callista, are strained in the 
 extreme. 
 
 f' How comes it, then, that Newman, of all 
 men in the world, with his hatred of com- 
 promise and thirst after logicality, should 
 have ever thought to find rest in a via media, 
 a compromise among compromises ? There 
 comes in another quality of his mind, which 
 is equally un-English outside the particular 
 profession for which it is appropriate. In 
 reckoning up the formative influences on his 
 character, something should be said of the 
 legal tone which was given to it in early years 
 by the fact that he was intended for the Bar. 
 There is a curious touch of the man of the 
 world in much that was done and said by the 
 author of the Dream of Gerontius. In much 
 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 127 
 
 of his dialectic there is a subtlety of distinc- 
 tion which recalls the legal quibble, and at 
 times even the legal fiction. It was a crude 
 feeling of this that caused Kingsley to ask 
 his famous question, 'What, then, does Dr. 
 Newman mean ? ' to which he obtained so 
 crushing a reply. To the Philistine truth is 
 a matter of yea or nay ; there is no place for 
 subtle gradations of meaning and reference. 
 Kingsley was, with all his powers, something 
 of a Philistine, and required this sharpness of 
 outline in what we may term truths of the 
 emotions. Newman easily overthrew the con- 
 tention, but the very subtleties which he had 
 to introduce into his defence, in all parts of 
 it that were not merely personal, gave the 
 British public an uneasy feeling that there 
 was some justification for Kingsley's general 
 position. Newman amply vindicated his own 
 personal veracity, but he was scarcely so 
 successful in removing all suspicion of what 
 is euphemistically termed f economy of truth ' 
 in the practice of the Church he had joined, 
 and in his own method of dealing with 
 theological problems. It was the nisi prius 
 tone that left this impression, and it was 
 generally this legal and quibbling tone in the 
 treatment of religious topics that helped to 
 undermine Newman's influence from the time 
 of the appearance of ' Tract No. xc/ 
 
128 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 It was, too, this nisi prius attitude that 
 enabled Newman to believe as long as he did 
 in his via media. It is impossible even at this 
 distance of time to explain with any clearness 
 the subtle distinctions which in Newman's 
 mind differentiated the Anglican Church, as 
 the via media, from the Roman Catholic 
 Church. The distinctions he makes are 
 exactly of the legal kind. There was no 
 room in his mind for what Englishmen would 
 call the common-sense method of solving the 
 difficulties his own subtleties had raised. He 
 never to the last faced the plain fact that the 
 Roman Catholic Church no longer occupies 
 the position of the Church of the fifth century 
 or of the fifteenth. That Church is so far 
 removed from the tone and feeling of the 
 modern world that it is impossible to consider 
 conversion to its fold anything but il gran 
 rifiuto of these latter days a renunciation of 
 all the privileges the modern mind holds dear ; 
 and, to do it justice, the Roman Church fully 
 recognises the fact. But it remains that 
 Newman did make the renunciation, and 
 thereby declared his antipathy to the modern 
 ideals. They who hold to those ideals may 
 admire Newman, but they must condemn his 
 renunciation of reason and its claims. 
 
 He had the head of a lawyer, we have said, 
 but it should be added that he had the heart 
 
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 129 
 
 of a saint. The saintly life has never been 
 more faithfully followed than by John Henry 
 Newman. It is due to his life more than to 
 his doctrines or his presentation of them that 
 so marked a change of public opinion has 
 occurred about Newman and about his Church. 
 After all, men judge creeds by the characters 
 they produce rather than by the logical con- 
 sistency of their doctrines. That the pen- 
 dulum of public opinion about Roman Catholics 
 in England has swung back from violent 
 antipathy to sympathetic admiration is due in 
 large measure to the saintly life of John 
 Henry Newman. 
 
BUTTON'S NEWMAN'* 
 
 R. HUTTON opens yet another 
 new series by a biographical essay 
 on Cardinal Newman ,whichseems 
 likely to be the first of many 
 biographies of the late Cardinal. 
 It is but fair to Mr. Hutton to add at once 
 that it was prepared during Newman's life- 
 time, and has not been hurriedly written to 
 supply a demand caused by the Cardinal's 
 death. It is far from a biography in the 
 ordinary sense of the word ; of the man apart 
 from the theologian we hear but little. Mr. 
 Hutton has essayed to give a short history 
 of Newman's religious opinions while he was 
 in the Anglican Church, derived in the main 
 from the Apologia, but told from a point of 
 view necessarily less personal, and therefore 
 more impartial. 
 
 In many ways the essay is successful in 
 
 giving the reader the main critical points in 
 
 that remarkable transition from the extreme 
 
 left to the extreme right of Christian thought. 
 
 Mr. Hutton' s abstracts are clear, and his 
 
 * English Leaders of Religion. Cardinal Newman. 
 By R. H. Hutton. (Methuen & Co.) 
 
 130 
 
BUTTON'S 'NEWMAN* 131 
 
 criticisms judicious, if not profound. Yet 
 somehow the total impression left is not a 
 very decided one, owing, perhaps, to the 
 absence of any summary of the main lines of 
 development which led from Newman the 
 Evangelical to Newman the Cardinal. The 
 stages are clear, and have been discriminated 
 once for all by Newman himself in the 
 Apologia. It was difficult, if not impossible, 
 for any one coming after Newman to improve 
 on that statement, or amend it in any way. 
 The chief merit Mr. Hutton's treatment can 
 claim is that of conciseness. 
 
 The main lines of that development are 
 familiar enough by this time to all who have 
 read Newman's masterpiece. How the in- 
 tense Evangelicalism of his boyish years was 
 gradually dissolved and replaced by an equally 
 intense conception of the authority of the 
 Church, and how this led logically on to the 
 momentous question, ' Which is the true 
 Church ? ' how this was answered at first 
 with the old high and dry Churchmen, and 
 then, as the Erastianism of the Anglican 
 Church as then constituted became clear, how 
 the need of Church reform or reformation 
 became apparent, and so the via media was 
 devised as the ideal towards which the new 
 reformation should travel all this is some- 
 thing we have all known since 1864, if, 
 
132 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 indeed,, it was not known earlier. Mr. 
 Hutton has now and again a comment on 
 the facts or the views, or he contests the 
 contentions of the Tractarians on various 
 points, but as a rule he tells again the twice 
 told tale, with clearness, indeed, but without 
 much force. 
 
 It is only when he comes to the culmin- 
 ating episode the composition of the Essay 
 on Development that Mr. Hutton offers 
 much that is fresh or throws light on the 
 matter in hand. The chapter devoted to this 
 remarkable book is a closely written piece of 
 analysis interwoven with comment that does 
 credit to Mr. Hutton. He makes too much, 
 perhaps, of the anticipation of Darwinism 
 involved in such a treatment of doctrine. The 
 idea was in the air at the time. Chambers' s 
 Vestiges of Creation, which appeared just then, 
 was only the popularisation of much evolution- 
 ary speculation that was going on around 
 Newman as he was writing his essay on the 
 relation of doctrinal evolution and truth, for 
 that is his main subject. What are the signs 
 that show which doctrinal changes are de- 
 velopment and which degeneration ? That is 
 the problem which Newman set himself to 
 solve in the last year of his life as an Angli- 
 can. We all know the answer that he practi- 
 cally gave to the question, but it is of interest 
 
BUTTON'S < NEWMAN ' 133 
 
 to have presented to us so clear a summary of 
 the main points which led Newman to seek 
 the true Church in Rome alone, and not, as 
 heretofore, in the ideal Middle Way which he 
 and his school were to make dominant in the 
 Anglican Church. 
 
 The seven marks of true development were 
 to be found in the Roman Church, and in the 
 Roman Church alone, and therefore Newman 
 joined that communion. The remarkable 
 thing about all this is the intensely theological 
 tone of the whole procedure theological as 
 opposed to religious. Mr. Hutton has a whole 
 chapter devoted to a defence of Newman from 
 the charge of being secretly infidel or scepti- 
 cal. But to any one who reads a page of his 
 writings it is abundantly clear that Newman 
 never came within the region where doubt or 
 infidelity exists. His whole attitude towards 
 faith is a proof of this. He never needed a 
 foundation for his faith, for the faith itself was 
 a presumption in favour of the facts or feelings 
 that were to prove the faith. This is perhaps 
 not altogether a fair way of stating the case ; 
 but Newman is consistent throughout in de- 
 claring that faith itself is the most effectual 
 way of removing the difficulties that attend 
 faith, nowadays most of all, but that have 
 attended it at all times in the world's history. 
 
 Indeed, this utter absence of any scepticism 
 
134 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 as to the fundamental principles of revealed 
 religion is implied hi such a treatment of 
 theology as was adopted in Newman's writ- 
 ings both while he was within and after he 
 had left the Anglican Church. It is to him 
 the scientia scientiarum, a kind of deductive 
 science analogous to geometry, starting, like 
 it, with definitions, and assuming, like it, a 
 number of axioms. This conception at once 
 leads on to sacerdotalism, as it is obvious that 
 the knowledge of such a technical science and 
 its application to practice can only be safely 
 intrusted to experts. Hence the opposition 
 of the Tractarians to Protestantism, which from 
 this point of view represents the claim of 
 the common man to understand and apply 
 a highly technical science. 
 
