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ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
ESSAYS IN CKITICISM 
 
 SECOND SERIES fl^ 
 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEAV ARNOLD 
 
 fLontion 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. 
 
 NEW YORK : MACMILLAN & CO. 
 1896 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
First Edition (Crcnvn Zvo) 1888 
 
 Reprinted 1889, 1891 
 
 Firtt printed in tlie Eversley Series 1895 ; Reprinted 1896 
 
PREFATOKY NOTE 
 
 The collection of Essays contained in this volume 
 was made by Mr. Arnold himself, and they are, 
 therefore, in the opinion of a critic, at once com- 
 petent and severe, worthy to be collected and 
 preserved. Severe is perhaps hardly an epithet 
 ever properly applicable to Mr. Arnold ; but his 
 judgment was as serene and unbiassed in regard 
 to his own compositions as in regard to those of 
 any author whom from time to time he criticised. 
 But it was further characteristic of him to be 
 content to say one thing at one time ; and he has 
 been accused, not perhaps entirely without 
 reason, of repeating the same thing in the same 
 words, sometimes almost to the weariness of 
 the reader. This habit, however, had at least 
 the effect of fixing in the mind the phrases. 
 
vi PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 and therefore the thoughts or ideas which the 
 phrases conveyed, and with which for the moment 
 he was concerned. But in order to gather the 
 mind of Mr. Arnold on the whole of any subject, 
 literary, political, or religious, it is often necessary 
 to read more than one paper, because in each 
 paper he frequently deals with one aspect of a 
 subject only, which requires, for sound and com- 
 plete judgment, to be supplemented or completed 
 by another. It is especially necessary to bear 
 this in mind in reading what has become his 
 last utterance on Shelley. In Shelley's case 
 he is known to have intended to write some- 
 thing more ; not, indeed, to alter or to qualify 
 what he said, but to say something else which 
 he thought also true, and which needed saying. 
 
 This is not the place to attempt a character of 
 Mr. Arnold, even as a critic or an essayist. A 
 preface would expand into a volume if it attempted 
 to indicate even the materials for thought on such 
 subjects, handled by Mr. Arnold, as Poetry, Gray, 
 Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth (to name no 
 
PREFATORY NOTE vii 
 
 others), which are the subjects of some of the 
 Essays here collected. This is the last volume he 
 ever put together, and it contains some of his 
 ripest, best, most interesting writing. 
 
 Perhaps it is well to add that these few words 
 are contributed at the request of others. Inane 
 munus indeed, but all that a friend can do ! 
 
 C. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Study op Poetry 
 IT. Milton 
 
 III. Thomas Gray 
 
 IV. John Keats . 
 V. Wordsworth 
 
 VI. Byron 
 VII. Shelley 
 VIII. Count Leo Tolstoi 
 IX. Amiel . 
 
 1 
 56 
 69 
 100 
 122 
 163 
 205 
 253 
 300 
 
THE STUDY OF POETRY^ 
 
 'The future of poetry is immense, because in 
 poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, 
 our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer 
 and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not 
 shaken, not an accredited dogma .which is not 
 shown to be questionable, not a received tradition 
 which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion 
 has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed 
 fact ; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and 
 now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea 
 is everything ; the rest is a world of illusion, of 
 divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to 
 
 ^ Published in 1880 as the General Introduction to Tfie 
 English Poets, edited by T. H. Ward. 
 S> B 
 
2 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 the idea ; the idea is the fact. The strongest part 
 of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.' 
 
 Let me be permitted to quote these words of 
 my own, as uttering the thought which should, in 
 my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our 
 study of poetry. In the present work it is the 
 course of one great contributory stream to the 
 world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. 
 We are here invited to trace the stream of English 
 poetry. But whether we set ourselves, as here, to 
 follow only one of the several streams that make 
 the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to 
 know them all, our governing thought should be 
 the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, 
 and more highly than it has been the custom to 
 conceive of it. We should conceive of it as cap- 
 able of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, 
 than those which in general men have assigned 
 to it hitherto. More and more mankind will dis- 
 cover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret 
 life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without 
 poetry, our science will appear incomplete ; and 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 8 
 
 most of what now passes with us for religion and 
 philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, 
 I say, will appear incomplete without it. For 
 finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry ' the 
 impassioned expression which is in the counte- 
 nance of all science ' ; and what is a countenance 
 without its expression ? Again, Wordsworth 
 finely and truly calls poetry ' the breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge ' : our religion, parading 
 evidences such as those on which the popular 
 mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself 
 on its reasonings about causation and finite and 
 infinite being; what are they but the shadows 
 and dreams and false shows of knowledge ? The 
 day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves 
 for having trusted to them, for having taken them 
 seriously ; and the more we perceive their hollo w- 
 ness, the more we shall prize ' the breath and finer 
 spirit of knowledge ' offered to us by poetry. 
 
 But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies 
 of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry 
 high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such 
 
4 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of 
 excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a 
 high standard and to a strict judgment. Sainte- 
 Beuve relates that Napoleon one day said, when 
 somebody was spoken of in his presence as a 
 charlatan : ' Charlatan as much as you please ; 
 but where is there Twt charlatanism?' — 'Yes/ 
 answers Sainte-Beuve, 'in politics, in the art of 
 governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in 
 the order of thought, in art, the glory, the eternal 
 honour is that charlatanism shall find no en- 
 trance ; herein lies the inviolableness of that 
 noble portion of man's being.' It is admirably 
 said, and let us hold fast to it. In poetry, which 
 is thought and art in one, it is the glory, the 
 eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no 
 entrance ; that this noble sphere be kept inviolate 
 and inviolable. Charlatanism is for confusing or 
 obliterating the distinctions between excellent 
 and inferior, sound and imsound or only half- 
 sound, true and untrue or only half-true. It is 
 charlatanism, conscious or unconscious, whenever 
 
y 
 
 THE STUDY OF POETRY 
 
 we confuse or obliterate these. And in poetry, 
 more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to 
 confuse or obliterate them. For in poetry the 
 distinction between excellent and inferior, sound 
 and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue 
 or only half-true, is of paramount importance. It 
 is of paramount importance because of the high 
 destinies of poetry. In poetry, as a criticism of 
 life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism 
 by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty, the 
 spirit of our race will find, we have said, as time 
 goes on and as other helps fail, its consolation 
 and stay. But the consolation and stay will be of 
 power in proportion to the power of the criticism 
 of life. And the criticism of life will be of power 
 in proportion as the poetry conveying it is excellent 
 rather than inferior, sound rather than unsound 
 or half-sound, true rather than untrue or half-true. 
 The best poetry is what we want; the best 
 poetry will be found to have a power of forming, 
 sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. 
 A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and 
 
\ 
 
 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the 
 most precious benefit which we can gather from a 
 poetical collection such as the present. And yet 
 in the very nature and conduct of such a collection 
 there is inevitably something which tends to 
 obscure in us the consciousness of what our benefit 
 should be, and to distract us from the pursuit of it. 
 We should therefore steadily set it before our minds 
 at the outset, and should compel ourselves to revert 
 constantly to the thought of it as we proceed. 
 
 Yes ; constantly in reading poetry, a sense for 
 the best, the really excellent, and of the strength 
 and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in 
 our minds and should govern our estimate of what 
 we read. But this real estimate, the only true 
 one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watch- 
 ful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historic 
 estimate and the personal estimate, both of which 
 are fallacious. A poet or a poem may count to us 
 historically, they may count to us on grounds per- 
 sonal to ourselves, and they may count to us 
 reaUy. They may count to us historically. The 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 7 
 
 course of development of a nation's language, 
 thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting ; 
 and by regarding a poet's work as a stage in this 
 course of development we may easily bring our- 
 selves to make it of more importance as poetry 
 than in itself it really is, we may come to use a 
 language of quite exaggerated praise in criticising 
 it; in short, to over-rate it. So arises in our 
 poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the esti- 
 mate which we may call historic. Then, again, a 
 poet or a poem may count to us on grounds per- 
 sonal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings, 
 and circumstances, have great power to sway our 
 estimate of this or that poet's work, and to make 
 us attach more importance to it as poetry than in 
 itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has 
 been, of high importance. Here also we over-rate 
 the object of our interest, and apply to it a 
 language of praise which is quite exaggerated. 
 And thus we get the source of a second fallacy in 
 our poetic judgments — the fallacy caused by an 
 estimate which we may call personal. 
 
8 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 Both fallacies are natural. It is evident hov» 
 naturally the study of the history and develop- 
 ment of a poetry may incline a man to pause over 
 reputations and works once conspicuous hut now 
 ohscure, and to quarrel with a careless public for 
 skipping, in obedience to mere tradition and habit, 
 from one famous name or work in its national 
 poetry to another, ignorant of what it misses, and 
 of the reason for keeping what it keeps, and of the 
 whole process of growth in its poetry. The French 
 have become diligent students of their own early 
 poetry, which they long neglected; the study 
 makes many of them dissatisfied with their so- 
 called classical poetry, the court-tragedy of the 
 seventeenth century, a poetry which Pellisson 
 long ago reproached with its want of the true 
 poetic stamp, with its politesse sUrile et rampante, 
 but which nevertheless has reigned in France as 
 absolutely as if it had been the perfection of 
 classical poetry indeed. The dissatisfaction is 
 natural ; yet a lively and accomplished critic, M. 
 Charles d'H^ricault, the editor of Clement Marot, 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 9 
 
 goes too far when he says that ' the cloud of glory 
 playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to 
 the future of a literature as it is intolerable for 
 the purposes of history.' ' It hinders,' he goes on, 
 ' it hinders us from seeing more than one single 
 print, the culminating and exceptional point ; the 
 summary, fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and 
 of a work. It substitutes a halo for a physiog- 
 nomy, it puts a statue where there was once 
 a man, and hiding from us all trace of the 
 labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures, 
 it claims not study but veneration ; it does not 
 show us how the thing is done, it imposes upon 
 us a model. Above all, for the historian this crea- 
 tion of classic personages is inadmissible ; for it 
 withdraws the poet from his time, from his proper 
 life, it breaks historical relationships, it blinds 
 criticism by conventional admiration, and renders 
 the investigation of literary origins unacceptable. 
 It gives us a human personage no longer, but a 
 God seated immovable amidst His perfect work, 
 like Jupiter on Olympus ; and hardly will it be 
 
10 ESSAYS m CRITICISM i 
 
 possible for the young student, to whom such 
 work is exhibited at such a distance from him, to 
 believe that it did not issue ready made from that 
 divine head.' 
 
 All this is brilliantly and tellingly said, but we 
 must plead for a distinction. Everything depends 
 on the reality of a poet's classic character. If he 
 is a dubious classic, let us sift him ; if he is a 
 false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a 
 real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the 
 very best (for this is the true and right meaning of 
 the word classic, classical), then the great thing for 
 us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever 
 we can, and to appreciate the wide difference be- 
 tween it and all work which has not the same 
 high character. This is what is salutary, this is 
 what is formative ; this is the great benefit to be 
 got from the study of poetry. Everything which 
 interferes with it, which hinders it, is injurious. 
 True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and 
 not with eyes blinded with superstition ; we must 
 perceive when his work comes short, when it 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 11 
 
 drops out of the class of the very best, and we 
 must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value. 
 But the use of this negative criticism is not in 
 itself, it is entirely in its enabling us to have a 
 clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment of what is 
 truly excellent. To trace the labour, the attempts, 
 the weaknesses, the failures of a genuine classic, 
 to acquaint oneself with his time and his life and 
 his historical relationships, is mere literary dilet- 
 tantism unless it has that clear sense and deeper 
 enjoyment for its end. It may be said that the 
 more we know about a classic the better we shall 
 enjoy him ; and, if we lived as long as Methuselah 
 and had all of us heads of perfect clearness and 
 wills of perfect steadfastness, this might be true 
 in fact as it is plausible in theory. But the case 
 here is much the same as the case with the Greek 
 and Latin studies of our schoolboys. The elaborate 
 philological groundwork which we require them 
 to lay is in theory an admirable preparation for 
 appreciating the Greek and Latin authors worthily. 
 The more thoroughly we lay the groundwork, the 
 
12 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 better we shall be able, it may be said, to enjoy 
 the authors. True, if time were not so short, and 
 schoolboys' wits not so soon tired and their power 
 of attention exhausted ; only, as it is, the elaborate 
 philological preparation goes on, but the authors 
 are little known and less enjoyed. So with the 
 investigator of 'historic origins' in poetry. He 
 ought to enjoy the true classic all the better for 
 his investigations ; he often is distracted from the 
 enjoyment of the best, and with the less good he 
 overbusies himseK, and is prone to over-rate it in 
 proportion to the trouble which it has cost him. 
 
 The idea of tracing historic origins and his- 
 torical relationships cannot be absent from a 
 compilation like the present. And naturally the 
 poets to be exhibited in it will be assigned to 
 those persons for exhibition who are known to 
 prize them highly, rather than to those who have 
 no special inclination towards them. Moreover 
 the very occupation with an author, and the busi- 
 ness of exhibiting him, disposes us to affirm and 
 amplify his importance. In the present work, 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 18 
 
 therefore, we are sure of frequent temptation to 
 adopt the historic estimate, or the personal esti- 
 mate, and to forget the real estimate; which 
 latter, nevertheless, we must employ if we are to 
 make poetry yield us its full benefit. So high is 
 that benefit, the benefit of clearly feeling and of 
 deeply enjoying the really excellent, the truly 
 classic in poetry, that we do well, I say, to set it 
 fixedly before our minds as our object in studying 
 poets and poetry, and to make the desire of at- 
 taining it the one principle to which, as the 
 Imitation says, whatever we may read or come to 
 know, we always return. Cum multa legeris et cog- 
 noveris, ad unum semper oportet redire principium. 
 The historic estimate is likely in especial to 
 affect our judgment and our language when we 
 are dealing with ancient poets ; the personal 
 estimate when we are dealing with poets our con- 
 temporaries, or at any rate modern. The exag- 
 gerations due to the historic estimate are not in 
 themselves, perhaps, of very much gravity. Their 
 report hardly enters the general ear ; probably 
 
14 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM I 
 
 they do not always impose even on the literary 
 men who adopt them. But they lead to a dan- 
 gerous abuse of language. So we hear Caedmon, 
 amongst our own poets, compared to Milton. 1 
 have already noticed the enthusiasm of one accom- 
 ■ plished French critic for ' historic origins.' An- 
 other eminent French critic, M. Vitet, comments 
 upon that famous document of the early poetry 
 of his nation, the Cfhanson de Roland. It is indeed 
 a most interesting document. The jocvlator or 
 jongleur Taillefer, who was with William the Con- 
 queror's army at Hastings, marched before the 
 Norman troops, so said the tradition, singing * of 
 Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver, and of 
 the vassals who died at Eoncevaux' ; and it is 
 suggested that in the Chanson de Roland by one 
 Turoldus or Th^roulde, a poem preserved in a 
 manuscript of the twelfth century in the Bodleian 
 Library at Oxford, we have certainly the matter, 
 perhaps even some of the words, of the chant 
 which Taillefer sang. The poem has vigour and 
 freshness; it is not without pathos. But M, 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 16 
 
 Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it a document 
 of some poetic value, and of very high historic 
 and linguistic value ; he sees in it a grand and 
 beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its 
 general design he finds the grandiose conception, 
 in its details he finds the constant union of sim- 
 plicity with greatness, which are the marks, he 
 truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish 
 it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One 
 thinks of Homer ; this is the sort of praise which 
 is given to Homer, and justly given. Higher 
 praise there cannot well be, and it is the praise 
 due to epic poetry of the highest order only, and 
 to no other. Let us try, then, the Chanson de 
 Roland at its best. Eoland, mortally wounded, 
 lays himself down under a pine-tree, with his face 
 turned towards Spain and the enemy — 
 
 * De plusurs choses k remembrer li prist, 
 De tautes teres cume li bers cunquist, 
 De dulce France, des humes de sun lign, 
 De Carlemagne sun seignor ki I'nurrit.'^ 
 
 ^ ' Then began he to call many things to remembrance, — all 
 the lands which his valour conquered, and pleasant France, 
 
16 ESSAYS m CRITICISM l 
 
 That is primitive work, I repeat, with an unde- 
 niable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such 
 praise, and such praise is sufi&cient for it. But 
 now turn to Homer — 
 
 1^^ "fls (jidro' Tovs 8 -qSr} KaTe;(cv (f>v<Ti^oos aia 
 
 €V AaKtSai/iovt av6t, (f)iXr] ev TrarpcSt yairj. 
 
 We are here in another world, another order of 
 poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme 
 praise as that which M. Vitet gives to the Chanson 
 de Roland. If our words are to have any mean- 
 ing, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we 
 must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry 
 of an order immeasurably inferior. 
 
 Indeed there can be no more useful help for 
 discovering what poetry belongs to the class of 
 the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most 
 good, than to have always in one's mind lines and 
 
 and the men of his lineage, and Charlemagne his liege lord who 
 nourished him. ' — Chanson de Eoland, iii. 939-942. 
 
 ^ • So said she ; they long since in Earth's soft arms were 
 reposing, 
 There, in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lace- 
 daemon. ' 
 
 Hiad, iii. 243, 244 (translated by Dr. Hawtrey). 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 17 
 
 expressions of the great masters, and to apply 
 them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course 
 we are not to require this other poetry to resemble 
 them ; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have 
 any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged 
 them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone 
 for detecting the presence or absence of high 
 poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, 
 in all other poetry which we may place beside 
 them. Short passages, even single lines, will 
 serve our turn quite sufficiently. Take the two 
 lines which I have just quoted from Homer, the 
 poet's comment on Helen's mention of her brothers ; 
 — or take his 
 
 'A SetAw, Tt (T^wi Sofiev Ilr^X^i avaKxt 
 6vrjT(^ ; vfi€i<s S" ecTTov dyrjpo} t dOavaTO) re. 
 ^ Tva SvcTTijvourL fi€T dvSpaxTLV dXye e^^ryrov ;* 
 
 the address of Zeus to the horses of Peleus ; — or 
 take finally his 
 
 * ' Ah, unhappy pair, why gave we you to King Peleus, to 
 a mortal ? but ye are without old age, and immortal. Was it 
 that with men born to misery ye might have sorrow ?' — Hiad, 
 rviL 443-445. 
 
18 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 Kai (re, yepov, to irplv fi€v aKovofxev oA/3tov eivai' ^ 
 
 the words of Achilles to Priam, a suppliant before 
 
 him. Take that incomparable line and a half of 
 
 Dante, Ugolino's tremendous words — 
 
 ' lo no piangeva ; si dentro impietrai 
 Piangevan eUi . . .'^ 
 
 take the lovely words of Beatrice to Virgil — 
 
 * Id son fatta da Dio, sua merc6, tale, 
 Che la vostra miseria non mi tange, 
 
 N6 fiamma d'esto incendio non m'assale . . .'' 
 
 take the simple, but perfect, single line — 
 
 * In la sua volontade 6 nostra pace.'* 
 
 Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the 
 
 Fourth's expostulation with sleep — 
 
 ' Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast 
 Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains 
 In cradle of the rude imperious surge . . .' 
 
 * ' Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days wast, as we 
 hear, happy.' — Iliad, xxiv. 543. 
 
 2 ' I wailed not, so of stone grew I within ; — tJiey wailed.' — 
 Inferno, xxxiii. 39, 40. 
 
 ' ' Of such sort hath God, thanked be His mercy, made me, 
 that your misery toucheth me not, neither doth the flame of 
 this fire strike me.' — Inferno, ii. 91-98. 
 
 * 'In His will is our peace.' — Paradise, in. 85. 
 
1 THE STUDY OF POETRY 19 
 
 and take, as well, Hamlet's dying request to 
 Horatio — 
 
 ' If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain 
 To tell my story . . .' 
 
 Take of Milton that Miltonic passage — 
 
 'Darken'd so, yet shone 
 Above them all the archangel ; but his face 
 Deep scars of thunder had intrench'd, and care 
 Sat on his faded cheek . . .' 
 
 add two such lines as — 
 
 * And courage never to submit or yield 
 And what is else not to be overcome . . .' 
 
 and finish with the exquisite close to the loss of 
 Proserpine, the loss 
 
 ' . . . which cost Ceres all that pain 
 To seek her through the world.' 
 
 These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, 
 are enough even of themselves to keep clear and 
 sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from 
 fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real 
 estimate. 
 
20 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 The specimens I have quoted differ widely 
 from one another, but they have in common this : 
 the possession of the very highest poetical quality. 
 If we are thoroughly penetrated by their power, 
 we shall find that we have acquired a sense en- 
 abling us, whatever poetry may be laid before us, 
 to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality 
 is present or wanting there. Critics give them- 
 selves great labour to draw out what in the ab- 
 stract constitutes the characters of a high quality 
 of poetry. It is much better simply to have 
 recourse to concrete examples ; — to take specimens 
 of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, 
 and to say : The characters of a high quality of 
 poetry are what is expressed there. They are far 
 better recognised by being felt in the verse of the 
 master, than by being perused in the prose of the 
 critic. Nevertheless if we are urgently pressed to 
 give some critical account of them, we may safely, 
 perhaps, venture on laying down, not indeed how 
 and why the characters arise, but where and in 
 what they arise. They are in the matter and sub- 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 21 
 
 stance of the poetry, and they are in its manner 
 and style. Both of these, the substance and 
 matter on the one hand, the style and manner on 
 the other, have a mark, an accent, of high beauty, 
 worth, and power. But if we are asked to define 
 this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer 
 must be : No, for we should thereby be darken- 
 ing the question, not clearing it. The mark and 
 accent are as given by the substance and matter 
 of that poetry, by the style and manner of that 
 poetry, and of all other poetry which is akin to it 
 in quality. 
 
 Only one thing we may add as to the substance 
 and matter of poetry, guiding ourselves by Aris- 
 totle's profound observation that the superiority 
 of poetry over history consists in its possessing a 
 higher truth and a higher seriousness {c^iXocro- 
 (fxoTepov Kol (TTrovSatorepov). Let us add, there- 
 fore, to what we have said, this : that the substance 
 and matter of the best poetry acquire their special 
 character from possessing, in an eminent degree, 
 truth and seriousness. We may add yet further. 
 
22 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 what is in itself evident, that to the style and 
 manner of the best poetry their special character, 
 their accent, is given by their diction, and, even 
 yet more, by their movement. And though we 
 distinguish between the two characters, the two 
 accents, of superiority, yet they are nevertheless 
 vitally connected one with the other. The superior 
 character of truth and seriousness, in the matter 
 and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable 
 from the superiority of diction and movement 
 marking its style and manner. The two superi- 
 orities are closely related, and are in steadfast 
 proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic 
 truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet's 
 matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, 
 will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement 
 be wanting to his style and manner. In propor- 
 tion as this high stamp of diction and movement, 
 again, is absent from a poet's style and manner, 
 we shall find, also, that high poetic truth and 
 seriousness are absent from his substance and 
 matter. 
 
J THE STUDY OF POETRY 28 
 
 So stated, these are but dry general ties ; their 
 whole force lies in their application. And I could 
 wish every student of poetry to make the applica- 
 tion of them for himself Made by himself, the 
 application would impress itself upon his mind far 
 more deeply than made by me. Neither will my 
 limits allow me to make any full application of 
 the generalities above propounded; but in the 
 hope of bringing out, at any rate, some signifi- 
 cance in them, and of establishing an important 
 principle more firmly by their means, I will, in 
 the space which remains to me, follow rapidly 
 from the commencement the course of our English 
 poetry with them in my view. 
 
 Once more I return to the early poetry of 
 France, with which our own poetry, in its origins, 
 is indissolubly connected. In the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries, that seed-time of all modern 
 language and literature, the poetry of France had 
 a clear predominance in Europe. Of the two 
 divisions of that poetry, its productions in the 
 langue d'oil and its productions in the langue d'oc. 
 
24 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 the poetry of the laiigue d'oc, of southern France, 
 of the troubadours, is of importance because of its 
 effect on Italian literature ; — the first literature of 
 modem Europe to strike the true and grand note, 
 and to bring forth, as in Dante and Petrarch it 
 brought forth, classics. But the predominance of 
 French poetry in Europe, during the twelfth and 
 thirteenth centuries, is due to its poetry of the 
 langue (Toil, the poetry of northern France and of 
 the tongue which is now the French language. 
 In the twelfth century the bloom of this romance- 
 poetry was earlier and stronger in England, at the 
 court of our Anglo-Norman kings, than in France 
 itselfl But it was a bloom of French poetry ; and 
 as our native poetry formed itself, it formed itself 
 out of this. The romance-poems which took pos- 
 session of the heart and imagination of Europe in 
 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are French ; 
 'they are,' as Southey justly says, 'the pride of 
 French literature, nor have we anything which 
 can be placed in competition with them.' Themes 
 were supplied from all quarters ; but the romance- 
 
1 THE STUDY OF POETRY 26 
 
 setting whicli was common to them all, and which 
 gained the ear of Europe, was French. This con- 
 stituted for the French poetry, literature, and lan- 
 guage, at the height of the Middle Age, an un- 
 challenged predominance. The Italian Brunetto 
 Latini, the master of Dante, wrote his Treasure in 
 French because, he says, ' la parleure en est plus 
 d^litable et plus commune k toutes gens.' In the 
 same century, the thirteenth, the French romance- 
 writer. Christian of Troyes, formulates the claims, 
 in chivalry and letters, of France, his native 
 country, as follows : — 
 
 * Or vous art par ce livre apris. 
 Que Gresse ot de chevalerie 
 Le premier los et de clergie ; 
 Puis vint chevalerie k Rome, 
 Et de la clergie la some, 
 Qui ore est en France venue. 
 Diex doinst qu'ele i soit retenue, 
 Et que li lius li abelisse 
 Tant que de France n'isse 
 L'onor qui s'i est arest^e ! ' 
 
 Now by this book you will learn that first 
 Greece had the renown for chivalry and letters : 
 
26 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM I 
 
 then chivalry and the primacy in letters passed 
 to Rome, and now it is come to France. God 
 grant it may be kept there ; and that the place 
 may please it so well, that the honour which has 
 come to make stay in France may never depart 
 thence ! ' 
 
 Yet it is now sill gone, this French romance- 
 poetry, of which the weight of substance and the 
 power of style are not unfairly represented by 
 this extract from Christian of Troyes. Only by 
 means of the historic estimate can we persuade 
 ourselves now to think that any of it is of poetical 
 importance. 
 
 But in the fourteenth century there comes an 
 Englishman nourished on this poetry, taught his 
 trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyrae, metre 
 from this poetry ; for even of that stanza which 
 the Italians used, and which Chaucer derived 
 immediately from the Italians, the basis and sug- 
 gestion was probably given in France. Chaucer 
 (I have already named him) fascinated his con- 
 temporaries, but so too did Christian of Troyes 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 27 
 
 and Wolfram of Eschenbach. Chaucer's power 
 of fascination, however, is enduring ; his poetical 
 importance does not need the assistance of the 
 historic estimate ; it is real. He is a genuine 
 source of joy and strength, which is flowing still 
 for us and will flow always. He will be read, as 
 time goes on, far more generally than he is read 
 now. His language is a cause of difficulty for us ; 
 but so also, and I think in quite as great a degree, 
 is the language of Burns. In Chaucer's case, as 
 in that of Burns, it is a difficulty to be unhesitat- 
 ingly accepted and overcome. 
 
 If we ask ourselves wherein consists the im- 
 mense superiority of Chaucer's poetry over the 
 romance-poetry — why it is that in passing from 
 this to Chaucer we suddenly feel ourselves to be 
 in another world, we shall find that his superiority 
 is both in the substance of his poetry and in the 
 style of his poetry. His superiority in substance 
 is given by his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly 
 view of human Ufe, — so unlike the total want, in 
 the romance-poets, of all intelligent command of 
 
28 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 it. Chaucer has not their helplessness; he has 
 gained the power to survey the world from a 
 central, a truly human point of view. We have 
 only to call to mind the Prologue to The CaiUer- 
 Jmry Tales. The right comment upon it is Dry- 
 den's : ' It is sufficient to say, according to the 
 proverb, that here is God's plenty.' And again: 
 ' He is a perpetual fountain of good sense.' It is 
 by a large, free, sound representation of things, that 
 poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth of sub- 
 stance; and Chaucer's poetry has truth of substance. 
 Of his style and manner, if we think first of 
 the romance-poetry and then of Chaucer's divine 
 liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of move- 
 ment, it is difficult to speak temperately. They 
 are irresistible, and justify all the rapture with 
 which his successors speak of his ' gold dew-drops 
 of speech.' Johnson misses the point entirely 
 when he finds fault with Dryden for ascribing to 
 Chaucer the first refinement of our numbers, and 
 says that Gower also can show smooth numbers 
 and easy rhymes. The refinement of our numbers 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 29 
 
 means something far more than this. A nation 
 may have versifiers with smooth numbers and 
 easy rhymes, and yet may have no real poetry at 
 all. Chaucer is the father of our splendid English 
 poetry ; he is our ' well of English undefiled/ 
 because by the lovely charm of his diction, the 
 lovely charm of his movement, he makes an 
 epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser, Shake- 
 speare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradi- 
 tion of the liquid diction, the fluid movement, of 
 Chaucer ; at one time it is his liquid diction of 
 which in these poets we feel the virtue, and at 
 another time it is his fluid movement And the 
 virtue is irresistible. 
 
 Bounded as is my space, I must yet find room 
 for an example of Chaucer's virtue, as I have 
 given examples to show the virtue of the great 
 classics. I feel disposed to say that a single line 
 is enough to show the charm of Chaucer's verse ; 
 that merely one line like this — 
 
 '0 martyr souded^ in virginitee !' 
 
 * The French soucU; soldered, fixed fast. 
 
30 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 has a virtue of manner and movement such as we 
 
 shall not find in all the verse of romance-poetry ; 
 
 — but this is saying nothing. The virtue is such 
 
 as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English 
 
 poetry, outside the poets whom I have named as 
 
 the special inheritors of Chaucer's tradition. A 
 
 single line, however, is too little if we have not the 
 
 strain of Chaucer's verse well in our memory; let us 
 
 take a stanza. It is from The Prioress's Tale, the 
 
 story of the Christian child murdered in a Jewry — 
 
 ' My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone 
 Said6 this child, and as by way of kinde 
 I should have deyd, yea, long6 time agone ; 
 But Jesu Christ, as ye in book^s finde, 
 Will that his glory last and be in minde, 
 And for the worship of his mother dere 
 Yet may I sing Alma loud and clere.' 
 
 Wordsworth has modernised this Tale, and to feel 
 
 how delicate and evanescent is the charm of verse, 
 
 we have only to read Wordsworth's first three 
 
 lines of this stanza after Chaucer's — 
 
 * My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow, 
 Said this young child, and by the law of kind 
 I should have died, yea, many hours ago.' 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 81 
 
 The charm is departed. It is often said that the 
 power of liquidness and fluidity in Chaucer's verse 
 was dependent upon a free, a licentious dealing 
 with language, such as is now impossible; upon 
 a liberty, such as Burns too enjoyed, of making 
 words like rueck, bird, into a dissyllable by adding 
 to them, and words like cause, rhyme, into a dis- 
 syllable by sounding the e mute. It is true that 
 Chaucer's fluidity is conjoined with this liberty, 
 and is admirably served by it ; but we ought not 
 to say that it was dependent upon it. It was de- 
 pendent upon his talent. Other poets with a like 
 liberty do not attain to the fluidity of Chaucer ; 
 Burns himseK does not attain to it. Poets, again, 
 who have a talent akin to Chaucer's, such as 
 Shakespeare or Keats, have known how to attain 
 to his fluidity without the like liberty. 
 
 And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. 
 His poetry transcends and effaces, easUy and with- 
 out effort, all the romance - poetry of Catholic 
 Christendom ; it transcends and effaces all the 
 English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends 
 
32 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 and effaces all the English poetry subsequent to it 
 down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is 
 poetic truth of substance, in its natural and neces- 
 sary union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I 
 say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He 
 has not their accent. What is wanting to him is 
 suggested by the mere mention of the name of the 
 first great classic of Christendom, the immortal 
 poet who died eighty years before Chaucer, — 
 Dante. The accent of such verse as 
 
 ' In la sua volontade 6 nostra pace . . .' 
 is altogether beyond Chaucer's reach ; we praise 
 him, but we feel that this accent is out of the 
 question for him. It may be said that it was 
 necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the 
 England of that stage of growth. Possibly ; but 
 we are to adopt a real, not a historic, estimate 
 of poetry. However we may account for its 
 absence, something is wanting, then, to the poetry 
 of Chaucer, which poetry must have before it can 
 be placed in the glorious class of the best. And 
 there is no doubt what that something is. It is 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 33 
 
 the airovZaioTT]^, the high and excellent serious- 
 ness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand 
 virtues of poetry. The substance of Cliaucer's 
 poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, 
 has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity ; but 
 it has not this high seriousness. Homer's criticism 
 of life has it, Dante's has it, Shakespeare's has it. 
 It is this chiefly which gives to our spirits what 
 they can rest upon ; and with the increasing de- 
 mands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue 
 of giving us what we can rest upon will be more 
 and more highly esteemed. A voice from the 
 slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, 
 the voice of poor Villon out of his life of riot and 
 crime, has at its happy moments (as, for instance, 
 in the last stanza of La Belle HeaulmUre^) more 
 
 ^ The name Heaulmiire is said to be derived from a head- 
 dress (helm) worn as a mark by courtesans. In Villon's ballad, 
 a poor old creature of this class laments her days of youth and 
 beauty. The last stanza of the ballad runs thus — 
 ' Ainsi le bon temps regretons 
 Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes, 
 Assises bas, h. croppetons, 
 Tout en ung tas comme pelottes ; 
 A petit feu de chenevottes 
 Tost allumees, tost estainctes. 
 D 
 
34 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 of this important poetic virtue of seriousness than 
 all the productions of Chaucei". But its apparition 
 in Villon, and in men like Villon, is fitful; the 
 greatness of the great poets, the power of their 
 criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained. 
 
 To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet 
 there must be this limitation ; he lacks the high 
 seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an 
 important part of their virtue. Still, the main 
 fact for us to bear in mind about Chaucer is his 
 sterling value according to that real estimate which 
 we firmly adopt for all poets. He has poetic truth 
 of substance, though he has not high poetic 
 seriousness, and corresponding to his truth of 
 substance he has an exquisite virtue of style and 
 manner. With him is bom our real poetry. 
 
 For my present purpose I need not dwell on 
 
 Et jadis fusmes si mignottes ! 
 Ainsi en prend h, maintz et maintes.' 
 
 * Thus amongst ourselves we regret the good time, poor silh- 
 old things, low-seated on our heels, all in a heap like so many 
 balls ; by a little fire of hemp-stalks, soon lighted, soon spent. 
 And once we were such darlings ! So fares it w^ith many and 
 many a one.' 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 86 
 
 our Elizabethan poetry, or on the continuation 
 and close of this poetry in Milton. We all of us 
 profess to be agreed in the estimate of this poetry ; 
 we all of us recognise it as great poetry, our 
 greatest, and Shakespeare and Milton as our 
 poetical classics. The real estimate, here, has 
 universal currency. With the next age of our 
 pqetry divergency and difficulty begin. An historic 
 estimate of that poetry has established itself ; and 
 the question is, whether it will be found to coincide 
 with the real estimate. 
 
 The age of Dryden, together with our whole 
 eighteenth century which followed it, sincerely 
 believed itself to have produced poetical classics 
 of its own, and even to have made advance, in 
 poetry, beyond all its predecessors. Dryden re- 
 gards as not seriously disputable the opinion 'that 
 the sweetness of English verse was never under- 
 stood or practised by our fathers.' Cowley could 
 see nothing at all in Chaucer's poetry. Dryden 
 heartily admired it, and, as we have seen, praised 
 its matter admirably ; but of its exquisite manner 
 
36 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 and movement all he can find to say is that 'there 
 is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which 
 is natural and pleasing, though not perfect.' Addi- 
 son, wishing to praise Chaucer's numbers, compares 
 them with Dryden's own. And all through the 
 eighteenth century, and down even into our own 
 times, the stereotjrped phrase of approbation for 
 good verse found in our early poetry has been, 
 that it even approached the verse of Dryden, 
 Addison, Pope, and Johnson, 
 
 Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is 
 the historic estimate, which represents them as 
 such, and which has been so long established that 
 it cannot easily give way, the real estimate? 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, 
 denied it ; but the authority of Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge does not weigh much with the young 
 generation, and there are many signs to show that 
 the eighteenth century and its judgments are 
 coming into favour again. Are the favourite poets 
 of the eighteenth century classics ? 
 
 It is impossible within my present limits to 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 87 
 
 discuss the question fully. And what man of 
 letters would not shrink from seeming to dispose 
 dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at 
 any rate, such masters in letters as Dryden and 
 Pope ; two men of such admirable talent, both of 
 them, and one of them, Dryden, a man, on all 
 sides, of such energetic and genial power ? And 
 yet, if we are to gain the full benefit from poetry, 
 we must have the real estimate of it. I cast 
 about for some mode of arriving, in the present 
 case, at such an estimate without ofifence. And 
 perhaps the best way is to begin, as it is easy to 
 begin, with cordial praise. 
 
 When we find Chapman, the Elizabethan trans- 
 lator of Homer, expressing himself in his preface 
 thus : ' Though truth in her very nakedness sits 
 in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and 
 Ganges few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those 
 few here will so discover and confirm that, the 
 date being out of her darkness in this morning of 
 our poet, he shall now gird his temples with the 
 sun,' — we pronounce that such a prose is intoler- 
 
88 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 able. When we find Milton ^vTiting : ' And long 
 it was not after, when I was confirmed in this 
 opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate of 
 his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 
 ought himself to be a true poem,' — we pronounce 
 that such a prose has its own grandeur, but that 
 it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when we 
 find Dryden telling us : ' What Virgil wrote in 
 the vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have 
 undertaken to translate in my declining years ; 
 struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, 
 curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in 
 all I write,' — then we exclaim that here at last we 
 have the true English prose, a prose such as we 
 would all gladly use if we only knew how. Yet 
 Dryden was Milton's contemporary. 
 
 But after the Eestoration the time had come 
 when our nation felt the imperious need of a fit 
 prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when 
 our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself 
 from the absorbing preoccupation which religion 
 in tlie Puritan age had exercised. It was im- 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 89 
 
 possible that this freedom should be brought 
 about without some negative excess, without some 
 neglect and impairment of the religious life of 
 the soul ; and the spiritual history of the eight- 
 eenth century shows us that the freedom was not 
 achieved without them. Still, the freedom was 
 achieved ; the preoccupation, an undoubtedly 
 baneful and retarding one if it had continued, was 
 got rid of. And as with religion amongst us at 
 that period, so it was also with letters. A fit 
 prose was a necessity ; but it was impossible that 
 a fit prose should establish itself amongst us 
 without some touch of frost to the imagin- 
 ative life of the soul. The needful qualities for 
 a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, 
 balance. The men of letters, whose destiny it 
 may be to bring their nation to the attainment 
 of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they 
 work in prose or in verse, give a predominat- 
 ing, an almost exclusive attention to the qual- 
 ities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. 
 But an almost exclusive attention to these 
 
40 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 qualities involves some repression and silencing 
 of poetry. 
 
 We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and 
 glorious founder, Pope as the splendid higli priest, 
 of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent 
 and indispensable eighteenth century. For the 
 purposes of their mission and destiny their poetry, 
 like their prose, is admirable. Do you ask me 
 whether Dryden's verse, take it almost where you 
 will, is not good ? 
 
 ' A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged, 
 Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged.' 
 
 I answer : Admirable for the purposes of the 
 inaugurator of an age of prose and reason. Do 
 you ask me whether Pope's verse, take it almost 
 where you will, is not good ? 
 
 ' To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down ; 
 Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own.' 
 
 I answer : Admirable for the purposes of the high 
 priest of an age of prose and reason. But do you 
 ask me whether such verse proceeds from men 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 41 
 
 with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from 
 men whose criticism of life has a high seriousness, 
 or even, without that high seriousness, has poetic 
 largeness, freedom, insight, benignity? Do you 
 ask me whether the application of ideas to life in 
 the verse of these men, often a powerful applica- 
 tion, no doubt, is a powerful poetic application ? 
 Do you ask me whether the poetry of these men 
 has either the matter or the inseparable manner 
 of such an adequate poetic criticism ; whether it 
 has the accent of 
 
 'Absent thee from felicity awhile . . .' 
 or of 
 
 ' And what is else not to be overcome . . ' 
 or of 
 
 '0 martyr souded in virginitee !' 
 
 I answer : It has not and cannot have them ; it 
 is the poetry of the builders of an age of prose 
 and reason. Though they may write in verse, 
 though they may in a certain sense be masters of 
 the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not 
 
12 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM I 
 
 classics of our poetry, they are classics of our 
 prose. 
 
 Gray is our poetical classic of that literature 
 and age ; the position of Gray is singular, and 
 demands a word of notice here. He has not the 
 volume or the power of poets who, coming in 
 times more favourable, have attained to an inde- 
 pendent criticism of life. But he lived with the 
 great poets, he lived, above all, with the Greeks, 
 through perpetually studying and enjoying them ; 
 and he caught their poetic point of view for 
 regarding life, caught their poetic manner. The 
 point of view and the manner are not self-sprung 
 in him, he caught them of others ; and he had 
 not the free and abundant use of them. But 
 whereas Addison and Pope never had the use of 
 them. Gray had the use of them at times. He 
 is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our 
 poetry, but he is a classic. 
 
