HEART OF MAN 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 " Deep in the general heart of men " 
 
 WOBDSWOBTH 
 
 Nefo ffork 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
 1901 
 
 All riyhtt reicrved 
 
 ftB 1908
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1899, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped March, 1899. Reprinted July, 
 1901. 
 C V .- i t 
 
 J. 8. Gushing & Co. Berwick Si Smith 
 Norwood Maes. U.S.A.
 
 2T0 tlje JKemotg of 
 EUGENE MONTGOMERY 
 
 MY FRIEND 
 
 DEAR WAS HIS PRAISE, AND PLEASANT 'T WERE TO ME, 
 ON WHOSE FAR GRAVE TO-NIGHT THE DEEP SNOWS DRIFT; 
 
 IT NEEDS NOT NOW; TOGETHER WE SHALL SEE 
 HOW HIGH CHRIST'S LILIES O'ER MAN'S LAURELS LIFT. 
 
 FEBRUARY 13, 1899.
 
 TS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 OF the papers contained in this volume 
 "Taormina" was published in the Century 
 Magazine ; the others are new. The intention 
 of the author was to illustrate how poetry, poli- 
 tics, and religion are the flowering of the same 
 human spirit, and have their feeding roots in 
 a common soil, "deep in the general heart of 
 men." 
 
 COLUMBIA COLLEGE, 
 February 22, 1899.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 TAORMINA 1 
 
 A NEW DEFENCK OF POETRY 73 
 
 DEMOCRACY 211 
 
 THE RIDE .... 263
 
 TAORMINA
 
 TAORMINA 
 
 WHAT should there be in the glimmering 
 
 lights of a poor fishing- village to fascinate me ? 
 
 Far below, a mile perhaps, I behold them in 
 
 the darkness and the storm like some phospho- 
 
 rescence of the beach ; I see the pale tossing of 
 
 the surf beside them; I hear the continuous 
 
 roar borne up and softened about these heights ; 
 
 and this is night at Taormina. There is a 
 
 weirdness in the scene the feeling without 
 
 the reality of mystery ; and at evening, I know 
 
 W not why, I cannot sleep without stepping upon 
 
 ^ the terrace or peering through the panes to see 
 
 ^ those lights. At morning the charm has flown 
 
 <j from the shore to the further heights above 
 
 me. I glance at the vast banks of southward- 
 
 lying cloud that envelop Etna, like deep fog 
 
 upon the ocean ; and then, inevitably, my eyes 
 
 seek the double summit of the Taorminian 
 
 mountain, rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, 
 
 3
 
 4 HEART OF MAN 
 
 almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. 
 The nearer height, precipice-faced, towers full 
 in front with its crowning ruined citadel, and 
 discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock 
 toward its right, a hermitage church among the 
 heavily hanging mists. The other horn of the 
 massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and 
 to the old castle's left, exposes on its slightly 
 loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. It, too, is 
 cloud- wreathed the lonely crag of Mola. Over 
 these hilltops, I know, mists will drift and 
 touch all day ; and often they darken threaten- 
 ingly, and creep softly down the slopes, and 
 fill the next-lying valley, and roll, and lift 
 again, and reveal the flank of Monte d'Oro 
 northward on the far-reaching range. As I 
 was walking the other day, with one of these 
 floating showers gently blowing in my face 
 down this defile, I noticed, where the mists 
 hung in fragments from the cloud out over the 
 gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined 
 the profound ravine ; and thinking how much 
 of the romantic charm which delights lovers of 
 the mountains and the sea springs from such 
 Gothic moods of nature, I felt for a moment 
 something of the pleasure of recognition in
 
 TAORMINA 6 
 
 meeting with this northern and familiar ele- 
 ment in the Sicilian landscape. 
 
 One who has grown to be at home with na- 
 ture cannot be quite a stranger anywhere on 
 earth. In new lands 1 find the poet's old do- 
 main. It is not only from the land-side that 
 these intimations of old acquaintance come. 
 When my eyes leave, as they will, the near 
 girdle of rainy mountain tops, and range home 
 at last upon the sea, something familiar is there 
 too, that which I have always known, but 
 marvellously transformed and heightened in 
 beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sun- 
 shine in the offing through unseen rents of 
 heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have be- 
 held a thousand times, but here they remind 
 me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains ; 
 and where have I seen those still tracts of 
 changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery 
 vapours of noon ; or, when the weather freshens 
 and darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald 
 bright in the gray expanse of storm? They 
 seem like memories of what has been, made 
 fairer. One recurring scene has the same fas- 
 cination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It 
 is a simple picture : only an arm of mist thrust
 
 6 HEART OF MAN 
 
 ing out from yonder lowland by the little cape, 
 and making a near horizon, where, for half an 
 hour, the waves break with great dashes of 
 purple and green, deep and angry, against the 
 insubstantial mole. All day I gaze on these 
 sights of beauty until it seems that nature her- 
 self has taken on nobler forms forever more. 
 When the mountain storin beats the pane at 
 midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me 
 in the hour before dawn, I can forget in what 
 climate I am ; but the oblivion is conscious, 
 and half a memory of childhood nights : in an 
 instant comes the recollection, " I am on the 
 coasts, and these are the couriers, of Etna." 
 
 The very rain is strange : it is charged with 
 obscure personality; it is the habitation of a 
 new presence, a storm-genius that I have never 
 known ; it is born of Etna, whence all things 
 here have being and draw nourishment. It is 
 not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the 
 valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, 
 the ocean-plain ; it is not a storm, but a season. 
 It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or ride 
 with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night ; 
 it does not pass like Atlantic tempests on great 
 world-currents : it remains. Its home is upon
 
 Etna ; thence it comes and thither it returns ; 
 it gathers and disperses, lightens and darkens, 
 blows and is silent, and though it suffer the 
 clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils 
 with heaven, again it draws the folds together 
 about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends 
 it forth ; then with clouds and thick darkness 
 the mountain hides its face : it is the Sicilian 
 winter. 
 
 II 
 
 But Etna does not withdraw continuously 
 from its children even in this season. On the 
 third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring 
 back the sun ; and I was not deceived. Two 
 days it was closely wrapped in impenetrable 
 gray; but the third morning, as I threw open 
 my casement and stepped out upon the terrace, 
 I saw it, like my native winter, expanding its 
 broad flanks under the double radiance of 
 dazzling clouds spreading from its extreme 
 summit far out and upward, and of the snow- 
 fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the 
 sides. Villages and groves were visible, cloth- 
 ing all the lower zone, and between lay the 
 plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is
 
 8 HEART OF MAN 
 
 twelve miles away. From the sea-dipping base 
 to the white cone the slope measures more than 
 twenty miles, and as many more conduct the 
 eye downward to the western fringe a vast 
 bulk ; yet one does not think of its size as he 
 gazes ; so large a tract the eye takes in, but no 
 more realizes than it does the distance of the 
 stars. High up, forests peer through the ribbed 
 snows, and extinct craters stud the frozen scene 
 with round hollow mounds innumerable. A 
 thousand features, but it remains one mighty 
 mountain. How natural it seems for it to be 
 sublime ! It is the peer of the sea and of the 
 sky. All day it flashed and darkened under 
 the rack, and I rejoiced in the sight, and knew 
 why Pindar called it the pillar of heaven ; and 
 at night it hooded itself once more with the 
 winter cloud. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Would you see this land as I see it ? Come 
 then, since Etna gives a fair, pure morning, 
 up over the shelving bank to the great eastern 
 spur of Taormina, where stood the hollow 
 theatre, now in ruins, and above it the small 
 temple with which the Greeks surmounted the
 
 TAORMINA 9 
 
 highest point. It is such a spot as they often 
 chose for their temples ; but none ever com- 
 manded a more noble prospect. The far-shin- 
 ing sea, four or five hundred feet below, washes 
 the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each 
 hand is disclosed the whole of that side of 
 Sicily which faces the rising sun. To the left 
 and northward are the level straits, with the 
 Calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with 
 light snow, as far as the Cape of Spartivento, 
 distinctly seen, though forty miles away ; in 
 front expands the open sea ; straight to the 
 south runs the indented coast, bay and beach, 
 point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, 
 the great blue promontory of Syracuse makes 
 far out. On the land-side Etna fills the south 
 with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed 
 at the languid cone ; and thence, though linger- 
 ingly, the eye ranges nearer over the interven- 
 ing plain to the well-wooded ridge of Castiglione, 
 and, next, to the round solitary top of Monte 
 Maestra, with its long shoreward descent, and 
 comes to rest on the height of Taormina over- 
 head, with its hermitage of Santa Maria della 
 Rocca, its castle, and Mola. Yet further off, 
 at the head of the defile, looms the barren sum-
 
 10 HEART OF MAN 
 
 mit of Monte Venere, with Monte d'Oro and 
 other hills in the foreground, and northward, 
 peak after peak, travels the close Messina 
 range. 
 
 A landscape of sky, sea, plain, and moun- 
 tains, great masses majestically grouped, grand 
 in contour ! Yet to call it sublime does not 
 render the impression it makes upon the soul. 
 Sublime, indeed, it is at times, and dull were 
 he whose heart from hour to hour awe does 
 not visit here ; but constantly the scene is 
 beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells 
 unwearied with the soul. One may be seldom 
 touched to the exaltation which sublimity im- 
 plies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the 
 habit of one who lives as heaven made him ; 
 and what characterizes this landscape and sets 
 it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its 
 perpetual and perfect charm through every 
 change of light and weather, and in every 
 quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally 
 whether the eye sweeps the great circuit with 
 its vision, or pauses on the nearer features, for 
 they, too, are wonderfully composed. This hill 
 of my station falls down for half a mile with 
 broken declivities, and then becomes the Cape
 
 TAORMINA 11 
 
 of Taormina, and takes its steep plunge into 
 the sea. Yonder picturesque peninsula to its 
 left, diminished by distance and strongly re- 
 lieved on the purple waves, is the Cape of 
 Sant' Andrea, and beside it a cluster of small 
 islands lies nearer inshore. On the other side, 
 to the right of our own cape, shines our port, 
 with Giardini, the village of my fishers' lights, 
 the beach with its boats, and the white main 
 road winding in the narrow level between the 
 bluffs and the sands. The port is guarded on 
 the south by the peninsula of Schiso, where 
 ancient Naxos stood ; and just beyond, the 
 river Alcantara cuts the plain and flows to the 
 sea. At the other extremity, northward of 
 Sant' Andrea, is the cove of Letojanni, with its 
 village, and then, perhaps eight miles away, 
 the bold headland of Sant' Alessio closes the 
 shore view with a mass of rock that in former 
 times completely shut off the land approach 
 hither, there being no passage over it, and 
 none around it except by the strip of sand 
 when the sea was quiet. All this ground, with 
 its several villages, from Sant' Alessio to the 
 Alcantara, and beyond into the plain, was 
 anciently the territory of Taormina.
 
 12 HEART OF MAN 
 
 The little city itself lies on its hill, between 
 the bright shore and the gray old castle, on a 
 crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out 
 into the air like capes. The northern one of 
 these is my station, the site of the old temple 
 and the amphitheatre ; the southern one op- 
 posite shows the fagade of the Dominican con- 
 vent ; and the town circles between, possibly 
 a mile from spur to spur. Here and there long 
 broken lines of the ancient wall, black with 
 age, stride the hillside. A round Gothic tower, 
 built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined 
 gateway, stand out among the humble roofs. 
 Gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like 
 oblong parks, principally on the upper edge 
 toward the great rock. If you will climb, as I 
 have done, the craggy plateau close by, which 
 overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view 
 of the extreme end of the town at this point, 
 you will see from its level face, rough with the 
 plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an emi- 
 nence just below, and the gate toward Messina. 
 
 The face of the country is bare. Here be- 
 neath, where the main ravine of Taormina cuts 
 into the earth between the two spurs of the 
 city, are terraces of fruit trees and vegetables,
 
 TAORMINA 18 
 
 and, wherever the naked rock permits, similar 
 terraces are seen on the castle hill and every 
 less steep slope, looking as if they would slide 
 off. Almond and olive trees cling and climb 
 all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not 
 clothe the country. It is gray to look at, be- 
 cause of the masses of natural rock everywhere 
 cropping out, and also from the substructure of 
 the terraces, which, seen from below, present 
 banks of the same gray stone. The only colour 
 is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly- 
 pear, whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped 
 leaves, stuck with thorns, and often extruding 
 their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull 
 green to the scene. This plant grows every- 
 where, like wild bush, to a man's height, cover- 
 ing the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats 
 crop it. A closer view shows patches of wild 
 candytuft and marigolds, like those at my feet, 
 and humble purple and blue blossoms hang 
 from crannies or run over the stony turf ; but 
 these are not strong enough to be felt in the 
 prevalent tones. The blue of ocean, the white 
 of Etna, the gray of Taormina this is the 
 scene. 
 
 Three ways connect the town with the lower
 
 14 HEART OF MAN 
 
 world. The modern carriage road runs from 
 the Messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind 
 the northern spur, winds in great serpentine 
 loops between the Carnpo Santo below and 
 old wayside tombs, Roman and Arabic, above, 
 until it slowly opens on the southern outlook, 
 and, after two miles of tortuous courses above 
 the lovely coves, comes out on the main road 
 along the coast. The second way starts from 
 the other end of the town, the gate toward 
 Etna, and goes down more precipitously along 
 the outer flank of the southern spur, with Mola 
 (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill) 
 closing the deep ravine behind ; and at last it 
 empties into the torrent of Selina, in whose bed 
 it goes on to Giardini. The third, or short 
 way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, 
 and yet keeps to a ridge between the folds of 
 the ravine which it discloses on each side, 
 with here and there a coutadino cutting rock 
 on the steep hillsides, or a sportsman wander- 
 ing with his dog ; or often at twilight, from 
 some coign of vantage, you may see the goats 
 trooping home across the distant sands by the 
 sea. It debouches through great limestone 
 quarries on the main road. There, seen from
 
 TAORMINA 16 
 
 below, Taormina comes out a cape, a town, 
 and a hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken 
 ridge, shaped like a wedge ; one end of the 
 broad face dips into the sea, the other, high 
 on land, exposes swelling bluffs ; its back bears 
 the town, its point lifts the castle. 
 
 This is the Taonninian land. What a quie- 
 tude hangs over it ! How poor, how mean, how 
 decayed the little town now looks amid all this 
 silent beauty of enduring nature ! It could not 
 have been always so. This theatre at my feet, 
 hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end 
 by great piers of massive Roman masonry, 
 and showing broken columns thick strewn in 
 the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of an- 
 cient splendour and populousness. The narrow 
 stage still stands, with nine columns in posi- 
 tion in two groups ; part are shattered half-way 
 up, part are yet whole, and in the gap be- 
 tween the groups shines the lovely sea with 
 the long southern coast, set in the beauty of 
 these ruins as in a frame. Here Attic trage- 
 dies were once played, and Roman gladiators 
 fought. The enclosure is large, much over a 
 hundred yards in diameter. It held many 
 thousands. Whence came the people to fill
 
 16 HEART OF MAN 
 
 it ? I noticed by the roadside, as I came up, 
 Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I 
 entered those small Norman windows, with the 
 lovely pillars and the round arch. On the 
 ancient church I have observed the ornamen- 
 tation and mouldings of Byzantine art. The 
 Virgin with her crown, over the fountain, was 
 paltry enough, but I saw that this was origi- 
 nally a mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, 
 a bath there ; in all quarters I come on some 
 slight, poor relics of other ages ; and always in 
 the faces of the people, where every race seems 
 to have set its seal, I see the ruins of time. 
 These echoes are not all of far-off things. That 
 lookout below was a station of English can- 
 non, I am told ; and the bluff over Giardini, 
 beyond the torrent, takes its name from the 
 French tents pitched there long ago. The 
 old walls can be traced for five miles, but 
 now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as 
 I go down to my room in the Casa Timeo, 
 what was the past of this silent town, now so 
 shrunken from its ancient limits ; and who, I 
 ask myself, was Timeo ?
 
