LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO 

 
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 $A"
 
 LECTURES ON POETRY 
 
 DOYLE
 
 LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 1868 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR F. H. DOYLE, Bart., M.A., B.C.L. 
 Sf 
 
 Late Fellow 0/ All Souls' 
 
 PROFESSOR OF POETRY 
 
 bonbon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1869
 
 OXFORD: 
 
 BY T. COMBE, M A., E. B. GARDNER, E. P. HALL, AND H. LATHAM, M.A., 
 
 PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 In giving these Lectures to the world, I believe I am 
 only taking a usual step, and one that is expected of 
 Oxford Professors, more or less, by that University. I 
 need only then ask my readers to bear in mind that they 
 are lectures, to be heard, as ancient Pistol says, ' with 
 ears' — not subtle disquisitions to be meditated upon in 
 a quiet stud)-. They have therefore been thrown into a 
 key more rhetorical and familiar than I should otherwise 
 have adopted, and are rather, to use Aristotle's phrase, 
 epideictic orations than argumentative essays. I must add 
 that for five -and -twenty years and more, I have done 
 nothing as an orator, except to mumble now and then 
 a few words, against my will, at a wedding breakfast. It 
 follows that these compositions must be, in point of tone 
 and style, necessarily tentative. Indeed, one reason for 
 not putting off publication till a greater number of them 
 had heaped themselves up, is, that the sooner any cor- 
 rigible defects and mistakes arc pointed out to me (and
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 I dare sav I shall find critics obliging enough to meet 
 my wishes in that respect), the less delay will there be, on 
 my part, in reconsidering the whole subject, and in mend- 
 ing, so far as I can, the error of my ways.
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE.
 
 LECTURE I. 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 When any one steps into the place of a poet and 
 critic such as Mr. Arnold, he naturally feels somewhat 
 awkward in undertaking his new functions. £ If it 
 had not been/ he fancies his hearers saying to them- 
 selves, c for the inconvenient restrictions by which this 
 Professorship is hampered, we might have kept, with 
 all the tact and power superadded which arises out 
 of a long experience, our man of genius. Now, how- 
 ever, he is forced, for us at least, into an unnecessary 
 silence, in order that another may speak — another, 
 who has, no doubt, much of his business yet to learn, 
 and who, even when he has learnt it, is not likely 
 to give out anything half so good as that to which 
 his predecessor has accustomed us/ 
 
 And yet, perhaps, if we suppose the founder of this 
 Chair to have been actuated, in limiting its tenure, by 
 reason and not by caprice ; there is something, even 
 
 '•>* B
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 though it may involve temporary failures and occa- 
 sional disappointments, to be said for such a limita- 
 tion. Criticism, to speak roughly, for I am not aiming 
 at any logical division, is of two kinds — the criticism of 
 knowledge, and the criticism of sympathy. The critics 
 who know, of whom Aristotle may be taken as the type 
 and representative, judge mainly by the intellect j and 
 any great leader of that school, if he be, in his degree, 
 worthy to follow in the steps of his master, throws, 
 like the noon-day sun, a broad and equal illumina- 
 tion over all the departments of his subject alike. 
 But as the lovelier tints of colouring, and the more 
 pathetic lights, are due to those narrowing rays which 
 fasten upon their own domain, so is there a criticism 
 of the sympathies specially worth having, wherever 
 those sympathies are specially interested. It therefore 
 might be not unreasonably hoped, and not unwisely 
 attempted, to accumulate the most delicate insights, 
 and the liveliest sensibilities of different minds, so 
 that, converging from opposite quarters, they should 
 coalesce into a perfect whole. For an unbroken suc- 
 cession of Aristotles it is vain to hope. But thus, 
 it might be possible to build up, limb by limb, a 
 great body of doctrine — of doctrine, keen with that 
 intensity, which the wide critic is apt to want, and
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 all-embracing in that width, which no passionate 
 critic is likely to attain to, unless he be one of 
 those rare men, whom the world waits for through 
 centuries of expectation. In this manner it ought 
 to result, that the poetry of thought and the poetry 
 of passion — that which belongs to the present and 
 that which is reflected from the past, that which is 
 of home growth, and that which rises up among other 
 habits of thought, and takes its shape from a different 
 national character — should, in their turns, be ade- 
 quately interpreted and discussed. 
 
 If this way of looking at the office of Poetry Pro- 
 fessor, and at the objects which he has to set before 
 himself, be, under ordinary circumstances I mean, 
 a right and convenient one, he should, I think, take 
 the earliest opportunity (as I hope to do on the present 
 occasion) of opening himself frankly and freely to his 
 audience. It seems to me therefore desirable, before 
 I enter into any details of criticism, before I praise 
 one poet or disparage another, that my general view 
 as to the nature of the poetical imagination, as to its 
 uses and its dangers, as to the manner in which it 
 acts for itself, and reacts upon the character at large, 
 should be known to those for whom such criticisms 
 of detail are intended. All this I believe to be 
 
 B 1
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 desirable, not only for you who hear, but also for 
 me who speak. These questions go so deep into the 
 roots of life, they have been so often disputed about, 
 and still remain so incompletely solved, that I, for 
 one, am not going to dogmatize thereon. I can but 
 state plainly, and without affectation, what I think 
 and feel. I can but promise that, being at least as 
 anxious to learn as I am willing to teach, the objec- 
 tions which will rise up against any theories of mine, 
 as they have risen up against the theories of men 
 to whom I should not dream of comparing myself, 
 shall be examined (if I know my own mind) with an 
 attention unvexed by prejudice, and only eager for the 
 truth. 
 
 So complete, indeed, is the discordance of senti- 
 ment, as to all these matters, between rival instructors, 
 who alike claim the highest authority, that even before 
 entering upon the actual subject of this address, 1 have 
 to go a step back, and to fight, as it seems, for my very 
 existence here, by undertaking the defence of Poetry 
 itself. Against whom you will say, Quis vhuperavit? 
 Ay, that is the question; not against men up to 
 their necks in business — stockbrokers, bankers, and 
 the like — not against the family of that typical 
 clerk —
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 • Foredoomed his father's soul to cross, 
 Who pens a stanza when he should engross,' 
 
 but against writers of the highest genius, who could, 
 as far as we can judge, equip, out of their rich and 
 powerful imaginations, an ordinary poet or so, with- 
 out much feeling the loss. Against such high autho- 
 rities, in a word, as Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. 
 I am not clear at this moment whether Mr. Carlyle 
 has ever put his hatred of verse-making on record, 
 in any formal shape j but it may be gathered from 
 any one of his writings. Everybody knows how 
 he confides, at uncertain intervals, to the eternities 
 and immensities — his bitter regret, that men of noble 
 faculties, like Tennyson and Browning, should have 
 become entangled, under some evil star, in the 
 meshes of rhyme, instead of devoting themselves to 
 
 I do not exactly know what — but to something or 
 
 anything else. Mr. Ruskin, however, in one of his 
 most characteristic passages, announces himself to the 
 universe as admitting but two orders of poets. Both 
 of these, according to him, must be first-rate in their 
 range, though their range be different, and with poetry 
 second-rate in quality no one ought to be allowed 
 to trouble mankind. £ There is quite enough of the 
 best,' says he, £ much more than we can read or enjoy,
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 in the length of a single life, and it is a literal wrong 
 or sin to encumber us with inferior work.' c I have 
 no patience,' he now proceeds (by way of encourag- 
 ing and inspiring the bards of the future), 'with the 
 apologies made by young pseudo-poets, that they be- 
 lieve that there is some good in what they have 
 written ; some good — if there is not all good, there is 
 no good. If they ever hoped to do better, why do 
 they trouble us now?' If these views were correct, 
 the first thing to strike me in this place, would be 
 that a conscientious Poetry Professor must have a 
 dreadful time of it. His mission he must look upon 
 as wholly negative ; his motto could only be, ' Preven- 
 tion is better than cure.' His duty would summon 
 him to rise up early and late take rest, to run hither 
 and thither, saying to this undergraduate, 'Writing 
 for the Newdegate? Have you no principles?' To 
 that bachelor of arts, c What ! at your age contend- 
 ing for the triennial Religious Poem ? Do you not 
 know that you are guilty of a literal sin ? ' He must 
 consider himself, in short, elected for the purpose of 
 proctorizing generally the haunts of song, and of hunt- 
 ing up meditated stanzas, in the act of concoction, like 
 an Irish exciseman on the track of an illicit still. 
 Happily for me, I do not feel bound to incur any
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 such onerous responsibilities. I differ entirely from 
 every one of the sentences quoted above, and the very 
 last position, which I should think of taking up, would 
 be that of a critical Canute, who plants his foot upon 
 the brink of the advancing age, and says to the rising 
 tide of genius, as it rolls shoreward under an irre- 
 sistible impulse from within, c You know you should 
 not come here.' 
 
 I have said that Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin 
 are possessed of rich, I might have added of almost 
 inexhaustible, imaginations; I suspect, however — and 
 it makes them all the greater if I am right in my 
 conjecture — that for neither of their minds is it abso- 
 lutely the dominant or master faculty. Now I think 
 we shall find, that whenever this is the case, whenever 
 other gifts and talents (equally admirable, perhaps,) 
 have the power, and, indeed, in some sort, the right 
 to struggle against the rule of the formative imagina- 
 tion, the result is not a genuine poet, at least not 
 a genuine poet of the normal type ; but a thinker, or 
 a rhetorician, or a critic in verse. One test of this 
 I believe to be, that when such a man has recourse 
 to poetry, that he may embody and communicate 
 what he thinks and feels ; he finds himself moving, 
 no matter with what degree of vigour and energy, in
 
 8 LECTURE I. 
 
 an element which is not his most natural one ; his 
 thoughts do not flow as freely as they should ; his 
 metaphors do not kindle and rush upon him with their 
 usual affluence and splendour. He differs, in short, 
 from the real singers by this, that for him the pressure 
 of rhythm and the law of measured words weighs down 
 like a fetter, instead of uplifting as a wing. Hence a 
 certain distrust of poetry itself j hence, unconsciously, 
 I dare say, something like a contemptuous bitterness 
 against smaller men, who, amid the stumbling-blocks 
 and intricacies which have half baffled their superiors, 
 go twittering about, more comfortable, and more at 
 home, than, in the opinion of the giants, they have any 
 business to be. 
 
 Setting, however, all this aside, and taking Mr. 
 Ruskin's utterances for what they are worth, without 
 attempting to explain their origin, let us examine them 
 in turn, and endeavour to ascertain their real value. 
 
 First, Mr. Ruskin admits only two orders of poets. 
 Of the higher order, he names Homer, Dante, Shake- 
 speare • of the lower, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats. 
 Nothing can be better- but how is he to get his 
 chosen ones ? It seems to me that what he desires 
 is to gather the perfect fruit without any blossoms 
 competing beforehand j without any previous rise or
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 struggle of the sap. He may have been somehow 
 or other clothed by Apollo with a special mission 
 to move about among undeveloped rhymesters, and to 
 pronounce at once, by the help of some diviner in- 
 stinct, 'This poet-grub is a pseudo-grub, be careful 
 that his wings are cut hereafter. This one again is of 
 royal spirit, let him be put into a royal cell; feed 
 him upon honey-dew; make him drink the milk of 
 Paradise, and train him up, without any disturbance 
 from importunate rivals, into a bard proper.' But 
 unless something of this kind can be done (as bees in a 
 difficulty, under the impulse of their unerring instinct, 
 fix upon the very one they want, out of a multitude of 
 seemingly undistinguishable little creatures, and feed 
 it up into an unexceptionable queen), we must, I fear, 
 be content to take our poets as they arise, according 
 to the methods in which nature usually supplies them. 
 Now, we all know the story of Brummel's valet coming 
 down-stairs with an unshapely mass of crumpled neck- 
 cloths under his arm ; and how, on being asked what 
 on earth he was about? he replied, not without a 
 tincture of becoming pride, c These are our failures.' 
 Meanwhile, the successful tie above was, I may say, 
 the poet of muslin, a consummation and a flower which 
 had emerged out of some thirty dishevelled existences.
 
 10 LECTURE I. 
 
 Or, to take another illustration, if you go into a 
 china manufactory, you may see the workman carefully 
 shaping, out of the same raw material, bowls, and jugs, 
 and vases, but the form of this one is not perfect, the 
 paste of that other is too thin to stand the trial of 
 fire. But come, here is a third; surely that will do? 
 No, not quite yet. There is a half imperceptible flaw 
 somewhere, which renders it unfit to bear the required 
 stress and strain. And thus they are all of them 
 mercilessly kneaded up again into chaos, till the eye 
 and hand of the artist have taught themselves to work 
 in harmony together, and the structure, sufficient at 
 last, receives that delicate texture, and imbibes those 
 glowing colours, which often last on without a blemish, 
 when bulkier and stronger, and apparently more im- 
 portant productions have rotted, or crumbled, or rusted 
 into ruin. I recollect standing at Worcester long 
 ago, amid work that was thus going on, and saying 
 to myself, in rather a melancholy mood, £ This is the 
 way in which Nature gets her poets. She has to mal- 
 treat rather savagely a great deal of very respectable 
 clay in the process, but I make no doubt that the clay, 
 sooner or later, finds its proper place in some other 
 condition : and, after all, the poet is there.' 
 
 Of course I must not be taken as meaning seriously
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. II 
 
 to say that this is the actual method according to which 
 illustrious men are compounded and turned out of the 
 laboratory of Nature. What I do mean is, I trust, suffi- 
 ciently obvious, the rather that it has often enough been 
 insisted on before — I mean that they belong to their 
 time and are but specimens selected out of a multitude 
 which clusters around them. A thousand influences co- 
 operate with, a thousand accidents combine to impress 
 each original mind, and nearly the same influences co- 
 operate with, and nearly the same accidents combine 
 to impress myriads of other minds and other tempera- 
 ments, separated from the nobler ones by narrower 
 or broader lines of demarcation. I hope I may say 
 it without irreverence, c they that run in the race 
 run all, but one only receiveth the prize.' Mr. Ruskin 
 would forbid the race. Is he sure that, having done 
 so, he could always secure the prize for the most 
 deserving? The very great are apt sometimes in 
 youth to outgrow their strength, to exhibit more of 
 struggle and contortion and awkwardness than some 
 symmetrical rival, who is a better master of his genius, 
 because his genius was never born to rise so high, 
 and therefore never strives and ferments with such 
 irregular and intermitting power. All this, however, 
 has been brought home to the feelings and common-
 
 12 LECTURE I. 
 
 sense of mankind by the world-famous story of the 
 Ugly Duck, so that 1 need not enlarge upon the 
 subject. I will content myself with reminding Mr. 
 Ruskin, that even if he could succeed in establishing 
 his prohibitory decrees, and in beating down free-trade 
 so far as poetry is concerned, he might still find himself 
 self-baffled in the end, by the defeat of his own object, 
 and the suppression of his own swan. 
 
 The second proposition to which Mr. Ruskin de- 
 mands our assent is this : that as there is more first- 
 rate poetry than can be read or enjoyed in the length 
 of a single life, the attention of the world ought to 
 be concentrated upon that, and the lyres of all meaner 
 minstrels impounded at once, as you take away a gun 
 from a poacher. Whether this be quite the case, 
 unless he include in his corpus poetarum that huge 
 Calmuck Epic, of which every polite person among 
 the Calmucks is expected to know by heart forty-eight 
 books, at least, out of the three or four hundred which 
 lie open to his memory, I do not think it necessary 
 to inquire, because it is wholly irrelevant to the 
 matter in hand. He himself has told us, elsewhere, 
 with his usual eloquence, that the artist (and it really 
 matters not a jot whether such artist be poet, painter, 
 sculptor, or musician) becomes great, and earns his
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 1 3 
 
 glory, by being the man of men, the contemporary 
 among contemporaries in his own day. He embodies 
 their aspirations, he interprets their vague yearnings, 
 he soothes their sorrows, he gives a voice to the 
 dumb struggle of their passions, he lives, as they do, 
 in the life of the present, instead of striving to create 
 a future as yet unfelt by them, or to reawaken a past 
 which they have forgotten. Now the complicated 
 influences, which act upon our own time, may be less 
 noble and less fruitful than those which acted upon the 
 fellow-citizens of Dante or of Shakespeare, but still 
 they have a nobility which belongs to themselves, and 
 are entitled to bear their own natural fruit. This 
 again brings us back to what I said before, that we 
 must get our poets as we can, according to the methods 
 which nature is determined to employ. 
 
 There is a dismal theory of the universe, that all 
 the uncountable suns throughout space are smoulder- 
 ing down, gradually, but surely, into one perpetual 
 night. More cheerful astronomers, however, are to 
 be found, who encourage a hope that this is not 
 altogether so ; that what seems to us a void, is 
 filled everywhere with dormant seeds of being — with, 
 as it were, a diffused and impalpable vapour of heat 
 and light and energy. So that everywhere, the great
 
 14 LECTURE I. 
 
 stars perish not, but are endowed with mysterious 
 powers for drawing forth, and condensing, and assi- 
 milating to their own essence, the spirit of universal 
 life which lies floating around them wherever they 
 goj and for repairing, in this manner, the over- 
 flowings of incessant waste, from fountains of ever- 
 lasting renovation. To this movement (if there be 
 such a movement) of the heavens through space, we 
 can perhaps liken the progress of Poetry through Time. 
 At one season it may rejoice as a giant to run its 
 course, in harmony with noble materials of inspira- 
 tion, and with the heart of some great age ; at another, 
 it may have to toil across poorer and thinner regions 
 of thought. But always, whether the element in which 
 it moves be rich or poor, it is driven, by the law of 
 its existence, to get as much life as it can for itself 
 out of the surrounding atmosphere, or else to starve 
 and die. 
 