 And now, after Gray, we are met, as we draw 
 towards the end of the eighteenth century, we are 
 met by the great name of Burns. We enter now 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 43 
 
 on times where the personal estimate of poets 
 begins to be rife, and where the real estimate of 
 them is not reached without difficulty. But in 
 spite of the disturbing pressures of personal par- 
 tiality, of national partiality, let us try to reach 
 a real estimate of the poetry of Burns. 
 
 By his English poetry Burns in general belongs 
 CO the eighteenth century, and has little import- 
 ance for us. 
 
 ' Mark ruffian Violence, distain'd with crimes, 
 Rousing elate in these degenerate times ; 
 View unsuspecting Innocence a prey. 
 As guileful Fraud points out the erring way ; 
 While subtle Litigation's pliant tongue 
 The life-blood equal sucks of Eight and Wrong ! ' 
 
 Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name 
 and fame would have disappeared long ago. Nor 
 is Clarinda's love-poet, Sylvander, the real Burns 
 either. But he tells us himself : ' These English 
 songs gravel me to death. I have not the com- 
 mand of the language that I have of my native 
 tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more 
 barren in English than in Scotch. I have been 
 
44 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 at Duncan Gray to dress it in English, but all I 
 can do is desperately stupid.' We English turn 
 naturally, in Bums, to the poems in our own 
 language, because we can read them easily ; but 
 in those poems we have not the real Burns. 
 
 The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems. 
 Let us boldly say that of much of this poetry, 
 a poetry dealing perpetually with Scotch drink, 
 Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotch- 
 man's estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotch- 
 man is used to this world of Scotch drink, Scotch 
 religion, and Scotch manners ; he has a tenderness 
 for it; he meets its poet half way. In this tender 
 mood he reads pieces like the Holy Fair or 
 Halloween. But this world of Scotch drink, Scotch 
 religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet, 
 not for him, when it is not a partial countryman 
 who reads him ; for in itself it is not a beautiful 
 world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage 
 to a poet to deal with a beautiful world. Burns's 
 world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch 
 manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive 
 
1 THE STUDY OF POETRY , 45 
 
 world; even the world of his Cotter^ s Saturday 
 
 Night is not a beautiful world. No doubt a poet's 
 
 criticism of life may have such truth and power 
 
 that it triumphs over its world and delights us. 
 
 Burns may triumph over his world, often he does 
 
 triumph over his world, but let us observe how 
 
 and where. Burns is the first case we have had 
 
 where the bias of the personal estimate tends to 
 
 mislead ; let us look at him closely, he can bear it. 
 
 Many of his admirers will tell us that we have 
 
 Burns, convivial, genuine, delightful, here — 
 
 ' Leeze me on drink ! it gies us mair 
 Than either school or college ; 
 It kindles wit, it waukens lair, 
 
 It pangs us fou o' knowledge. 
 Be 't whisky gill or penny wheep 
 
 Or ony stronger potion, 
 It never fails, on drinking deep, 
 To kittle up our notion 
 
 By night or day.' 
 
 There is a great deal of that sort of thing in Bums, 
 and it is unsatisfactory, not because it is bacchan- 
 alian poetry, but because it has not that accent 
 of sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, to do it 
 
40 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 justice, very often has. There is something in it 
 of bravado, something which makes us feel that 
 we have not the man speaking to us with his real 
 voice ; something, therefore, poetically unsound. 
 
 With still more confidence will his admirers 
 tell us that we have the genuine Bums, the great 
 poet, when his strain asserts the independence, 
 equality, dignity, of men, as in the famous song 
 For OL that and a' that — 
 
 ' A prince can mak' a belted knight, 
 
 A marquis, duke, and a' that ; 
 
 But an honest man's aboon his might, 
 
 Guid faith he mauna fa' that ! 
 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 Their dignities, and a' that, 
 The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, 
 Are higher rank than a' that.' 
 
 Here they find his grand, genuine touches ; and 
 still more, when this puissant genius, who so often 
 set morality at defiance, falls moralising — 
 
 * The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love 
 Luxuriantly indulge it ; 
 But never tempt th' illicit rove, 
 The' naething should divulge it. 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 47 
 
 I waive the quantum o' the sin, 
 
 The hazard o' concealing, 
 But och ! it hardens a' within, 
 
 And petrifies the feeling.' 
 
 Or in a higher strain — 
 
 Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 
 
 Decidedly can try us ; 
 He knows each chord, its various tone ; 
 
 Each spring, its various bias. 
 Then at the balance let's be mute. 
 
 We never can adjust it ; 
 What's done we partly may compute. 
 
 But know not what's resisted.' 
 
 Or in a better strain yet, a strain, his admirers 
 will say, unsurpassable — 
 
 ' To make a happy fire-side clime 
 To weans and wife. 
 That's the true pathos and sublime 
 Of human life.' 
 
 There is criticism of life for you, the admirers of 
 Burns will say to us ; there is the application 
 of ideas to life ! There is, undoubtedly. The 
 doctrine of the last-quoted lines coincides almost 
 exactly with what was the aim and end, Xenophon 
 tells us, of all the teaching of Socrates. And the 
 
48 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 application is a powerful one ; made by a man of 
 vigorous understanding, and (need I say?^ a master 
 of language. 
 
 But for supreme poetical success more is re- 
 quired than the powerful application of ideas to 
 life ; it must be an application under the condi- 
 tions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic 
 beauty. Those laws fix as an essential condition, 
 in the poet's treatment of such matters as are here 
 in question, high seriousness ; — the high serious- 
 ness which comes from absolute sincerity. The 
 accent of high seriousness, born of absolute 
 sincerity, is what gives to such verse as 
 
 * In la sua volontade h nostra pace . . .' 
 
 to such criticism of life as Dante's, its power. Is 
 this accent felt in the passages which I have been 
 quoting from Burns ? Surely not ; surely, if our 
 sense is quick, we must perceive that we have not 
 in those passages a voice from the very inmost 
 soul of the genuine Bums ; he is not speaking to 
 us from these depths, he is more or less preaching. 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 49 
 
 And the compensation for admiring such passages 
 less, from missing the perfect poetic accent in 
 them, will be that we shall admire more the 
 poetry where that accent is found. 
 
 No; Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the 
 high seriousness of the great classics, and the 
 virtue of matter and manner which goes with that 
 high seriousness is wanting to his work. At 
 moments he touches it in a profound and passion- 
 ate melancholy, as in those four immortal lines 
 taken by Byron as a motto for The Bride of 
 Ahydos, but which have in them a depth of poetic 
 quality such as resides in no verse of Byron's 
 own — 
 
 ' Had we never loved sae kindly, 
 Had we never loved sae blindly, 
 Never met, or never parted, 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted.' 
 
 But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot 
 make ; the rest, in the Farewell to Nancy, is verbi- 
 age. 
 
 "We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I 
 
50 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM l 
 
 think, by conceiving his work as having truth of 
 matter and truth of manner, but not the accent 
 or the poetic virtue of the highest masters. His 
 genuine criticism of life, when the sheer poet in 
 him speaks, is ironic ; it is not — 
 
 'Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme 
 
 These woes of mine fulfil, 
 Here firm I rest, they must be best 
 Because they are Thy will ! ' 
 
 It is far rather : Whistle owre the lave o't / Yet 
 we may say of him as of Chaucer, that of life and 
 the world, as they come before him, his view is 
 large, free, shrewd, benignant, — truly poetic, there- 
 fore ; and his manner of rendering what he sees is 
 to match. But we must note, at the same time, 
 his great difference from Chaucer. The freedom 
 of Chaucer is heightened, in Burns, by a fiery, 
 reckless energy ; the benignity of Chaucer deepens, 
 in Burns, into an overwhelming sense of the pathos 
 of things ; — of the pathos of human nature, the 
 pathos, also, of non- human nature. Instead of 
 the fluidity of Chaucer's manner, the manner of 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 61 
 
 Burns has spring, bounding swiftness. Burns is 
 by far the greater force, though he has perhaps 
 less charm. The world of Chaucer is fairer, 
 richer, more significant than that of Burns ; but 
 when the largeness and freedom of Burns get full 
 sweep, as in Tam o' Shanter, or still more in that 
 puissant and splendid production, The Jolly 
 Beggars, his world may be what it will, his 
 poetic genius triumphs over it. In the world of 
 The Jolly Beggars there is more than hideousness 
 and squalor, there is bestiality; yet the piece is 
 a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, 
 and power which make the famous scene in 
 Auerbach's Cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem artificial 
 and tame beside it, and which are only matched 
 by Shakespeare and Aristophanes. 
 
 Here, where his largeness and freedom serve 
 him so admirably, and also in those poems and 
 songs where to shrewdness he adds infinite arch- 
 ness and wit, and to benignity infinite pathos, 
 where his manner is flawless, and a perfect poetic 
 whole is the result, — in things like the address to 
 
62 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 the mouse whose home he had ruined, in things 
 like Duncan Gh^ay, Tarn Glen, Whistle and I'll 
 come to you my Lad, Auld Lang Syne (this list 
 might be made much longer), — here we have the 
 genuine Burns, of whom the real estimate must be 
 high indeed. Not a classic, nor with the excellent 
 (TTrovSaioTijf; of the great classics, nor with a verse 
 rising to a criticism of life and a virtue like theirs ; 
 but a poet with thorough truth of substance and 
 an answering truth of style, giving us a poetry 
 sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning 
 towards the pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps 
 to prize Burns most for his touches of piercing, 
 sometimes almost intolerable, pathos ; for verse 
 like— 
 
 ' We twa has paidl't i' the burn 
 From momin' sun till dine ; 
 But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
 Sin auld lang syne . . .' 
 
 where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps 
 it is by the perfection of soundness of his lighter 
 and archer masterpieces that he is poetically most 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 68 
 
 wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a 
 personal estimate of Shelley, as so many of us 
 have been, are, and will be, — of that beautiful 
 spirit building his many-coloured haze of words 
 and images 
 
 * Pinnacled dim in the intense inane ' — 
 
 no contact can be wholesomer than the contact 
 with Bums at his archest and soundest. Side by 
 side with the 
 
 * On the brink of the night and the morning 
 
 My coursers are wont to respire, 
 But the Earth has just whispered a warning 
 That their flight must be swifter than fire . . .' 
 
 of PrometTieus Unbound, how salutary, how very 
 salutary, to place this from Tam Glen — 
 
 ' My minnie does constantly deave me 
 
 And bids me beware o' young men ; 
 They flatter, she says, to deceive me ; 
 But wha can think sae o' Tam Glen V 
 
 But we enter on burning ground as we approach 
 the poetry of times so near to us — poetry like that 
 of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth — of which the 
 
54 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i 
 
 estimates are so often not only personal, but per- 
 sonal with passion. For my purpose, it is enough 
 to have taken the single case of Burns, the first 
 poet we come to of whose work the estimate 
 formed is evidently apt to be personal, and to 
 have suggested how we may proceed, using the 
 poetry of the great classics as a sort of touchstone, 
 to correct this estimate, as we had previously 
 corrected by the same means the historic estimate 
 where we met with it. A collection like the 
 present, with its succession of celebrated names 
 and celebrated poems, offers a good opportunity 
 to us for resolutely endeavouring to make our 
 estimates of poetry reaL I have sought to point 
 out a method which will help us in making them 
 so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to put any 
 one who likes in a way of applying it for himself. 
 At any rate the end to which the method and 
 the estimate are designed to lead, and from leading 
 to which, if they do lead to it, they get their whole 
 value, — the benefit of being able clearly to feel 
 and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in 
 
I THE STUDY OF POETRY 55 
 
 poetry, — is an end, let me say it once more at 
 parting, of supreme importance. We are often 
 told that an era is opening in which we are to see 
 multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses 
 of a common sort of literature ; that such readers 
 do not want and could not relish anything better 
 than such literature, and that to provide it is 
 becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if 
 good literature entirely lost currency with the 
 world, it would still be abundantly worth while to 
 continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never will 
 lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary 
 appearances ; it never will lose supremacy. Cur- 
 rency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed 
 by the world's deliberate and conscious choice, but 
 by something far deeper, — by the instinct of self- 
 preservation in humanity. 
 
II 
 
 MILTON^ 
 
 The most eloquent voice of our century uttered, 
 shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry 
 against 'the Anglo-Saxon contagion.' The tenden- 
 cies and aims, the view of life and the social economy 
 of the ever-multiplying and spreading Anglo-Saxon 
 race, would be found congenial, this prophet feared, 
 by all the prose, all the vulgarity amongst man- 
 kind, and would invade and overpower all nations. 
 The true ideal would be lost, a general sterility of 
 mind and heart would set in. 
 
 The prophet had in view, no doubt, in the 
 warning thus given, us and our colonies, but the 
 
 ' An address delivered in St. Margaret's Church, Westmin- 
 ster, on the 13th of February 1888, at the unveiling of a Mem- 
 morial Window presented by Mr. George W. Childs of Phila- 
 delphia. 
 
n MILTON 57 
 
 United States still more. There the Anglo-Saxon 
 race is already most numerous, there it increases 
 fastest ; there material interests are most absorb- 
 ing and pursued with most energy ; there the ideal, 
 the saving ideal, of a high and rare excellence, 
 seems perhaps to suffer most danger of being ob- 
 scured and lost. Whatever one may think of the 
 general danger to the world from the Anglo-Saxon 
 contagion, it appears to me dif&cult to deny that 
 the growing greatness and influence of the United 
 States does bring with it some danger to the ideal 
 of a high and rare excellence. The average man 
 is too much a religion there ; his performance is un- 
 duly magnified, his shortcomings are not duly seen 
 and admitted. A lady in the State of Ohio sent 
 to me only the other day a volume on American 
 authors ; the praise given throughout was of such 
 high pitch that in thanking her I could not forbear 
 saying that for only one or two of the authors 
 named was such a strain of praise admissible, and 
 that we lost all real standard of excellence by 
 praising so uniformly and immoderately. She 
 
58 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ll 
 
 answered me with charming good temper, that very 
 likely I was quite right, but it was pleasant to her 
 to think that excellence was common and abun- 
 dant. But excellence is not common and abun- 
 dant ; on the contrary, as the Greek poet long ago 
 said, excellence dwells among rocks hardly access- 
 ible, and a man must almost wear his heart out 
 before he can reach her. Whoever talks of ex- 
 cellence as common and abundant, is on the way 
 to lose all right standard of excellence. And 
 when the right standard of excellence is lost, it is 
 not likely that much which is excellent will be 
 produced. 
 
 To habituate ourselves, therefore, to approve, as 
 the Bible says, things that are really excellent, b, 
 of the highest importance. And some apprehen- 
 sion may justly be caused by a tendency in Ameri- 
 cans to take, or, at any rate, attempt to take, pro- 
 fess to take, the average man and his performances 
 too seriously, to over-rate and overpraise what is 
 not really superior. 
 
 But we have met here to-day to witness the un- 
 
II MILTON 69 
 
 mling of a gift in Milton's honour, and a gift 
 bestowed by an American, Mr. Childs of Phila- 
 delphia ; whose cordial hospitality so many Eng- 
 lishmen, I myself among the number, have experi- 
 enced in America. It was only last autumn that 
 Stratford-upon-Avon celebrated the reception of 
 a gift from the same generous donor in honour of 
 Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Milton — he who 
 wishes to keep his standard of excellence high, 
 cannot choose two better objects of regard and 
 honour. And it is an American who has chosen 
 them, and whose beautiful gift in honour of one of 
 them, Milton, with Mr. Whittier's simple and true 
 lines inscribed upon it, is unveiled to-day. Per- 
 haps this gift in honour of Milton, of which I 
 am asked to speak, is, even more than the gift in 
 honour of Shakespeare, one to suggest edifying 
 reflections to us. 
 
 Like Mr. Whittier, I treat the gift of Mr. Childs 
 as a gift in honour of Milton, although the 
 window given is in memory of his second wife, 
 Catherine Woodcock, the ' late espoused saint ' of 
 
60 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM U 
 
 the famous sonnet, who died in child-bed at the 
 end of the first year of her marriage with Milton, 
 and who lies buried here with her infant. Milton 
 is buried in Cripplegate, 'but he lived for a good 
 while in this parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster, 
 and here he composed part of Paradise Lost, and 
 the whole of Paradise Regained and Samson Ago- 
 nistes. When death deprived him of the Catherine 
 whom the new window commemorates, Milton 
 had still some eighteen years to live, and Crom- 
 well, his ' chief of men,' was yet ruling England. 
 But the Eestoration, with its ' Sons of Belial,' was 
 not far off; and in the meantime Milton's heavy 
 affliction had laid fast hold upon him, his eyesight 
 had failed totally, he was blind. In what re- 
 mained to him of life he had the consolation of 
 producing the Paradise Lost and the Samson 
 Agonistes, and such a consolation we may indeed 
 count as no slight one. But the daily life of hap- 
 piness in common things and in domestic affec- 
 tions — a life of which, to Milton as to Dante, too 
 small a share was given — he seems to have known 
 
II MILTON 61 
 
 most, if not only, in his one married year with 
 the wife who is here buried. Her form ' vested all 
 in white,' as in his sonnet he relates that after her 
 death she appeared to him, her face veiled, but 
 with 'love, sweetness, and goodness' shining in her 
 person, — this fair and gentle daughter of the rigid 
 sectarist of Hackney, this lovable companion with 
 whom Milton had rest and happiness one year, is 
 a part of Milton indeed, and in calling up her 
 memory, we call up his. 
 
 And in calling up Milton's memory we call up, 
 let me say, a memory upon which, in prospect of 
 the Anglo-Saxon contagion and of its dangers sup- 
 posed and real, it may be well to lay stress even 
 more than upon Shakespeare's. If to our English 
 race an inadequate sense for perfection of work is 
 a real danger, if the discipline of respect for a high 
 and flawless excellence is peculiarly needed by us, 
 Milton is of all our gifted men the best lesson, the 
 most salutary influence. In the sure and flawless 
 perfection of his rhythm and diction he is as 
 admirable as Virgil or Dante, and in this respect 
 
62 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 he is unique amongst us. No one else in Eng- 
 lish literature and art possesses the like dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, all of them 
 good poets who have studied Milton, followed 
 Milton, adopted his form, fail in their diction and 
 rhythm if we try them by that high standard of 
 excellence maintained by Milton constantly. From 
 style really high and pure Milton never departs ; 
 their departures from it are frequent. 
 
 Shakespeare is divinely strong, rich, and attract- 
 ive. But sureness of perfect style Shakespeare 
 himself does not possess. I have heard a politician 
 express wonder at the treasures of political wisdom 
 in a certain celebrated scene of Troilus and Cres- 
 sida ; for my part I am at least equally moved to 
 wonder at the fantastic and false diction in which 
 Shakespeare has in that scene clothed them. Mil- 
 ton, from one end of Paradise Lost to the other, is in 
 his diction and rhythm constantly a great artist in 
 the great style. AVhatever may be said as to the 
 subject of his poem, as to the conditions under 
 
U MILTON 63 
 
 which he received his subject and treated it, that 
 praise, at any rate, is assured to him. 
 
 For the rest, justice is not at present done, in 
 my opinion, to Milton's management of the inevi- 
 table matter of a Puritan epic, a matter full of 
 difficulties, for a poet. Justice is not done to the 
 architectonics, as Goethe would have called them, 
 of Paradise Lost ; in these, too, the power of 
 Milton's art is remarkable. But this may be a 
 proposition which requires discussion and develop- 
 ment for establishing it, and they are impossible 
 on an occasion like the present. 
 
 That Milton, of all our English race, is by his 
 diction and rhythm the one artist of the highest 
 rank in the great style whom we have; this I 
 take as requiring no discussion, this I take as 
 certain. 
 
 The mighty power of poetry and art is gener- 
 ally admitted. But where the soul of this power, 
 of this power at its best, chiefly resides, very 
 many of us fail to see. It resides chiefly in the 
 refining and elevation wrought in us by the high 
 
64 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM li 
 
 and rare excellence of the great style. We may 
 feel the effect without being able to give ourselves 
 clear account of its cause, but the thing is so. 
 Now, no race needs the influences mentioned, the 
 influences of refining and elevation, more than 
 ours ; and in poetry and art our grand source for 
 them is Milton. 
 
 To what does he owe this supreme distinction ? 
 To nature first and foremost, to that bent of 
 nature for inequality which to the worshippers of 
 the average man is so unacceptable ; to a gift, a 
 divine favour. ' The older one grows,' says Goethe, 
 ' the more one prizes natural gifts, because by no 
 possibility can they be procured and stuck on.' 
 Nature formed Milton to be a great poet. But 
 what other poet has shown so sincere a sense of 
 the grandeur of his vocation, and a moral effort so 
 constant and sublime to make and keep himself 
 worthy of it ? The Milton of religious and political 
 controversy, and perhaps of domestic life also, is 
 not seldom disfigured by want of amenity, by 
 acerbity. The Milton of poetry, on the other 
 
11 MILTON 66 
 
 hand, is one of those great men ' who are modest ' 
 — to quote a fine remark of Leopardi, that gifted 
 and stricken young Italian, who in his sense for 
 poetic style is worthy to be named with Dante 
 and Milton — ' who are modest, because they con- 
 tinually compare themselves, not with other men, 
 but with that idea of the perfect which they have 
 before their mind.' The Milton of poetry is the 
 man, in his own magnificent phrase, of 'devout 
 prayer to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with 
 all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his 
 Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to 
 touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases.' 
 And finally, the Milton of poetry is, in his own 
 words again, the man of ' industrious and select 
 reading.' Continually he lived in companionship 
 with high and rare excellence, with the great 
 Hebrew poets and prophets, with the great poets 
 of Greece and Kome. The Hebrew compositions 
 were not in verse, and can be not inadequately 
 represented by the grand, measured prose of our 
 English Bible. The verse of the poets of Greece 
 
66 ESSAYS m CRITICISM u 
 
 and Rome no translation can adequately re- 
 produce. Prose cannot have the power of verse ; 
 verse-translation may give whatever of charm is 
 in the soul and talent of the translator himself, 
 but never the specific charm of the verse and poet 
 translated. In our race are thousands of readers, 
 presently there will be millions, who know not a 
 word of Greek and Latin, and will never learn 
 those languages. If this host of readers are ever 
 . to gain any sense of the power and charm of the 
 great poets of antiquity, their way to gain it is not 
 through translations of the ancients, but through 
 the original poetry of Milton, who has the like 
 power and charm, because he has the like great 
 style. 
 
 Through Milton they may gain it, for, in con- 
 clusion, Milton is English; this master in the 
 great style of the ancients is English. Virgil, 
 whom Milton loved and honoured, has at the end 
 of the ^neid a noble passage, where Juno, 
 seeing the defeat of Turnus and the Italians 
 imminent, the victory of the Trojan invaders 
 
II MILTON 67 
 
 assured, entreats Jupiter that Italy may neverthe- 
 less survive and be herself still, may retain her 
 own mind, manners, and language, and not adopt 
 those of the conqueror. 
 
 ' Sit Latium, sint Albani per secula reges ! 
 
 Jupiter grants the prayer ; he promises perpetuity 
 and the future to Italy — Italy reinforced by what- 
 ever virtue the Trojan race has, but Italy, not 
 Troy. This we may take as a sort of parable 
 suiting ourselves. All the Anglo-Saxon contagion, 
 all the flood of Anglo-Saxon commonness, beats 
 vainly against the great style but cannot shake it, 
 and has to accept its triumph. But it triumphs 
 in Milton, in one of our own race, tongue, faith, 
 and morals. Milton has made the great style 
 no longer an exotic here ; he has made it an 
 inmate amongst us, a leaven, and a power. 
 Nevertheless he, and his hearers on both sides 
 of the Atlantic, are English, and will remain 
 English — 
 
 'Sermonem Ausonii patrium moresque tenebunt.' 
 
68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 The English race overspreads the world, and at 
 the same time the ideal of an excellence the most 
 high and the most rare abides a possession with it 
 for ever. 
 
Ill 
 
 THOMAS GRAY^ 
 
 Jamus Brown, Master of Pembroke Hall at 
 Cambridge, Gray's friend and executor, in a letter 
 written a fortnight after Gray's death to another 
 of his friends, Dr. Wharton of Old Park, Durham, 
 has the following passage : — 
 
 ' Everything is now dark and melancholy in 
 Mr. Gray's room, not a trace of him remains 
 there; it looks as if it had been for some time 
 uninhabited, and the room bespoke for another 
 inhabitant. The thoughts I have of him will 
 last, and will be useful to me the few years I can 
 expect to live. He never spoke out, but I 
 believe from some little expressions I now re- 
 
 ' Prefixed to the Selection from Gray in Ward's English 
 Poets, vol. iv. 1880. 
 
70 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM m 
 
 member to have dropped from him, that for some 
 time past he thought himself nearer his end than 
 those about him apprehended.' 
 
 He never sjooke out. In these four words is 
 contained the whole history of Gray, both as a 
 man and as a poet. The words fell naturally, and 
 as it were by chance, from their writer's pen ; but 
 let us dwell upon them, and press into their 
 meaning, for in following it we shall come to 
 understand Gray. 
 
 He was in his fifty-fifth year when he died, 
 and he lived in ease and leisure, yet a few pages 
 hold all his poetry ; he never spoke out in poetry. 
 Still, the reputation which he has achieved by his 
 few pages is extremely high. True, Johnson 
 speaks of him with coldness and disparagement. 
 Gray disliked Johnson, and refused to make his 
 acquaintance; one might fancy that Johnson 
 wrote with some irritation from this cause. But 
 Johnson was not by nature fitted to do justice 
 to Gray and to his poetry ; this by itself is a 
 sufficient explanation of the deficiencies of his 
 
Ill THOMAS GRAY 71 
 
 criticism of Gray. We may add a further ex- 
 planation of them which is supplied by Mr. Cole's 
 papers. * When Johnson was publishing his Life 
 of Gray,' says Mr. Cole, ' I gave him several anec- 
 dotes, but he was very anxious as soon as possible to 
 get to the end of his labours! Johnson was not 
 naturally in sympathy with Gray, whose life he 
 had to write, and when he wrote it he was in a 
 hurry besides. He did Gray injustice, but even 
 Johnson's authority failed to make injustice, in 
 this case, prevail. Lord Macaulay calls the Life 
 of Gray the worst of Johnson's Lives, and it had 
 found many censurers before Macaulay. Gray's 
 poetical reputation grew and flourished in spite 
 of it. The poet Mason, his first biographer, in his 
 epitaph equalled him with Pindar. Britain has 
 known, says Mason, 
 
 • ... a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, 
 A Pindar's rapture in the lyre of Gray.' 
 
 The immense vogue of Pbpe and of his style of 
 versification had at first prevented the frank re- 
 
72 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM iii 
 
 ception of Gray by the readers of poetry. The 
 Elegy pleased ; it could not but please : but 
 Gray's poetry, on the whole, astonished his con- 
 temporaries at first more than it pleased them ; it 
 was so unfamiliar, so unlike the sort of poetry in 
 vogue. It made its way, however, after his death, 
 with the public as well as with the few; and 
 Gray's second biographer, Mitford, remarks that 
 ' the works which were either neglected or 
 ridiculed by their contemporaries have now raised 
 Gray and Collins to the rank of our two greatest 
 lyric poets.' Their reputation was established, at 
 any rate, and stood extremely high, even if they 
 were not popularly read. Johnson's disparage- 
 ment of Gray was called ' petulant,' and severely 
 blamed. Beattie, at the end of the eighteenth 
 century, writing to Sir William Forbes, says : ' Of 
 all the English poets of this age Mr. Gray is most 
 admired, and I think with justice.' Cowpei 
 writes : * I have been reading Gray's works, and 
 think him the only poet since Shakespeare en- 
 titled to the character of sublime. Perhaps you 
 
rir THOMAS GRAY 73 
 
 will remember that I once had a different opinion 
 of him. T was prejudiced.' Adam Smith says : 
 ' Gray joins to the sublimity of Milton the 
 elegance and harmony of Pope ; and nothing is 
 wanting to render him, perhaps, the first poet in 
 the English language, but to have written a little 
 more.' And, to come nearer to our own times, 
 Sir James Mackintosh speaks of Gray thus : ' Of 
 all English poets he was the most finished artist. 
 He attained the highest degree of splendour of 
 which poetical style seemed to be capable.' 
 
 In a poet of such magnitude, how shall we 
 explain his scantiness of production ? Shall we 
 explain it by saying that to make of Gray a poet 
 of this magnitude is absurd ; that his genius and 
 resources were small, and that his production, 
 therefore, was small also, but that the popularity 
 of a single piece, the Elegy, — a popularity due in 
 great measure to the subject, — created for Gray 
 a reputation to which he has really no right ? 
 He himself was not deceived by the favour shown 
 to the Elegy. ' Gray told me with a good deal of 
 
74 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 acrimony,' writes Dr. Gregory, ' that the Elegy 
 owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and 
 that the public would have received it as well if 
 it had been written in prose.' This is too much 
 to say ; the Elegij is a beautiful poem, and in 
 admiring it the public showed a true feeling for 
 poetry. But it is true that the Elegy owed 
 much of its success to its subject, and that it has 
 received a too unmeasured and unbounded praise. 
 
 Gray himself, however, maintained that the 
 Elegy was not his best work in poetry, and he was 
 right. High as is the praise due to the Elegy, it 
 is yet true that in other productions of Gray he 
 exhibits poetical qualities even higher than those 
 exhibited in the Elegy. He deserves, therefore, 
 his extremely high reputation as a poet, although 
 his critics and the public may not always have 
 praised him with perfect judgment. We are 
 brought back, then, to the question : How, in a 
 poet so really considerable, are we to explain his 
 scantiness of production ? 
 
 Scanty Gray's production, indeed, is ; so scanty 
 
in THOMAS GRAY 75 
 
 that to supplement our knowledge of it by a 
 knowledge of the man is in this case of peculiar 
 interest and service. Gray's letters and the 
 records of him by his friends have happily made 
 it possible for us thus to know him, and to ap- 
 preciate his high qualities of mind and soul. 
 Let us see these in the man first, and then observe 
 how they appear in his poetry ; and why they 
 cannot enter into it more freely and inspire it 
 with more strength, render it more abundant. 
 
 We will begin with his acquirements. ' Mr. 
 Gray was,' writes his friend Temple, ' perhaps the 
 most learned man in Europe. He knew every 
 branch of history both natural and civil ; had 
 read all the original historians of England, France, 
 and Italy ; and was a great antiquarian. Criti- 
 cism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a prin- 
 cipal part of his study. Voyages and travels of 
 all sorts were his favourite amusements ; and he 
 had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, 
 and gardening.' The notes in his interleaved 
 copy of Linnaeus remained to show the extent and 
 
76 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ill 
 
 accuracy of his knowledge in the natural sciences, 
 particularly in botany, zoology, and entomology. 
 Entomologists testified that his account of English 
 insects was more perfect than any that had then 
 appeared. His notes and papers, of which some 
 have been published, others remain still in manu- 
 script, give evidence, besides, of his knowledge of 
 literature ancient and modern, geography and 
 topography, painting, architecture and antiquities, 
 and of his curious researches in heraldry. He 
 was an excellent musician. Sir James Mackin- 
 tosh reminds us, moreover, that to all the other 
 accomplishments and merits of Gray we are to 
 add this : ' That he was the first discoverer of the 
 beauties of nature in England, and has marked 
 out the course of every picturesque journey that 
 can be made in it.' 
 
 Acquirements take all their value and char- 
 acter from the power of the individual storing 
 them. Let us take, from amongst Gray's observa- 
 tions on what he read, enough to show us his 
 power. Here are criticisms on three very different 
 
in THOMAS GRAY 77 
 
 authors, criticisms without any study or preten- 
 sion, but just thrown out in chance letters to his 
 friends. First, on Aristotle : — 
 
 ' In the first place he is the hardest author by far 
 I ever meddled with. Then he has a dry conciseness 
 that makes one imagine one is perusing a table of 
 contents rather than a book ; it tastes for all the 
 world like chopped hay, or rather like chopped logic ; 
 for he has a violent afi"ection to that art, being in 
 some sort his own invention ; so that he often loses 
 himself in little trifling distinctions and verbal 
 niceties, and what is worse, leaves you to extricate 
 yourself as you can. Thirdly, he has suffered vastly 
 by his transcribers, as all authors of great brevity 
 necessarily must. Fourthly and lastly, he has abun- 
 dance of fine, uncommon things, which make him 
 well worth the pains he gives one. You see what 
 you have to expect.' 
 
 Next, on Isocrates : — 
 
 ' It would be strange if I should find fault with 
 you for reading Isocrates ; I did so myself twenty 
 years ago, and in an edition at least as bad as 
 yours. The Panegyric, the De Pace, Areopagitic, 
 and Advice to Philip, are by far the noblest remains 
 we have of this writer, and equal to most things 
 extant in the Greek tongue ; but it depends on your 
 judgment to distinguish between his real and occa- 
 
78 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 sional opinion of things, as he directly contradicts 
 in one place what he has advanced in another ; for 
 example, in the Panathenaic and the De Pace, on the 
 naval power of Athens ; the latter of the two is 
 undoubtedly his own undisguised sentiment.' 
 
 After hearing Gray on Isocrates and Aristotle, 
 let us hear him on Froissart : — 
 
 ' I rejoice you have met with Froissart, he is the 
 Herodotus of a barbarous age ; had he but had the 
 luck of writing in as good a language, he might have 
 been immortal. His locomotive disposition (for 
 then there was no other way of learning things), his 
 simple curiosity, his religious credulity, were much 
 like those of the old Grecian. When you have tant 
 chevaucM as to get to the end of him, there is 
 Monstrelet waits to take you up, and will set you 
 down at Philip de Commines ; but previous to all 
 these, you should have read Villehardouin and 
 Joinville.' 
 
 Those judgments, with their, true and clear 
 ring, evince the high quality of Gray's mind, his 
 power to command and use his learning. But 
 Gray was a poet ; let us hear him on a poet, on 
 Shakespeare. We must place ourselves in the 
 fuU midst of the eighteenth century and of its 
 
in THOMAS GRAY 79 
 
 criticism ; Gray's friend, West, had praised Eacine 
 for using in his dramas ' the language of the 
 times and that of the purest sort ' ; and he had 
 added : ' I will not decide what style is fit for our 
 English stage, but I should rather choose one that 
 bordered upon Cato, than upon Shakespeare.' 
 Gray replies : — 
 
 ' As to matter of style, I have this to say : The 
 language of the age is never the language of poetry ; 
 except among the French, whose verse, where the 
 thought does not support it, differs in nothing from 
 prose. Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language 
 peculiar to itself, to which almost every one that 
 has written has added something. In truth, Shake- 
 speare's language is one of his principal beauties ; 
 and he has no less advantage over your Addisons 
 and Rowes in this, than in those other great 
 excellences you mention. Every word in him is a 
 picture. Pray put me the following lines into the 
 tongue of our modern dramatics — 
 
 * " But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks. 
 Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass " — 
 
 and what follows 1 To me they appear untranslat- 
 able ; and if this be the case, our language is greatly 
 degenerated.' 
 
80 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ill 
 
 It is impossible for a poet to lay down the 
 rules of his own art with more insight, soundness, 
 and certainty. Yet at that moment in England 
 there was perhaps not one other man, besides 
 Gray, capable of writing the passage just quoted. 
 
 Gray's quality of mind, then, we see ; his 
 quality of soul will no less bear inspection. His 
 reserve, his delicacy, his distaste for many of the 
 persons and things surrounding him in the Cam- 
 bridge of that day, — ' this silly, dirty place,' as he 
 calls it, — have produced an impression of Gray as 
 being a man falsely fastidious, finical, effeminate. 
 But we have already had that grave testimony to 
 him from the Master of Pembroke Hall : ' The 
 thoughts I have of him will last, and will be 
 useful to me the few years I can expect to live.' 
 And here is another to the same effect from a 
 younger man, from Gray's friend Nicholls : — 
 
 ' You know,' he writes to his mother, from abroad, 
 when he heard of Gray's death, ' that I considered 
 Mr. Gray as a second parent, that I thought only of 
 him, built all my happiness on him, talked of him 
 for ever, wished him with me whenever I partook of 
 
m THOMAS GRAY 81 
 
 any pleasure, and flew to him for refuge whenever 
 I felt any uneasiness. To whom now shall I talk 
 of all I have seen here 1 Who will teach me to 
 read, to think, to feel 1 I protest to you, that 
 whatever I did or thought had a reference to him. 
 If I met with any chagrins, I comforted myself that 
 I had a treasure at home ; if all the world had 
 despised and hated me, I should have tlioiight myself 
 perfectly recompensed in his friendship. There 
 remains only one loss more ; if I lose you, I am left 
 alone in the world. At present I feel that I have 
 lost half of myself.' 
 
 Testimonies such as these are not called forth 
 by a fastidious effeminate weakling ; they are 
 not called forth, even, by mere qualities of mind ; 
 they are called forth by qualities of soul. And of 
 Gray's high qualities of soul, of his a-TrovBatoTTjf;, 
 his excellent seriousness, we may gather abundant 
 proof from his letters. Writing to Mason who 
 had just lost his father, he says : — 
 
 ' I have seen the scene you describe, and know 
 how dreadful it is ; I know too I am the better for 
 it. We are all idle and thoughtless things, and 
 have no sense, no use in the world any longer than 
 that sad impression lasts ; the deeper it is engraved 
 the better.' 
 
 G 
 
82 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM tli 
 
 And again, on a like occasion to another 
 
 friend : — 
 
 * He who best knows our nature (for he made us 
 what we are) by such afflictions recalls us from our 
 wandering thoughts and idle merriment, from the 
 insolence of youth and prosperity, to serious reflec- 
 tion, to our duty, and to himself; nor need we 
 hasten to get rid of these impressions. Time (by 
 appointment of the same Power) will cure the smart 
 and in some hearts soon blot out all the traces of 
 sorrow ; but such as preserve them longest (for it 
 is partly left in our own power) do perhaps best 
 acquiesce in the will of the chastiser.' 
 
 And once more to Mason, in the very hour 
 
 of his wife's death ; Gray was not sure whether 
 
 or not his letter would reach Mason before the 
 
 end : — 
 
 'If the worst be not yet past, you will neglect 
 and pardon me ; but if the last struggle be over, if 
 the poor object of your long anxieties be no longer 
 sensible to your kindness or to her own sufferings, 
 allow me, at least an idea (for what could I do, were 
 I present, more than this 1) to sit by you in silence 
 and pity from my heart not her, who is at rest, but 
 you, who lose her. May he, who made us, the 
 Master of our pleasures and of our pains, support 
 you! Adieu.' 
 
ra THOMAS GRAY 83 
 
 Seriousi;iess, character, was the foundation of 
 things with him ; where this was lacking he was 
 always severe, whatever might he offered to him 
 in its stead. Voltaire's literary genius charmed 
 him, but the faults of Voltaire's nature he felt so 
 strongly that when his young friend NichoUs was 
 going abroad in l77l, just before Gray's death, he 
 said to him : 'I have one thing to beg of you 
 which you must not refuse.' Nicholls answered : 
 ' You know you have only to command ; what is 
 it ? ' — * Do not go to see Voltaire,' said Gray ; and 
 then added : ' No one knows the mischief that 
 man will do.' Nicholls promised compliance with 
 Gray's injunction ; ' But what,' he asked, ' could a 
 visit from me signify ? ' — ' Every tribute to such 
 a man signifies,' Gray answered. He admired 
 Dryden, admired him, even, too much ; had too 
 much felt his influence as a poet. He told Beattie 
 'that if there was any excellence in his own 
 numbers he had learned it wholly from that great 
 poet ' ; and writing to Beattie afterwards he 
 recurs to Dryden, whom Beattie, he thought, did 
 
84 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM iii 
 
 not honour enough as a poet : ' Eemember Dryden,' 
 he writes, ' and be blind to all his faults.' Yes, 
 his faults as a poet; but on the man Dryden, 
 nevertheless, his sentence is stern. Speaking of 
 the Poet-Laureateship, 'Dryden,' he writes to 
 Mason, ' was as disgraceful to the office from his 
 character, as the poorest scribbler could have been 
 from his verses. Even where crying blemishes 
 were absent, the want of weight and depth of 
 character in a man deprived him, in Gray's judg- 
 ment, of serious significance. He says of Hume : 
 ' Is not that naiveU and good-humour, which his 
 admirers celebrate in him, owing to this, that he 
 has continued all his days an infant, but one that 
 has unhappily been taught to read and write ? ' » 
 And with all this strenuous seriousness, a pathe- 
 tic sentiment, and an element, likewise, of sportive 
 and charming humour. At Keswick, by the lake- 
 side on an autumn evening, he has the accent of 
 the ESveries, or of Obermann, or Wordsworth : — 
 
 ' Tu the evening walked down alone to the lake by 
 the side of Crow Park after sunset and saw the 
 
Ill THOMAS GRAY 86 
 
 solemn colouring of light draw on, the last gleam of 
 sunshine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep serene 
 of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains 
 thrown across them, till they nearly touched the 
 hithermost shore. At distance heard the murmur 
 of many waterfalls, not audible in the daytime. 
 Wished for the Moon, but she was dark to me and 
 silent, hid in her vacant interlunar cave.' * 
 
 Of his humour and sportiveness his delightful 
 letters are full ; his humour appears in his poetry 
 too, and is by no means to be passed over there. 
 Horace Walpole said that * Gray never wrote 
 anything easily but things of humour ; humour 
 was his natural and original turn.' 
 