 TAORMINA 17 
 
 IV 
 
 I thought when I first saw the inaccessi- 
 bility of this mountain-keep that I should 
 have no walks except upon the carriage road ; 
 but I find there are paths innumerable. Leap 
 the low walls where I will, I come on unsus- 
 pected ways broad enough for man and beast. 
 They run down the hillsides in all directions, 
 and are ever dividing as they descend, like 
 the branching streams of a waterfall. Some 
 are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls ; 
 others are mere footways on the natural rock 
 and earth, often edging precipices, and open- 
 ing short cross-cuts in the most unexpected 
 places, not without a suggestion of peril, to 
 make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a cer- 
 tain wild pleasure into the exercise. The mul- 
 tiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the 
 lover of beauty, for here one charm of Italian 
 landscape exists in perfection. Every few mo- 
 ments the scene rearranges itself in new com- 
 binations, as on the Riviera or at Amalfi, and 
 makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. 
 The infinite variety of these views is not to be 
 imagined unless it has been witnessed ; and
 
 18 HEART OF MAN 
 
 besides the magic wrought by mere change 
 of position, there is also a constant transfor- 
 mation of tone and colour from hour to hour, 
 as the lights and shadows vary, and from day 
 to day, with the unsettled weather. 
 
 Yet who could convey to black-and-white 
 speech the sense of beauty which is the better 
 part of my rambles? It is only to say that 
 here I went up and down on the open hill- 
 sides, and there I followed the ridges or kept 
 the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I 
 dropped down into the vales, under the shade 
 of olive and lemon branches, and wound by 
 the gushing streams through the orchards. In 
 every excursion I make some discovery, and 
 bring home some golden store for memory. 
 Yesterday I found the olive slopes over Leto- 
 janni beautiful old gnarled trees, such as I 
 have never seen except where the nightingales 
 sing by the eastern shore of Spezzia. I did 
 not doubt when I was told that these orchards 
 yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was 
 the lemon harvest, and everywhere were piles 
 of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples 
 under the slender trees, with a gatherer here 
 and there ; for this is always a landscape of
 
 TAORMINA. 19 
 
 solitary figures. To-day I found the little 
 beach of San Nicolo, not far from the same 
 place. I kept inland, going down the hollow 
 by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, 
 gravelly stream in a dell that is like a nook 
 in the Berkshire hills, and then along the 
 upland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by 
 a sharp turn seaward I came out through a 
 marble quarry where men were working with 
 what seemed slow implements on the gray or 
 party-coloured stone. I passed through the 
 rather silent group, who stopped to look at 
 me, and a short distance beyond I crossed the 
 main road, and went down by a stream to the 
 shore. I found it strewn with seaside rock, 
 as a hundred other beaches are, but none with 
 rocks like these. They were marble, red or 
 green, or shot with variegated hues, with 
 many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined ; and 
 the sea had polished them. Very lovely they 
 were, and shone where the low wave gleamed 
 over them. I had wondered at the profusion 
 of marbles in the Italian churches, but I had 
 not thought to find them wild on a lonely 
 Sicilian beach. Once or twice already I had 
 seen a block rosy in the torrent-beds, and it
 
 20 HEART OF MAN 
 
 had seemed a rare sight ; but here the whole 
 shore was piled and inlaid with the beautiful 
 stone. 
 
 I have learned now that Taormina is famous 
 for these marbles. Over thirty varieties were 
 sent to the Vienna Exhibition, and they won 
 the prize. I got this information from the 
 keeper of the Communal Library, with whom 
 I have made friends. He recalls to my mem- 
 ory the ship that Hieron of Syracuse gave to 
 Ptolemy, wonderful for its size. It had 
 twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and 
 space to hold a library, a gymnasium, gardens 
 with trees in them, stables, and baths, and 
 towers for assault, and it was provided by 
 Archimedes with many ingenious mechanical 
 devices. The wood of sixty ordinary galleys 
 was required for its construction. I describe 
 it because its architect, Filea, was a Taormin- 
 ian by birth, and esteemed in his day second 
 only to Archimedes in his skill in mechanics ; 
 and in lining the baths of this huge galley he 
 used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My 
 friend the librarian told me also, with his 
 Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the 
 Eugensean, which was praised by Pliny, and
 
 TAOKMINA 21 
 
 used at the sacred feasts of Rome ; but now, 
 he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour. 
 
 The sugar-cane, which flourished in later 
 times, is also gone. But the mullet that is 
 celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lam- 
 preys that once went to better Alexandrian 
 luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the 
 shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the 
 marbles will endure as long as this rock it- 
 self. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most 
 ancient memory here is of them, for this is 
 the shore of Charybdis. It is stated in Sal- 
 lust and other Latin authors, as well as by 
 writers throughout the Middle Ages, that all 
 which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of 
 the straits, after being carried beneath the 
 sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach 
 beneath the hill of Taormina. 
 
 The rock and the sea were finely blended 
 in one of my first discoveries in the land, and 
 in consequence they have seemed, to my im- 
 agination, more closely united here than is com- 
 mon. On a stormy afternoon I had strolled 
 down the main road, and was walking toward 
 Letojanni. I came, after a little, to a great 
 cliff that overhung the sea, with room for the
 
 road to pass beneath ; and as I drew near I 
 heard a strange sound, a low roaring, a deep- 
 toned reverberation, that seemed not to come 
 from the breaking waves, loud on the beach : 
 it was a more solemn, a more piercing and 
 continuous sound. It was from the rock it- 
 self. The grand music of the rolling sea be- 
 neath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and 
 reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from 
 invisible sources. It seemed the voice of the 
 rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbour- 
 hood in that lonely place the cliff were inter- 
 penetrated with the sea-music, and had become 
 resonant of itself with those living harmonies 
 heard only in the Psalmist's song. It seemed 
 a lyre for the centuries ; and I thought over 
 how many a conqueror, how many a race, that 
 requiem had been lifted upon it as they passed 
 to their death on this shore. I came back 
 slowly in the twilight, and was roused from 
 my reverie by the cold wind breathing on me 
 as I reached the top of the hill, pure and keen 
 and frosted like the bright December breezes 
 of my own land. It was the kiss of Etna on 
 my cheek.
 
 TAORMINA 23 
 
 Will you hear the legend of Taormina ? 
 for in these days I dare not call it history. 
 Noble and romantic it is, and age-long. I had 
 not hoped to recover it ; but my friend the 
 librarian has brought me books in which pa- 
 triotic Taorminians have written the story cele- 
 brating their dear city. I was touched by the 
 simplicity with which he informed me that the 
 town authorities had been unwilling to waste 
 on a passing stranger these little paper-bound 
 memorials of their city. " But," he said, " I 
 told them I had given you my word." So I 
 possess these books with a pleasant association 
 of Sicilian honour, and I have read them with 
 real interest. As I turned the pages I was re- 
 minded once more how impossible it is to know 
 the past. The past survives in human institu- 
 tions, in the temperament of races, and in the 
 creations of ideal art ; but only in the last is it 
 immortal. Custom and law are for an age ; 
 race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies ; 
 only epic and saga and psalm have one date 
 with man, one destiny with the breath of his 
 lips, one silence at the last with them. Least
 
 24 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of all does the past survive in the living memo- 
 ries of men. Here and there the earth cherishes 
 a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some 
 solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air pre- 
 serve on rock and column the lost speech of 
 Nile ; so the mind of man holds in dark places, 
 or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and 
 fragments of the life that was. I have been a 
 diligent reader of books in my time ; and here 
 in an obscure corner of the Old- World I find a 
 narrative studded with noble names, not undis- 
 tinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the 
 great movements of history and a few shadowy 
 figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have 
 looked on three thousand years of human life 
 upon this hill ; something of what they have 
 yielded, if you will have patience with such a 
 tract of time, I will set down. 
 
 My author is Monsignore Giovanni di Gio- 
 vanni, a Taorminian, who flourished in the last 
 century. He was a man of vast erudition, and 
 there is in his pages that Old- World learning 
 which delights me. He was born before the 
 days of historic doubt. He tells a true story. 
 To allege an authority is with him to prove a 
 fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the orig-
 
 TAORMINA 25 
 
 inal source is to render truth impregnable. 
 Rarely does he show any symptom of the 
 modern malady of incredulity. Scripta littera 
 is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his 
 city chances to be at stake. He was really 
 learned, and I do wrong to seem to diminish his 
 authority. He was a patient investigator of 
 manuscripts, and did important service to Sicil- 
 ian history. The simplicity I have alluded to 
 affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his nar- 
 rative. A few statements also in regard to the 
 prehistoric period might disturb the modern 
 mind, but I own to finding in them the charm 
 of lost things. In my mental provinces I wel- 
 come the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake- 
 dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the 
 abode of science ; but I feel them to be in- 
 truders in my antiquity. I was brought up on 
 quite other chronologies, and I still like a his- 
 tory that begins with the flood. I will not, 
 however, ask any one of more serious mind to 
 go back with Monsignore and myself to the era 
 of autochthonous Sicily, when the children of 
 the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter 
 in her search for Proserpina wept on this hill, 
 and Charybdis lay stretched out under these
 
 26 HEART OF MAN 
 
 bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough 
 to say that Taormina began eighty years before 
 the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must be ac- 
 knowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriv- 
 ing and driven, like all doomed races, south and 
 west out of the land, and in their place the 
 Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages 
 over the straits from Italy and joins them. 
 Here for three centuries these sparse communi- 
 ties lived along these heights in fear of the sea 
 pirates, and warred confusedly from their main- 
 hold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called 
 because the two summits of the mountain from 
 a distance resemble a bull's horns; and they 
 left no other memory of themselves. 
 
 Authentic history begins toward the end of 
 the eighth century before our era. It is a bright 
 burst ; for then, down by yonder green-foaming 
 rock, the young Greek mariners leaped on the 
 strand. This was their first land-fall in Sicily ; 
 that rock, their Plymouth ; and here, doubtless, 
 the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness 
 and watched the bearers of the world's torch, 
 and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the 
 dark island for evermore, but fought, as bar- 
 barism will, against the light, and were at last
 
 TAORMINA 27 
 
 made friends with it a chance that does not 
 always befall. Then quickly rose the lowland 
 city of Naxos, and by the river sprang up the 
 temple to Guiding Apollo, the earliest shrine 
 of the Sicilian Greeks, where they came ever 
 afterward to pray for a prosperous voyage 
 when they would go across the sea, homeward. 
 They were from the first a fighting race ; and 
 decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier 
 on each horizon, southward from Syracuse and 
 northward from Messina, and swords beat fiercer 
 and stronger with the rivalries of growing 
 states battles dimly discerned now. A single 
 glimpse flashes out on the page of Thucydides. 
 He relates that when once the Messenians 
 threatened Naxos with overthrow, the moun- 
 taineers rushed down from the heights in great 
 numbers to the relief of their Greek neighbours, 
 and routed the enemy and slew many. This is 
 the first bloodstain, clear and bright, on our 
 Taorminian land. Shall I add, from the few 
 relics of that age, that Pythagoras, on the jour- 
 ney he undertook to establish the governments 
 of the Sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, 
 curing a mad lover of his frenzy by music, and 
 being present on this hill and at Metaponto the
 
 28 HEART OF MAN 
 
 same day a thing not to be done without 
 magic ? But at last we see plainly Alcibiades 
 coasting along below, and the ill-fated Athe- 
 nians wintering in the port, and horsemen go- 
 ing out from Naxos toward Etna on the side of 
 Athens in the death-struggle of her glory. 
 And then, suddenly, after the second three 
 hundred years, all is over, the Greek city be- 
 trayed, sacked, destroyed, Naxos trodden out 
 under the foot of Dionysius the tyrant. 
 
 Other fortune awaited him a few years later 
 when he came again, and our city (which, one 
 knows not when, had been walled and fortified) 
 stood its first historic siege. Dionysius arrived 
 in the dead of winter. Snow and ice I 
 can hardly credit it whitened and roughened 
 these ravines, a new ally to the besieged ; but 
 the tyrant thought to betray them by a false 
 security in such a season. On a bitter night, 
 when clouds hooded the hilltop, and mists 
 rolled low about its flanks, he climbed unob- 
 served, with his forces, up these precipices, and 
 gained two outer forts which gave footways to 
 the walls ; but the town roused at the sound 
 of arms and the cries of the guards, and came 
 down to the fray, and fought until six hundred
 
 TAORMINA 29 
 
 of the foe fell dead, others with wounds sur- 
 rendered, and the rest fled headlong, with 
 Dionysius among them, hard pressed, and 
 staining the snow with his blood as he went. 
 This was the city's first triumph. 
 
 Not only with brave deeds did Taormina 
 begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. 
 He was really great, this Andromachus. Do 
 you not remember him out of Plutarch, and 
 the noble words that have been his immortal 
 memory among men ? " This man was incom- 
 parably the best of all those that bore sway in 
 Sicily at that time, governing his citizens accord- 
 ing to law and justice, and openly professing 
 an aversion and enmity to all tyrants." Was 
 the defeat of Dionysius the first of his youthful 
 exploits, as some say ? I cannot determine ; 
 but it is certain that he gathered the surviving 
 exiles of Naxos, and gave them this plateau to 
 dwell upon, and it was no longer called Mount 
 Taurus, as had been the wont, but Tauromen- 
 ium, or the Abiding-place of the Bull. A few 
 years later Andromachus performed the signal 
 action of his life by befriending Timoleon, as 
 great a character, in my eyes, as Plutarch re- 
 cords the glory of. Timoleon had set out
 
 30 
 
 from Corinth, at the summons of his Greek 
 countrymen, to restore the liberty of Syracuse, 
 then tyrannized over by the second Dionysius ; 
 and because Andromachus, in his stronghold 
 of Taormina, hated tyranny, Plutarch says, he 
 " gave Timoleon leave to muster up his troops 
 there and to make that city the seat of war, 
 persuading the inhabitants to join their arms 
 with the Corinthian forces and to assist them 
 in the design of delivering Sicily." It was on 
 our beach that Timoleon disembarked, and 
 from our city he went forth to the conquest 
 foretold by the wreath that fell upon his head 
 as he prayed at Delphi, and by the prophetic 
 fire that piloted his ship over the sea. The 
 Carthaginians came quickly after him from 
 Reggio, where he had eluded them, for they 
 were in alliance with the tyrant ; and from 
 their vessels they parleyed with Andromachus 
 in the port. With an insolent gesture, the 
 envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning 
 it lightly over, said that even so, and with such 
 ease, would he overturn the little city ; and 
 Andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered 
 that if he did not leave the harbour, even so 
 would he upset his galley. The Carthaginians
 
 TAORMINA 31 
 
 sailed away. The city remained firm-perched. 
 Timoleon prospered, brought back liberty to 
 Syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and gave to 
 Sicily those twenty years of peace which were 
 the flower of her Greek annals. Then, we 
 must believe, rose the little temple on our 
 headland, the Greek theatre where the tongue 
 of Athens lived, the gymnasium where the 
 youths grew fair and strong. Then Taormina 
 struck her coins : Apollo with the laurel, with 
 the lyre, with the grape ; Dionysus with the 
 ivy, and Zeus with the olive ; for the gods and 
 temples of the Naxians had become ours, and 
 were religiously cherished ; and with the rest 
 was struck a coin with the Minotaur, our 
 symbol. But of Andromachus, the founder of 
 the well-built and fairly adorned Greek city that 
 then rose, we hear no more a hero, I think, 
 one of the true breed of the founders of states. 
 But alas for liberty ! A new tyrant, Agatho- 
 cles, was soon on the Syracusan throne, and he 
 won this city by friendly professions, only to 
 empty it by treachery and murder ; and he 
 drove into exile Timseus, the son of Androm- 
 achus. Timteus ? He, evidently, of my Casa 
 Timeo. I know him now, the once famed his-
 
 32 HEART OF MAN 
 
 torian whom Cicero praises as the most erudite 
 in history of all writers up to his time, most co- 
 pious in facts and various in comment, not un- 
 polished in style, eloquent, and distinguished 
 by terse and charming expression. Ninety 
 years he lived in the Greek world, devoted 
 himself to history, and produced many works, 
 now lost. The ancient writers read him, and 
 from their criticism it is clear that he was 
 marked by a talent for invective, was given to 
 sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of 
 truth. He introduced precision and detail into 
 his art, and is credited with being the first to 
 realize the importance of chronology and to 
 seek exactness in it. He 3: ever saw again his 
 lovely birthplace, and I easily forgive to the 
 exile and the son of Andromachus the vigour 
 with which he depicted the crimes of Agatho- 
 cles and others of the tyrants. In our city, 
 meanwhile, the Greek genius waning to its ex- 
 tinction, Tyndarion ruled ; and in his time 
 Pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever 
 invading power of Carthage. But he was little 
 more than a shedder of blood ; he accomplished 
 nothing, and I name him only as one of the 
 figures of our beach.
 