 It is therefore idle to talk of the great writers of old, 
 as being enough for the world, and that without any 
 addition to their numbers. Men of mature age may 
 return to them with delight, and interest themselves 
 by observing how and where the poets who enchanted 
 their boyhood approach to, and how and where they 
 fall short of these, the acknowledged masters of their
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 
 
 *5 
 
 common art. But there is a yearning instinct in the 
 youth of each generation, the mother, I believe, of all 
 true poetry, which seeks ever to find in the songs 
 which it loves and dwells upon, the reflection of its 
 own passions and the echo of its own thoughts. In 
 proportion as those passions are worth reflecting, and 
 those thoughts are worth echoing, in that proportion, 
 I apprehend, does the poetry of any particular time or 
 country establish itself among the lasting possessions 
 of mankind j but whether it be ephemeral or whether 
 it be immortal, have it you must. 
 
 We now come to the remarkable dictum that unless 
 the poetry of any poet be all good, it is none of it good. 
 Surely this is a hard saying, and the lantern of 
 Diogenes must be put into requisition, if we hope 
 to find a writer of verses who is fit to live. Is all 
 Shakespeare good? is all Homer good? is all Dante 
 good ? He must be an unflinching partizan who could 
 answer these questions in the affirmative. Even, 
 however, if we put aside such Di Majores, as soaring, 
 in a region of their own, beyond the reach of criticism, 
 I, for one, am not prepared to give up Lochiel and the 
 Battle of the Baltic, the Last Man, and O'Connor's 
 Child, and the Mariners of England, and some twenty 
 other of Campbell's odes, because he wrote much
 
 1 6 LECTURE 1. 
 
 hardly above mediocrity, and not a little which is 
 hopelessly below par. I am not prepared to blot out 
 the story of Margaret, and Lucy Gray, and Tintern 
 Abbey, and the countless exquisite compositions which 
 must occur to all who hear me, because Wordsworth 
 was once ill-inspired enough to write, in honour of the 
 Border damsel who saved her lover by the sacrifice 
 of her own life, some flat, poor stanzas, which begin 
 thus — 
 
 ' Sweet Ellen Irwin, when she sat 
 
 Upon the braes of Kirtle, 
 Was lovely as a Grecian maid 
 Adorned with wreaths of myrtle.' 
 
 And that on Scottish ground, too, and with the pas- 
 sionate music of the old lyrical cry ringing in his 
 ears — 
 
 'I wish I were where Helen lies; 
 Night and day on me she cries ; 
 Oh that I were where Helen lies, 
 On fair Kirkonnel lea. 
 
 Curst be the heart that thought the thought, 
 And curst the hand that fired the shot, 
 When in my arms Burd Helen dropt, 
 And died to rescue me. 
 
 Oh, think na ye my heart was sair, 
 When my love dropt down and spak nae mair; 
 I laid her down wi' mickle care 
 On fair Kirkonnel lea.
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 17 
 
 As I went down the water side, 
 None but my foe to be my guide, 
 None but my foe to be my guide, 
 
 On fair Kirkonnel lea, 
 I lighted down my sword to draw, 
 I hacked him in pieces sma', 
 
 On fair Kirkonnel lea. 
 
 I would my grave were growing green, 
 A winding-sheet drawn o'er my e'en, 
 And I in Helen's arms were lying 
 On fair Kirkonnel lea. 
 
 I wish I were where Helen lies; 
 Night and day on me she cries ; 
 And I am weary of the skies 
 Since my love died for me.' 
 
 Now it may be said that I am dissecting words 
 somewhat captiously: this might be so, if I thought 
 Mr. Ruskin any nearer the truth in the spirit of these 
 criticisms, than he is in the letter of them. As to their 
 form, that, no doubt, is comparatively unimportant. 
 
 When he says that poetry not first-rate adds 
 altogether to human weariness, in a most uncom- 
 fortable manner, I may imagine that I catch the 
 tones of a famous voice, whose natural accent is a 
 Scottish one — a voice which belongs not so much to 
 Mr. Ruskin as to an elder if not a better dogmatizer. 
 I may think that even if Mr. Ruskin be the appointed 
 heir of our well-known Chelsea Elijah, it might have 
 
 c
 
 1 8 LECTURE I. 
 
 been more discreet to wait, before wrapping himself 
 in the familiar mantle, until the prophet in pos- 
 session had let it drop. But I am quite willing to 
 acknowledge that a man may state his case crudely 
 and violently, and yet be right in the main. Can we 
 say this, however, in the present instance ? Honestly, 
 I think not. After all, people must be educated, or 
 must educate themselves, through the capacities they 
 have, and not through those which they have not. 
 Accordingly, one boy cannot write a letter to a school- 
 fellow without scribbling horses, and huntsmen, and 
 little wiry terriers, all over the paper; another steals 
 down in the grey of the morning, with his nightgown 
 still on, to pick out times upon the pianoforte before 
 it is wanted for those inevitable scales; a third, in 
 my day, used to know Marmion and the Bride of 
 Abydos, now he knows the Idylls of the King by 
 heart, and delights himself with flabby imitations of 
 Tennyson, or Byron, or Scott. Now, if you say to the 
 rirst of these lads, £ You will never become a Raphael 
 or a Titian, and therefore never let me hear of your 
 touching a pencil again;' to the second, £ Do you 
 suppose you can hereafter rival Beethoven or Mozart ? 
 keep therefore away from the pianoforte, or conse- 
 quences which I should deplore will be the result;'
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 19 
 
 and to the third, 'You are not a Shakespeare — no, 
 nor even a Tennyson — therefore, if ever you stumble 
 on a rhyme again, you must instantly be flogged j* you 
 would, in my opinion, be going altogether the wrong 
 way to work. Instead of clearing the mind, as you 
 intend, for the ordinary purposes of life, you only sour 
 the temper and darken the understanding with the 
 dust and smoke of an extinguished faculty. 
 
 Leave, then, the young verse-makers alone ; some of 
 them, not always those whose apparent promise first 
 meets the eye, are about to stand forth as the genuine 
 poets of the on-coming time. In others, the impulse 
 will gradually wear itself out, but not until it has 
 imparted to the intellect a certain elasticity and glow 
 of colour, which tends to heighten its attractiveness, 
 and to increase its general power. But there is a 
 third class, not usually of great importance, members 
 of which, nevertheless, are lifted every now and then 
 by the force of circumstances, and under the pressure 
 of awakened passion, out of and above themselves j so 
 that we get high poetry from men who are not really 
 high poets, and owe more than one of those 
 
 ' Jewels, five words long, 
 That on the stretched forefinger of old Time 
 Sparkle for ever ' 
 
 C 2
 
 20 LECTURE I. 
 
 to writers, either wholly unknown, or at least com- 
 paratively obscure. For instance, what have we to 
 do with Colonel Lovelace ? He was a gallant soldier, 
 without question, famous for personal beauty among 
 his contemporaries, able, popular, and accomplished; 
 but so were many others then, who are now totally 
 forgotten. If the times had been smooth, he would 
 have gone on glittering at the Court of Charles I, and 
 polishing up his love ditties, till he got tired of that 
 work, with very little interest for us. But the times 
 were not smooth. Civil war swept down as a sword, 
 cutting family ties and old affections asunder. Then 
 came the partings, £ such as press the life out from young 
 hearts ' — the despairing appeals from sisters and sweet- 
 hearts and mothers and wives, encountered with a re- 
 sistance equally despairing on the part of brothers and 
 lovers and husbands and sons. And I say that the 
 spirit of England is stronger, and the literature of 
 England richer even unto this day, because Colonel 
 Lovelace was able to stand forth, for Puritan and 
 Loyalist alike, out of the multitude of gentlemen and 
 men of honour — to stand forth and fix in living 
 words that answer to such appeals, which has to be 
 given by all true men, and accepted by all true women, 
 as implacable and final for evermore : —
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 21 
 
 ' Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, 
 
 That from the nunnery 
 Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 
 To war and arms I fly. 
 
 True, a new mistress now I chase, 
 
 The first foe in the field, 
 And with a stronger faith embrace 
 
 A sword, a horse, a shield. 
 
 Yet this inconstancy is such 
 
 As thou, too, shalt adore ; 
 I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 
 Loved I not honour more.' 
 
 A manly sentiment indeed, certain to live on with 
 the English language in its own manly words — words 
 not unworthy to rank close up with that first great 
 utterance of unselfish public duty, which yet speaks to 
 the soul of man across the silence of three thousand 
 years — 
 
 (Is oluivus &pitTTOi, a/j-weffOai mpl TraTpTjs. 
 
 But observe, if Colonel Lovelace's verse -making 
 tendencies had been sternly repressed, this poem would 
 never have seen the light. He is rather a voluminous 
 author, and wrote a good deal, which nobody reads 
 or is likely to read now j but he learnt thereby to use 
 language as a tool, and to put his thoughts into shape. 
 Had he not cultivated poetry as an art, before it seized 
 upon him as an inspiration, the feeling would have 
 been there for him, as it was there for many others
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 who gave it no permanent expression ; but it must 
 have fallen back like a broken wave into the depths 
 of his own heart, and the literature of England would 
 have been all the poorer by the absence of one of its 
 poetical gems. 
 
 Up to this point I hope that we have gone on to- 
 gether. We all, I hope, agree in thinking, first, that 
 the course of poetry cannot be stopped by proscribing 
 future poets ; secondly, that however desirable it might 
 be to have none but great writers, we cannot get these 
 except by a process of natural selection out of the 
 crowd of smaller men ; and that, thirdly, each succes- 
 sive age will, without dethroning older potentates, 
 possess itself of its own sworn interpreters and guides. 
 Therefore it was that the tribes of Hellas, amid the 
 petty cares and struggles of a duller age, yearned to hear 
 of those heroic days, when their forefathers, led on by 
 children of the gods, established for ever the distinction 
 between the barbarian and the Hellene. Accordingly 
 the songs of Homer, which this yearning of theirs had 
 half created, were received at feast and game with 
 unfading enthusiasm, whereas recitations from the 
 philosophical poetry of Wordsworth would have fallen 
 idly and without music on their ears. Therefore the 
 patriarchs of Arabia, smitten by their overwhelming
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 23 
 
 sense of the personality of God, and the utter nothing- 
 ness of men, bowed down before the glorious inspira- 
 tion of Job, with hearts which echoed every word of it 
 back. But the wide and tolerant gentleness of Shake- 
 speare they would probably have resented as a personal 
 affront. 
 
 Different, however, as are the forms which at 
 different times poetry has put on, they seem for the 
 most part to be derived from a single source — that dis- 
 satisfaction, I mean, with what is present and close at 
 hand, which is one of Nature's silent promises to the 
 heart, one stimulus to the advancement of our race, 
 one evidence of the abiding greatness of man. Even 
 when the poet plunges headlong into lower elements, 
 and prostitutes his genius by investing frivolous plea- 
 sures or animal passions with his draperies of beauty 
 and grace, it is but an angry recoil from the pressure 
 of the Infinite — the c desire of the moth for the star,' 
 driven back upon itself, and maddened by its bitter 
 disappointment. The imagination, indeed, not con- 
 fined to poetry, but under the name of Hope, 'as broad 
 and general as the casing air,' has well been called by 
 some old writer — Simonides, I think — the nurse of life. 
 But who this nurse of life actually is, and what her 
 exact position with reference to the mental faculties
 
 24 LECTURE I. 
 
 may be, is quite another question. A great deal 
 has been thought and published upon the subject, by 
 men eminent in different degrees, and at different 
 times. They have, however, hitherto failed to land us 
 in any definite conclusion. 
 
 Now, the first point to lay down, in order that we 
 may escape from the mystification of mere words, 
 seems to be that we must distinctly recognise as a 
 fact that everybody possesses some imagination. We 
 call one man imaginative as we call another muscular j 
 not meaning thereby that weaker persons are without 
 the same muscles, but only that they do not impress us 
 with a special sense of their existence. I say this, 
 however, with some doubt, and as it were tentatively, 
 because there are critics of high authority who, when 
 they speak of the imagination, connecting it with such 
 names as Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare, speak of it 
 in terms which might lead us to suppose that they look 
 upon it as a separate faculty, by no means to be found, 
 even as a germ, in average human creatures, but re- 
 served for the peculiar favourites of Heaven. Just as 
 the power of Samson, if I may follow up the analogy 
 glanced at above, was infused into him, and him 
 alone, by a Divine influence from on high, whilst 
 that of Hercules, however gigantic, was the same
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 25 
 
 in kind as the power of other men, 'diffused and 
 manacled in joint and limb, and founded on the brittle 
 strength of bones.' Now this view of theirs may be 
 the right one. The larger cannot of course be com- 
 prehended by the smaller, and we know that there are 
 shades of emotion rising up in many minds, quite 
 naturally, which are wholly unintelligible to the rest 
 of mankind. For instance, there is that strange state 
 of feeling which seems to itself to recognise as familiar, 
 places, persons, and expressions never seen or heard 
 before. Upon some this weighs with such persistency 
 and vividness of impression, that its absence from the 
 souls of others surprises and bewilders them, whilst to 
 those who have it not, the assertion of its existence is 
 met by half-incredulous astonishment- so much so that 
 we might almost fancy that the former, according to 
 Plato's theory, were in the middle of their preordained 
 transfigurations, whilst the latter were only entering 
 upon their earliest phase of life. In like manner, the 
 higher imagination may be some such peculiarity, only 
 rarer in its manifestations, and belonging to the in- 
 tellectual, rather than to the emotional side of human 
 character. I can only say that, as at present advised, 
 I can see no reason for supposing so. But if it be, it 
 would seem hopeless, even for the possessors thereof, to
 
 26 LECTURE I. 
 
 analyse, and explain to the world of common sense, the 
 nature of their incommunicable faculty. Voltaire's 
 inhabitants of Saturn and Sirius, with their seventy-two 
 and their thousand senses respectively, might as well 
 attempt to make clear to the earth-born pigmy, whom 
 they pitied as they talked, the secret of their com- 
 plicated organisations. If, then, we are to examine 
 this question at all, we must assume that it is within 
 the ordinary jurisdiction of mankind, and take for 
 granted, at present at least, that, vast as may be the 
 difference between one imagination and another, it is 
 Still but a difference in degree, and not in kind. 
 
 There is, however, a new and original hypothesis, 
 which it would be wrong to pass over in silence : that 
 hypothesis, I mean, which has been advocated by Mr. 
 Dallas, in his essay on c The Gay Science,' with great 
 ingenuity and zeal. He has done good service to all 
 who busy themselves with investigation of mental phe- 
 nomenon, by accumulating and discussing a number 
 of recorded instances, in which the intellect is known 
 to have worked, for the most part unconsciously, at 
 times when the bodily frame was laid asleep. In this 
 state it produces out of that work results sometimes 
 natural to the producing mind, as when Coleridge, in 
 an opium dream, created Kubla Khan; or as when a
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 2J 
 
 lawyer, with his eyes shut, in the middle of the night, 
 builds up an elaborate opinion on some point of law ; 
 but in other cases, again, other results wholly foreign 
 to it and unexpected, as when persons, ignorant of 
 music whilst awake, pour out in sleep their unre- 
 membered strains, imitating with accuracy and skill 
 certain melodies which have, somehow or other, forced 
 themselves in upon a latent sensibility of the brain. 
 This latent sensibility, when thus called into action, 
 Mr. Dallas describes as c the hidden soul/ and identi- 
 fies it with the creative imagination. Since his book, 
 which promises to be an interesting and a valuable 
 one, is but half completed, it would be premature to 
 condemn this theory, which may be reinforced by fresh 
 arguments and additional explanations. But I must 
 frankly confess that I do not understand it now. I 
 do not see how the great works which are meditated 
 and wrought out in full day-light, with a perfect con- 
 sciousness both of the means employed and of the ends 
 they are directed to accomplish, can be referred to 
 the hidden soul. Nor, again, do I perceive in what 
 manner the organised memory and methodical arrange- 
 ment of facts, by the help of which a barrister grapples 
 with his point of law, whether he grapples with it at his 
 chambers or on his bed, can be ranked under the faculty
 
 28 LECTURE I. 
 
 of the imagination. Nay, it appears to me, as far 
 as I can judge, that the hidden soul, which no doubt, 
 for most men (Mr. Dallas, I think, has established that 
 position), is more active than they could readily be- 
 lieve, executes its labours very much as the unhidden 
 soul executes hers, at other times. I do not think it 
 unlikely that some here, when boys at a public school, 
 may have done Latin verses in a dream. I have, I 
 know, more than once j though I never could remember 
 anything higher up than the last two. But they, and 
 I suppose their predecessors, were framed without any 
 mysterious agency at all — they were framed by the 
 same soul precisely, whatever that may be, which is 
 set apart for the manufacture of fifth-form longs and 
 shorts in an ordinary after twelve; nor could I ever 
 discover that they were appreciably better, or appre- 
 ciably worse, than if I had hammered them out upon 
 the normal quarter of paper, whilst sitting at an 
 orthodox desk. I settled the matter for myself in 
 a careless sort of way, by supposing that different 
 portions of the brain were unequally asleep, and that 
 those portions nearest to wakefulness might exercise 
 their energies, more or less, without breaking that bond 
 which was yet enchaining the senses and the limbs. 
 Nor does it seem to me that the accidental circum-
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 29 
 
 stance of my remembering how I was engaged, instead 
 of, as is perhaps more frequently the case, forgetting 
 it altogether, can in any way affect the character of 
 the mental operation itself.* At the same time, I 
 readily admit that Mr. Dallas is an earnest student 
 on all such subjects, and a conscientious thinker- I 
 therefore wait with some impatience to hear if he has 
 anything to add to his mental speculations. Mean- 
 while, I adhere to Shakespeare's much simpler creed 
 that. — 
 
 * The last time when this happened to me (not very many years ago) 
 may be worth record, as illustrating the instantaneous effects of a change 
 in the mental attitude during sleep. I found myself one morning at 
 Mrs. Holt's again, bent over the well-remembered wooden desk, and 
 writing verses, for which my tutor was waiting, upon Spring. I got 
 on smoothly enough till I came to this couplet, — 
 
 ' Emicat omnis ager renovato flore rosarum, 
 Et passim herbosa nube virescit humus.' 
 Here my critical faculty came into play, I doubted about 'herbosa 
 nubes,' but so completely was I the Eton boy once more that I put 
 the doubt aside by saying, ' Oh, I think it will do, and if my tutor does 
 not like it, he may alter it, and be hanged to him' (an improper speech 
 of Philip asleep, for which Philip awake begs pardon of the excellent 
 Provost of King's) ; but the little shift of thought, involved in this, 
 woke me instantly with the two lines in question on my lips. The 
 preceding ones had drifted irrecoverably (without, I fancy, leaving the 
 world much poorer) into the abyss of space; if no such hitch had 
 occurred, my belief is that I should have roused myself, at my usual 
 hour, without any memory of the transaction at all.
 