 Knowledge, penetration, seriousness, sentiment, 
 humour. Gray had them all ; he had the equipment 
 and endowment for the office of poet. But very 
 soon in his life appear traces of something ob- 
 structing, something disabling; of spirits failing, 
 and health not sound ; and the evil increases with 
 years. He writes to West in 1737 : — 
 
 ' Low spirits are my true and faithful companions ; 
 they get up with me, go to bed with me, make 
 journeys and returns as I do ; nay, and pay visits 
 
86 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM m 
 
 and will even affect to be jocose and force a feeble 
 laugh with me ; but most commonly we sit alone 
 together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the 
 world.' 
 
 The tone is playful, Gray was not yet twenty- 
 one. ' Mine,' he tells West four or five years later, 
 ' mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or 
 rather Leucocholy, for the most part ; which, though 
 it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to 
 what one calls joy or pleasure, yet is a good easy 
 sort of a state.' But, he adds in this same 
 letter : — 
 
 ' But there is another sort, black indeed, which I 
 have now and then felt, that has something in it like 
 Tertullian's rule of faith, Credo quia impossibUe est; 
 for it believes, nay, is sure of everything that is un- 
 likely, so it be but frightful ; and on the other hand 
 excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, 
 and everything that is pleasurable ; from this the 
 Lord deliver us ! for none but he and sunshiny 
 weather can do it.' 
 
 Six or seven years pass, and we find him 
 
 writing to Wharton from Cambridge thus : — 
 
 ' The spirit of laziness (the spirit of this place) 
 begins to possess even me, that have so long declaimed 
 
Ill THOMAS GRA\ 87 
 
 against it. Yet has it not so prevailed, but that 1 
 feel that discontent with myself, that ennui, that ever 
 accompanies it in its beginnings. Time will settle 
 my conscience, time will reconcile my languid com- 
 panion to me ; we shall smoke, we shall tipple, we 
 shall doze together, we shall have our little jokes, like 
 other people, and our long stories. Brandy will 
 finish what port began ; and, a month after the time, 
 you will see in some corner of a London Evening 
 Post, " Yesterday died the Rev. Mr. John Gray, 
 Senior-Fellow of Clare Hall, a facetious companion, 
 and well-respected by all who knew him." ■ 
 
 The humorous advertisement ends, in the ori- 
 ginal letter, with a Hogarthian touch which I 
 must not quote. Is it Leucocholy or is it Melan- 
 choly which predominates here ? at any rate, 
 this entry in his diary, six years later, is black 
 enough : — 
 
 ' Insomnia crehra, atque expergiscenti surdus quidam 
 doloris sensus ; frequens etiam in regione sterni oppressio, 
 et cardialgia gravis, fere sempiterna.' 
 
 And in 1757 he writes to Hurd : — 
 
 'To be employed is to be happy. This principle 
 of mine (and I am convinced of its truth) has, as 
 usual, no influence on my practice. I am alone, and 
 
88 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ni 
 
 ennuyi to the last degree, yet do nothing. Indeed I 
 have one excuse ; my health (which you have so 
 kindly inquired after) is not extraordinary. It is no 
 great malady, but several little ones, that seem brew- 
 ing no good to me.' 
 
 From thence to the end his languor and de- 
 pression, though still often relieved by occupation 
 and travel, keep fatally gaining on him. At last 
 the depression became constant, became mechani- 
 cal. ' Travel I must,' he writes to Dr. Wharton, 
 ' or cease to exist. Till this year I hardly knew 
 what mechanical low spirits were ; but now I even 
 tremble at an east wind.' Two months afterwards 
 he died. 
 
 What wonder, that with this troublous cloud, 
 throughout the whole term of his manhood, brood- 
 ing over him and weighing him down. Gray, finely 
 endowed though he was, richly stored with know- 
 ledge though he was, yet produced so little, found 
 no full and sufficient utterance, 'never,' as the 
 Master of Pembroke Hall said, 'spoke out.' He 
 knew well enough, himself, how it was with him. 
 My verve is at best, you know ' (he writes to 
 
Ill THOMAS GRAY 89 
 
 Mason), 'of so delicate a constitution, and has such 
 weak nerves, as not to stir out of its chamber 
 above three days in a year.' And to Horace 
 Walpole he says : ' As to what you say to me 
 civilly, that I ought to write more, I will be 
 candid, and avow to you, that till fourscore and 
 upward, whenever the humour takes me, I will 
 write ; because I like it, and because I like myself 
 better when I do so. If I do not write much, it is 
 because I cannot.' How simply said, and how truly 
 also ! Fain would a man like Gray speak out if he 
 could, he 'likes himself better' when he speaks out; 
 if he does not speak out, ' it is because I cannot.' 
 
 Bonstetten, that mercurial Swiss who died in 
 1832 at the age of eighty - seven, having been 
 younger and livelier from his sixtieth year to his 
 eightieth than at any other time in his life, paid a 
 visit in his early days to Cambridge, and saw much 
 of Gray, to whom he attached himself with devo- 
 tion. Gray, on his part, was charmed with his 
 young friend; 'I never saw such a boy,' he wTites; 
 'our breed is not made on this model.' Long 
 
90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 afterwards Bonstetten published his reminisceuces 
 of Gray. ' I used to tell Gray,' he says, ' about my 
 life and my native country, but his life was a sealed 
 book to me ; he never would talk of himself, never 
 would allow me to speak to him of his poetry. If 
 I quoted lines of his to him, he kept silence like 
 an obstinate child. I said to him sometimes : 
 "Will you have the goodness to give me an 
 answer ? " But not a word issued from his lips.' 
 He never spoke out. Bonstetten thinks that Gray's 
 life was poisoned by an unsatisfied sensibility, was 
 withered by his having never loved ; by his days 
 being passed in the dismal cloisters of Cambridge, 
 in the company of a set of monastic book-worms, 
 ' whose existence no honest woman ever came to 
 cheer.' Sainte-Beuve, who was much attracted 
 and interested by Gray, doubts whether Bon- 
 stetten's explanation of him is admissible; the 
 secret of Gray's melancholy he finds rather in the 
 sterility of his poetic talent, ' so distinguished, so 
 rare, but so stinted ' ; in the poet's despair at his 
 own unproductiveness. 
 
Ill THOMAS GRAY 91 
 
 But to explain Gray, we must do more than 
 allege his sterility, as we must look further than 
 to his reclusion at Cambridge. What caused his 
 sterility? Was it his ill-health, his hereditary 
 gout? Certainly we will pay all respect to the 
 powers of hereditary gout for afflicting us poor 
 mortals. But Goethe, after pointing out that 
 Schiller, who was so productive, was ' almost con- 
 stantly ill,' adds the true remark that it is incredible 
 how much the spirit can do, in these cases, to 
 keep up the body. Pope's animation and activity 
 through all the course of what he pathetically 
 calls 'that long disease, my life,' is an example 
 presenting itself signally, in Gray's own country 
 and time, to confirm what Goethe here says. 
 What gave the power to Gray's reclusion and 
 ill-health to induce his sterility ? 
 
 The reason, the indubitable reason as I cannot 
 but think it, I have already given elsewhere. 
 Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He 
 fell upon an age whose task was such as to call 
 forth in general men's powers of understanding, 
 
92 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest 
 powers of mind and soul. As regards literary 
 production, the task of the eighteenth century in 
 England was not the poetic interpretation of the 
 world, its ta,sk was to create a plain, clear, straight- 
 forward, efficient prose. Poetry obeyed the bent 
 of mind requisite for the due fulfilment of this 
 task of the century. It was intellectual, argu- 
 mentative, ingenious; not seeing things in their 
 truth and beauty, not interpretative. Gray, with 
 the qualities of mind and soul of a genuine poet, 
 was isolated in his century. Maintaining and 
 fortifying them by lofty studies, he yet could not 
 fully educe and enjoy them ; the want of a genial 
 atmosphere, the failure of sympathy in his con- 
 temporaries, were too gi-eat. Born in the same 
 year with Milton, Gray would have been another 
 man ; born in the same year with Burns, he would 
 have been another man. A man born in 1608 
 could profit by the larger and more poetic scope 
 of the English spirit in the Elizabethan age ; a 
 man born in 1759 could profit by that European 
 
ill THOMAS GRAY 93 
 
 renewing of men's minds of which the great his- 
 torical manifestation is the French Eevolution. 
 Gray's alert and hrilliant young friend, Bonstetten, 
 who would explain the void in the life of Gray by 
 his having never loved, Bonstetten himself loved, 
 married, and had children. Yet at the age of fifty 
 he was bidding fair to grow old, dismal and torpid 
 like the rest of us, when he was roused and made 
 young again for some thirty years, says M. Sainte- 
 Beuve, by the events of 1789. If Gray, like 
 Burns, had been just thirty years old when the 
 French Revolution broke out, he would have 
 shown, probably, productiveness and animation in 
 plenty. Coming when he did, and endowed as he 
 was, he was a man born out of date, a man whose 
 full spiritual flowering was impossible. The same 
 thing is to be said of his great contemporary, 
 Butler, the author of the Atudogy. In the sphere 
 of religion, which touches that of poetry, Butler 
 was impelled by the endowment of his nature to 
 strive for a profound and adequate conception of 
 religious things, which was not pursued by his 
 
94 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 contemporaries, and which at that time, and in 
 that atmosphere of mind, was not fully attainable. 
 Hence, in Butler too, a dissatisfaction, a weariness, 
 as in Gray ; ' great labour and weariness, great 
 disappointment, pain and even vexation of mind.' 
 A sort of spiritual east wind was at that time 
 blowing; neither Butler nor Gray could flower. 
 They never spoJce out. 
 
 Gray's poetry was not only stinted in quantity 
 by reason of the age wherein he lived, it suffered 
 somewhat in quality also. We have seen under 
 what obligation to Dryden Gray professed him- 
 self to be — ' if there was any excellence in his 
 numbers, he had learned it wholly from that great 
 poet.' It was not for nothing that he came when 
 Dryden had lately ' embellished,' as Johnson says, 
 English poetry ; had ' found it brick and left it 
 marble.' It was not for nothing that he came just 
 when ' the English ear,' to quote Johnson again, 
 ' had been accustomed to the mellifluence of Pope's 
 numbers, and the diction of poetry had grown 
 more splendid.' Of the intellectualities, inge- 
 
m THOMAS GRAY 95 
 
 nuities, personifications, of the movement and dic- 
 tion of J)ryden and Pope, Gray caught something, 
 caught too much. We have little of Gray's poetry, 
 and that little is not free from the faults of his 
 age. Therefore it was important to go for aid, as 
 we did, to Gray's life and letters, to see his mind 
 and soul there, and to corroborate from thence that 
 high estimate of his quality which his poetry in- 
 deed calls forth, but does not establish so amply 
 and irresistibly as one could desire. 
 
 For a just criticism it does, however, clearly 
 establish it. The difference between genuine 
 poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all 
 their school, is briefly this : their poetry is con- 
 ceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry 
 is conceived and composed in the' soul. The differ- 
 ence between the two kinds of poetry is immense. 
 They differ profoundly in their modes of language, 
 they differ profoundly in their modes of evolution. 
 The poetic language of our eighteenth century in 
 general is the language of men composing without 
 their eye on the object, as Wordsworth excellently 
 
96 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 said of Dryden ; language merely recalling the 
 object, as the common language of prose does, and 
 then dressing it out with a certain smartness and 
 brilliancy for the fancy and understanding. This 
 is called ' splendid diction.' The evolution of the 
 poetry of our eighteenth century is likewise in- 
 tellectual ; it proceeds by ratiocination, antithesis, 
 ingenious turns and conceits. This poetry is often 
 eloquent, and always, in the hands of such masters 
 as Dryden and Pope, clever ; but it does not take 
 us much below the surface of things, it does not 
 give us the emotion of seeing things in their truth 
 and beauty. The language of genuine poetry, on 
 the other hand, is the language of one composing 
 with his eye on the object; its evolution is 
 that of a thing which has been plunged in the 
 poet's soul until it comes forth naturally and 
 necessarily. This sort of evolution is infinitely 
 simpler than the other, and infinitely more satis- 
 fying ; the same thing is true of the genuine poetic 
 language likewise. But they are both of them also 
 infinitely harder of attainment; they come only from 
 
Ill THOMAS GRAY 97 
 
 those who, as Emerson says, 'live from a great 
 depth of being.' 
 
 Goldsmith disparaged Gray who had praised his 
 Traveller, and indeed in the poem on the Alliance 
 of Education and Government had given him hints 
 which he used for it. In retaliation let us take 
 from Goldsmith himself a specimen of the poetic 
 language of the eighteenth century. 
 
 * No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale ' — 
 
 there is exactly the poetic diction of our prose 
 century ! rhetorical, ornate, — and, poetically, quite 
 false. Place beside it a line of genuine poetry, 
 such as the 
 
 ' In cradle of the rude, imperious surge ' 
 
 of Shakespeare ; and all its falseness instantly be- 
 comes apparent. 
 
 Dryden's poem on the death of Mrs. Killigrew 
 is, says Johnson, 'undoubtedly the noblest ode 
 that our language ever has produced.' In this 
 vigorous performance Dryden has to say, what is 
 interesting enough, that not only in poetry did 
 
98 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in 
 
 Mrs. Kjlligrew excel, but she excelled in painting 
 
 also. And thus he says it — 
 
 ' To the next realm she stretch'd her sway, 
 For Painture near adjoining lay — 
 A plenteous province and alluring prey. 
 A Chamber of Dependencies was framed 
 (As conquerors will never want pretence 
 When arm'd, to justify the offence). 
 And the whole fief, in right of Poetry, she claim'd.* 
 
 The intellectual, ingenious, superficial evolution of 
 poetry of this school could not be better illustrated. 
 Place beside it Pindar's 
 
 alwv ao-(^aA.7)s 
 ovK lyevr' ovr' AiaKtS^ Trapa UrjXei, 
 ovT€ Trap dvTtdeio KdBfiO} . . . 
 
 ' A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the 
 son of ^acus, nor of the godlike Cadmus ; howbeit 
 these are said to have had, of all mortals, the 
 supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded 
 Muses sing, — on the mountain the one heard them, 
 the other in seven-gated Thebes.' 
 
 There is the evolution of genuine poetry, and such 
 
 poetry kills Dryden's the moment it is put near it. 
 
 Gray's production was scanty, and scanty, as 
 
 we have seen, it could not but be. Even what he 
 
Ill THOMAS GRAY 99 
 
 produced is not always pure in diction, true in 
 evolution. Still, with whatever drawbacks, he is 
 alone, or almost alone (for Collins has something of 
 the like merit) in his age. Gray said himself that 
 ' the style he aimed at was extreme conciseness of 
 expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical.' 
 Compared, not with the work of the great masters 
 of the golden ages of poetry, but with the poetry 
 of his own contemporaries in general, Gray's may 
 be said to have reached, in style, the excellence at 
 which he aimed ; while the evolution also of such 
 a piece as his Progress of Poesy must be accounted 
 not less noble and sound than its style. 
 
IV 
 
 JOHN KEATS^ 
 
 Poetry, according to Milton's famous saying, 
 shvould be ' simple, sensuous, impassioned.' No 
 one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, 
 of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is 
 abundantly and enchantingly sensuous ; the ques- 
 tion with some people will be, whether he is any- 
 thing else. Many things may be brought forward 
 which seem to show him as under the fascination 
 and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing 
 better. There is the exclamation in one of his 
 letters : ' O for a life of sensations rather than of 
 thoughts !' There is the thesis, in another, 'that 
 with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes 
 
 ^ Prefixed to the Selection from Keats in Ward's English 
 Poets, vol. iv. 1880. 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 101 
 
 every other consideration, or rather obliterates all 
 consideration.' There is Haydon's story of him, 
 how ' he once covered his tongue and throat as far 
 as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order 
 to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in 
 all its glory — his own expression.' One is not 
 much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of 
 the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks 
 together he was hardly ever sober. ' He had no 
 decision of character,' Haydon adds ; ' no object 
 upon which to direct his great powers.' 
 
 Character and self-control, the virtus verusque 
 labor so necessary for every kind of greatness, and 
 for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to 
 be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon's 
 portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats 
 of the Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters 
 make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon's 
 anecdotes. The editor of Haydon's journals could 
 not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but 
 for the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne 
 I can see no good reason whatever. Their publi- 
 
102 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 cation appears to me, I confess, inexcusable ; they 
 ought never to have been published. But pub- 
 lished they are, and we have to take notice of 
 them. Letters written when Keats was near his 
 end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of 
 mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a 
 letter written some months before he was taken 
 ilL It is printed just as Keats wrote it. 
 
 • You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at 
 the present moment as though I was dissolving — I 
 should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of 
 soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate 
 myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your 
 heart never change 1 My love, will it ? I have no 
 limit now to my love. . . . Your note came in just 
 here. I cannot be happier away from you. 'Tis 
 richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat 
 me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men 
 could die Martyrs for religion — I have shuddered 
 at it. I shudder no more — I could be martyred for 
 my Religion — Love is my religion — I could die for 
 that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love 
 and you are its only tenet You have ravished me 
 away by a Power I cannot resist ; and yet I could 
 resist till I saw you ; and even since I have seen you 
 I have endeavoured often "to reason against the 
 reasons of my Love." I can do that no more — the 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 103 
 
 pain would be too great. My love is selfish. 1 
 cannot breathe without you.' 
 
 A man who writes love-letters in this strain is 
 probably predestined, one may observe, to mis- 
 fortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. 
 The complete enervation of the writer is the real 
 point for remark. We have the tone,- or rather 
 the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all 
 reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous 
 man, of the man who ' is passion's slave.' Nay, 
 we have them in such wise that one is tempted 
 to speak even as Blackwood or the Quarterly were 
 in the old days wont to speak ; one is tempted to 
 say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a 
 surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self- 
 abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as 
 of a youth ill brought up, without the training 
 which teaches us that we must put some con- 
 straint upon our feelings and upon the expression 
 of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's 
 apprentice which one might hear read out in a 
 breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court. 
 
104 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM iv 
 
 The sensuous man speaks in it, and the sensuous 
 man of a badly bred and badly trained sort. That 
 many who are themselves also badly bred and 
 badly trained should enjoy it, and should even 
 think it a beautiful and characteristic production 
 of him whom they call their * lovely and beloved 
 Keats,' does not make it better. These are the 
 admirers whose pawing and fondness does not 
 good but harm to the fame of Keats; who con- 
 centrate attention upon what in him is least 
 wholesome and most questionable ; who worship 
 him, and would have the world worship him too, 
 as the poet of 
 
 • Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair, 
 Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast' 
 
 This sensuous strain Keats had, and a man of his 
 poetic powers could not, whatever his strain, but 
 show his talent in it. But he has something more, 
 and something better. We who believe Keats to 
 have been by his promise, at any rate, if not fully 
 by his performance, one of the very greatest of 
 
rv JOHN KEATS 105 
 
 English poets, and who believe also that a merely 
 sensuous man cannot either by promise or by 
 performance be a very great poet, because poetry 
 interprets life, and so large and noble a part of life 
 is outside of such a man's ken, — we cannot but 
 look for signs in him of something more than 
 sensuousness, for signs of character and virtue. 
 And indeed the elements of high character Keats 
 undoubtedly has, and the effort to develop them ; 
 the effort is frustrated and cut short by misfor- 
 tune, and disease, and time, but for the due 
 understanding of Keats's worth the recognition 
 of this effort, and of the elements on which it 
 worked, is necessary. 
 
 Lord Houghton, who praises very discrimin- 
 atingly the poetry of Keats, has on his character 
 also a remark full of discrimination. He says : 
 ' The faults of Keats's disposition were precisely 
 the contrary of those attributed to him by common 
 opinion.' And he gives a letter written after the 
 death of Keats by his brother George, in which 
 the writer, speaking of the fantastic Johnny Keats 
 
106 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM rv 
 
 invented for common opinion by Lord Byron and 
 by the reviewers, declares indignantly : ' John was 
 the very soul of manliness and courage, and as 
 much like the Holy Ghost as Johnny Keats' It 
 is important to note this testimony, and to look 
 well for whatever illustrates and confirms it. 
 
 Great weight is laid by Lord Houghton on 
 such a direct profession of faith as the following : 
 ' That sort of probity and disinterestedness,' Keats 
 writes to his brothers, ' which such men as Bailey 
 possess, does hold and grasp the tip-top of any 
 spiritual honours that can be paid to anything in 
 this world.' Lord Houghton says that 'never 
 have words more effectively expressed the con- 
 viction of the superiority of virtue above beauty 
 than those.* But merely to make a profession of 
 faith of the kind here made by Keats is not diffi- 
 cult ; what we should rather look for is some 
 evidence of the instinct for character, for virtue, 
 passing into the man's life, passing into his work. 
 
 Signs of virtue, in the true and large sense of 
 the word, the instinct for virtue passing into the 
 
rv JOHN KEATS 107 
 
 life of Keats and strengthening it, I find in the 
 
 admirable wisdom and temper of what he says 
 
 to his friend Bailey on the occasion of a quarrel 
 
 between Eeynolds and Haydon : — 
 
 'Things have happened lately of great perplexity; 
 you must have heard of them ; Reynolds and Hay- 
 don retorting and recriminating, and parting for 
 ever. The same thing has happened between Hay- 
 don and Hunt. It is unfortunate ; men should bear 
 with each other ; there lives not the man who may 
 not be cut up, aye, lashed to pieces, on his weakest 
 side. The best of men have but a portion of good 
 in them. . . . The sure way, Bailey, is first to know 
 a man's faults, and then be passive. If, after that, 
 he insensibly draws you towards him, then you have 
 no power to break the link. Before I felt interested 
 in either Reynolds or Haydon, I was well read in 
 their faults ; yet, knowing them, I have been cement- 
 ing gradually with both. I have an affection for 
 them both, for reasons almost opposite ; and to both 
 must I of necessity cling, supported always by the 
 hope that when a little time, a few years, shall have 
 tried me more fully in their esteem, I may be able to 
 bring them together.' 
 
 Butler has well said that 'endeavouring to 
 
 enforce upon our own minds a practical sense of 
 
 virtue, or to beget in others that practical sense of 
 
108 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM iv 
 
 it which a man really has himseK, is a virtuous 
 act! And such an * endeavouring ' is that of Keats 
 in those words written to Bailey. It is more 
 than mere words ; so justly thought and so dis- 
 creetly urged as it is, it rises to the height of a 
 virtuous dct. It is proof of character. 
 
 The same thing may be said of some words 
 written to his friend Charles Brown, whose kind- 
 ness, willingly exerted whenever Keats chose to 
 avail himself of it, seemed to free him from any 
 pressing necessity of earning his own living. 
 Keats felt that he must not allow this state of 
 things to continue. He determined to set him- 
 self to * fag on as others do ' at periodical literature, 
 rather than to endanger his independence and his 
 seK-respect ; and he writes to Brown : — 
 
 * I had got into a habit of mind of looking towards 
 you as a help in all difficulties. This very habit 
 would be the parent of idleness and difficulties. You 
 will see it is a duty I owe to myself to break the 
 neck of it. I do nothing for my subsistence — make 
 no exertion. At the end of another year you shall 
 applaud me, not for verses, but for conduct' 
 
rv JOHN KEATS 109 
 
 He had not, alas, another year of health before 
 him when he announced that wholesome resolve ; 
 it then wanted but six months of the day of his 
 fatal attack. But in the brief time allowed to 
 him he did what he could to keep his word. 
 
 What character, again, what strength and clear- 
 ness of judgment, in his criticism of his own pro- 
 ductions, of the public, and of ' the literary circles '! 
 His words after the severe reviews of Endymion 
 have often been quoted ; they cannot be quoted 
 too often : — 
 
 ' Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on 
 the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes 
 him a severe critic on his own works. My own 
 criticism has given me pain without comparison be- 
 yond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly 
 inflict ; and also, when I feel I am right, no external 
 praise can give me such a glow as my own solitary 
 reperception and ratification of what is fine. J. S. is 
 perfectly right in regard to the " slip-shod Endymion." 
 That it is so is no fault of mine. No ! though it 
 may sound a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had 
 power to make it by myself.' 
 
 And again, as if he had foreseen certain of hia 
 
110 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM iy 
 
 admirers gushing over him, and was resolved to 
 disengage his responsibility : — 
 
 ' I have done nothing, except for the amusement 
 of a few people who refine upon their feelings till 
 anything in the un-understandable way will go down 
 with them. I have no cause to complain, because I 
 am certain anything really fine will in these days 
 be felt. I have no doubt that if I had written Othello 
 I should have been cheered. I shall go on with 
 patience.' 
 
 Young poets almost inevitably over-rate what 
 
 they call ' the might of poesy,' and its power over 
 
 the world which now is, Keats is not a dupe on 
 
 this matter any more than he is a dupe about the 
 
 merit of his own performances : — 
 
 'I have no trust whatever in poetry. I don't 
 wonder at it ; the marvel is to me how people read 
 80 much of it.' 
 
 His attitude towards the public is that of a 
 
 strong man, not of a weakling avid of praise, and 
 
 made to ' be snuff'd out by an article ' : — 
 
 ' I shall ever consider the public as debtors to 
 me for verses, not myself to them for admiration, 
 which I can do without.' 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 111 
 
 And again, in a passage where one may per- 
 haps find fault with the capital letters, but surely 
 with nothing else : — 
 
 'I have not the slightest feel of humility towards 
 the public or to anything in existence but the Eternal 
 Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of 
 great Men. ... I would be subdued before my 
 friends, and thank them for subduing me ; but among 
 multitudes of men I have no feel of stooping ; I hate 
 the idea of humility to them. I never wrote one 
 single line of poetry with the least shadow of thought 
 about their opinion. Forgive me for vexing you, but 
 it eases me to tell you : I could not live without the 
 love of my friends ; I would jump down Etna for 
 any great public good — but I hate a mawkish popu- 
 larity. I cannot be subdued before them. My glory 
 would be to daunt and dazzle the thousand jabberers 
 about pictures and books.' 
 
 Against these artistic and literary 'jabberers,' 
 amongst whom Byron fancied Keats, probably, to 
 be always living, flattering them and flattered by 
 them, he has yet another outburst : — 
 
 'Just so much as I am humbled by the genius 
 above my grasp, am I exalted and look with hate and 
 contempt upon the literary world. Who could wish 
 
112 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 to be among the commonplace crowd of the little 
 famous, who are each individually lost in a throng 
 made up of themselves 1 ' 
 
 And he loves Fanny Brawne the more, he tells 
 her, because he believes that she has liked him for 
 his own sake and for nothing else. ' I have met 
 with women who I reaUy think would like to be 
 married to a Poem and to be given away by a 
 Novel' 
 
 There is a tone of too much bitterness and 
 defiance in all this, a tone which he with great 
 propriety subdued and corrected when he wrote 
 his beautiful preface to Endymion. But the thing 
 to be seized is, that Keats had flint and iron in 
 him, that he had character ; that he was, as his 
 brother George says, 'as much like the Holy Ghost 
 as Johnny Keais,' — as that imagined sensuous 
 weakling, the delight of the literary circles of 
 Hampstead. 
 
 It is a pity that Byron, who so misconceived 
 Keats, should never have known how shrewdly 
 Keats, on the other hand, had characterised him. 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 113 
 
 as 'a fine thing' in the sphere of 'the worldly, 
 theatrical, and pantomimical.' But indeed nothing 
 is more remarkable in Keats than his clear- 
 sightedness, his lucidity ; and lucidity is in itself 
 akin to character and to high and severe work. 
 In spite, therefore, of his overpowering feeling for 
 beauty, in spite of his sensuousness, in spite of his 
 facility, in spite of his gift of expression, Keats 
 could say resolutely :- 
 
 ' I know nothing, I have read nothing; and I mean 
 to follow Solomon's directions : " Get learning, get 
 understanding." There is but one way for me. The 
 road lies through application, study, and thought. I 
 will pursue it.' 
 
 And of Milton, instead of resting in Milton's 
 incomparable phrases, Keats could say, although 
 indeed all the while ' looking upon fine phrases,' 
 as he himself tells us, ' like a lover ' — 
 
 ' Milton had an exquisite passion for what is pro- 
 perly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical 
 luxury ; and with that, it appears to me, he would 
 fain have been content, if he could, so doing, pre- 
 serve his self-respect and feeling of duty performed ; 
 but there was working in him, as it were, that same 
 I 
 
114 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 sort of thing which operates in the great world to the 
 end of a prophecy's being accomplished. Therefore 
 he devoted himself rather to the ardours than the 
 pleasures of song, solacing himself at intervals with 
 cups of old wine.' 
 
 In his own poetry, too, Keats felt that place 
 
 must be found for ' the ardours rather than the 
 
 pleasures of song,' although he was aware that he 
 
 was not yet ripe for it — 
 
 ' But my flag is not unfurl'd 
 On the Admiral-staff, and to philosophise 
 I dare not yet' 
 
 Even in his pursuit of ' the pleasures of song,' 
 
 however, there is that stamp of high work which 
 
 is akin to character, which is character passing 
 
 into intellectual production, * The best sort of 
 
 poetry — that,' he truly says, * is all I care for, aU I 
 
 live for.' It is curious to observe how this severe 
 
 addiction of his to the best sort of poetry affects 
 
 him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had 
 
 been to mathematics, towards those prime objects 
 
 of a sensuous and passionate poet's regard, love 
 
 and women. He speaks of ' the opinion I have 
 
 fonned of the generality of women, who appear to 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 116 
 
 me as children to whom I would rather give a 
 sugar-plum than my time.' He confesses ' a ten- 
 dency to class women in my books with roses and 
 sweetmeats — they never see themselves dominant' ; 
 and he can understand how the unpopularity of 
 his poems may be in part due to 'the offence 
 which the ladies,' not unnaturally ' take at him ' 
 from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can 
 write 'a flint- worded letter/ when his 'mind is 
 heaped to the full ' with poetry : — 
 
 * I know the generality of women would hate me 
 for this ; that I should have so unsoftened, so hard a 
 mind as to forget them ; forget the brightest realities 
 for the dull imaginations of my own brain. . . . My 
 heart seems now made of iron — I could not write a 
 proper answer to an invitation to Idaha.' 
 
 The truth is that ' the yearning passion for the . 
 Beautiful,' which was with Keats, as he himself 
 truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion of 
 the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion 
 of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an in- 
 tellectual and spiritual passion. It is ' connected 
 and made one,' as Keats declares that in his case 
 
118 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM i> 
 
 it was, ' with the ambition of the intellect,' It is, 
 as he again says, 'the mighty abstract idea of 
 Beauty in all things.' And in his last days Keats 
 wrote : ' If I should die, I have left no immortal 
 work behind me — nothing to make my friends 
 proud of my memory ; hut I have loved the priri- 
 ciple of beauty in all things, and if I had had time 
 I would have made myself remembered.' He has 
 made himself remembered, and remembered as no 
 merely sensuous poet could be ; and he has done 
 it by having ' loved the principle of beauty in all 
 things.' 
 
 For to see things in their beauty is to see 
 things in their truth, and Keats knew it. ' What 
 the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,' 
 he says in prose; and in immortal verse he has 
 said the same thing — 
 
 * Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 
 
 No, it is not all ; but it is true, deeply true, and 
 we have deep need to know it. And with beauty 
 goes not only truth, joy goes with her also ; and 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 117 
 
 this too Keats saw and said, as in the famous first 
 line of his Endymion it stands written — 
 
 ' A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' 
 
 It is no small thing to have so loved the 
 principle of beauty as to perceive the necessary 
 relation of beauty with truth, and of both with 
 joy. Keats was a great spirit, and counts for far 
 more than many even of his admirers suppose, 
 because this just and high perception made itself 
 clear to him. Therefore a dignity and a glory 
 shed gleams over his Hfe, and happiness, too, was 
 not a stranger to it. ' Nothing startles me beyond 
 the moment,' he says ; ' the setting sun will always 
 set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my 
 window I take part in its existence and pick about 
 the gravel.' But he had terrible bafQers, — con- 
 suming disease and early death. 'I think,' he 
 writes to Eeynolds, * if I had a free and healthy 
 and lasting organisation of heart, and lungs as 
 strong as an ox's, so as to be able to bear unhurt 
 the shock of extreme thought and sensation with- 
 
118 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM r» 
 
 out weariness, I could pass my life very nearly 
 alone, though it should last eighty years. But 
 I feel my body too weak to support me to the 
 height ; I am obliged continually to check myself, 
 and be nothing.' He had against him even more 
 than this ; he had against him the blind power 
 which we call Fortune. '0 that something for- 
 tunate,' he cries in the closing months of his Kfe, 
 ' had ever happened to me or my brothers ! — then 
 I might hope, — but despair is forced upon me as 
 a habit.' So bafSed and so sorely tried, — while 
 laden, at the same time, with a mighty formative 
 thought requiring health, and many days, and 
 favouring circumstances, for its adequate mani- 
 festation, — what wonder if the achievement of 
 Keats be partial and incomplete ? 
 
 Nevertheless, let and hindered as he was, and 
 with a short term and imperfect experience, — 
 'young,* as he says of himself, 'and writing at 
 random, straining after particles of light in the 
 midst of a great darkness, without knowing the 
 bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion,' 
 
rv JOHN KEATS 119 
 
 — notwithstanding all this, by virtue of his feeling 
 for beauty and of his perception of the vital con- 
 nection of beauty with truth, Keats accomplished 
 80 much in poetry, that in one of the two great 
 modes by which poetry interprets, in the faculty 
 of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call 
 natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare. ' The 
 tongue of Kean,' he says in an admirable criticism 
 of that great actor and of his enchanting elocution, 
 'the tongue of Kean must seem to have robbed 
 the Hybla bees and left them honeyless. There is 
 an indescribable gusto in his voice ; — in Bichard, 
 " Be stirring with the lark to-morrow, gentle Nor- 
 folk!" comes from him as through the morning 
 atmosphere towards which he yearns.' This magic, 
 this ' indescribable gusto in the voice,' Keats him- 
 self, too, exhibits in his poetic expression. No 
 one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has 
 in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, 
 his perfection of loveliness. 'I think,' he said 
 humbly, ' I shall be among the English poets after 
 my death.' He is ; he is with Shakespeare. 
 
120 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM iv 
 
 For the second great half of poetic interpreta- 
 tion, for that faculty of moral interpretation which 
 is in Shakespeare, and is informed by him with 
 the same power of beauty as his naturalistic in- 
 terpretation, Keats was not ripe. For the archi- 
 tectonics of poetry, the faculty which presides at 
 the evolution of works like the Agamemnon or 
 Lear, he was not ripe. His Endymion, as he 
 himself well saw, is a failure, and his Hyperion, 
 fine things as it contains, is not a success. But 
 in shorter things, where the matured power of 
 moral interpretation, and the high architectonics 
 which go with complete poetic development, are 
 not required, he is perfect. The poems which 
 follow prove it, — prove it far better by themselves 
 than anything which can be said about them will 
 prove it. Therefore I have chiefly spoken here of 
 the man, and of the elements in him which explain 
 the production of such work. Shakespearian work 
 it is ; not imitative, indeed, of Shakespeare, but 
 Shakespearian, because its expression has that 
 rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness of 
 
IV JOHN KEATS 121 
 
 which Shakespeare is the great master. To show 
 
 such work is to praise it. Let us now end by 
 
 delighting ourselves with a fragment of it, too 
 
 broken to find a place among the pieces which 
 
 follow, but far too beautiful to be lost. It is a 
 
 fragment of an ode for May-day. might I, he 
 
 cries to May, might I 
 
 '. . . thy smiles 
 Seek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles, 
 By bards who died content on pleasant sward, 
 Leaving great verse unto a little clan ! 
 0, give me their old vigour, and unheard 
 Save of the quiet primrose, and the span 
 
 Of heaven, and few years, 
 Bounded by thee, my song should die away, 
 
 Content as theirs. 
 Rich in the simple worship of a day ! ' 
 
V 
 
 WORDSWORTH^ 
 
 I REMEMBER hearing Lord Macaulay say, aftei 
 Wordsworth's death, when subscriptions were 
 being collected to found a memorial of him, that 
 ten years earlier more money could have been 
 raised in Cambridge alone, to do honour to Words- 
 worth, than was now raised all through the 
 country. Lord Macaulay had, as we know, his 
 own heightened and telling way of putting things, 
 and we must always make allowance for it. But 
 probably it is true that Wordsworth has never, 
 either before or since, been so accepted and 
 popular, so established in possession of the minds 
 of all who profess to care for poetry, as he was 
 
 ^ The preface to The Poems oj Wordsworth, chosen and 
 edited by Matthew Arnold, 1879. 
 
T WORDSWORTH 123 
 
 between the years 1830 and 1840, and at Cam- 
 bridge. From the very first, no doubt, he had his 
 believers and witnesses. But I have myself heard 
 him declare that, for he knew not how many 
 years, his poetry had never brought him in enough 
 to buy his shoe-strings. The poetry-reading public 
 was very slow to recognise him, and was very 
 easily drawn away from him. Scott effaced him 
 with this public, Byron effaced him. 
 
 The death of Byron, seemed, however, to make 
 an opening for Wordsworth. Scott, who had for 
 some time ceased to produce poetry himself, and 
 stood before the public as a great novelist ; Scott, 
 too genuine himself not to feel the profound 
 genuineness of Wordsworth, and with an instinct- 
 ive recognitijn of his firm hold on nature and of 
 his local truth, always admired him sincerely, and 
 praised him generously. The influence of Cole- 
 ridge upon young men of ability was then power- 
 ful, and was still gathering strength ; this influence 
 told entirely in favour of Wordsworth's poetry. 
 Cambridge was a place where Coleridge's influence 
 
124 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 had great action, and where Wordsworth's poetry, 
 therefore, flourished especially. But even amongst 
 the general public its sale grew large, the emi- 
 nence of its author was widely recognised, and 
 Rydal Mount became an object of pilgrimage. I 
 remember Wordsworth relating how one of the 
 pilgrims, a clergyman, asked him if he had ever 
 written anything besides the Guide to the Lakes. 
 Yes, he answered modestly, he had written verses. 
 Not every pilgrim was a reader, but the vogue 
 was established, and the stream of pilgrims came, 
 Mr. Tennyson's decisive appearance dates from 
 1842. One cannot say that he effaced Wordsworth 
 as Scott and Bjrron had effaced him. The poetry of 
 Wordsworth had been so long before the public, the 
 suffrage of good judges was so steady and so strong 
 in its favour, that by 1842 the verdict of posterity, 
 one may almost say, had been already pronounced, 
 and Wordsworth's English fame was secure. But 
 the vogue, the ear and applause of the great body 
 of poetry-readers, never quite thoroughly perhaps 
 his, he gradually lost more and more, and Mr 
 
V WORDSWORTH 125 
 
 Tennyson gained them. Mr, Tennyson drew to 
 himself, and away from Wordsworth, the poetry- 
 reading public, and the new generations. Even in 
 1850, when Wordsworth died, this diminution of 
 popularity was visible, and occasioned the remark 
 of Lord Macaulay which I quoted at starting. 
 
 The diminution has continued. The influence 
 of Coleridge has waned, and Wordsworth's poetry 
 can no longer draw succour from this ally. The 
 poetry has not, however, wanted eulogists ; and it 
 may be said to have brought its eulogists luck, for 
 almost every one who has praised Wordsworth's 
 poetry has praised it well. But the public has re- 
 mained cold, or, at least, undetermined. Even 
 the abundance of Mr. Palgrave's fine and skil- 
 fully chosen specimens of Wordsworth, in the 
 Golden Treasury, surprised many readers, and 
 gave offence to not a few. To tenth-rate critics 
 and compilers, for whom any violent shock to 
 the public taste would be a temerity not to be 
 risked, it is still quite permissible to speak of 
 Wordsworth's poetry, not only with ignorance, but 
 
126 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 with impertinence. On the Continent he is 
 almost unknown. 
 
 I cannot think, then, that Wordsworth has, up 
 to this time, at all obtained his deserts. ' Glory.' 
 said M. Kenan the other day, 'glory after all is 
 the thing which has the best chance of not being 
 altogether vanity.' Wordsworth was a homely 
 man, and himseK would certainly never have 
 thought of talking of glory as that which, after all, 
 has the best chance of not being altogether vanity. 
 Yet we may well allow that few things are less 
 vain than real glory. Let us conceive of the whole 
 group of civilised nations as being, for intellectual 
 and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, 
 bound to a joint action and working towards a 
 common result ; a confederation whose members 
 have a due knowledge both of the past, out of 
 which they all proceed, and of one another. This 
 was the ideal of Goethe, and it is an ideal which 
 will impose itseK upon the thoughts of our modem 
 societies more and more. Then to be recognised 
 by the verdict of such a confederation as a master 
 
r WORDSWORTH 127 
 
 or even as a seriously and eminently worthy work- 
 man, in one's own line of intellectual or spiritual 
 activity, is indeed glory ; a glory which it would 
 be difficult to rate too highly. For what could be 
 more beneficent, more salutary? The world is 
 forwarded by having its attention fixed on the 
 best things ; and here is a tribunal, free from all 
 suspicion of national and provincial partiality, 
 putting a stamp on the best things, and recom- 
 mending them for general honour and acceptance. 
 A nation, again, is furthered by recognition of its 
 real gifts and successes ; it is encouraged to develop 
 them further. And here is an honest verdict, tell- 
 ing us which of our supposed successes are really, 
 in the judgment of the great impartial world, and 
 not in our own private judgment only, successes, 
 and which are not. 
 