 TAORMINA 33 
 
 The day of Greece was gone ; but those two 
 clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north 
 and south, with ever darker tempest. Instead 
 of Syracuse and Messina, Carthage and the 
 new name of Rome now sent them forth, and 
 over this island they encountered. Our city, 
 true to its ancient tradition, became Rome's 
 ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem 
 of Silius Italicus, and was dignified by treaty 
 with the title of a confederate city ; and of this 
 fact Cicero reminded the judges when in that 
 famous trial he thundered against Verres, the 
 spoiler of our Sicilian province, and with the 
 other cities defended this of ours, whose people 
 had signalized their hatred of the Roman 
 praetor by overthrowing his statue in the mar- 
 ket-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, 
 to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. From 
 the Roman age, however, I take but two epi- 
 sodes, for I find that to write this town's his- 
 tory were to write the history of half the 
 Mediterranean world. When the slaves rose 
 in the Servile War, they intrenched themselves 
 on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its 
 siege by the Roman consul as hardily as was 
 ever its custom. Cruel they were, no doubt, 
 
 D
 
 34 HEART OF MAN 
 
 and vindictive. With horror Monsignore re- 
 lates that they were so resolved not to yield 
 that, starving, they ate their children, their 
 wives, and one another ; and he rejoices when 
 they were at last betrayed and massacred, and 
 this disgrace was wiped away. I hesitate. I 
 cannot feel regret when those whom man has 
 made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors. 
 I have enough of the old Taorminian spirit 
 to remember that the slaves, too, fought for 
 liberty. I am sorry for those penned and 
 dying men ; their famine and slaughter in 
 these walls were least horrible for their part in 
 the catastrophe, if one looks through what they 
 did to what they were, and remembers that the 
 civilization they violated had stripped them of 
 humanity. After the slave, I make room for 
 whom else than imperial Augustus ? Off this 
 shore he defeated Sextus Pompey, and he 
 thought easily to subdue the town above when 
 he summoned it. But Taormina was always a 
 loyal little place, and it would not yield without 
 a siege. Then Augustus, sitting down before 
 it, prayed in our temple of Guiding Apollo that 
 he might have the victory ; and as he walked 
 by the beach afterward a fish threw itself out
 
 TAORMINA 35 
 
 of the water before him an omen, said the 
 diviners, that even so the Pompeians, who held 
 the seas, after many turns of varied fortune, 
 should be brought to his feet. Pompey re- 
 turned with a fleet, and in these waters again 
 the battle was fought and Augustus lost it, 
 and the siege was raised. But when a third 
 time the trial of naval strength was essayed, and 
 the cause of the Pompeians ruined, Augustus 
 remembered the city that had defied him, sent 
 its inhabitants into exile, and planted a Roman 
 colony in its place. Latin was now the lan- 
 guage here. The massive grandeur of Roman 
 architecture replaced the old Greek structures. 
 The amphitheatre was enlarged and renewed in 
 its present form, villas of luxury bordered the 
 coasts as in Campania, and coins were struck in 
 the Augustan name. 
 
 The Roman domination in its turn slowly 
 moved to its fall ; and where should the new 
 age begin more fitly than in this city of begin- 
 nings ? As of old the Greek torch first gleamed 
 here, here first on Sicilian soil was the Cross 
 planted. The gods of Olympus had many tem- 
 ples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable 
 antiquity even in those days ; but if the monk-
 
 36 HEART OF MAN 
 
 ish chronicles be credited, the new faith sig- 
 nalized its victory rather over three strange 
 idolatries, the worship of Falcone, of Lissone, 
 and of Scamandro, a goddess. I refuse to be- 
 lieve that the citizens were accustomed to sac- 
 rifice three youths annually to Falcone ; and as 
 for the other two deities, little is known of them 
 except that their destruction marked the ad- 
 vent of the young religion. Pancrazio was the 
 name of him who was destined to be our patron 
 saint through the coming centuries. He was 
 born in Antioch, and when a child of three 
 years, going with his father into Judsea, he had 
 seen the living Christ; now, grown into man- 
 hood, he was sent by St. Peter to spread the 
 gospel in the isles of the sea. He disem- 
 barked on our beach, and forthwith threw Lis- 
 sone's image into the waves, and with it a holy 
 dragon which was coiled about it like a gar- 
 ment and was fed with sacrifices ; and he shat- 
 tered with his cross the great idol Scamandro : 
 and so Taormina became Christian, welcomed 
 St. Peter on his way to Rome, and entered 
 on the long new age. It was here, as else- 
 where, the age of martyrs Pancrazio first, 
 and after him Geminiano, guided hither with
 
 TAORMINA 37 
 
 his mother by an angel ; and then San Nicone, 
 who suffered with his one hundred and ninety- 
 nine brother monks, and Sepero and Corneliano 
 with their sixty; the age of monks Luca, 
 who fled from his bridal to live on Etna, with 
 fasts, visions, and prophecies ; and, later, sim- 
 ple-minded Daniele, the follower of St. Elia, 
 of whom there is more to be recorded ; the 
 age of bishops, heard in Roman councils and 
 the palace of Byzantium, of whom two onjy 
 are of singular interest Zaccaria, who was 
 deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and pol- 
 icy of all the succession, once a great figure in 
 the disputes of East and West ; and Procopio, 
 whom the Saracens slew, for the Crescent now 
 followed the Cross. 
 
 The ancient war-cloud had again gathered 
 out of Africa. The Saracens were in the land, 
 and every city had fallen except Syracuse and 
 Taormina. For sixty years the former held 
 out, and our city for yet another thirty, the 
 sole refuge of the Christians. Signs of the 
 impending destruction were first seen by that 
 St. Elia alread} r mentioned, who wandered 
 hither, and was displeased by the manners and 
 morals of the citizens. I am sorrv to record
 
 38 HEART OF MAN 
 
 that Monsignore believed his report, for only 
 here is there mention of such a matter. u The 
 citizens," says my author, " lived in luxury and 
 pleasure not becoming to a state of war. They 
 saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses 
 burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the 
 Hames, friends and companions killed or re- 
 duced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, 
 that did not rule unpunished among them." 
 Therefore the saint preached the woe to come, 
 and, turning to the governor, Constantino Pa- 
 trizio, in his place in the cathedral, he appealed 
 to him to restrain his people. " Let the philos- 
 ophy of the Gentiles," he exclaimed, "be your 
 shame. Epaminondas, that illustrious condot- 
 tiere, strictly restrained himself from intem- 
 perance, from every lust, every allurement of 
 pleasure. So, also, Scipio, the Roman leader, 
 was valorous through the same continence as 
 Epaminondas ; and therefore they brought back 
 signal victory, one over the Spartans, the other 
 over the Carthaginians, and both erected im- 
 mortal trophies." He promised them mercy 
 with repentance, but ended threateningly: "So 
 far as in me lies I have clearly foretold to you 
 all that has been divinely revealed to me. If
 
 TAORMINA 39 
 
 you believe my words, like the penitents of 
 Nineveh, you shall find mercy ; if you despise 
 my admonitions, bound and captive you shall 
 be reduced to the worst slavery." He prophe- 
 sied yet more in private. He went to the house 
 of a noble citizen, Crisione, who esteemed him 
 as a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him : 
 " Do you see, Crisione, the bed in which I 
 now lie ? In this same bed shall Ibrahim sleep, 
 hungry for human blood, and the walls of the 
 rooms shall see many of the most distinguished 
 persons of this city all together put to the edge 
 of the sword." Then he left the house and 
 went to the square in the centre of the city, 
 and, standing there, he lifted his garments 
 above the knee. Whereupon simple Daniele, 
 who always followed him about, marvelling 
 asked, " What does this thing mean, father ? " 
 The old man had his answer ready, "Now 1 
 see rivers of blood running, and these proud 
 and magnificent buildings which you see ex- 
 alted shall be destroyed even to the founda- 
 tions by the Saracens." And the monk fled 
 from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and 
 went overseas. 
 
 The danger was near, but perhaps not more
 
 40 HEART OF MAN 
 
 felt than it must always have been where the 
 prayer for defence against the Saracens had 
 gone up for a hundred years in the cathedral. 
 The governor, however, had taken pains to add 
 to the strength of the city by strong fortifica- 
 tions upon Mola. Ahulabras came under the 
 walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful at- 
 tempt to take the place, and went on to ruin 
 Reggio beyond the straits. When it was told 
 to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the 
 Saracens called it, had again been passed by, 
 he cried out upon his son, " He is degenerate, 
 degenerate ! He took his nature from his mother 
 and not from his father ; for, had he been born 
 from me, surely his sword would not have spared 
 the Christians ! " Therefore he recalled him 
 to the home government, and came himself and 
 sat down before the city. The garrison was 
 small and insufficient, but, says my author, fol- 
 lowing old chronicles, "youths, old men, and 
 children, without distinction of age, sex, or con- 
 dition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would 
 expose them to, all spontaneously offered them- 
 selves to fight in this holy war even to death : 
 with such courage did love of country and re- 
 ligious zeal inspire the citizens." Ibrahim had
 
 TAORMINA 41 
 
 other weapons than the sword. He first cor- 
 rupted the captains of the Greek fleet, who were 
 afterward condemned for the treason at By- 
 zantium. Then, all being ready, he promised 
 some Ethiopians of his army, who are described 
 as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that 
 he would give them the city for booty, besides 
 other gifts, if they would devote themselves to 
 the bold undertaking. The catastrophe de- 
 serves to be told in Monsignore's own words : 
 
 " This people, accustomed to rapine, allured by 
 the riches of the Taorminians and the promises 
 of the king, with the aid of the traitors entered 
 unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody 
 swords and mighty cries and clamour assailed 
 the citizens. Meanwhile King Ibrahim, having 
 entered with all his army by a secret gate under 
 the fortress of Mola, thence called the gate of 
 the Saracens, raged against the citizens with 
 such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not 
 only neither the weakness of sex, nor tender 
 years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even 
 the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed 
 down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious 
 heart. The soldiers, masters of the beautiful
 
 42 HEART OP MAN 
 
 and wealthy city, divided among them the riches 
 and goods of the citizens according as to each 
 one the lot fell ; they levelled to the ground the 
 magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred 
 or profane, all that were proudest for ampli- 
 tude, construction, and ornament ; and that 
 not even the ruins of ancient splendour should 
 remain, all that had survived they gave to the 
 flames." 
 
 This city, which the Saracens destroyed, is 
 the one the Taormiriians cherish as the cul- 
 mination of their past. In the Greek, the 
 Roman, and the early Christian ages it had 
 flourished, as both its ruins and its history 
 attest, and much must have yet survived from 
 those times ; while its station as the only 
 Christian stronghold in the island would 
 naturally have attracted wealth hither for 
 safety. In this first sack of the Saracens, 
 the ancient city must have perished, but the 
 destruction could hardly have been so thorough 
 as is represented, since some of the churches 
 themselves, in their present state, show Byzan- 
 tine workmanship. 
 
 There remains one bloody and characteristic
 
 TAORMINA 43 
 
 episode to Ibrahim's victory. The king, says 
 the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally 
 compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot 
 his usual mildness. In the midst of fire and 
 blood he ordered the soldiers to search the 
 caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth 
 many prisoners, among whom was the Bishop 
 Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and 
 nobly, " Because you are wise and old, O Bishop, 
 I exhort you with soft words to obey my advice, 
 and to have foresight for your own safety and 
 that of your companions ; otherwise you shall 
 suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered 
 from me. If you will embrace my laws, and 
 deny the Christian religion, you shall have the 
 second place after me, and shall be more dear 
 to me than all the Agarenes." The prelate 
 only smiled. Then, full of wrath, the king 
 said : " Do you smile while you are my pris- 
 oner? Know you not in whose presence you 
 are ? " "I smile truly," came the answer, 
 "because I see you are inspired by a demon 
 who puts these words into your mouth." 
 Furious, the king called to his attendants, 
 " Quick, break open his breast, tear out his 
 heart, that we may see and understand the
 
 44 HEART OF MAN 
 
 secrets of his mind." While the command 
 was being executed, Procopio reproved the 
 king and comforted his companions. " The 
 tyrant, swollen with rage, and grinding his 
 teeth'," says the narrative, "barbarously of- 
 fered him the torn-out heart that he might eat 
 it." Then he bade them strike off the bishop's 
 head (who, we are told, was already half dead), 
 and also the heads of his companions, and to 
 burn the bodies all together. And as St. Pan- 
 crazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into 
 the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to 
 the winds of heaven ; and Ibrahim, having ac- 
 complished his work, departed. 
 
 Some of the citizens, however, had survived, 
 and among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. 
 He went to bear the tidings to the saint ; and 
 being now assured of the gift of prophecy pos- 
 sessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell 
 his future. He met the customary fate of the 
 curious in such things. " I foresee," said the 
 discomfortable saint, "that within a few days 
 you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia 
 with Crisione, let me record here the simple 
 Daniele's last act of piety to his master. It is 
 little that in such company he fought with
 
 TAORMINA 45 
 
 devils, or that after he had written with much 
 labour a beautiful Psalter, the old monk bade 
 him fling it and worldly pride together over the 
 cliff into a lake. Such episodes belonged to 
 the times ; and, after all, by making a circuit 
 of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously 
 unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at 
 the lake's bottom. But it was a mind singu- 
 larly inventive of penance that led the dying 
 saint to charge poor Daniele to bear the corpse 
 on his back a long way over the mountains, 
 merely because, he said, it would be a difficult 
 thing to do. Other survivors of the sack 
 of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione, 
 watched their opportunity, and, at a moment 
 when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the 
 place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the 
 Greek emperor once more. He could not 
 maintain war with the Saracens, but by a 
 treaty made with them he secured his faithful 
 Taorminians in the possession of the city. 
 After forty years of peace under this treaty it 
 was again besieged for several months, and fell 
 on Christmas night. Seventeen hundred and 
 fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors into 
 slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon
 
 46 HEART OF MAN 
 
 retook the city in a campaign that opened brill- 
 iantly in Sicily only to close in swift disaster ; 
 but for five years longer Taormina sustained 
 continual siege, and when it fell at last, with 
 the usual carnage of its citizens and the now 
 thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic vic- 
 tory, we may well believe that, though it re- 
 mained the seat of a governor, little of the 
 city was left except its memory. Its name 
 even was changed to Moezzia. 
 
 The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hun- 
 dred years, until the landing of Count Roger, 
 the Norman, the great hero of mediae val Sicily, 
 who recovered the island to the Christian faith. 
 Taormina, true to its tradition, was long in 
 falling ; but after eighteen years of desultory 
 warfare Count Roger sat down before it with 
 determination. He surrounded it with a cir- 
 cumvallation of twenty-two fortresses con- 
 nected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off 
 all access by land or sea. Each day he in- 
 spected the lines ; and the enemy, having no- 
 ticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in 
 some young myrtles where the path he fol- 
 lowed had a very narrow passage over the 
 precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as
 
 TAORMINA 47 
 
 he was unarmed and alone, would have killed 
 him, had not their cries attracted one Evandro, 
 a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief's 
 Deril, threw himself between, and died in his 
 place. Count Roger was not forgetful of this 
 noble action. He recovered the body, held 
 great funeral services, and gave gifts to the 
 soldiers and the church. The story appealed 
 so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he 
 told it in both prose and verse. After seven 
 months the city surrended, and the iron cross 
 was again set up on the rocky eminence by the 
 gate. It is a sign of the ruin which had be- 
 fallen that the city now lost its bishopric and 
 was ecclesiastically annexed to another see. 
 
 Taormina, compared with what it had been, 
 was now a place of the desert ; but not the less 
 for that did the tide of war rage round it for 
 five hundred years to come. It was like a rock 
 of the sea over which conflicting billows break 
 eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story 
 of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all 
 every religious order set up monasteries upon 
 the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is 
 now left but the piles of books in old bindings 
 over which my friend the librarian keeps guard,
 
 48 HEART OF MAN 
 
 mourning the neglect in which they are left. 
 Among both the nobles and the fathers were 
 some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learn- 
 ing, but their deeds and virtues may sleep 
 unwaked by me. The kings and queens who 
 took refuge here, and fled again, Messenian 
 foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go un- 
 recorded. I must not, however, in the long 
 roll of the famous figures of our beach forget 
 that our English Richard the Lion-hearted was 
 entertained here by Tancred in crusading days; 
 and of notable sieges let me name at least that 
 which the city suffered for its loyalty to the 
 brave and generous Manfred when the Mes- 
 senians surprised and wasted it, and that which 
 with less destruction the enemies of the second 
 Frederick inflicted on it, and that of the French 
 under Charles II., who, contrary to his word, 
 gave up the surrendered city to the soldiery for 
 eight whole days a terrible sack, of which 
 Monsigriore has heard old men tell. What 
 part the citizens took in the Sicilian Vespers, 
 and how the Parliament that vainly sought a 
 king for all Sicily was held here, and in later 
 times the marches of the Germans, Spaniards, 
 and English these were too long a tale.
 