 3° LECTURE I. 
 
 ' As imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name.' 
 
 From this point of view, the first constituent element 
 of the imagination seems to be a particular form of 
 memory, which presents its facts in groups, with all 
 their attendant circumstances and details retraced to 
 the life. It stretches out, as it were, into a spiritual 
 gallery, holding and exhibiting a long series of pictures 
 gathered from the past ; one man recollects that such 
 a thing has happened, another exactly how it happened, 
 and this last kind of recollection is, no doubt, one of 
 the main foundations on which the imagination has 
 to rest. If we join to this a power of unlimited com- 
 bination — out of all the contents of such a gallery, 
 a power, as Shakespeare calls it, of bodying forth from 
 the endless variety of things known, the forms of 
 things unknown, and of turning them, by the help of 
 language, into, shapes — we have before us, I think, the 
 imaginative faculty in the rough. I do not, however, 
 say that he who possesses, or is possessed by such a 
 faculty, is therefore a poet. I understand that mathe- 
 maticians require a high degree of it to deal, for 
 instance, with the dimensions and configurations of 
 space, and probably with other parts of their science.
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 3 1 
 
 There is also the musical imagination, of which I am 
 not qualified to speak ; but, as far as my observation 
 extends, music is more akin to mathematics than to 
 poetry. 
 
 The radical difference, however, which separates 
 the poetical imagination proper from other forms 
 of the same faculty — from those, at least, which deal 
 with articulate words, is that it is essentially and above 
 all things suggestive. A mathematician may have to 
 conceive the starry life and desert chasms of the 
 universe by a mental gift, such as that which Dante 
 put forth to drag before the inner eye his maps and 
 ground-plans of hell ; but when he comes to communi- 
 cate the result of these far-stretching speculations, he 
 has to unwind his story, link by link, and to pause 
 at every step. The rhetorician may clothe what he 
 has to say in purple and fine linen. He may dazzle 
 all around him by the splendour of his diction ; but 
 still the object and duty of his art is to unfold and 
 enlarge upon, and to hammer in, by repeated strokes, 
 what he wishes to impress upon his audience. He 
 leaves as little as possible to be supplied from within 
 by any mental action of theirs- and the reason is clear, 
 namely, that as the particular business of eloquence is 
 to hurry the listener along with the speaker, any one
 
 32 LECTURE I. 
 
 who stops to feel his own feelings, and to think his 
 own thoughts, becomes entangled in them, and is left 
 behind. But the poet, on the other hand, is con- 
 tented to touch a chord, which then vibrates at will, as 
 its own sensitiveness may dictate; and according to 
 the number and intensity of the vibrations awakened, 
 legitimately awakened I mean, is the poetical power 
 shown. 
 
 The poet, of course, ought also to be an artist, and 
 must not overdo his work, or overstrain the attention 
 of his readers ; so that passages of repose, and mixed 
 passages of rhetoric and poetry, or of thought and 
 poetry, are often well and wisely introduced into any 
 considerable work ; but they do not, so far as it is 
 a poem, constitute its essence. So, again, the rheto- 
 rician, when the ears of his crowd are caught, and their 
 hearts are hot within them, may often heighten the 
 effect of his appeals by a rapid flash of poetry ; but any 
 speaker who, instead of expatiating upon topic after 
 topic as they arise in their order, should flit quickly from 
 one delicate suggestion to another, after the manner of 
 a poet, as an orator would be certain to fail. To 
 illustrate what I mean, let us take two well-known 
 passages from Jeremy Taylor. I choose a prose writer 
 to quote from, because the naked limbs, disjecti poeta^
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 33 
 
 are easier to operate upon in the way of anatomy. 
 Every one knows the famous paragraph in which he 
 compares the swift passage from youth to age, and 
 from life to death, with the opening, the blooming, and 
 the fading of a flower : — f But so I have seen a rose 
 newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first 
 it was fair and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's 
 fleece ; but when a ruder breath forced upon its virgin 
 modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe 
 retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline 
 to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age, till at 
 night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, 
 it fell into the portion of weeds and worn-out faces.' 
 Now the thought here is obvious enough, not to say 
 commonplace. The comparison of the life of man to 
 the flowers of the field can hardly have been an original 
 simile much later than the age of Jubal. The whole 
 beauty of the passage, a rhetorical beauty, consists in 
 the exquisite accumulation of details, which must drive 
 the meaning of this well-known metaphor home to the 
 sense of the dullest peasant, and force him to acknow- 
 ledge that the likeness is a real one. But, again, let 
 us take this other sentence : — c I have read of a fair 
 young German gentleman, who, living, often refused to 
 be painted, but put off the importunity of his friends 
 
 D
 
 34 LECTURE I. 
 
 by giving way that, after a few days' burial, they might 
 send a painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it, 
 draw the image of his death to the life.' The Bishop 
 then proceeds to enumerate, rhetorically, the ghastly 
 circumstances of that condition, but he concludes, and, 
 as it were, locks his sentences together by a touch of 
 the purest poetry, and c so he stands painted among his 
 armed ancestors ! ' His armed ancestors ! That single 
 word, that short epithet, builds up for us in an instant 
 a feudal castle, frowning with all its towers above the 
 Danube or the Rhine, with its wide halls, its sounding 
 corridors, its stately picture-galleries filled with the 
 masterpieces of Albert Durer, of Holbein, and the like. 
 We know further how, in the midst of men and women 
 who seemed to move and breathe along its walls, that 
 fearful shadow in the midst was even then mocking 
 at their false pretences to life. We know how the 
 bereaved mother and forlorn sisters knelt continually 
 beneath, praying for the repose of the dead, and how 
 the shuddering vassals crossed themselves as they 
 passed. We know all this ; but we read it by a light 
 which lives and spreads within, as soon as it has 
 been kindled for us from without. And therefore I go 
 on to say that we feel ourselves to be in the presence 
 of a great rhetorician, no doubt, but also in that of
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE, 35 
 
 a genuine poet. Nay, so completely does the inner- 
 most poetry of a line lie in the soul, and not in the 
 outward form of words, that the very same passage 
 may be high poetry or simple prose according to the 
 suggestions which it involves. When Ariel, in answer 
 to Prospero's inquiries as to how it is possible that the 
 affections of a man injured as he had been should be 
 touched by the misery of his foes, replies at once, c mine 
 would, sir, were they human, 5 nothing can be more un- 
 pretending than this brief speech considered as to its 
 form of expression; but what interminable insights 
 does it not open out into the world of spirits, and the 
 infinite gradations of being! 
 
 Again, to use a more modern instance, Robert 
 Browning's Duke of Ferrara, in that wonderful little 
 tragedy of his, c My Last Duchess,' dismisses the 
 terror-stricken envoy from his future bride's father, in 
 the following words : — 
 
 ' Taming a sea-horse thought a rarity 
 Which Claus of Innspruck cast in bronze for me.' 
 
 If we are to suppose this quiet observation to be ad- 
 dressed to some fair-haired English Milordo who, with 
 the mediaeval equivalent for Murray in his hand, had 
 blundered up against a courteous Italian prince, it 
 would be absolute, not to say rather bald prose j but 
 
 d 2
 
 $6 LECTURE I. 
 
 coming, as it does, at the end of that dreadful series of 
 hints, through which the ambassador must convey to 
 the new wife, if he takes any interest in his own life, 
 without implicating the Duke of Ferrara, c woe to him 
 if he does this,' — a warning not to be mistaken ; it 
 is lighted up by a terrible significance from within. 
 We shudder to feel that if the innocent bride-elect 
 lifts a finger or raises an eyelash except in harmony 
 with the unspoken bidding of her lord, the grave which 
 holds the beautiful original of one veiled portrait has 
 room for her also, and that the picture-galleries of 
 Ferrara even yet are not without available space ; and 
 acknowledge heartily, with how slight a motion of his 
 hand, the man of real genius can create an imperishable 
 dramatic effect. 
 
 And this brings us to another question much dis- 
 cussed and open to much discussion — the comparative 
 merits of the vigorous grasp, as opposed to the impal- 
 pable touchings of the poetical imagination. There 
 can be no doubt that where the vigorous grasp of 
 a subject is possible, such a grasp should always be laid 
 upon it ; but there are regions of poetry, perhaps the 
 very highest, beyond the reach of the human eye, except 
 through fluctuating glimpses and visionary hints. And 
 a grander dream of suggestion may visit the heart of
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 37 
 
 an intelligent disciple, where the poet catches, or half 
 catches, an evanescent ray from lights behind the sun, 
 than if he had measured his distances and counted up 
 his materials with the precision of an architectural 
 draughtsman. When Alfred Tennyson in his c In 
 Memoriam ' attempts to rest on the cheering belief 
 that the soul of his friend, and of my friend, was 
 removed for high purposes and events; and utters his 
 passionate longing for faith, in these sublime words : — 
 
 ' The wish, that of the living whole 
 No life may fail beyond the grave; 
 Derives it not from what we have 
 The likest God within the soul ? 
 
 ' Are God and Nature then at strife. 
 That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life ; 
 
 ' That I, considering everywhere 
 
 Her secret meaning in her deeds, 
 And finding that of fifty seeds 
 She often brings but one to bear ; 
 
 ' I falter where I firmly trod, 
 
 And falling with my weight of cares 
 Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
 That slope thro' darkness up to God :' — 
 
 he would not, so far as I am concerned, have im- 
 proved his picture by telling us that the stairs in 
 question were of white marble, as if they had been
 
 38 LECTURE I. 
 
 hewn out of the quarries of Carrara ; and that each of 
 the steps was twice as large as those which led up to 
 St. Peter's Church at Rome. 
 
 We now come to a much contested point on which 
 it would ill become me to pronounce a confident 
 opinion, in the face of such thinkers as Coleridge, as 
 Wordsworth, as Ruskin, not to speak of others ; the 
 distinction, I mean, deep and vital, which they profess 
 to have discovered between the fancy and the imagina- 
 tion. It would ill become me, I say, to pronounce 
 a confident opinion, but at the same time, as I am 
 bound here to be perfectly frank and open, I must at 
 once state, and, in venturing upon such a statement, 
 I am happy to find myself fortified by the high authority 
 of Mr. Dallas, that I cannot accept their conclusions. 
 To begin with the etymology of the words, though 
 I lay no more stress thereon than it deserves (it 
 indicates at least the original belief of mankind), 
 1 imagination ' is simply Latin for c fancy ; ' c fancy ' 
 merely Greek for c imagination. 5 In spite of this, how- 
 ever, I am by no means insensible to the convenience 
 of classing those inward pictures which spring up in 
 light minds, or at least in lighter moods of mind, apart 
 from those which embody the nobler and stronger forms 
 of passion and of thought.
 
 IX AUGURAL LECTURE. 39 
 
 To that extent, therefore, I willingly recognise the 
 distinction which our English language, according to 
 its later arrangement, establishes between them. To 
 any further extent I do not recognise it. I believe 
 that the picturesque procession of Queen Mab, which, 
 in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare formed for the delight 
 of his hearers, and which is usually presented to us as 
 an admirable instance of poetic fancy, was seen by 
 Shakespeare according to precisely the same laws of 
 inward vision, as were called into action when Dante 
 beheld those dilating flakes of fire which fell slowly 
 upon the enemies of God, as the snow falls heavily 
 among the Alps, without a sound. And yet I suppose 
 none would deny that the Italian lines to which I refer 
 compose a fine imaginative picture. Shakespeare from 
 his memory, his reading, his powers of observation and 
 combination, blended together one set of images into 
 a bright and sparkling whole. Dante, from his memory, 
 his reading, his powers of observation and combina- 
 tion, blended together another set of images into a 
 gloomy and impressive whole. But I say the modus 
 operajzdi was in both cases exactly the same. Two 
 separate faculties were no more needed to call into 
 life these two separate poetical creations, than we, 
 under the laws of the physical world, need two retinas,
 
 40 LECTURE I. 
 
 one framed for glancing at a fire-fly, and the other for 
 contemplating a fixed star. 
 
 To me, indeed, it seems that the upholders of the 
 opposite theory would do well to examine themselves, 
 so as to learn whether they have kept before their 
 judgment with sufficient steadiness a truth which no 
 one disputes in words, but which may often be, in the 
 haste and tumult of thought, practically forgotten. 
 Namely, that however expedient, however desirable 
 we may consider it in discussions of this sort to talk 
 of memory and imagination and humour and fancy, 
 as if they were independent and self-existing sub- 
 stances, they are, after all, intimately and indis- 
 solubly united in one homogeneous mind. The com- 
 posite life within is always one thing, and acts in- 
 variably in one mass. Like Wordsworth's cloud, c it 
 moveth altogether, if it move at all.' Hence the 
 reason and humour of an imaginative man contain 
 elements which the reason and humour of an un- 
 imaginative man do not contain ; hence also the 
 imagination of a humourist and logician is interpene- 
 trated by logic and humour, and the mind acts as a 
 whole under the combined influence of these three 
 separate forces. Above all does one imagination 
 differ from another, according to the proportions in
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 41 
 
 which a certain energy and glow of soul is mixed up 
 with it. 
 
 And here, unless I deceive myself, is the true prac- 
 tical difference between what the English people 
 choose noiv to call by the Greek name of fancy, and 
 what they prefer to speak of under the Latin name 
 of imagination. Imagination is fancy with ardour 
 of thought, and heat of passion burning through it. 
 Fancy is imagination, playing as the northern light, 
 and glittering without intensity and without warmth. 
 Nay, so absolutely, from my point of view, is this 
 the case, that the very same work of art may appear 
 to one critic fanciful, and to another imaginative, 
 according as they respectively perceive, or overlook, 
 in it the presence of passion. For instance, Mr. 
 Ruskin, in one of those eloquent passages which make 
 us proud of the English language, is giving due honour 
 to his favourite painter Tintoretto. In the course 
 of his panegyric, he presents to us, as the crowning 
 glory of that illustrious artist, his almost superhuman 
 imagination. A picture of Christ crucified is the one 
 upon which, above all others, he delights to dwell. 
 In this the fickleness of the Jews, and indeed the 
 evanescent character of all mere human love, is sym- 
 bolized by an ass's colt in the background, such a one,
 
 42 LECTURE I. 
 
 we may presume, as the Saviour had ridden upon a 
 few days before, feeding now upon withered palm- 
 leaves, the same, no doubt, which had been strewed, 
 in their freshness, across the triumphal path of the 
 accepted Messiah. Now I feel sure that Mr. Ruskin 
 is here perfectly right, but neither can I hesitate to 
 believe, that the mighty Venetian of whom he speaks 
 grew more and more inflamed by an overmastering 
 impulse of sympathy as he brooded over his own work. 
 The divine face of the suffering Mediator, visible 
 only to him, must have pressed in upon his heart and 
 filled it with a living glow of affection. Out of a re- 
 action from this he must have flung upon his canvas, 
 with all the magic power of genius, a fiery scorn and 
 an inspiring hatred against those cowards who had 
 deserted and those miscreants who had betrayed the 
 Son of God. And thus arose, for all time, that which 
 Mr. Ruskin has recorded as the sublimest achievement 
 of imagination, yet accomplished by any painter-poet, 
 among the sons of men. Otherwise, if we suppose 
 the like point introduced by one of colder tempera- 
 ment into a picture on the same subject, as a stroke 
 of art, it might well be considered as too clever, too 
 ingenious, too much under the same conditions of 
 thought as Hogarth's happy incident of the spider's
 
 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 43 
 
 web woven across the poor-box, to be classed with the 
 highest efforts of man's creative intelligence. In a 
 word, I should say definitively that it was fanciful, 
 and not imaginative. 
 