 It is so easy to feel pride and satisfaction in 
 one's own things, so hard to make sure that one is 
 right in feeling it! We have a great empira 
 But so had Nebuchadnezzar. We extol the ' un- 
 rivalled happiness' of our national civilisation. 
 
128 ESSAYS m CRITICISM v 
 
 But then comes a candid friend, and remarks that 
 our upper class is materialised, our middle class 
 vulgarised, and our lower class brutalised. We are 
 proud of our painting, our music. But we find that 
 in the judgment of other people our painting is 
 questionable, and our music non-existent. We are 
 proud of our men of science. And here it turns 
 out that the world is with us ; we find that in the 
 judgment of other people, too, Newton among the 
 dead, and Mr. Darwin among the living, hold as 
 high a place as they hold in our national opinion, 
 Finally, we are proud of our poets and poetry. 
 Now poetry is nothing less than the most perfect 
 speech of man, that in which he comes nearest 
 to being able to utter the truth. It is no small 
 thing, therefore, to succeed eminently in poetry. 
 And so much is required for duly estimating suc- 
 cess here, that about poetry it is perhaps hardest 
 to arrive at a sure general verdict, and takes 
 longest. Meanwhile, our own conviction of the 
 superiority of our national poets is not decisive, is 
 almost certain to be mingled, as we see constantly 
 
r WORDSWORTH 129 
 
 in English eulogy of Shakespeare, with much of 
 provincial infatuation. And we know what was 
 the opinion current amongst our neighbours the 
 French — 'people of taste, acuteness, and quick 
 literary tact — not a hundred years ago, about our 
 great poets. The old Biographie Universelle notices 
 the pretension of the English to a place for their 
 poets among the chief poets of the world, and says 
 that this is a pretension which to no one but an 
 Englishman can ever seem admissible. And the 
 scornful, disparaging things said by foreigners 
 about Shakespeare and Milton, and about our 
 national over-estimate of them, have been often 
 quoted, and will be in every one's remembrance. 
 
 A great change has taken place, and Shake- 
 speare is now generally recognised, even in France, 
 as one of the greatest of poets. Yes, some anti- 
 Gallican cynic will say, the French rank him with 
 Comeille and with Victor Hugo ! But let me 
 have the pleasure of quoting a sentence about 
 Shakespeare, which I met with by accident not 
 long ago in the Correspondant, a French review 
 
180 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 which not a dozen English people, I suppose, look 
 at. The writer is praising Shakespeare's prose. 
 With Shakespeare, he says, ' prose comes in when- 
 ever the subject, being more familiar, is unsuited 
 to the majestic English iambic' And he goes 
 on : ' Shakespeare is the king of poetic rhythm 
 and style, as well as the king of the realm of 
 thought ; along with his dazzling prose, Shake- 
 speare has succeeded in giving us the most varied, 
 the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded 
 upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks.' 
 M. Henry Cochin, the writer of this sentence, 
 deserves our gratitude for it ; it would not be easy 
 to praise Shakespeare, in a single sentence, more 
 justly. And when a foreigner and a Frenchman 
 writes thus of Shakespeare, and when Goethe says 
 of Milton, in whom there was so much to repel 
 Goethe rather than to attract him, that ' nothing 
 has been ever done so entirely in the sense of the 
 Greeks as Samson Agonistes,' and that ' Milton is 
 in very truth a poet whom we must treat with all 
 reverence,' then we understand what constitutes 
 
V WORDSWORTH 181 
 
 a European recognition of poets and poetry as 
 contradistinguished from a merely national recog- 
 nition, and that in favour both of Milton and of 
 Shakespeare the judgment of the high court of 
 appeal has finally gone. 
 
 I come back to M. Eenan's praise of glory, 
 from which I started. Yes, real glory is a most 
 serious thing, glory authenticated by the Amphic- 
 tyonic Court of final appeal, definitive glory. 
 And even for poets and poetry, long and difficult 
 as may be the process of arriving at the right 
 award, the right award comes at last, the definitive 
 glory rests where it is deserved. Every establish- 
 ment of such a real glory is good and wholesome 
 for mankind at large, good and wholesome for the 
 nation which produced the poet crowned with it. 
 To the poet himself it can seldom do harm ; for 
 he, poor man, is in his grave, probably, long before 
 his glory crowns him. 
 
 Wordsworth has been in his grave for some 
 thirty years, and certainly his lovers and admirers 
 cannot flatter themselves that this great and 
 
132 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM T 
 
 steady light of glory as yet shines over him. He 
 is not fully recognised at home ; he is not recog- 
 nised at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that the 
 poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that 
 of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world 
 now recognises the worth, undoubtedly the most 
 considerable in our language from the Elizabethan 
 age to the present time. Chaucer is anterior ; 
 and on other grounds, too, he cannot well be 
 brought into the comparison. But taking the roll 
 of our chief poetical names, besides Shakespeare 
 and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth downwards, 
 and going through it, — Spenser, Dryden, Pope, 
 Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, 
 Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats (I men- 
 tion those only who are dead), — I think it certain 
 that Wordsworth's name deserves to stand, and 
 will finally stand, above them all. Several of the 
 poets named have gifts and excellences which 
 Wordsworth has not. But taking the performance 
 of each as a whole, I say that Wordsworth seems 
 to me to have left a body of poetical work superior 
 
V WORDSWORTH 133 
 
 in power, in interest, in the qualities which give 
 enduring freshness, to that which any one of the 
 others has left. 
 
 But this is not enough to say. I think it cer- 
 tain, further, that if we take the chief poetical 
 names of the Continent since the death of Moli^re, 
 and, omitting Goethe, confront the remaining 
 names with that of Wordsworth, the result is the 
 same. Let us take Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, 
 Uhland, Eiickert, and Heine for Germany ; Fili- 
 caia, Alfieri, Manzoni, and Leopardi for Italy ; 
 Eacine, Boileau, Voltaire, Andre Chenier, B^r- 
 anger, Lamartine, Musset, M. Victor Hugo (he 
 has been so long celebrated that although he still 
 lives I may be permitted to name him) for France. 
 Several of these, again, have evidently gifts and 
 excellences to which Wordsworth can make no 
 pretension. But in real poetical achievement it 
 seems to me indubitable that to Wordsworth, here 
 again, belongs the palm. It seems to me that 
 Wordsworth has left behind him a body of poeti- 
 cal work which wears, and will wear, better on 
 
184 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ▼ 
 
 the whole than the performance of any one of 
 these personages, so far more brilliant and cele- 
 brated, most of them, than the homely poet of 
 Eydal. Wordsworth's performance in poetry is 
 on the whole, in power, in interest, in the qualities 
 which give enduring freshness, superior to theirs. 
 This is a high claim to make for Wordsworth. 
 But if it is a just claim, if Wordsworth's place 
 among the poets who have appeared in the last 
 two or three centuries is after Shakespeare, Moli^re, 
 Milton, Goethe, indeed, but before all the rest, 
 then in time Wordsworth will have his due. We 
 shall recognise him in his place, as we recognise 
 Shakespeare and Milton ; and not only we our- 
 selves shall recognise him, but he will be recog- 
 nised by Europe also. Meanwhile, those who 
 recognise him already may do well, perhaps, to 
 ask themselves whether there are not in the case 
 of Wordsworth certain special obstacles which 
 hinder or delay his due recognition by others, and 
 whether these obstacles are not in some measure 
 removable. 
 
V WORDSWORTH 135 
 
 The Excursion and the Prelude, his poems of 
 greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth's best 
 work. His best work is in his shorter pieces, and 
 many indeed are there of these which are of first- 
 rate excellence. But in his seven volumes the 
 pieces of high merit are mingled with a mass of 
 pieces very inferior to them ; so inferior to them 
 that it seems wonderful how the same poet should 
 have produced both. Shakespeare frequently has 
 lines and passages in a strain quite false, and 
 which are entirely unworthy of him. But one 
 can imagine his smiKng if one could meet him in 
 the Elysian Melds and tell him so ; smiling and 
 replying that he knew it perfectly well himself, 
 and what did it matter ? But with Wordsworth 
 . y/ the case is different. Work altogether inferior, 
 work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced 
 by him with evident unconsciousness of its 
 defects, and he presents it to us with the same 
 faith and seriousness as his best work. Now a 
 drama or an epic fill the mind, and one does not 
 look beyond them; but in a collection of short 
 
136 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 pieces the impression made by one piece requires 
 to be continued and sustained by the piece follow- 
 ing. In reading Wordsworth the impression made 
 by one of his fine pieces is too often dulled and 
 spoiled by a very inferior piece coming after it. 
 
 Wordsworth composed verses during a space of 
 some sixty years ; and it is no exaggeration to 
 say that within one single decade of those years, 
 between 1798 and 1808, almost all his really first- 
 rate work was produced. A mass of inferior work 
 remains, work done before and after this golden 
 prime, imbedding the first-rate work and clogging 
 it, obstructing our approach to it, chiUing, not 
 unfrequently, the high-wrought mood with which 
 we leave it. To be recognised far and wide as 
 a great poet, to be possible and receivable as a 
 classic, Wordsworth needs to be relieved of a great 
 deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers 
 him. To administer this relief is indispensable, 
 unless he is to continue to be a poet for the few 
 only, — a poet valued far below his real worth by 
 the world. 
 
V WORDSWORTH 137 
 
 There is another thing. Wordsworth classified 
 his poems not according to any commonly received 
 plan of arrangement, but according to a scheme of 
 mental physiology. He has poems of the fancy, 
 poems of the imagination, poems of sentiment and 
 reflection, and so on. His categories are ingenious 
 but far-fetched, and the result of his employment 
 of them is unsatisfactory. Poems are separated 
 one from another which possess a kinship of 
 subject or of treatment far more vital and deep 
 than the supposed unity of mental origin, which 
 was Wordsworth's reason for joining them with 
 others. 
 
 The tact of the Greeks in matters of this kind 
 was infallible. We may rely upon it that we 
 shall not improve upon the classification adopted 
 by the Greeks for kinds of poetry ; that their 
 categories of epic, dramatic, lyric, and so forth, 
 have a natural propriety, and should be adhered 
 to. It may sometimes seem doubtful to which of 
 two categories a poem belongs ; whether this or 
 that poem is to be called, for instance, narrative 
 
138 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ▼ 
 
 or lyric, lyric or elegiac. But there is to be found 
 in every good poem a strain, a predominant note, 
 which determines the poem as belonging to one of 
 these kinds rather than the other ; and here is 
 the best proof of the value of the classification, 
 and of the advantage of adhering to it. Words- 
 worth's poems will never produce their due efifect 
 until they are freed from their present artificial 
 arrangement, and grouped more naturally. 
 
 Disengaged from the quantity of inferior work 
 which now obscures them, the best poems of 
 Wordsworth, I hear many people say, would 
 indeed stand out in great beauty, but they would 
 prove to be very few in number, scarcely more 
 than half a dozen. I maintain, on the other hand, 
 that what strikes me with admiration, what estab- 
 lishes in my opinion Wordsworth's superiority, 
 is the great and ample body of powerful work 
 which remains to him, even after all his inferior 
 work has been cleared away. He gives us so 
 much to rest upon, so much which communicates 
 his spirit and engages ours ! 
 
V WORDSWORTH 189 
 
 This is of very great importance. If it were a 
 comparison of single pieces, or of three or four 
 pieces, by each poet, I do not say that Words- 
 worth would stand decisively above Gray, or 
 Bums, or Coleridge, or Keats, or Manzoni, or 
 Heine. It is in his ampler body of powerful 
 work that I find his superiority. His good work 
 itself, his work which counts, is not all of it, of 
 course, of equal value. Some kinds of poetry are 
 in themselves lower kinds than others. The 
 ballad kind is a lower kind ; the didactic kind, 
 still more, is a lower kind. Poetry of this latter 
 sort counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical 
 interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure 
 and simple ; but then this can only be when the 
 poet producing it has the power and importance 
 of Wordsworth, a power and importance which he 
 assuredly did not establish by such didactic poetry 
 alone. Altogether, it is, I say, by the great body 
 of powerful and significant work which remains to 
 him, after every reduction and deduction has been 
 made, that Wordsworth's superiority is proved. 
 
7 
 
 140 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ▼ 
 
 To exhibit this body of Wordsworth's best 
 work, to clear away obstructions from around it, 
 and to let it speak for itself, is what every lover 
 of Wordsworth should desire. Until this has 
 been done, Wordsworth, whom we, to whom he 
 is dear, all of us know and feel to be so great a 
 poet, has not had a fair chance before the world. 
 When once it has been done, he will make his 
 way best, not by our advocacy of him, but by his 
 own worth and power. We may safely leave him 
 to make his way thus, we who believe that a 
 superior worth and power in poetry finds in man- 
 kind a sense responsive to it and disposed at last 
 to recognise it. Yet at the outset, before he has 
 been duly known and recognised, we may do 
 Wordsworth a service, perhaps, by indicating in 
 what his superior power and worth will be found 
 to consist, and in what it wUl not. 
 
 Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that 
 the noble and profound application of ideas to life 
 is the most essential part of poetic greatness. I 
 said that a great poet receives his distinctive 
 
y WORDSWORTH 141 
 
 character of superiority from his application, under 
 the conditions immutably fixed by the laws of 
 poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his applica- 
 tion, I say, to his subject, whatever it may be, of 
 the ideas 
 
 ' On man, on nature, and on human life,' 
 
 which he has acquired for himself. The line 
 quoted is "Wordsworth's own ; and his superiority 
 arises from his powerful use, in his best pieces, 
 his powerful application to his subject, of ideas 
 * on man, on nature, and on human life.' 
 
 Voltaire, with his signal acuteness, most truly 
 remarked that *no nation has treated in poetry 
 moral ideas with more energy and depth than the 
 English nation,' And he adds : ' There, it seems 
 to me, is the great merit of the English poets.' 
 Voltaire does not mean, by 'treating in poetry 
 moral ideas,' the composing moral and didactic 
 poems ; — that brings us but a very little way in 
 poetry. He means just the same thing as was 
 meant when I spoke above * of the noble and pro- 
 
142 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ▼ 
 
 found application of ideas to life ' ; and he means 
 
 the application of these ideas under the conditions 
 
 fixed for us by the laws of poetic beauty and 
 
 poetic truth. If it is said that to call these ideas 
 
 moral ideas is to introduce a strong and injurious 
 
 limitation, I answer that it is to do nothing of the 
 
 kind, because moral ideas are really so main a 
 
 part of human life. The question, how to live, is 
 
 itself a moral idea ; and it is the question which 
 
 most interests every man, and with which, in 
 
 some way or other, he is perpetually occupied. 
 
 A large sense is of course to be given to the 
 
 term moral. Whatever bears upon the question, 
 
 ' how to live,' comes under it. 
 
 * Nor love thy life, nor hate ; but, what thou liv'st, 
 live well ; how long or short, permit to heaven.' 
 
 In those fine lines Milton utters, as every one at 
 once perceives, a moral idea. Yes, but so too, 
 when Keats consoles the forward -bending lover 
 on the Grecian Urn, the lover arrested and pre- 
 sented in immortal relief by the sculptor's hand 
 before he can kiss, with the line. 
 
V WORDSWORTH 143 
 
 * For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair ' — 
 
 he utters a moral idea. When Shakespeare says, 
 
 that 
 
 ' We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made of, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep,' 
 
 he utters a moral idea. 
 
 Voltaire was right in thinking that the energetic 
 and profound treatment of moral ideas, in this 
 large sense, is what distinguishes the English 
 poetry. He sincerely meant praise, not dispraise 
 or hint of limitation ; and they err who suppose 
 that poetic limitation is a necessary consequence 
 of the fact, the fact being granted as Voltaire 
 states it. If what distinguishes the greatest poets 
 is their powerful and profound application of ideas 
 to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then 
 to prefix to the term ideas here the term moral 
 makes hardly any difference, because human life 
 itself is in so preponderating a degree moral 
 
 It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this : 
 that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life ; that 
 
144 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ^ 
 
 the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and 
 beautiful application of ideas to life, — to the ques- 
 tion : How to live. Morals are often treated in a 
 narrow and false fashion ; they are bound up with 
 systems of thought and belief which have had 
 their day ; they are fallen into the hands of pedants 
 and professional dealers; they grow tiresome to 
 some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in 
 a poetry of revolt against them ; in a poetry which 
 might take for its motto Omar Eiteyam's words : 
 ' Let us make up in the tavern for the time which 
 we have wasted in the mosque.' Or we find 
 attractions in a poetry indifferent to them ; in a 
 poetry where the contents may be what they wiU, 
 but where the form is studied and exquisite. We 
 delude ourselves in either case ; and the best cure 
 for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that 
 great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn 
 to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt 
 against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against 
 life ; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas 
 is a poetry of indifference towards life. 
 
V WORDSWORTH 145 
 
 Epictetus had a happy figure for things like 
 the play of the senses, or literary form and finish, 
 or argumentative ingenuity, in comparison with 
 * the best and master thing ' for us, as he called 
 it, the concern, how to live. Some people were 
 afraid of them, he said, or they disliked and 
 undervalued them. Such people were wrong ; they 
 were unthankful or cowardly. But the things 
 might also be over -prized, and treated as final 
 when they are not. They bear to life the relation 
 which inns bear to home. 'As if a man, journey- 
 ing home, and finding a nice inn on the road, and 
 liking it, were to stay for ever at the inn ! Man, 
 thou hast forgotten thine object ; thy journey was 
 not to this, but through this. " But this inn is 
 taking." And how many other inns, too, are 
 taking, and how many fields and meadows! but 
 as places of passage merely. You have an object, 
 which is this : to get home, to do your duty to your 
 family, friends, and fellow-countrymen, to attain 
 inward freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment. 
 Style takes your fancy, arguing takes your fancy, 
 
146 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ▼ 
 
 and you forget your home aud want to make your 
 
 abode with them and to stay with them, on the plea 
 
 that they are taking. Who denies that they are 
 
 taking? but as places of passage, as inns. And 
 
 when I say this, you suppose me to be attacking 
 
 the care for style, the care for argument. I am 
 
 not ; I attack the resting in them, the not looking 
 
 to the end which is beyond them.' 
 
 Now, when we come across a poet like Th^o- 
 
 phile Gautier, we have a poet who has taken up 
 
 his abode at an inn, and never got farther. There 
 
 may be inducements to this or that one of us, at this 
 
 or that moment, to find delight in him, to cleave to 
 
 him ; but after aU, we do not change the truth 
 
 about him, — we only stay ourselves in his inn 
 
 along with him. And when we come across a 
 
 poet like Wordsworth, who sings 
 
 ' Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love and hope. 
 And melancholy fear subdued by faith. 
 Of blessed consolations in distress, 
 Of moral strength and intellectual power, 
 Of joy in widest commonalty spread ' — 
 
 then we have a poet intent on ' the best and 
 
Y WORDSWORTH 147 
 
 master thing/ and who prosecutes his journey 
 home. We say, for brevity's sake, that he deals 
 with life, because he deals with that in which life 
 really consists. This is what Voltaire means to 
 praise in the English poets, — this dealing with 
 what is really life. But always it is the mark of 
 the greatest poets that they deal with it ; and to 
 say that the English poets are remarkable for 
 dealing with it, is only another way of saying, 
 what is true, that in poetry the English genius 
 has especially shown its power. 
 
 Wordsworth deals with it, and his greatness 
 lies in his dealing with it so powerfully. I have 
 named a number of celebrated poets above all of 
 whom he, in my opinion, deserves to be placed. 
 He is to be placed above poets like Voltaire, Dry- 
 den, Pope, Lessing, Schiller, because these famous 
 personages, with a thousand gifts and merits, 
 never, or scarcely ever, attain the distinctive ac- 
 cent and utterance of the high and genuine poets — 
 
 • Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti,' 
 at all. Burns, Keats, Heine, not to speak of 
 
/, 
 
 148 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM t 
 
 others in our list, have this accent; — who can 
 doubt it ? And at the same time they liave trea- 
 sures of humour, felicity, passion, for which in 
 Wordsworth we shall look in vain. Where, then, 
 is Wordsworth's superiority ? It is here ; he deals 
 with more of life than they do ; he deals with life, 
 as a whole, more powerfully. 
 
 No Wordsworthian will doubt this. Nay, the 
 ^ fervent Wordsworthian will add, as Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen does, that Wordsworth's poetry is precious 
 because his philosophy is sound ; that his ' ethical 
 system is as distinctive and capable of exposition 
 as Bishop Butler's ' ; that his poetry is informed 
 by ideas which ' fall spontaneously into a scientific 
 system of thought.' But we must be on our 
 guard against the Wordsworthians, if we want to 
 secure for Wordsworth his due rank as a poet. 
 The Wordsworthians are apt to praise him for the 
 wrong things, and to lay far too much stress upon 
 what they call his philosophy. His poetry is the 
 reality, his philosophy, — so far, at least, as it may 
 put on the form and habit of ' a scientific system 
 
V WORDSWORTH 149 
 
 of thought,' and the more that it puts them on, 
 — is the illusion. Perhaps we shall one day 
 learn to make this proposition general, and to 
 say : Poetry is the reality, philosophy the illusion. 
 But in Wordsworth's case, at any rate, we can- 
 not do him justice until we dismiss his formal 
 philosophy. 
 
 The Excursion abounds with philosophy, and 
 therefore the Excursion is to the Wordsworthian 
 what it never can be to the disinterested lover of 
 poetry, — a satisfactory work. ' Duty exists,' says 
 Wordsworth, in the Excursion ; and then he pro- 
 ceeds thus — 
 
 '. . . Immutably survive, 
 For our support, the measures and the forms, 
 Which an abstract Intelligence suppUes, 
 Whose kingdom is, where time and space are not' 
 
 And the Wordsworthian is delighted, and thinks 
 that here is a sweet union of philosophy and 
 poetry. But the disinterested lover of poetry will 
 feel that the lines carry us really not a step farther 
 than the proposition which they would interpret ; 
 
160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 that they are a tissue of elevated but abstract ver- 
 biage, alien to the very nature of poetry. 
 
 Or let us come direct to the centre of Words- 
 worth's philosophy, as ' an ethical system, as dis- 
 tinctive and capable of systematical exposition as 
 Bishop Butler's ' — 
 
 * . . . One adequate support 
 For the calamities of mortal life 
 Exists, one only ; — an assured belief 
 That the procession of our fate, howe'er 
 Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being 
 Of infinite benevolence and power ; 
 Whose everlasting purposes embrace 
 All accidents, converting them to good' 
 
 That is doctrine such as we hear in church too, 
 religious and philosophic doctrine; and the at- 
 tached Wordsworthian loves passages of such 
 doctrine, and brings them forward in proof of his 
 poet's excellence. But however true the doctrine 
 may be, it has, as here presented, none of the 
 characters oi poetic truth, the kind of truth which 
 we require from a poet, and in which Wordsworth 
 is really strong. 
 
7 WORDSWORTH 151 
 
 Even the ' intimations ' of the famous Ode, 
 those corner-stones of the supposed philosophic 
 system of Wordsworth, — the idea of the high 
 instincts and affections coming out in childhood, 
 testifying of a divine home recently left, and fad- 
 ing away as our life proceeds, — this idea, of un- 
 deniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not 
 the character of poetic truth of the best kind ; it 
 has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in 
 Nature and her beauty had no doubt extraordi- 
 nary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. 
 But to say that universally this instinct is mighty 
 in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is 
 to say what is extremely doubtfuL In many 
 people, perhaps with the majority of educated 
 persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible 
 at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. 
 In general we may say of these high instincts of 
 early childhood, the base of the alleged systematic 
 philosophy of Wordsworth, what Thucydides says 
 of the early achievements of the Greek race : ' It 
 is impossible to speak with certainty of what is 
 
162 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM t 
 
 SO remote ; but from all that we can really investi- 
 gate, I should say that they were no very great 
 things.' 
 
 Finally, the ' scientific system of thought ' in 
 Wordsworth gives us at last such poetry as this, 
 which the devout Wordsworthian accepts — 
 
 ' for the coining of that glorious time 
 When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth 
 And best protection, this Imperial Realm, 
 While she exacts allegiance, shall admit 
 An obligation, on her part, to teach 
 Them who are born to serve her and obey ; 
 Binding herself by statute to secure, 
 For all the children whom her soil maintains, 
 The rudiments of letters, and inform 
 The mind with moral and religious truth.' 
 
 Wordsworth calls Voltaire dull, and surely the 
 production of these un-Voltairian lines must have 
 been imposed on him as a judgment ! One can 
 hear them being quoted at a Social Science Con- 
 gress ; one can call up the whole scene. A great 
 room in one of our dismal provincial towns ; dusty 
 air and jaded afternoon daylight ; benches full of 
 men with bald heads and women in spectacles; 
 
V WORDSWORTH 153 
 
 an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript 
 written within and without to declaim these lines 
 of Wordsworth ; and in the soul of any poor 
 child of nature who may have wandered in 
 thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, and 
 mourning, and woe ! 
 
 ' But turn we,' as Wordsworth says, ' from these 
 bold, bad men,' the haunters of Social Science 
 Congresses. And let us be on our guard, too, 
 against the exhibitors and extollers of a ' scientific 
 system of thought ' in Wordsworth's poetry. The 
 poetry will never be seen aright while they thus 
 exhibit it. The cause of its greatness is simple, 
 and may be told quite simply. Wordsworth's 
 poetry is great because of the extraordinary power 
 with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to 
 us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple 
 primary affections and duties ; and because of the 
 extraordinary power with which, in case after case, 
 he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make 
 us share it. 
 
 The source of joy from which he thus draws is 
 
154 ESSAYS m CRITICISM t 
 
 the truest and most unfailing source of joy ac- 
 cessible to man. It is also accessible universally. 
 Wordsworth brings us word, therefore, according 
 to his own strong and characteristic line, he brings 
 us word 
 
 ' Of joy in widest commonalty spread.' 
 
 Here is an immense advantage for a poet. Words- 
 worth tells of what all seek, and tells of it at its 
 truest and best source, and yet a source where all 
 may go and draw for it 
 
 Nevertheless, we are not to suppose that every- 
 thing is precious which Wordsworth, standing 
 even at this perennial and beautiful source, may 
 give us. Wordsworthians are apt to talk as if it 
 must be. They will speak with the same rever- 
 ence of The Sailor's Mother, for example, as of 
 Lucy Gray. They do their master harm by such 
 lack of discrimination. Lucy Gray is a beautiful 
 success ; The Sailor's Mother is a failure. To give 
 aright what he wishes to give, to interpret and 
 render successfully, is not always within Words- 
 
Y WORDSWORTH 155 
 
 worth's own command. It is within no poet's 
 command ; here is the part of the Muse, the in- 
 spiration, the God, the 'not ourselves.' In Words- 
 worth's case, the accident, for so it may almost be 
 called, of inspiration, is of peculiar importance. 
 No poet, perhaps, is so evidently filled with a new 
 and sacred energy when the inspiration is upon 
 hiTn ; no poet, when it fails him, is so left ' weak 
 as is a breaking wave.' I remember hearing him 
 say that 'Goethe's poetry was not inevitable 
 enough.' The remark is striking and true ; no 
 line in Goethe, as Goethe said himself, but its 
 maker knew well how it came there. Wordsworth 
 is right, Goethe's poetry is not inevitable ; not inevi- 
 table enough. But Wordsworth's poetry, when he 
 is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature 
 herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave 
 h\vn the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem 
 for him. He has no style. He was too conversant 
 with Milton not to catch at times his master's 
 manner, and he has fine Miltonic lines ; but he 
 has no assured poetic style of his own, like Milton 
 
156 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM y 
 
 When he seeks to have a style he falls into pon- 
 derosity and pomposity. In the Excursion we 
 have his style, as an artistic product of his own 
 creation ; and although Jeffrey completely failed 
 to recognise "Wordsworth's real greatness, he was 
 yet not wrong in saying of the Excursion, as a work 
 of poetic style : ' This will never do.' And yet 
 magical as is that power, which Wordsworth has 
 not, of assured and possessed poetic style, he has 
 something which is an equivalent for it 
 
 Every one who has any sense for these things 
 feels the subtle turn, the heightening, which is 
 given to a poet's verse by his genius for style. 
 We can feel it in the 
 
 * After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well ' — 
 
 of Shakespeare ; in the 
 
 ' . . . though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues ' — 
 
 of Milton. It is the incomparable charm of 
 Milton's power of poetic style wliich gives such 
 worth to Paradise Regained, and makes a great 
 
7 WORDSWORTH 157 
 
 poem of a work in which Milton's imagination does 
 not soar high. Wordsworth has in constant pos- 
 session, and at command, no style of this kind ; but 
 he had too poetic a nature, and had read the great 
 poets too well, not to catch, as I have already re- 
 marked, something of it occasionally. We find it not 
 only in his Miltonic lines; we find it in such a phrase 
 as this, where the manner is his own, not Milton's — 
 
 ' . . . the fierce confederate storm 
 Of sorrow barricadoed evermore 
 Within the walls of cities ;' 
 
 although even here, perhaps, the power of style 
 which is undeniable, is more properly that of elo- 
 quent prose than the subtle heightening and 
 change wrought by genuine poetic style. It is style, 
 again, and the elevation given by style, which 
 chiefly makes the effectiveness of Laodameia. Still 
 the right sort of verse to choose from Wordsworth, 
 if we are to seize his true and most characteristic 
 form of expression, is a line like this from Michael — 
 
 * And never lifted up a single stone.' 
 There is nothing subtle in it, no heightening, no 
 
158 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 study of poetic style, strictly so called, at all ; yet 
 it is expression of the highest and most truly ex- 
 pressive kind. 
 
 Wordsworth owed much to Burns, and a style 
 of perfect plainness, relying for effect solely on 
 the weight and force of that which with entire 
 fidelity it utters. Burns could show hiin. 
 
 * The poor inhabitant below 
 Was quick to learn and wise to know, 
 And keenly felt the friendly glow 
 
 And softer flame ; 
 But thoughtless follies laid him low 
 
 And stain'd his name.' 
 
 Every one will be conscious of a likeness here to 
 Wordsworth ; and if Wordsworth did great things 
 with this nobly plain manner, we must remember, 
 what indeed he himself would always have been 
 forward to acknowledge, that Burns used it before 
 him. 
 
 Still Wordsworth's use of it has something 
 unique and unmatchable. Nature herself seems, 
 I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to 
 write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetra^ 
 
T WORDSWORTH 169 
 
 ing power. This arises from two causes ; from 
 the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth 
 feels his subject, and also from the profoundly 
 sincere and natural character of his subject itself. 
 He can and will treat such a subject with nothing 
 but the most plain, first-hand, almost austere 
 naturalness. His expression may often be called 
 bald, as, for instance, in the poem of Besolution 
 and Independence; but it is bald as the bare 
 mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is 
 full of grandeur. 
 
 "Wherever we meet with the successful balance, 
 in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with 
 profound truth of execution, he is unique. His 
 best poems are those which most perfectly exhibit 
 this balance. I have a warm admiration for 
 Laodameia and for the great Ode ; but if I am to 
 tell the very truth, I find Laodameia not wholly 
 free from something artificial, and the great Ode 
 not wholly free from something declamatory. If 
 I had to pick out poems of a kind most perfectly 
 to show Wordsworth's unique power, I should 
 
160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM v 
 
 rather choose poems such as Michael, The Foun- 
 tain, The Highland Reaper. And poems with the 
 peculiar and unique beauty which distinguishes 
 these, Wordsworth produced in considerable num- 
 ber ; besides very many other poems of which the 
 worth, although not so rare as the worth of these, 
 is still exceedingly high. 
 
 On the whole, then, as I said at the beginning, 
 not only is "Wordsworth eminent by reason of the 
 goodness of his best work, but he is eminent also 
 by reason of the great body of good work which 
 he has left to us. With the ancients I will not 
 compare him. In many respects the ancients are 
 far above us, and yet there is something that we 
 demand which they can never give. Leaving the 
 ancients, let us come to the poets and poetry 
 of Christendom. Dante, Shakespeare, Moli^re, 
 Milton, Goethe, are altogether larger and more 
 splendid luminaries in the poetical heaven than 
 Wordsworth. But I know not where else, among 
 the modems, we are to find his superiors. 
 
 To disengage the poems which show his power, 
 
y WORDSWORTH 161 
 
 and to present them to the English-speaking public 
 and to the world, is the object of this volume. I 
 by no means say that it contains all which in 
 Wordsworth's poems is interesting. Except in the 
 case of Margaret, a story composed separately from 
 the rest of the Excursion, and which belongs to a 
 different part of England, I have not ventured on 
 detaching portions of poems, or on giving any piece 
 otherwise than as Wordsworth himself gave it. 
 But under the conditions imposed by this reserve, 
 the volume contains, I think, everything, or nearly 
 everything, which may best serve him with the 
 majority of lovers of poetry, nothing which may 
 disserve him. 
 
 I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians ; and 
 if we are to get Wordsworth recognised by the 
 public and by the world, we must recommend 
 him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit 
 of disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a 
 Wordsworthian myself. I can read with pleasure 
 and edification Peter Bell, and the whole series of 
 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and the address to Mr. Wil- 
 
 M 
 
162 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ▼ 
 
 kinson's spade, and even the Thanksgiving Ode ; — 
 everything of Wordsworth, I think, except Vaud- 
 racour and Julia. It is not for nothing that one 
 has been brought up in the veneration of a man so 
 truly worthy of homage ; that one has seen him 
 and heard him, lived in his neighbourhood, and 
 been familiar with his country. No Words- 
 worthian has a tenderer affection for this pure and 
 sage master than I, or is less really offended by 
 his defects. But Wordsworth is something more 
 than the pure and sage master of a small band of 
 devoted followers, and we ought not to rest satis- 
 fied untU he is seen to be what he is. He is one 
 of the very chief glories of English Poetry ; and by 
 nothing is England so glorious as by her poetry. Let 
 us lay aside every weight which hinders our getting 
 him recognised as this, and let our one study be to 
 bring to pass, as widely as possible and as truly as 
 possible, his own word concerning his poems : 
 ' They will co-operate with the benign tendencies in 
 human nature and society, and will, in their degree, be 
 efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.' 
 
VI 
 
 BYRON' 
 
 When at last I held in my hand the volume of 
 poems which I had chosen from Wordsworth, and 
 began to turn over its pages, there arose in me 
 almost immediately the desire to see beside it, as 
 a companion volume, a like collection of the best 
 poetry of Byron. Alone amongst our poets of the 
 earlier part of this century, Byron and Words- 
 worth not only furnish material enough for a 
 volume of this kind, but also, as it seems to me, 
 they both of them gain considerably by being thus 
 exhibited. There are poems of Coleridge and of 
 Keats equal, if not superior, to anything of Byron 
 or Wordsworth ; but a dozen pages or two will 
 
 ^ Preface to Poetry of Byron, chosen and arranged by 
 Matthew Arnold, 1881. 
 
164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 contain them, and the remaining poetry is of a 
 quality much inferior. Scott never, I think, rises 
 as a poet to the level of Byron and Wordsworth at 
 all. On the other hand, he never falls below his 
 own usual level very far; and by a volume of 
 selections from him, therefore, his effectiveness is 
 not increased. As to Shelley there will be more 
 question ; and indeed Mr. Stopford Brooke, whose 
 accomplishments, eloquence, and love of poetry 
 we must aU recognise and admire, has actually 
 given us Shelley in such a volume. But for my 
 own part I cannot think that Shelley's poetry, 
 except by snatches and fragments, has the value 
 of the good work of Wordsworth and Byron ; or 
 that it is possible for even Mr. Stopford Brooke to 
 make up a volume of selections from him which, 
 for real substance, power, and worth, can at all 
 take rank with a like volume from Byron or 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Shelley knew quite well the difference between 
 the achievement of such a poet as Byron and his 
 own. He praises Byron too unreservedly, but he 
 
VI BYRON 165 
 
 sincerely felt, and he was right in feeling, that 
 Byron was a greater poetical power than himself 
 As a man, Shelley is at a number of points im- 
 measurably Byron's superior ; he is a beautiful 
 and enchanting spirit, whose vision, when we call 
 it up, has far more loveliness, more charm for our 
 soul, than the vision of Byron. But all the per- 
 sonal charm of Shelley cannot hinder us from at 
 last discovering in his poetry the incurable want, 
 in general, of a sound subject-matter, and the in- 
 curable fault, in consequence, of unsubstantiality. 
 Those who extol him as the poet of clouds, the 
 poet of sunsets, are only saying that he did not, in 
 fact, lay hold upon the poet's right subject-matter; 
 and in honest truth, with all his charm of soul and 
 spirit, and with all his gift of musical diction and 
 movement, he never, or hardly ever, did. Except, 
 as I have said, for a few short things and single 
 stanzas, his original poetry is less satisfactory than 
 his translations, for in these the subject-matter 
 was found for him. Nay, I doubt whether his 
 delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be 
 
IM ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 far more read than they are now, will not resist 
 the wear and tear of time better, and finally come 
 to stand higher, than his poetry. 
 
 There remain to be considered Byron and 
 Wordsworth. That Wordsworth affords good 
 material for a volume of selections, and that he 
 gains by having his poetry thus presented, is an 
 old belief of mine which led me lately to make up 
 a volume of poems chosen out of Wordsworth, and 
 to bring it before the public. By its kind recep- 
 tion of the volume, the public seems to show itself 
 a partaker in my belief. Now Byron also sup- 
 plies plenty of material for a like volume, and he 
 too gains, I think, by being so presented. Mr. 
 Swinburne urges, indeed, that ' Byron, who rarely 
 wrote anything either worthless or faultless, can 
 only be judged or appreciated in the mass ; the 
 greatest of his works was his whole work taken 
 together.' It is quite true that Byron rarely wrote 
 anything either worthless or faultless ; it is quite 
 true also that in the appreciation of Byron's 
 power a sense of the amount and variety of his 
 
VI BYRON 167 
 
 work, defective though much of his work is, enters 
 justly into our estimate. But although there may 
 be little in Byron's poetry which can be pronounced 
 either worthless or faultless, there are portions of 
 it which are far higher in worth and far more free 
 from fault than others. And although, again, the 
 abundance and variety of his production is un- 
 doubtedly a proof of his power, yet I question 
 whether by reading everything which he gives us 
 we are so likely to acquire an admiring sense even 
 of his variety and abundance, as by reading what 
 he gives us at his happier moments. Varied and 
 abundant he amply proves himself even by this 
 taken alone. Eeceive him absolutely without 
 omission or compression, follow his whole out- 
 pouring stanza by stanza and line by line from the 
 very commencement to the very end, and he is 
 capable of being tiresome. 
 
 Byron has told us himself that the Giaour ' is 
 but a string of passages.' He has made full con- 
 fession of his own negligence. ' No one,' says he, 
 ' has done more through negligence to corrupt the 
 
168 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 language.' This accusation brought by himself 
 against his poems is not just ; but when he goes 
 on to say of them, that 'their faults, whatever 
 they may be, are those of negligence and not of 
 labour,' he says what is perfectly true. ' La/ra,* 
 he declares, ' I wrote while undressing after coming 
 home from balls and masquerades, in the year of 
 revelry, 1814 The Bride was written in four, the 
 Corsair in ten days.' He calls this * a humiliating 
 confession, as it proves my own want of judgment 
 in publishing, and the public's in reading, things 
 which cannot have stamina for permanence.' 
 Again he does his poems injustice ; the producer 
 of such poems could not but publish them, the 
 public could not but read them. Nor could Byron 
 have produced his work in any other fashion ; his 
 poetic work could not have first grown and matured 
 in his own mind, and then come forth as an 
 organic whole ; Byron had not enoug h of the arti st J 
 in him for this, nor enough of self-command. He 
 
 wrote, as he truly teUs us, to relieve himself, and 
 he went on writing because he found the relief 
 
▼r BYRON 169 
 
 become indispensable. But it was inevitable that 
 works so produced should be, in general, ' a string 
 of passages,' poured out, as he describes them, 
 with rapidity and excitement, and with new 
 passages constantly suggesting themselves, and 
 added while his work was going through the press. 
 It is evident that we have here^jieither deliberate 
 scientific constructio n, nor yet the instinctiv e 
 artistic creation of poetic wholes ; and that to 
 take passages from work produced as Byron's was 
 is a very different thing from taking passages out 
 of the (Edipus or the Tempest, and deprives the 
 poetry far less of its advantage. 
 