 TAORMINA 49 
 
 With one more signal memory I close this 
 world-history, as it began, with a noble name. 
 It was from our beach yonder that Garibaldi 
 set out for Italy in the campaign of Aspro- 
 monte ; hither he was brought back, wounded, 
 to the friendly people, still faithful to that love 
 of liberty which flowed in the old Taorminian 
 blood. 
 
 I shut my books ; but to my eyes the rock 
 is scriptured now. What a leaf it is from the 
 world-history of man upon the planet ! Every 
 race has splashed it with blood ; every faith 
 has cried from it to heaven. It is only a hill- 
 station in the realm of empire ; but in the 
 records of such a city, lying somewhat aside 
 and out of common vision, the course of human 
 fate may be more simply impressive than in 
 the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Con- 
 stantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of 
 history ; but in them the mind is confused by 
 the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of 
 events. Here on this bare rock there is no 
 thronging of illustrious names, and little of 
 that glory that conceals imperial crime, the 
 massacre of armies, and the people's woe. 
 Again I use the figure : it is like a rock of
 
 60 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediter- 
 ranean world, washed by all the tides of his- 
 tory, beat on by every pitiless storm of the 
 passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, 
 the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of 
 the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its 
 time ; all governments, from Greek democracy 
 to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn ; 
 Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, 
 each a long age : yet civilization in all its his- 
 toric forms has never here done more, seem- 
 ingly, than alleviate at moments the hard 
 human lot. And what has been the end ? Go 
 down into the streets ; go out into the vil- 
 lages ; go into the country-side. The men 
 will hardly look up from their burdens, the 
 women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you 
 will see a degradation of the human form that 
 speaks not of the want of individuals, of one 
 generation, or of an age, but of the destitution 
 of centuries stamped physically into the race. 
 There is, as always, a prosperous class, men 
 well to do, the more fortunate and better-born ; 
 but the common people lead toilsome lives, and 
 among them suffering is widespread. Three 
 thousand years of human life, and this the
 
 TAORMINA 61 
 
 result ! Yet I see many indications of a brave 
 patriotism in the community, an effort to im- 
 prove general conditions, to arouse, to stimu- 
 late, to encourage the spirit of free and 
 united Italy awakening here, too, with faith 
 in the new age of liberty and hope of its 
 promised blessings. And for a sign there 
 stands in the centre of the poor fishing-village 
 yonder a statue of Garibaldi. 
 
 VI 
 
 The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, 
 warm, and clear, and every hour tempts me 
 forth to wander about the hills. It is not 
 spring, but the hesitancy that holds before the 
 season changes; yet each day there are new 
 flowers not our delicate wood flowers, but 
 larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm 
 to them that I do not know their names. The 
 trees are budding, and here and there, like a 
 wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, 
 an almond has burst into blossom, white and 
 solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the 
 orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale 
 pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it
 
 52 HEAKT OF MAN 
 
 but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or 
 sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, 
 under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags ; 
 now on our cape, among the majestic rocks, I 
 watch the swajdng of the smooth deep-violet 
 waters below, changing into indigo as they 
 lap the rough clefts, or I loiter on the beach 
 to see the fishers about their boats, weather- 
 worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength 
 of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: 
 and always I bring back something for memory, 
 something unforeseen . 
 
 I have ever found this uncertainty a rare 
 pleasure of travel. It is blessed not to know 
 what the gods will give. I remember once in 
 other days I left the beach of Amalfi to row 
 away to the isles of the Sirens, farther down 
 the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave- 
 wild morning, and I strained my sight, as every 
 headland of the high cliff-coast was rounded, to 
 catch the first glimpse of the low isles ; and 
 there came by a country boat-load of the peas- 
 ants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, 
 I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and 
 dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping 
 prow a figure out of old Italian pictures,
 
 TAOKMINA 53 
 
 some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. 
 I have forgotten how the isles of the Sirens 
 looked, but that boy's face I shall never forget. 
 It is such moments that give the Italy of the 
 imagination its charm. Here, too, I have simi- 
 lar experiences. A day or two ago, when the 
 bright weather began, I was threading the rough 
 edge of a broken path under the hill, and cling- 
 ing to the rock with my hand. Suddenly a 
 figure rose just before me, where the land made 
 out a little farther on a point of the crag, so 
 strange that I was startled ; but straightway I 
 knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive 
 face, the garments of goatskin and leather on 
 his limbs. It came on me like a flash eccola 
 the country of Theocritus ! 
 
 I have never seen it set down among the ad- 
 vantages of travel that one learns to understand 
 the poets better. To see courts and govern- 
 ments, manners and customs, works of archi- 
 tecture, statues and pictures and ruins this, 
 since modern travel began, is to make the grand 
 tour ; but though I have diligently sought such 
 obvious and common aims, and had my reward, 
 T think no gain so great as that I never thought 
 of, the light which travel sheds upon the poets ;
 
 64 HEART OF MAN 
 
 unless, indeed, I should except that stronger 
 hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the 
 imagination which comes from familiar life with 
 pictures, and statues, and kindred physical ren- 
 derings of art. This latter advantage must 
 necessarily be more narrowly availed of by 
 men, since it implies a certain peculiar tem- 
 perament ; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, 
 is open and common to all who are not im- 
 mersed in the materialism of their own lives, 
 and whatever helps to unlock the poetic treas- 
 ures of other lands for our possession may be 
 an important part of life. I think none can 
 fully taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, 
 of English song even, until he has wandered 
 in the lanes and fields of the mother-country ; 
 and in the case of foreign, and especially of the 
 ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and 
 assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is 
 very great. I had trodden many an Italian 
 hillside before I noticed how subtly Dante's 
 landscape had become realized in my mind as 
 a part of nature. I own to believing that 
 Virgil's storms never blew on the sea until 
 once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Pses- 
 tuin, there came a storm over the wide gulf
 
 TAORMINA 66 
 
 that held my eyes enchanted such masses of 
 ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their 
 broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a 
 change beneath so swift, such anger on the 
 sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming 
 hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a 
 commingling of all these a revelation of the 
 wrath of colour ! The waves were wild with 
 the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf 
 came thundering on the sands ; the light went 
 out as if it were extinguished, and the dark 
 rain came down ; and I said, " 'Tis one of 
 Virgil's storms." Such a one you will find 
 also in Theocritus, where he hymns the chil- 
 dren of Leda, succourers of the ships that, 
 " defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, 
 have encountered the perilous breath of storms. 
 The winds raise huge billows about their stern, 
 yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind 
 wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, 
 and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail 
 hangs all the gear confused and broken, and 
 the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts 
 and by showers of iron hail." 
 
 I must leave these older memories, to tell, 
 so far as it is possible in words, of that laud
 
 66 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of 
 the imagination is the hardest for him without 
 the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all 
 about me in the places where the poets first 
 unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, 
 as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the 
 hills and the campagna. Descending under 
 the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and 
 turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes 
 the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music 
 at his lips. Then the centuries rolled together 
 like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning 
 notes. That was a single moment ; but here, 
 day-long is the idyl world. I read the old 
 verses over, and in my walks the song keeps 
 breaking in. The idyls are full of streams 
 and fountains, just such as I meet with wher- 
 ever I turn, and the water counts in the land- 
 scape as in the poems. It is always tumbling 
 over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded 
 forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, 
 bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the 
 cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The 
 run that comes down from Mola, the torrent 
 under the olive and lemon branches toward 
 Letojanni, the more open course in the ra-
 
 TAORMINA 67 
 
 vine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter 
 of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the cam- 
 pagna in the meadows, and that further fiume 
 freddo, the cold stream, " chill water that 
 for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the 
 white snow, a draught divine," each of these 
 seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that 
 it does not resemble its neighbours. But all 
 alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it 
 near, and make it real. 
 
 On the beach one feels most keenly the ac- 
 tuality of much of the idyls, and finds the con- 
 tinuousness of the human life that enters into 
 them. No idyl appeals so directly to modern 
 feeling, I suspect, as does that of the two fisher- 
 men and the dream of the golden fish. Go 
 down to the shore ; you will find the old men 
 still at their toil, the same implements, the 
 same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. 
 Often as I look at them I recall the old words, 
 while the goats hang their heads over the scant 
 herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and 
 heavily on the sands. 
 
 "Two fishers, on a time, two old men, to- 
 gether lay and slept ; they had strewn the
 
 68 HEART OF MAN 
 
 dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, 
 and there lay against the leafy wall. Beside 
 them were strewn the instruments of their toil- 
 some hands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, 
 the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, 
 the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of 
 rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble 
 upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty 
 matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. Here 
 was all their toil, here all their wealth. The 
 threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. 
 All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for 
 Poverty was their sentinel ; they had no neigh- 
 bour by them, but ever against their narrow 
 cabin gently floated up the sea." 
 
 This is what the eye beholds ; and I dare not 
 say that the idyl is touched more with the mel- 
 ancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. 
 Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see every- 
 where at every hour. It is a terrible sight. It 
 is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs 
 and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping 
 eyes despair made flesh. How long has it suf- 
 fered here ? and was it so when Theocritus saw 
 his fishers and gave them a place in the country
 
 TAORMINA 69 
 
 of his idyls ? He spreads before us the hills and 
 fountains, and fills the scene with shepherds, 
 and maidens, and laughing loves, and among 
 the rest are these two poor old men. The 
 shadow of the world's poverty falls on this 
 paradise now as then. With the rock and sea 
 it, too, endures. 
 
 A few traces of the old myths also survive 
 on the landscape. Not far from here, down the 
 coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after 
 the fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the 
 shore above which he piped to Galatea. Some 
 day I mean to take a boat and see them. But 
 now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them 
 Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling 
 women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds 
 of Herakles : these all belong to the cities of 
 the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more 
 conscious forms ; but my heart stays in the cam- 
 pagna, where are the song-contests, the amor- 
 ous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the 
 young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I re- 
 cover the breath of that springtime ; but while 
 from my foot " every stone upon the way spins 
 singing," make what speed I can, I come not 
 to the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among
 
 60 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, 
 and night falls with Hesperus ; but fruitless on 
 my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is 
 gone, is Bion's prayer : " Hesperus, golden 
 lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam dear 
 Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, 
 dimmer as much than the moon as thou art 
 among the stars preeminent, hail, friend ! " 
 Dead now is that ritual. Now more silent than 
 ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the 
 flower of all those who sing when the heart is 
 young. Sweet was his flute's first triumph 
 over Menalcas : " Then was the boy glad, and 
 leaped high, and clapped his hands over his 
 victory, as a young fawn leaps about his 
 mother " ; but sweeter was the unwon victory 
 when he strove with Damcetas : " Then Da- 
 moetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, 
 and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave 
 him a beautiful flute. Damoetas fluted, and 
 Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the 
 calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. 
 Neither won the victory, but both were in- 
 vincible." And him, too, I miss who loved 
 his friend, and wished that they twain might 
 "become a song in the ears of all men un-
 
 TAOEMINA 1 
 
 born," even for their love's sake ; and prayed, 
 " Would, O Father Cronides, and would, ye 
 ageless immortals, that this might be, and that 
 when two generations have sped, one might 
 bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the ir- 
 remeable stream : the loving-kindness that was 
 between thee and thy gracious friend is even 
 now in all men's mouths, and chiefly on the 
 lips of the young." Hill and fountain and 
 pine, the gray sea and Mother Etna, are here ; 
 but no children gather in the land, as once 
 about the tomb of Diocles at the coming in 
 of the spring, contending for the prize of the 
 kisses " Whoso most sweetly touches lip to 
 lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his 
 mother. Happy is he who judges those kisses 
 of the children." Lost over the bright furrows 
 of the sea is Europa riding on the back of the 
 divine bull as Moschus beheld her "With 
 one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, 
 and with the other caught up the purple fold 
 of her garment, lest it might trail and be wet 
 in the hoar sea's infinite spray " ; and from 
 the border-land of mythic story, that was then 
 this world's horizon, yet more faintly the fading 
 voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout
 
 62 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of Herakles. Faint now as his voice are the 
 voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth 
 and maiden and children ; dimly I see them, 
 vaguely I hear them ; at last there remains 
 only "the hoar sea's infinite spray." And will 
 you say it was in truth all a dream ? Were 
 the poor fishermen in their toil alone real, and 
 the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a 
 local habitation and a name ? It was Virgil's 
 dream and Spenser's ; and some secret there 
 was something still in our breasts that 
 made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian 
 Muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness 
 in every young and noble heart that the gods 
 have softened with sweet thoughts. 
 
 And here I shut in my pages the one laurel 
 leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her cen- 
 turies has had her poet. Perhaps none who 
 will see these words ever gave a thought to 
 the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few 
 of his works remain, and little is known of his 
 life. He is said to have been the friend of Pol- 
 lio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war 
 between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He 
 wrote the first book of an epic poem on that 
 subject, so excellent that it has been thought
 
 TAORMINA 63 
 
 that, had the entire work been continued at the 
 same level, he would have held the second 
 place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote 
 also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, 
 one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which 
 Seneca quotes, saying of him, " No one out of 
 so many talented men deplored the death of 
 Cicero better than Cornelius Severus." Some 
 dialogues in verse also seem to have been writ- 
 ten by him. These fragments may not be easily 
 obtained. But take down your Virgil ; and, if it 
 be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, 
 you will find at the very end, last of the shorter 
 pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length 
 of a book of the " Georgics," called "Etna." 
 This is the work of Cornelius Severus. An 
 early death took from him the perfection of his 
 genuis and the hope of fame ; but happy was 
 the fortune of him who wrote so well that for 
 centuries his lines were thought not unworthy 
 of Virgil, whose name still shields this Taor- 
 minian verse from oblivion. 
 
 VII 
 
 It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen 
 the sunrise from my old station by the Greek
 
 64 HEART OF MAN 
 
 temple, and watched the throng of cattle and 
 men gathered on the distant beach of Letojanni 
 and darkening the broad bed of the dry torrent 
 that there makes down to the sea, and I wished 
 I were among them, for it is their annual fair ; 
 and still I dwell on every feature of the land- 
 scape that familiarity has made more beautiful. 
 The afternoon I have dedicated to a walk to 
 Mola. It is a pleasant, easy climb, with the 
 black ancient wall of the city on the left, where 
 it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the 
 right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere 
 in the west. All is very quiet ; a silent, silent 
 country ! There are few birds or none, and 
 indeed I have heard no bird-song since I have 
 been here. Opposite, on the other side of the 
 wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in 
 strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems 
 goats could hardly cling ; but the unwieldy, 
 awkward creatures move with sure feet, and 
 seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare 
 precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a 
 narrow stream, deep below me, but I see the 
 women of Mola washing by the old fountain 
 which is its source. There is no other sign of 
 human life. The fresh spring flowers, large and
 
 TAORMINA 65 
 
 coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I have of 
 company, and the sky is blue and the air like 
 crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am 
 by the gate of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted 
 town. A place more dreary, desolate to the 
 eye, is seldom seen. There are only low, mean 
 houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If 
 you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a 
 glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the 
 sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, 
 and silence over all that is Mola. The ruins 
 of the fortress are near the gate on the high- 
 est point of the crag. Within is a barren spot 
 a cistern, old foundations, and some broken 
 walls. Look over the battlement westward, 
 and you will see a precipice that one thinks 
 only birds could assail ; and, observing how 
 isolated is the crag on all sides, you will under- 
 stand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and 
 cannot be surprised at its record of defence. 
 
 Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place 
 of man upon the hill, and it was the securest 
 retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, 
 the son of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, 
 was the first builder ; but I do not doubt its 
 antiquity was very great, and it seems likely
 
 66 HEART OF MAN 
 
 that this was the original Siculian stronghold 
 before the coming of the Greeks, and the build- 
 ing of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins 
 that exist are part of the fortress made by that 
 governor who lost the city to the Saracens, to 
 defend it against them on this side ; and here 
 it stood for nigh a thousand years, like the 
 citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. It 
 seldom yielded, and always by treachery or 
 mutiny ; for more than once, when Taormina 
 was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained 
 untaken and unconquerable on their extreme 
 heights. I shall not tell its story ; but one 
 brave man once commanded here, and his name 
 shall be its ' fame now, and my last tale of the 
 Taorminian past. 
 