 I stated, at the opening of this Lecture, that one 
 of the subjects which it might be expedient to discuss 
 was, what are the effects which imagination indulged 
 tends to produce upon the character at large ? I have, 
 however, trespassed upon your attention too long 
 already, and must content myself by indicating my 
 belief that the use of the imagination, as a moral 
 element, is to fight against selfishness. This it ought 
 to do, by giving life to an intelligent sympathy with 
 the thoughts and emotions of others ; whilst the danger 
 to which it exposes men is, that if they give way to 
 the habit of looking c upon the world as a stage, and 
 on all its men and women as merely players,' the 
 heart may grow cold, even whilst the understanding- 
 is enlarged. It is obvious, however, that this is a 
 matter which would require, if any justice is to be 
 done to it, a lecture to itself. I shall therefore put 
 it by for the present, and conclude by thanking you 
 for the patience and attention with which you have 
 listened to this somewhat ill-organized discourse.
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY.
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 
 
 When Monsieur De Talleyrand, if Monsieur De 
 Talleyrand it were who is the author of the well-known 
 saying, amused an ultra-civilized company of wits and 
 diplomatists by telling them that speech was first given 
 to man in order that he might conceal his thoughts, it 
 is probable that he had in his mind Parisian French, 
 Queen's English, very choice Italian, Attic Greek, 
 Ciceronian Latin, and the like : that kind of diction, 
 in a word, to which are liable, more or less, most of 
 those books that no gentleman's library ought to be 
 without. One main reason, in the opposite direction, 
 which leads me to speak here of provincial poetry 
 and provincial poets, is my belief that this celebrated 
 sarcasm does not apply to those rustic dialects which 
 nave never diluted themselves, like the expanding 
 circles of a pond, over the wide surface of literary com-
 
 48 LECTURE II. 
 
 monplace. The words in use among uneducated men 
 are (I imagine) but few • they accommodate themselves 
 to the every-day topics and elementary passions which 
 make up the daily life of the village or the farm. The 
 same subjects of conversation, if conversation it can be 
 called, recur at the same times, from week to week, 
 from month to month, from year to year. And the 
 talk of the alehouse, or the blacksmith's shop, seldom 
 passes out far beyond them. Hence when a labourer, 
 still more when a labourer's wife, happens to possess 
 an energetic understanding, a lively imagination, or 
 a vehement temper, she has to struggle up to eloquence 
 by making all the language within reach bend under 
 her till it cracks. Every phrase is, as it were, double- 
 shotted with meaning. Vivid metaphors are pressed 
 into their place, not to decorate a sentence, not to 
 round a period, but, with the true object of all such 
 illustrations, to quicken and fortify the sense. She 
 pounces upon them, and drags them towards her from 
 every quarter, so that she may bridge over the shortest 
 road home to the hearts and intellects of her audience. 
 Such a woman I met not so very long ago in one of our 
 northern districts. She was boiling up with eager 
 wrath against an oppressive squire, who, according to 
 her, had treated a deserving tenant with shameless
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 49 
 
 injustice. It was clear that pour out her emotions 
 upon somebody she must; and perhaps it occurred to 
 her that I, as a stranger and a bird of passage, was 
 a safer confidant than any of her particular friends. I 
 know nothing of the facts of the case, and therefore 
 neither acquit nor condemn the supposed delinquent. 
 Her story, at any rate, ran thus: — The tenant in 
 question was one who, like Tennyson's Northern Farmer, 
 had a passionate sense of his duty to the land. If she 
 represented him truly, he worked early and late, paying 
 his rent to a moment, and improving his fields with 
 a zeal that never slackened, not so much in the hope of 
 conciliating his landlord, or of increasing his worldly 
 substance, as to feel his life keen within him, and to 
 satisfy the natural instincts of his soul. But though 
 admirable in these respects, he was not altogether the 
 discreetest of men, or, as she put it, £ He wor an 
 oonhandy kind of chap, who let his toongue wagg in 
 pooblic-hoose.' Now this ill-advised wagging of the 
 tongue, in that dangerous part of the hamlet, un- 
 happily set in motion certain scandals, of which it is 
 unnecessary to say more, than that the lord of the 
 manor objected to their public discussion among his 
 humbler neighbours. Some pickthank contrived to let 
 the little great man know what had taken place, and 
 
 E
 
 50 LECTURE II. 
 
 he, so she informed me, was ungenerous enough to 
 wreak a mean revenge. All this she flung forth in 
 her fiery Yorkshire, which crackled and rung as she 
 gave it out, (Yorkshire, compared with which my 
 pottering dictionary-English is as the outer to the inner 
 rainbow,) and ended her impassioned declamation (of 
 the truth or justice of which, I repeat, I know nothing) 
 in the following words : — ' He broake him in no time at 
 a'. He blaacked him reet awaY Now you or I should 
 probably have said, he never rested till he had accom- 
 plished his ruin, or some such platitude. This woman, 
 however, had but little of such Norman-English at com- 
 mand. From her very poverty she was compelled to 
 make herself rich. From her very incapacity to find 
 ordinary words, strong enough to hold her meaning, 
 she was forced into a noble image ; at least by the 
 power of that phrase, c He blaacked him reet awa', 5 
 she has left, sculptured on my imagination ever since, 
 the form of her sorrowing friend, walled round, without 
 a gleam of sunshine, by the darkness of despair, buried 
 alive, so to speak, under the gloom of his unmerited 
 misfortunes. 
 
 On another occasion, a stalwart ploughman, be- 
 lieving in himself, and honourably conscious that he 
 never gave less than a day's work for a day's wages,
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 5 1 
 
 refused to acknowledge any obligation to a master, for 
 whom, neither in point of ability nor in point of 
 character, did he feel any respect, and compressed his 
 burst of resolute independence into the following weighty 
 sentence: — c I'se neither debt-bound, nor awe-bound 
 till him.' Again, a quaint old gardener, whom 1 knew 
 well, took the measure of his master, a clever but 
 indolent man, in these words: — 'Sir Thomas is nae 
 fule, but he 's t 3 ignorantest mann as is ; he knows 
 nought about ought.' The same worthy, complaining 
 to a married woman, one of the daughters of the house, 
 that his walls got no rest from busy little fingers (he 
 never, even in a dream, considered the fruit as 
 belonging to anybody but himself), she endea- 
 voured to console him, by pointing out that in both 
 generations, her's and the next, the family had over- 
 flowed with girls. ' We might,' she said, ' have been 
 all boys, and where would you have been then ? ' But 
 he, deeply meditating on these things, shook his head," 
 and replied, — c Na, lass ; na, then, I should have got 
 shut on you whiles.' In plain English, I should have 
 got rid of you, except when you were at home for the 
 holidays. He felt, much as a Sicilian or North African 
 of old might have preferred a flying inroad of pirates 
 or Moors to the steady exactions of his Roman Pro- 
 
 e 2
 
 52 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 consul, that, with the public school for an ally, he 
 could endure a transitory storm of boys, if only he were 
 spared the constant tribute levied upon him by perma- 
 nent young ladies. Now, such massive bits of ver- 
 nacular speech, wherever we light upon them, teach us 
 that a non-literary tongue may, within certain limits 
 (narrow enough no doubt when compared with the 
 larger aims of language), possess advantages peculiar to 
 itself. The principal of these seems to be that a 
 vigorous mind has to impress a portion of its own 
 strength and life upon the few forms of utterance 
 which constitute its whole vocabulary ; otherwise 
 there would not really be enough of them to get on 
 with at all. On the other hand, men brought up 
 mainly upon words, men who have all the conven- 
 tional expressions and accredited phrases from the 
 elegant extracts ready at call, are apt to be over- 
 whelmed by their allies; they are apt, sometimes even 
 when there is real power, to be embarrassed and 
 weighed down by great lumps of commonplace diction, 
 much of which, like the copper money that hampered 
 poor Correggio to death, has but little, except bulk and 
 abundance, to recommend it to mankind. Dr. Johnson, 
 for instance, if he had been born in Yorkshire or 
 Dorsetshire, and had published his imitations of Juvenal
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 53 
 
 in either of these dialects, would never, 1 am sure, 
 have started off in the tenth satire with so vague and 
 futile a personification as — 
 
 ' Let observation, with extensive view, 
 Survey mankind from China to Peru.' 
 
 The high road of the national language we will con- 
 sider, if you please, as built to sustain the pressure of 
 the whole English mind — to find room for the passage 
 up and down of all great thoughts, all wide-reaching 
 imaginations, all stormy passions, which enter into our 
 national life. But still there may be certain shy graces 
 of idiom and feeling which, like wild roses, or thorn- 
 blossoms, or lilies of the valley, are more likely to be 
 found among the nooks and windings of a Devonshire 
 or Dorsetshire lane. When, therefore, poems full of 
 beauty and power, like Mr. Tennyson's c Northern 
 Farmer,' or the lyrics of Mr. Barnes, are given to the 
 world, it would be a mistake to consider them as origi- 
 nating in mere whim and caprice on the part of their 
 authors. We have heard that when my friend Lord 
 Houghton read the c Northern Farmer ' to his tenants, 
 and ex-constituents, round about Ferrybridge and Ponte- 
 fract, they rose at him as one man, shouting together, 
 c That caps a',' and begged to be informed — a recogni- 
 tion of merit which speaks volumes for the right-
 
 54 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 hearted population north of Trent — where the book, 
 which contained so fine a poem, might be summarily 
 bought ? I do not wish to step out of my province, but 
 I cannot help remarking, that our statesmen, having 
 first opened wide the doors which were formerly locked, 
 and removed the shutter-bars originally intended to 
 protect the house, are now making haste to tell us that 
 they know little of the crowds sure to swarm in • but 
 that it is everybody's instant business to educate them, 
 so that they may not push. If this be so, the story 
 which I have just told indicates that there are veins of 
 feeling still unworked, modes of access to the deeper 
 thoughts and emotions of our fellow-countrymen yet 
 almost unexplored ; and these, as a step in the right 
 direction, it may be as well to occupy at once. If, 
 therefore, in order to commence the poetical part of 
 the people's parliamentary education, we need no more 
 than that a channel should be cleared out for those 
 well-springs of speech, any one of which might have 
 been the main feeder of our English tongue — if men, 
 whose daily thoughts and words are too remote from 
 those of our established poets to be in any degree im- 
 pressed by them, are yet to be reached and taught, so 
 far as poetry can be made a teacher, by the help of 
 their native dialects, — the fact, I apprehend, is an
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. $$ 
 
 important one. Under such circumstances we cannot, 
 I am sure, be ready enough to hail Mr. Barnes, 
 Mr. Waugh, and other labourers in the same field, with 
 due reward, ample honour, and immediate recognition. 
 Nay, even if we put aside such practical aims, as foreign 
 to the scope of a professorship like this ; from a philo- 
 logical point of view such labours are full of interest 
 and value. By turning up the subsoil about the roots 
 of our language, we may strengthen the trunk, and 
 possibly enrich some of the branches with unexpected 
 fruit. If, to descend to minutise — if, by the help of pro- 
 vincial poets, we could recover for ordinary use such 
 adjectives as £ silvern,' etc. — recover them, I mean, 
 without worrying our readers by any sense of pedantry 
 or strangeness (nothing is worth that), we should get 
 rid of a defect in idiom to which we have been hurried, 
 through our metropolitan impatience of delay. When 
 substantives, such as 'silver' and the like, are thus put 
 upon double duty, I think it is a mark of poverty, or 
 stinginess, in the establishment to which they belong; 
 reminding us somewhat of Moliere's c Avare/ in which, 
 as we know, Harpagon's cook was his coachman also; 
 but I do not think we should, on that account, have been 
 tempted to accompany the miser in a drive, and I am 
 sure that we should have refused, one and all, his
 
 56 LECTURE II. 
 
 invitations to dinner. It is an odd instance, by the 
 way, of the unequal manner in which time and custom 
 act upon language, that whereas ' silvern ' has drifted 
 entirely, or all but entirely, out of reach, — so that 
 Mr. Tennyson rightly personifies the evening star as 
 c Sitting under stiver hair with a silver eye,' — the corre- 
 sponding epithet 'golden' still keeps its head above 
 water, though somewhat hardly pressed. We talk of 
 a gold watch, gold plate, and so on, but we write about 
 golden hair, golden hours, golden children, and the like ; 
 though what £ golden children ' may mean is not so easy 
 to say — ' possibly the German equivalent for what we 
 call yellow-boys,' as I once heard suggested to a student 
 of Schiller's lyrics, who stuck at the phrase. Instances 
 of this kind are numerous enough : one word perishes, 
 another, apparently with no particular reason for out- 
 lasting it, lives on. Now a good deal of light may be 
 thrown upon the language if we search, among the pro- 
 vincial varieties of speech, for these vanished or vanish- 
 ing forms and idioms. Though any one of them would, 
 I am sure, repay investigation, the Dorsetshire variety 
 in which most of Mr. Barnes's poems are written, is 
 the one which it is most natural for me to examine at 
 present. Its participles want the hard final g of ours : 
 for instance —
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 57 
 
 ' The light of waves a runnin there 
 Did play on leaves up over head, 
 And fishes scaly sides did gleam, 
 A darten on their shallow bed.' 
 
 Now, upon the whole, I do not prefer this gram- 
 matical form to our own; the English last syllable 
 lends itself better to a keen and ringing melody, and 
 carries within itself a greater appearance of strength. 
 But sometimes, where graceful sentiment is aimed at, 
 where pathos, in its lighter aspects, is what we re- 
 quire — as in some rustic idyll or tender song— if we 
 could only give the Dorsetshire participle a brevet and 
 local rank, to act as Queen's English for the nonce, 
 we should, I think, be richer in point of diction than 
 we are. Still more do I envy Mr. Barnes his old plurals 
 in -en, such as houscn, cheesen, furzen. Everybody 
 knows what an intrusive, ubiquitous creature is the un- 
 manageable English s. Every one who writes verses has 
 been bothered about s pure and s impure. And though 
 we Britons have to put a bold face upon the matter, 
 and to maintain that the cacophony in question does 
 not signify at all ; it is only because we cannot help 
 ourselves, and have given up all hope of a remedy. 
 Now if once more — in accordance with Horace's 
 dictum that f multa renascentur, quae jam cecidere' — 
 we could call back from oblivion and disuse that
 
 58 LECTURE II. 
 
 valuable termination in -en, it is impossible to say 
 what metrical triumphs might not be achieved. We 
 might even hope to allay, if we could not wholly 
 quench, the disembodied hiss which floats round a 
 church, whenever the school children pause in their 
 hymn. I fear greatly, however, that this cannot now 
 be done; I fear that a language, so long as it lives, 
 must roll on like a river, which becomes broader, and 
 deeper, and of greater importance, at each stride of its 
 onward course; separating hostile kingdoms perhaps, 
 or bearing huge three-deckers down to the sea; but 
 which yet, alas! also leaves behind, at every bend, 
 more and more, the flower-crowned banks and spark- 
 ling purity of its parent brook. Nay, to the annoyance 
 of literary men, I believe that whenever Horace's 
 anticipations are realised, whenever his proposed re- 
 naissance does take place, it takes place as a necessity, 
 and not as a luxury of language. I doubt whether Mr. 
 Tennyson, with all his genius, and all his popularity, 
 could re-awaken one strong preterite which has really 
 lapsed; whilst railway navvies, with a sublime un- 
 consciousness, like that of the brewer's horse, who 
 undertook (through a godfather, I admit) to draw a 
 thousand inferences at once, have disinterred, and 
 brought into daily use, the sound old English verb
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 59 
 
 c to shunt ' — a verb which had slept, somewhere or other, 
 like the annual toad of our coal-mines, since it was 
 last alive and awake for poets who flourished before 
 Chaucer. 
 
 If, however, determination can do anything — if the 
 laws of human speech are in any degree to be influ- 
 enced by the human will — here is a proper occasion 
 for its exercise. Men more sanguine than I am 
 might think that the power of varying our hissing 
 plurals, by a recurrence to the old plurals in -en which 
 jet linger in the provinces, is not absolutely lost and 
 gone. If so, let us hope sooner or later to see sports- 
 men shooting their fifty brace of grousen on the 12th 
 of August, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli fighting out 
 their differences in full housen, and young ladies en- 
 gaged for twenty successive dancen, even from the 
 time of this present Commemoration. But no, alas ! 
 "jolat irrevocable ver£>um y — all I can say is, if it were 
 possible to accomplish successfully this literary feat, 
 he who accomplished it would deserve £4000, — ay, 
 from the most economical of governments — much 
 better than the gentleman who patented that method 
 of punching holes between postage-stamps, which to 
 me, I speak humbly as a blind and awkward man, 
 appears a success — only for the inventor.
 
 60 LECTURE II. 
 
 I have dwelt at some length on the possible philolo- 
 gical value of such poetical studies, because I find that 
 among young people who are at first disposed to admire 
 the exquisite lyrics of Mr. Barnes, this admiration is 
 followed at once by a hot fit of wrath, and a sense 
 of being cheated, as soon as they discover that he 
 is a scholar and a gentleman. A popular writer — De 
 Quincey, I think — tells a story of his ill success in 
 lending c The Vicar of Wakefield ' to his landlady's 
 daughter, somewhere among the Westmoreland lakes. 
 At first, the girl took intense interest in the tale, 
 accepted the dramatis personae as real men and women, 
 and loved and hated them with all the proper emphasis 
 of youth ; but, alas ! suddenly it was revealed to her 
 that the book was a work of fiction. Now that was 
 a portent, the idea of which had never crossed her 
 innocent mind. Accordingly she became furious at 
 the supposed deception, looked upon De Quincey as 
 bankers look upon a man who has tried knowingly to 
 utter a forged bill of exchange; and, as for Goldsmith, 
 if she could have resuscitated him, and had her will, 
 she would have consigned him to Appleby jail as a 
 rogue and a vagabond, for obtaining sympathy under 
 false pretences Just so fared the unfortunate Mr. 
 Barnes, at the hands of those to whom I refer. Oh !
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 6l 
 
 said they, he is a gentleman after all, is he ? Oh ! we 
 thought he was a ploughman. Oh ! we don't care a 
 bit about his poetry now. I endeavoured to convince 
 them they were entirely in the wrong j but of that 
 strategical operation I have always observed that, 
 however skilfully and zealously it may be undertaken, 
 it is apt, with regard to young and old alike, to fail 
 of success in the most unaccountable manner. With 
 you, however, who are not committed to any opinions 
 on the subject, I hope to do better. Now, when a man 
 of great natural genius, like Burns (God forbid that I 
 should call Burns a provincial poet ; but I may perhaps 
 be allowed to use him for purposes of illustration), 
 thinks and feels, and writes what he thinks and feels, 
 in one dialect, after having been imperfectly educated 
 in another, he is apt to attach a fictitious value to the 
 long words and polyglot phrases which he may have 
 gathered from his dialect of education. Let us take 
 an instance: when Burns, in one of his most charac- 
 teristic outbursts, carries us off our critical feet by this 
 lyrical impulse — 
 
 ' Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears 
 Her noblest work she classes, oh ! 
 Her 'prentice hand she tried on man, 
 And then she made the lasses, oh !' 
 
 the spirit, grace, and sparkling originality of the two
 
 62 LECTURE II. 
 
 last lines charm us away from examining the two first ; 
 but, if we refuse to listen to the voice of the charmer, 
 it cannot be denied that the conception of nature, 
 classing her lovely dears, is an intrusion, what geolo- 
 gists call a ( fault,' of school English, cutting awkwardly 
 across the vein of his inborn Scottish idiom. But 
 when a scholar like Mr. Barnes, who, besides being 
 thoroughly acquainted with the way of thinking, and 
 the way of talking, which prevails in his native dis- 
 trict, adds research to that familar knowledge, traces 
 the expressions which he finds about him home to 
 their proper origin, and looks at them by the light of 
 comparative philology, this criticism does not apply. 
 Such a man, when he writes, can trust himself safely 
 to the impulses of his own mind, and will probably 
 give us better Dorsetshire, better Yorkshire, better 
 Scotch, as the case may be, than the clever peasant 
 or artisan who has learnt but little outside his native 
 tongue, and therefore overvalues that little. Such a 
 peasant is in danger of fancying that he rises above 
 himself, whenever he inserts, among his own idioms, 
 a word of four syllables derived from the Latin — when- 
 ever, to recall an old Joe Miller, he edifies his village 
 hearers by using that c blessed word Mesopotamia.' 
 Having thus endeavoured to persuade you that you
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 6$ 
 
 are not bound to despise Mr. Barnes, because, instead 
 of being an ignorant man of genius, he is a learned 
 man of genius, I shall now proceed to call your atten- 
 tion to the poems which he has written. I do not 
 mean to confine myself to him altogether ; but he 
 merits our particular attention. Mr. Barnes, with 
 an accurate estimate, I think, not so much of his 
 own powers, as of the powers and resources of his 
 Dorsetshire Doric, has confined himself to the lyrical 
 interpretation of such simple emotions as arise out 
 of the simple drama of an average country life. I 
 refer this absence of ambitious aim, in his little 
 odes, to the nature of his dialect, rather than to any 
 deficiency in himself; because I do not choose to 
 believe, though some such assumption is constantly 
 made, that the art of doing one thing very well im- 
 plies that you are to do everything else particularly 
 ill. We all remember Horace's encomium, which 
 strikes us now as such an inadequate one — 
 
 ' Molle atque facetum 
 Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rare Camoenae.' 
 