 When we combine with this confidence in 
 the capacity of a dogmatic theology to solve 
 the difficulties of life an intense feeling of the 
 historic continuity of the race we have the 
 idees meres of Newman's position throughout 
 his career. The conception of the unity of 
 history is implied in all Newman's work, and 
 is the foundation of his conception of reli- 
 gious development that led him ultimately to 
 Rome. Simultaneously almost with Hegel's 
 philosophy of history Newman applied the 
 conception of evolution to man's spiritual 
 nature, before Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace 
 
BUTTON'S < NEWMAN* 135 
 
 had applied the same ruling idea to organic 
 nature. That this should have led him and 
 his school to Rome is easily comprehensible 
 now, but Newman's history in the Anglican 
 Church was a bold attempt to claim for her 
 the same privileges as the Church of Rome 
 in this respect. 
 
 Mr. Hutton rests his claim for Newman's 
 greatness on the persistency with which he 
 applied himself to the working out in full 
 detail of his main conceptions in theology, 
 and on the greatness of the powers which, as 
 Mr. Hutton intimates, he sacrificed to those 
 objects. He might have been, it is argued, a 
 great poet or a great literary artist in prose, 
 and he gave this up in order to save the 
 Church of England and to devote his whole 
 energies to theology. It is very doubtful, we 
 think, whether Newman would have become 
 a great poet in any other way than he did, 
 as a hymn-writer and as the author of The 
 Dream of Geroni'ms. It is, again, somewhat 
 difficult to guess in what direction but the 
 theological Newman's exquisite prose, which 
 at times became over-florid in his Romish 
 works, could have been effective. He had 
 few of the qualities that make the great 
 historian, his literary essays are not even 
 readable nowadays, and his so-called novels 
 are only of interest in their theological bear- 
 
136 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 ing. Newman's whole mind and spiritual 
 feeling were against the whole position of 
 modern research he could not bear not to 
 know. 
 
 Mr. Hutton is basing his hero's claim on 
 a false issue. Newman's claim to greatness 
 does not lie in any deliberate sacrifice of pro- 
 blematic powers for the sake of theological 
 science. He deserves the name of great 
 because in an age of materialism and super- 
 ficial intellectualism he held aloft the banner 
 of spiritualism, because amidst all obloquy and 
 insult he held to what he considered the 
 truth,, because he yielded up the proud posi- 
 tion of a great spiritual leader to follow the 
 inward summons. He has been one of the 
 operative forces that have aided to transform 
 England. It is for this reason he has been 
 honoured and mourned by Englishmen of all 
 creeds, quite apart from the merits and de- 
 merits of the theology to which he devoted 
 his saintly life. 
 
'LETTERS; ETC.* 
 
 FTER a great man's death the 
 floodgates of biography are 
 opened. First come the press 
 memoirs,, often running to the 
 length of monographs, then the 
 magazine articles and the popular lives, and 
 the climax is reached by the official biography ; 
 itself, perhaps, to be followed by rival lives, 
 or at least popular summaries. This familiar 
 process is clearly being followed in the case 
 of Newman, and we are now in the midst of 
 the first onrush of the waters. The three 
 books under notice include the first instalment 
 of the official biography, dealing with Newman's 
 life as an Anglican, Mr. Fletcher's popular 
 life, and a revised reprint of Mr. Meynell's ex- 
 cellent magazine articles. The two latter are 
 written from a Roman Catholic point of view, 
 the first from that of an Anglican,, and thus 
 
 * Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman. 
 Edited by Anne Mozley, 2 vols. (Longmans & Co.) 
 
 A Short Life of Cardinal Newman. By J. S. 
 Fletcher. (Ward & Downey.) 
 
 John Henry Newman. By W. Meynell. (Kegan 
 Paul & Co.) 
 
 137 
 
138 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 together they cover the whole development 
 of Newman's career. 
 
 It will always be impossible, as it will be 
 unnecessary, to write or rewrite Newman's life 
 as an Anglican. The Apologia stands in the 
 way, in which he himself wrote his early life 
 once and for all time. True, it is only the 
 ' History of his Religious Opinions.' But with 
 Newman, more, perhaps, than with any other 
 man, his religious opinions were his life. 
 Certainly Miss Mozley's work does not profess 
 to retell the story of the Apologia. Her 
 volumes are, in fact, a huge appendix to that 
 work, containing the pieces justificatives for it. 
 They are full of materials, but these do not 
 explain themselves, and at every turn have 
 reference to the events spoken of in the 
 Apologia. 
 
 In large measure this supplement to New- 
 man's religious autobiography is the work of 
 Newman himself. He has throughout the 
 two volumes edited the letters and added ex- 
 planatory words and notes, which often read 
 very oddly, interspersed as they are in the 
 midst of the text. Indeed, it seems probable, 
 from the date attached to many of these 
 annotations, 1860, that something like the 
 present collection was intended to do the work 
 that the Apologia itself did so efficiently. If 
 that be so, the world owes a large debt of 
 
'LETTERS,' ETC. 139 
 
 gratitude to Kingsley for having provoked the 
 more artistic presentation of the facts. It 
 would be quite safe to prophesy, if one can 
 prophesy about past events, that Newman's 
 name would have far different associations with 
 it if these volumes, or volumes similar to them, 
 had taken the place of the Apologia. While 
 nearly every line of that masterpiece is of en- 
 trancing interest, there is scarcely a single page 
 in these two bulky volumes which anybody 
 would care to read again for its own sake. 
 Part of this unreadableness is due to the want 
 of explanatory and connecting matter. There 
 is not even a list of the celebrated Tracts. 
 The second volume in particular, which is en- 
 tirely devoted to the ' Movement/ is in the main a 
 collection of business letters, the business being 
 of a highly ideal character no doubt, but still 
 its details are in large measure of the character 
 of machinery. Whether intentionally or no, 
 almost everything of human interest has been 
 eliminated from these pages, which are filled 
 throughout with controversial and theological 
 details, with scarcely any reference to the 
 feelings and aspirations of the workers in 
 the ' Movement.' 
 
 These volumes, then, must be regarded as a 
 supplement to the Apologia, and their direct 
 interest is the additional light they throw on 
 its pages. The main increase of knowledge 
 
140 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 about Newman's life consists of an auto- 
 biographical memoir running to some seventy- 
 six pages, and bringing his life-history up to 
 the summer of 1832, the year preceding the 
 beginnings of the ' Movement.' This is, un- 
 fortunately, written in oblique narration, and 
 thus loses much of its vividness. Take, for 
 instance, the following passage : 
 
 'The Provost's butler to whom it fell by 
 ' usage to take the news to the fortunate 
 f candidate made his way to Mr. Newman's 
 ' lodgings in Broad Street, and found him 
 ' playing the violin. This in itself disconcerted 
 ' the messenger, who did not associate such an 
 ' accomplishment with a candidateship for the 
 ' Oriel Common- Room ; but his perplexity was 
 ' increased when, on his delivering what may 
 ( be supposed to have been his usual form 
 ' of speech on such occasions, that " he had, 
 ' he feared, disagreeable news to announce, viz. 
 ' that Mr. Newman was elected Fellow of Oriel, 
 f and that his immediate presence was re- 
 ' quired there," the person addressed, thinking 
 ' that such language savoured of impertinent 
 ' familiarity, merely answered,, e( Very well," 
 1 and went on fiddling. This led the man to 
 ' ask whether, perhaps, he had mistaken the 
 ' rooms and gone to the wrong person, to 
 1 which Mr. Newman replied that it was all 
 ( right. But, as may be imagined, no sooner 
 
'LETTERS/ ETC. 141 
 
 ' had the man left, than he flung down his 
 ' instrument, and dashed downstairs with all 
 f speed to Oriel College. And he recollected, 
 ' after fifty years, the eloquent faces and eager 
 ' bows of the tradesmen and others whom he 
 ' met on his way, who had heard the news, 
 e and well understood why he was crossing 
 ( from St. Mary's to the lane opposite at so 
 ' extraordinary a pace/ 
 
 If the reader will translate this back into 
 fs, mys, and mes t the gain of vividness will 
 be apparent. It is a pity that Miss Mozley did 
 not induce the Cardinal to reconsider his choice 
 of form for this autobiographical fragment. 
 The gain such a narration receives from being 
 put in the first person may be illustrated 
 by the following letter embedded in the 
 memoir : 
 
 ' On Wednesday, April 29, about breakfast- 
 f time, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Short called for 
 ' me, and asked me whether I intended to 
 ' stand for the scholarship. I answered that 
 ' I intended next year. However, they 
 c wished me to stand this year, because they 
 ' would wish to see me on the foundation. I 
 ' said I would think of it. I wrote home that 
 e day. How often was my pen going to tell 
 ' the secret ! but I determined to surprise you. 
 ( I told you in a letter written in the midst of 
 * the examination that there were five [candi- 
 
142 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 ' dates] of our own [men] ; did you suspect 
 ' that I was one of the five ? A Worcester man 
 ' was very near getting it. They made me 
 ' first do some verses ; then Latin translation ; 
 ' then Latin theme ; then chorus of Euripides ; 
 c then an English theme ; then some Plato ; 
 ' then some Lucretius ; then some Xenophon ; 
 ( then some Livy. What is more distressing 
 ' than suspense ? At last I was called to the 
 ' place where they had been voting ; the Vice- 
 ' Chancellor [the President] said some Latin 
 ' over me ; then made a speech. The electors 
 ( then shook hands with me, and I immediately 
 ' assumed the scholar's gown. First, as I was 
 1 going out, before I had changed my gown, 
 ' one of the candidates met me and wanted to 
 ' know if it was decided. What was I to say ? 
 ' " It was." " And who has got it ? " " Oh, 
 ' an in-college man," I said ; and I hurried 
 ' away as fast as I could. On returning with 
 * my newly-earned gown, I met the whole set 
 f going to their respective homes. I did not 
 c know what to do ; I held my eyes down. By 
 1 this I am a scholar for nine years at 60 a 
 ( year. In which time, if there be no Fellow 
 ' of my county (among the Fellows), I may be 
 ' elected Fellow, as a regular thing, for five 
 ' years without taking orders/ 
 