 Nay, it gives advantage to the poetry, instead 
 of depriving it of any, Byron, I said, has not a 
 great artist's profound and patient skill in com- 
 bining an action or in developing a character, — a 
 skill which we must watch and follow if we are to 
 do justice to it. But he has a wonderful power 
 of vividly conceiving a single incident, a single 
 situation ; of throwing himself upon it, grasping it 
 as if it were real and he saw and felt it, and ot 
 
170 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 making us see and feel it too. The Giaour is, as 
 he truly called it, ' a string of passages,' not a 
 work moving by a deep internal law of develop- 
 ment to a necessary end ; and our total impres- 
 sion from it cannot but receive from this, its in- 
 herent defect, a certain dimness and indistinctness 
 But the incidents of the journey and death of 
 Hassan, in that poem, are conceived and presented 
 with a vividness not to be surpassed; and our 
 impression from them is correspondingly clear 
 and powerful. In Lara, again, there is no 
 adequate development either of the character 
 of the chief personage or of the action of 
 the poem ; our total impression from the work is 
 a confused one. Yet such an incident as the dis- 
 posal of the slain Ezzelin's body passes before our 
 eyes as if we actually saw it. And in the same 
 way as these bursts of incident, bursts of senti- 
 ment also, living and vigorous, often occur in the 
 midst of poems which must be admitted to be but 
 weakly -conceived and loosely- combined wholes. 
 Byron cannot but be a gainer by having attention 
 
VI BYRON 171 
 
 concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful, effective 
 in his work, and withdrawn from what is not so. 
 
 Byron, I say, cannot but be a gainer by this, 
 just as Wordsworth is a gainer by a like proceed- 
 ing. I esteem Wordsworth's poetry so highly, and 
 the world, in my opinion, has done it such scant 
 justice, that I could not rest satisfied until I had 
 fulfilled, on Wordsworth's behalf, a long- cherished 
 desire ; — had disengaged, to the best of my power, 
 his good work from the inferior work joined with 
 it, and had placed before the public the body of 
 his good work by itself. To the poetry of Byron 
 the world has ardently paid homage ; full justice 
 from his contemporaries, perhaps even more than 
 justice, his torrent of poetry received. His poetry 
 was admired, adored, ' with all its imperfections 
 on its head,' — in spite of negligence, in spite of 
 diffuseness, in spite of repetitions, in spite of what- 
 ever faults it possessed. His name is still great 
 and brilliant. Nevertheless the hour of irresistible 
 vogue has passed away for him ; even for Byron 
 it could not but pass away. The time has come 
 
172 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM VI 
 
 for him, as it comes for all poets, when he must 
 take his real and permanent place, no longer 
 depending upon the vogue of his own day and upon 
 the enthusiasm of his contemporaries. Whatever 
 we may think of him, we shall not be subjugated 
 by him as they were ; for, as he cannot be for us 
 what he was for them, we cannot admire him so 
 hotly and indiscriminately as they. His faults of 
 negligence, of diffuseness, of repetition, his faults 
 of whatever kind, we shall abundantly feel and 
 unsparingly criticise ; the mere interval df time 
 between us and him makes disillusion of this 
 kind inevitable. But how then will Byron stand, 
 if we relieve him too, so far as we can, of the en- 
 cumbrance of his inferior and weakest work, and 
 if we bring before us his best and strongest work in 
 one body together ? That is the question which I, 
 who can even remember the latter years of Byron's 
 vogue, and have myself felt the expiring wave 
 of that mighty influence, but who certainly also 
 regard him, and have long regarded him, without 
 illusion, cannot but ask myself, cannot but seek to 
 
VI BYRON 173 
 
 answer. The present volume is an attempt to 
 provide adequate data for answering it. 
 
 Byron has been over-praised, no doubt. ' Byron 
 is one of our French superstitious,' says M. 
 Edmond Scherer ; but where has Byron not been 
 a superstition ? He pays now the penalty of this 
 exaggerated worship. ' Alone among the English 
 poets his contemporaries, Byron,' said M. Taine, 
 ' atteint it la dme, — gets to the top of the poetic 
 mountain.' But the idol that M. Taine had thus 
 adored M. Scherer is almost for burning. ' In 
 Byron,' he declares, 'there is a remarkable in- 
 ability ever to lift himself into the region of real 
 poetic art, — art impersonal and disinterested, — at 
 all. He has fecundity, eloquence, wit, but even 
 these qualities themselves are confined within 
 somewhat narrow limits. He has treated hardly 
 any subject but one, — himself ; now the man, in 
 Byron, is of a nature even less sincere than the 
 poet. This beautiful and blighted being is at 
 bottom a coxcomb. He posed all his life long.' 
 
 Our poet could not well meet with more severs 
 
174 ESSAYS m CRITICISM n 
 
 and unsympathetic criticism. However, the praise 
 often given to Byron has been so exaggerated as to 
 provoke, perhaps, a reaction in which he is unduly 
 disparaged. ' As various in composition as Shake- 
 speare himself, Lord Byron has embraced,' says 
 Sir Walter Scott, ' every topic of human life, and 
 sounded every string on the divine harp, from its 
 slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding 
 tones.' It is not surprising that some one with a 
 cool head should retaliate, on such provocation as 
 this, by saying : ' He heis treated hardly any sub- 
 ject but one, himself.' ' In the very grand and tre- 
 mendous drama of Cain' says Scott, ' Lord Byron 
 has certainly matched Milton on his own ground.' 
 And Lord Byron has done all this, Scott adds. 
 ' while managing his pen with the careless and 
 negligent ease of a man of quality.' Alas, ' man- 
 aging his pen with the careless and negligent ease 
 of a man of quality,' Byron wrote in his Cain — 
 
 ' Souls that dare look the Omnipotent tyrant iu 
 His everlasting face, and tell him that 
 His evil is not good ; ' 
 
▼I BYRON 175 
 
 or he wrote — 
 
 ' . . . And thou would'st go on aspiring 
 To the great double Mysteries ! the two Principles/ ' ' 
 
 One has only to repeat to oneself a line from 
 Paradise Lost in order to feel the difference. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, speaking of that exquisite master 
 of language, the Italian poet Leopardi, remarks 
 how often we see the alliance, singular though it 
 may at first sight appear, of the poetical genius 
 with the genius for scholarship and philology. 
 Dante and Milton are instances which will occur 
 to every one's mind. Byron is so negligent in his 
 poetical style, he is often, to say the truth, so 
 slovenly, slipshod, and infelicitous, he is so little 
 haunted by the true artist's fine passion for the 
 correct use and consummate management of words, 
 that he may be described as having for this artistic 
 gift the insensibility of the barbarian ; — which is 
 perhaps only another and a less flattering way of 
 saying, with Scott, that he ' manages his pen with 
 
 ^ The italics are in the original. 
 
176 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality.' 
 Just of a piece with the rhythm of 
 
 * Dare you await the event of a few minutes' 
 Deliberation 1 ' 
 
 or of 
 
 'All shall be void — 
 Destroy 'd ! ' 
 
 is the diction of 
 
 ' Which now is painful to these eyes, 
 Which have not seen the sun to rise ; ' 
 
 or of 
 
 '. . . there let him lay !* 
 
 or of the famous passage beginning 
 
 * He who hath bent him o'er the dead ;* 
 
 with those trailing relatives, that crying gramma- 
 tical solecism, that inextricable anacolouthou ! 
 To class the work of the author of such things 
 with the work of the authors of such verse as 
 
 ' In the dark backward and abysm of time ' — 
 
 or as 
 
 * Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line 
 Or the tale of Troy divine ' — 
 
VI BYRON 177 
 
 is ridiculous. Shakespeare and Milton, with their 
 secret of consummate felicity in diction and 
 movement, are of another and an altogether 
 higher order from Byron, nay, for that matter, 
 from Wordsworth also ; from the author of such 
 verse as 
 
 ' Sol hath dropt into his harbour ' — 
 
 OT (if Mr. Ruskin pleases) as 
 
 ' Parching summer hath no warrant ' — 
 
 as from the author of 
 
 * All shall be void — 
 Destroy'd!' 
 
 With a poetical gift and a poetical performance of 
 the very highest order, the slovenliness and tune- 
 lessness of much of Byron's production, the 
 pompousness and ponderousness of much of 
 Wordsworth's are incompatible. Let us admit 
 this to the full. 
 
 Moreover, while we are hearkening to M. 
 Scherer, and going along with him in his fault- 
 finding, let us admit, too, that the man in Byron 
 
 / 
 
178 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 is in many respects as unsatisfactory as the poet. 
 And, putting aside all direct moral criticism of 
 him, — with which we need not concern our- 
 selves here, — we shall find that he is unsatisfactoiy 
 in the same way. Some of Byron's most crying 
 faults as a man, — his vulgarity, his affectation, — 
 are really akin to the faults of commonness, of 
 want of art, in his workmanship as a poet. The 
 ideal nature for the poet and artist is that of the 
 finely touched and finely gifted man, the €v^vri<i of 
 the Greeks ; now, Byron's nature was in sub- 
 stance not that of the ev^vrj^ at all, but rather, 
 as I have said, of the barbarian. The want of 
 fine perception which made it possible for him to 
 formulate either the comparison between himself 
 and Rousseau, or his reason for getting Lord Dela- 
 warr excused from a ' licking ' at Harrow, is 
 exactly what made possible for him also his 
 terrible dealings in, An ye wool ; I have redde thee ; 
 Sunburn me ; Oons, and it is excellent well. It is 
 exactly, again, what made possible for him his 
 precious dictum that Pope is a Greek temple, and 
 
n BYRON 179 
 
 a string of other criticisms of the like force ; it 
 is exactly, in fine, what deteriorated the quality 
 of his poetic production. If we think of a good 
 representative of that finely touched and exqui- 
 sitely gifted nature which is the ideal nature for 
 the poet and artist, — if we think of Eaphael, for 
 instance, who truly is ev^vrj<i just as Byron is 
 not, — we shall bring into clearer light the connec- 
 tion in Byron between the faults of the man and 
 the faults of the poet. With Eaphael's character 
 Byron's sins of vulgarity and false criticism 
 would have been impossible, just as with Eaphael's 
 art Byron's sins of common and bad workman- 
 ship. 
 
 Yes, all this is true, but it is not the whole 
 truth about Byron nevertheless ; very far from it. 
 The severe criticism of M. Scherer by no means 
 gives us the whole truth about Byron, and we 
 have not yet got it in what has been added to that 
 criticism here. The negative part of the true" 
 criticism of him we perhaps have ; the positive 
 part, by far the more important, we have not. 
 
180 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ti 
 
 Byron's admirers appeal eagerly to foreign testi- 
 monies in his fayour. Some of these testimonies 
 do not much move me ; but one testimony there 
 is among them which will always carry, with me 
 at any rate, very great weight, — the testimony of 
 Goethe. Goethe's sayings about Byron were 
 uttered, it must however be remembered, at the 
 height of Byron's vogue, when that puissant and 
 splendid personality was exercising its full power 
 of attraction. In Goethe's own household there 
 was an atmosphere of glowing Byron -worship; 
 his daughter-in-law was a passionate admirer of 
 Byron, nay, she enjoyed and prized his poetry, as 
 did Tieck and so many others in Germany at that 
 time, much above the poetry of Goethe himself. 
 Instead of being irritated and rendered jealous by 
 this, a nature like Goethe's was inevitably led by 
 it to heighten, not lower, the note of his praise. 
 The Time-Spirit, or Zeit-Geist, he would himself 
 have said, was working just then for Byron. This 
 working of the Zeit-Geist in his favour was an 
 advantage added to Byron's other advantages, an 
 
VI BYRON 181 
 
 advantage of which he had a right to get the 
 benefit. This is what Goethe would have thought 
 and said to himself ; and so he would have been 
 led even to heighten somewhat his estimate of 
 Byron, and to accentuate the emphasis of praise. 
 Goethe speaking of Byron at that moment was not 
 and could not be quite the same cool critic as 
 Goethe speaking of Dante, or Moli^re, or Milton. 
 This, I say, we ought to remember in reading 
 Goethe's judgments on Byron and his poetry. 
 Still, if we are careful to bear this in mind, and if 
 we quote Goethe's praise correctly, — which is not 
 always done by those who in this country quote 
 it, — and if we add to it that great and due quali- 
 fication added to it by Goethe himself, — which so 
 far as I have seen has never yet been done by his 
 quoters in this country at all, — then we shall have 
 a judgment on Byron, which comes, I think, very 
 near to the truth, and which may well command 
 our adherence. 
 
 In his judicious and interesting Life of Byron, 
 Professor Nichol quotes Goethe as saying that 
 
182 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 Byron ' is undoubtedly to be regarded as the 
 greatest genius of our century.' What Goethe did 
 really say was ' the greatest talent^ not ' the 
 greatest genivs.' The difference is important, be- 
 cause, while talent gives the notion of power in a 
 man's performance, genius gives rather the notion 
 of felicity and perfection in it ; and this divine 
 gift of consummate felicity by no means, as we 
 have seen, belongs to Byron and to his poetry. 
 Goethe said that Byron ' must imquestionably be 
 regarded as the greatest talent of the century.'^ 
 He said of him moreover : * The English may think 
 of Byron what they please, but it is certain that 
 they can point to no poet who is his like. He is 
 different from all the rest, ^nd in the main 
 greater.' Here, again, Professor Nichol trans- 
 lates : ' They can show no (living) poet who is 
 to be compared to him;' — inserting the word 
 living, I suppose, to prevent its being thought 
 that Goethe would have ranked Byron, as a poet, 
 
 * ' Der ohue Frage als das grbsste Talent des Jahrhunderta 
 anzaaehen ist.' 
 
VI BYRON 188 
 
 above Shakespeare and Milton. But Goethe did 
 not use, or, I think, mean to imply, any limitation 
 such as is added by Professor Nichol. Goethe said 
 simply, and he meant to say, ' no poet.' Only 
 the words which follow ^ ought not, I think, to 
 be rendered, 'who is to be compared to him,' 
 that is to say, ' who is his equal as a poet.' They 
 mean rather, ' who may properly be compared with 
 him,' ' who is his parallel.' And when Goethe said 
 that Byron was 'in the main greater' than all 
 the rest of the English poets, he was not so 
 much thinking of the strict rank, as poetry, of 
 Byron's production ; he was thinking of that 
 wonderful personality of Byron which so enters 
 into his poetry, and which Goethe called ' a 
 personality such, for its eminence, as has never 
 been yet, and such as is not likely to come again.' 
 He was thinking of that ' daring, dash, and gran- 
 diosity,' ^ of Byron, which are indeed so splendid ; 
 
 ^ ' Der ihm zu vergleichen ware. ' 
 
 ^ ' Byron's Kiihuheit, Keckheit und Grandiositat, ist das 
 aicht alles bildend ? — AUes Grosse bildet, sobald wir es gewahr 
 werden. ' 
 
184 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 and which were, so Goethe maintained, of a 
 character to do good, because 'everything great 
 is formative,' and what is thus formative does 
 us good. 
 
 The faults which went with this greatness, and 
 which impaired Byron's poetical work, Goethe saw 
 very well. He saw the constant state of warfare 
 and combat, the ' ne gative an dpolemical working ,' 
 which makes Byron's poetry ajoetry jfi which w e 
 can so little fi nd restj he saw the Hang zum Un- 
 hegrenzten, the strain ing after the unlimited, which 
 made it impossible for Byron to produce poetic 
 wholes such as the Tempest or Lear ; he saw the 
 zu viel Empirie, the promiscuous adoption of all 
 the matter offered to the poet by life, just as it was 
 offered, without thought or patience for the mys- 
 terious transmutation to be operated on this matter 
 by poetic form. But in a sentence which I can- 
 not, as I say, remember to have yet seen quoted in 
 any English criticism of Byron, Goethe lays his 
 finger on tbe^c ause of all the3 e_defects in Byrnn» 
 and on his real source of weakness both as a man 
 
VI BYRON 186 
 
 and as a poet. 'The momen t he reflects, he is 
 a child,' j ays Goethe ; — ' sobald er rejiectirt ist er 
 tin Kind! 
 
 Now if we take the two parts of Goethe's 
 criticism of Byron, the favourable and the un- 
 favourable, and put them together, we shall have, 
 I think, the truth. On the one hand, a splendid 
 and puissant personality — a personality ' in emi- 
 nence such as has never been yet, and is not likely 
 to come again' ; of which the like, therefore, is 
 not to be found among the poets of our nation, by 
 which Byron ' is different from all the rest, and 
 in the main greater.' Byron is, moreover, 'the 
 greatest talent of our century.' On the other 
 hand, this splendid personality and unmatched 
 talent, this unique Byron, ' is quite too much in 
 the dark about himself;'^ nay, 'the moment he 
 begins to reflect, he is a child.' There we have, I 
 J jhink, Byron complete; and in estimating him 
 and ranking him we have to strike a balance 
 between the gain which accrues to his poetry, as 
 ' ' Gar zu dunkel iiber sich selbst.' 
 
 -^ 
 
186 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 compared with the productions of other poets, 
 from his superiority, and the loss which accrues to 
 it from his defects. 
 
 A balance of this kind has to be struck in the 
 case of all poets except the few supreme masters 
 in whom a profound criticism of life exhibits itself 
 in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic 
 truth and beauty. I have seen it said that I 
 allege poetry to have for its characteristic this: 
 that it is a criticism of life; and that I make it 
 to be thereby distinguished from prose, which is 
 something else. So far from it, that when I first 
 used this expression, a criticism of life, now many 
 years ago, it was to literature in general that I 
 applied it, and not to poetry in especial. ' The 
 end and aim of all literature,' I said, ' is, if one 
 considers it attentively, nothing but that : a criti- 
 cism of life.' And so it surely is ; the main end 
 and aim of all our utterance, whether in prose or 
 in verse, is surely a criticism of life. We are not 
 brought much on our way, I admit, towards an 
 adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from 
 
n BYRON 187 
 
 prose by that truth ; still a truth it is, and poetry 
 can never prosper if it is forgotten. In poetry, 
 however, the criticism of lif e has to be made con- 
 formably to the laws of poetic truth and poetic 
 beauty. Truth and seriousness of substance and 
 matter, felicity and perfection of diction and man- 
 ner, as these are exhibited in the best poets, are 
 what constitute a criticism of life made in con- 
 formity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic 
 beauty; and it is by knowing and feeling the 
 work of those poets, that we learn to recognise 
 the fulfilment and non-fulfilment of such con- 
 ditions. 
 
 The moment, however, that we leave the small 
 band of the very best poets, the true classics, and 
 deal with poets of the next rank, we shall find that 
 perfect truth and seriousness of matter, in close 
 alliance with perfect truth and felicity of manner, 
 is the rule no longer. We have now to take what 
 we can get, to forego something here, to admit 
 compensation for it there ; to strike a balance, and 
 to see how our poets stand in respect to one another 
 
188 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 when that balance has been struck. Let us ob- 
 serve how this is so. 
 
 We will take three poets, among the most con- 
 siderable of our century : Leopardi, Byron, Words- 
 worth. Giacomo Leopardi was ten years younger 
 than Byron, and he died thirteen years after him ; 
 both of them, therefore, died young — Byron at the 
 age of thirty-six, Leopardi at the age of thirty-nine. 
 Both of them were of noble birth, both of them 
 suffered from physical defect, both of them were 
 in revolt against the established facts and beliefs 
 of their age ; but here the likeness between them 
 ends. The stricken poet of Eecanati had no 
 country, for an Italy in his day did not exist ; he 
 had no audience, no celebrity. The volume of his 
 poems, published in the very year of Byron's 
 death, hardly sold, I suppose, its tens, whUe the 
 volumes of Byron's poetry were selling their tens 
 of thousands. And yet Leopardi has the very 
 qualities which we have found wanting to Byron ; 
 he has the sense for form and style, the passion 
 for just expression, the sure and firm touch of the 
 
VI BYROIS 189 
 
 true artist. Nay, more, he has a grave fulness of 
 knowledge, an insight into the real bearings of the 
 questions which as a sceptical poet he raises, a 
 power of seizing the real point, a lucidity, with 
 which the author of Cain has nothing to compare. 
 I can hardly imagine Leopardi reading the 
 
 ' . . . And tfiou would'st go on aspiring 
 To the great double Mysteries! the two Principles/' 
 
 or following Byron in his theological controversy 
 with Dr. Kennedy, without having his features 
 overspread by a calm and fine smile, and remark- 
 ing of his brilliant contemporary, as Goethe did, 
 that 'the moment he begins to reflect, he is a 
 child.' But indeed whoever wishes to feel the full 
 superiority of Leopardi over Byron in philosophic 
 thought, and in the expression of it, has only to 
 read one paragraph of one poem, the paragraph of 
 La Ginestra, beginning 
 
 * Sovente in queste piagge,' 
 and ending 
 
 ' Non so 86 il riso o la pieti prevale.' 
 
190 ESSAYS m CRITICISM Ti 
 
 In like manner, Leopardi is at many points the 
 poetic superior of Wordsworth too. He has a far 
 wider culture than Wordsworth, more mental 
 lucidity, more freedom from illusions as to the real 
 character of the established fact and of reigning 
 conventions ; above all, this Italian, with his pure 
 and sure touch, with his fineness of perception, is 
 far more of the artist. Such a piece of pompous 
 dulness as 
 
 * for the coming of that glorious time,' 
 
 and aU the rest of it, or such lumbering verse as 
 Mr. Euskin's enemy, 
 
 ' Parching summer hath no warrant ' — 
 
 would have been as impossible to Leopardi as to 
 Dante. Where, then, is Wordsworth's superiority ? 
 for the worth of what he has given us in poetry 
 I hold to be greater, on the whole, than the worth 
 of what Leopardi has given us. It is in Words- 
 worth's sound and profound sense 
 
 * Of joy in widest commonalty spread ;' 
 whereas Leopardi remains with his thoughts ever 
 
VI BYRON 191 
 
 fixed upon the essenza insanabile, upon the acerho, 
 indegno mistero delle cose. It is in the power with 
 which Wordsworth feels the resources of joy 
 offered to us in nature, offered to us in the prim- 
 ary human affections and duties, and in the power 
 with which, in his moments of inspiration, he 
 renders this joy, and makes us, too, feel it ; a force 
 greater than himself seeming: to lift him and to 
 prompt his tongue, so that he speaks in a style 
 far above any style of which he has the constant 
 command, and with a truth far beyond any philo- 
 sophic truth of which he has the conscious and 
 assured possession. Neither Leopardi nor Words- 
 worth are of the same order with the great poets 
 who made such verse as 
 
 TAr;Tov yap Mot/)ai 6vjx6v Oka-av avOpmrouriv 
 
 or as 
 
 ' In la sua volontade e nostra pace ; 
 
 or as 
 
 * . . Men must endure 
 Their going hence, even as their coming hither ; 
 Ripeness is all.' 
 
192 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 But as compared with Leopardi, Wordsworth, 
 though at many points less lucid, though far less 
 a master of style, far less of an artist, gains so 
 much by his criticism of life being, in certain 
 matters of profound importance, healthful and 
 true, whereas Leopardi's pessimism is not, that the 
 value of Wordsworth's poetry, on the whole, stands 
 higher for us than that of Leopardi's, as it stands 
 higher for us, I think, than that of any modern 
 poetry except Goethe's. 
 
 Byron's poetic value is also greater, on the 
 whole, than T^eopardi's ; and his superiority turns 
 in the same way upon the surpassing worth of 
 something which he had and was, after all deduc- 
 tion has been made for his shortcomings. We 
 talk of Byron's personality, ' a personality in emi- 
 nence such as has never been yet, and is not 
 likely to come again ; ' and we say that by this 
 personality Byron is ' different from all the rest of 
 English poets, and in the main greater,' But can 
 we not be a little more circumstantial, and name 
 that in which the wonderful power of this person- 
 
VI BYRON 193 
 
 ality consisted ? We can ; with the instinct of a 
 poet Mr. Swi nburne has seized upon it and named 
 it for us. The power of Byron's personality lies 
 in ' the splendid and imperishable excellence 
 which covers all his offences and outweighs all his 
 defects : the excellence of sincerity and strength.' 
 
 Byron found our nation, after its long and vic- 
 torious struggle with revolutionary France, fixed 
 in a system of established facts and dominant 
 ideas which revolted him. The mental b ondage 
 of the most powerful part of our nation, ^ its 
 strong middle-class, to a narrow and false system 
 of this kind, is what we call British Philistinism. 
 T hat bondage is unbroken to thi s hour, but in 
 Byron's time it was even far more deep and dark 
 than it is now. B jron was an aristocrat, and it is 
 not difficult for an aristocrat to look on the preju- ) ' ) 
 dices and habits of the British Philistine with 
 scepticism_anijiiadaiii — Plenty of young men of 
 his own class Byron met at Almack's or at Lady 
 Jersey's, who regarded the established facts and 
 reigning beliefs of the England of that day with as 
 
194 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 little reverence as he did. But these men, dis- 
 believers in British Philistinism in private, entered 
 English public life, the most conventional in the 
 world, and at once they saluted with respect the 
 habits and ideas of British Philistinism as if they 
 were a part of the order of creation, and as if in 
 public no sane man would think of warring against 
 them. With Byron it was different. What he 
 called the cant of the great middle part of the 
 English nation, what we call its Philistinism, re- 
 volted him ; but the cant of his own class, defer- 
 ring to this Philistinism and profiting by it, while 
 they disbelieved in it, revolted him even more. 
 ' Come what may,' are his own words, ' I will 
 never flatter the million's canting in any shape.' 
 His class in general, on the other hand, shrugged 
 their shoulders at this cant, laughed at it, pandered 
 to it, and ruled by it. The falsehood, cynicism, 
 insolence, misgovemment, oppression, with their 
 consequent unfailing crop of human misery, which 
 were produced by this state of things, roused 
 Byron to irreconcilable revolt and battle. They 
 
vr BYRON 195 
 
 made him indignant, they infuriated him ; they 
 were so strong, so defiant, so maleficent, — and yet 
 he felt that they were doomed. ' You have seen 
 every trampler down in turn,' he comforts himself 
 with saying, ' from Buonaparte to the simplest in- 
 dividuals.' The old order, as after 1815 it stood 
 victorious, with its ignorance and misery below, 
 its cant, selfishness, and cynicism above, was at 
 home and abroad equally hateful to him. ' I have 
 simplified my politics,' he writes, ' into an utter 
 detestation of all existing governments.' And 
 again : ' Give me a republic. The king-times are 
 fast finishing ; there will be blood shed like water 
 and tears like mist, but the peoples wiU conquer 
 in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I fore- 
 see it' 
 
 Byron himself gave the preference, he tells us, 
 to politicians and doers, far above writers and 
 singers. But the politics of his own day and of 
 his own class, — even of the Liberals of his own 
 class, — were impossible for him. Nature had not 
 formed him for a Liberal peer, proper to move the 
 
196 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 Address in the House of Lords, to pay compliments 
 to the energy and self-reliance of British middle- 
 class Liberalism, and to adapt his politics to suit 
 it. Unfitted for such politics, he threw himself 
 upon poetry as his organ ; and in poetry his topics 
 were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of Atlas, and 
 the Sensitive Plant — they were the upholders of 
 the old order, George the Third and Lord Castle- 
 reagh and the Duke of Wellington and Southey, 
 and they were the canters and tramplers of the 
 great world, and they were his enemies and him-^ 
 self 
 
 Such was Byron's personality, by which ' he is 
 different from all the rest of English poets, and in 
 the main greater.' But he posed all his life, says 
 M. Scherer. Let us distinguish. There is the 
 
 Byron who posed, there is the Byron with his 
 - — \ 
 
 affectations and silliness, the Byron whose weak- 
 ness Lady Blessington, with a woman's acuteness, 
 so admirably seized : ' His great defect is flippancy 
 and a total want of self-possession.' But when 
 this theatrical and easily criticised personage be- 
 
 I 
 
^llX>U^rv*-.c<jt, 
 
 Tl BYRON 197 
 
 took himself to poetry, and when he had fairly 
 warmed to his work, then h p. hp.p.amp. a nnt.hp.r 
 man ; then ^ theatrical personage 'passed away ; 
 then a higher power took possession of him and 
 filled him ; then at last came forth into light that 
 \^ true and pui ssant personality, \ with its direct 
 strokes, its ever- welling force, its satire, its energy, 
 and its agony. Thi s is the real Byro n ; whoever 
 stops at the theatrical preludings does not know 
 him. And this real B)rron may well be superior 
 to the stricken Leopardi, he may well be declared 
 * different from all the rest of English poets, and 
 in the main greater,' in so far as it is true of him, 
 as M. Taine weU says, that ' aU other souls, in 
 comparison with his, seem inert ' ; in so far as it 
 is true of him that with superb, exhaustless energy, 
 he maintained, as Professor Nichol well says, ' the 
 struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the 
 soul ;' in so far, finally, as he deserves (and he 
 does deserve) the noble praise of him which I have 
 already quoted from Mr. Swinburne; the praise 
 for ' the splendid and imperishable excellence 
 
198 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 which covers all his offences and outweighs all his 
 defects : the excellence of sincerity and strength' 
 
 True, as a man, Byron could not manage him- 
 self, could not guide his ways aright, but was all 
 astray. True, he has no light, cannot lead us 
 from the past to the future; 'the moment he 
 reflects, he is a child.' The way out of the false 
 state of things which enraged him he did not see, 
 — the slow and laborious way upward ; he had 
 not the patience, knowledge, self-discipline, virtue, 
 requisite for seeing it. True, also, as a poet, he 
 has no fine and exact sense fo r word and structure 
 and rhythm ; he has not the artist's nature and 
 gifts. Yet a personality of Byron's force counts 
 for so much in life, and a rhetorician of Byron's 
 force counts for so much in literature! But it 
 would be most unjust to label Byron, as M. 
 Scherer is disposed to label him, as a rhetorician 
 only. Along with his asto unding power an d 
 passion he had a strong and deep sense for what is 
 beautiful in nature, and for what is beautiful in 
 human action and suffering. When he warms to 
 
vt BYRON 199 
 
 his work, when he is inspired, Nature herself 
 seems to take the pen from him as she took it 
 from Wordsw orth, and to write for him as she 
 wrote for Wordsworth, though in a different 
 fashion, with her own penetrating simplicity. 
 Goethe has well observed of Bjrron, that when he 
 is at his happiest his representation of things is 
 as easy and real as if he were improvising. It is 
 so ; and his verse then exhibits quite another and 
 a higher quality from the rhetorical quality, — 
 admirable as this also in its own kind of merit is, 
 — of such verse as 
 
 ' Minions of splendour shrinking from distress,' 
 
 and of so much more verse of Byron's of that 
 stamp. Nature, I say, takes the pen for him; 
 and then, assured_-m astftr of-a-tnifi. poetic stvl e 
 though he is not, any more than Wordsworth, yet 
 as from Wordsworth at his best there will come 
 such verse as 
 
 'Will no one tell me what she sings ? ' 
 
 so from Byron, too, at his best, there will come 
 
200 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vi 
 
 such verse as 
 
 * He heard it, hut he heeded not ; his eyes 
 Were with his heart, and that was far away.' 
 
 Of verse of this high quality, Byron has much ; 
 of verse of a quality lower than this, of a quality 
 rather rhetorical than truly poetic, yet still of 
 extraordinary power and merit, he has still more. 
 To separate, from the mass of poetry which Byron 
 poured forth, all this higher portion, so superior 
 to the mass, and still so considerable in quantity, 
 and to present it in one body by itself, is to do a 
 service, I believe, to Byron's reputation, and to 
 the poetic glory of our country. 
 
 Such a service I have in the present volume 
 attempted to perform. To Byron, after all the 
 tributes which have been paid to him, here is yet 
 one tribute more — 
 
 ' Among thy mightier offerings here are mine ! ' 
 
 not a tribute of boundless homage certainly, but 
 sincere ; a tribute which consists not in coverino 
 the poet with eloquent eulogy of our own, but in 
 
VI BYRON 201 
 
 letting him, at his best and greatest, speak for 
 himself. Surely the critic who does most for 
 his author is the critic who gains readers for 
 his author himself, not for any lucubrations on 
 his author ; — gains more readers for him, and 
 enables those readers to read him with more 
 admiration. 
 
 And in spite of his prodigious vogue, Byron 
 has never yet, perhaps, had the serious admira- 
 tion which he deserves. Society read him and 
 talked about him, as it reads and talks about 
 Endymion to-day ; and with the same sort of 
 result. It looked in Byron's glass as it looks in 
 Lord Beaconsfield's, and sees, or fancies that it 
 sees, its own face there ; and then it goes its way, 
 and straightway forgets what manner of man it 
 saw. Even of his passionate admirers, how many 
 neve r got bevond the theatrical Byron, f rom whom 
 they caught the ffls ^iinn nf deranging_ their hg ir, or 
 of knotting their neck-handke rghigt or of leaving 
 th eir shirt-collar unbuttoned ; how few profoundly 
 felt his vital influence, the influence of his splen- 
 
202 
 
 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 VI 
 
 4 
 
 did and imperishable excellence of sincerity and 
 strength ! 
 
 His own aristocratic class, whose cynical make- 
 believe drove him to fury ; the great middle-class, 
 on whose impregnable Philistinism he shattered 
 himself to pieces, — how little have either of these 
 felt Byron's vital influence! As the inevitable 
 break-up of the old order comes, as the English 
 middle-class slowly awakens from its intellectua l 
 sleep of two cen turies, as our actual present world, 
 to which this sleep has condemned us, shows itself 
 more clearly, — our world of an aristocracy materi- 
 alised and null, a middle -class purblind and 
 hideous, a lower class crude and brutal, — we shal 
 turn our eyes again, and to more purpose, upon 
 this passionate and dauntless_soldie r of a forlorn 
 hope, who, ignorant of the future and unconsoled 
 by its promises, nevertheless waged against the 
 conservation of the old impossible world so fiery 
 battle ; waged it till he fell, — waged it with such 
 splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity 
 and strength. 
 
VI BYRON 203 
 
 Wordsworth's value is of another kind. Words- 
 worth has an insight into permanent sources of 
 joy and consolation for mankind which Byron 
 has not ; his poetry gives us more which we may 
 rest upon than Byron's, — more which we can 
 rest upon now, and which men may rest upon 
 always. I place Wordsworth's poetry, therefore, 
 above Byron's on the whole, although in some 
 points he was greatly Byron's inferior, and al- 
 though Byron's poetry will always, probably, find 
 more readers than Wordsworth's, and will give 
 pleasure more easily. But these two, Wordsworth 
 and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and pre- 
 eminent in actual performance, a glorious pair, 
 among the English poets of this centur}', Keats 
 had probably, indeed, a more consummate poetic 
 gift than either of them ; but he died having pro- 
 duced too little and being as yet too immature to 
 rival them. I for my part can never even think 
 of equalling with them any other of their contem- 
 poraries ; — either Coleridge, poet and philosopher 
 wrecked in a mist of opium ; or Shelley, beautiful 
 
204 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Vl 
 
 and ineffectual angel, beatingin the void his 
 luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron 
 stand out by themselves. When the year 1900 is 
 turned, and our nation comes to recount her poetic 
 glories in the century which has then just ended, 
 the first names with her will be theset 
 
SHELLEY^ 
 
 Nowadays all things appear in print sooner or 
 later; but I have heard from a lady who knew 
 Mrs. SheUey a story of her which, so far as I 
 know, has not appeared in print hitherto. Mrs, 
 Shelley was choosing a school for her son, and 
 asked the advice of this lady, who gave for advice 
 — to use her own words to me — ' Just the sort of 
 banality, you know, one does come out with : Oh, 
 send him somewhere where they will teach him to 
 think for himself!' I have had far too long a 
 training as a school inspector to presume to call 
 an utterance of this kind a hanality ; however, it 
 is not on this advice that I now wish to lay stress, 
 
 • Published in The Nineteenth Cemtwry, January 1888. 
 
206 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vri 
 
 but upon Mrs. Shelley's reply to it. Mrs. Shelley 
 answered : ' Teach him to think for himself? Oh, 
 my God, teach him rather to think like other 
 people ! ' 
 
 To the lips of many and many a reader of Pro- 
 fessor Dowden's volumes a cry of this sort will 
 surely rise, called forth by Shelley's life as there 
 delineated. I have read those volumes with the 
 deepest interest, but I regret their publication, and 
 am surprised, I confess, that Shelley's family 
 should have desired or assisted it. For my own 
 part, at any rate, I would gladly have been left 
 with the impression, the ineffaceable impression, 
 made upon me by Mrs. Shelley's first edition of 
 her husband's collected poems. Medwin and 
 Hogg and Trelawny had done little to change the 
 impression made by those four delightful volumes 
 of the original edition of 1839. The text of the 
 poems has in some places been mended since ; but 
 Shelley is not a classic, whose various readings are 
 to be noted with earnest attention. The charm of 
 the poems flowed in upon us from that edition 
 
VII SHELLEY 207 
 
 and the charm of the character. Mrs. Shelley had 
 done her work admirably; her introductions to 
 the poems of each year, with Shelley's prefaces 
 and passages from his letters, supplied the very 
 picture of Shelley to be desired. Somewhat 
 idealised by tender regret and exalted memory 
 Mrs. Shelley's representation no doubt was. But 
 without sharing her conviction that Shelley's char- 
 acter, impartially judged, ' would stand in fairer 
 and brighter light than that of any contemporary,' 
 we learned from her to know the soul of affection, 
 of ' gentle and cordial goodness,' of eagerness and 
 ardour for human happiness, which was in this 
 rare spirit — so mere a monster unto many. Mrs. 
 Shelley said in her general preface to her hus- 
 band's poems : ' I abstain from any remark on the 
 occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as 
 the passions which they engendered inspired his 
 poetry; this is not the time to relate the truth.' I 
 for my part could wish, I repeat, that that time 
 had never come. 
 
 But come it has. and Professor Dowden has given 
 
208 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 US the Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley in two very thick 
 volumes. If the work was to be done, Professor 
 Dowden has indeed done it thoroughly. One or 
 two things in his biography of Shelley I could wish 
 different, even waiving the question whether it was 
 desirable to relate in full the occurrences of Shel- 
 ley's private life. Professor Dowden holds a brief 
 for Shelley ; he pleads for Shelley as an advocate 
 pleads for his client, and this strain of pleading, 
 united with an attitude of adoration which in Mrs. 
 SheUey had its charm, but which Professor Dow- 
 den was not bound to adopt from her, is unservice- 
 able to SheUey, nay, injurious to him, because it 
 inevitably begets, in many readers of the story 
 which Professor Dowden has to tell, impatience 
 and revolt. Further, let me remark that the 
 biography before us is of prodigious length, 
 although its hero died before he was thirty years 
 old, and that it might have been considerably 
 shortened if it had been more plainly and simply 
 written. I see that one of Professor Dowden's 
 critics, while praising his style for ' a certain poetic 
 
vn SHELLEY 209 
 
 quality of fervour and picturesqueness,' laments 
 that in some important passages Professor Dow- 
 den ' fritters away great opportunities for sustained 
 and impassioned narrative.' I am inclined much 
 rather to lament that Professor Dowden has not 
 steadily kept his poetic quality of fervour and 
 picturesqueness more under control. Is it that 
 the Home Eulers have so loaded the language that 
 even an Irishman who is not one of them catches 
 something of their full hahit of style ? No, it is 
 rather, I believe, that Professor Dowden, of poetic 
 nature himself, and dealing with a poetic nature 
 like Shelley, is so steeped in sentiment by his 
 subject that in almost every page of the biography 
 the sentiment runs over. A curious note of his 
 style, suffused with sentiment, is that it seems 
 incapable of using the common word child. A 
 great many births are mentioned in the biography, 
 but always it is a poetic hahe that is born, not 
 a prosaic child. And so, again, Andr^ Ch^nier 
 is not guillotined, but ' too foully done to death.' 
 Again, Shelley after his runaway marriage with 
 
210 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 Harriet Westbrook was in Edinburgh without 
 money and full of anxieties for the future, and 
 complained of his hard lot in being unable to get 
 away, in being * chained to the filth and commerce 
 of Edinburgh.' Natural enough ; but why should 
 Professor Dowden improve the occasion as follows? 
 ' The most romantic of northern cities could lay no 
 spell upon his spirit. His eye was not fascinated 
 by the presences of mountains and the sea, by the 
 fantastic outlines of aerial piles seen amid the 
 wreathing smoke of Auld Eeekie, by the gloom of 
 the Canongate illuminated with shafts of sunlight 
 streaming from its interesting wynds and alleys ; 
 nor was his imagination kindled by storied house 
 or palace, and the voices of old, forgotten, far-off 
 things, which haunt their walls.' If Professor Dow- 
 den, writing a book in prose, could have brought 
 himself to eschew poetic excursions of this kind and 
 to tell his story in a plain way, lovers of simplicity 
 of whom there are some still left in the world, would 
 have been gratified, and at the same time his book 
 would have been the shorter by scores of pages. 
 
vii SHELLEY 211 
 
 These reserves being made, I have little except 
 praise for the manner in which Professor Dowden 
 has performed his task ; whether it was a task 
 which ought to be performed at all, probably did 
 not lie with him to decide. His ample materials 
 are used with order and judgment ; the history of 
 Shelley's life develops itself clearly before our 
 eyes ; the documents of importance for it are 
 given with sufficient fulness, nothing essential 
 seems to have been kept back, although I would 
 gladly, I confess, have seen more of Miss Clair- 
 mont's journal, whatever arrangement she may in 
 her later life have chosen to exercise upon it. 
 In general all documents are so fairly and fully 
 cited, that Professor Dowden's pleadings for 
 Shelley, though they may sometimes indispose 
 and irritate the reader, produce no obscuring of 
 the truth ; the documents manifest it of them- 
 selves. Last but not least of Professor Dowden's 
 merits, he has provided his book with an excellent 
 index. 
 