 It is clear that he looked to Varius as the heroic 
 bard of the time, and never suspected for a moment 
 that in his ingenious asthmatic friend, who wrote
 
 64 LECTURE II. 
 
 such graceful verses about ploughs, and olives, and 
 bees, and Corycian old men, lay hid the author of 
 the national epic. But whatever Mr. Barnes' reasons 
 may be — want of power, want of will, or a scientific 
 measurement of the capabilities and non-capabilities 
 of his own provincial tongue — as a fact he has 
 attempted nothing inconsistent with the character 
 which he has assumed— that, namely, of a small Dor- 
 setshire farmer. He dwells lovingly upon the lights 
 and shadows which play among the wooded coverts 
 of his native hills, upon the bells of his village 
 church, upon the dear old mill : — 
 
 ' Oh, joy betide the dear old mill, 
 My neighbour play-mate's happy home, 
 With rolling wheel and leaping foam 
 Below the overhanging hill. 
 Where wide and slow 
 The stream did flow, 
 And flags did grow, and lightly flee, 
 Below the grey-leaved withy tree; 
 Whilst clack, clack, clack, from hour to hour 
 Did go the mill by cloty Stour.' 
 
 I must here pause to explain the word 'cloty' — the rather 
 that it illustrates something which I said, at the outset 
 of this lecture, as to the compensations which belong 
 to a non - literary language ; I mean, that when a 
 peasant speaks of anything within the circle of his
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 65 
 
 daily occupations, he gives it, as a distinguished friend 
 of mine acutely observed to me, a special name to 
 itself. A sheep, for instance, of a certain age — I am 
 sure I do not know of what age — which we should 
 describe at length, he pithily calls a tegg. A yellow 
 water-lily, to put which clumsily before our readers 
 we require three words, he marks off at once as a 
 c clote,' whilst the river upon whose breast it lies float- 
 ing, becomes, for him, the c doty Stour.' And thus he 
 condenses into two syllabes a rural picture which it 
 would take, I believe, two lines to paint in English 
 proper. To return, however, as the French proverb 
 has it, to our teggs, Mr. Barnes does his work among 
 the ordinary scenery, the ordinary joys and sorrows of 
 a commonplace English county. And here his posi- 
 tion, as we must admit, contrasts unfavourably with 
 that of Burns. Burns had a proud national history to 
 appeal to ; there were, in every direction, national 
 sensibilities, founded on a haughty sense of blood and 
 of race, ready to answer such an appeal ; whereas any- 
 thing emphatically English is somewhat out of Mr. 
 Barnes' reach, because what he has undertaken to 
 deliver is, not the universal English, but the local 
 Dorsetshire mind. However, even in a common- 
 place English county, love and death are as busy as 
 
 F
 
 66 LECTURE II. 
 
 over the regions beyond, and the true poet, having 
 them to deal with, requires but little else. More- 
 over, paradoxical as it may seem to say so of one 
 who uses such a dialect, Mr. Barnes has done much 
 to atone for a certain inevitable monotony in the 
 choice of his subjects — a limitation of ideas and 
 images, forced upon him through the narrowness of 
 the path which he has chosen to tread — by cultivating, 
 in the execution of his short poems, a most exquisite 
 finish of style. He has felt, I think very justly, that 
 anything like slovenliness of diction, metrical harshness, 
 nimiety (if I may use a word which I am sure I have 
 seen somewhere) would be more intolerable in him, 
 than in writers who make use of average English 
 like the rest of us. Accordingly, as a rule, his little 
 pieces exhibit a delicate grace and a completeness not 
 unworthy of Horace. It is time, however, to allow 
 our poet to speak for himself. Some of the poems 
 are short comic dialogues, intended to set forth, in 
 that form, the characteristic features, as they appear 
 to him, of his Dorsetshire neighbourhood. But what- 
 ever merit they may possess from that point of view, 
 they do not strike me as being among his happier 
 efforts, and in no degree approach to the grim pathos 
 and dramatic humour of the ' Northern Farmer.' It is
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 6 J 
 
 through his own pathos however, but pathos generally 
 of the lighter and more sentimental kind, that he takes 
 his proper rank — a high rank, I think, among contem- 
 porary writers of verse ; and indeed, though I say this 
 as generally true, it would be unfair to deny that he 
 sometimes rises into a higher mood, and gives way to 
 deeper impulses of feeling and of thought. I propose 
 now to read to you one or more of his shorter poems, 
 premising only that I shall read them so as to be under- 
 stood. The Dorsetshire dialect, I am happy to say, 
 admits of this without difficulty; in a more northern 
 one, it could perhaps hardly have been managed. 
 Indeed, except where the local word is used as a 
 rhyme, nothing is lost by transferring Mr. Barnes' lines 
 into our common tongue — they pass, without an effort, 
 into good and simple English. In the following little 
 ode, for instance, which he calls £ The Echo,' if you will 
 only bear in mind that c slooe' is the Dorsetshire form 
 of our 'sloe,' and ' sheen' of the verb c to shine,' you 
 have ready for your ears some beautiful English verses. 
 
 THE ECHO. 
 
 ' About the tow'r an' churchyard wall, 
 Out nearly overright our door, 
 A tongue ov wind did always call 
 Whatever we did call avore. 
 
 F 2
 
 68 LECTURE II. 
 
 The vaice did mock our neiimes, our cheers, 
 
 Our merry laughs, our hands' loud claps, 
 An' mother's call "Come, come, my dears" 
 
 — my dears; 
 Or " Do as I do bid, bad chaps" 
 
 — bad chaps. 
 
 An' when o' Zundays on the green, 
 
 In frocks an' cwoats as gay as new, 
 We walk'd wi' shoes a-meade to sheen 
 
 So black an' bright 's a vull-ripe slooe, 
 We then did hear "the tongue ov air 
 A-mocken mother's vaice so thin, 
 "Come, now the bell do goo vor pray'r" 
 
 — vor pray'r; 
 " 'Tis time to goo to church ; come in " 
 
 — come in. 
 
 ' The night when little Anne that died 
 Begun to zicken, back in May, 
 An' she, at dusk ov evenon-tide, 
 
 Wer out wi' others at their play, 
 Within the churchyard that do keep 
 
 Her little bed, the vaice o' thin 
 Dark air, mock'd mother's call " To sleep " 
 
 — to sleep ; 
 " 'Tis bed time now, my love, come in " 
 
 — come in. 
 
 ' An' when our Jeiine come out so smart 
 A-married, an' we help'd her in 
 To Henry's newly-varnish'd cart, 
 
 The while the wheels begun to spin,
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 69 
 
 An' her gay nods, vor all she smil'd, 
 
 Did sheiike a tear-drop vrom each eye, 
 The vaice mock'd mother's call, " Dear child " 
 
 — dear child; 
 " God bless ye evermwore ; good bye " 
 
 — good bye.' 
 
 The four last lines of the third stanza are, in my 
 judgment, exquisite above the rest : — 
 
 ' Within the churchyard that do keep 
 Her little bed, the vaice o' thin 
 Dark air, mock'd mother's call " To sleep," 
 
 — to sleep ; 
 " 'Tis bed time now, my love, come in," 
 
 — come in.' 
 
 The manner in which this ominous echo, 'come in,' 
 breathing forth, upon the doomed child, its phantom-like 
 summons from her future home within the grave, yet 
 softens itself into the likeness of a mother's voice call- 
 ing her child to sleep, can hardly be too much admired. 
 It imparts a spiritual grace to the whole poem, and 
 teaches us, better than many sermons, how that place 
 within the churchyard is, after all, but a place of quiet, 
 £ where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary 
 are at rest.' In spite, however, of the charm and im- 
 pressiveness of this affecting stanza, Mr. Barnes feels 
 that to finish thus would react, with too much solem- 
 nity, on the primal conception of this little piece, and
 
 70' LECTURE II. 
 
 so jar upon his fine artistic perceptions ; he there- 
 fore skilfully rounds off these suggestions of his 
 memory by introducing, after the burial, a bridal, 
 wherewith to end ; but still, in order to chime in 
 with the key-note from which he started, it is not 
 the glow of triumphant love, nor the joyous revel of 
 the wedding-bells, to which he invites our attention, 
 but the gentle regrets and natural tears of the maiden, 
 as she departs, into a new home, from her mother's 
 clinging embrace. He leaves us, therefore, cheered 
 with a gleam of brightness and a touch of pleasure, 
 but the brightness, in order that it may not be out of 
 harmony with his original theme, is a subdued one, 
 and the pleasure not without melancholy. 
 
 The next poem which I shall read to you is c The 
 Rose in the Dark,' p. 32 ; in this case, it is unneces- 
 sary to make any preface at all. 
 
 THE RWOSE IN THE DARK. 
 
 In zummer, leate at evenen tide, 
 I zot to spend a moonless hour 
 
 'Ithin the window, wi' the zide 
 A-bound wi' rwoses out in flow'r, 
 
 Bezide the bow'r, vorsook o' birds, 
 
 An' listen'd to my true-love's words.
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 7 I 
 
 ' A-risen to her comely height, 
 
 She push'd the swingen ceasement round ; 
 
 And I could hear, beyond my zight, 
 The win'-blown beech-tree softly sound, 
 
 On higher ground, a-swayen slow, 
 
 On drough my happy hour below. 
 
 ' An' tho' the darkness then did hide 
 The dewy rwose's blushen bloom, 
 He still did cast sweet air inside 
 
 To Jeiine, a-chatten in the room ; 
 An' though the gloom did hide her feiice, 
 Her words did bind me to the pleiice. 
 
 • An' there, while she, wi' runnen tongue, 
 
 Did talk unzeen 'ithin the hall, 
 I thought her like the rwose that flung 
 
 His sweetness vrom his darken'd ball, 
 Tlhout the wall, an' sweet's the zight 
 Ov her bright feace, by mornen light.' 
 
 Every one, 1 think, will agree with me in looking 
 upon this as a country love-idyll exquisite of its kind. 
 It is also a good instance of Mr. Barnes 5 fine taste 
 in knowing when and where to stop, in discerning 
 how much poetical embroidery a little incident of this 
 kind will bear, so that he may not overwork his sub- 
 ject, or overload it with ornament. £ The Snowy 
 Night ' is a companion picture to the c Rose in the 
 Dark/ only somewhat keener and livelier in point of 
 colouring : it carries with it a Christmas sparkle of
 
 72 LECTURE II. 
 
 December stars, instead of the fragrant gloom of a 
 breathless evening in June. No preliminary instruc- 
 tion is needed, except that you ought to be told the 
 meaning of the Dors?tshire word ' lew' — it means 
 £ screened,' ' sheltered.' 
 
 A SNOWY NIGHT. 
 
 ' 'Twer at night, an' a keen win' did blow 
 
 Vrom the east under peale-twinklen stars, 
 All a-zweepen along the white snow ; 
 
 On the gronn', on the trees, on the bars, 
 Vrom the hedge where the win' russled droo, 
 
 There a light-russlen snow-doust did vail ; 
 An' noo pleiice were a-vound that wer lew, 
 
 But the shed, or the ivy-hung wall. 
 
 ' Then I knock'd at the wold passage door 
 
 Wi' the win'-driven snow on my locks ; 
 Till, a-comen along the cwold vloor, 
 
 There my Jenny soon answer'd my knocks. 
 Then the wind, by the door a-swung wide, 
 
 Flung some snow in her clear-bloomcn feiice. 
 An' she blink'd, wi' her head all a-zide, 
 
 An' a-chucklen, went back to her pleiice. 
 
 ' An' in there, as we zot roun' the brands, 
 
 Though the talkers wer mainly the men, 
 Bloomen Jeane, wi' her work in her hands, 
 
 Did put in a good word now an' then. 
 An' when I took my leave, though so bleak 
 
 Wer the weather, she went to the door, 
 Wi' a smile, an' a blush on the cheak 
 
 That the snow had a-smitten avore. '
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 73 
 
 The last poem with which I shall trouble you is 
 1 The Turnstile.' In this you have only to be tolerant 
 of c goo ' for c go ' and c overjayed ' for c overjoyed.' 
 
 THE TURNSTILE. 
 
 ' Ah ! sad wer we as we did peace 
 The wold church road, wi' downcast feace. 
 The while the bells, that mwoan'd so deep 
 Above our child a-left asleep, 
 Wer now a-zingen all alive 
 W ' t'other bells to meake the vive. 
 But up at woone pleiice we come by, 
 'Twere hard to keep woone's two eyes dry ; 
 On Stean-cliff road, 'ithin the drong, 
 Up where, as vo'k do pass along, 
 The turnen-stile, a-painted white, 
 Doo sheen by day an' show by night. 
 \'or always there, as we did goo 
 To church, thik stile did let us drough, 
 Wi' spreaden earms that wheel'd to guide 
 Us each in turn to t'other zide. 
 An' vu'st ov all the train he took 
 My wife, wi' winsome gait an' look ; 
 An' then zent on my little maid, 
 As skippen onward, overjay'd 
 To reach agean the pleiice o' pride, 
 Her comely mother's left han' zide. 
 An' then, a-wheelen roun', he took 
 On me, 'ithin his third white nook. 
 An' in the fourth, a-sheiikcn wild, 
 He zent us on our giddy child. 
 But yesterday he guided slow 
 My downcast Jenny, vull o' woe,
 
 74 LECTURE 11. 
 
 An' then my little maid in black, 
 
 A-walken softly on her track ; 
 
 An' a'ter he'd a-turn'd ageiin, 
 
 To let me goo along the leane, 
 
 He had noo little bwoy to vill 
 
 His last white eiirms, an' they stood still.' 
 
 Now this little poem, as a representation of quiet 
 sadness — sadness not yielding to despair, but never- 
 theless clouding the common daylight, and tinging 
 each familiar object with the shadow of its own black- 
 ness, is, so far as I can judge, unsurpassed in its way. 
 At the same time, I own that I have some diffi- 
 culty in assigning to such a poem its proper place 
 on the scale of poetic excellence. A pathetic wail, 
 like the one I have just read, like Mrs. Hemans' 
 £ Graves of a Household,' like many others which you 
 will easily recall, is sure of producing its full effect 
 — sure, I may say, of becoming an universal favourite. 
 A critic, no doubt, may find it hard to determine how 
 much of its influence is derived from instincts which 
 are alive in all hearts at all times, from sympathies 
 which tremble at a touch • and how much from the 
 real genius shown by its author ; but, whatever he 
 may decide, we may feel sure that he will not be 
 listened to, especially by the young, who have rather 
 a turn for playing with sorrow, as children play with
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 75 
 
 fire until they have been burnt by it. Accepting, 
 accordingly, their verdict for the present, I think we 
 may fairly claim for £ The Turnstile ' a high place in 
 the very first rank of such charming compositions. I 
 might multiply my quotations from Mr. Barnes inde- 
 finitely. Out of his three volumes, in the Dorsetshire 
 dialect, many selections might be made of equal merit 
 with the above; still, I think those which I have cited 
 are characteristic specimens of the poet ; so that a just 
 notion may be drawn from them, both of what he 
 usually aims at, and how he has succeeded in his 
 attempts. At the time, moreover, when I began to 
 turn this lecture over in my mind, several laudatory 
 articles referring to him, which have recently appeared, 
 were still unwritten. I do not, however, regret the 
 labour which I have given to the subject; he deserves, 
 unless I deceive myself, all and more than all, the 
 notice which he has obtained ; and I am happy to find 
 the conclusions, at which I had arrived in this matter, 
 fortified by the unanimous concurrence of so many able 
 critics. It is surely no light praise for an author, by 
 one and the same work, to render valuable services 
 to philology, and to secure, without requiring a particle 
 of indulgence on any ground of dialect, the renown 
 of a distinguished poet.
 
 76 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 There are other provincial poets, besides Mr. Barnes, 
 of whom it might be proper to say something, notably 
 Mr. Waugh, whose beautiful lyric 'Come Home to 
 the Children and Me,' has made its way into the 
 hearts of his keen-minded Lancashire fellow-country- 
 men. It is not, however, so easy to read off into 
 English as the Dorsetshire idylls of Mr. Barnes, and 
 therefore I shall not attempt it; the rather that I 
 wish to call your attention to a much older ballad, 
 which connects itself with some interesting specula- 
 tions as to the manner in which epic poetry is born, 
 and grows. I mean the well-known legend of Chevy 
 Chase. Not only is this a provincial poem, but it is 
 written, says Bishop Percy, in the broadest and coarsest 
 northern dialect; at a time, too, when that northern 
 half of England, if compared with the southern and 
 western counties, was insignificant in point of wealth 
 and population. And yet men found these rugged 
 verses so full of fire and authentic force — so gallantly 
 do they appeal to the strong English pulses that beat 
 in Northumberland and in Cornwall alike, so rich are 
 they in all those qualities which make war noble — that 
 in a hundred years or so after its first publication, this 
 rough Border lay was stirring the heart of Sir Philip 
 Sidney like a trumpet, and taking its place, no longer
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. J J 
 
 provincial, among the recognised trophies of our English 
 literature. I say of our English literature, because, 
 though I am aware that there exists a Scottish version 
 of the tale, for me a single stanza decides the pro- 
 prietorship at once : — 
 
 ' Our Scottish archers bent their bows, 
 Their hearts were good and true, 
 At the first flight of arrows sent 
 They four-score English slew.' 
 