 These four autobiographical chapters and 
 the accompanying inter-chapters in which Miss 
 
'LETTERS/ ETC. 143 
 
 Mozley has given supplementary documents 
 form the most important addition to our know- 
 ledge of Newman and his career contained in 
 these volumes. They tell us of his early home 
 and education. They give interesting details 
 like that just given of his college career. 
 Above all, they display him in a more secular 
 aspect, so to speak, than we are accustomed to 
 regard him. As he himself informs us, it was 
 only on his election to the Oriel Fellowship 
 in 1822 that the possibility of a theological 
 career occurred to him. Besides this they 
 give glimpses of the charming character of his 
 sister, Mary, whose loss affected him so deeply. 
 The fragments of her letters have a girlish 
 charm that lightens the somewhat gloomy and 
 austere tone of the book, so rarely relieved by 
 touches of humour from Newman or his corre- 
 spondents, the only exceptions being Keble and 
 Hurrell Froude. 
 
 A large part of the first volume is taken up 
 by Newman's impressions during his grand 
 tour with the Froudes in 1832-33. Much of 
 this is not of extraordinary interest, and might 
 have been well omitted. Yet it is quite true 
 and this is one of the main points brought 
 out in this work that the solitary travel in 
 Sicily and the fever that overtook him there 
 formed the crisis in Newman's life. His escape 
 from death might easily seem miraculous and 
 
144 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 a special sign of grace to so ardent a believer. 
 But for the untiring attention of his courier, 
 Gennaro, his life would have paid the penalty 
 of a somewhat hazardous exploit. His feeling 
 of special mission was intensified by the narrow 
 escape from death. 
 
 The celebrated hymn ' Lead, kindly Light/ 
 turns out to be the exact expression of the deep 
 feelings aroused by his Sicilian experience ; it 
 was written, as is well known, on his voyage 
 to Marseilles during his convalescence. Almost 
 every expression has a personal reference : ' I 
 am far from home/ ' those angel faces ' (his 
 father and sister Mary), ' Pride ruled my will ' 
 referred to the strong feeling Newman had that 
 his Sicilian illness was a punishment for his 
 self-will. Even * the moor and fen, crag and 
 torrent/ were probably the reflex of the deep 
 impression Sicilian scenery had made upon 
 him. If one could generalise from a single 
 example and one often does so generalise 
 in the first instance it might seem that the 
 popular effect of a poem depends on the 
 intensity of personal feeling with which it is 
 written. A poem's impressiveness, one might 
 say, depends on the number of heart's drops 
 instilled into it. 
 
 On this Sicilian illness there is a remarkable 
 paper of Newman's in this volume which is 
 almost morbid in the detail with which it 
 
f LETTERS/ ETC. 145 
 
 enters into each phase of the fever. Incident- 
 ally it contains a piece of self-portraiture, which 
 is perhaps, taking all things together, the most 
 striking thing in these volumes : 
 
 ' Indeed, this is how I look on myself; very 
 ( much (as the illustration goes) as a pane of 
 ' glass, which transmits heat, being cold itself. 
 ' I have a vivid perception of the consequences 
 ' of certain admitted principles, have a con- 
 ' siderable intellectual capacity of drawing them 
 
 * out, have the refinement to admire them, and 
 ( a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent 
 ' them ; and, having no great (i.e. no vivid) love 
 ' of this world, whether riches, honours, or 
 ' anything else, and some firmness and natural 
 ' dignity of character, take the profession of 
 ' them upon me, as I might sing a tune which 
 ' I liked loving the Truth, but not possessing 
 ( it, for I believe myself at heart to be nearly 
 ' hollow, i.e. with little love, little self-denial. 
 < I believe I have some faith, that is all ; and, 
 ' as to my sins, they need my possessing no 
 ' little amount of faith to set against them and 
 
 gain their remission. By-the-bye, this state- 
 ' ment will account for it, how I can preach the 
 ' Truth without thinking much of myself/ 
 
 It must be remembered that this was 
 written in a moment of self-depreciation, sin- 
 cere enough, but rather tending to exaggerate 
 demerits and failings. But external evidence 
 
146 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 and the general impression made by Newman 
 on his contemporaries show that these lines 
 are more truthful than such self-portraiture 
 usually is. With regard to his coolness there 
 is a confirmatory passage in a letter in the 
 second volume, where he describes in an 
 amusing way his meeting Arnold the chief 
 representative of ' Liberalism ' in the Church 
 in the Oriel Common-Room : 
 
 ' I was most absolutely cool, or rather calm 
 ' and unconcerned, all through the meeting 
 ' from beginning to end ; but I don't know 
 ' whether you have seen me enough in such 
 ' situations to know (what I really believe is 
 ' not any affectation at all on my part ; I am 
 ' not at all conscious of any such thing, though 
 ' people would think it) that I seem, if you 
 ' will let me say it, to put on a very simple, 
 ' innocent, and modest manner. I sometimes 
 ' laugh at myself, and at the absurdities which 
 ' result from it ; but really I cannot help it, 
 ' and I really do believe it to be genuine. On 
 ' one occasion in the course of our conversation 
 ' I actually blushed high at some mistake I 
 ' made, and yet on the whole I am quite 
 ( collected. Now, are you not amused at all 
 ' this ? or ought not I to blush now ? I never 
 ' said a word of all this about myself to any 
 ' one in my life before ; though, perhaps, that 
 ' does not mend the matter that I should say 
 ' it now.' 
 
'LETTERS/ ETC. 147 
 
 Both passages concur in giving an impres- 
 sion of cool dispassionateness that contrasts 
 with some of the impassioned language he 
 used in self-defence against Kingsley and in 
 his newspaper letters. Both Mr. Fletcher 
 and Mr. Meynell remark that this passion was 
 simulated and calculated on the part of New- 
 man, who defended it on the plausible ground 
 that the British public will never believe a 
 man is in earnest unless he loses, or seems to 
 lose, his temper. 
 
 The end of the first volume and the whole 
 of the second are entirely taken up with 
 letters and documents relating to the ' Move- 
 ment' which gave new life to the Anglican 
 Church, and led the leader of it to the Roman 
 fold. It clearly forms the raw material the 
 very raw material out of which Newman 
 drew up his own lucid account, and it affords 
 explicit information on every phase and diva- 
 gation of Tractarianism in its formative period. 
 But its very minuteness renders it practically 
 unreadable; there is little or no connecting 
 narrative only a few ' Chronological Notes ' 
 of Newman's which assume in the reader a 
 minute acquaintance with every turn of events 
 in the long struggle. It thus affords a mine 
 of evidence for the Oxford Movement, but 
 its riches have to be dug for, and it is only to 
 be used as a supplement to the Apologia or 
 to a book like that of Dean Church. 
 
148 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 That these documents should confirm the 
 Apologia is comprehensible enough, for they 
 were mostly in Newman's hands when he 
 wrote it, and have practically been edited by 
 him before now being given to the world. 
 Here and there we catch a glimpse of edi- 
 torial motive : thus the note on vol. i. p. 476, 
 ' First mention of Pusey's name/ and the 
 entries from Newman's Journal, vol. ii. p. 24, 
 giving details of Pusey's movements, were 
 clearly intended to dissociate Pusey's name 
 from the ' Movement/ Yet it remains to be 
 proved whether the impetus and force given 
 to it by Pusey's social position were not vital 
 to the development of the ' Movement/ As 
 Mr. Meynell points out, it was Newman's 
 family connections, or rather want of them, 
 that threw the direction of the ' Movement ' 
 into Pusey's hands, and gave rise to the 
 popular epithet ' Puseyite.' These are, how- 
 ever, almost the only instances of pettiness to 
 be observed in these volumes, unless the 
 reference to Golightly, vol. i. p. 165 (' he is 
 better to know than to see '), can be regarded 
 as such. But the intense minuteness in 
 personal details shows an amount of self-will 
 and self-opinion in Newman which is extra- 
 ordinary in a man of such genuine modesty. 
 
 The total impression given by the details 
 of the ' Movement ' confirms the general idea 
 
' LETTERS/ ETC. 149 
 
 that has long been current. It was an 
 attempt to transfer the seriousness of Evan- 
 gelicalism to the side of the High Church. 
 In a significant passage (vol. i. p. 277) Go- 
 lightly declared that the only young men in 
 whom there was true seriousness were Cal- 
 vinistic in tone. Newman had been trained 
 Calvinistically, and was thus adapted by his 
 training to make the required transition from 
 the Low to the High Church. As early as 
 1830 T. Mozley recognised his suitability as 
 leader of such a movement. Theologically 
 and technically speaking, Newman and his 
 followers made earnest, as the Germans say, 
 with the conception of the Apostolical Succes- 
 sion and all that it implies : * Apostolical/ 
 indeed, becomes a cant word in these letters to 
 indicate the aims of the party. Newman was 
 thus, in Heine's phrase, though not in Heine's 
 sense, a Knight of the Holy Ghost, and 
 valiantly he fought the fight of the Faith. 
 