 Undoubtedly this biography, with its fuU 
 
212 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM \u 
 
 account of the occurrences of Shelley's private 
 life, compels one to review one's former impres- 
 sion of him. Undoubtedly the brilliant and 
 attaching rebel who in thinking for himself had 
 of old our sympathy so passionately with him, 
 when we come to read his full biography makes 
 us often and often inclined to cry out : ' My God ! 
 he had far better have thought like other people.' 
 There is a passage in Hogg's capitally written and 
 most interesting account of Shelley which I wrote 
 down when I first read it and have borne in mind 
 ever since ; so beautifully it seemed to render the 
 true Shelley. Hogg has been speaking of the in- 
 tellectual expression of Shelley's features, and he 
 goes on : ' Nor was the moral expression less 
 beautiful than the intellectual ; for there was a 
 softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially 
 (though this will surprise many) that air of pro- 
 found religious veneration that characterises the 
 best works and chiefly the frescoes (and into these 
 they infused their whole souls) of the great masters 
 of Florence and of Eome.' What we have of 
 
VII SHELLEY 218 
 
 Shelley in poetry and prose suited with this 
 charming picture of him; Mrs. Shelley's account 
 suited with it; it was a possession which one 
 would gladly have kept unimpaired. It still 
 subsists, I must now add ; it subsists even after 
 one has read the present biography ; it subsists, 
 but so as by fire. It subsists with many a scar 
 and stain ; never again wiU it have the same 
 pureness and beauty which it had formerly. I 
 regret this, as I have said, and I confess I do not 
 see what has been gained. Our ideal Shelley was 
 the true Shelley after all ; what has been gained 
 by making us at moments doubt it ? What has 
 been gained by forcing upon us much in him 
 which is ridiculous and odious, by compelling any 
 fair mind, if it is to retain with a good conscience 
 its ideal Shelley, to do that which I propose to do 
 now ? I propose to mark firmly what is ridiculous 
 and odious in the Shelley brought to our know- 
 ledge by the new materials, and then to show that 
 our former beautiful and lovable Shelley neverthe- 
 less survives. 
 
214 ESSAYS m CRITICISM vii 
 
 Almost everybody knows the main outline of 
 the events of Shelley's life. It will be necessary 
 for me, however, up to the date of his second 
 marriage, to go through them here. Percy Bysshe 
 Shelley was bom at Field Place, near Horsham, in 
 Sussex, on the 4th of August 1792. He was of 
 an old family of country gentlemen, and the heir 
 to a baronetcy. He had one brother and five 
 sisters, but the brother so much younger than 
 himself as to be no companion for him in his boy- 
 hood at home, and after he was separated from 
 home and England he never saw him. Shelley 
 was brought up at Field Place with his sisters. 
 At ten years old he was sent to a private school at 
 Isleworth, where he read Mrs. Eadclifife's romances 
 and was fascinated by a popular scientific lecturer. 
 After two years of private school he went in 1804 
 to Eton. Here he took no part in cricket or foot- 
 ball, refused to fag, was known as ' mad Shelley ' 
 and much tormented ; when tormented beyond 
 endurance he could be dangerous. Certainly he 
 was not happy at Eton ; but he had friends, he 
 
VII SHELLEY 216 
 
 boated, he rambled about the country. His school 
 lessons were easy to him, and his reading extended 
 far beyond them ; he read books on chemistry, he 
 read Pliny's Natural History, Godwin's Folitical 
 Justice, Lucretius, Franklin, Condorcet. It is said 
 he was called ' atheist Shelley ' at Eton, but this is 
 not so well established as his having been called 
 ' mad Shelley.' He was full, at any rate, of new 
 and revolutionary ideas, and he declared at a 
 later time that he was twice expelled from the 
 school but recalled through the interference of his 
 father. 
 
 In the spring of 1810 Shelley, now in his 
 eighteenth year, entered University College, Ox- 
 ford, as an exhibitioner. He had already written 
 novels and poems ; a poem on the Wandering 
 Jew, in seven or eight cantos, he sent to Campbell, 
 and was told by Campbell that there were but two 
 good lines in it. He had solicited the correspond- 
 ence of Mrs. Hemans, then Felicia Browne and 
 unmarried ; he had fallen in love with a charming 
 cousin, Harriet Grove. In the autumn of 1810 he 
 
216 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vn 
 
 found a publisher for his verse ; he also found a 
 friend in a very clever and free-minded commoner 
 of his college, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who has 
 admirably described the Shelley of those Oxford 
 days, with his chemistry, his eccentric habits, hia 
 charm of look and character, his conversation, his 
 shrill discordant voice. Shelley read incessantly. 
 Hume's Essays produced a powerful impression on 
 him; his free speculation led him to what his 
 father, and worse still his cousin Harriet, thought 
 ' detestable principles ' ; his cousin and his family 
 became estranged from him. He, on his part, 
 became more and more incensed against the 
 * bigotry ' and ' intolerance ' which produced such 
 estrangement. ' Here I swear, and as I break my 
 oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me — here I 
 swear that never will I forgive intolerance.' At 
 the beginning of 1811 he prepared and published 
 what he called a ' leaflet for letters,' having for its 
 title The Necessity of Atheism. He sent copies to 
 all the bishops, to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, 
 and to the heads of houses. On Lady Day he was 
 
vn SHELLEY 217 
 
 summoned before the authorities of his College, 
 refused to answer the question whether he had 
 written The Necessity of Atheism, told the Master 
 and Fellows that ' their proceedings would become 
 a court of inquisitors but not free men in a free 
 country,' and was expelled for contumacy. Hogg 
 wrote a letter of remonstrance to the authorities, 
 was in his turn summoned before them and ques- 
 tioned as to his share in the ' leaflet,' and, refusing 
 to answer, he also was expelled. 
 
 Shelley settled with Hogg in lodgings in Lon- 
 don. His father, excusably indignant, was not a 
 wise man and managed his son ill. His plan of 
 recommending Shelley to read Paley's Natural 
 Theology, and of reading it with him himself, makes 
 us smile. Shelley, who about this time wrote of 
 his younger sister, then at school at Clapham, 
 ' There are some hopes of this dear little girl, she 
 would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I 
 could get hold of her,' was not to have been cured 
 by Paley's Natural Theology administered through 
 Mr. Timothy Shelley. But by the middle of May 
 
218 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 Shelley's father had agreed to allow him two 
 hundred pounds a year. Meanwhile in visiting his 
 sisters at their school in Clapham, SheUey made 
 the acquaintance of a schoolfellow of theirs, Harriet 
 Westbrook. She was a beautiful and lively girl, 
 with a father who had kept a tavern in Mount 
 Street, but had now retired from business, and one 
 sister much older than herself, who encouraged in 
 every possible way the acquaintance of her sister 
 of sixteen with the heir to a baronetcy and a great 
 estate. Soon Shelley heard that Harriet met with 
 cold looks at her school for associating with an 
 atheist ; his generosity and his ready indignation 
 against ' intolerance ' were roused. In the summer 
 Harriet wrote to him that she was persecuted not 
 at school only but at home also, that she was lonely 
 and miserable, and would gladly put an end to her 
 life. Shelley went to see her ; she owned her love 
 for him, and he engaged himself to her. He told 
 his cousin Charles Grove that his happiness had 
 been blighted when the other Harriet, Charles's 
 sister, cast him off ; that now the only thing worth 
 
VII SHELLEY 219 
 
 living for was self-sacrifice. Harriet's persecutors 
 became yet more troublesome, and Shelley, at the 
 end of August, went off with her to Edinburgh and 
 they were married. The entry in the register is 
 this : — 
 
 ^August 28, 1811. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, fanner, 
 Sussex, and Miss Harriet Westbrook, St. Andrew 
 Church Parish, daughter of Mr. John Westbrook, 
 London.' 
 
 After five weeks in Edinburgh the young farmer 
 and his wife came southwards and took lodgings at 
 York, under the shadow of what Shelley calls 
 that 'gigantic pile of superstition,' the Minster. 
 But his friend Hogg was in a lawyer's office in York, 
 and Hogg's society made the Minster endurable. 
 Mr. Timothy Shelley's happiness in his son was 
 naturally not increased by the runaway marriage ; 
 he stopped his allowance, and Shelley determined 
 to visit ' this thoughtless man,' as he calls his 
 parent, and to ' try the force of truth ' upon him. 
 Nothing could be effected : Shelley's mother, too, 
 was now against him. He returned to York to 
 
220 ESSAYS IN CKITICISM vn 
 
 find that in his absence his friend Hogg had been 
 making love to Harriet, who had indignantly re- 
 pulsed him. SheUey was shocked, but after a 
 ' terrible day ' of explanation from Hogg, he ' fully, 
 freely pardoned him,' promised to retain hiTn still 
 as 'his friend, his bosom friend,' and 'hoped soon to 
 convince him how lovely virtue was.' But for the 
 present it seemed better to separate. In Novem- 
 ber he and Harriet, with her sister Eliza, took a 
 cottage at Keswick. Shelley was now in great 
 straits for money ; the great Sussex neighbour of 
 the Shelley's, the Duke of Norfolk, interposed in 
 his favour, and his father and grandfather seem to 
 have offered him at this time an income of £2000 
 a year, if he would consent to entail the family 
 estate. Shelley indignantly refused to ' forswear 
 his principles,' by accepting 'a proposal so in- 
 sultingly hateful.' But in December his father 
 agreed, though with an iU grace, to grant him 
 his allowance of £200 a year again, and Mr. 
 Westbrook promised to allow a like sum to his 
 daughter. So after four months of marriage the 
 
vn SHELLEY 22] 
 
 Shelleys began 1812 with an income of £400 
 a year. 
 
 Early in February they left Keswick and pro- 
 ceeded to Dublin, where Shelley, who had prepared 
 an address to the Catholics, meant to ' devote him- 
 self towards forwarding the great ends of virtue 
 and happiness in Ireland.' Before leaving Kes- 
 wick he wrote to William Godwin, ' the regulator 
 and former of his mind,' making profession of his 
 mental obligations to him, of his respect and 
 veneration, and soliciting Godwin's friendship. 
 A correspondence followed ; Godwin pronounced 
 his young disciple's plans for ' disseminating the 
 doctrines of philanthropy and freedom ' in Ireland 
 to be unwise; Shelley bowed to his mentor's 
 decision and gave up his Irish campaign, quitting 
 Dublin on the 4th of April 1812. He and 
 Harriet wandered first to Nant-Gwillt in South 
 Wales, near the upper Wye, and from thence after 
 a month or two to Lynmouth in North Devon, 
 where he busied himself with his poem of Queen 
 Mob, and with sending to sea boxes and bottles 
 
222 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ni 
 
 containing a Declaration of Rights by him, in the 
 hope that the winds and waves might carry hia 
 doctrines where they would do good. But his 
 Irish servant, bearing the prophetic name of Healy, 
 posted the Declaration on the walls of Barnstaple 
 and was taken up ; Shelley found himself watched 
 and no longer able to enjoy Lynmouth in peace. 
 He moved in September 1812 to Tremadoc, in 
 North Wales, where he threw himself ardently 
 into an enterprise for recovering a great stretch of 
 drowned land, from the sea. But at the beginning 
 of October he and Harriet visited London, and 
 Shelley grasped Godwin by the hand at last. At 
 once an intimacy arose, but the future Mary 
 Shelley — Godwin's daughter by his first wife, 
 Mary WoUstonecraft — was absent on a visit in 
 Scotland when the Shelleys arrived in London. 
 They became acquainted, however, with the second 
 Mrs. Godwin, on whom we have Charles Lamb's 
 friendly comment : ' A very disgusting woman, and 
 wears green spectacles ! ' with the amiable Fanny, 
 Mary WoUstonecraft's daughter by Imlay, before 
 
viT SHELLEY 223 
 
 her marriage with Godwin ; and probably also 
 with Jane Clairmont, the second Mrs. Godwin's 
 daughter by a first marriage, and herself, after- 
 wards the mother of Byron's Allegra. Complicated 
 relationships, as in the Theban story ! and there 
 will be not wanting, presently, something of the 
 Theban horrors. During this visit of six weeks to 
 London Shelley renewed his intimacy with Hogg ; 
 in the middle of November he returned to Trema- 
 doc. There he remained until the end of February 
 1813, perfectly happy with Harriet, reading widely, 
 and working at his Queen Mah and at the notes to 
 that poem. On the 26th of February an attempt 
 was made, or so he fancied, to assassinate him, 
 and in high nervous excitement he hurriedly left 
 Tremadoc and repaired with Harriet to Dublin 
 again. On this visit to Ireland he saw Killarney, 
 but early in April he and Harriet were back again 
 in London. 
 
 There in June 1813 their daughter lanthe was 
 born ; at the end of July they moved to Bracknell, 
 in Berkshire. They had for neighbours there a 
 
224 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vli 
 
 Mrs. Boinville and her married daughter, whom 
 Shelley found to be fascinating women, with a 
 culture which to his wife was altogether wanting. 
 Cornelia Turner, Mrs. Boinville's daughter, was 
 melancholy, required consolation, and found it, 
 Hogg tells us, in Petrarch's poetry ; ' Bysshe 
 entered at once fully into her views and caught 
 the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and 
 sweetest melancholy as every true poet ought' 
 Peacock, a man of keen and cultivated mind, 
 joined the circle at Bracknell. He and Harriet, 
 not yet eighteen, used sometimes to laugh at the 
 gushing sentiment and enthusiasm of the Brack- 
 nell circle; Harriet had also given offence to 
 Shelley by getting a wet-nurse for her child ; in 
 Professor Dowden's words, ' the beauty of Harriet's 
 motherly relation to her babe was marred in 
 Shelley's eyes by the introduction into his home 
 of a hireling nurse to whom was delegated the 
 mother's tenderest office.' But in September 
 Shelley wrote a sonnet to his child which expresses 
 his deep love for the mother also, to whom in 
 
VII SHELLEY 225 
 
 March 1814 he was remarried in London, lest the 
 Scotch marriage should prove to have been in any 
 point irregular. Harriet's sister Eliza, however, 
 whom Shelley had at first treated with excessive 
 deference, had now become hateful to him. And 
 in the very month of the London marriage we find 
 him writing to Hogg that he is staying with the 
 Boinvilles, having ' escaped, in the society of all 
 that philosophy and friendship combine, from the 
 dismaying solitude of myself Cornelia Turner, 
 he adds, whom he once thought cold and reserved, 
 ' is the reverse of this, a,s she is the reverse of 
 everything bad ; she inherits all the divinity of 
 her mother. Then comes a stanza, beginning 
 
 * Thy dewy looks sink in my breast, 
 Thy gentle words stir poison there.' 
 
 It has no meaning, he says ; it is only written 
 in thought. 'It is evident from this pathetic 
 letter,' says Professor Dowden, 'that Shelley's 
 happiness in his home had been fatally stricken.' 
 This is a curious way of putting the matter. To 
 
226 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 me what is evident is rather that Shelley had, to 
 use Professor Dowden's words again — for in these 
 things of high sentiment I gladly let him speak for 
 me — ' a too vivid sense that here (in the society 
 of the BoinviUe family) were peace and joy and 
 gentleness and love.' In April come some more 
 verses to the Boinvilles, wnich contain the first good 
 stanza that Shelley wrote. In May comes a poem 
 to Harriet, of which Professor Dowden's prose 
 analysis is as poetic as the poem itself. ' If she 
 has something to endure (from the BoinviUe attach- 
 ment), it is not much, and all her husband's 
 weal hangs upon her loving endurance, for see how 
 pale and wildered anguish has made him !' Harriet, 
 unconvinced, seems to have gone off to Bath in 
 resentment, from whence, however, she kept up 
 a constant correspondence with SheUey, who was 
 now of age, and busy in London raising money on 
 post-obit bonds for his own wants and those of the 
 friend and former of his mind, Godwin. 
 
 And now, indeed, it was to become true that if 
 from the inflammable Shelley's devotion to the 
 
VII SHELLEY 22? 
 
 Boinville family poor Harriet had had ' something 
 to endure,' yet this was ' not much ' compared with 
 what was to follow. At Godwin's house Shelley 
 met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, his future wife, 
 then in her seventeenth year. She was a gifted 
 person, but, as Professor Dowden says, she ' had 
 breathed during her entire life an atmosphere of 
 free thought' On the 8th of June Hogg called at 
 Godwin's with Shelley ; Godwin was out, but ' a 
 door was partially and softly opened, a thrilling 
 voice called " Shelley ! " a thrilling voice answered 
 " Mary ! " ' Shelley's summoner was ' a very young 
 female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with 
 a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan.' Already 
 they were 'Shelley' and 'Mary' to one another; 
 ' before the close of June they knew and felt,' says 
 Professor Dowden, ' that each was to the other in- 
 expressibly dear.' The churchyard of St. Pancras, 
 where her mother was buried, became 'a place 
 now doubly sacred to Mary, since on one eventful 
 day Bysshe here poured forth his griefs, his hopes, 
 his love, and she, in sign of everlasting union, 
 
228 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 placed her hand in his.' In July Shelley gave 
 her a copy of Qiieen Mob, printed but not published, 
 and under the tender dedication to Harriet he 
 wrote : ' Count Slobendorf was about to marry a 
 woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved 
 her selfishness by deserting him in prison.' Mary 
 added an inscription on her part: *I love the 
 author beyond all powers of expression ... by 
 that love we have promised to each other, although 
 I may not be yours I can never be another's,' — and 
 a good deal more to the same effect. 
 
 Amid these excitements Shelley was for some 
 days without writing to Harriet, who applied to 
 Hookham the publisher to know what had hap- 
 pened. She was expecting her confinement ; ' 1 
 always fancy something dreadful has happened,' 
 she wrote, 'if I do not hear from him ... I cannot 
 endure this dreadful state of suspense.' Shelley 
 then wrote to her, begging her to come to London ; 
 and when she arrived there, he told her the state 
 of his feelings, and proposed separation. The 
 shock made Harriet ill ; and Shelley, says Peacock, 
 
ra SHELLEY 228 
 
 ' between his old feelings towards Harriet, and his 
 new passion for Mary, showed in his looks, in his 
 gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind " suffer- 
 ing, like a little kingdom, the nature of an in- 
 surrection.'" Godwin grew uneasy about his 
 daughter, and after a serious talk with her, wrote 
 to Shelley. Under such circumstances, Professor 
 Dowden teUs us, 'to youth, swift and decisive 
 measures seem the best.' In the early morning of 
 the 28th of July 1814 ' Mary Godwin stepped 
 across her father's threshold into the summer air,' 
 she and Shelley went off together in a post-chaise 
 to Dover, and from thence crossed to the Con- 
 tinent. 
 
 On the 14th of August the fugitives were at 
 Troyes on their way to Switzerland. From Troyes 
 Shelley addressed a letter to Harriet, of which the 
 best description I can give is that it is precisely 
 the letter which a man in the writer's circum- 
 stances should not have written. 
 
 • My dearest Harriet (he begins). — I write to 
 you from this detestable town ; I write to show that 
 
280 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 I do not forget you ; I write to urge you to come to 
 Switzerland, where you will at last find one firm and 
 constant friend to whom your interests will be always 
 dear — by whom your feelings will never wilfully be 
 injured. From none can you expect this but me — 
 all else are either unfeeling or selfish, or have be- 
 loved friends of their own.' 
 
 Then follows a description of his journey with 
 Mary from Paris, ' through a fertile country, 
 neither interesting from the character of its in- 
 habitants nor the beauty of the scenery, with a 
 mule to carry our baggage, as Mary, who has not 
 been sufficiently well to walk, fears the fatigue of 
 walking.' Like St. Paul to Timothy, he ends 
 with commissions : — 
 
 * I wish you to bring with you the two deeds 
 which Tahourdin has to prepare for you, as also a 
 copy of the settlement Do not part with any of 
 your money. But what shall be done about the 
 books ? You can consult on the spot. With love 
 to my sweet little lanthe, ever most afifectionately 
 yours, S. 
 
 * I write in great haste ; we depart directly.' 
 
 Professor Dowden's flow of sentiment is here 
 80 agitating, that I relieve myself by resorting to 
 
VII SHELLEY 281 
 
 a drier world. Certainly my comment on this 
 letter shall not be his, that it ' assures Harriet 
 that her interests were still dear to Shelley, though 
 now their lives had moved apart.' But neither 
 will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous 
 letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslat- 
 able French word, a Mte letter. And it is Mte 
 from what is the signal, the disastrous want and 
 weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual 
 gifts — his utter deficiency in humour. 
 
 Harriet did not accept Shelley's invitation to 
 join him and Mary in Switzerland. Money dif- 
 ficulties drove the travellers back to England in 
 September. Godwin would not see Shelley, but he 
 sorely needed, continually demanded and eagerly 
 accepted, pecuniary help from his erring * spiritual 
 son.' Between Godwin's wants and his own, Shel- 
 ley was hard pressed. He got from Harriet, who 
 still believed that he would return to her, twenty 
 pounds which remained in her hands. In Novem- 
 ber she was confined ; a son and heir was born to 
 Shelley. He went to see Harriet, but ' the interview 
 
232 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vn 
 
 left husband and wife each embittered against the 
 other.' Friends were severe; 'when Mrs. Boinville 
 wrote, her letter seemed cold and even sarcastic,' 
 says Professor Dowden. ' Solitude,' he continues, 
 ' unharassed by debts and duns, with Mary's com- 
 panionship, the society of a few friends, and the 
 delights of study and authorship, would have made 
 these winter months to Shelley months of unusual 
 happiness and calm.' But, alas ! creditors were 
 pestering, and even Harriet gave trouble. In 
 January 1815 Mary had to write in her journal 
 this entry: ' Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty 
 woman. Now we must change our lodgings.' 
 
 One day about this time Shelley asked Pea- 
 cock, 'Do you think Wordsworth could have 
 written such poetry if he ever had dealings with 
 money-lenders ? ' Not only had Shelley dealings 
 with money-lenders, he now had dealings with 
 bailiffs also. But still he continued to read largely. 
 In January 1815 his grandfather, Sir Bysshe 
 Shelley, died. Shelley went down into Sussex; 
 his father would not suffer him to enter the house, 
 
VII SHELLEY 233 
 
 but he sat outside the door and read Comus, while 
 the reading of his grandfather's will went on in- 
 side. In February was born Mary's first child, a 
 girl, who lived but a few days. All the spring 
 Shelley was ill and harassed, but by June it was 
 settled that he should have an allowance from his 
 father of £1000 a year, and that his debts (includ- 
 ing £1200 promised by him to Godwin) should be 
 paid. He on his part paid Harriet's debts and 
 allowed her £200 a year. In August he took a 
 house on the borders of Windsor Park, and made 
 a boating excursion up the Thames as far as Lech- 
 lade, an excursion which produced his first entire 
 poem of value, the beautiful Stanzas in Lechlade 
 Churchyard. They were followed, later in the 
 autumn, by Alastor. Henceforth, from this winter 
 of 1815 until he was drowned between Leghorn and 
 Spezzia in July 1822, Shelley's literary history is 
 sufficiently given in the delightful introductions 
 prefixed by Mrs. Shelley to the poems of each year. 
 Much of the history of his life is there given also ; 
 but with some of those ' occurrences of his private 
 
234 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 life ' on which Mrs. Shelley forbore to touch, and 
 which are now made known tj us in Professor 
 Dowden's book, we have still to deal. 
 
 Mary's first son, William, was bom in January 
 1816, and in February we find Shelley declaring 
 himself ' strongly urged, by the perpetual experi- 
 ence of neglect or enmity from almost every one 
 but those who are supported by my resources, to 
 desert my native country, hiding myself and Mary 
 from the contempt which we so unjustly endure.' 
 Early in May he left England with Mary and 
 Miss Clairmont ; they met Lord Byron at Geneva 
 and passed the summer by the Lake of Geneva 
 in his company. Miss Clairmont had already in 
 London, without the knowledge of the Shelleys, 
 made Byron's acquaintance and become his mis- 
 tress. Shelley determined, in the course of the 
 summer, to go back to England, and, after all, ' to 
 make that most excellent of nations my perpetual 
 resting-place.' In September he and his ladies 
 returned ; Miss Clairmont was then expecting her 
 confinement. Of her being Byron's mistress the 
 
VII SHELLEY 235 
 
 Shelleys were now aware ; but ' the moral indig- 
 nation,' says Professor Dowden, 'which Byron's 
 act might justly arouse, seems to have been felt by 
 neither Shelley nor Mary.' If Byron and Claire 
 Clairmont, as she was now called, loved and were 
 happy, all was well. 
 
 The eldest daughter of the Godwin household, 
 the amiable Fanny, was unhappy at home and in 
 deep dejection of spirits. Godwin was, as usual, 
 in terrible straits for money. The Shelleys and 
 Miss Clairmont settled themselves at Bath ; early 
 in October Fanny Godwin passed through Bath 
 without their knowing it, travelled on to Swansea, 
 took a bedroom at the hotel there, and was found 
 in the morning dead, with a bottle of laudanum on 
 the table beside her and these words in her hand- 
 writing : — 
 
 *I have long determined that the best thing I 
 could do was to put an end to the existence of a 
 being whose birth was unfortunate,^ and whose life 
 
 ^ She was Mary WoUstonecraft's natural daughter by 
 Imlay. 
 
236 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vn 
 
 has only been a series of pain to those persons who 
 have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote 
 her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give 
 you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of 
 forgetting that such a creature ever existed as . . .' 
 
 There is no signature. 
 
 A sterner tragedy followed. On the 9th of 
 November 1816 Harriet Shelley left the house in 
 Brompton where she was then living, and did not 
 return. On the 10th of December her body was 
 found in the Serpentine ; she had drowned herself. 
 In one respect Professor Dowden resembles Pro- 
 vidence : his ways are inscrutable. His comment 
 on Harriet's death is : ' There is no doubt she 
 wandered from the ways of upright living.' But, 
 he adds : ' That no act of Shelley's, during the 
 two years which immediately preceded her death, 
 tended to cause the rash act which brought her 
 life to its close, seems certain.' Shelley had been 
 living with Mary all the time ; only that ! 
 
 On the 30th of December 1816 Mary Godwin 
 and Shelley were married. I shall pursue 'the 
 occurrences of Shelley's private life' no further. 
 
VII SHELLEY 237 
 
 For the five years and a half which remain, Pro- 
 fessor Dowden's book adds to our knowledge of 
 Shelley's life much that is interesting ; but what 
 was chiefly important we knew already. The 
 new and grave matter which we did not know, or 
 knew in the vaguest way only, but which Shelley's 
 family and Professor Dowden have now thought 
 it well to give us in full, ends with Shelley's 
 second marriage. 
 
 I regret, I say once more, that it has been 
 given. It is a sore trial for our love of Shelley. 
 "What a set ! what a world ! is the exclamation 
 that breaks from us as we come to an end of this 
 history of 'the occurrences of Shelley's private 
 life.' I used the French word h4te for a letter of 
 Shelley's ; for the world in which we find him I 
 can only use another French word, sale. Godwin's 
 house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and 
 holding the hat, and the green - spectacled Mrs. 
 Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt 
 the Horace of this precious world, and, to go up 
 higher, Sir Timothy Shelley, a great country gentle- 
 
238 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 man, feeling himseK safe while * the exalted mind 
 of the Duke of Norfolk [the drinking Duke] pro- 
 tects me with the world,' and Lord Byron with his 
 deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his 
 affectation, his brutal selfishness — what a set ! 
 The history carries us to Oxford, and I think of 
 the clerical and respectable Oxford of those old 
 times, the Oxford of Copleston and the Kebles 
 and Hawkins, and a hundred more, with the relief 
 Keble declares himself to experience from Izaak 
 Walton, 
 
 'When, wearied with the tale thy times disclose, 
 The eye first finds thee out in thy secure repose.' 
 
 I am not only thinking of morals and the house of 
 Godwin, I am thinking also of tone, bearing, 
 dignity. I appeal to Cardinal Newman, if per- 
 chance he does me the honour to read these words, 
 is it possible to imagine Copleston or Hawkins 
 declaring himself safe * while the exalted mind 
 of the Duke of Norfolk protects me with the 
 world'? 
 
VII SHELLEY 239 
 
 Mrs. Shelley, after her mamage and during 
 Shelley's closing years, becomes attractive ; up to 
 her marriage her letters and journal do not please. 
 Her ability is manifest, but she is not attractive. 
 In the world discovered to us by Professor Dowden 
 as surrounding Shelley up to 1817, the most 
 pleasing figure is poor Fanny Godwin; after 
 Fanny Godwin, the most pleasing figure is Harriet 
 Shelley herself. 
 
 Professor Dowden's treatment of Harriet is not 
 worthy — so much he must allow me in all kind- 
 ness, but also in all seriousness, to say — of either 
 his taste or his judgment. His pleading for 
 Shelley is constant, and he does more harm than 
 good to Shelley by it. But here his championship 
 of Shelley makes him very unjust to a cruelly 
 used and unhappy girl. For several pages he 
 balances the question whether or not Harriet was 
 unfaithful to Shelley before he left her for Mary, 
 and he leaves the question unsettled. As usual 
 Professor Dowden (and it is his signal merit) 
 supplies the evidence decisive against himself 
 
240 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 Thornton Hunt, not well disposed to Harriet, 
 Hogg, Peacock, Trelawny, Hookham, and a mem- 
 ber of Godwin's own family, are all clear in their 
 evidence that up to her parting from Shelley 
 Harriet was perfectly innocent. But that precious 
 witness, Godwin, wrote in 1817 that 'she had 
 proved herself unfaithful to her husband before 
 their separation. . . . Peace be to her shade!' 
 Why, Godwin was the father of Harriet's suc- 
 cessor. But Mary believed the same thing. She 
 was Harriet's successor. But Shelley believed it 
 too. He had it from Godwin. But he was con- 
 vinced of it earlier. The evidence for this is, 
 that, in writing to Southey in 1820, Shelley 
 declares that * the single passage of a life, other- 
 wise not only spotless but spent in an impassioned 
 pursuit of virtue, which looks like a blot,' bears 
 that appearance ' merely because I regulated my 
 domestic arrangements without deferring to the 
 notions of the vulgar, although I might have done 
 80 quite as conveniently had I descended to their 
 base thoughts.' From this Professor Dowden con- 
 
VII SHELLEY 241 
 
 eludes that Shelley believed he could have got a 
 
 divorce from Harriet had he so wished. The 
 
 conclusion is not clear. But even were the 
 
 evidence perfectly clear that Shelley believed 
 
 Harriet unfaithful when he parted from her, we 
 
 should have to take into account Mrs. Shelley's 
 
 most true sentence in her introduction to Aldstor : 
 
 ' In all Shelley did, he, at the time of doing it, 
 
 believed himself justified to his own conscience.' 
 
 Shelley's asserting a thing vehemently does not 
 
 prove more than that he chose to believe it and 
 
 did believe it. His extreme and violent changes 
 
 of opinion about people show this sufficiently. 
 
 Eliza Westbrook is at one time ' a diamond not 
 
 so large ' as her sister Harriet but ' more highly 
 
 polished ' ; and then : ' I certainly hate her with 
 
 all my heart and souL I sometimes feel faint 
 
 with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of 
 
 my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable 
 
 wretch.' The antipathy, Hogg tells us, was as 
 
 unreasonable as the former excess of deference. 
 
 To his friend Miss Hitchener he says : ' Never 
 B 
 
242 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 shall that intercourse cease, which has been the 
 day -dawn of my existence, the sun which has 
 shed warmth on the cold drear length of the 
 anticipated prospect of life.' A little later, and 
 she has become * the Brown Demon, a woman of 
 desperate views and dreadful passions, but of cool 
 and undeviating revenge.' Even Professor Dow- 
 den admits that this is absurd ; that the real Miss 
 Kitchener was not seen by Shelley, either when 
 he adored or when he detested. 
 
 Shelley's power of persuading himself was equal 
 to any occasion ; but would not his conscientious- 
 ness and high feeling have prevented his exerting 
 this power at poor Harriet's expense ? To abandon 
 her as he did, must he not have known her 
 to be false? Professor Dowden insists always 
 on Shelley's 'conscientiousness.' SheUey himself 
 speaks of his ' impassioned pursuit of virtue.' 
 Leigh Hunt compared his life to that of 'Plato 
 himself, or, still more, a Pythagorean,' and added 
 that he ' never met a being who came nearer, 
 perhaps so near, to the height of humanity,' to 
 
VII SHELLEY 243 
 
 being an 'angel of charity.' In many respects 
 Shelley really resembled both a Pythagorean and 
 an angel of charity. He loved high thoughts, he 
 cared nothing for sumptuous lodging, fare, and 
 . raiment, he was poignantly aSlicted at the sight 
 of misery, he would have given away his last 
 farthing, would have suffered in his own person, 
 to relieve it. But in one important point he was 
 like neither a Pythagorean nor an angel : he was 
 extremely inflammable. Professor Dowden leaves 
 no doubt on the matter. After reading his book, 
 one feels sickened for ever of the subject of 
 irregular relations; God forbid that I should 
 go into the scandals about Shelley's ' Neapolitan 
 charge,' about Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about 
 SheUey and Miss Clairmont, and the rest of it! 
 I will say only that it is visible enough that when 
 the passion of love was aroused in SheUey (and it 
 was aroused easily) one could not be sure of him, 
 his friends could not trust him. We have seen 
 him with the Boinville family. With Emilia 
 Viviani he is the same. If he is left much alone 
 
244 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 with Miss Clairmont, he evidently makes Mary 
 uneasy ; nay, he makes Professor Dowden himseK 
 uneasy. And I conclude that an entirely human 
 inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of 
 humour and a superhuman power of self-deception, , 
 are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley's 
 abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and 
 then his behaviour to her and his defence of him- 
 self afterwards. 
 
 His misconduct to Harriet, his want of humour, 
 his self-deception, are fully brought before us for 
 the first time by Professor Dowden's book. Good 
 morals and good criticism alike forbid that when 
 all this is laid bare to us we should deny, or hide, 
 or extenuate it. Nevertheless I go back after all 
 to what I said at the beginning; still our ideal 
 Shelley, the angelic Shelley, subsists. UnhappUy 
 the data for this Shelley we had and knew long 
 ago, while the data for the unattractive Shelley are 
 fresh ; and what is fresh is likely to fix our atten- 
 tion more than what is familiar. But Professor 
 Dowden's volumes, which give so much, which give 
 
vii SHELLEY 245 
 
 too much, also afford data for picturing anew the 
 Shelley who delights, as well as for picturing for 
 the first time a Shelley who, to speak plainly, 
 disgusts ; and with what may renew and restore 
 our impression of the delightful Shelley T shall 
 end. 
 
 The winter at Marlow, and the ophthalmia 
 caught among the cottages of the poor, we knew, 
 but we have from Professor Dowden more details of 
 this winter and of Shelley's work among the poor ; 
 we have above all, for the first time I believe, a 
 line of verse of Shelley's own which sums up truly 
 and perfectly this most attractive side of him — 
 
 'I am the friend of the unfriended poor.' 
 
 But that in Shelley on which I would especially 
 dwell is that in him which contrasts most with 
 the ignobleness of the world in which we have 
 seen him living, and with the pernicious nonsense 
 which we have found him talking. The Shelley 
 of ' marvellous gentleness,' of feminine refinement, 
 with gracious and considerate manners, ' a perfect 
 
246 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vu 
 
 gentleman, entirely without arrogance or aggres- 
 sive egotism/ completely devoid of the proverbial 
 and ferocious vanity of authors and poets, always 
 disposed to make little of his own work and to 
 prefer that of others, of reverent enthusiasm for 
 the great and wise, of high and tender seriousness, 
 of heroic generosity, and of a delicacy in rendering 
 services which was equal to his generosity — the 
 Shelley who was aU this is the Shelley with 
 whom I wish to end. He may talk nonsense 
 about tyrants and priests, but what a high and 
 noble ring in such a sentence as the following, 
 written by a young man who is refusing £2000 
 a year rather than consent to entail a great 
 property ! 
 
 'That I should entail £120,000 of command over 
 labour, of power to remit this, to employ it for bene- 
 volent purposes, on one whom I know not — who 
 might, instead of being the benefactor of mankind, 
 be its bane, or use this for the worst purposes, which 
 the real delegates of my chance -given property 
 might convert into a most useful instrument of 
 benevolence ! No 1 this you wiU not suspect me 
 of.' 
 
Til SHELLEY 247 
 
 And again : — 
 
 *I desire money because I think I know the use 
 of it. It commands labour, it gives leisure ; and to 
 give leisure to those who will employ it in the for- 
 warding of truth is the noblest present an individual 
 can make to the whole.' 
 
 If there is extravagance here, it is extravagance 
 of a beautiful and rare sort, like Shelley's ' under- 
 hand ways ' also, which differed singularly, the 
 cynic Hogg tells us, from the underhand ways of 
 other people ; ' the latter were concealed because 
 they were mean, selfish, sordid ; Shelley's secrets, 
 on the contrary (kindnesses done by stealth), were 
 hidden through modesty, delicacy, generosity, re- 
 finement of soul.' 
 
 His forbearance to Godwin, to Godwin lectur- 
 ing and renouncing him and at the same time 
 holding out, as I have said, his hat to him for 
 alms, is wonderful ; but the dignity with which 
 he at last, in a letter perfect for propriety of tone, 
 reads a lesson to his ignoble father-in-law, is in 
 the best possible style : — 
 
248 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vn 
 
 ' Perhaps it is well that you should be informed 
 that I consider your last letter to be written in a 
 style of haughtiness and encroachment which neither 
 awes nor imposes on me ; but I have no desire to 
 transgress the limits which you place to our inter- 
 course, nor in any future instance will I make any 
 remarks but such as arise from the strict question in 
 discussion.' , 
 
 And again : — 
 
 ' My astonishment, and, I will confess, when I 
 have been treated with most harshness and cruelty 
 by you, my indignation, has been extreme, that, 
 knowing as you do my nature, any considerations 
 should have prevailed on you to have been thus harsh 
 and cruel. I lamented also over my ruined hopes of 
 all that your genius once taught me to expect from 
 your virtue, when I found that for yourself, your 
 family, and your creditors, you would submit to that 
 communication with me which you once rejected and 
 abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or suffer- 
 ings, assumed willingly for you, could avail to ex- 
 tort.' 
 
 Moreover, though Shelley has no humour, he 
 can show as quick and sharp a tact as the most 
 practised man of the world. He has been with 
 Byron and the Countess Guiccioli, and he writes 
 of the latter : — 
 
vn SHELLEY 249 
 
 * La Guiccioli is a very pretty, sentimental, inno- 
 cent Italian, who has sacrificed an immense future for 
 the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I know any- 
 thing of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will 
 hereafter have plenty of opportunity to repent her 
 rashness.' 
 
 Tact also, and something better than tact, he 
 shows in his dealings, in order to befriend Leigh 
 Hunt, with Lord Byron. He writes to Hunt : — 
 
 ' Particular circumstances, or rather, I should say, 
 particular dispositions in Lord Byron's character, 
 render the close and exclusive intimacy with him, in 
 which I find myself, intolerable to me ; thus much, 
 my best friend, I will confess and confide to you. 
 No feelings of my own shall injure or interfere with 
 what is now nearest to them — your interest ; and I 
 will take care to preserve the little influence I may 
 have over this Proteus, in whom such strange ex- 
 tremes are reconciled, until we meet.' 
 
 And so we have come back again, at last, to 
 our original SheUey — to the Shelley of the lovely 
 and well-known picture, to the Shelley with 
 ' flushed, feminine, artless face,' the SheUey ' blush- 
 ing like a girl,' of Trelawny. Professor Dowden 
 
250 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vii 
 
 gives us some further attempts at portraitura 
 One by a Miss Eose, of Shelley at Marlow : — 
 
 ' He was the most interesting figure I ever saw j 
 his eyes like a deer's, bright but rather wild ; his 
 white throat unfettered ; his slender but to me al- 
 most faultless shape ; his brown long coat with curl- 
 ing lambs' wool collar and cuffs — in fact, his whole 
 appearance — are as fresh in my recollection as an 
 occurrence of yesterday.' 
 
 Feminine enthusiasm may be deemed suspi- 
 cious, but a Captain Kennedy must surely be able 
 to keep his head. Captain Kennedy was quartered 
 at Horsham in 1813, and saw Shelley when he 
 was on a stolen visit, in his father's absence, at 
 Field Place :— 
 
 ' He received me with frankness and kindliness, 
 as if he had known me from childhood, and at once 
 won my heart. I fancy I see him now as he sate by 
 the window, and hear his voice, the tones of which 
 impressed me with his sincerity and simplicity. His 
 resemblance to his sister Elizabeth was as striking 
 as if they had been twins. His eyes were most ex- 
 pressive ; his complexion beautifully fair, his features 
 exquisitely fine ; his hair was dark, and no peculiar 
 attention to its arrangement was manifest. In per 
 
vn SHELLEY 261 
 
 son he was slender and gentlemanlike, but inclined 
 to stoop ; his gait was decidedly not military. The 
 general appearance indicated great delicacy of consti- 
 tution. One would at once pronounce of him that 
 he was diflferent from other mea There was an 
 earnestness in his manner and such perfect gentleness 
 of breeding and freedom from everything artificial 
 as charmed every one. I never met a man who so 
 immediately won upon me.' 
 
 Mrs. Gisbome's son, who knew Shelley well at 
 Leghorn, declared Captain Kennedy's description 
 of him to be * the best and most truthful I have 
 ever seen.' 
 