 Now this is a manifest, I may add a most unskilful 
 
 adaptation and distortion of the lines. The spear or 
 
 the axe, not the bow, was notoriously the Scottish 
 
 weapon. We all must remember the gasp of patriotic 
 
 despair through which Sir Walter Scott describes the 
 
 pitiable equipment of his Hebridean archers, before 
 
 the fight of Flodden : — 
 
 ' but oh ! 
 Short was the shaft and weak the bow 
 To that which England bore.' 
 
 Again, when Marmion, the grave and cautious am- 
 bassador from England, is taunted by James IV, and 
 endeavours, in his answer, to check those unbridled 
 passions of the king which are hurrying him to instant 
 war, how does he proceed ? Why, his warning begins, 
 his warning ends, with an ominous allusion to the 
 invincible arrows of England : —
 
 7 8 LECTURE II. 
 
 ' Much honoured were my humble home, 
 If thither brave King James should come : 
 But Nottingham has archers good, 
 And Yorkshire men are stern of mood, 
 Northumbrian prickers wild and rude ; 
 And many a banner shall be torn, 
 And many a knight to earth be borne, 
 And many a sheaf of arrows spent, 
 Ere Scotland's king shall cross the Trent.' 
 
 Whether, however, this stern old song be in its 
 original form Scotch or English, matters little. Both 
 nations have a right to be proud of it. Earl Douglas 
 frankly offers to peril his life, so that the blood of 
 meaner men may not be spilt in his private quarrel. 
 Earl Percy leans upon his hand — 
 
 ' And sees the Douglas de ; 
 Then takes the dead man by the hand, 
 And says, woe is me for thee. 
 To have saved thy life, I'd have parted with 
 
 My landes for years three ; 
 For a better man, nor of heart, nor of hand, 
 Was not in all the north-countree.' 
 
 And so these two champions stand always together 
 on the same level in our affections. They represent 
 equally the highest form of middle-age chivalry, the 
 highest type, I hope I may add, of our English cha- 
 racter. Nor has that type, I trust, died out as yet 
 upon our English soil.
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 79 
 
 I have heard, on the authority of an eye-witness, 
 how in one of the fiercest and most dubious of our 
 Peninsular struggles, a young French officer, superb 
 of stature and brilliant in horsemanship, after rallying 
 and remodelling his scattered brigade, came down, 
 with the aspect of Henry of Navarre, waving a white 
 handkerchief two lengths in front of that plunging 
 cloud of cavalry which threatened to sweep the motion- 
 less battalions before it — into headlong ruin. But no, 
 the English squares were too firmly rooted, the English 
 volleys too true. Among the first who dropped, under 
 their withering impact, was the gallant Frenchman. 
 His baffled followers at once melted away into defeat. 
 Still, even then, our advancing soldiers, with the light 
 of victory on their brows, and the white heat of battle 
 burning in their veins, bent for a moment in sadness 
 over the stately form of their fallen foe, and muttered 
 gloomily to each other, c Poor gentleman, what a pity!' 
 I could not but feel, when this anecdote was first 
 told to me, that these men also, though the technical 
 period of chivalry may be gone for ever — that these 
 men also were born English knights, spiritual heirs, 
 as we well may call them, to the generous Percy, 
 and his high-hearted Northumbrian bard. It was not, 
 however, so much to remind you of the merits of this
 
 8o LECTURE II. 
 
 familiar poem, merits which the criticism of Addison 
 in the 'Spectator' has ratified for ali generations of 
 Englishmen, as to make some remarks upon its epic 
 character, that 1 have referred to it here. In the fiist 
 place, we shall find that it sprung as it were from the 
 soil, among the ancestral woodlands of those knights 
 whose heroism it proclaims, whilst it deplores their 
 untimely fate. In the next place, we may remark that 
 the autnor, though he deals with real men and real 
 manners, is careless altogether about the actual truth 
 of his facts j he kills people who were not killed, con- 
 fuses one skirmish with another, and treats accurate 
 chronology with placid contempt. And yet how wrong 
 we should be, (having historical access to other sources 
 of information, we are sure of that,) if we denied that 
 there was a substantial basis of well-grounded belief 
 below this old Border song. The persons introduced 
 into it, the events described, the known national results 
 with which it manages to connect itself, all inform us 
 that there lurks a vanished history beneath, as certainly 
 as the rose-tinted clouds, that hang over the sunken 
 sun, testify to the previous existence of daylight. 
 
 And here, if I may be permitted to digress for a 
 moment, I would add that the same conclusion is to 
 be arrived at, through mistier labyrinths of doubt, and
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. Nl 
 
 with a fainter confidence of having really landed our- 
 selves at the goal, if we compare the Arthurian Tales 
 with the monkish chronicle of Nennius. In that 
 writer's bitter invective against Mael-Gwyn, who has 
 on reasonable suggestions been identified with the le- 
 gendary knight Lancelot, we discern a faint outline 
 of the glorious personal qualities, as well as of the 
 characteristic faults, which blend themselves into the 
 impressive portrait, as drawn for us by his poets, of 
 that mediaeval Achilles. It seems as if eminent men 
 left an ineffaceable mark upon their times, as if, how- 
 ever completely the truth of history may be over- 
 shadowed and blotted out by bewildering myths and 
 traditions — however absolutely the truth oi circum- 
 stances may perish, the truth of character nevertheless 
 will survive. 
 
 To go back, however, to Chevy Chase. In the reigns 
 of Elizabeth and James I, the patriotism of England 
 became intensified in all directions, particularly in the 
 Scotch direction; the men of Devon and of Somerset 
 would be as keen against the c daughter of debate,' or 
 the poisoner Kerr, as any native of Bamboroughshire or 
 Otterburn ; so that the glowing stanzas of Chevy Chase 
 would make a welcome for themselves, in any part of 
 England, as soon as they were understood. In order, 
 
 c
 
 82 LECTURE II. 
 
 however to get this opening for them, the language had 
 to be somewhat changed, and immediately the required 
 adapter arose. We have, as it happens, the two di- 
 minutive Iliads ready at hand, and whenever we please 
 can compare them together. We see how the younger 
 poet has dealt with the older, and accordingly may 
 conjecture, if we choose, how such a process is apt to 
 take place at other times. It must be confessed that, 
 in this instance at any rate, the poem is not improved 
 by it. I once travelled by rail in the same carriage 
 with an enthusiastic and impassioned French cook; 
 for three mortal hours did he hurl at my head a 
 divine and conspicuous Philippic against the besotted 
 Philistinism of the British kitchen-maid. Would that 
 there had been, in my seat, to listen sympathetically, 
 instead of me — my eminent predecessor. Among other 
 profound truths, this artist explained with overwhelm- 
 ing eloquence, and at great length, how the outer leaves 
 of lettuces, celery, and the like imbibe from the sun 
 and the life-giving air a higher flavour and a finer 
 energy than those which are shrouded within ; but 
 though, Cassandra -like, he everlastingly warned and 
 adjured, the infatuated young woman in question 
 would, under some foolish pretext of cleanliness or 
 tidiness or immemorial custom, keep on trimming
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 83 
 
 and maiming their vegetables in spite of him. Some- 
 what after their fashion, the re-caster of Chevy Chase 
 into English, whilst removing the rough border out- 
 side and husk, has pared away a little of its native 
 freshness and pith — a little of that spirit and wild 
 fragrance which it had drunk in from the self-sown 
 forests and heather-clad fells of the North. But after 
 all there is not much to complain of, all the best 
 verses, all the happiest images, all the most striking 
 thoughts, are substantially reproduced. There is but 
 one observation, I think, sufficiently important in 
 itself to call for a critical observation — the modern 
 re-adjuster gives way to a momentary impulse of 
 national spite, from which the old warrior-minstrel 
 was wholly free. The spurious lines, I admit, have 
 great force : — 
 
 ' And the Lord Maxwell in likewise, 
 
 Did with the Douglas die, 
 Of twenty hundred Scottish spears 
 
 Scarce fifty-five did fly ; 
 Of fifteen hundred Englishmen 
 
 Went home but fifty-three, 
 The rest were slain in Chevy Chase, 
 
 Under the greenwood tree.' 
 
 These lines, I have said, are forcible and full of 
 spirit ; but still I am glad that the genuine Northum- 
 
 g 2
 
 84 LECTURE II. 
 
 brian harper knew better than to fail in respect 
 towards such gallant adversaries, of whom he had 
 already said, — 
 
 ' Hardier men, nor of heart nor of hand, 
 Were not in ChristianteV 
 
 His closing picture is, I think, at once simpler and 
 more noble in its simplicity than that of his south- 
 country interpreter. According to him, both parties 
 alike, after struggling on with unflinching courage 
 throughout the long summer day, cease fighting, and 
 that only from utter exhaustion, when the moon rises 
 and the vesper-bell begins to sound : — 
 
 ' They took off on either hand 
 
 By the light of the moon, 
 Many had no strength to stand 
 
 On Cheviot the hills aboone: 
 Of fifteen hundred archers of Inglonde 
 
 Went away but fifty and three, 
 Of twenty hundred spearmen of Skotlonde 
 
 But five and fifti.' 
 
 And now, before I conclude, seeing that I hold a 
 brief for provincial poets in general on this occasion, 
 I should like to ask you a question : Is there no other 
 well-known lay, besides c The Hunting of the Cheviot/ 
 which started into life among outsiders and refugees?
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 85 
 
 no other which, though careless of historical facts, yet 
 from the impressive truth of its characters, above all 
 from the noble proportions and intense life of the 
 central one, gives sufficient evidence of a basis of 
 history beneath? no other which, though it dealt with 
 alien traditions, and celebrated the triumphs of a clan 
 beaten and dispossessed by Sparta, stirred, neverthe- 
 less, the heart of a Spartan Sir Philip Sidney like a 
 trumpet? Under his auspices it insinuated itself 
 gradually into every corner of the land — into the 
 metropolitan cities and the remotest colonies alike. 
 Its provincialism sloughed itself away as the serpent 
 sloughs its skin : it became national, it became a bond 
 of union, it became a kind of Bible to all who spoke 
 any one of the numberless dialects of Hellas. And 
 now this old yEolic ballad, which began its career as 
 the Hellenic Chevy Chase of some obscure Smyrniotc 
 rhapsodist or rhapsodists, stands forth to endless genera- 
 tions as the poem of the world. I can easily imagine 
 the disgust of the fashionable Court minstrels, from 
 Argos and Mycenae and Corinth and Lacedaemon, who 
 thought it a stretch of condescension when they attended 
 the festivals of meaner states, at their unexpected re- 
 ception. They came to see and to conquer; but the 
 beautiful maidens of Delos and the other ^Egean isles
 
 86 LECTURE II. 
 
 turned away from their brand-new Dorian hexameters 
 to listen, delightedly, to < that blind old fiddler from 
 Chios, who sings about those effeminate iEolian princes 
 and their trumpery Asiatic expedition/ Some one of 
 them, perhaps, may have anticipated, more or less, the 
 candour of Monsieur Falconet, who, after comparing the 
 beauties of his own faultless model for Peter the Great's 
 equestrian statue, with the countless defects of that in- 
 ferior animal upon which Marcus Aurelius sits, an em- 
 peror for ever, above the steps of the Capitol at Rome, 
 stopped, took a pinch of snuff, and ended his lecture 
 thus : £ £t cependant, Messieurs, il faut avouier que cette 
 vilaine bete est vivante, tandis que la mienne est morte.' 
 In some such spirit, possibly, the laureate of Temenus, 
 or the favourite rhapsode of Cresphontes, may have 
 checked the sneers of those hangers-on and parasites 
 by whom he was sure to be surrounded. He may have 
 said to them, — 'Nay, nay; you are too hard on the 
 old man: there is often something fine in what he 
 declaims ; and could he correct himself of that horrible 
 habit of dropping his h's, and of the other vulgar Ion- 
 isms which disfigure his style, I am certain that I could 
 make something of him.' Oh, sacred but forgotten 
 poet, I have no doubt that you could. He, however, 
 has managed to do without you, and has made some-
 
 PROVINCIAL POETRY. 87 
 
 thing of himself — so much, indeed, that we who are 
 not provincial poets look upon him as the light of the 
 past, the creator of Hellas, the bard of bards, the in- 
 exhaustible well-head — 
 
 ' A quo, seu fonte perenni 
 Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.' 
 
 But were I Mr. Barnes, Mr. Waugh, or any member 
 of their special literary guild, I should insist upon con- 
 templating him from a different point of view — I 
 should claim him as my particular ava£ avhp&v — as 
 the captain and patron-saint, if I may so speak, of 
 my own poetical brotherhood ; and, if ever a hostile 
 critic were ill-advised enough to decry my pretensions 
 by saying, ' After all, you do not write English ; you 
 are only a provincial poet, 5 I should reply, without 
 hesitation, c True, so I am • so also in his day — was 
 Homer/
 
 DR. NEWMAN'S 
 
 DREAM OF GERONTIUS.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 DR. NEWMAN'S 
 'DREAM OF GERONTIUS: 
 
 A poet is not always interesting to his readers 
 exactly in proportion to his artistic eminence. The 
 distinction drawn by Wordsworth at the opening of the 
 ' Excursion/ between what he calls c the vision and the 
 faculty divine' and what he calls the accomplishment 
 of verse, does not apply itself only, as he applies it there, 
 to those who write and to those who refrain altogether 
 from writing. It enters also into our comparative esti- 
 mate of certain different classes among literary men. 
 With regard to some, we should say, that what they 
 give to the world is, more emphatically, an exhibition of 
 talent, of intellectual brilliancy, of pure literary power ; 
 whilst, as to others again, we cannot but feel that their 
 efforts come upon us as suggesting something more, as
 
 9* LECTURE III. 
 
 outpourings from unsounded depths within the cha- 
 racter, as irrepressible utterances of the hidden soul. 
 
 Now, in the earlier stages of society, the true and 
 born poet was not looked upon, I apprehend, as a 
 literary man at all ; he belonged to a race apart (avev 
 IxavCas ovbeh 77017/7775), and was ranked accordingly among 
 prophets rather than among authors ; he was a favoured 
 servant upon whom a precious burden was laid; a chosen 
 interpreter, to whom noble messages were entrusted — 
 messages which he was driven, under the pressure of 
 a self-consuming enthusiasm, to communicate in music 
 to man. But as civilisation rolled down from those 
 august heights and clouded solitudes, where, according 
 to the common belief of nations, her original fountain- 
 head derived itself from God ; as she flowed into 
 a thousand circulating channels, and fertilised new 
 ground, the arts of life gradually assumed a more 
 practical and definite form. When this took place, 
 the poet was, in a great degree, unmantled and dis- 
 crowned — perhaps at present I ought rather to say, was 
 disestablished and disendowed j — he had, whatever the 
 proper phrase may be, to retire into the background. 
 Sophists, rhetoricians, orators, and statesmen all thought 
 that they could teach the people how to live and what 
 to wish for, much better than solemn old gentlemen
 
 ' THE DREAM OF GEROXTIUS.' i, } 
 
 who kept crooning their mystic hexameters, in har- 
 mony with the motions of a staff". Philosophers, in 
 their turn, maintained that the right to bore mankind 
 with discussions about to ev and the pure reason, was 
 indisputably theirs; whilst historians made it clear 
 that the necessary twist could be given to facts more 
 succinctly and more plausibly in prose than in verse. 
 Poetry, therefore, though it still continued to live and 
 to please, ceased to be that exhausting burthen, that 
 painful wrestling with the powers of the universe, by 
 which its earlier votaries were at once ennobled and 
 overwhelmed. Still, however, some rays from the re- 
 tiring sun-god were refracted around the image of the 
 bard j and, even to this day, there lingers a belief, true 
 or false, that when a poet, real, original, and unmis- 
 takeable, rises upon us, his genius, his inspiration, as we 
 call it, is something special, something differing not in 
 degree but in kind from any inspiration which urges 
 on the orator, the statesman, or the mathematician. 
 When, therefore, we turn to our present imaginative 
 writers, who come forward as artists and creators to 
 enchant us with the graces and varieties of a beauti- 
 ful literature, a half thought crosses the mind now and 
 then whether the harp which they have inherited 
 retains all her original strings ; whether the chord of
 
 94 LECTURE III. 
 
 mystery which at first gave a tone of strange power and 
 earnestness to the whole instrument, has not somehow 
 or other relaxed itself, and silently mouldered away. 
 If, then, at such moments we find in our path some 
 lonely and single-minded searcher after wisdom, — 
 
 ' Whose soul is like a star, and dwells apart,' — 
 
 if we find one for whom life is no arena upon which 
 brilliant accomplishments may be displayed, or glitter- 
 ing crowns of victory arrived at — no place for easy 
 pleasure, or even the most innocent self-indulgence, 
 we are surprised and startled into reverence. We, 
 perhaps, may be wasting our time in frivolous pleasures 
 or unsubstantial pursuits ; but, to him, his life has 
 ever proved a problem which all the years of it are 
 too short to solve — an arid desert massed up with 
 mirages and phantoms, through which he has to 
 struggle, in order that he may bring himself face to face 
 with his own ideal of the truth. Such a man — and 
 I call Dr. Newman such a man— if he writes verses, 
 writes them because he cannot help himself; the 
 travail of his heart must come out somehow, or else it 
 will tear him to pieces ; and in his restlessness he dis- 
 covers that verse, for him, is the natural outlet of 
 feeling. From his thoughts any idea of mere literary
 
 1 THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 
 
 95 
 
 success is a thousand leagues away. The subjects 
 which he chooses are not those most susceptible of 
 poetical embellishments. No; they are his own doubts 
 and struggles, the glimpses of light and the oppressions 
 of darkness which alternately cheer and sadden his un- 
 participated existence. To put it better than I can, he 
 grapples, not as an imaginative exercise, but in deadly 
 earnest with 
 
 ' Those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense, and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings. 
 Blank misgivings of a creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realised : 
 High instincts, before which our mortal nature 
 Doth tremble, like a guilty thing surprised.' 
 