 Towards the end of the second volume 
 Newman's development had reached a stage 
 when Rome loomed in the distance as the 
 inevitable goal of his theological thinking. 
 It will come as a surprise to most people 
 that this stage was reached much earlier 
 than the final step would lead one to imagine. 
 At first, indeed, he was unconscious of the 
 direction of his steps ; he did not know where 
 
150 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 he was leading his followers, because he did 
 not know how far he was going himself. So 
 far he could honestly deny the imputation 
 that he was a Romanist in disguise while 
 seemingly fighting for a via media between 
 Anglicanism and Romanism. But it appears 
 from a touching series of letters between his 
 sister and himself that he was practically a 
 Romanist in disguise for some years probably 
 as many as four before he took the final 
 step. It is curious that his consciousness of 
 being drawn towards Rome should have coin- 
 cided in point of time with the rejection by 
 the Anglican Church, and to a certain extent 
 by his own party, of the doctrines of ' Tract 
 No. xc.' Here again we seem to have 
 glimpses of quasi-personal motives in what 
 appear to be doctrinal developments that 
 clash with our preconceived notions of his 
 humility and disinterestedness in the highest 
 sense of the word. 
 
 There is one thing that comes out in these 
 letters that is explanatory of much. He was 
 a theologian, or rather a theological thinker, 
 but he was not, comparatively speaking, a 
 theological scholar in the sense in which we 
 can apply that term to Dollinger or even to 
 Pusey. It is curious to find a thinker who 
 laid such absolute stress on authority in the 
 living Church, and on development in the 
 
< LETTERS/ ETC. 161 
 
 Church of the past, knowing so little about 
 the actual facts of that development. His- 
 torical criticism in the field of theology was 
 not born in his time, above all in England, 
 and there is an utter absence of any appeal 
 to it in these volumes. 
 
 Altogether these letters do not impress one 
 with very high ideas of the intellect of the 
 Tractarians. They all seem too deeply im- 
 mersed in the practical details of their schemes. 
 There is scarcely any discussion of principles, 
 or even any distinct consciousness of the 
 principles to be fought for. Resistance to 
 ' Liberalism ' in its inroads on the Church is 
 a more prominent motive, it would seem, 
 than any distinct conception of the ideals 
 which they desired to realise. Even in 
 Newman there is too much immersion in 
 detail, and there is far too little of humanism 
 in his letters to make them interesting. It 
 is the e Movement,' the ' Movement/ and 
 still again the ' Movement.' Of life, of art, 
 except stray references to music, of letters, 
 there is scarcely anything throughout these 
 thousand pages. It is possible that this was 
 designed by the editor and by the Cardinal, 
 but the result has been to make these volumes 
 terribly technical and monotonous. 
 
 The two remaining books on our list deal 
 more fully with the Cardinal's Catholic life. 
 
152 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 
 In one way this was a failure, his Cardinal- 
 deaconship being a somewhat empty honour, 
 and he never acquired any real influence in 
 his adopted Church, such as has been wielded 
 by the rival English Cardinal. It is, indeed, 
 curious to reflect that Newman's theological 
 thoughts on the necessary development of 
 religious truth should have led him into the 
 fold of the Church which practically negatives 
 the possibility of such development. There 
 is clearly no field in her economy for the 
 theological thinker; the Pope's infallibility 
 renders such efforts nugatory. On the other 
 hand, it must be remembered that the late 
 Cardinal's work as a literary artist was mainly 
 performed in his Catholic period. His novels, 
 the Dream of Gerontius, the Idea of a Uni- 
 versity, the Grammar of Assent, even the 
 Apologia itself, were all products of his 
 Catholic period. Except the Lyra and the 
 sermons but what an exception is there ! 
 the chief works by which he will be remem- 
 bered were written within the Church of his 
 adoption. And his life in that Church, when 
 it comes to be told, must surely be more full 
 of human and natural interest than the some- 
 what morbid and gloomy period that closed 
 in 1845. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 October 6, 1892 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 (HE greatest poetic artist of the 
 English - speaking race has 
 passed away. There need be 
 no sadness of farewell at such a 
 close to such a career. To have 
 passed a long life in undivided devotion to 
 the noblest of the arts, to have grown in 
 mastery of it almost to the end, to have be- 
 come in very deed the voice of the nation 
 he loved so well: this has been surely the 
 supreme lot. It is characteristic that almost 
 the only trouble of his later years was the 
 intrusive reverence of his fellow-countrymen, 
 a burden that might have been borne with 
 somewhat more of patience and geniality. 
 But there was a touch of the aristocrat about 
 Tennyson that chimed in well with the dignity 
 of his art, and completes the picture of the 
 vales sacer, the consecrated voice of a mighty 
 people, brooding in self-chosen isolation upon 
 the things of highest import. 
 
 That is not the figure which Tennyson pre- 
 155 
 
156 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 sents on his first appearance in the arena 
 where he was to outstrip all rivals. His Keep- 
 sake period lasted long. Looking back, we 
 can indeed discern in the volume of 1842 in 
 the Ulysses, in the Morte d' Arthur, in The Two 
 Voices the promise of nearly all that was to 
 come. But these were imbedded in much 
 that was pretty but petty, Wordsworthian 
 idylls too long drawn out, Lords of Burleigh 
 and Ladies Clare, that half justified the early 
 scoffers, Wilson and the rest. Even the 
 melody, though sweet and clear, was thin and 
 at times tinkling. Grace, not force or dignity, 
 was the characteristic up to and including The 
 Princess of 1847, the most graceful poem of 
 such length in the language. The Rape of the 
 Lock, the only other poem in English literature 
 that can be compared with it, is more witty 
 than graceful. 
 
 Yet all the while the master was growing in 
 command over his instrument. Even in the 
 earlier volumes of 1830 and 1832 there were 
 premonitions of the almost flawless workman- 
 ship in words which was to be the cachet of 
 Tennyson's style. They say that men's minds 
 ossify after forty. Certainly there comes to 
 languages growing old a stage of ossification, 
 when new collocations of words become in- 
 creasingly difficult and the conventional epithet 
 is stereotyped and polarised. In the history 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 157 
 
 of English style, in prose indirectly as directly 
 in poetry, that stage of ossification was arrested 
 by Tennyson. He is the great Master of the 
 Epithet in our language. He revived old 
 words like 'marish,' he invented new ones 
 like 'Ionian.' He seems to have taken 
 infinite care over the filing of his phrases. A 
 careful study of the variae lectiones of his suc- 
 cessive editions is a liberal education in poetic 
 form, and there was probably much greater 
 modification before anything of his appeared 
 in print at all. The earlier edition of the 
 celebrated Charge of the Light Brigade is of 
 great interest in this connection. 
 
 It is for this reason that the poet with whom 
 he is to be affiliated in the history of English 
 poetry, regarded simply as an art, is, of all 
 poets in the world, Pope. It was Pope's aim, 
 he himself avowed, to make English poetry 
 correct in form. It was Tennyson's function 
 to bring back to English verse that care for 
 form which had disappeared from it when he 
 began to write. During his formative period, 
 the titular head of English poetry was Robert 
 Southey, who published amorphous masses 
 which he called poems, while Wordsworth was 
 acting up to a theory of poetry which implied 
 that form was of no consequence. Tennyson 
 rescued English poetry from these tendencies. 
 No wonder that his influence has been the 
 
158 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 dominant one among all but a few. As in the 
 eighteenth century every poetaster aped Pope, 
 so in the nineteenth every English minor poet 
 has followed in the wake of Tennyson. 
 
 There can be little doubt that this loving 
 care for form was due to his University educa- 
 tion on the old Trinity lines. Tennyson is of 
 the classical order of poets in a double sense. 
 There are always poets learned in their art who 
 love to reproduce and recall the best work of 
 their predecessors in their own or in the classi- 
 cal languages: Milton and Gray are of this 
 class. There are poets, again, who preserve 
 in their lines the reserve, the dignity, the 
 /cat/aos of the great poets of antiquity, even 
 though they may not be intimately acquainted 
 with them : Collins and Keats are classical in 
 this sense. Tennyson was classical in both 
 ways : he has antique reserve, he is full of re- 
 miniscences. It is this fact that has made the 
 comparison to Virgil or to Theocritus so natural, 
 yet so misleading. The reference to Theo- 
 critus might pass for one side of his work, 
 and that the least important. But Tennyson 
 had no such theme as the Majeslas Romae 
 of the great Mantuan before him : no 
 national-religious sanction to his subject, no 
 haunting sense of a world -theme in his 
 words. 
 
 There is, indeed, in Tennyson's first period, 
 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 159 
 
 which we are at present considering, no haunt- 
 ing sense of anything. There is none of the 
 magic, the mystical charm of Coleridge or of 
 Rossetti in his lines. They are as clear cut as 
 crystal, and as cold. One feels no rush of 
 impetuous emotion behind the words, no un- 
 controllable outburst of imaginative force. 
 Yet it is this that gives us the sense of a great 
 poet, a vision of unknown vistas of the poet- 
 soul flashing through the verse. Tennyson in 
 his first period knows exactly what he wants 
 to say, and says it in the best way. This is 
 the side of him that has made him popular, 
 and contrasts so favourably with the obscurity 
 and incoherence of many of his compeers. 
 Yet it has its weakness in the want of depth, 
 want of soul-tone in his earlier work. 
 