 He was Count Matteo, a nobleman of the 
 days when the Messenians revolted against the 
 chancellor of Queen Margaret. He was placed 
 over this castle ; and when a certain Count 
 Riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy to 
 murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, 
 he was given into Matteo's charge, and impris- 
 oned here. The Messenians came and surprised 
 the lower city of Taormina, but they could not 
 gain Mola nor persuade Matteo to yield Ric-
 
 TAORMINA 67 
 
 cardo up to them. So they thought to over- 
 come his fidelity cruelly. They took his wife 
 and children, who were at Messina, threw them 
 into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. 
 Then they sent Matteo's brother-in-law to treat 
 with him. But when the count knew the rea- 
 son of the visit he said : " It seems to me that 
 you little value the zeal of an honest man who, 
 loyal to his office, does not wish, neither knows 
 how, to break his sworn faith. My wife and 
 children would look on me with scornful eyes 
 should I be renegade ; for shame is not the re- 
 ward that sweetens life, but burdens it. If 
 the Messenians stain themselves with innocent 
 blood, I shall weep for the death of my wife 
 and sons, but the heart of an honest citizen 
 will have no remorse." Then he was silent. 
 But treachery could do what such threats failed 
 to accomplish. One Gavaretto was found, who 
 unlocked the prison, and Riccardo was already 
 escaping when Matteo, roused at a slight noise, 
 came, sword in hand, and would have slain him ; 
 but the traitor behind, " to save his wages," 
 struck Matteo in the body, and the faithful count 
 fell dead in his blood. I thought of this story, 
 standing there, and nothing else in the castle's
 
 68 HEART OF MAN 
 
 legend seemed worthy of memory in compari- 
 son, from its mystic beginning until that night, 
 near two centuries ago, when the thunderbolt 
 fell on it, igniting its store of powder, and blew 
 it utterly to fragments with a great explosion. 
 The castle of Taormina on the eastward 
 height is easily reached by a ridge that runs 
 toward it on the homeward track. Along the 
 way are seen the caves so often mentioned in 
 the records of the city as the refuge of the peo- 
 ple in times of disaster. The castle itself, much 
 larger and more important than Mola, is wholly 
 in ruins. The walls stand, with some broken 
 stairways, and a room or two, massive and 
 desolate, remains. Of its history I have found 
 no particular mention, but here must always 
 have been the citadel. Once more from its 
 open platform I gazed on the fair country it 
 had guarded, while the snows of Etna began to 
 be touched with sunset ; and as my hand lay 
 on the ruined battlement, for which how many 
 thousand died bloody deaths, again the long 
 past rose from the rock. I saw the young 
 Greeks raising Apollo's altar by the river-bank. 
 I saw Dionysius in the winter night, staining 
 the snow from the wound in his breast as he
 
 TAORMINA 69 
 
 fled down the darkness, and the Norman sol- 
 dier dying for Roger beneath the cimeters by 
 the young myrtles. I saw the citizens in the 
 market-place overthrowing Verres' statue, the 
 monk Elia with his lifted garment, the bishop 
 in his murder before Ibrahim. I wondered at 
 the little port that was large enough to hold 
 the fleets of Athens, of Carthage, and of Au- 
 gustus, and at the strip of beach trodden by so 
 many famous men on heroic enterprises. There 
 the fishers were drawing up their boats, coming 
 home at the day's close from that toil of the sea 
 which has outlived gods and martyrs and em- 
 pires. The snows of Etna were now aflame with 
 sunset, and the high clouds trembled with swift 
 and mighty radiance, and league after league 
 the sea took on the pale rose-colour. Descend- 
 ing, I passed through the dark cleft between 
 the castle and the silent, deserted church of the 
 hermitage by its side, and, in a moment, again 
 the vision burst on me, and in its glow I went 
 down the rock-face by the terraces under al- 
 mond blossoms. Softly the sea changed through 
 every tender colour, bathing beach and headland, 
 and strange lights fell upon the crags from the 
 mild heaven, and all the Taorminian land was
 
 70 HEART OF MAN 
 
 filled with bloom ; then the infinite beauty, 
 slowly fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly 
 it parted from my eyes. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Yet once more I step out upon the terrace 
 into the night. I hear the long roar of the 
 breakers ; I see the flickering fishers' lights, 
 and Etna pale under the stars. The place is 
 full of ghosts. In the darkness I seem to hear 
 vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the 
 murmur of many tongues that have perished 
 here, Sicanian and Siculian and the lost Oscan, 
 Greek and Latin and the hoarse jargon of bar- 
 baric slaves, Byzantine and Arabic confused 
 with strange African dialects, Norman and 
 Sicilian, French and Spanish, mingling, blend- 
 ing, changing, the sharp battle-cry of a thou- 
 sand assaults rising from the low ravines, the 
 death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within 
 these walls, ringing on the hard rock and fall- 
 ing to silence only to rise more full with fiercer 
 pain century after century of the battle-wrath 
 and the battle- woe. My fancy shapes the air 
 till I see over the darkly lifted castle-rock the
 
 TAORMINA 71 
 
 triple crossing swords of Greek, Carthaginian, 
 and Roman in the age-long duel, and as these 
 fade, the springing brands of Byzantine, Arab, 
 and Norman, and yet again the heavy blades of 
 France, Spain, and Sicily ; and ever, like rain 
 or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill- 
 side. " Oh, wherefore ? " I whisper ; and all is 
 silent save the surge still lifting round the 
 coast the far voices of the old Ionian sea. I 
 have wondered that the children of Etna should 
 dwell in its lovely paradise, as I thought how 
 often, how terribly, the lava has poured forth 
 upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black 
 horror of volcanic eruption overwhelmed the 
 land. Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that 
 Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, 
 the agonies of her burnings, the terrors of her 
 living entombments, all her manifold deaths 
 at once, and what were it in comparison with 
 the blood that has flowed on this hillside, the 
 slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here 
 suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is 
 not thou that man should fear ! He should 
 fear his brother-man.
 
 72 HEART OF MAN 
 
 IX 
 
 The stars were paling over Etna, white and 
 ghostly, as I came out to depart. In the dark 
 street I met a woman with a young boy cling- 
 ing to her side. Her black hair fell down 
 over her shoulders, and her bosom was scantily 
 clothed by the poor garment that fell to her 
 ankles and her feet. She was still young, and 
 from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine with 
 that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown 
 familiar ; the child, half naked, gazed up at me 
 as he held his mother's hand. What brought 
 her there at that hour, alone with her child ? 
 She seemed the epitome of the human life I 
 was leaving behind, come forth to bid farewell ; 
 and she passed on under the shadows of the 
 dawn. The last star faded as I went down 
 the hollow between the spurs. Etna gleamed 
 white and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, 
 and, as I dipped down, was gone.
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 
 
 
 
 THERE was an old cry, Return to Nature ! 
 Let us rather return unto the soul. Nature is 
 great, and her science marvellous; but it is man 
 who knows it. In what he knows it is partial 
 and subsidiary. Know thyself, was the first 
 command of reason ; and wisdom was an ancient 
 thing when the sweet influences of the Pleiades 
 and the path of Arcturus with his sons were 
 young in human thought. These late con- 
 quests of the mind in the material infinities of 
 the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its 
 exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of in- 
 visible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its 
 sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of 
 achievement, thought winnowing the world 
 as with a fan ; the vivid spectacle of vast and 
 beneficent changes wrought by this means 
 in human welfare, the sense of the increase of 
 man's power springing from unsuspected and 
 illimitable resources, all this has made us 
 76
 
 76 HEART OF MAN 
 
 forgetful of truth that is the oldest heirloom of 
 the race. In the balances of thought the soul 
 of man outweighs the mass that gravitation 
 measures. Man only is of prime interest to 
 men ; and man as a spirit, a creature but made 
 in the likeness of gomething divine. The lapse 
 of aeons touches us as little as the reach of 
 space; even the building of our planet, and 
 man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality 
 of cradle records. Science may reconstruct the 
 inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our 
 mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton 
 of the physical being we now wear; but the 
 mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past 
 without some discipline in the arts, some exer- 
 cise in rude virtue, and some proverbial lore 
 handed down from sire to son. The tree of 
 knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; 
 nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker 
 in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin 
 guardians of the soul, the poet and the priest. 
 Conscience and imagination were the pioneers 
 who made earth habitable for the human spirit ; 
 they are still its lawgivers; and where they 
 have lodged their treasures, there is wisdom. 
 I desire to renew the long discussion of the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 77 
 
 nature and method of idealism by engaging in 
 a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art 
 in any of its kinds, as the means by which this 
 wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, 
 is stored up for the race in its most manifest, 
 enduring, and vital forms. It is, by literary 
 tradition and association, a proud task. May 
 I not take counsel of Spenser and be bold at 
 the first door ? Sidney and Shelley pleaded 
 this cause. Because they spoke, must we be 
 dumb ? or shall not a noble example be put to 
 its best use in trying what truth can now do 
 on younger lips? The old hunt is up in the 
 Muses' bower ; and I would fain speak for that 
 learning which has to me been light. I use 
 this preface not unwillingly in open loyalty to 
 studies on which my youth was nourished, and 
 the masters I then loved whom the natural 
 thoughts of youth made eloquent ; my hope is 
 to continue their finer breath, as they before 
 drank from old fountains ; but chiefly I name 
 them as a reminder that the main argument is 
 age-long ; it does not harden into accepted 
 dogma ; and it is thus ceaselessly tossed be- 
 cause it belongs in that sphere of our warring 
 nature where conflict is perpetual. It goes on
 
 78 HEART OF MAN 
 
 in the lives as well as on the lips of men. It 
 is a question how to live as well as how to ex- 
 press life. Each race uses its own tongue, 
 each age its dialect ; but, change the language 
 as man may, he ever remains the questioner of 
 his few great thoughts. 
 
 The defenders of the soul inherit an old 
 cause that links them together in a long de- 
 scent ; but the battle is always to a present 
 age. Continually something is becoming su- 
 perfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work 
 of the past. Victory itself makes arms useless, 
 and consigns them to dark closets. New times, 
 new weapons, is the history of all warfare. 
 The doubt of the validity of the ideal, never 
 absent from any intellectual period, is active on 
 all sides, and in more than one quarter passes 
 into denial. Literature and the other arts of 
 expression suffer throughout the world. To 
 that point is it come that those of the old stock 
 who believe that the imagination exercises 
 man's faculty at its highest pitch, and that the 
 method of idealism is its law, are bid step down, 
 while others more newly grounded in what be- 
 longs to literature possess the city ; but seeing 
 the shrines interdicted, the obliteration of
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 79 
 
 ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, 
 shall we learn what our predecessors never 
 knew to abdicate and abandon? I hear in 
 the temples the footsteps of the departing 
 gods 
 
 Di quibus iraperium hoc steterat ; 
 
 but no ; for our opponents are worse off than 
 those of whom it was said that though one rose 
 from the dead they would not believe, Plato, 
 being dead, yet speaks, Shal^spere treads our 
 boards, and (why should I hesitate?) Tenny- 
 j3on_ yet breathes among us though already 
 immortal. That which convinced the master 
 minds of antiquity and many in later ages is 
 still convincing, if it be attended to ; the old 
 tradition is yet unbroken ; therefore, because I 
 was bred in this faith, I will try to set forth 
 anew in the phrases of our time the eternal 
 ground of reason on which idealism rests. 
 
 The specific question concerns literature and 
 its method, but its import is not mainly literary. 
 Life is the matter of literature ; and thence 
 it comes that all leading inquiries to which 
 literature gives rise probe for their premises 
 to the roots of our being and expand in their
 
 80 HEART OF MAN 
 
 issues to the unknown limits of human fate. 
 It is an error to think of idealism as a thing 
 remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. It enters 
 intimately into the lives of all men, however 
 humble and unlearned, if they live at all 
 except in their bodies. What is here pro- 
 posed is neither speculative, technical, nor 
 abstruse ; it is practical in matter, universal in 
 interest, and touches upon those things which 
 men most should heed. I fear rather to incur 
 the reproach of uttering truisms than para- 
 doxes. But he does ill who is scornful of 
 the trite. To be learned in commonplaces is 
 no mean education. They make up the great 
 body of the people's knowledge. They are 
 the living words upon the lips of men from 
 generation to generation ; the real winged 
 words ; the matter of the unceasing reitera- 
 tion of families, schools, pulpits, libraries ; the 
 tradition of mankind. Proverb, text, homily, 
 happy the youth whose purse is stored with 
 these broad pieces, current in every country and 
 for every good, like fairy gifts of which the 
 occasion only when it arises shows the use. 
 It is with truth as with beauty, familiarity 
 endears and makes it more precious. What is
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 81 
 
 common is for that very reason in danger of 
 neglect, and from it often flashes that divine 
 surprise which most enkindles the soul. Why 
 must Prometheus bring fire from heaven to 
 savage man ? Did it not sleep in the flint at 
 his feet ? How often, at the master stroke of 
 life, has some text of Holy Scripture, which lay 
 in the mind from childhood almost like the 
 debris of memory, illuminated the remorseful 
 darkness of the mind, or interpreted the sweet- 
 ness of God's sunshine in the happy heart ! 
 Common as light is love, sang Shelley ; and 
 equally common with beauty and truth and 
 love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that 
 feeds it and gives it power ; if aught be lack- 
 ing, it is the eye to see and the heart to under- 
 stand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk 
 and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and 
 electricity, were not all, like the spark, 
 within arm's reach of savage man ? The slow 
 material progress of mankind through ages is 
 paralleled by the slow growth of the individual 
 soul in laying hold of and putting to use the 
 resources of spiritual strength that are nigh 
 unto it. The service of man to man in the 
 ways of the spirit is, in truth, an act as simple
 
 82 HEART OF MAN 
 
 as the giving of a cup of cold water to him 
 who is athirst. 
 
 Can there be any surprise when I say that 
 the method of idealism is that of all thought ? 
 that in its intellectual process the art of the 
 poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is 
 the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, 
 the statesman ? It is no more than to say that 
 in creating literature the mind acts ; the action 
 of the mind is thought ; and there are no more 
 two ways of thinking than there are two kinds 
 of gravitation. Experience is the matter of 
 all knowledge. It is given to the mind as a 
 complex of particular facts, a series, ever con- 
 tinuing, of impressions outward and inward. 
 It is stored in the memory, and were memory 
 the only mental faculty, no other knowledge 
 than this of particular facts in their temporal 
 sequence could be acquired ; the sole method 
 of obtaining knowledge would be by observa- 
 tion. All literature would then be merely 
 annals of the contents of successive moments 
 in their order. Reason, however, intervenes. 
 Its process is well known. In every object of 
 perception, as it exists in the physical world 
 and is given by sensation to our consciousness,
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 83 
 
 there is both in itself and in its relations a 
 likeness to other objects and relations, and this 
 likeness the mind takes notice of ; it thus 
 analyzes the complex of experience, discerns 
 the common element, and by this means classi- 
 fies particular facts, thereby condensing them 
 into mental conceptions, abstract ideas, for- 
 mulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the 
 course of its normal operation. As soon as we 
 think at all, we speak of white and black, of 
 bird and beast, of distance and size, of uni- 
 formities in the behaviour of nature, or laws ; 
 by such classification of qualities, objects, and 
 various relations, not merely in the sensuous 
 but in every sphere of our consciousness, the 
 mind simplifies its experience, compacts its 
 knowledge, and economizes its energies. To 
 this work it brings, also, the method of ex- 
 periment. It then interferes arbitrarily with 
 the natural occurrence of facts, and brings 
 that to pass which otherwise would not have 
 been ; and this method it uses to investigate, 
 to illustrate what was previously known, and 
 to confirm what was surmised. Its end, 
 whether through observation or experiment, 
 is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-
 
 84 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of-fact, universals more or less embracing as 
 opposed to particulars, the units of thought 
 as opposed to the units of phenomena. The 
 body of these constitutes rational knowledge. 
 Nature then becomes known, not as a series 
 of impressions on the retina of sense merely, 
 but as a system seized by the eye of reason ; for 
 the senses show man the aspect worn by the 
 world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to 
 him the order obtaining in the world as it must be 
 at every moment ; and the instrument by which 
 man rises from the phenomenal plane of expe- 
 rience to the necessary sphere of truth is the 
 generalizing faculty whose operation has just 
 been described. The office of the reason in 
 the exercise of this faculty is to find organic 
 form in that experience which memory pre- 
 serves in the mass, to penetrate, that is, to 
 that mould of necessity in the world which 
 phenomena, when they arise, must put on. The 
 species once perceived, the mind no longer cares 
 for the individual ; the law once known, the 
 mind no longer cares for the facts ; for in these 
 universals all particular instances, past, present, 
 and to come, are contained in their significance. 
 All sciences are advanced in proportion as they
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 86 
 
 have thus organized their appropriate matter 
 in abstract conceptions and laws, and are back- 
 ward in proportion as there remains much in 
 their provinces not yet so coordinated and sys- 
 tematized ; and in their hierarchy, from astro- 
 nomical physics downward, each takes rank 
 according to the nature of the universals it 
 deals with, as these are more or less embracing. 
 The matter of literature that part of total 
 experience which it deals with is life ; and, 
 to confine attention to imaginative literature 
 where alone the question of idealism arises, the 
 matter with which imaginative literature deals 
 is the inward and spiritual order in man's 
 breast as distinguished from the outward and 
 physical order with which science deals. The 
 reason as here exercised organizes man's ex- 
 perience in this great tract of emotion, will, 
 and meditation, and so possesses man of true 
 knowledge of himself, just as in the realm 
 of science it possesses him of true knowledge 
 of the physical world, or, in psychology and 
 metaphysics, of the constitution and processes 
 of the mind itself. Such knowledge is, with- 
 out need of argument, of the highest conse- 
 quence to mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in
 
 86 HEART OF MAN 
 
 dignity and value all other knowledge ; for to 
 penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to 
 grasp it with the mind and conform to it with 
 the will, is not, as is the case with every other 
 sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort 
 of selected minds, but the daily business of all 
 men in their lives. The method of the mind 
 here is and must be the same with that by 
 which it accomplishes its work elsewhere, its 
 only method. Here, too, its concern is with 
 the universal; its end is to know life the 
 life with which literature deals not empiri- 
 cally in its facts, but scientifically in its neces- 
 sary order, not phenomenally in the senses but 
 rationally in the mind, not without relation in 
 its mere procession but organically in its laws ; 
 and its instrument here, as through the whole 
 gamut of the physical sciences and of philoso- 
 phy itself, is the generalizing faculty. 
 