 From such a man we may be as far removed in 
 spirit and in feeling as if he were an inhabitant of the 
 Dog-star ; but still we find ourselves, whenever we meet 
 him, in the presence of something unquestionably 
 noble. Moreover, if we regard him as a poet, though 
 others may delight us more, though his intellectual 
 gifts for that particular purpose may be comparatively 
 unimportant, still the fibre of intensity is always alive 
 within him; and over him the sense of intercom- 
 munion with something higher and deeper than man 
 
 ' Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave — 
 A presence that is not to be put by.'
 
 9^ LECTURE III. 
 
 It is not wonderful, therefore, if we think sometimes 
 that he may be united to the rapt singers and prophets 
 of old by links of feeling, and touches of privilege, 
 which obtain no entrance into more brilliant souls; 
 it is not wonderful, therefore, if we pause sometimes 
 to consider whether it be not to such as him, rather 
 than to such as them, that we ought to look for any 
 fragments of the lost and forgotten tune, for any last 
 faint echoes upon earth from that primeval melody 
 which arose in heaven when £ the morning stars sang 
 together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.' 
 
 Now, if the distinction I have here taken be a sound 
 one — if Dr. Newman, by some delicate thread of con- 
 nection, be affiliated to the older instincts, and the 
 more prophetic half of the poetical character — if for 
 him the imagination be not an intellectual plaything, 
 not a mere musical instrument, but the appointed 
 spiritual energy by the help of which he raises himself, 
 at intervals, to glance over the imprisoning walls or 
 sense and matter into the spiritual world beyond — 
 then surely he deserves from us, as a man of high 
 and unusual nature, the most attentive consideration. 
 
 1 am not here, of course, to claim for him a literary 
 station as high as if he were a Tennyson or a Browning ; 
 or, indeed, to deny that Tennyson, throughout his £ In
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 97 
 
 Memoriam ' and elsewhere probably, is visited by that 
 remoter and more authentic inspiration of which 
 I have been speaking; but still, for Tennyson, as for 
 others, — 
 
 ' The rainbow comes and goes, 
 
 And lovely is the rose; 
 The moon doth with delight 
 
 Look round her, when the heavens are bare : 
 Waters on a starry night 
 
 Are beautiful and fair ; 
 The sunshine is a glorious birth, 
 
 Albeit he know, where'er he go, 
 That there has passed away a glory from the earth.' 
 
 For Dr. Newman, on the other hand, the inaccessible 
 muse Urania is almost his only patroness; from her 
 eight earthlier sisters he gets hardly any assistance, 
 Nay, unless I misconceive his philosophy, he scarce 
 believes in any real rose, in any actual rainbow; the 
 stars themselves are little more than phantom lights, 
 visionary flashings of that great dream, woven between 
 the soul and God, which men agree here to call for 
 the moment our visible and material universe. Now 
 to us, originally of coarser texture, and who have 
 knocked about the world ever since, who have gone 
 sessions, squabbled with attorneys as revising bar- 
 risters, and done work for the Poor Law Board, much 
 of this is almost inconceivable. The children and 
 
 H
 
 98 LECTURE III. 
 
 champions of compromise, we undergo a sense of in- 
 significance and degradation which creeps into the 
 marrow of our bones when, as in the c Apologia,' we 
 stumble upon a man who, really and earnestly sincere, 
 has lived always in, for, and by the spirit alone. His 
 love of truth is so keen, so subtly keen, that the will 
 answers to every breath of logical impulse, just as our 
 telegraph-wires acknowledge the lightest pulsations of 
 an electric current. We may gasp with astonishment, 
 when we find that a casual phrase of St. Augustine's 
 has upset, as if it were a house of cards, some cherished 
 theory which the labour of years had gradually wrought 
 into shape; we may smile when we perceive how 
 simple, how child-like in many ways was that powerful 
 mind, beneath whose sway the hearts of so many c were 
 moved to and fro, as the trees of the wood are moved 
 by the wind ; ' but still the more we know, the more 
 we honour the man, the more do we accept him as 
 a strange, an abnormal, a solitary, but still as a 
 beautiful soul. Among other matters, more important 
 no doubt, but less within my province, if we read his 
 poetry, we read it with affectionate respect, not so 
 much because it is exquisite in point of art, as be- 
 cause it is essentially spontaneous, spiritual, and deep. 
 A good deal of it, doubtless, awakens no echo in our
 
 1 THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 99 
 
 sympathies, it does not speak to us, possibly because 
 our sense of hearing is not of the requisite compass; 
 but we all of us, in our degree, have been vexed and 
 harassed by inward struggles ; we all of us have known 
 the weight of darkness upon our life, and therefore we 
 can all feel that in this prayer— this cry — for light, 
 there is an intense reality and truth which lend to it 
 no ordinary charm : — 
 
 THE PILLAR OF THE CLOUD. 
 
 ' Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, 
 
 Lead Thou me on ! 
 The night is dark, and I am far from home — 
 
 Lead Thou me on ! 
 Keep Thou my feet ; I do not ask to see 
 The distant scene, — one step enough for me. 
 
 I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou 
 
 Shouldst lead me on. 
 I loved to choose and see my path, but now 
 
 Lead Thou me on ! 
 I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, 
 Pride ruled my will : remember not past years. 
 
 So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still 
 
 Will lead me on, 
 O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 
 
 The night is gone; 
 And with the morn those angel faces smile 
 \\ hich I have loved long since, and lost awhile.' 
 
 I have entered upon these preliminary details, and 
 
 h 2
 
 lOO LECTURE III. 
 
 dwelt upon the inborn peculiarities which Dr. Newman 
 himself has disclosed to us, because all his poems, 
 'Gerontius' among the rest, grow out of his whole 
 character. They are the expressions of a nature, not 
 the developments and elaborations of an art. It is 
 remarkable how, more than once, in his c Apologia,' 
 this strange man recurs, with something like fear, to 
 a haunting sense that all the outward aspects of matter 
 are phantasmal and unreal: a sense which seems to 
 have been about his path and about his bed from early 
 childhood. I have known the same feeling, or one 
 like it, in others. I have known men, yes, and young 
 children also, with such an impression, seldom given 
 out, but always on cross-examination found to be 
 lurking at the heart. We poco-curanti who think 
 life too short to be wasted on metaphysics, and who 
 refute Berkeley in the style of Dr. Johnson, by kicking 
 at a stone or a foot-ball, are apt, whenever we run up 
 against such weird mystics, to feel dissatisfied with 
 ourselves and every one else. We may go on further- 
 more to reflect (though that Buddhist creed implies the 
 unimportance rather than the unreality of matter) how, 
 at this very day, the absolute majority of mankind 
 believe, under ancestral traditions beyond a date, in the 
 transmigration of souls, and grow thereupon still hotter
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' IOl 
 
 and more flurried and more uncomfortable. We have 
 even been known, for a quarter of an hour, to question 
 whether all wisdom and all knowledge of human nature 
 has condensed itself, as to time, within the latter half 
 of this nineteenth century- and as to space, within 
 some twenty streets round about Piccadilly and Pall 
 Mall. Luckily for our peace of mind this unnatural 
 modesty does not last long But even when we have 
 recovered our legitimate self-esteem, it may not be 
 without profit to study the effect of such anomalous 
 temperaments upon religion, upon politics, upon life. 
 Our present business is with literature — with poetry, 
 indeed — more especially the poetry of Dr. Newman. 
 Now, original as he is, he cannot, any more than 
 smaller men, escape from the conditions of his age. 
 When he first became known, the influence of Words- 
 worth was perhaps at its highest ; there was a surfeit 
 of Byron ; there had been a reaction from Scott ; 
 Tennyson, as yet, was below the horizon. I should 
 therefore expect to find, as one result of Dr. Newman's 
 scepticism with regard to matter, that he would remain 
 comparatively unaffected by much in Wordsworth that 
 produced a deep impression upon others. I should 
 have previously imagined, for instance, that Dr. New- 
 man would be somewhat hard and cold to the beauty
 
 102 LECTURE III. 
 
 and influence of the outer world. I think, upon ex- 
 amining this point, that these anticipations of mine 
 are realised more or less. We all know, at any rate, 
 what the opposite tendency — the tendency, I mean, to 
 see life in everything, and to spiritualise for himself all 
 the manifestations of matter — have produced for us in 
 Wordsworth. It has indeed so informed his poetry, 
 that in spite of a religion keen, unintermitting and 
 profound, he has been grumbled at by sound divines as 
 a Pantheist. Speaking, however, not as a theological 
 but only as a poetical critic, this is a heresy, if Words- 
 worth were a heretic, which I cannot bring myself to 
 regret; under that stimulus he pursues Nature as if 
 she were his mistress, and colours every description of 
 her with a living glow of love. Dr. Newman, on the 
 other hand, so far as I can judge from the book which 
 I hold here, is not much interested in what for him 
 has but little reality, and dwells but seldom on the 
 earthly outside of things with any warmth of personal 
 affection. Now this, in my judgment, is a grave 
 defect. I think a want of sensuousness in a poet (and 
 I say so openly, because the poetry of abstract thought 
 is not likely to be undervalued at present,) fatal to 
 very high eminence in that department of literature. 
 Wordsworth, it may be said, has clothed deep and
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' IO3 
 
 original views with enduring poetry. True; but he 
 was enabled to do so just because he united a character 
 peculiar in its passion, no doubt, but still intensely 
 passionate, with a great faculty of thought : — 
 
 ' The sounding cataract 
 Haunted him like a passion ; the tall rock, 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
 Their colours and their forms, had been to him 
 An appetite, a feeling, and a love.' 
 
 And therefore it is that the dry bones scattered about 
 the c Excursion ' and the 'Prelude' have had strength 
 given them to stand up on their feet and live. Nay, 
 without referring again to what Wordsworth says of 
 himself, how is it that Coleridge describes the inspira- 
 tion of his friend ? 
 
 An orphic song indeed, 
 
 A song divine of high and passionate thoughts. 
 To their own music chanted.' 
 
 It is this double refraction of passion and of thought, 
 fused into one flash of blended light, which gives their 
 life and character to his poetical diamonds; but still 
 it is in the passion rather than in the thought, if we 
 could but disentangle them, that we should find, I 
 believe, the quickening spirit of the gem. Hence 1 
 think Dr. Newman in his earlier poems has suffered 
 somewhat by assigning too much weight to Words-
 
 104 LECTURE III. 
 
 worth's power of thought, without sufficiently taking 
 into account the more poetical and less imitable qua- 
 lities by which it is relieved. The same criticism 
 may be directed with even more propriety against 
 other esteemed writers who have enlisted, during the 
 last thirty years, in the < Wordsworth's own Cumber- 
 land meditators j 3 they may knit their brows like their 
 illustrious colonel, but they cannot mimic £ the beat- 
 ings of his heart.' 
 
 I once knew of two young ladies, both fond of 
 poetry — both Wordsworthians to the tips of their 
 fingers. The first had drunk in so deeply her poet's 
 views of intercommunion with the life of the universe 
 — views which suffered nothing to lie for him inert and 
 dead — that in her universal sympathy she even out- 
 Wordsworthed Wordsworth ; she could not rest till she 
 had clothed her very gowns with a personal identity and 
 an individual character. She baptized them accordingly, 
 as fast as they came home from her milliner, with sono- 
 rous names of heroes and of kings. Hence a girlish 
 friend sitting with her was startled by the sudden 
 irruption of a stern though affectionate maid: 'Now, 
 Miss, you have gone and torn Castor, and Pollux is as 
 dirty as the ground; you have nothing left for Sunday 
 but old Lysander, and yet, you know, I told you over
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 105 
 
 and over again how wrong you were to leave Superbus 
 behind/ Her rival inclined to the austerer side of the 
 Great Man's intellect, and was found to have jotted 
 down in her commonplace book the following awful 
 entry : c Resolved, for the future, to think clearly, com- 
 prehensively, and profoundly on all subjects.' This at 
 the first aspect may appear the more noble proceeding, 
 but I am convinced that if they intend to follow as 
 poetesses in the steps of their master, the gowns woman 
 of the two was in the right. 
 
 Nay, even as far as that master himself is concerned, 
 I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that in 
 spite of the width of thought and glow of feeling 
 which distinguish him from his numberless imitators, 1 
 hardly look upon him as taking rank among the nor- 
 mal summits in the orthodox range of Parnassus, but 
 rather as standing, with respect to such mountain 
 brothers of song, like a peak of Teneriffe, apart, and 
 unsympathising and alone. 
 
 To return, however, to our immediate subject. Any 
 comparative insensibility to the beauty of nature, or to 
 those outward aspects which stimulate the imagination 
 of the passionate and sensuous po^t, is in the c Dream 
 of Gerontius ' of less importance. The region through 
 which it moves is filled with the dry colourless light of
 
 105 LECTURE III. 
 
 infinity, and not by those fluctuating rays which tinge 
 our human atmosphere. I should say, therefore, that 
 Dr. Newman, in grappling with such an awful subject 
 as immortality and the state of the soul after death, 
 had chosen well for himself j if such a statement did 
 not somewhat imply that this fine poem had originated 
 in an artistical pursuit of literary excellence, instead 
 of springing up spontaneously out of the innermost 
 fountains of a deeply religious mind. 
 
 However this may be, the massiveness of thought, 
 the purity of feeling, and the austere grandeur of 
 imagination which distinguish Dr. Newman, find 
 here an appropriate place. In a more secular poem, 
 I should expect that, either from the natural bias of 
 his understanding, or perhaps from the collapse of all 
 slighter emotions under the pressure of intense thought, 
 a certain dryness and stiffness of style would have 
 made themselves felt, and felt disadvantageous^. Dr. 
 Newman, however, is here dealing with high matters, 
 fitted to call forth that deep-seated zeal and fire which 
 always lay in the heart of his character — a zeal and fire 
 which, in their instinctive rebellion against his pre- 
 conceived plans for being calm and tranquil and 
 reserved, often lend a subtle and peculiar charm to 
 his writings. Besides, what I have called above an
 
 C THE DREAM OF GEROXTIUS.' 107 
 
 austere imagination, that is, a faculty of which the 
 business is to conceive and body forth great architec- 
 tural wholes of thought, without frittering itself away 
 on the details of ornamentation, is the only form 
 of the imaginative intellect suitable to a drama so 
 solemn as c Gerontius ;' and, in that respect, Dr. New- 
 man is eminently strong. 
 
 And now I must ask your pardon, if I detain you 
 at this point for a moment, by a short analysis of 
 the poem which we are examining. I can hardly 
 doubt that every one of you is at least as well ac- 
 quainted with it as I am myself. But still, the old 
 maxim that half the failures in love, in war, in 
 trade, in every department of life, have as their cause 
 the taking things for granted, claims a hearing, 
 and must be attended to. c Gerontius,' then, is a re- 
 ligious drama which describes a dying Catholic, not 
 apparently a man of any special or exceptional holi- 
 ness, but one who has struggled worthily through a 
 long series of years, and is now before the gates 
 of Death. He still is, as he ever has been, a 
 dutiful and pious son of his mother Church ; but 
 his senses arc shaken by pain, and by his human 
 terror of the grave ; his senses, moreover, half spiri- 
 tualized as the strength of the flesh ebbs away from
 
 lo8 LECTURE III. 
 
 them, detect on the air around and in the soul within, 
 hostile and malignant emanations bent to poison his 
 latest breathings, and to beat down that sacred hope 
 which falters more and more as it approaches its 
 fulfilment. Still he is supported against these unseen 
 enemies by faith; and when his earthly destiny has 
 accomplished itself, departs in peace. Immediately he 
 finds that he is borne along by some protecting power, 
 through sneering demons and sympathizing angels, up 
 to the Throne of Judgment itself. The dramatic ele- 
 ment is made up of a colloquy between him and this 
 glorious creature to whom he has been entrusted. In 
 order, however, to make head against the monotony 
 which would ensue if this were all, the dialogue, as it 
 proceeds, is from time to time relieved by the choral 
 hymns of the seraphs whom they pass, interrupted by 
 the malevolent utterances howled at by them by demons, 
 who would fain impede their progress; and solemnly 
 closes with a lyrical valediction sung by that immortal 
 guide over the awe-stricken soul; which then is left, 
 after having been at once cheered and blasted by a 
 single glimpse of the Most High, to cleanse itself from 
 those disfiguring stains which forbid its immediate 
 entrance into heaven. Of the doctrines involved in 
 this striking production it is unnecessary to say more
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 109 
 
 than that there is nothing, except the bare idea of 
 purgatory (a theological and not a poetical blemish), 
 which need prevent any Christian, or, indeed, any one 
 who believes in the providence of God, from valuing it 
 according to its deserts. It is built mainly upon those 
 noble foundations which were laid eighteen hundred 
 years ago, and which are still the common inheritance 
 of Christendom, the common centre of our European 
 civilization. 
 