 Akin to this clear-cut form was the accuracy 
 and minuteness of observation which made 
 him so successful a painter of domesticated 
 Nature. His achievements in this direction 
 may have been over-estimated. He is not 
 immaculate ; the songster nightingale is always/ 
 with him, the female, not the male, as it is in 
 Nature : he was probably misled by the myth 
 of Philomela. But the minuteness and inde- 
 pendence of his powers of observation are 
 acknowledged on all hands, and go naturally 
 with the clear vision of the artist in words. 
 Yet here'again the result is to impair the true 
 
160 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 poetic effect, except of course in the purely 
 landscape poems, where this power gave him 
 an advantage over every predecessor in that 
 genre of poetry. Nature in romantic or pas- 
 sionate poetry must be used as a 'pathetic 
 fallacy ' to use Mr. Ruskin's phrase in order 
 to give the Stimmung to the emotions the poet 
 wishes to arouse. Minute attention to detail 
 diverts the emotion, and at best produces only 
 a decorative effect. 
 
 The danger was that this mastery of form 
 and clearness of vision would lead to mere 
 daintiness, might even result in the sugared 
 elegance of vers de societe. Tennyson was 
 saved from this by the great chastening sorrow 
 of his life. While he was training himself as 
 a poetic artist with metrical experiments and 
 coinages of five-word phrases enshrining his 
 observations of Nature, he was also elaborating 
 his masterpiece, In Memoriam. For twice the 
 Horatian period he kept this series of poem- 
 sequences by him, adding, revising, inserting, 
 and rejecting, till the whole grew to a moving 
 series of pictures of a soul's development, from 
 the first overwhelming stroke till the final re- 
 conciliation of sorrow and hope. Injustice is 
 done to Tennyson in thinking of the In 
 Memoriam as one outburst written in somewhat 
 cold blood immediately after Hallam's death. 
 He is careful to mark the stages of his grief. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 161 
 
 In one case we can even date a canto at least 
 thirteen years later than the death of Arthur 
 Hallam. When the poet speaks of science 
 charming her secret from the latest moon, 
 there is little doubt he is referring to the dis- 
 covery of Neptune in 1 846 ; yet this occurs in 
 one of the earlier sections of the poem. The 
 dangers involved in a philosophical poem were 
 overcome by putting the problem in a concrete 
 shape. The theology of the poem was from 
 Rugby: it is the voice of the Broad Church 
 clear, yet somewhat thin, and wanting in the 
 higher imagination. The curious anticipations 
 of Darwinism which occur so frequently in it 
 were due to the interest excited by Chambers' s 
 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 
 which appeared in 1844, and enable us to see 
 how late these sections of the poem were 
 added. The felicities of phrase with which it 
 abounds cause it to rank as one of the best 
 known poems in the language, and the one 
 with which the name of Tennyson will be in- 
 dissolubly connected. Here,, again, the com- 
 parison with Pope is justified. The only other 
 long philosophical poem in the language of 
 any real literary merit is his Essay on Man. 
 
 Maud is even a greater surprise when com- 
 pared with the Tennyson of the first period. 
 There is no lack here of impetuous emotion, 
 no cold decorative work. There is even a 
 L 
 
162 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 touch of hysteria in the highly wrought passion. 
 The poet, under Carlyle's influence, broke here 
 with Manchesterthum : the sword is the voice 
 of God, as a later poet has put it. There was 
 in Maud an indication of emotional power, as 
 in In Memoriam there was an unexpected proof 
 of intellectual power, in one who had hitherto 
 seemed only the idle singer of an empty day. 
 To the poet of In Memoriam and of Maud 
 there seemed no height too high, no poetic 
 exploit too ambitious. 
 
 Unhappily, the poet's ambition turned for 
 nearly a quarter of a century into spheres of 
 poetic art where his powers, great as they 
 were, were inadequate. He was not an epic 
 poet, he was not a dramatic poet ; yet he 
 devoted his forces at their highest capacity to 
 epic, to drama. An epic is the presentation 
 of a national myth regarded as sacred : the 
 Paradise Lost answers to this description, the 
 Idylls of the King do not. Arthur has never 
 been a national hero : he is mainly the out- 
 come of a long series of literary creation ; the 
 Idylls could at best claim only to be a literary 
 epic, not a national one. But the temper 
 required for the literary epic is the romantic, 
 not the classical spirit. There must be some- 
 thing of the Viking delight in battle, a tone of 
 Xa/o/>/, not to mention a certain sensuous 
 glory, surrounding the passion of the epic. 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 163 
 
 Such ideals are different from the Rugby ones, 
 which Tennyson represents in literature. 
 Attempts have been made to defend the Idylls 
 from the lack of epic interest by claiming them 
 as an allegory of the struggle of man's soul 
 through life. But the defence is really a 
 verdict against the poet. The medium that 
 carries the allegory must be of interest on its 
 own account, as in the Faerie Queene, Pilgrim's 
 Progress, Faust, or Dr. Jekyll, or else where is 
 the advantage of the allegorical mode of treat- 
 ment ? 
 
 It is scarcely denied that Tennyson trans- 
 formed the tone of his originals, of the 
 Mabinogion and the Morte d' Arthur. The 
 unworthy gibe that the Morte d' Arthur of 
 Tennyson was a Morte d' Albert was the more 
 unfair, as the Morte d' Arthur is the least un- 
 successful of the series, and departs least from 
 the original. But the whole conception of 
 Guinevere, and still more of Vivien, was that 
 of the nineteenth-century English gentleman, 
 and something in the spirit of Mr. Podsnap. 
 The control of passion, which is so character- 
 istic a part of the Rugby ideal, has its noble 
 side, but it has a narrowing effect on the artist 
 when dealing with passionate subjects. Along 
 with it goes a want of humour, conspicuous 
 alike in Tennyson and in Wordsworth. The 
 Northern Farmer is almost the sole exception 
 
164 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 to the high seriousness of his work. The isola- 
 tion of the poet must have contributed to this 
 defect : one cannot keep one's-self in cotton 
 wool with impunity. 
 
 The epic period, 1860-1872, was succeeded 
 by a dramatic decade even more damaging for 
 his reputation. It is not merely that the 
 dramas were unsuited for the stage ; their 
 fatal defect was that they were not dramatic. 
 There is more dramatic force, for example, 
 in the closing lines of Lucretius than in the 
 whole of the dramas put together. It is use- 
 less to note that the character of Henry n., or 
 of Mary, is according to the Records : dramas 
 are not histories. Tennyson may have con- 
 ceived his characters aright according to Stubbs 
 or to Froude; he has not presented them 
 dramatically. Here, again, as in the epic 
 series, one felt the absence of the creative 
 rush, the sense of a personality behind the 
 artistic work, and greater than it. The great 
 poet is himself greater than his work; the 
 sense of easy mastery of their materials is given 
 by men like Shakespeare or Homer. Tenny- 
 son's epic and dramatic studies leave a sense 
 of the poet's struggle with an uncongenial 
 task. Even the poet's mastery of form had 
 declined. There are indeed many passages in 
 the Idylls of the King, especially in The Passing 
 of Arthur and the Guinevere, which, by their 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 165 
 
 mere verbal beauty, redeem the poems from 
 insignificance. There are scarcely any in the 
 dramas apart from the lyrical interludes 
 which are either worthy of their setting or 
 worthy of being taken out of their setting. 
 
 I can well remember the disastrous effect 
 the epic and dramatic periods had on Tenny- 
 son's reputation during the ' seventies/ We 
 that were interested in the future of English 
 letters had lost all hope in Tennyson : our 
 eyes were turned to Rossetti and Mr. Swin- 
 burne. It became the fashion to think and 
 speak slightingly of the great master, who was 
 all the while maturing to a final creative out- 
 burst which was to raise him far above any 
 contemporary, far above most of his prede- 
 cessors in English song, except the two greatest 
 names of all. The fifth act of the drama of 
 Tennyson's poetic career fulfils all, and more 
 than all, the promise of the earlier ones. 
 
 Since Sophocles there has been nothing in 
 all literature like that St. Martin's summer of 
 Tennyson's muse. The old age of Goethe, 
 which seems at first sight a parallel, was de- 
 voted to science ; the vital portions of the 
 second part of Faust were written years before 
 they were published. The vigour and virility 
 of the volume of Ballads, the Teiresias volume, 
 the New Locksley Hall, and the Demeter volume 
 were astounding : Rizpah t Fastness, the Ballad 
 
166 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 of the Revenge, Teiresias, to mention some of 
 the more striking, were achievements of the 
 first order in poetic force. There was no want 
 of the rush of inspiration behind the verse; 
 there was rugged vigour, sublime incoherence. 
 The metrical forms could no longer bear the 
 fulness of the poetic fervour. There was no 
 over-niceness of precision ; even the metre had 
 grown less smooth, more Michalangelesque. 
 It was as if the frost of eld was sending spikes 
 of ice across the surface of the stream of verse. 
 Thus, in the Crossing of the Bar, which was so 
 mercilessly reiterated immediately after the 
 poet's death, the third line of each stanza is 
 wanting in the old smoothness and ring ; yet 
 it is the more effective for that. The rhythm 
 is more complex, the harmony richer. This 
 was the more needed, as Tennyson was never 
 very rich in rhymes, the other expedient for 
 giving mellowness to English verse. It was 
 perhaps from a sense of this defect that he 
 resorted so frequently and with such effect to 
 alliteration. 
 