 To all this we have to add the charm of the 
 man's writings — of Shelley's poetry. It is his 
 poetry, above everything else, which for many 
 people establishes that he is an angeL Of his 
 poetry I have not space now to speak. But let 
 no one suppose that a want of humour and a self- 
 delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a 
 man's poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is 
 not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not en- 
 tirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a 
 vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing 
 
262 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vn 
 
 nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no 
 less than in life, he is ' a beautiful and ineffectual 
 angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in 
 vain.' 
 
VIII 
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI* 
 
 In reviewing at the time of its first publication, 
 thirty years ago, Flaubert's remarkable novel of 
 Madame Bovary, Sainte-Beuve observed that in 
 Flaubert we come to another manner, another kind 
 of inspiration, from those which had prevailed 
 hitherto ; we find ourselves dealing, he said, with 
 a man of a new and different generation from 
 novelists like George Sand. The ideal has ceased, 
 the lyric vein is dried up ; the new men are 
 cured of lyricism and the ideal ; ' a severe and 
 pitiless truth has made its entry, as the last word 
 of experience, even into art itself.' The char- 
 acters of the new literature of fiction are ' science, 
 
 * Published in the Fortnightly Review, December 1887. 
 
264 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 a spirit of observation, maturity, force, a touch of 
 hardness.' L'icUal a cess4, le lyrique a tari. 
 
 The spirit of observation and the touch of hard- 
 ness (let us retain these mild and inoffensive 
 terms) have since been carried in the French novel 
 very far. So far have they been carried, indeed, 
 that in spite of the advantage which the French 
 language, familiar to the cultivated classes every- 
 where, confers on the French novel, this novel 
 has lost much of its attraction for those classes ; 
 it no longer commands their attention as it did 
 formerly. The famous English novelists have 
 passed away, and have left no successors of like 
 fame. It is not the English novel, therefore, which 
 has inherited the vogue lost by the French novel. 
 It is the novel of a country new to literature, or 
 at any rate unregarded, till lately, by the general 
 public of readers : it is the novel of Eussia. The 
 Eussian novel has now the vogue, and deserves to 
 have it. If fresh literary productions maintain 
 this vogue and enhance it, we shall all be learning 
 Eussian. 
 
viii COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 256 
 
 The Slav nature, or at any rate the Eussian 
 nature, the Eussian nature as it shows itself in 
 the Eussian novels, seems marked by an extreme 
 sensitiveness, a consciousness most quick and 
 acute both for what the man's self is experiencing, 
 and also for what others in contact with him are 
 thinking and feeling. In a nation full of life, but 
 young, and newly in contact with an old and 
 powerful civilisation, this sensitiveness and self- 
 consciousness are prompt to appear. In the 
 Americans, as well as in the Eussians, we see 
 them active in a high degree. They are somewhat 
 agitating and disquieting agents to their possessor, 
 but they have, if they get fair play, great powers 
 for evoking and enriching a literature. But the 
 Americans, as we know, are apt to set them at 
 rest in the manner of my friend Colonel Higgin- 
 son of Boston. ' As I take it. Nature said, some 
 years since: "Thus far the English is my best 
 race ; but we have had Englishmen enough ; we 
 need something with a little more buoyancy than 
 the Englishman ; let us lighten the structure, even 
 
266 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vin 
 
 at some peril in the process. Put in one drop 
 more of nervous fluid, and make the American." 
 With that drop, a new range of promise opened on 
 the human race, and a lighter, finer, more highly 
 organised type of mankind was born,' People 
 who by this sort of thing give rest to their sensi- 
 tive and busy self-consciousness may very well, per- 
 haps, be on their way to great material prosperity, 
 to great political power ; but they are scarcely on 
 the right way to a great literature, a serious art. 
 
 The Russian does not assuage his sensitiveness 
 in this fashion. The Russian man of letters does 
 not make Nature say : ' The Russian is my best 
 race.' He finds relief to his sensitiveness in 
 letting his perceptions have perfectly free play, 
 and in recording their reports with perfect fidelity. 
 The sincereness with which the reports are given 
 has even something childlike and touching. In 
 the novel of which I am going to speak there is not 
 a line, not a trait, brought in for the glorification 
 of Russia, or to feed vanity ; things and characters 
 go as nature takes them, and the author is absorbed 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 257 
 
 in seeing how nature takes them and in relating it. 
 But we have here a condition of things which is 
 highly favourable to the production of good litera- 
 ture, of good art. We have great sensitiveness, 
 subtlety, and finesse, addressing themselves with 
 entire disinterestedness and simplicity to the re- 
 presentation of human life. The Eussian novelist 
 is thus master of a spell to which the secrets of 
 human nature — both what is external and what 
 is internal, gesture and manner no less than 
 thought and feeling — willingly make themselves 
 known. The crown of literature is poetry, and 
 the Eussians have not yet had a great poet. But 
 in that form of imaginative literature which in 
 our day is the most popular and the most possible, 
 the Eussians at the present moment seem to me 
 to hold, as Mr. Gladstone would say, the field. 
 They have great novelists, and of one of their 
 great novelists I wish now to speak. 
 
 Count Leo Tolstoi is about sixty years old, and 
 tells us that he shall write novels no more. He 
 
 is now occupied with religion and with the Chris- 
 8 
 
■^■^CS )^'o'^^ 
 
 258 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 tian life. His writings concerning these great 
 matters are not allowed, I believe, to obtain pub- 
 lication in Eussia, but instalments of them in 
 French and English reach us from time to time. 
 I find them very interesting, but I find his novel 
 of Anna Kar4nine more interesting still. I be- 
 lieve that many readers prefer to AnTia Kar4nine 
 Count Tolstoi's other great novel, La Guerre et la 
 Faix. But in the novel one prefers, I think, to 
 have the novelist dealing with the life which he 
 knows from having lived it, rather than with the 
 life which he knows from books or hearsay. If 
 one has to choose a representative work of Thack- 
 eray, it is Vanity Fair which one would take 
 rather than The Virginians. In like manner I 
 take Anna Kar4nin£ as the novel best represent- 
 ing Count TolstoL I use the French translation ; 
 in general, as I long ago said, work of this kind is 
 better done in France than in England, and Anna 
 Kar6nine is perhaps also a novel which goes better 
 into French than into English, just as Frederika 
 Bremer's Home goes into English better than into 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 269 
 
 French. After I have done with Anna Karenine 
 I must say something of Count Tolstoi's religious 
 writings. Of these too I use the French trans- 
 lation, so far as it is available. The English trans- 
 lation, however, which came into my hands late, 
 seems to be in general clear and good. Let me 
 say in passing that it has neither the same arrange- 
 ment, nor the same titles, nor altogether the same 
 contents, with the French translation. 
 
 There are many characters in Anna Karenine — 
 too many if we look in it for a work of art in 
 which the action shall be vigorously one, and to 
 that one action everything shall converge. There 
 are even two main actions extending throughout 
 the book, and we keep passing from one of them 
 to the other — from the affairs of Anna and 
 Wronsky to the affairs of Kitty and Levine. 
 People appear in connection with these two main 
 actions whose appearance and proceedings do not 
 in the least contribute to develop them; inci- 
 dents are multiplied which we expect are to lead 
 to something important, but which do not. What, 
 
260 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viu 
 
 for instance, does the episode of Kitty's friend 
 Warinka and Levine's brother Serge Ivanitch, 
 their inclination for one another and its failure to 
 come to anything, contribute to the development 
 of either the character or the fortunes of Kitty 
 and Levine ? What does the incident of Levine's 
 long delay in getting to church to be married, a 
 delay which as we read of it seems to have signi- 
 ficance, really import? It turns out to import 
 absolutely nothing, and to be introduced solely to 
 give the author the pleasure of telling us that 
 all Levine's shirts had been packed up. 
 
 But the truth is we are not to take Anna 
 KarSnin^ as a work of art ; we are to take it as 
 a piece of life. A piece of life it is. The author 
 has not invented and combined it, he has seen it ; 
 it has all happened before his inward eye, and it 
 was in this wise that it happened. Levine's shirts 
 were packed up, and he was late for his wedding 
 in consequence ; Warinka and Serge Ivanitch met 
 at Levine's country-house and went out walking 
 together ; Serge was very near proposing, but did 
 
viii COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 261 
 
 not. The author saw it all happening so — saw it, 
 and therefore relates it ; and what his novel in 
 this way loses in art it gains in reality. 
 
 For this is the result which, by his extra- 
 ordinary fineness of perception, and by his sincere 
 fidelity to it, the author achieves ; he works in us 
 a sense of the absolute reality of his personages 
 and their doings. Anna's shoulders, and masses 
 of hair, and half-shut eyes; Alexis Karenine's up- 
 drawn eyebrows, and tired smile, and cracking 
 finger-joints; Stiva's eyes suffused with facile 
 moisture — these are as real to us as any of those 
 outward peculiarities which in our own circle of 
 acquaintance we are noticing daily, while the 
 inner man of our own circle of acquaintance, 
 happily or unhappily, lies a great deal less clearly 
 revealed to us than that of Count Tolstoi's crea- 
 tions. 
 
 I must speak of only a few of these creations, 
 the chief personages and no more. The book 
 opens with ' Stiva,' and who that has once made 
 Stiva's acquaintance will ever forget him ? We 
 
262 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 are living, in Count Tolstoi's novel, among the 
 great people of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the 
 nobles and the high functionaries, the governing 
 class of Eussia. St^pane Arcadievitch — 'Stiva' 
 — is Prince Oblonsky, and descended from Eurik, 
 although to think of him as anything except 
 ' Stiva ' is difficult. His air souriant, his good 
 looks, his satisfaction ; his ' ray,' which made the 
 Tartar waiter at the club joyful in contemplating 
 it; his pleasure in oysters and champagne, his 
 pleasure in making people happy and in render- 
 ing services ; his need of money, his attachment to 
 the French governess, his distress at his wife's 
 distress, his affection for her and the children ; 
 his emotion and suffused eyes, while he quite dis- 
 misses the care of providing funds for household 
 expenses and education ; and the French attach- 
 ment, contritely given up to-day only to be suc- 
 ceeded by some other attachment to-morrow — no 
 never, certainly, shall we come to forget Stiva. 
 Anna, the heroine, is Stiva's sister. His wife 
 Dolly (these English diminutives are common 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 263 
 
 among Count Tolstoi's ladies) is daughter of 
 the Prince and Princess Cherbatzky, grandees 
 who show us Eussian high life by its most respect- 
 able side; the Prince, in particular, is excellent 
 — simple, sensible, right-feeling ; a man of dignity 
 and honour. His daughters, Dolly and Kitty, 
 are charming. Dolly, Stiva's wife, is sorely tried 
 by her husband, full of anxieties for the chil- 
 dren, with no money to spend on them or herself, 
 poorly dressed, worn and aged before her time. 
 She has moments of despairing doubt whether the 
 gay people may not be after all in the right, 
 whether virtue and principle answer; whether 
 happiness does not dwell with adventuresses and 
 profligates, brilliant and perfectly dressed adven- 
 turesses and profligates, in a land flowing with 
 roubles and champagne. But in a quarter of an 
 hour she comes right again and is herself — a nature 
 straight, honest, faithful, loving, sound to the core ; 
 such she is and such she remains; she can be 
 no other. Her sister Kitty is at bottom of the 
 same temper, but she has her experience to get. 
 
264 ESSAYS m CRITICISM viii 
 
 while Dolly, when the book begins, has already 
 acquired hers. Kitty is adored by Levine, in 
 whom we are told that many traits are to be found 
 of the character and history of Count Tolstoi him- 
 self. Levine belongs to the world of great people 
 by his birth and property, but he is not at all a 
 man of the world. He has been a reader and 
 thinker, he has a conscience, he has public spirit 
 and would ameliorate the condition of the people, he 
 lives on his estate in the country, and occupies him- 
 self zealously with local business, schools, and agri- 
 culture. But he is shy, apt to suspect and to take 
 offence, somewhat impracticable, out of his element 
 in the gay world of Moscow. Kitty likes him, 
 but her fancy has been taken by a brilliant guards- 
 man. Count Wronsky, who has paid her attentions. 
 Wronsky is described to us by Stiva ; he is ' one of 
 the finest specimens of the Jeunesse dor4e of St. 
 Petersburg ; immensely rich, handsome, aide-de- 
 camp to the emperor, great interest at his back, 
 and a good fellow notwithstanding ; more than a 
 good fellow, intelligent besides and well read — a 
 
Till COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 265 
 
 man who has a splendid career before him.' Let 
 us complete the picture by adding that Wronsky 
 is a powerful man, over thirty, bald at the top of 
 his head, with irreproachable manners, cool and 
 calm, but a little haughty. A hero, one murmurs 
 to oneself, too much of the Guy Livingstone type, 
 though without the bravado and exaggeration. 
 And such is, justly enough perhaps, the first im- 
 pression, an impression which continues all through 
 the first volume ; but Wronsky, as we shall see, 
 improves towards the end. 
 
 Kitty discourages Levine, who retires in misery 
 and confusion. But Wronsky is attracted by 
 Anna Karenine, and ceases his attentions to Kitty. 
 The impression made on her heart by Wronsky 
 was not deep ; but she is so keenly mortified with 
 herself, so ashamed, and so upset, that she falls 
 ill, and is sent with her family to winter abroad. 
 There she regains health and mental composure, 
 and discovers at the same time that her liking 
 for Levine was deeper than she knew, that it 
 was a genuine feeling, a strong and lasting one. 
 
266 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 On her return they meet, their hearts come to- 
 gether, they are married ; and in spite of Levine's 
 waywardness, irritability, and unsettlement of 
 mind, of which I shall have more to say presently, 
 they are profoundly happy. Well, and who could 
 help being happy with Kitty ? So I find myself 
 adding impatiently. Count Tolstoi's heroines are 
 really so living and charming that one takes them, 
 fiction though they are, too seriously. 
 
 But the interest of the book centres in Anna 
 Kar^nine. She is Stiva's sister, married to a high 
 official at St. Petersburg, Alexis Karenine. She 
 has been married to him nine years, and has one 
 child, a boy named Serge. The marriage had not 
 brought happiness to her, she had found in it no 
 satisfaction to her heart and soul, she had a sense 
 of want and isolation ; but she is devoted to her 
 boy, occupied, calm. The charm of her personality 
 is felt even before she appears, from the moment 
 when we hear of her being sent for as the good 
 angel to reconcile Dolly with Stiva. Then she 
 arrives at the Moscow station from St. Peters- 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 267 
 
 burg, and we see the gray eyes with their long eye- 
 lashes, the graceful carriage, the gentle and caress- 
 ing smile on the fresh lips, the vivacity restrained 
 but waiting to break through, the fulness of life, 
 the softness and strength joined, the harmony, the 
 bloom, the charm. She goes to Dolly, and achieves, 
 with infinite tact and tenderness, the task of re- 
 conciliation. At a ball a few days later, we add 
 to our first impression of Anna's beauty, dark hair, 
 a quantity of little curls over her temples and at 
 the back of her neck, sculptural shoulders, firm 
 throat, and beautiful arms. She is in a plain dress 
 of black velvet with a pearl necklace, a bunch of 
 forget-me-nots in the front of her dress, another in 
 her hair. This is Anna Kar^nine. 
 
 She had travelled from St. Petersburg with 
 Wronsky's mother ; had seen him at the Moscow 
 station, where he came to meet his mother, had 
 been struck with his looks and manner, and 
 touched by his behaviour in an accident which 
 happened while they were in the station to a poor 
 workman crushed by a train. At the ball she 
 
268 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 meets him again ; she is fascinated by him and he 
 by her. She had been told of Kitty's fancy, and 
 had gone to the ball meaning to help Kitty ; but 
 Kitty is forgotten, or at any rate neglected ; the 
 spell which draws Wronsky and Anna is irresist- 
 ible. Kitty finds herself opposite to them in a 
 quadrille together : — 
 
 ' She seemed to remark in Anna the s3m[iptoms 
 of an over-excitement which she herself knew from 
 experience — that of success. Anna appeared to her 
 as if intoxicated with it. Kitty knew to what to 
 attribute that brilliant and animated look, that 
 happy and triumphant smile, those half-parted lips, 
 those movements full of grace and harmony.' 
 
 Anna returns to St. Petersburg, and Wronsky 
 returns there at the same time ; they meet on the 
 journey, they keep meeting in society, and Anna 
 begins to find her husband, who before had not 
 been sympathetic, intolerable. Alexis Karenine 
 is much older than herself, a bureaucrat, a formalist, 
 a poor creature; he has conscience, there is a root of 
 goodness in him, but on the surface and until deeply 
 stirred he is tiresome, pedantic, vain, exasperating 
 
viii COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 269 
 
 The change in Anna is not in the slightest degree 
 comprehended by him ; he sees nothing which an 
 intelligent man might in such a case see, and 
 does nothing which an intelligent man would 
 do. Anna abandons herself to her passion for 
 Wronsky, 
 
 I remember M. Nisard saying to me many 
 years ago at the ^^cole Normale in Paris, that he 
 respected the English because they are une nation 
 qui sail se gSner — people who can put constraint 
 on themselves and go through what is disagree- 
 able. Perhaps in the Slav nature this valuable 
 faculty is somewhat wanting ; a very strong 
 impulse is too much regarded as irresistible, too 
 little as what can be resisted and ought to be 
 resisted, however difficult and disagreeable the 
 resistance may be. In our high society with its 
 pleasure and dissipation, laxer notions may to 
 some extent prevail ; but in general an English 
 mind will be startled by Anna's suffering herself 
 to be so overwhelmed and irretrievably carried 
 away by her passion, by her almost at once regard- 
 
270 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vin 
 
 ing it, apparently, as something which it was hope- 
 less to fight against. And this I say irrespectively 
 of the worth of her lover. Wronsky's gifts and 
 graces hardly qualify him, one might think, to be 
 the object of so instantaneous and mighty a passion 
 on the part of a woman like Anna. But that is 
 not the question. Let us allow that these passions 
 are incalculable ; let us allow that one of the male 
 sex scarcely does justice, perhaps, to the powerful 
 and handsome guardsman and his attractions. 
 But if Wronsky had been even such a lover as 
 Alcibiades or the Master of Eavenswood, still that 
 Anna, being what she is and her circumstances 
 being what they are, should show not a hope, 
 hardly a thought, of conquering her passion, of 
 escaping from its fatal power, is to our notions 
 strange and a little bewildering. 
 
 I state the objection ; let me add that it is the 
 triumph of Anna's charm that it remains paramount 
 for us nevertheless ; that throughout her course, 
 with its failures, errors, and miseries, still the im- 
 pression of her large, fresh, rich, generous, delight- 
 
 I 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 271 
 
 fill nature, never leaves us — keeps our sympathy, 
 keeps even, I had almost said, our respect. 
 
 To return to the story. Soon enough poor 
 Anna begins to experience the truth of what the 
 Wise Man told us long ago, that ' the way of 
 transgressors is hard.' Her agitation at a steeple- 
 chase where Wronsky is in danger attracts her 
 husband's notice and provokes his remonstrance. 
 He is bitter and contemptuous. In a transport 
 of passion Anna declares to him that she is his 
 wife no longer ; that she loves Wronsky, belongs 
 to Wronsky, Hard at first, formal, cruel, thinking 
 only of himself, Kar^nine, who, as I have said, has 
 a conscience, is touched by grace at the moment 
 when Anna's troubles reach their height. He 
 returns to her to find her with a child just bom 
 to her and Wronsky, the lover in the house and 
 Anna apparently dying. Kar^nine has words of 
 kindness and forgiveness only. The noble and 
 victorious effort transfigures him, and all that her 
 husband gains in the eyes of Anna, her lover 
 Wronsky loses. Wronsky comes to Anna's bed- 
 
272 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 side, and standing there by Karenine, buries his 
 face in his hands. Anna says to him, in the 
 hurried voice of fever : — 
 
 * " Uncover your face ; look at that man ; he is 
 a saint. Yes, uncover your face ; uncover it," she 
 repeated with an angry air. "Alexis, uncover his 
 face ; I want to see him." 
 
 'Alexis took the hands of Wronsky and un- 
 covered his face, disfigured by suffering and humilia- 
 tion. 
 
 ' " Give him your hand ; pardon him." 
 
 ' Alexis stretched out his hand without even 
 seeking to restrain his tears. 
 
 '"Thank God, thank God!" she said; "all 
 is ready now. How ugly those flowers are," she 
 went on, pointing to the wall-paper ; " they are not 
 a bit like violets. My God, my God ! when will all 
 this end 1 Give me morphine, doctor — I want mor- 
 phine. Oh, my God, my God ! " ' 
 
 She seems dying, and Wronsky rushes out and 
 shoots himself. And so, in a common novel, the 
 story would end. Anna would die, "Wronsky 
 would commit suicide, Karenine would survive, 
 in possession of our admiration and sympathy. 
 But the story does not always end so in life: 
 
 I 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 273 
 
 neither does it end so in Count Tolstoi's novel. 
 Anna recovers from her fever, Wronsky from his 
 wound. Anna's passion for Wronsky reawakens, 
 her estrangement from Karenine returns. Nor 
 does Karenine remain at the height at which in 
 the forgiveness scene we saw him. He is formal, 
 pedantic, irritating. Alas! even if he were not 
 all these, perhaps even his pince-nez, and his rising 
 eyebrows, and his cracking finger-joints, would 
 have been provocation enough. Anna and Wron- 
 sky depart together. They stay for a time in 
 Italy, then return to Eussia. But her position is 
 false, her disquietude incessant, and happiness is 
 impossible for her. She takes opium every night, 
 only to find that ' not poppy nor mandragora shall 
 ever medicine her to that sweet sleep which she 
 owed yesterday.' Jealousy and irritability grow 
 upon her ; she tortures Wronsky, she tortures 
 herself. Under these trials Wronsky, it must be 
 said, comes out well, and rises in our esteem. 
 His love for Anna endures ; he behaves, as our 
 English phrase is, 'like a gentleman'; his patience 
 
274 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vin 
 
 is in general exemplary. But then Anna, let us 
 remember, is to the last, through all the fret and 
 misery, still Anna ; always with something which 
 charms ; nay, with something, even, something in 
 her nature, which consoles and does good. Her 
 life, however, was becoming impossible under its 
 existing conditions. A trifling misunderstanding 
 brought the inevitable end. After a quarrel with 
 Anna, Wronsky had gone one morning into the 
 country to see his mother; Anna summons him 
 by telegraph to return at once, and receives an 
 answer from him that he cannot return before ten 
 at night. She follows him to his mother's place 
 in the country, and at the station hears what leads 
 her to believe that he is not coming back. IMad- 
 dened with jealousy and misery, she descends the 
 platform and throws herself under the wheels of 
 a goods train passing through the station. It is 
 over — ^the graceful head is untouched, but all the 
 rest is a crushed, formless heap. Poor Anna ! 
 
 We have been in a world which misconducts 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 275 
 
 itself nearly as much as the world of a French 
 novel all palpitating with ' modernity.' But there 
 are two things in which the Eussian novel — Count 
 Tolstoi's novel at any rate — is very advantageously 
 distinguished from the type of novel now so much 
 in request in France. In the first place, there is 
 no fine sentiment, at once tiresome and false. We 
 are not told to believe, for example, that Anna 
 is wonderfully exalted and ennobled by her passion 
 for Wronsky. The English reader is thus saved 
 from many a groan of impatience. The other 
 thing is yet more important. Our Eussian novelist 
 deals abundantly with criminal passion and with 
 adultery, but he does not seem to feel himself 
 owing any service to the goddess Lubricity, or 
 bound to put in touches at this goddess's dictation. 
 Much in Anna Kardnine is painful, much is un- 
 pleasant, but nothing is of a nature to trouble the 
 senses, or to please those who wish their senses 
 troubled. This taint is wholly absent. In the 
 French novels where it is so abundantly present 
 its baneful effects do not end with itself. Bums 
 
276 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 long ago remarked with deep truth that it petrifies 
 feeliiig. Let us revert for a moment to the power- 
 ful novel of which I spoke at the outset, Madame 
 Bovary. Undoubtedly the taint in question is 
 present in Madame Bovary, although to a much 
 less degree than in more recent French novels, 
 which will be in every one's mind. But Madame 
 Bovary, with this taint, is a work of petrified 
 feeling ; over it hangs an atmosphere of bitterness, 
 irony, impotence ; not a personage in the book to 
 rejoice or console us ; the springs of freshness and 
 feeling are not there to create such personages. 
 Emma Bovary follows a course in some respects 
 like that of Anna, but where, in Emma Bovary, 
 is Anna's charm? The treasures of compassion, 
 tenderness, insight, which alone, amid such guUt 
 and misery, can enable charm to subsist and to 
 emerge, are wanting to Flaubert. He is cruel, 
 with the cruelty of petrified feeling, to his poor 
 heroine ; he pursues her without pity or pause, as 
 with malignity ; he is harder upon her himself than 
 any reader even, I think, will be inclined to be. 
 
vin COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 277 
 
 But where the springs of feeling have carried 
 Count Tolstoi, since he created Anna ten or twelve 
 years ago, we have now to see. 
 
 We must return to Constantine Dmitrich 
 Levine. Levine, as I have already said, thinks. 
 Between the age of twenty and that of thirty-five 
 he had lost, he tells us, the Christian belief in 
 which he had been brought up, a loss of which 
 examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere, 
 but which in Eussia, as in France, is among all 
 young men of the upper and cultivated classes 
 more a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, 
 more avowed, than it is with us. Levine had 
 adopted the scientific notions current all round 
 him ; talked of cells, organisms, the indestructi- 
 bility of matter, the conservation of force, and was 
 of opinion, with his comrades of the university, 
 that religion no longer existed. But he was ol 
 a serious nature, and the question what his life 
 meant, whence it came, whither it tended, pre- 
 sented themselves to him in moments of crisis 
 and affliction with irresistible importunity, and 
 
278 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 getting no answer, haunted him, tortured him, 
 made him think of suicide. 
 
 Two things, meanwhile, he noticed. One was, 
 that he and his university friends had been mis- 
 taken in supposing that Christian belief no longer 
 existed; they had lost it, but they were not all 
 the world. Levine observed that the persons to 
 whom he was most attached, his own wife Kitty 
 amongst the number, retained it and drew comfort 
 from it; that the women generally, and almost 
 the whole of the Eussian common people, retained 
 it and drew comfort from it. The other was, that 
 his scientific friends, though not troubled like him- 
 self by questionings about the meaning of human 
 life, were untroubled by such questionings, not 
 because they had got an answer to them, but 
 because, entertaining themselves intellectually 
 with the consideration of the cell theory, and 
 evolution, and the indestructibility of matter, 
 and the conservation of force, and the like, 
 they were satisfied with this entertainment, and 
 did not perplex themselves with investigat- 
 
nil COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 279 
 
 ing the meaning and object of their own life 
 at all. 
 
 But Levine noticed further that he himself did 
 not actually proceed to commit suicide ; on the 
 contrary, he lived on his lands as his father had 
 done before him, busied himself with all the duties 
 of his station, married Kitty, was delighted when 
 a son was born to him. Nevertheless he was 
 indubitably not happy at bottom, restless and dis- 
 quieted, his disquietude sometimes amounting to 
 agony. 
 
 Now on one of his bad days he was in the field 
 with his peasants, and one of them happened to 
 say to him, in answer to a question from Levine 
 why one farmer should in a certain case act more 
 humanely than another : ' Men are not all alike ; 
 one man lives for his belly, like Mitiovuck, another 
 for his soul, for God, like old Plato.' ^—' What do 
 you call,' cried Levine, 'living for his soid, for 
 God ? ' The peasant answered : ' It's quite simple 
 — living by the rule of God, of the truth. All 
 
 ^ A common name among Russian peasants. 
 
280 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 men are not the same, that's certain. You your- 
 self, for instance, Constantino Dmitrich, you 
 wouldn't do wrong by a poor man.' Levin e 
 gave no answer, but turned away with the phrase, 
 liviTig by the rule of God, of the truth, sounding in 
 his ears. 
 
 Then he reflected that he had been bom of 
 parents professing this rule, as their parents again 
 had professed it before them ; that he had sucked 
 it in with his mother's milk ; that some sense of 
 it, some strength and nourishment from it, had 
 been ever with him although he knew it not ; 
 that if he had tried to do the duties of his station 
 it was by help of the secret support ministered by 
 this rule ; that if in his moments of despairing 
 restlessness and agony, when he was driven to 
 think of suicide, he had yet not committed suicide, 
 it was because this rule had silently enabled him 
 to do his duty in some degree, and had given 
 biTTi some hold upon life and happiness in con- 
 seqaence. 
 
 The words came to him as a clue of which he 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 281 
 
 could never again lose sight, and which with full 
 consciousness and strenuous endeavour he must 
 henceforth follow. He sees his nephews and 
 nieces throwing their milk at one another and 
 scolded by Dolly for it. He says to himself that 
 these children are wasting their subsistence be- 
 cause they have not to earn it for themselves and 
 do not know its value, and he exclaims inwardly : 
 ' I, a Christian, brought up in the faith, my life 
 fiUed with the benefits of Christianity, living 
 on these benefits without being conscious of it, I, 
 like these children, I have been trying to destroy 
 what makes and builds up my life.' But now 
 the feeling has been borne in upon him, clear 
 and precious, that what he has to do is to be 
 good; he has 'cried to Him.' What will come 
 of it? 
 
 ' I shall probably continue to get out of temper 
 with my coachman, to go into useless arguments, to 
 air my ideas unseasonably; I shall always feel a 
 barrier between the sanctuary of my soul and the 
 soul of other people, even that of my wife ; I shall 
 always be holding her responsible for my annoyances 
 
282 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM rni 
 
 and feeling sorry for it directly afterwards. I shall 
 continue to pray without being able to explain to 
 myself why I pray ; but my inner life has won its 
 liberty ; it will no longer be at the mercy of events, 
 and every minute of my existence Avill have a 
 meaning sure and profound which it will be in my 
 power to impress on every single one of my actions, 
 that of beifig good.' 
 
 With these words the novel of Anna Kar4nine 
 ends. But in Levine's religious experiences Count 
 Tolstoi was relating his own, and the history is 
 continued in three autobiographical works trans- 
 lated from him, which have within the last two 
 or three years been published in Paris : Ma Con- 
 fession, Ma Religion, and Que Faire. Our author 
 announces further, ' two great works,' on which he 
 has spent six years : one a criticism of dogmatic 
 theology, the other a new translation of the four 
 Gospels, with a concordance of his own arranging. 
 The results which he claims to have established in 
 these two works, are, however, indicated suffi- 
 ciently in the three published volumes which I 
 have named above. 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 288 
 
 These autobiographical volumes show the same 
 extraordinary penetration, the same perfect sin- 
 cerity, which are exhibited in the author's noveL 
 As autobiography they are of profound interest, 
 and they are fuU, moreover, of acute and fruitful 
 remarks. I have spoken of the advantages which 
 the Eussian genius possesses for imaginative litera- 
 ture. Perhaps for Biblical exegesis, for the criticism 
 of religion and its documents, the advantage lies 
 more with the older nations of the West. They 
 will have more of the experience, width of know- 
 ledge, patience, sobriety, requisite for these studies; 
 they may probably be less impulsive, less heady. 
 
 Count Tolstoi regards the change accomplished 
 in himself during the last half-dozen years, he 
 regards his recent studies and the ideas which he 
 has acquired through them, as epoch-making in 
 his life and of capital importance : — 
 
 • Five years ago faith came to me ; I believed 
 in the doctrine of Jesus, and all my life suddenly 
 changed. I ceased to desire that which previously 
 I desired, and, on the other hand, I took to desiring 
 what I had never desired before. That which 
 
284 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vin 
 
 formerly used to appear good in my eyes appeared 
 evil, that which used to appear evil appeared good.' 
 
 The novel of Anna Kar4nine belongs to that 
 past which Count Tolstoi has left behind him; 
 his new studies and the works founded on them 
 are what is important ; light and salvation are 
 there. Yet I will venture to express my doubt 
 whether these works contain, as their contribution 
 to the cause of religion and to the establishment of 
 the true mind and message of Jesus, much that 
 had not already been given or indicated by Count 
 Tolstoi in relating, in Anna Kar4nine, Levine's 
 mental history. Points raised in that history are 
 developed and enforced ; there is an abundant and 
 admirable exhibition of knowledge of human 
 nature, penetrating insight, fearless sincerity, wit, 
 sarcasm, eloquence, style. And we have too the 
 direct autobiography of a man not only interesting 
 to us from his soul and talent, but highly interest- 
 ing also from his nationality, position, and course 
 of proceeding. But to light and salvation in the 
 Christian religion we are not, I think, brought 
 
yiii COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 286 
 
 very much nearer than in Le vine's history. I 
 ought to add that what was already present in that 
 history seems to me of high importance and value. 
 Let us see what it amounts to. 
 
 I must be general and I must be brief; neither 
 my limits nor my purpose permit the introduction 
 of what is abstract. But in Count Tolstoi's reli- 
 gious philosophy there is very little which is 
 abstract, arid. The idea of life is his master idea 
 in studying and establishing religion. He speaks 
 impatiently of St. Paul as a source, in common 
 with the Fathers and the Eeformers, of that eccle- 
 siastical theology which misses the essential and 
 fails to present Christ's Gospel aright. Yet Paul's 
 ' law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus freeing me 
 from the law of sin and death ' is the pith and 
 ground of all Count Tolstoi's theology. Moral life 
 is the gift of God, is God, and this true life, this 
 union with God to which we aspire, we reach 
 through Jesus. We reach it through union with 
 Jesus and by adopting his life. This doctrine is 
 proved true for us by the life in God, to be acquired 
 
288 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 through Jesus, being what our nature feels after 
 and moves to, by the warning of misery if we are 
 severed from it, the sanction of happiness if we 
 find it. Of the access for us, at any rate, to the 
 spirit of life, us who are born in Christendom, are 
 in touch, conscious or unconscious, with Chris- 
 tianity, this is the true account. Questions over 
 which the churches spend so much labour and 
 time — questions about the Trinity, about the 
 godhead of Christ, about the procession of the 
 Holy Ghost, are not vital ; what is vital is the 
 doctrine of access to the spirit of life through 
 Jesus. 
 
 Sound and saving doctrine, in my opinion, this 
 is. It may be gathered in a great degree from 
 what Count Tolstoi had already given us in the 
 novel of Anna Karinine. But of course it is 
 greatly developed in the special works which have 
 followed. Many of these developments are, I 
 will repeat, of striking force, interest, and value. 
 In Anna KarSnine we had been told of the scep- 
 ticism of the upper and educated classes in Eussia 
 
viii COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 287 
 
 But what reality is added by such an anecdote as 
 the following from Ma Confession : — 
 
 ' I remember that when I was about eleven years 
 old we had a visit one Sunday from a boy, since 
 dead, who announced to my brother and me, as great 
 news, a discovery just made at his public school. This 
 discovery was to the effect that God had no existence, 
 and that everything which we were taught about Him 
 was pure invention.' 
 
 Count Tolstoi touched, in Anna Kardnine, on 
 the failure of science to tell a man what his life 
 means. Many a sharp stroke does he add in his 
 latter writings : — 
 
 'Development is going on, and there are laws 
 which guide it. You yourself are a part of the whole. 
 Having come to understand the whole so far as is 
 possible, and having comprehended the law of de- 
 velopment, you will comprehend also your place in 
 that whole, you will understand yourself. 
 
 * In spite of all the shame the confession costs me, 
 there was a time, I declare, when I tried to look as 
 if I was satisfied with this sort of thing ! ' 
 
 But the men of science may take comfort from 
 hearing that Count Tolstoi treats the men of letters 
 
288 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vin 
 
 no better than them, although he is a man of letters 
 himself : — 
 
 'The judgment which my literary companions 
 passed on life was to the effect that life in general 
 is in a state of progress, and that in this develop- 
 ment we, the men of letters, take the principal part 
 The vocation of us artists and poets is to instruct the 
 world ; and to prevent my coming out with the 
 natural question, " What am I, and what am I to 
 teach 1 " it was explained to me that it was useless to 
 know that, and that the artist and the poet taught 
 without perceiving how. I passed for a superb artist, 
 a great poet, and consequently it was but natural 
 I should appropriate this theory. I, the artist, the 
 poet — I wrote, I taught, without myself knowing 
 what. I was paid for what I did. I had everything : 
 splendid fare and lodging, women, society ; I had 
 la gloire. Consequently, what I taught was very 
 good. This faith in the importance of poetry and of 
 the development of life was a religion, and I was 
 one of its priests — a very agreeable and advantageous 
 office. 
 
 'And I lived ever so long in this belief, never 
 doubting but that it was true ! ' 
 
 The adepts of this literary and scientific religion 
 are not numerous, to be sure, in comparison with 
 the mass of the people, and the mass of the people. 
 
Tin COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 289 
 
 as Levine had remarked, find comfort still in the 
 old religion of Christendom ; but of the mass of 
 the people our literary and scientific instructors 
 make no account. Like Solomon and Schopen- 
 hauer, these gentlemen, and ' society ' along with 
 them, are, moreover, apt to say that life is, after 
 all, vanity : but then they all know of no life 
 except their own. 
 
 ' It used to appear to me that the small number 
 of cultivated, rich, and idle men, of whom I was 
 one, composed the whole of humanity, and that the 
 millions and millions of other men who had lived 
 and are still hving were not in reality men at all. 
 Incomprehensible as it now seems to me, that I 
 should have gone on considering Ufe without seeing 
 the life which was surrounding me on all sides, the 
 Hfe of himianity ; strange as it is to think that I 
 should have been so mistaken, and have fancied my 
 life, the life of the Solomons and the Schopenhauers, 
 to be the veritable and normal hfe, while the life of 
 the masses was but a matter of no importance — 
 strangely odd as this seems to me now, so it was, 
 notwithstanding. ' 
 
 And this pretentious minority, who caU them- 
 selves 'society,' 'the world,' and to whom their 
 U 
 
290 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viu 
 
 own life, the life of ' the world,' seems the only life 
 worth naming, are aU the while miserable ! Our 
 author found it so in his own experience : — 
 
 *In my life, an exceptionally happy one from a 
 worldly point of view, I can number such a quantity 
 of sufferings endured for the sake of "the world," 
 that they would be enough to furnish a martyr for 
 Jesus. All the most painful passages in my life, 
 beginning with the orgies and duels of my student 
 days, the wars I have been in, the illnesses, and the 
 abnormal and unbearable conditions in which I am 
 living now — all this is but one martyrdom endured 
 in the name of the doctrine of the world. Yes, and I 
 speak of my own life, exceptionally happy from the 
 world's point of view. 
 
 ' Let any sincere man pass his life in review, and 
 he will perceive that never, not once, has he suffered 
 through practising the doctrine of Jesus ; the chief 
 part of the miseries of his life have proceeded solely 
 from his following, contrary to his inclination, the 
 spell of the doctrine of the world.' 
 
 On the other hand, the simple, the multitudes, 
 outside of this spell, are comparatively con- 
 tented : — 
 
 * In opposition to what I saw in our circle, where 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 291 
 
 life without faith is possible, and where I doubt 
 whether one in a thousand would confess himself a 
 believer, I conceive that among the people (in Eussia) 
 there is not one sceptic to many thousands of 
 believers. Just contrary to what I saw in our circle, 
 where life passes in idleness, amusements, and dis- 
 content with life, I saw that of these men of the 
 people the whole life was passed in severe labour, 
 and yet they were contented with life. Instead of 
 complaining like the persons in our world of the 
 hardship of their lot, these poor people received 
 sickness and disappointments without any revolt, 
 without opposition, but with a firm and tranquil 
 confidence that so it was to be, that it could not be 
 otherwise, and that it was all right.' 
 
 All this is but development, sometimes rather 
 surprising, but always powerful and interesting, of 
 what we have already had in the pages of Anna 
 Karenine. And like Levine in that novel. Count 
 Tolstoi was driven by his inward struggle and 
 misery very near to suicide. What is new in the 
 recent books is the solution and cure announced. 
 Levine had accepted a provisional solution of the 
 difficulties oppressing him ; he had lived right on, 
 80 to speak, obeying his conscience, but not asking 
 
292 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vrn 
 
 how far all his actions hung together and were 
 consistent : — 
 
 ' He advanced money to a peasant to get him out 
 of the clutches of a money-lender, but did not give 
 up the arrears due to himself ; he punished thefts 
 of wood strictly, but would have scrupled to im- 
 pound a peasant's cattle trespassing on his fields ; 
 he did not pay the wages of a labourer whose 
 father's death caused him to leave work in the 
 middle of harvest, but he pensioned and maintained 
 his old servants ; he let his peasants wait while he 
 went to give his wife a kiss after he came home, but 
 would not have made them wait while he went to 
 visit his bees.' 
 