 It is probable, indeed, that the first idea of com- 
 posing such a dramatic work may have been suggested 
 to Dr. Newman by the Autos Sacramentales of Spain, 
 and especially by those of the illustrious Calderon ; but, 
 so far as I can learn, he has derived hardly anything 
 from them beyond the vaguest hints, except, indeed, 
 the all-important knowledge that a profound religious 
 feeling can represent itself, and that effectively, in the 
 outward form of a play. I may remark that these 
 Spanish Autos of Calderon constitute beyond all ques- 
 tion a very wonderful and a very original school of 
 poetry, and I am not without hope that, when I know 
 my business a little better, we may examine them im- 
 partially together. Nay, even as it is, Calderon stands 
 so indisputably at the head of all Catholic religious 
 dramatists, among whom Dr. Newman has recently
 
 IIO LECTURE III. 
 
 enrolled himself, that perhaps it may not be out of 
 place to inquire for a moment into his poetical methods 
 and aims, in order that we may then discover, if we 
 can, how and why the disciple differs from his master. 
 Now there is a great convict of opinion as to the 
 precise degree of merit which these particular Spanish 
 dramas possess. Speaking as an ignorant man, I should 
 say that, whilst those who disparage them seem rather 
 hasty in their judgments, and not so well informed as 
 could be wished, still the kind of praise which they 
 receive from their most enthusiastic admirers puzzles 
 and does not instruct us. 
 
 Taking, for example, the great German authority on 
 this point, Dr. Lorinzer, as our guide, we see his poet 
 looming dimly through a cloud of incense, which may 
 embalm his memory, but certainly does not improve our 
 eyesight. Indeed, according to him, any appreciation 
 of Calderon is not to be dreamt of by a Protestant. 
 c Even learned critics,' says he, c highly cultivated in 
 all the niceties of sesthetics, are deficient in the know- 
 ledge of Catholic faith and Catholic theology without 
 which it is impossible properly to understand Calderon.' 
 And yet, without being Greeks we feel the Iliad, without 
 being Parsees the Shahnama comes home to us, without 
 being Mahometans the songs of Arabia quicken our
 
 £ THE DREAM OF GEROXTIUS.' Ill 
 
 pulses with their lyrical impulse and fire; Berserker 
 poets, Hindoo poets, even Chinese poets speak a lan- 
 guage not unintelligible to our ears : — 
 
 ' One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.' 
 
 However true, therefore, these Teutonic dicta may- 
 be, we cannot be expected patiently to acquiesce in 
 them. Dr. Lorinzer then goes on to say, c that old 
 traditions which twine round the dogma like a beautiful 
 garland of legends, deeply profound thoughts expressed 
 here and there by some of the Fathers of the Church, are 
 made use of with such incredible skill and introduced so 
 appositely at the right place ', that (I presume) even ordinary 
 imaginations are awakened to the charm of the poetry, 
 even ordinary understandings roused up to enter into 
 the depth of the thoughts.' Oh, no ! I beg your pardon, 
 I have misread the learned German. He does not 
 finish his sentence in that way at all. What he does 
 really say is this, £ are made use of with such incredible 
 skill, and inserted so appositely at the right place, that 
 — frequently it is not easy to guess the source from 
 whence they have been derived.' The learned German's 
 notion of incredible dramatic skill, and exquisite appo- 
 siteness of introduction, seems to be that the exercise 
 of these high faculties should leave spectator or reader, 
 as the case may be, in hopeless perplexity and con-
 
 112 LECTURE III. 
 
 fusion. According to this method of reasoning, the 
 logical objection against Calderon ought to be taken 
 thus, that though often most meritoriously difficult, 
 he falls short of absolute perfection in this, that it is 
 sometimes possible to understand his meaning. Never- 
 theless, these scenes so unfathomably profound, these 
 sublime enigmas, which exact, like the handwriting on 
 the wall, a specially inspired interpreter to decypher 
 them, were composed in the first instance to gratify, 
 and did gratify, the uneducated populace of Madrid. I 
 should like to have Calderon himself up, even for half 
 an hour, if it were only that he might criticise his 
 critics. 
 
 At the same time, Dr. Lorinzer's knowledge of his 
 subject is so profound, and his appreciation of his 
 favourite author so keen, that for me, who am almost 
 entirely unacquainted with this branch of literature, 
 formally to oppose his views, would be an act of 
 presumption of which I am, as I trust, incapable. I 
 may, however, perhaps be permitted to observe, that 
 with regard to the few pieces of this kind which in 
 an English dress I have read, whilst I think them not 
 only most ingenious but also surprisingly beautiful, 
 they do not strike me as incomprehensible at all. 
 We must accept them, of course, as coming from the
 
 6 THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS? 113 
 
 mind of a devout Catholic and Spanish gentleman who 
 belongs to the seventeenth century ; but when once 
 that is agreed upon, there are no difficulties greater than 
 those which we might expect to find in any system of 
 poetry so remote from our English habits of thought. 
 There is, for instance, the c Divine Philothea,' in other 
 words, our human spirit considered as the destined 
 bride of Christ. This sacred drama, we may well 
 call it the swan-song of Calderon's extreme old age, 
 is steeped throughout in a serene power and a mellow 
 beauty of style, making it not unworthy to be ranked 
 with that (Edipus Colonaeus which glorified the sun- 
 set of his illustrious predecessor ; but yet, Protestant 
 as I am, I cannot discover that it is in the least ob- 
 scure. Faith, Hope, Charity, the five senses, Heresy, 
 Judaism, Paganism, Atheism, and the like, which 
 in inferior hands must have been mere lay figures, 
 are there instinct with a dramatic life and energy 
 such as beforehand I could hardly have supposed 
 possible. Moreover, in spite of Dr. Lorinzcr's odd 
 encomiums, each allegory as it rises up is more neatly 
 rounded off, and shows a finer grain than any of the 
 personifications of Spenser- so that the religious effect 
 and the theological effect intended by the writer are 
 both amply produced — yes, produced upon us, his
 
 114 LECTURE III. 
 
 heretical admirers. Hence, even if there be myste- 
 rious treasures of beauty below the surface, to which 
 we aliens must remain blind for ever, this expression, 
 which broke from the lips of one to whom I was 
 eagerly reading the play, £ Why, in the original, this 
 must be as grand as Dante, 5 tends to show that such 
 merits as do come within our ken are not likely to 
 be thrown away upon any fair-minded Protestant. Dr. 
 Newman, as a Catholic, will have entered, I presume, 
 more deeply still into the spirit of these extraordinary 
 creations : his life, however, belongs to a different era, 
 and to a colder people. And thus, however much he 
 may have been directed to the choice of a subject 
 by the old mysteries and moralities (of which these 
 Spanish autos must be taken as the final development 
 and bright consummate flower), he has treated that sub- 
 ject, when once undertaken by him, entirely from his 
 own point of view. 'Gerontius' is meant to be studied 
 and dwelt upon by the meditative reader. The autos of 
 Calderon were got ready by perhaps the most accom- 
 plished playwright that ever lived, to amuse and stimu- 
 late a thronging southern population. c Gerontius 5 is, 
 we may perhaps say for Dr. Newman in the words 
 of Shelley, — 
 
 ' The voice of his own soul 
 Heard in the calm of thought,'
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 115 
 
 whilst the conceptions of the Spanish dramatist burst 
 into life with tumultuous music, gorgeous scenery, 
 hurrying processions, and all the pomps and splen- 
 dours of the Catholic Church. No wonder, therefore, 
 that our English auto, though composed with the same 
 general purpose of using verse, and dramatic verse, to 
 promote a religious and even a theological end, should 
 differ from them in essence as well as in form. There 
 is room, however, for both kinds in the wide empire 
 of Poetry, and though Dr. Newman himself would be 
 the first to cry shame upon me if I were to name 
 him with Calderon even for a moment, still his 
 mystery of this most unmysterious age will, I believe, 
 keep its honourable place in our English literature 
 as an impressive, an attractive, and an original pro- 
 duction. 
 
 If we proceed to examine it in detail, I think, 
 though I speak diffidently, that the finest thing it 
 contains is the early soliloquy of Gerontius when 
 he finds himself, as he believes at first, alone with 
 infinity. The whole of this speech is so real and 
 so plausible, that we accept it at once as the natural 
 continuation of his earthly career, and seem to feel 
 with him that his actual position, however new and 
 previously unimagined, has nothing in it to awaken 
 
 1 2
 
 Il6 LECTURE III. 
 
 either surprise or confusion. I will now, with your 
 permission, read it to you at length : — 
 
 ' I went to sleep ; and now I am refresh'd, 
 A strange refreshment : for I feel in me 
 An inexpressive lightness, and a sense 
 Of freedom, as I were at length myself, . 
 And ne'er had been before. How still it is ! 
 I hear no more the busy beat of time, 
 No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse; 
 Nor does one moment differ from the next. 
 I had a dream ; yes ; — some one softly said 
 " He's gone ;" and then a sigh went round the room. 
 And then I surely heard a priestly voice 
 Cry "Subvenite;" and they knelt in prayer. 
 I seem to hear him still ; but thin and low, 
 And fainter and more faint the accents come, 
 As at an ever-widening interval. 
 Ah ! whence is this ? What is this severance ? 
 This silence pours a solitariness 
 Into the very essence of my soul ; 
 And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet, 
 Hath something too of sternness and of pain, 
 For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring 
 By a strange introversion, and perforce 
 I now begin to feed upon myself, 
 Because I have nought else to feed upon. 
 
 Am I alive or dead? I am not dead, 
 
 But in the body still ; for I possess 
 
 A sort of confidence, which clings to me, 
 
 That each particular organ holds its place 
 
 As heretofore, combining with the rest 
 
 Into one symmetry, that wraps me round, 
 
 And makes me man; and surely I could move,
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 1 1 J 
 
 Did I but will it, every part of me. 
 
 And yet I cannot to my sense bring home 
 
 By very trial, that I have the power. 
 
 Tis strange ; I cannot stir a hand or foot. 
 
 I cannot make my fingers or my lips 
 
 By mutual pressure witness each to each, 
 
 Nor by the eyelid's instantaneous stroke 
 
 Assure myself I have a body still. 
 
 Nor do I know my very attitude. 
 
 Nor if I stand, or lie, or sit, or kneel.' 
 
 The rest of the work is much in the same key as 
 the above: it is grave and subdued as to tone, some- 
 what bare of ornament, but everywhere weighty with 
 thought. It is written also with Dr. Newman's usual 
 mastery over the English language, and moves along 
 from the beginning to the end with a solemn harmony 
 of its own. I am here referring to the blank verse • 
 the speeches rather. The lyrical portions (with the 
 exception of two, on which I shall touch by-and-by) 
 are, in my judgment, less successful. The strains as 
 they flow forth from the various ranks of angels are 
 not, if I may use a somewhat pedantic word, differen- 
 tiated by any intelligible gradations of feeling and of 
 style, and, indeed, do not move me much more than 
 those average hymns which people, who certainly are 
 not angels yet, sing weekly in church. The inter- 
 locutory blasphemies of the demons are still worse.
 
 Il8 LECTURE III. 
 
 I cannot help pronouncing them to be mean and 
 repulsive. 
 
 I am aware that here there is room for a wide 
 difference of opinion • I know that German critics of 
 renown will tell you that the fiends of Dante or of 
 Tasso are more to be admired than those of £ Paradise 
 Lost. 5 But, though I do not wish to enter into any 
 abstract discussions on the nature of good and evil, 
 or on the metaphysical effects consequent on utter 
 alienation from God, I yet feel that, poetically speak- 
 ing, what they say is not true. I stand here in an 
 English University, as an Englishman — an English 
 Philistine, if you will — and profess myself, on that 
 head at least, incurably Miltonic. I do not forget 
 that another class of thinkers, very different from 
 German critics, have arrived, by a separate road, at 
 something like the same conclusion, and that our 
 Miltonic Hades has been condemned by intelligent 
 English divines. The silent valley where the lost 
 spirits sing — 
 
 ' With notes angelical to many a harp ;' 
 
 the intellectual pleasures reserved for them when they 
 reason high — 
 
 ' Of fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute ;'
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 119 
 
 the noble palace, for which 
 
 ' The blazing cressets, fed 
 With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light 
 As from a sky,' 
 
 are thought of, as opening avenues to something more 
 like comparative happiness, than is consistent with the 
 appointed prison-house of misery and sin. Excellent 
 men, therefore, speak of such fine imaginations as 
 dangerous and deceitful ; just as if these sublime visions 
 of our great Puritan poet had lent some colour of 
 plausibility to the hypothetical plans of that Yankee 
 pedlar who, on being asked, when he returned from a 
 business tour in Texas, what kind of a place it was, 
 is said to have replied, c Wall, stranger, if Hell and 
 Texas both belonged to me, J should sell Texas.' Now, 
 whatever may be the moral or theological force of 
 these objections, upon me as a poetical critic, and 
 nothing more, they do not tell with any weight. When 
 1 look at the question from my own point of view, I 
 think that if you degrade one who was 
 
 ' Of the first 
 If not the first Archangel,' 
 
 into an imp, you destroy, to our apprehensions, his 
 personal identity at once; he is no longer the same 
 being; no longer an antagonist powerful enough to
 
 120 LECTURE III. 
 
 dispute with Michael • no longer the centre of the 
 hostile system— a spiritual anti-sun, as it were, raying 
 out that darkness which maintains to the end its fierce 
 though unequal battle against the immeasurable light. 
 
 Nay, even if Milton had never existed, I should still 
 consider the fiendish shapes of the c Inferno,' who are 
 like nothing so much as the harsh ushers and malignant 
 young bullies of an ill-conducted private school, to be 
 wanting altogether in dignity and effect. 
 
 I sympathise with both clauses of Wordsworth's 
 noble line — 
 
 ' Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains ; ' 
 
 and therefore I turn away, not without a sense of 
 relief, from Dr. Newman's gibbering devils, to the 
 melancholy grandeur with which Byron, in his £ Heaven 
 and Earth,' reproduces our Miltonic idea of a fallen 
 
 spirit: — 
 
 ' Son of the saved, 
 When thou and thine have braved 
 The wide and warring element, 
 Shall thou and thine be happy ? No ! 
 Thy new world and new race shall be of woe. 
 * * * * 
 
 And art thou not ashamed 
 
 Thus to survive, 
 
 And eat, and drink, and wive, 
 With a base heart so far subdued and tamed 
 As even to hear this wide destruction named -
 
 I 
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 121 
 
 Who would outlive their kind 
 Except the base and blind ? 
 
 ' There is not one who hath not left a throne 
 
 Vacant in heaven, to dwell in darkness here, 
 Rather than see his mates endure alone. 
 Go, wretch, and give 
 
 A life like thine to other wretches — live ! 
 And when the annihilating waters roar 
 
 Above what they have done, 
 Envy the giant patriarchs then no more, 
 And scorn thy sire, as the surviving one, 
 
 Thyself for being his son.' 
 
 In justice to Dr. Newman, however, I must admit 
 that the passage wherein the guardian angel explains 
 to Gerontius why the hellish outcries by which they 
 are assailed are now ineffective and contemptible, is 
 finely conceived and vigorously expressed : — 
 
 ' In thy trial-state 
 Thou hadst a traitor nestling close at home, 
 Connatural, who with the powers of hell 
 Was leagued, and of thy senses kept the keys, 
 And to that deadliest foe unlock'd thy heart. 
 And therefore is it, in respect of man, 
 Those fallen ones show so majestical. 
 But, when some child of grace, Angel or Saint, 
 Pure and upright in his integrity 
 Of nature, meets the demons on their raid, 
 They scud away as cowards from the fight. 
 Nay, oft hath holy hermit in his cell. 
 Not yet disburden'd of mortality, 
 Mock'd at their threats and warlike overtures ;
 
 122 LECTURE III. 
 
 Or, dying, when they swarm'd, like flies, around, 
 Defied them, and departed to his Judge.' 
 
 The two rhymed pieces which stand out from all the 
 others as deserving of high commendation are, first, 
 the final utterance of Gerontius after his momentary 
 interview with the hidden power of God : it is full of 
 a sad and yearning melody, well calculated to infuse 
 into our hearts the lesson which Dr. Newman designed 
 it to convey. The other lines to which I referred are 
 those which contain the farewell of the guardian angel, 
 who, in a strain of solemn and tender pensiveness, fitly 
 closes the drama. It may suffice, perhaps, if I read the 
 former of these two, which, upon the whole, I prefer : — 
 
 ' Take me away, and in the lowest deep 
 
 There let me be, 
 And there in hope the lone night-watches keep, 
 
 Told out for me. 
 There, motionless and happy in my pain, 
 
 Lone, not forlorn, — 
 There will I sing my sad perpetual strain, 
 
 Until the morn. 
 There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast, 
 
 Which ne'er can cease 
 To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest 
 
 Of its Sole Peace. 
 There will I sing my absent Lord and Love : — 
 
 Take me away, 
 That sooner I may rise, and go above, 
 And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.'
 
 c THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS.' 1 23 
 
 1 think I have now said all that I had to say about 
 the 'Dream of Gerontius;' but perhaps I may venture 
 to add, in conclusion, that little as I sympathise with 
 the actual opinions, or even with the methods of 
 reasoning which characterise Dr. Newman, it has 
 nevertheless been a real pleasure to me to recall the 
 days of my youth, and to feel that he deserved then, 
 and has ever since continued to deserve, the admiring 
 reverence with which he filled the men of my genera- 
 tion. He has bared his heart before the crowd, and 
 all who will may see how true, and pure, and tender 
 a heart it is. 
 
 There may be others whom we looked up to like- 
 wise, who have surrendered their souls to a bitterer 
 antagonism and a more hostile zeal • who pain us, 
 now and then, by assuming a somewhat unsympathetic 
 demeanour — by seeming to undervalue the memories 
 that lie behind them, and the ties which they com- 
 pelled themselves to break. If such there are, it is not 
 for us to blame them ; we know too well how keen the 
 edge of these disputes, how envenomed the spirit of 
 these religious differences, is and ever must be ; but 
 though we blame nobody, it is still lawful for us to 
 rejoice, that one the most eminent of his class, should 
 not, in spite of an unwavering devotion to his new
 
 124 LECTURE III. 
 
 creed, even wish to forget the years when he worked 
 and flourished at Oxford ; that by him, at any rate, the 
 old influences are yet spoken of with genuine respect, 
 the old friends with undiminished affection ; that of 
 him, at any rate, we may yet fairly say, in words which 
 are hacknied no doubt, but hacknied only because 
 they cannot be improved upon — 
 
 ' Cum talis sis, utinam noster esses.'
 
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