 It is in the Tennyson of these later days 
 that we recognise the Master the great poet- 
 soul looming behind the poem, and greater 
 than it. He rises at times to an almost pro- 
 phetic strain. He had always been English of 
 the English ; if this had given him some 
 narrowness of vision and sympathy, it gave 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 167 
 
 him in later years the intensity which seems 
 impossible without some narrowness. He had 
 revived for us the half-forgotten sentiment of 
 patriotism. Even throughout the pseudo- 
 cosmopolitanism of the Manchester period of 
 recent history he was always for England first. 
 ' Love thou thy land ! ' was his refrain through- 
 out, and he set the example himself. He has 
 been the one Laureate that was really the 
 nation's voice. If his utterances as Laureate 
 except perhaps the Wellington Ode do not 
 take a foremost place among his compositions, 
 that is simply because the English nation 
 during his laureateship has been happy in 
 having no dramatic episodes in its history. 
 You cannot be strikingly effective in dealing 
 with a slow and unconscious development. 
 
 It cannot be said of Tennyson that he has 
 been a great spiritual force in the national 
 development of the last half-century. The 
 Princess may have aided the movement for the 
 higher education of women, though it is in 
 essence a protest against it. In Memoriam has 
 liberalised theology, and been to the Broad 
 Church movement what The Christian Year 
 has been to the High Church. But where is 
 the Broad Church now ? Tennyson was, on 
 the whole, adverse to evolution, which has 
 been almost an instinct in English speculation 
 for the last quarter of a century. So far as he 
 
168 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 was the voice of his age in speculative matters, 
 he only represented the thought of the ' sixties.' 
 Maud may have helped to free England from 
 the shackles of Manchesterthum. His later 
 incursions into polemics, In the Children's 
 Hospital and the unfortunate Promise of May, 
 were best forgotten. Direct didacticism is 
 likely at all times to lead to priggishness. The 
 teaching of the true poet is indirect a sort of 
 induction of the poetic temper and attitude, 
 far more subtle and penetrating in its effects 
 than all your direct teaching. The pictures of 
 still and cleanly English life in the earlier 
 idylls, of sturdy heroism in the ballads, even 
 the somewhat namby-pamby chivalry of the 
 epical Idylls these were the teachings of 
 Tennyson, so far as he was a teacher. It is 
 noteworthy that, in almost all these aspects, 
 he was carrying on the tradition of his prede- 
 cessor on the poetic throne. 
 
 There were so many Tennysons that one 
 would never have done in attempting to deal 
 with all sides of his multifarious poetic activity. 
 But throughout the five acts of his poetic life 
 there is one common element that binds them 
 into an organic unity. His lyrics were as 
 sweet last as first. They run through and 
 connect together, like a string of pearls, all his 
 poetic phases, even his bronze and iron periods. 
 They give unity to The Princess ; they relieve 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 169 
 
 the heaviness of the dramas. Dainty and ex- 
 quisite in form, they have, besides that haunt- 
 ing charm, that imaginative atmosphere which 
 is too often wanting in Tennyson's other work. 
 Their melody is almost unsurpassed in our 
 language, and they have received the homage 
 of musicians in frequent settings. Yet I re- 
 member George Eliot saying to me, that, ex- 
 quisite as they are, they are seldom suitable 
 for singing, especially when compared with 
 the Elizabethan lyrics which trill forth as 
 naturally as from a bird. The collocations of 
 consonants in Tennyson's lyrics often impede 
 voice production. It is easy to explain the 
 difference. The Elizabethans were writing for 
 a nation of singers ; Tennyson was writing for 
 a people with whom singing is a lost art. 
 
 It was his lyrics that made him the popular 
 poet he undoubtedly was. He was emphatic- 
 ally, for the Victorian era, the man that sang 
 the nation's songs. If these were at times 
 wanting in the finer harmonies and the more 
 complex rhythms, that was no bar to their 
 popularity it was rather a condition of it. 
 The critical problem of Tennyson's art, we 
 have been told, is his simultaneous acceptance 
 by mob and by dilettanti. The solution of 
 the problem is a tolerably obvious one : he ap- 
 pealed to these different classes with different 
 phases of his art. He could use the simplicity, 
 
170 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 even the banality, of Longfellow,, and he could 
 also wield the wand of Coleridge, or of 
 Rossetti. There were so many Tennysons. 
 
 Of Tennyson the man the public know 
 nothing ; it was his dignified wish to live his 
 life apart. The glimpses we catch of him re- 
 veal something akin to his own bluff English 
 squires, tempered by even more than the usual 
 share of poetic sensitiveness. This aloofness 
 need only be here considered in reference to 
 its consequences on his art. This cannot but 
 have suffered from want of contact with the 
 larger life, which made him impossible as a 
 dramatist. But it prepared the way for the 
 Seerhood of the closing period, and, above 
 all, enabled him to live his life solely devoted 
 to his glorious art. 
 
 No English poet impresses one with such a 
 sense of continuous improvement in the tech- 
 nique of his vocation. At first the echoes 
 resound : a phrase of Keats, a sentiment of 
 Wordsworth, a rhythm of Byron, a lilt of 
 Shelley or of Coleridge, experiments in 
 metrical quantity everywhere we find the 
 poet testing all things poetical, and holding 
 fast that which was good. Soon the individual 
 accent comes, in the Palace of Art, in the 
 Lotus Eaters, in The Epic, and the music 
 strengthens and deepens till the last. No 
 English poet but Milton shows so steady an 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 171 
 
 advance in his art from the beginning of his 
 career till its close. Nor has Milton the same 
 wide command of all the keys. Tennyson is 
 undoubtedly the greatest poetic artist of 
 England, and he will thus remain at once the 
 people's poet and the poets' poet of these 
 isles. 
 
 It is no world-poet that England now is 
 mourning with commingled pride and grief. 
 No world-pain throbs through his lines. No 
 world-problem finds in him expression or 
 solution. The sweet domesticities, the manly 
 and refined ideals of English life in the middle 
 period of the nineteenth century Tennyson 
 was the fluted voice of these. To these he has 
 given immortality while he has gained immor- 
 tality from them. For us he has helped to 
 express the English ideals which are destined 
 to be an abiding influence in the national life. 
 He spoke not to the world at large : he spoke 
 only to his beloved England. He was, and is, 
 our own Tennyson. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 December 3, 1894 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 - f 
 |HE most striking individuality 
 
 in English letters of to-day has 
 gone from us. The loss is the 
 greater since one of the peculiar 
 notes of his genius was its ver- 
 satility and unexpectedness. You could never 
 guess what Stevenson's next book was going 
 to be about. It might be a footnote to 
 history, a familiar study of men or of books, 
 a mediaeval romance, a new Arabian night, a 
 talk about talking, a tale of Thule or a ballad 
 of the South Seas, a nursery rhyme or a 
 sympathetic study of old men. What might 
 he not have given us if his years had stretched 
 to the Psalmist's span ? 
 
 But amid all the diversity of his work there 
 was one common strain which made it all 
 his and gave the individual note. Jeffrey 
 wondered where Macaulay got that style of 
 his; Stevenson has told us how he created 
 the prose instrument which has done more 
 than anything to break up the Macaulayesque 
 
 175 
 
176 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 influence. He played the 'sedulous ape/ as 
 he himself phrased it, to Mr. Ruskin, to 
 Hazlitt, to Sir Thomas Browne, to all the 
 great ones of the past. It has been suggested 
 that in his style he owed more to a master of 
 the present than to any of the past grand 
 masters. There are who give to Mr. George 
 Meredith the rights of paternity to Stevenson's 
 style. And, indeed, in their search for the 
 unexpected adjective, in their use of the 
 metaphoric verb, in their appeal to the sous- 
 entendu, both masters have a common method. 
 Yet the younger man has surpassed his model 
 in lucidity, in grace, in restraint of his eccen- 
 tricities, with the result that for ease there 
 has been nothing like Stevenson's style since 
 Lamb, while for vivacity and vividness there 
 is nothing like it elsewhere in English prose. 
 The richer rhythms he perhaps lacks, and his 
 tone has possibly at times a touch of affecta- 
 tion. But no more subtle instrument of 
 human thought has ever been wielded more 
 gracefully outside the shores of France. No 
 wonder that its influence has spread far and 
 wide, till even the suburban journalist writes 
 with something like ease. 
 
 But it was something more than that 
 edulous imitation that gave Stevenson's style 
 its cachet. The style is the habiliment of the 
 spirit. At first sight it might seem that 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 177 
 
 Stevenson was as much the sedulous ape in 
 the spirit of his work as he had been in the 
 style of it. Here we see Edgar Allan Poe, 
 there Alexandre Dumas ; here Walt Whitman, 
 and there Walter Scott; Hazlitt here, and 
 there Laurence Sterne. Yet what is this but 
 to say that he was of the classic tradition and 
 carried it on in all branches of his work ? 
 And in all his superiority of style put him on 
 the level even of the great masters he was 
 copying. If he could not equal Poe's com- 
 mand of the eerie and fantastic, Dumas's 
 grouping and broad canvas, Scott's humour 
 and geniality and multifarious life, he could 
 clothe what he took from each in drapery 
 more closely fitting than any they had in their 
 wardrobe. His very choice of models was 
 significant, and the Romantic Revival in the 
 English novel of to-day had in him its leader. 
 But for one side of his activity he had to go 
 back to no other original than himself. He 
 first found himself in his characteristic studies 
 of men young and old, and revealed in his 
 treatment of them a philosophy of life that 
 was all his own. Stevenson was the first of 
 the younger voices who spoke out the thoughts 
 of men who faced life without the support of 
 the older traditions. He was the laureate of 
 the joy of life, of the life here and now. He 
 courted Life like the gallant that he was what 
 M 
 
178 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 time he himself was walking hand in hand 
 with Death. That joyous acceptance of life 
 as it is was the predominant note of Stevenson, 
 and was the chief artistic lesson he has left to 
 his age. 
 