 One difference there is between scientific and 
 imaginative truth, a difference in the mode 
 of statement. Science and also philosophy for- 
 mulate truth and end in the formula ; litera- 
 ture, as the saying is, clothes truth in a tale. 
 Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the 
 mind projects a world of its own, whose prin-
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 87 
 
 ciple of being is that it reembodies general or 
 abstract truth and presents it concretely to 
 the eye of the mind, and in some arts gives 
 it physical form. So, to draw an example 
 from science itself, when Leverrier projected 
 in imagination the planet Uranus, he incar- 
 nated in matter a whole group of universal 
 qualities and relations, all that go to make up a 
 world, and in so doing he created as the poet 
 creates; there was as much of truth, too, in 
 his imagined world before he found the actual 
 planet as there was of reality in the planet 
 itself after it swam into his ken. This crea- 
 tion of the concrete world of art is the joint act 
 of the imagination and the reason working in 
 unison ; and hence the faculty to which this act 
 is ascribed is sometimes called the creative rea- 
 son, or shaping power of the mind, in distinc- 
 tion from the scientific intellect which merely 
 knows. The term is intended to convey at once 
 the double phase, under one aspect of which 
 the reason controls imagination, and under the 
 other aspect the imagination formulates the 
 reason ; it is meant to free the idea, on the one 
 hand, from that suggestion of abstraction im- 
 plied by the reason, and to disembarrass it, on
 
 88 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the other, of any connection with the irrational 
 fancy ; for the world of art so conceived is 
 necessarily both concrete, correspondent to the 
 realities of experience, and truthful, subjeot to 
 the laws of the universe ; it cannot contain the 
 impossible, it cannot amalgamate the actual 
 with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and 
 retain its own nature. The use of this ra- 
 tional imagination is not confined to the world 
 of art. It is only by its aid that we build 
 up the horizons of our earthly life and fill 
 them with objects and events beyond the reach 
 of our senses. To it we are indebted for our 
 knowledge of the greater part of others' lives, 
 for our idea of the earth's surface and the 
 doings of foreign nations, of all past history 
 and its scene, and the events of primaeval 
 nature which were even before man was. So 
 far as we realize the world at all beyond the 
 limit of our private experience of it, we do so 
 by the power of the imagination acting on the 
 lines of reason. It fills space and time for us 
 through all their compass. Nor is it less opera- 
 tive in the practical pursuits of men. The 
 scientist lights his way with it ; the statesman 
 forecasts reform by it, building in thought
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 89 
 
 the state which he afterward realizes in fact ; 
 the entire future lives to us and it is the 
 most important part of life only by its in- 
 cantation. The poet acts no otherwise in em- 
 ploying it than the inventor and the speculator 
 even, save that he uses it for the ends of reason 
 instead of for his private interest. In some 
 parts of this field there is, or was once, or will 
 be, a physical parallel, an actuality, containing 
 the verification of the imagined state of things ; 
 but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a con- 
 ception of the reason just as normal, which is 
 not the less real because it is a tissue of 
 abstract thought. In art this governance of 
 the imagination by the reason is fundamental, 
 and gives to the office of the latter a seeming 
 primacy ; and therefore emphasis is rightly 
 placed on the universal element, the truth, as 
 the substance of the artistic form. But in the 
 light of this preliminary description of the men- 
 tal processes involved, let us take a nearer view 
 of their particular employment in literature. 
 
 Human life, as represented in literature, con- 
 sists of two main branches, character and ac- 
 tion^ Of these, character, which is the realm 
 of personality, is generalized by means of type,
 
 90 HEART OF MAN 
 
 which is ideal character ; action, which is the 
 realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal 
 action. It is convenient to examine the nature 
 of these separately. A type, the example of a 
 class, contains the characteristic qualities which 
 make an individual one of that class ; it does 
 not differ in this elementary form from the 
 bare idea of the species. The traits of a tree, 
 for instance, exist in every actual tree, however 
 stunted or imperfect; and in the type which 
 condenses into itself what is common in all 
 specimens of the class, these traits only exist ; 
 they constitute the type. Comic types, in lit- 
 erature, are often simple abstractions of some 
 single human quality, and hence easily afford 
 illustrations. The braggart, the miser, the 
 hypocrite, contain that one trait which is com- 
 mon to the class ; and in their portrayal this 
 characteristic only is shown. In proportion as 
 the traits are many in any character, the type 
 becomes complex. In simple types attention 
 is directed to some one vice, passion, or virtue, 
 capable of absorbing a human life into itself. 
 This is the method of Jonson, and, in tragedy, 
 of Marlowe. As human energy displays itself 
 more variously in a life, in complex types, the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 91 
 
 mind contemplates human nature in a more 
 catholic way, with a less exclusive identifica- 
 tion of character with specific trait, a more free 
 conception of personality as only partially ex- 
 hibited ; thus, in becoming complex, types 
 gather breadth and depth, and share more in 
 the mystery of humanity as something incom- 
 pletely known to us at the best. Such are the 
 characters of Shakspere. 
 
 The manner in which types are arrived at 
 and made recognizable in other arts opens the 
 subject more fully and throws light upon their 
 nature. The sculptor observes in a group of 
 athletes that certain physical habits result in 
 certain moulds of the body ; and taking such 
 characteristics as are common to all of one 
 class, and neglecting such as are peculiar to 
 individuals, he carves a statue. So perma- 
 nent are the physical facts he relies upon 
 that, centuries after, when the statue is dug 
 up, men say without hesitation here is the 
 Greek runner, there the wrestler. The habit 
 of each in life produces a bodily form which 
 if it exists implies that habit ; the reality here 
 results from the operation of physical laws 
 and can be physically rendered ; the type is
 
 92 HEAET OF MAN 
 
 constituted of permanent physical fact. There 
 are habits of the soul which similarly impress 
 an outward stamp upon the face and form 
 so certainly that expression, attitude, and 
 shape authentically declare the presence of 
 the soul that so reveals itself. In the Phidian 
 Zeus was all awe ; in the Praxitelean Hermes 
 all grace, sweetness, tenderness ; in the Pallas 
 Athene of her people who carved or minted 
 her image in statue, bas-relief, or coin, was all 
 serene and grave wisdom ; or, in the glowing 
 and chastened colours of the later artistic time, 
 the Virgin mother shines out, in Fra Angelico 
 all adoration, in Bellini all beatitude, in Ra- 
 phael all motherhood. The sculptor and the 
 painter are restricted to the bodily signs of 
 the soul's presence ; but the poet passes into 
 another and wider range of interpretation. 
 He finds the soul stamped in its characteristic 
 moods, words, actions. He then creates for 
 the mind's eye Achilles, ^Eneas, Arthur ; and 
 in his verse are beheld their spirits rather 
 than their bodies. 
 
 These several sorts of types make an ascend- 
 ing series from the predominantly physical to 
 the predominantly spiritual ; but, from the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 93 
 
 present point of view, the arts which embody 
 their creations in a material form should not be 
 opposed to literature which employs the least 
 intervention of sensation, as if the former had a 
 physical and the last a spiritual content. All 
 types have one common element, they express 
 personality; they have for the mind a spiritual 
 meaning, what they contain of human character; 
 they differ here only in fulness of represen- 
 tation. The most purely physical types imply 
 spiritual qualities, choice, will, command, all 
 the life which was a condition precedent to the 
 bodily perfection that was its flower; and, 
 though the eye rests on the beautiful form, it 
 may discern through it the human soul of the 
 athlete as in life ; and, moreover, the figure may 
 be represented in some significant act, or mood 
 even, but this last is rare. The more plainly 
 spiritual tj^pes, physically rendered, are most 
 often shown in some such mood or act expres- 
 sive in itself of the soul whose habit lives in the 
 form it has moulded. It is not that the plastic 
 and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone 
 and the canvas as well as humanize it bodily; 
 equally with the poetic art they reveal character, 
 but within narrower bounds. The limitation
 
 94 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of these arts in embodying personality is one of 
 scope, not of intention ; and though it springs 
 out of their use of material forms, it does so in 
 a peculiar way. It is not the employment of a 
 physical medium of communication that differ- 
 entiates them, for a physical medium of some 
 sort is the only means of exchange between mind 
 and mind; neither is it the employment of a 
 physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests 
 on a physical basis the world of imagination 
 is exhaled from things that are. The physical 
 basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when 
 it is enacted on the stage ; but it is substantially 
 the same whether beheld in thought or ocularly. 
 The fact is that the limitation of sculpture 
 and painting and their kindred arts results from 
 their use of the physical basis of life only par- 
 tially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. 
 They set forth their works in the single ele- 
 ment of space ; they exclude the changes that 
 take place in time. The types they show are 
 arrested, each in its moment; or if a story 
 is told by a series of representations, it is a 
 succession of such moments of arrested life. 
 The method is that of the camera; what is 
 given is a fixed state. But literature renders
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 95 
 
 life in movement; it revolves life through its 
 moments as rapidly as on the retina of sense ; 
 its method is that of the kinetoscope. It 
 holds under its command change, growth, the 
 entire energy of life in action; it can chase 
 mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can 
 speak the word, which is the most powerful 
 instrument of man. Hence the types it shows 
 by presenting moods, words, and acts with the 
 least obstruction of matter and the slightest 
 obligation to the active senses, are the most 
 complete. They have broken the bonds of the 
 flesh, of moment and place. They exhibit 
 themselves in actions; they speak, and in 
 dialogue and soliloquy set forth their states of 
 mind lying before, or accompanying, or follow- 
 ing their actions, thus interpreting these more 
 fully. Action by itself reveals character ; speech 
 illumines it, and casts upon the action also a 
 forward and a backward light. The lapse of 
 time, binding all together, adds the continuous 
 life of the soul. This large compass, which is 
 the greatest reached by any art, rests on the 
 wider command and more flexible control which 
 literature exercises over that physical basis 
 which is the common foundation of all the arts.
 
 96 HEART OF MAN 
 
 Hence it abounds in complex types, just as 
 other arts present simple types with more fre- 
 quency. All types, however, in so far as they 
 appeal to the mind and interpret the inward . 
 world, under which aspect alone they are now 
 considered, have their physical nature, materially 
 or imaginatively, even though it be solely visible 
 beauty, in order to express personality. 
 
 The type, in the usage of literature, must be 
 further distinguished from the bare idea of the 
 species as it has thus far been defined. It is 
 more than this. It is not only an example ; it 
 is an example in a high state of development, if 
 not perfect. The best possible tree, for instance, 
 does not exist in nature, o.ving to a confused 
 environment which does not permit its forma- 
 tion. In literature a type is made a high type 
 either by intensity, if it be simple, or by rich- 
 ness of nature, if it be complex. Miserliness, 
 braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are 
 the characters of comedy ; a rich nature, such 
 as Hamlet, showing variety of faculty and 
 depth of experience, is the hero of more pro- 
 found drama. This truth, the necessity of high 
 development in the type, underlay the old 
 canon that the characters of tragedy should be
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 97 
 
 of lofty rank, great place, and consequence in 
 the world's affairs, preferably even of historic 
 fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means 
 of securing credible intensity or richness for 
 the many which are possible. The end in view 
 is to represent human qualities at their acme. 
 In other times as a matter of fact persons 
 highly placed were most likely to exhibit such 
 development ; birth, station, and their oppor- 
 tunities for unrestrained and conspicuous action 
 made them examples of the compass of human 
 energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought 
 other conditions. Shakspere recognized the 
 truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis 
 where it belongs, upon the humanity of the 
 king, not on the kingly office of the man. Said 
 Henry V. : "I think the king is but a man as I 
 am ; the violet smells to him as it doth to me ; 
 the element shows to him as it doth to me ; all 
 his senses have but human conditions ; his cere- 
 monies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but 
 a man; and though his appetites are higher 
 mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they 
 stoop with like wing." Such, too, was Lear in 
 the tempest. And from the other end of the 
 scale hear Shylock : " Hath not a Jew eyes ?
 
 98 HEART OF MAN 
 
 hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, 
 senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same 
 food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to 
 the same diseases, healed by the same means, 
 warmed and cooled by the same winter and 
 summer as a Christian is ? If you prick us, do 
 we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? 
 if you poison us, do we not die? and if you 
 wrong us, shall we not revenge ? " Rank and 
 race are accidents ; the essential thing is that 
 the type be highly human, let the means of 
 giving it this intensity and richness be what 
 they may. 
 
 It is true that the type may seem defective in 
 the point that it is at best but a fragment of 
 humanity, an abstraction or a combination of 
 abstracted qualities. There was never such an 
 athlete as our Greek sculptor's, never a pagan 
 god nor Virgin Mother, nor a hero equal to 
 Homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and cour- 
 teous, so terrible to his foe, so loving to his 
 friend. And yet is it not thus that life is 
 known to us actually? does not this typical 
 rendering of character fall in with the natural 
 habit of life? What man, what friend, is 
 known to us except by fragments of his spirit ?
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 99 
 
 Only one life, our own, is known to us as a con- 
 tinuous existence. Just as when we see an 
 orange, we supply the further side and think of 
 it as round, so with men we supply from our- 
 selves the unseen side that makes the man com- 
 pletely and continuously human. Moreover, it 
 is a matter of common experience that men, we 
 ourselves, may live only in one part, and the 
 best, of our nature at one moment, and yet for 
 the moment be absorbed in that activity both in 
 consciousness and energy ; for that moment we 
 are only living so; now, if a character were 
 shown to us only in the moments in which he 
 was living so, at his best and in his charac- 
 teristic state as the soldier, the priest, the lover, 
 then the ideal abstraction of literature would not 
 differ from the actuality of our experience. In 
 this selfsame way we habitually build for our- 
 selves ideal characters out of dead and living 
 men, by dwelling on that part of their career 
 which we most admire or love as showing their 
 characteristic selves. Napoleon is the con- 
 queror, St. Francis the priest, Washington the 
 great citizen, only by this method. They are 
 not thereby de-humanized ; neither do the ideal 
 types of imagination fail of humanization be-
 
 100 HEART OF MAN 
 
 cause they are thus fragmentarily, but consist- 
 ently, presented. 
 