 Count Tolstoi has since advanced to a far more 
 definite and stringent rule of life — the positive 
 doctrine, he thinks, of Jesus. It is the determina- 
 tion and. promulgation of this rule which is the 
 novelty in our author's recent works. He ex- 
 tracts this essential doctrine, or rule of Jesus, 
 from the Sermon on the Mount, and presents it 
 in a body of commandments — Christ's command- 
 ments ; the pith, he says, of the New Testament, 
 as the Decalogue is the pith of the Old. These 
 
vin COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 298 
 
 all-important commandments of Christ are ' com- 
 mandments of peace,' and five in number. The 
 first commandment is : ' Live in peace with all 
 men; treat no one as contemptible and beneath 
 you. Not only allow yourself no anger, but do 
 not rest until you have dissipated even unreason- 
 able anger in others against yourself.' The second 
 is : ' No libertinage and no divorce ; let every 
 man have one wife and every woman one hus- 
 band.' The third : ' Never on any pretext take an 
 oath of service of any kind; all such oaths are 
 imposed for a bad purpose.' The fourth : ' Never 
 employ force against the evil-doer ; bear whatever 
 wrong is done to you without opposing the wrong- 
 doer or seeking to have him punished.' The fifth 
 and last : ' Eenounce all distinction of nationality ; 
 do not admit that men of another nation may 
 ever be treated by you as enemies ; love all 
 men alike as alike near to you ; do good to all 
 alike.' 
 
 If these five commandments were generally 
 observed, says Count Tolstoi, aU men would become 
 
294 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 brothers. Certainly the actual society in which 
 we live would be changed and dissolved. Armies 
 and wars would be renounced ; courts of justice, 
 police, property, would be renounced also. And 
 whatever the rest of us may do, Count Tolstoi at 
 least will do his duty and follow Christ's com- 
 mandments sincerely. He has given up rank. 
 office, and property, and earns his bread by the 
 labour of his own hands. ' I believe in Christ's 
 commandments,' he says, ' and this faith changes 
 my whole former estimate of what is good and 
 great, bad and low, in human life.' At present — 
 
 * Everything which I used to think bad and low — 
 the rusticity of the peasant, the plainness of lodging, 
 food, clothing, manners — all this has become good 
 and great in my eyes. At present I can no longer 
 contribute to anything which raises me externally 
 above others, which separates me from them. I 
 cannot, as formerly, recognise either in my own 
 case or in that of others any title, rank, or quality 
 beyond the title and quality of man. I cannot seek 
 fame and praise ; I cannot seek a culture which 
 separates me from men. I cannot refrain from 
 seeking in my whole existence — in my lodging, my 
 food, my clothing, and my ways of going on with 
 
VIII COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 295 
 
 people — whatever, far from separating me from the 
 mass of mankind, draws me nearer to them.' 
 
 Whatever else we have or have not in Count 
 Tolstoi, we have at least a great soul and a great 
 writer. In his Biblical exegesis, in the criticism 
 by which he extracts and constructs his Five 
 Commandments of Christ which are to be the rule 
 of our lives, I find much which is questionable 
 along with much which is ingenious and powerful. 
 But I have neither space, nor, indeed, inclination, 
 to criticise his exegesis here. The right moment, 
 besides, for criticising this will come when the 
 * two great works,' which are in preparation, shall 
 have appeared. 
 
 For the present I limit myself to a single 
 criticism only — a general one. Christianity can- 
 not be packed into any set of commandments. 
 As I have somewhere or other said, ' Christianity 
 is a source ; no one supply of water and refresh- 
 ment that comes from it can be called the sum 
 of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to 
 much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even 
 
296 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM viii 
 
 those of the Sermon on the Mount, as the ultimate 
 sum and formula into which Christianity may be 
 run up.' 
 
 And the reason mainly lies in the character of 
 the Founder of Christianity and in the nature of 
 his utterances. Not less important than the teach- 
 ings given by Jesus is the temper of their giver, 
 his temper of sweetness and reasonableness, of 
 epieikeia. Goethe calls him a Schwarmer, a 
 fanatic ; he may much more rightly be called an 
 opportunist. But he is an opportunist of an 
 opposite kind from those who in politics, that 
 'wild and dreamlike trade' of insincerity, give 
 themselves this name. They push or slacken, 
 press their points hard or let them be, as may 
 best suit the interests of their self-aggrandisement 
 and of their party. Jesus has in view simply 
 ' the rule of God, of the truth.' But this is served 
 by waiting as well as by hasting forward, and 
 sometimes served better. 
 
 Count Tolstoi sees rightly that whatever the 
 propertied and satisfied classes may think, the 
 
viu COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 297 
 
 world, ever since Jesus Christ came, is judged; 
 'a new earth' is in prospect. It was ever in 
 prospect with Jesus, and should be ever in pros- 
 pect with his followers. And the ideal in 
 prospect has to he realised. 'If ye know these 
 things, happy are ye if ye do them.' But they 
 are to be done through a great and widespread 
 and long- continued change, and a change of the 
 inner man to begin with. The most important 
 and fruitful utterances of Jesus, therefore, are not 
 things which can be drawn up as a table of stiff 
 and stark external commands, but the things 
 which have most soul in them ; because these can 
 best sink down into our soul, work there, set up 
 an influence, form habits of conduct, and prepare 
 the future. The Beatitudes are on this account 
 more helpful than the utterances from which 
 Count Tolstoi builds up his Five Commandments. 
 The very secret of Jesus, * He that loveth his life 
 shall lose it, he that will lose his life shall save it,' 
 does not give us a command to be taken and 
 followed in the letter, but an idea to work in 
 
298 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM vin 
 
 our mind and soul, and of inexhaustible value 
 there. 
 
 Jesus paid tribute to the government and dined 
 with the publicans, although neither the empire 
 of Eome nor the high finance of Judea v^ere com- 
 patible with his ideal and with the ' new earth ' 
 which that ideal must in the end create. Perhaps 
 Levine's provisional solution, in a society like 
 ours, was nearer to ' the rule of God, of the truth,' 
 than the more trenchant solution which Count 
 Tolstoi has adopted for himself since. It seems 
 calculated to be of more use. I do not know how 
 it is in Russia, but in an English village the 
 determination of ' our circle ' to earn their bread 
 by the work of their hands would produce only 
 dismay, not fraternal joy, amongst that * majority ' 
 who are so earning it already. ' There are plenty 
 of us to compete as things stand,' the gardeners, 
 carpenters, and smiths would say ; ' pray stick 
 to your articles, your poetry, and nonsense; in 
 manual labour you will interfere with us, and be 
 taking the bread out of our mouths.' 
 
vriii COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 2d9 
 
 So I axrive at the conclusion that Count Tolstoi 
 has perhaps not done well in abandoning the work 
 of the poet and artist, and that he might with 
 advantage return to it. But whatever he may do 
 in the future, the work which he has already done, 
 and his work in religion as well as his work in 
 imaginative literature, is more than sufficient to 
 signalise him as one of the most marking, interest- 
 ing, and sympathy -inspiring men of our time — 
 an honour, I must add, to Russia, although he 
 forbids us to heed nationality. 
 
IX 
 
 AMIEL* 
 
 It is somewhat late to speak of Amiel, but I was 
 late in reading him. Goethe says that in seasons 
 of cholera one should read no books but such as 
 are tonic, and certainly in the season of old age 
 this precaution is as salutary as in seasons of 
 cholera. From what I heard I could clearly make 
 out that Amiel's Journal was not a tonic book : 
 the extracts from it which here and there I feU in 
 with did not much please me; and for a good while 
 I left the book unread. 
 
 But what M. Edmond Scherer writes I do not 
 easily resist reading, and I found that M. Scherer 
 had prefixed to Amiel's Journal a long and im- 
 
 ^ Published in Macmillan's Magazine, September 1887. 
 
rx AMIEL 801 
 
 portant introduction. This I read ; and was not 
 less charmed by the mitis sapientia, the under- 
 standing, kindness and tenderness, with which the 
 character of Amiel himself, whom M. Scherer had 
 known in youth, was handled, than interested by 
 the criticism on the Journal Then I read Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward's interesting notice, and then — 
 for all biography is attractive, and of Amiel's life 
 and circumstances I had by this time become 
 desirous of knowing more — the Etude Biogra- 
 phique of Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier. 
 
 Of Amiel's cultivation, refinement, and high 
 feeling, of his singular graces of spirit and 
 character, there could be no doubt. But the 
 specimens of his work given by his critics left me 
 hesitating. A poetess herself, Mademoiselle Berthe 
 Vadier is much occupied with Amiel's poetry, and 
 quotes it abundantly. Even Victor Hugo's poetry 
 leaves me cold, I am so unhappy as not to be 
 able to admire Olympio ; what am I to say, then, 
 bo Amiel's 
 
802 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 ' Journ^e 
 
 Illumin6e, 
 Riant soleil d'avril, 
 
 En quel songe 
 
 Se plonge 
 Mon coeur, et que veut-il ' 1 
 
 But M. Scherer and other critics, who do not re- 
 quire us to admire Amiel's poetry, maintain that 
 in his Journal he has left ' a book which will not 
 die,' a book describing a malady of which ' the 
 secret is sublime and the expression wonderful ' ; 
 a marvel of ' speculative intuition,' a ' psychological 
 experience of the utmost value.' M. Scherer and 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward give Amiel's Journal very 
 decidedly the preference over the letters of an old 
 friend of mine, Obermann. The quotations made 
 from Amiel's Journal by his critics failed, I say, 
 to enable me quite to understand this high praise. 
 But I remember the time when a new publication 
 by George Sand or by Sainte-Beuve was an event 
 bringing to me a shock of pleasure, and a French 
 book capable of renewing that sensation is seldom 
 produced now. If Amiel's Journal was of the 
 
IX AMIEL 803 
 
 high quality alleged, what a pleasure to make 
 acquaintance with it, what a loss to miss it ! In 
 spite, therefore, of the unfitness of old age to bear 
 atonic influences, I at last read Amiel's Journal, — 
 read it carefully through. Tonic it is not ; but it 
 is to be read with profit, and shows, moreover, 
 powers of great force and value, though not quite, 
 I am inclined to think, in the exact line which his 
 critics with one consent indicate. 
 
 In speaking of Amiel at present, after so much 
 has been written about him, I may assume that 
 the main outlines of his life are known to my 
 readers : that they know him to have been bom in 
 1821 and to have died in 1881, to have passed 
 the three or four best years of his youth at 
 the University of Berlin, and the remainder of 
 his life mostly at Geneva, as a professor, first of 
 aesthetics, afterwards of philosophy. They know 
 that his publications and lectures, during his life- 
 time, disappointed his friends, who expected much 
 from his acquirements, talents, and vivacity ; and 
 that his fame rests upon two volumes of extracts 
 
804 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM n 
 
 from many thousand pages of a private journal, 
 Journal Intime, extending over more than thirty 
 years, from 1848 to 1881, which he left behind 
 him at his death. This Journal explains hia 
 sterility; and displays in explaining it, say his 
 critics, such sincerity, with such gifts of expression 
 and eloquence, of profound analysis and speculative 
 intuition, as to make it most surely * one of those 
 books which will not die.' 
 
 The sincerity is unquestionable. As to the 
 gifts of eloquence and expression, what are we to 
 say ? M. Scherer speaks of an ' ever new elo- 
 quence ' pouring itself in the pages of the Journal : 
 M. Paul Bourget, of * marvellous pages ' where the 
 feeling for nature finds an expression worthy of 
 Shelley or Wordsworth : Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
 of * magic of style,' of ' glow and splendour of ex- 
 pression,' of the ' poet and artist ' who fascinates us 
 in Amiel's prose. I cannot quite agree. Ober- 
 mann has been mentioned : it seems to me that 
 we have only to place a passage from S^nancour 
 beside a passage from Amiel, to perceive the 
 
IX AMIKL 805 
 
 dilference between a feeling for nature which gives 
 magic to style and one which does not. Here and 
 throughout I am to use as far as possible Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward's translation, at once spirited and 
 faithful, of Amiel's Journal. I will take a passage 
 where Amiel has evidently some reminiscence of 
 S6nancour (whose work he knew well), is inspired 
 by S^nancour — a passage which has been extolled 
 by M. Paul Bourget : — 
 
 ' Shall I ever enjoy again those marvellous reveries 
 of past days, — as, for instance, once, when I was still 
 quite a youth in the early dawn sitting amongst the 
 ruins of the castle of Faucigny ; another time in the 
 mountains above Lancy, under the mid-day sun, lying 
 under a tree and visited by three butterflies ; and 
 again another night on the sandy shore of the North 
 Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes 
 wandering over the Milky Way ? Will they ever re- 
 turn to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic 
 dreams in which one seems to carry the world in one's 
 breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite 1 
 Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies 
 from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, 
 breathes with a respiration large, tranquil, and pro- 
 foimd like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and 
 boundless like the blue heaven ! Visits from the 
 
306 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 Muse Urania, who traces around the foreheads of 
 those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of con- 
 templative power, and who pours into their hearts the 
 tranquil intoxication, if not the authority of genius, — 
 moments of irresistible intuition in which a man feels 
 himself great as the universe and calm like God ! 
 . . . What hours, what memories ! ' 
 
 And now for Obermann's turn, Obermann by 
 the Lake of Bienne : — 
 
 * My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. 
 Feeling inclined to muse, and finding the night so 
 warm that there was no hardship in being all night 
 out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I 
 descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of 
 the lake where its ripple came up and expired. The 
 air was calm ; every one was at rest ; I remained there 
 for hours. Towards morning the moon shed over the 
 earth and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last 
 gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand, when, 
 plunged in a long reverie, one hears the rippling of 
 the waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night 
 still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon. 
 
 ' Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and torment 
 of our vain years ; vast consciousness of a nature 
 everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere im- 
 penetrable ; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, 
 delicious self-abandonment — everything that a mortal 
 heart can contain of life-weariness and yearning, I felt 
 
» AMIEL 307 
 
 it all, I experienced it all, in this memorable night. 
 I have made a grave step towards the age of decline, 
 I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy 
 the simple, whose heart is always young ! ' 
 
 No translation can render adequately the ca- 
 dence of diction, the ' dying fall ' of reveries like 
 those of S^nancour or Eousseau, But even in a 
 translation we must surely perceive that the magic 
 of style is with S^nancour's feeling for nature, not 
 Amiel's ; and in the original this is far more mani- 
 fest still. 
 
 Magic of style is creative : its possessor himself 
 creates, and he inspires and enables his reader in 
 some sort to create after him. And creation gives 
 the sense of life and joy ; hence its extraordinary 
 value. But eloquence may exist without magic of 
 style, and this eloquence, accompanying thoughts 
 of rare worth and depth, may heighten their effect 
 greatly. And M. Scherer says that Amiel's specu- 
 lative philosophy is ' on a far other scale of vast- 
 ness ' than Sdnancour's, and therefore he gives the 
 preference to the eloquence of Amiel, which clothes 
 and conveys this vaster philosophy. Amiel was 
 
808 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 QO doubt greatly S^nancour's superior in culture 
 and instruction generally ; in philosophical read- 
 ing and what is called philosophical thought he 
 was immensely his superior. My sense for philo- 
 sophy, I know, is as far from satisfying Mr. 
 Frederic Harrison as my sense for Hugo's poetry 
 is from satisfying Mr. Swinburne. But I am too 
 old to change and too hardened to hide what I 
 think; and when I am presented with philosophical 
 speculations and told that they are 'on a high 
 scale of vastness,' I persist in looking closely at 
 them and in honestly asking myself what I find to 
 be their positive value. And we get from Amiel's 
 powers of ' speculative intuition ' things like this — 
 
 'Created spirits in the accomplishment of their 
 destinies tend, so to speak, to form constellations and 
 milky ways within the empyrean of the divinity; 
 in becoming gods, they surround the throne of the 
 sovereign with a sparkling court.' 
 
 Or this— 
 
 ' Is not mind the universal virtuality, the universe 
 latent ? If so, its zero would be the germ of the in- 
 finite, which is expressed mathematically by the 
 double zero (00).' 
 
IX AMIEL 809 
 
 Or, to let our philosopher develop himself at more 
 length, let us take this return to the zero, which 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward prefers here to render by 
 nothiTigness : — 
 
 * This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation 
 of death ; it represents the life beyond the grave, the 
 return to Scheol, the soul fading into the world of 
 ghosts or descending into the region of Die Mutter ; 
 it implies the simplification of the individual who, 
 allowing all the accidents of personality to evaporate, 
 exists henceforward only in the invisible state, the 
 state of point, of potentiality, of pregnant nothingness. 
 Is not this the true definition of mind 1 is not mind, 
 dissociated from space and time, just this ? Its 
 development, past or future, is contained in it just as 
 a curve is contained in its algebraical formula. This 
 nothing is an all. This punctum without dimensions 
 is a punctum saliens.' 
 
 French critics throw up their hands in dismay at 
 the violence which the Germanised Amiel, propound- 
 ing his speculative philosophy, often does to the 
 French language. My objection is rather that such 
 speculative philosophy, as that of which I have been 
 quoting specimens has no value, is perfectly futile. 
 And Amiel's Journal contains far too much of it. 
 
810 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM nc 
 
 What is futile we may throw aside ; but when 
 Amiel tells us of his 'protean nature essentially 
 metamorphosable, polarisable, and virtual,' when 
 he tells us of his longing for ' totality/ we must 
 listen, although these phrases may in France, as 
 M. Paul Bourget says, 'raise a shudder in a 
 humanist trained on Livy and Pascal.' But these 
 phrases stood for ideas which did practically rule, 
 in a great degree, Amiel's life, which he often de- 
 velops not only with great subtlety, but also with 
 force, clearness, and eloquence, making it both 
 easy and interesting to us to follow him. But still, 
 when we have the ideas present before us, I shall 
 ask, what is their value, what does Amiel obtain 
 in them for the service of either himself or other 
 people ? 
 
 Let us take first what, adopting his own phrase, 
 we may call his ' bedazzlement with the infinite,' 
 his thirst for 'totality.' Omnis determinatio est 
 negatio. Amiel has the gift and the bent for 
 making his soul ' the capacity for all form, not a 
 soul but the soul.' He finds it easier and more 
 
IX AMIEL 811 
 
 natural ' to be man than a man.' His permanent 
 instinct is to be ' a subtle and fugitive spirit which 
 no base can absorb or fix entirely.' It costs him 
 an effort to af&rm his own personality : ' the in- 
 finite draws me to it, the Henosis of Plotinus in- 
 toxicates me like a philtre.' 
 
 It intoxicates him until the thought of absorp- 
 tion and extinction, the Nirvdna of Buddhism, be- 
 comes his thought of refuge : — 
 
 ' The individual life is a nothing ignorant of itself, 
 and as soon as this nothing knows itself, individual 
 life is abolished in principle. For as soon as the illu- 
 sion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its eternal sway, 
 the suflfering of life is over, error has disappeared, 
 time and form have for this enfranchised individuality 
 ceased to be ; the coloured air-bubble has burst in 
 the infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk 
 to rest in the changeless repose of all-embracing 
 Nothing.' 
 
 With this bedazement with the infinite and 
 this drift towards Buddhism comes the impatience 
 with all production, with even poetry and art 
 themselves, because of their necessary limits and 
 imperfection : — 
 
812 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM w 
 
 ' Composition demands a concentration, decision, 
 and pliancy which I no longer possess. I cannot fuse 
 together materials and ideas. If we are to give 
 anything a form we must, so to speak, be the tyrants 
 of it. We must treat our subject brutally and not 
 be always trembling lest we should be doing it a 
 wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb 
 it into our own substance. This sort of confident 
 effrontery is beyond me ; my whole nature tends to 
 that impersonality which respects and subordinates 
 itself to the object ; it is love of truth which holds 
 me back from concluding and deciding.' 
 
 The desire for the all, the impatience with what 
 is partial and limited, the fascination of the in- 
 finite, are the topics of page after page in the 
 Journal. It is a prosaic mind which has never 
 been in contact with ideas of this sort, never felt 
 their charm. They lend themselves well to poetry, 
 but what are we to say of their value as ideas to 
 be lived with, dilated on, made the governing 
 ideas of life ? Except for use in passing, and with 
 the power to dismiss them again, they are un> 
 profitable. Shelley's 
 
 ' Life like a dome of many-coloured glass 
 Stains the white radiance of eternity 
 Until death tramples it to fragments ' 
 
rx AMIEL 313 
 
 has value as a splendid image nobly introduced in 
 a beautiful and impassioned poem. But Amiel's 
 ' coloured air-bubble,' as a positive piece of ' specu- 
 lative intuition,' has no value whatever. Nay, the 
 thoughts which have positive truth and value, the 
 thoughts to be lived with and dwelt upon, the 
 thoughts which are a real acquisition for our 
 minds, are precisely thoughts which counteract 
 the ' vague aspiration and indeterminate desire ' 
 possessing Amiel and filling his Journal : they 
 are thoughts insisting on the need of limit, the 
 feasibility of performance. Goethe says admir- 
 ably— 
 
 ' Wer grosses will muss sich zusammenraflFen : 
 In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister.' 
 
 ' He who will do great things must puU himself 
 together : it is in working within limits that the 
 master comes out.' Buffon says not less admir- 
 ably— 
 
 ' Tout sujet est un ; et quelque vaste qu'il soit, il 
 pent etre renferm6 dans un seul discours.' 
 
 ' Every subject is one ; and however vast it may be 
 
314 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 is capable of being contained in a single discourse.' 
 The ideas to live with, the ideas of sterling value to 
 us, are, I repeat, ideas of this kind : ideas staunchly 
 counteracting and reducing the power of the in- 
 finite and indeterminate, not paralysing us with it. 
 And indeed we have not to go beyond Amiel 
 himself for proof of this. Amiel was paralysed by 
 living in these ideas of ' vague aspiration and in- 
 determinate desire,' of ' confounding his personal 
 life in the general life,' by feeding on these ideas, 
 treating them as august and precious, and filling 
 hundreds of pages of Journal with them. He was 
 paralysed by it, he became impotent and miser- 
 able. And he knew it, and tells us of it himself 
 with a power of analysis and with a sad elo- 
 quence which to me are much more interesting 
 and valuable than his philosophy of Maia and the 
 Great WheeL 'By your natural tendency,' he 
 says to himself, ' you arrive at disgust with Hfe, 
 despair, pessimism,' And again : ' Melancholy 
 outlook on all sides. Disgust with myself.' And 
 again : ' I cannot deceive myself as to the fate in 
 
IX AMIEL 315 
 
 store for me : increasing isolation, inward disap- 
 pointment, enduring regrets, a melancholy neither 
 to be consoled nor confessed, a mournful old age, 
 a slow agony, a death in the desert.' And all this 
 misery by his own fault, his own mistakes. ' To 
 live is to conquer incessantly; one must have 
 the courage to be happy. I turn in a vicious 
 circle ; I have never had clear sight of my true 
 vocation.' 
 
 I cannot, therefore, fall in with that particular 
 line of admiration which critics, praising Amiel's 
 Journal, have commonly followed. I cannot join 
 in celebrating his prodigies of speculative intui- 
 tion, the glow and splendour of his beatific vision 
 of absolute knowledge, the marvellous pages in 
 which his deep and vast philosophic thought is 
 laid bare, the secret of his sublime malady is ex- 
 pressed, I hesitate to admit that all this part of 
 the Journal has even a very profound psychologi- 
 cal interest : its interest is rather pathological. 
 In reading it we are not so much pursuing a study 
 of psychology as a study of mental pathology. 
 
316 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM tx 
 
 But the Journal reveals a side in Amiel which 
 his critics, so far as I have seen, have hardly 
 noticed, a side of real power, originality, and value. 
 He says hinaself that he never had clear sight of his 
 true vocation: well, his true vocation, it seems to me, 
 was that of a literary critic. Here he is admirable : 
 M. Scherer was a true friend when he offered to 
 introduce him to an editor, and suggested an article 
 on Uhland. There is hardly a literary criticism 
 in these two volumes which is not masterly, and 
 which does not make one desire more of the same 
 kind. And not Amiel's literary criticism only, 
 but his criticism of society, politics, national char- 
 acter, religion, is in general well informed, just, 
 and penetrating in an eminent degree. Any one 
 single page of this criticism is worth, in my 
 opinion, a hundred of Amiel's pages about the In- 
 finite Illusion and the Great Wheel. It is to this 
 side in Amiel that I desire now to draw attention. 
 I would have abstained from writing about him if 
 I had only to disparage and to find fault, only to 
 say that he had been overpraised, and that his 
 
IX AMIEL 317 
 
 dealings with Maia seemed to me profitable neither 
 for himself nor for others. 
 
 Let me first take Amiel as a critic of literature, 
 and of the literature which he naturally knew 
 best, French literature. Hear him as critic on 
 that best of critics, Sainte-Beuve, of whose death 
 (1869) he had just heard :— 
 
 ' The fact is, Sainte-Beuve leaves a greater void 
 behind him than either B6ranger or Lamartine ; their 
 greatness was already distant, historical ; he was still 
 helping us to think. The true critic supplies all the 
 world with a basis. He represents the public judg- 
 ment, that is to say, the public reason, the touchstone, 
 the scales, the crucible, which tests the value of each 
 man and the merit of each work. Infallibility of 
 judgment is perhaps rarer than anything else, so fine 
 a balance of qualities does it demand — qualities both 
 natural and acquired, qualities of both mind and 
 heart. What years of labour, what study and com- 
 parison, are needed to bring the critical judgment to 
 maturity ! Like Plato's sage, it is only at fifty that 
 the critic is risen to the true height of his literary 
 priesthood, or, to put it less pompously, of his social 
 function. Not till then has he compassed all modes 
 of being, and made every shade of appreciation his 
 own. And Sainte-Beuve joined to this infinitely re- 
 fined culture a prodigious memory and an incredible 
 
318 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 multitude of facts and anecdotes stored up for the 
 service of his thought.' 
 
 The criticism is so sound, so admirably put, 
 and so charming, that one wishes Sainte-Beuve 
 could, have read it himself. 
 
 Try Amiel next on the touchstone afforded 
 by that 'half genius, half charlatan,' Victor 
 Hugo : — 
 
 • I have been again looking through Victor Hugo's 
 Paris (1867). For ten years event after event 
 has given the lie to the prophet, but the confidence 
 of the prophet in his own imaginings is not therefore 
 a whit diminished. Humility and common sense are 
 only fit for Lilhputians. Victor Hugo superbly 
 ignores everything which he has not foreseen. He 
 does not know that pride limits the mind, and that 
 a limitless pride is a littleness of soul. If he could 
 but learn to rank himself with other men and France 
 with other nations, he would see things more truly, 
 and would not fall into his insane exaggerations, his 
 extravagant oracles. But proportion and justness 
 his chords will never know. He is vowed to the 
 Titanic; his gold is always mixed with lead, his 
 insight with childishness, his reason with madness. 
 He cannot be simple ; like the blaze of a house on 
 fire, his light is blinding. In short, he astonishes 
 but provokes, he stirs but annoys. His note is 
 
rx AMIEL 319 
 
 always half or two-thirds false, and that is why he 
 perpetually makes us feel uncomfortable. The great 
 poet in him cannot get clear of the charlatan. A 
 few pricks of Voltaire's irony would have made the 
 inflation of this genius collapse, and rendered him 
 stronger by rendering him saner. It is a public mis- 
 fortune that the most powerful poet of France should 
 not have better understood his rdle, and that, unlike 
 the Hebrew prophets who chastised because they 
 loved, he flatters his fellow-citizens from system and 
 from pride. France is the world, Paris is France, 
 Hugo is Paris. Bow down and worship, ye nations ! ' 
 
 Finally, we will hear Amiel on a consummate 
 
 and supreme French classic, as perfect as Hugo is 
 
 flawed. La Fontaine : — 
 
 'Went through my La Fontaine yesterday, and 
 remarked his omissions. . . . He has not an echo of 
 chivalry haunting him. His French history dates 
 from Louis XIV. His geography extends in reality 
 but a few square miles, and reaches neither the 
 Rhine nor the Loire, neither the mountains nor the 
 sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently 
 takes them ready-made from elsewhere. But with 
 all this, what an adorable writer, what a painter, 
 what an observer, what a master of the comic and 
 the satirical, what a teller of a story ! I am never 
 tired of him, though I know half his fables by heart. 
 In the matter of vocabulary, turns of expression, 
 
320 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 tones, idioms, his language is perhaps the richest of 
 the gi'eat period, for it combines skilfully the archaic 
 with the classical, the Gaulish element with what is 
 French. Variety, finesse, sly fun, sensibility, rapidity, 
 conciseness, suavity, grace, gaiety — when necessary 
 nobleness, seriousness, grandeur — ^you find everything 
 in our fabulist. And the happy epithets, and the 
 telling proverbs, and the sketches dashed off, and 
 the unexpected audacities, and the point driven well 
 home ! One cannot say what he has not, so many 
 diverse aptitudes he has. 
 
 ' Compare his Woodcutter and Death with Boileau's, 
 and you can measure the prodigious diflFerence 
 between the artist and the critic who wanted to 
 teach him better. La Fontaine brings visibly before 
 you the poor peasant under the monarchy, Boileau 
 but exhibits a drudge sweating under his load. The 
 first is a historic witness, the second a school-versifier. 
 La Fontaine enables you to reconstruct the whole 
 society of his age ; the pleasant old soul from Cham- 
 pagne, with his animals, turns out to be the one and 
 only Homer of France. 
 
 ' His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge 
 of grossuess. This, no doubt, was what made La- 
 martine dislike him. The religious string is wanting 
 to his lyre, he has nothing which shows him to have 
 known either Christianity or the high tragedies of 
 the souL Kind Nature is his goddess, Horace his 
 prophet, and Montaigne his gospel. In other words, 
 his horizon is that of the Renascence. This islet 
 
IX AMIEL 321 
 
 of paganism in the midst of a Catholic society is 
 very curious ; the paganism is perfectly simple and 
 frank.' 
 
 These are but notes, jottings in his Journal, 
 and Amiel passed from them to broodings over the 
 infinite, and personality, and totality. Probably 
 the literary criticism which he did so well, and for 
 which he shows a true vocation, gave him never- 
 theless but little pleasure because he did it thus 
 fragmentarily and by fits and starts. To do it 
 thoroughly, to make his fragments into wholes, to 
 fit them for coming before the public, composition 
 with its toils and limits was necessary. Toils and 
 limits composition indeed has; yet all composi- 
 tion is a kind of creation, creation gives, as I have 
 already said, pleasure, and, when successful and 
 sustained, more than pleasure, joy. Amiel, had 
 he tried the experiment with literary criticism, 
 where lay his true vocation, would have found it 
 so. Sainte-Beuve, whom he so much admires, 
 would have been the most miserable of men if 
 his production had been but a volume or two of 
 
822 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 middling poems and a journal. But Sainte- 
 Beuve's motto, as Amiel himself notices, was that 
 of the Emperor Severus : Laborermis. ' Work,' 
 Sainte-Beuve confesses to a friend, ' is my sore 
 burden, but it is also my great resource. I eat my 
 heart out when I am not up to the neck in work ; 
 there you have the secret of the life I lead.' If 
 M. Scherer's introduction to the Revue Ger- 
 maniqiie could but have been used, if Amiel 
 could but have written the article on Uhland, and 
 followed it up by plenty of articles more ! 
 
 I have quoted largely from Amiel's literary 
 criticism, because this side of him has, so far as 
 I have observed, received so little attention, and 
 yet deserves attention so eminently. But his more 
 general criticism, too, shows, as I have said, the 
 same high qualities as his criticism of authors and 
 books. I must quote one or two of his aphorisms : 
 L' esprit sert Men d tout, mais ne suffit d, rien : ' Wits 
 are of use for everything, sufficient for nothing.' 
 Uhe soci6t6 vit de sa foi et se cUveloppepar la science : 
 ' A society lives on its faith and develops itself by 
 
IX AMIEL 828 
 
 science.' L'Etat liberal est irrdalisahle avec une 
 religion antilibdrale, et presque irrSalisable avec V ab- 
 sence de religion : ' Liberal communities are im- 
 possible with an anti-liberal religion, and almost 
 impossible with the absence of religion.' But 
 epigrammatic sentences of this sort are perhaps 
 not so very difficult to produce, in French at any 
 rate. Let us take Amiel when he has room and 
 verge enough to show what he can really say 
 which is important about society, religion, national 
 life and character. We have seen what an influ- 
 ence his years passed in Germany had upon him : 
 we have seen how severely he judges Victor 
 Hugo's faults : the faults of the French nation at 
 large he judges with a like severity. But what 
 a fine and just perception does the following 
 passage show of the deficiencies of Germany, the 
 advantage which the western nations have in 
 their more finished civilisation : — 
 
 ' It is in the novel that the average vulgarity oi 
 German society, and its inferiority to the societies of 
 France and England are most clearly visible. The 
 Y 2 
 
824 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 notion of a thing's jarring on the tasU is wanting to 
 German aesthetics. Their elegance knows nothing of 
 grace ; they have no sense of the enormous distance 
 between distinction (gentlemanly, ladylike) and their 
 stiff Vornehmlichkeit. Their imagination lacks ?tyle, 
 training, education, and knowledge of the world ; it 
 is stamped with an ill-bred air even in its Sunday 
 clothes. The race is practical and intelligent, but 
 common and ill-mar nered. Ease, amiability, manners, 
 wit^ animation, dignity, charm, are qualities which 
 belong to others. 
 
 ' Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound 
 harmony of all the faculties, which I have so 
 often observed among the best Germans, ever come 
 to the surface ? Will the conquerors of to-day 
 ever civilise their forms of life 1 It is by their future 
 novels that we shall be able to judge. As soon as 
 the German novel can give us quite good society, 
 the Germans will be in the raw stage no longer.' 
 
 And this pupil of Berlin, *this devourer of 
 German books, this victim, say the French critics, 
 to the contagion of German style, after three 
 hours, one day, of a GescJiichte der JEstheiik in 
 Deutschland, breaks out : — 
 
 * Learning and even thought are not everything. 
 A little esprit, point, vivacity, imagination, grace, 
 would do no harm. Do these pedantic books leave 
 
rx AMIEL 825 
 
 a single image or sentence, a single striking or new 
 fact, in the memory when one lays them down ? 
 No, nothing but fatigue and confusion. Oh, for 
 clearness, terseness, brevity ! Diderot, Voltaire, or 
 even Galiani ! A short article by Sainte - Beuve, 
 Scherer, Renan, Victor Cherbulioz, gives one more 
 pleasure, and makes one ponder and reflect more, 
 than a thousand of these German pages crammed 
 to the margin and showing the work itself rather 
 than its result. The Germans heap the faggots for 
 the pile, the French bring the fire. Spare me your 
 lucubrations, give me facts or ideas. Keep your 
 vats, your must, your dregs, to yourselves ; I want 
 wine fully made, wine which will sparkle in the glass, 
 and kindle my spirits instead of oppressing them.' 
 
 Amiel may have been led away deteriora sequi : 
 he may have Germanised until he has become 
 capable of the verb cUpersonnaliser and the noun 
 ^implication ; but after all, his heart is in the 
 right place : videt meliora prohatque. He remains 
 at bottom the man who said : Le livre serait mon 
 ambition. He adds, to be sure, that it would be 
 son ambition, * if ambition were not vanity, and 
 vanity of vanities.' 
 
 Yet tliis disenchanted brooder, ' full of a tran- 
 
826 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 quil disgust at the futility of our ambitions, the 
 void of our existence/ bedazzled with the infinite, 
 can observe the world and society with consum- 
 mate keenness and shrewdness, and at the same 
 time with a delicacy which to the man of the 
 world is in general wanting. Is it possible to 
 analyse le grand monde, high society, as the Old 
 World knows it and America knows it not, more 
 acutely than Amiel does in what follows ? — 
 
 ' In society people are expected to behave as if 
 they lived on ambrosia and concerned themselves 
 with no interests but such as are noble. Care, need, 
 passion, do not exist. All realism is suppressed as 
 brutal. In a word, what is called le grand monde 
 gives itself for the moment the flattering illusion that 
 it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing 
 the air of the gods. For this reason all vehemence, 
 any cry of nature, all real suffering, all heedless 
 familiarity, any genuine sign of passion, are startling 
 and distasteful in this delicate milieu, and at once 
 destroy the collective work, the cloud-palace, the im- 
 posing architectural creation raised by common con- 
 sent. It is like the shrill cock-crow which breaks the 
 spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies to flight. 
 These select gatherings produce without intending it 
 a sort of concert for eye and ear, an improvised work 
 
tx AMIEL 327 
 
 of art. By the instinctive collaboration of everybody 
 concerned, wit and taste hold festival, and the associa- 
 tions of reality are exchanged for the associations of 
 imagination. So understood, society is a form of 
 poetry ; the cultivated classes deliberately recompose 
 the idyll of the past, and the buried world of Astrsea. 
 Paradox or not, I believe that these fugitive attempts 
 to reconstruct a dream, whose only end is beauty, 
 represent confused reminiscences of an age of gold 
 haunting the human heart ; or rather, aspirations 
 towards a harmony of things which every-day reality 
 denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a 
 glimpse.' 
 
 I remember reading in an American newspaper 
 a solemn letter by an excellent republican, asking 
 what were a shopman's or a labourer's feelings 
 when he walked through Eaton or Chatsworth. 
 Amiel will tell him : they are ' reminiscences of an 
 age of gold haunting the human heart, aspirations 
 towards a harmony of things which every-day reality 
 denies to us.' I appeal to my friend the author 
 of Triumphant Democracy himself, to say whether 
 these are to be had in walking through Pittsburg. 
 
 Indeed it is by contrast with American life 
 that Nirvdna appears to Amiel so desirable : — 
 
328 ESSAYS IN CKITICISM ix 
 
 'For the Americans, life means devouring, in- 
 cessant activity. They must win gold, predomi- 
 nance, power ; they must crush rivals, subdue nature. 
 They have their heart set on the means, and never 
 for an instant think of the end. They confound 
 being with individual being, and the expansion of 
 self with happiness. This means that they do not 
 live by the soul, that they ignore the immutable and 
 eternal, bustle at the circumference of their existence 
 because they cannot penetrate to its centre. They 
 are restless, eager, positive, because they are super- 
 ficial. To what end all this stir, noise, greed, struggle] 
 It is all a mere being stunned and deafened !' 
 
 Space is failing me, but I must yet find room 
 for a less indirect criticism of democracy than the 
 foregoing remarks on American life : — 
 
 ' Each function to the most worthy : this maxim is 
 the professed rule of all constitutions, and serves to 
 test them. Democracy is not forbidden to apply it ; 
 but Democracy rarely does apply it, because she holds, 
 for example, that the most worthy man is the man 
 who pleases her, whereas he who pleases her is not 
 always the most worthy ; and because she supposes 
 that reason guides the masses, whereas in reality they 
 are most commonly led by passion. And in the end 
 every falsehood has to be expiated, for truth always 
 takes its revenge.' 
 
IX AMIEL 329 
 
 What publicists and politicians have to learn 
 is, that ' the ultimate ground upon which every 
 civilisation rests is the average morality of the 
 masses and a sufficient amount of practical 
 righteousness.' But where does duty find its 
 inspiration and sanctions ? In religion. And 
 what does Amiel think of the traditional religion 
 of Christendom, the Christianity of the Churches ? 
 He tells us repeatedly; but a month or two before 
 his death, with death in full view, he tells us 
 with peculiar impressiveness : — 
 
 * The whole Semitic dramaturgy has come to seem 
 to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic 
 documents have changed in value and meaning to my 
 eyes. The distinction between belief and truth has 
 grown clearer and clearer to me. Religious psychology 
 has become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its 
 fixed and absolute value. The apologetics of Pascal, 
 Leibnitz, Secr6tan, appear to me no more convincing 
 than those of the Middle Age, for they assimie that 
 which is in question — a revealed doctrine, a definite 
 and unchangeable Christianity.' 
 
 Is it possible, he asks, to receive at this day the 
 common doctrine of a Divine Providence direct- 
 
330 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ix 
 
 ing all the circumstances of our life, and conse- 
 quently inflicting upon us our miseries as means 
 of education ? 
 
 * Is this heroic faith compatible Avith our actual 
 knowledge of the laws of nature ? Hardly. But 
 what this faith makes objective we may take sub- 
 jectively. The moral being may moralise his suffer- 
 ing in turning the natural fact to account for the 
 education of his inner man. What he cannot change 
 he calls the will of God, and to will what God wills 
 brings him peace.' 
 
 But can a religion, Amiel asks again, with- 
 out miracles, without unverifiable mystery, be 
 efi&cacious, have influence with the many ? And 
 again he answers : — 
 
 ' Pious fiction is still fiction. Truth has superior 
 rights. The world must adapt itself to truth, not 
 truth to the world. Copernicus upset the astronomy 
 of the Middle Age ; so much the worse for the 
 astronomy. The Everlasting Gospel is revolutionis- 
 ing the Churches ; w hat does it matter 1 * 
 
 This is water to our mill, as the Germans say, 
 indeed. But I have come even thus late in the 
 day to speak of Amiel, not because I found him 
 supplying water for any particular mill, either 
 
IX AMIEL 331 
 
 mine or any other, but because it seemed to me 
 that by a whole important side he was eminently 
 worth knowing, and that to this side of him the 
 public, here in England at any rate, had not 
 had its attention sufficiently drawn. If in the 
 seventeen thousand pages of the Journal there 
 are many pages still unpublished in which 
 Amiel exercises his true vocation of critic, of 
 literary critic more especially, let his friends give 
 them to us, let M. Scherer introduce them to us, 
 let Mrs. Humphry Ward translate them for us. 
 But sat patrice Priamoque datum : Maiia has had 
 her full share of space already : I will not ask for 
 a word more about the infinite illusion, or the 
 double zero, or the Great WheeL 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh. 
 
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