 Herein Stevenson came in line with the 
 French school of literary critics of life. They 
 have been untrammelled by the older tradi- 
 tions, they have faced life in all its aspects 
 bravely and gallantly, they have been curious 
 in their wordcraft, yet in this last, if in nought 
 else, they carried on the older traditions. Only 
 in one thing did Stevenson part company with 
 them. One of the aspects of life which the 
 French faced most boldly and unflinchingly is 
 the fact of sex. Stevenson shrank from this 
 consciously and avowedly. He clung to the 
 cleanly tradition of restraint and self-respect 
 in this regard, and except for some slight 
 sketches in Prince Otto, woman is absent from 
 his pages. The fact is characteristic of the 
 two civilisations. 
 
 It was this gay, gallant, fresh philosophy of 
 life that lent their chief charm to his first 
 efforts, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a 
 Donkey. He moralised every step of the way. 
 Not a character appears that is not ethically 
 valued in the scheme of life this one for his 
 courtesy, that for his silence, another for his 
 courage, she for gaiety, he for his grumpiness 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 179 
 
 all are judged ethically as well as artistically. 
 Yet Stevenson was singularly deficient in 
 capacity for catching characteristic traits of 
 physiognomy. He rarely, if ever, pictures 
 men by his pen. He cannot give a character 
 by a trick of gesture as Dickens could, and 
 did. 
 
 Still more was this philosophy of his pre- 
 dominant and pervading in his critical studies. 
 Whether he was judging Burns or Villon, old 
 admirals or young men, a lover, a soldier, or a 
 poet, the appeal was to an ideal of character 
 which Stevenson had formed for himself 
 straight from the facts of life, or perhaps one 
 should say straight from the facts of Scottish 
 life. Although he may have thrown over the 
 older creeds, they formed at least the frame 
 to his picture of life. He was Scot of the 
 Scots in his judgment of things, and we might 
 almost forgive Calvinism for the misery it has 
 caused in the world if only because it formed, 
 as it were, the sash to the window from which 
 Stevenson looked out into the world. 
 
 It is this Calvinistic framework, hard but 
 clear, which imparted such effectiveness to 
 the booklet by which he most impressed the 
 world. Dr. Jekyll became a classic from the 
 day it was published. It stands beside The 
 Pilgrim's Progress and Gulliver s Travels as one 
 of the three great allegories in English. The 
 
180 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 idea had occupied Stevenson for long : it had 
 been utilised in the drama of Deacon Brodie, and 
 is referred to at the end of An Inland Voyage. 
 Its artistic economy is almost perfect; every 
 word tells. In the background looms one 
 aspect of the great problem of sex which 
 Stevenson elsewhere evaded or avoided. But 
 the facing of the facts of life is straight- 
 forward and sincere. Mr. Hyde is as much 
 part of the composite nature as is Dr. Jekyll. 
 
 It is curious that his other great popular 
 success should have been made with a book of 
 an entirely opposite character, as objective 
 as the other was psychopathic, as open and 
 straightforward as the other was weird and 
 mystic. Treasure Island struck, if not a new 
 note, a disused one in English fiction. He 
 founded, or at least refounded, the plein air 
 school. The moment was ripe and the man 
 had come. The world was getting tired of 
 analysis and introspection. It had had enough 
 of looking on at painful paturitions of society 
 nothings. Yet our gratitude to Stevenson 
 need not be the less because he appeared 
 when he was wanted. In literature, above all 
 things, the master is paramount. There are 
 always a number of facile pens that can write 
 ditto to Mr. Burke. If Stevenson had chosen 
 to develop the more morbid side of his genius, 
 the world might have been flooded with 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 181 
 
 morbidity. He took us out into the open air 
 and made us care for the common life and 
 adventures of men. If young gentlemen 
 nowadays find it more profitable to write 
 second-rate imitations of Dumas than to 
 become Cabinet ministers, they owe it to 
 Stevenson ; but for him they might have been 
 Howells and James young men. 
 
 Of Treasure Island itself one finds it difficult 
 to speak the unexaggerated word. That the 
 subject itself and many of its details were 
 reminiscential with Stevenson matters not. It 
 is the unique fusion of incident and character 
 interest that makes the book so remarkable. 
 It is action, action, action, from the first 
 sentence to the last. Yet every one who 
 plays his part in the action is as deeply 
 characterised as if he were the centre of an 
 introspective novel. It is not alone the sea 
 cook himself; there is not a single person 
 whose name is given in the book whose 
 character we do not know almost as well, 
 if not as thoroughly, as that versatile villain. 
 From Billy Jones to George Merry they are 
 characterised with a firmness of touch and 
 certainty of vision equal to Phil May's. 
 
 Much the same may be said of Kidnapped. 
 But though the plot lacks the epic unity of 
 the other, yet the characterisation here 
 touches profounder depths. Stevenson was 
 
182 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 breathing his native air he could create, and 
 not merely construct character. After all, 
 your buccaneer does not pay for mining deep 
 into his character. Stevenson had struck it 
 rich when he had to deal with Alan Breck, 
 poet and spy, deserter and rebel, brave and a 
 braggart. Those who know the printed report 
 of the trial of James Stuart will recognise 
 what scanty material Stevenson had for his 
 creation both in Kidnapped and its sequel 
 Catriona. This latter failed just because he 
 gave us too much of the trial. It is, indeed, 
 curious that in both books fascination only 
 begins when we cross the Highland line, 
 either locally or spiritually. The Lowlarider, 
 with his canny caution, cannot stir our blood. 
 It is one of Stevenson's triumphs to have kept 
 consistently cool the tone of the narrator, the 
 Lowland David Balfour, amidst all the feuds 
 of the Gael. 
 
 A similar triumph was achieved when 
 Stevenson put in the mouth of a dominie 
 the strange tale of a fraternal feud told in 
 The Master of Ballantrae. The Master him- 
 self is over-elaborated, and the whole book is 
 too episodical and not closely enough knit 
 together. Yet there are touches that cut us 
 deep, and there are scenes that stand out as 
 clear as anything in Stevenson. The duel by 
 candlelight, the Master's farewell to his home, 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 183 
 
 the two brothers at the tailor's shop, are as 
 vivid as anything he did, but the connection 
 of the book is not organic. 
 
 I have now commented upon all of Steven- 
 son's work in fiction that is of really first-class 
 rank. The Suicide Club in the New Arabian 
 Nights may go to join the others. But the 
 rest is only fantastic trifling which leaves but 
 slight impress on the memory. Almost the 
 same might be said of the Merry Men volume, 
 but the tales there touch deeper notes. In 
 Markheim a higher level is reached it wanted 
 little more to have been a second Jekyll. 
 Thrifty as Stevenson was as a creative artist, 
 wasting never a word or an incident, he yet 
 required a largish canvas before he could pro- 
 duce his full effect. It must ever be so with 
 the masters of characterisation; the conte is 
 not for them. 
 
 In thinking over Stevenson's work one is 
 apt to overlook Prince Otto. It is of so differ- 
 ent a genre, it has almost a note of insincerity. 
 Yet that very note is cognate with its subject, 
 and in its rococo manner it is a perfect bit of 
 novelistic bric-d-brac, a sort of romance in 
 Dresden china. There is one chapter, how- 
 ever, that redeems it. The flight of the 
 princess through the woods in the night is 
 one of the most perfect things Stevenson ever 
 wrote. It is characteristic that it should come 
 
184 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 with the plunge from courtly artificialities into 
 the open air and Nature unadorned. The 
 character drawing is as firm as elsewhere. 
 The Miller, the Scotch Colonel, the English 
 Traveller, the demirep Countess, the sensualist 
 Conspirator, all these bite the steel with clean- 
 cut lines. Yes, Prince Otto is the Stevensonian 
 crux; like not that and you are no true 
 Stevensonian. 
 
 Of his more recent excursions in company 
 with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne there is little need 
 to speak he could not ride tandem. Touches 
 there are in The Wrecker and the rest which 
 recall the unadulterate Stevenson, but they 
 are few and far between. Those books should 
 form no part of his luggage on his journey to 
 the House of Fame. 
 
 Nor will he carry with him up the hill his 
 volumes of verse, attractive though they be in 
 many respects. But their attraction lies not 
 in themselves, but rather in the fact that 
 Stevenson wrote them. That applies even to 
 the Child's Book of Verses, unique as it is. If 
 we contrast it with the Songs of Innocence, we 
 see how Stevenson has failed to transmute 
 verse into poetry. He was emphatically a 
 speaker, not a singer. 
 