 The type must make this human appeal 
 under all circumstances. Its whole meaning 
 and virtue lie in what it contains of our com- 
 mon humanity, in the clearness and brilliancy 
 with which it interprets the man in us, in the 
 force with which it identifies us with human 
 nature. If it is separated from us by a too high 
 royalty or a too base villany, it loses intelli- 
 gibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more 
 and more an object of simple curiosity, and re- 
 moves into the region of the unknown. Even 
 if the type passes into the supernatural, into 
 fairyland or the angelic or demoniac world, 
 it must not leave humanity behind. These 
 spheres are in fact fragments of humanity 
 itself, projections of its sense of wonder, its 
 goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction 
 though concretely felt. Fairy, angel, and devil 
 cease to be conceivable except as they are 
 human in trait, however the conditions of their 
 nature may be fancied; for we have no other 
 materials to build with save those of our life 
 on earth, though we may combine them in 
 ways not justified by reason. In so far as these
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 101 
 
 worlds are in the limits of rational imagination, 
 they are derived from humanity, partial inter- 
 pretations of some of its moods, portions of 
 itself ; and the beings who inhabit them are im- 
 paired for the purposes of art in the degree to 
 which their abstract nature is felt as stripping 
 them of complete humanity. For this reason 
 in dealing with such simple types, being 
 natures all of one strain, it has been found best 
 in practice to import into them individually 
 some quality widely common to men in addi- 
 tion to that limited quality they possess by 
 their conception. Some touch of weakness in 
 an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some 
 unmerited misfortune in an Ariel, bring them 
 home to our bosoms ; just as the frailty of the 
 hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a 
 stroke. Thus these abstract fragments also are 
 reunited with humanity, with the whole of life 
 in ourselves. 
 
 Types, then, whether simple or complex, 
 whether apparently physical or purely spiritual, 
 whether given fragmentarily or as wholes of 
 personality, express human character in its es- 
 sential traits. They may be narrow or broad 
 generalizations; but if to know ourselves be
 
 102 HEART OF MAN 
 
 our aim, those types, which show man his com- 
 mon and enduring nature, are the most valuable, 
 and rank first in importance ; in proportion as 
 they are specialized, they are less widely inter- 
 pretative ; in proportion as they escape from 
 time and place, race, culture, and religion, and 
 present man eternal and universal in his pri- 
 mary actions, moods, and passions, they appeal to 
 a greater number and with more permanence ; 
 they become immortal in becoming universal. 
 To preserve this universality is the essence of 
 the type, and the degree of universality it 
 reaches is its measure of value to men. It is 
 immaterial whether it be simple as Ajax or 
 complex as Hamlet, whether it be the work of 
 imagination solely as in Hercules, or have a his- 
 torical basis as in Agamemnon ; its exemplary 
 rendering of man in general is its substance and 
 constitutes its ideality. 
 
 Action, the second great branch of life, is 
 generalized by plot. It lies, as has been said, 
 in the region of experience. Character, though 
 it may be conceived as latent, can be presented 
 only energetically as it finds outward expres- 
 sion. It cannot be shown in a vacuum. It 
 embodies or reveals itself iu an act; form and
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 103 
 
 feature, as expressive of character, are the record 
 of past acts. This act is the link that binds 
 type to plot. By means of it character enters 
 the external world, determining the course of 
 events and being passively affected by them. 
 Plot takes account of this interplay and sets 
 forth its laws. It is, therefore, more deeply 
 engaged with the environment, as type is more 
 concerned with the man in himself. It is, ini- 
 tially, a thing of the outward as type is a thing 
 of the inward world. How, then, does litera- 
 ture, through plot, reduce the environment in 
 its human relations to organic form? 
 
 The course of events, taken as a whole, is in 
 part a process of nature independent of man, in 
 part the product of his will. It is a continuous 
 stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and 
 proceeding in a temporal sequence. Science 
 deals with that portion of the whole which is 
 independent of man, and may be called natural 
 events, and by discerning causal relations in 
 them arrives at the conception of law as a 
 principle of unchanging and necessary order 
 in nature. Science seeks to reduce the multi- 
 plicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur 
 to these simple formulas of law. Science does
 
 104 HEART OF MAN 
 
 not begin in reality until facts end ; facts, ten 
 or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the 
 law which contains them is found, and are a 
 burden to her until it is found. Literature, in 
 its turn, deals with human events ; and, in the 
 same way as science, by attending to causal re- 
 lations, arrives at the conception of spiritual 
 law as a similarly permanent principle in the 
 order of the soul. This causal unity is the car- 
 dinal idea of plot which by definition is a series 
 of events causally related and conceived as a 
 unit, technically called the action. Plot is 
 thus analogous to an illustrative experiment in 
 science ; it is a concrete example of law, it is 
 
 **^*******'' fcJ '*""**'*"*'*iTmiiii ^niu, immmai***~~~ 
 
 law operating. 
 
 The course of events again, so far as they 
 stand in direct connection with human life, 
 may be thought of as the expression of the in- 
 dividual's own will, or of that of his environ- 
 ment. The will of the environment may be 
 divided into three varieties, the will of nature, 
 the will of other men, and the will of God. In 
 each case it is will embodied in events. If these 
 ideas be all merged in the conception of the 
 world as a totality whose course is the unfold- 
 ing of one Divine will operant throughout it
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 105 
 
 and called Fate or Providence, then the indi- 
 vidual will, through which, as through nature 
 also, the Divine will works, is only its servant. 
 Action so conceived, the march of events under 
 some heavenly power working through the 
 mass of human will which it overrules in con- 
 junction with its own more comprehensive 
 purposes, is epic action; in it characters are 
 subordinate to the main progress of the action, 
 they are only terms in the action ; however free 
 they may be apparently, considered by them- 
 selves, that freedom is within such limits as to 
 allow entire certainty of result, its mutations 
 are included in the calculation of the Divine 
 will. The action of the ^Eneid is of this na- 
 ture : a grand series of destined events worked 
 out through human agency to fulfil the plan of 
 the ruler of all things in heaven and earth. On 
 the other hand, if the course of events be more 
 narrowly attended to within the limits of the in- 
 dividual's own activity, as the expression pri- 
 marily and significantly of his personal will, then 
 the successive acts are subordinate to the char- 
 acter ; they are terms of the character which is 
 thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. 
 Action, so conceived, is dramatic action. If in
 
 106 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the course of events there arises a conflict be- 
 tween the will of the individual and that of his 
 environment, whether nature, man, or God, then 
 the seed of tragedy, specifically, is present ; this 
 conflict is the essential idea of tragedy. In all 
 these varieties of action, the scene is the ex- 
 ternal world ; plot lies in that world, and sets 
 forth the order, the causal principle, obtaining 
 in it. 
 
 It is necessary, however, to refine upon this 
 statement of the matter. The course of exter- 
 nal events, in so far as it affects one person, 
 whether as proceeding from or reacting upon 
 him, reveals character, and has meaning as an 
 interpretation of inward life. It is a series 
 outward indeed, but parallel with the states of 
 will, intellect, and emotion which make up the 
 consciousness of the character ; and it is inter- 
 esting humanly only as a mirror of them. It 
 is not the murderous blow, but the depraved 
 will ; not the pale victim, but the shocked con- 
 science ; not the muttered prayer, the frantic 
 penance, the suicide, but remorse working itself 
 out, that hold our attention. Plot here mani- 
 fests the law of character outwardly ; but the 
 human reality lies within, and to be seen requires
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 107 
 
 the illumination which only our own hearts can 
 give. All action is such a shadowing forth of 
 the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the pro- 
 fundity with which Shakspere felt this, from 
 the earliest syllables of his art, and the fre- 
 quency with which he dwells upon it, mark a 
 characteristic of genius. Says Richard II. : 
 
 " 'Tis very true, my grief lies all within ; 
 And these external manners of lament 
 Are merely shadows to the unseen grief 
 That swells in silence in the tortured soul ; 
 There lies the substance." 
 
 So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of 
 Athens, excusing all art: "The best in this 
 kind are but shadows." So Hamlet; so Pros- 
 pero. 
 
 Action is vital in us, and has a double order 
 of phenomena; so far as these are physical, 
 their law is one of the physical world, and 
 interests us no more than other physical laws ; 
 so far as they belong in the inward world of 
 self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has 
 human interest as being operant in a soul like 
 our own. The external fact is seized by the eye 
 as a part of nature ; the internal fact is of the 
 unseen world, and is beheld only in the light
 
 108 HEART OF MAN 
 
 which is within our own bosoms it is spiritu- 
 ally discerned. On the stage plainly this is the 
 case. So far as the actions are for the eye of 
 sense alone they are merely spectacular ; so far 
 as they express desires and energies, they are 
 dramatic, and these we do not see but feel 
 according as our experience permits us so to 
 comprehend them. We contemplate a world 
 of emotion there in connection with the active 
 energy of the will, a world of character in 
 operation in man ; we feed it from our life, 
 interpret it therefrom, build it up in ourselves, 
 suffering the illusion till absorbed in what is 
 arising in our consciousness under the actor's 
 genius we become ourselves the character. 
 The greatest actor is he who makes the specta- 
 tor play the part. So far is the drama from 
 the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms ; 
 there is the stage without any illusion whatso- 
 ever; the play is vital for the moment in our- 
 selves. 
 
 And what is true of the stage is true of 
 life. It is only through our own hearts that 
 we look into the hearts of others. We inter- 
 pret the external signs of sense in terms of per- 
 sonality and experience known only within us ;
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 108 
 
 the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe 
 to our nearest and dearest friends is something 
 imagined, something never seen any more than 
 our own personality. Thus our knowledge of 
 them is not only fragmentary, as has been said ; 
 it is imaginative even within its limits. It is, 
 in reality as well as in art, a shadow- world we 
 live in, believing that within its sensuous films 
 a spirit like unto ourselves abides, the human 
 soul, though never seen face to face. To enter 
 this substantial world behind the phenomena of 
 human life as sensibly shown in imagination, 
 to know the invisible things of personality and 
 experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual 
 order, is the main end of ideal art. Though in 
 plot the outward order is brought into the full- 
 est prominence, and may seem to occupy .the 
 field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of 
 that order within. 
 
 In thus presenting plot as the means by 
 which the history of a single soul is external- 
 ized, one important element has been excluded 
 from consideration. The causal chain of events, 
 which constitutes plot, has a double unity, an- 
 swering to the double order of phenomena in 
 action as a state of mind and a state of external
 
 110 HEART OF MAN 
 
 fact. Under one aspect, so much of the action 
 as is included in any single life and is there a 
 linked sequence of mental states, has its unity 
 in the personality of that individual. Under 
 the other aspect, the entire action which sets 
 forth the relations of all the characters in- 
 volved, of their several courses of experience 
 as elements in the working out of the joint 
 result, has its unity in the constitution of the 
 universe, the impersonal order, that structure 
 of being itself, which is independent of man's 
 will, which is imposed upon him as a condition 
 of existence, and which he must accept without 
 appeal. This necessity, to give it the best name, 
 to which man is exposed without and subjected 
 within, is in its broadest conception the power 
 that increases life, and all things are under its 
 sway. Its sphere is above man's will; he 
 knows it as immutable law in himself as it 
 is in nature ; it is the highest object of his 
 thoughts. Its workings are submitted to his 
 observation and experiment as a part of the 
 world of knowledge; he sees its operation in 
 individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets 
 it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, 
 and the epic as the law of life. In its sphere
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 111 
 
 is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which 
 it integrates many lives in one main action. 
 Such, then, is the nature of plot as intermedi- 
 ary between man and his environment, but 
 deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be 
 freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic 
 philosophy; for though we say that, as under 
 one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world 
 of the soul's life, so under the other it shadows 
 forth the invisible will of God, we do not escape 
 from the outward world. Sense is still the 
 medium by which only man knows his brother 
 man and God also as through a glass darkly, 
 
 " The painted veil which those who live call life." 
 
 It separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense 
 element in which the pure soul is submerged. 
 
 It is necessary only to summarize the char- 
 acteristics of plot which are merely parallel to 
 those of type already illustrated. Plot may 
 be simple or complex; it may be more or less 
 involved in physical conditions in proportion as 
 it lays stress on its machinery or its psychol- 
 ogy ; it must be important, as the type must be 
 high, but important by virtue of its essential 
 human meaning and not of its accidents ; it is
 
 112 HEART OF MAN 
 
 a fragment of destiny only, but in this falls in 
 with the way life in others is known to us ; if 
 it passes into the superhuman world, it must 
 retain human significance and be brought back 
 to man's life by devices similar to those used in 
 the type for the same purpose ; it rises in value 
 in proportion to the universality it contains, 
 and gains depth and permanence as it is inter- 
 pretative of common human fate at all times 
 and among all men ; it may be purely imaginary 
 or founded on actual incidents; and its exem- 
 plary interpretation of man's life is its sub- 
 stance, and constitutes its ideality. 
 
 In the discussion of type and plot, the con- 
 crete nature of the world of art, which was 
 originally stated to be the characteristic work 
 of the creative reason, or imagination acting in 
 conformity with truth, has been assumed ; but 
 no reason has been given for it, because it 
 seemed best to develop first with some fulness 
 the nature of that inward order which is thus 
 projected in the forms of art. It belongs to the 
 frailty of man that he seizes with difficulty and 
 holds with feebleness the pure ideas of the 
 intellect, the more in proportion as they are 
 removed from sense ; and he seeks to support
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 113 
 
 himself against this weakness by framing sen- 
 sible representations of the abstract in which 
 the mind can rest. Thus in all lands and 
 among savage tribes, as well as in the most 
 civilized nations, symbols have been used im- 
 memorially. The flag of a nation has all its 
 meaning because it is taken as a physical token 
 of national honour, almost of national life itself. 
 The Moslem crescent, the Christian cross, have 
 only a similar significance, a bringing near to 
 the eye of what exists in reality only for the 
 mind and heart. A symbol, however, is an ar- 
 bitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a meta- 
 phor does to the thing itself. In literature the 
 parable of the mustard seed to which the king- 
 dom of heaven was likened, exemplifies sym- 
 bolical or metaphorical method; but the tale 
 of the court of Arthur's knights, ideal method ; 
 between them, and sharing something of both, 
 lies allegorical method. Idolatry is the religion 
 of symbolism, for the image is not the god; 
 Christianity is the religion of idealism, for 
 Christ is God incarnate. Idealism presents the 
 reality itself, the universal truth made manifest 
 in the concrete type, and there present and 
 embodied in its characteristics as they are, not
 
 114 HEART OF MAN 
 
 merely arbitrarily by a fiction of thought, sym- 
 bolically or allegorically. 
 
 The way in which type concretes truth is 
 sufficiently plain; but it may be useful, with 
 respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the 
 analogy which has been said to exist between 
 it and an illustrative scientific experiment. If 
 scientific law is declared experimentally, the 
 course of nature is modified by intent ; certain 
 conditions are secured, certain others elimi- 
 nated; a selected train of phenomena is then 
 set in motion to the end that the law may 
 be illustrated, and nothing else. In a perfect 
 experiment the law is in full operation. In 
 plot there is a like selection of persons, situa- 
 tions, and incidents so arranged as to disclose 
 the working of that order which obtains in 
 man's life. The law may be simple and shown 
 by means of few persons and incidents in a brief 
 way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhib- 
 ited with many characters in an abundance of 
 action over a wide scene as in Shakspere ; in 
 either case equally there is a selection from the 
 whole mass of man's life of what shall illus- 
 trate the causal union in its order and show 
 it in action. The process in the epic or prose
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 115 
 
 narrative is the same. The common method of 
 all is to present the universal law in a particu- 
 lar instance made for the purpose. 
 
 In thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth 
 suffers no transformation; it remains what it 
 was, general truth, the very essence of type and 
 plot being, as has been said, to preserve this 
 universality in the particular instance. There 
 is a sense in which this general truth is more 
 real, as Plato thought, than particulars ; a sense 
 in which the phenomenal world is less real than 
 the system of nature, for phenomena come and 
 go, but the law remains ; a sense in which the 
 order in man's breast is more real than he is, in 
 whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the 
 mould of law, are permanent, but their expres- 
 sion in us transitory. It is this higher realism, 
 as it was anciently called, that the mind strives 
 for in idealism, this organic form of life, the 
 object of all rational knowledge. Types, under 
 their concrete disguise, are thus only a part of 
 the general notions of the mind found in every 
 branch of knowledge and necessary to thought ; 
 plots, similarly, are only a part of the general 
 laws of the ordered world ; literature in using 
 them, and specializing them in concrete form
 
 118 HEART OF MAN 
 
 by which alone they differ in appearance from 
 like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails 
 itself of that condensing faculty of the mind 
 which most economizes mental effort and loads 
 conceptions with knowledge. In the type it is 
 not personal, but human character that interests 
 the mind ; in plot, it is not personal, but human 
 fate. 
 