 All his qualities coalesced when he came to 
 deal with his own life as a young man in the 
 Memories and Portraits, and with the life of 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 185 
 
 all young men in the Firginibus Puerisque. 
 The light touch, the full feeling, the deep 
 thought, the gay and gallant aspect, make the 
 books as bright as youth itself. He could 
 creep into a child's mind; but the thoughts 
 and feelings of these books were those of a 
 man who was ever young at heart, and so they 
 are fitted to be for ever the vade-mecum of the 
 young man. Who has entered into the 
 motives for a young man's laziness like 
 Stevenson? Who has expressed so well the 
 haunting sense of inutility which besets almost 
 all men on entering life ? Yet how play- 
 fully and how cheeringly he diagnoses the 
 nostalgia ! 
 
 These bright books, full of the most ebulli- 
 ent life, were written by a man gazing stead- 
 fastly into the eyes of Death. Perhaps it was 
 the insistent need for getting rid of morbid 
 thoughts that led Stevenson to dwell on the 
 active life in the open air. But what a daunt- 
 less courage that could disregard the perpetual 
 menace of his grisly visitant and play so well 
 the part of the young man into whose calcula- 
 tions Death enters not ! His were indeed 
 brave words, and their courage is an inspira- 
 tion. 
 
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 
 
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 
 
 EELEY was essentially a Cam- 
 bridge mind. Lucidity, sound 
 judgment, accurate knowledge, 
 wide outlook, were his. But 
 there was an absence of elan, 
 an avoidance of the personal note, a refusal 
 to appeal to the emotions or to be moved by 
 them, which left his readers cold. He could 
 convince, but not charm. His light, to use 
 the expression of another great Cambridge 
 man, was a dry one. It has been said that 
 Cambridge produces great men, Oxford great 
 movements, or, as another variant puts it, 
 ' Cambridge breeds men ; Oxford, Oxford 
 men.' In other words, the great ones of 
 Cambridge have not that personal charm 
 which leads to widespread influence, taking 
 the form of ' movements/ Seeley strikes one 
 as having more intellectual calibre than either 
 Jowett or Pater, yet he has left nothing 
 like the stamp of a similar influence on 
 Cambridge to that wielded at the other 
 university by either of the latter names. 
 
190 SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 
 
 Seeley as an historical writer had no charm ; 
 as a Cambridge man might put it, he could 
 not gush. I should digress too much if I dis- 
 cussed how far this was due to the influence 
 of the Cambridge ?J#os. Perhaps I may sum- 
 marise by saying that we of Cambridge woo 
 Truth, not Art, forgetful that the highest 
 truth can only be expressed by art. Be this 
 as it may, the fact remains that Seeley failed 
 to reach the highest, because of the absence 
 of that personal appeal which charms us in 
 many Oxford men of much inferior gifts. 
 
 Yet withal what an achievement was his in 
 the realm of pure intellect ! Putting aside 
 for a moment his theological * excursions and 
 alarms,' consider what he did for the modern 
 history of the three greatest European nations. 
 For Germany he wrote the best life of the 
 creator of modern Germany. If his biography 
 of Stein fails to attract, it is mainly because 
 Stein is not an attractive personality. The best 
 parts of the book are where he is not dealing 
 with Stein at all, but with some great move- 
 ment of European feeling, like the national 
 protest of Spain. What lends the book, how- 
 ever, an almost epic note, is the role played by 
 Napoleon as the Satan of the action. This he 
 also treated separately in his monograph on the 
 great condottiere, as he regarded him. This 
 was an artful book, in more senses than one. 
 
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 191 
 
 It might be described as a brief for the Devil's 
 advocate. From the choice of a frontispiece to 
 the last page, nothing is left undone to depre- 
 ciate the man and his work. He declared that 
 his plan precluded him from dealing at length 
 with Napoleon's campaigns, and by this artifice 
 was enabled to leave out of account that side of 
 his activity to which he could not have denied 
 greatness. One cannot help thinking that a 
 survival of the old English feeling against 
 * Boney ' animated his pen, and gave the work 
 a personal tone somewhat lacking elsewhere. 
 Yet he gave for France in it a clearer account, 
 in shorter compass, of the rise of her modern 
 institutions than is to be found elsewhere. 
 
 Original as was his work on modern 
 Germany and France, it was little less than 
 epoch-making on modern England. By the 
 earlier historians England was mainly regarded 
 as a majestic mother of Parliaments. Seeley 
 felt that from this point of view the interest 
 of English history ceased with Macaulay's 
 period, the English Revolution. He set him- 
 self to show that after this period England 
 had taken up a far greater, a world-important 
 task. He proved to conviction that the 
 eighteenth century was for history memor- 
 able, as containing the conflict of England 
 and France for world-empire. It was in vain 
 that Mr. Morley attempted to prove that 
 
192 SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 
 
 Carlyle, by his perpetual insistence, in the 
 Frederick, on Jenkins's ears, had anticipated 
 Seeley in giving due importance to the ex- 
 pansion of England. We felt that Seeley had 
 succeeded in what he had set out to do, in 
 giving an epic unity to the last two centuries 
 of English history. Surely since Sieyes no 
 pamphlet for it was little more in point of 
 size ever had such immediate and wide- 
 reaching influence. Our Imperialism of to- 
 day is the combined work of Beaconsfield and 
 of Seeley, a curious couple of collaborators. 
 Seeley's K.C.M.G. was a fit reward for services 
 done to the empire. 
 
 Seeley's work as historian and as teacher of 
 history at Cambridge was diplomatic in a 
 double sense. He aimed at giving a more 
 definite conception to the meaning of history 
 by confining it to the study of the State and its 
 development. Your development of literature 
 and science, your Cidturgeschichte, your social po- 
 sitionof the people, were not for him as historian. 
 Unless they got into State documents they had 
 nothing to do with history as he conceived it, 
 following in this the school of Ranke. For 
 his period, and for his purposes, the documents 
 that were of chief interest and importance 
 were those of the diplomatists. It is to be 
 hoped that sufficient remains of the work on 
 which he was engaged during the past few 
 
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 193 
 
 years to give him his due rank as the historian 
 of England's foreign policy. 
 
 Of Seeley's work at his post in Cambridge I 
 know but little. The Historical Tripos was 
 his creation, but it has yet to win its spurs. 
 I attended one of his professorial courses, and 
 went to one or two of his ' Friday evenings/ 
 at which Seeley played the role of Socrates. 
 His lectures were clear, but cold ; there was 
 an air of the higher mathematics about them, 
 congenial to the spot, perhaps, but hardly 
 fascinating. There was a curious resemblance 
 to Renan in his appearance, but Seeley had 
 none of Renan' s wit, still less had he any of 
 Renan' s diablerie. Yet both men, as is well 
 known, gained their greatest success by their 
 treatment of the life of Jesus. 
 
 Ecce Homo was, above all, an historian's 
 conception of Jesus. In fact, it was Seeley's 
 answer to Gibbon's problem in the celebrated 
 fifteenth chapter. Gibbon wished to explain 
 the remarkable spread and success of the early 
 Church ; Seeley tried to trace it back to the 
 personal influence of the Founder. In doing 
 this he had naturally to lay stress on Jesus' s 
 personal influence as man upon men, and 
 thereby raised the ire of the Evangelicals. 
 Curiously enough, it was on the historical side 
 of his work that Seeley was most wanting. 
 He failed to show from the Gospel records 
 
 N 
 
194 SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 
 
 that the conscious aim of Jesus' s life was the 
 formation of a Society of Humanity. He 
 could find no text for his refrain 'L'Eglise, 
 c'est moi.' Yet his insistence on the social side 
 of Jesus's work has done more for Christian 
 union than any theological utterance of the 
 past third of a century. Here, at any rate, 
 is common ground. 
 
 He attempted a similar eirenicon in his 
 Natural Religion, with reference to the con- 
 flict between religion and science. Religion 
 is the pursuit of the ideal in any sphere, was 
 his teaching. Thus science and art are both 
 religious in tendency, if not in aim. How far 
 the book served its purpose it is difficult to 
 say. Science and religion are no longer at 
 loggerheads, but that result, I fancy, has been 
 produced rather by a process of exhaustion 
 than by any direct influence of Seeley's. 
 Yet Natural Religion was fully as original as 
 Ecce Homo, and was much more attractive in 
 style. 
 
 Not much need be said about Seeley's in- 
 cursions into literary criticism. His contribu- 
 tions to English Lessons, so far as we can 
 trace them, are lucid, but wanting in imagina- 
 tive insight. Milton he treated rather as an 
 historian than a critic. His little book on 
 Goethe is somewhat commonplace, and fails 
 to do justice to the Titanic side of the poet. 
 
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY 195 
 
 Seeley's light was a dry one, I have said, 
 but it was pure and steady, and illumined 
 every branch of thought on which he turned 
 it. There are those who prefer this species 
 of illumination to the more iridescent glare 
 and more fantastic shadows cast by the feu 
 follet of imagination. Truth has its triumphs 
 no less than Fancy, and of these were Seeley's. 
 The votaries of Veracity need, above all things, 
 restraint and repression ; Imagination must be 
 their servant, not their master. Throughout 
 Seeley's work, so original in so many directions, 
 one feels that he never brought out all that 
 was in him. Of Gray another Cambridge 
 man, and Seeley's predecessor in his chair 
 it was said that he never spoke out. May we 
 not say of Seeley that he never let himself go ? 
 Yet in this restraint and repression Seeley was 
 English of the English. I have called his a 
 Cambridge mind. Should I not supplement 
 this by saying that the Cambridge mind, in 
 all its strength, with all its limitations, is the 
 characteristic English mind ? 
 
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