 While it is true that the object of ideal 
 method is to reach universals, and reembody 
 them in particular instances, this reasoning ac- 
 tion is often obscurely felt by the imagination 
 in its creative process. The very fact that its 
 operation is through the concrete complicates 
 the process. The mind of genius working out 
 its will does not usually start with a logical 
 attempt consciously ; it does not arrive at truth 
 in the abstract and then reduce it to concrete 
 illustration in any systematic way ; it does not 
 select the law and then shape the plot. TJie 
 poet is rather directly interested in certain char- 
 acters and events that appeal to him ; his sym- 
 pathies are aroused, and he procgjada-io show 
 forth, to interpret, to create ; and in proportion 
 as the characters he sets in motion and the 
 circumstances in which they are placed have
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 117 
 
 moulding force, they will develop traits and 
 express themselves in influences that he did not 
 foresee. This is a matter of familiar know- 
 ledge to authors, who frequently discover in the 
 trend of the imaginary tale a will of its own, 
 which has its unforeseen way. The drama or 
 story, once set in motion, tends to tell itself, 
 just as life tends to develop in the world. The 
 vitality of the clay it works in, is one of the 
 curious experiences of genius, and occasions 
 that mood of mystery in relation to their crea- 
 tures frequently observed in great writers. In 
 fact, this mode of working in the concrete, 
 which is characteristic of the creative imagina- 
 tion, gives to its activity an inductive and ex- 
 perimental character, not to be confounded with 
 the demonstrative act of the intellect which 
 states truth after knowing it, and not in the 
 moment of its discovery. In literature this 
 moment of discovery is what makes that flash 
 which is sometimes called intuition, and is one 
 of the great charms of genius. 
 
 The concrete nature of ideal art, to touch 
 conveniently here upon a related though minor 
 topic, is also the reason that it expresses more 
 than its creator is aware of. In imaging life he
 
 118 HEART OF MAN 
 
 includes more reality than he attends to; but 
 if his representation has been made with truth, 
 others may perceive phases of reality that he 
 neglected. It is the mark of genius, as has 
 hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmen- 
 tarily, but in the whole. So, in a scientific 
 experiment, intended to illustrate one particu- 
 lar form of energy, a spectator versed in another 
 science may detect some truth belonging in his 
 own field. This richer significance of great 
 works is especially found where the union of 
 the general and the particular is strong ; where 
 the fusion is complete, as in Hamlet. In a 
 sense he is more real than living men, and we 
 can analyze his nature, have doubts about his 
 motives, judge differently of his character, and 
 value his temperament more or less as one 
 might with a friend. The more imaginative a 
 character is, in the sense that his personality 
 and experience are given in the whole so that 
 one feels the bottom of reality there, the more 
 significance it has. Thus in the world of art 
 discoveries beyond the intention of the writer 
 may be made as in the actual world; so much 
 of reality does it contain. 
 
 Will it be said that, in making primary the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 119 
 
 universal contents and spiritual significance of 
 type and plot, I have made literature didactic, 
 as if the word should stop my mouth ? If it is 
 meant by this that I maintain that literature 
 conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since 
 only thus can it interest the mind which has its 
 whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in 
 the possession of truth. But if it be meant that 
 abstract or moral instruction has been made the 
 business of literature, the charge may be met 
 with a disclaimer, as should be evident, first, 
 from the emphasis placed on its concrete deal- 
 ing with persons and actions. On the contrary, 
 literature fails in art precisely in proportion 
 as it becomes expressly such a teacher. Sec- 
 ondly, the life which literature organizes, the 
 whole of human nature in its relation to the 
 world, is nrany-sided; and imaginative genius, 
 the creative reason, grasps it in its totality. 
 The moral aspect is but one among many that 
 life wears. If ethics are implicit in the mass 
 of life, so also are beauty and passion, pathos, 
 humour, and terror; and in literature any one 
 of these may be the prominent phase at the 
 moment, forjiterature gives mjt. not, only piasi-., 
 tical moral wisdonv knfc.-flIL-tlia-rp.fl.lity pf Tiff*.
 
 120 HEART OF MAN 
 
 Literature is didactic in the reproachful sense 
 of the word only in proportion as type and plot 
 are distinctly separated from the truth they em- 
 body, and ceases to be so in proportion as these 
 are blended and unified. The fable is one of 
 the most ancient forms of such didactic litera- 
 ture ; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, 
 and animals are made the characters, in con- 
 sequence of which it has the touch of humour 
 inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing 
 at being men ; but the very fact that the moral 
 is of men and the tale is of beasts involves a 
 separation of the truth from its concrete embodi- 
 ment, and besides the moral is stated by itself. 
 In the Oriental apologue an advance is made. 
 The parables of our Lord, in particular, are 
 admirable examples of its method. T,he char-^ 
 acters are few, the situations common, the ac- 
 tion simple, and the moral truth or lesson 
 enforceH is so completely clothed in the tale 
 that it needs no explanation ; at the same time, 
 the mind is awarerof the teacher. In the higher 
 forms of literature, however, the fusion of ethics 
 with life may be complete. Here the poet works 
 so subtly that the mind is not aware of the 
 illumination of this light which comes without
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 121 
 
 the violence of the preacher, until after the fact ; 
 and, indeed, the effect is wrought more through 
 the sympathies than the reason. In such a case 
 literature, though it conveys moral with other 
 kinds of truth, is not open to the charge of 
 didacticism, which is valid only when teaching 
 is explicit and abstract. The educative power 
 of literature, however, is not diminished because 
 in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, 
 which by its very definiteness is inelastic and 
 narrow; in fact, the more imaginative a char- 
 acter is, the more fruitful it may be even in 
 moral truth ; it may teach, as has been said, 
 what the poet never dreamed his work con- 
 tained. 
 
 If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, 
 the subject-matter of literature is life in the 
 forms of personality and experience, and the 
 particular facts with respect to these are gener- 
 alized by means of type and plot in concrete 
 form, and so are set forth as phases of an 
 ordered world for the intelligence, to the end 
 that man may know himself in the same way 
 as he knows nature in its living system if this 
 be so, what standing have those who would re- 
 strict literature to the actual in life ? who would
 
 122 HEART OF MAN 
 
 replace ideal types of manhood by the men of 
 the time, and the ordered drama of the stage by 
 the medley of life? They deny art, which is the 
 instrument of the creative reason, to literature ; 
 for as soon as art, which is the process of creat- 
 ing a rational world, begins, the necessity for 
 selection arises, and with it the whole question 
 of values, facts being no longer equal among 
 themselves on the score of actuality, nor in 
 fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, the 
 accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and 
 there will be no stopping short of the end ; for 
 art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no 
 other than the method of all reason, wherefore 
 idealism is to it what abstraction is to logic and 
 induction to natural science, the breath of 
 its rational being. Those who hold to realism 
 in its extreme form, as a representation of the 
 actual only, behave as if one should say to 
 the philosopher leave this formulation of 
 general notions and be content with sensible 
 objects ; or to the scientist experiment no 
 more, but observe the course of nature as it may 
 chance to arise, and describe it in its succession. 
 They bid us be all eye, no mind ; all sense, no 
 thought ; all chance, all confusion, no order,
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 123 
 
 no organization, no fabric of the reason. But 
 there are no such realists ; though pure realism 
 has its place, as will hereafter be shown, it is 
 usually found mixed with ideal method; and 
 as commonly employed the word designates the 
 preference merely for types and plots of much 
 detail, of narrow application, of little meaning, 
 in opposition to the highly generalized and sig- 
 nificant types and plots usually associated with 
 the term idealism. In what way such realism 
 has its place will also appear at a later stage. 
 Here it is necessary to say no more than that 
 in proportion as realism uses the ideal method 
 only at the lowest, it narrows its appeal, weak 
 ens its power, and takes from literature her 
 highest distinction by virtue of which she 
 grasps the whole of character and fate in her 
 creation and informs man of the secrets of his 
 human heart, the course of his mortal destiny, 
 and the end of all his spiritual effort and aspi- 
 ration. 
 
 I am aware that I have not proceeded so 
 far without starting objections. To meet that 
 which is most grave, what shall I say when 
 it is alleged that there is no order such as I 
 have assumed in life ; or, if there be, that it is
 
 124 HEART OF MAN 
 
 insufficiently known, too intangible and com- 
 plex, too various in different races and ages, to 
 be made the subject of such an exposition as 
 obtains of natural order? Were this assertion 
 true, yet there would be good reason to retain 
 our illusion : for the mind delights in order, and 
 will invent it. The mind is perplexed and dis- 
 turbed until it finds this order ; and in the pro- 
 gressive integration of its experience into an 
 ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure 
 to the intellect, because in its structure what- 
 ever is superfluous and extrinsic has been elimi- 
 nated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic 
 work as a unity of relations bound each to each 
 which it fully comprehends. Such works, we say, 
 have form, which is just this interdependence 
 of parts wholly understood which appeals to the 
 intellect, and satisfies it : they would please the 
 mind, though the order they embody were 
 purely imaginary, just as science would de- 
 light it, were the order of nature itself illusory. 
 Creative art would thus still have a ground of 
 being under a sceptical philosophy ; man would 
 delight to dream his dream. But it is not 
 necessary to take this lower line of argument. 
 It does not appear to me to be open to ques-
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 125 
 
 tion that there is in the soul of man a nature 
 and an order obtaining in it as permanent and 
 universal as in the material world. The soul 
 of man has a common being in all. There could 
 be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphys- 
 ics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to 
 the identity of mind in all, nor any science of 
 ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to 
 the identity of the will in all, nor any ground 
 of expression even, of communication between 
 man and man, on the hypothesis of any radical 
 difference in the experience and faculties to 
 which all expression appeals for its intelligi- 
 bility ; neither could there be any system of 
 life in social groups, or plan for education, 
 unless such a common basis is accepted. The 
 postulate of a common human nature is analo- 
 gous to that of the unity of matter in science ; 
 it finds its complete expression in the doctrine 
 of the brotherhood of man, for if race be funda- 
 mentally distinguished from race as was once 
 thought, it is only as element is distinguished 
 from element in the old chemistry. So, too, the 
 postulate of an order obtaining in the soul, uni- 
 versal and necessary, independent of man's voli- 
 tion, analogous in all respects to the order of
 
 126 HEART OF MAN 
 
 nature, is parallel with that of the constancy of 
 physical law. A rational life expects this order. 
 The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that 
 of natural law, by experience ; in the social 
 world the relations of men to one another 
 and in the more important region of our own 
 nature we learn the issue of certain courses of 
 action as well as in the external world ; in our 
 own lives and in our dealings with others we 
 come to a knowledge of, and a conformity to, 
 the conditions under which we live, the laws 
 operant in our being, as well as those of the phys- 
 ical world. Literature assumes this order; in 
 ^Eschylus, Cervantes, or Shakspere, it is this 
 that gives their work interest. Apart from nat- 
 ural science, the whole authority of the past 
 in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon 
 the permanence of this order, and its capacity 
 to be known by man ; that virtue makes men 
 noble and vice renders them base, is a statement 
 without meaning unless this order is continuous 
 through ages ; all principles of action, all 
 schemes of culture, would be uncertain except 
 on this foundation. 
 
 So near is this order to us that it was known 
 long before science came to any maturity.
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 127 
 
 We have added, in truth, little to our know- 
 ledge of humanity since the Greeks; and if 
 one wonders why ethics came before science, 
 let him own at least that its priority shows that 
 it is near and vital in life as science is not. 
 We can do, it seems, without Kepler's laws, but 
 not without the Decalogue. The race acquires 
 first what is most needful for life ; and man's 
 heart was always with him, and his fate near. A 
 second reason, it may be noted, for the later 
 development of science is that our senses, as 
 used by science, are more mental now, and the 
 object itself is observable only by the interven- 
 tion of the mind through the telescope or micro- 
 scope or a hundred instruments into which, 
 though physical, the mind enters. Our meth- 
 ods, too, as well as our instruments, are things 
 of the mind. It behooves us to remember in an 
 age which science is commonly thought to have 
 materialized, that more and more the mind 
 enters into all results, and fills an ever larger 
 place in life; and this should serve to make 
 materialism seem more and more what it is 
 a savage conception. But recognizing the 
 great place of mind in modern science, and 
 its growing illumination of our earthly sys-
 
 128 HEART OF MAN 
 
 tern, I am not disposed to discredit its earli- 
 est results in art and morals. I find in this 
 penetration of the order of the world within 
 us our most certain truth ; and as our bodies 
 exist only by virtue of sharing in the general 
 order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have 
 being only by sharing in this order of the 
 inward, the spiritual world. 
 
 What, then, is this order? We do not 
 merely contemplate it : we are immersed in it, 
 it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and 
 move and have our being, ever more and more 
 in proportion as the soul's life outvalues the 
 body in our experience. It is necessary to ex- 
 pand our conception of it. Hitherto it has been 
 presented only as an order of truth appealing 
 to the intellect: but the intellect is only one 
 function of the soul, and thinkers are the 
 merest fraction of mankind. We know this 
 order not only as truth, but as righteousness ; we 
 know that certain choices end in enlarging and 
 invigorating our faculties, and other choices 
 in their enfeeblement and extinction ; and the 
 race adds, acting under the profound motive of 
 self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one 
 thing and avoid the other, and stores up this
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 129 
 
 doctrine in conscience. We know this order 
 again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends 
 some choices, and sorrow others; and again 
 under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices 
 result in beauty and others in deformity. 
 What I maintain is that this order exists under 
 four aspects, and may be learned in any of them 
 as an order of truth in the reason, as an order 
 of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the 
 emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. 
 It is the same order, the same body of law, oper- 
 ating in each case ; it is the vital force of our 
 fourfold life, it has one unity in the intellect, 
 the will, the emotions, the senses, is equal to 
 the whole nature of man, and responds to him 
 and sustains him on every side. A lover of 
 beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot 
 wander if he follow beauty ; nor a cold thinker 
 err, though without a moral sense, if he accept 
 truth ; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure 
 joy merely, if they act according to knowledge 
 each in his sphere. The course of action that 
 increases life may be selected because it is rea- 
 sonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and 
 therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the 
 things that are beautiful, the things that are
 
 130 HEART OF MAN 
 
 joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things 
 that are right, and all else shall be added unto 
 you. The binding force in this order is what 
 literature, ideal literature, most brings out and 
 emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal 
 union which has hitherto been spoken of in the 
 region of plot only ; but it exists in every aspect 
 of this order, and literature universalizes ex- 
 perience in all these realms, in the provinces 
 of beauty and passion no less than in those of 
 virtue and knowledge, and its method is the 
 same in all. 
 
 Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order 
 in its principles, in those relations of its phe- 
 nomena which constitute its laws, of the high 
 est importance of anything of human concern? 
 In harmony with these laws, and only thus, we 
 ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, 
 
 righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal litera- 
 
 * , ' * '"*' in .^ 
 
 ture this knowledge is found, expressed, and 
 handed down age after age the knowledge 
 of necessary and permanent relations in these 
 great spheres which, taken together, exhaust 
 the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is 
 strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity 
 in the sequence of will and act; his intellect
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 131 
 
 is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, 
 are strong in the same way in proportion as 
 he apprehends necessity in each several field 
 of experience. And conversely, the weakness of 
 the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to 
 realize relations of fact in their logic ; and the 
 other faculties, in proportion as they fail to 
 realize such relations in their own region, have 
 a similar incapacity. Insanity, in the broad 
 sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapa- 
 ble of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnor- 
 mal or diseased ; but the state of error, whether 
 more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, 
 whether curable or incurable, in itself is the 
 same. To take an example from one sphere, in 
 the moral world the criminal through ignorance 
 of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme 
 divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own 
 power solitarily as if he might be a law unto 
 himself; he experiences, without the interven- 
 tion of any human judge, the condemnation 
 which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinc- 
 tion through the decay and death of his nature, 
 as a moral being, stage by stage ; this is God's 
 justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and 
 to most more obviously, in society itself, the
 
 132 HEART OF MAN 
 
 criminal against society, because he does not 
 understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept 
 arbitrary social law as the means by which 
 necessarily the general good, including his own, 
 is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own 
 intelligence, his cunning, in his search for pros- 
 perity, as he conceives it, by an adaptation of 
 means to ends on his own account. This is why 
 the imperfection of human law is sometimes a 
 just excuse for social crime in those whom 
 society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. 
 But whether in God's world or in man's, the 
 mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from 
 reliance on the whole fabric for whatever rea- 
 son, pulverizes because he fails to realize the 
 necessary relations of the world in which he 
 lives in their normal operation, and has no 
 effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant 
 in his nature or over his fortunes. This was 
 the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that 
 all sin is ignorance ; but Plato did not take 
 account of any possible depravity in the will. 
 Nor is what has been illustrated above true of 
 the mind and the will only. In the region of 
 emotion and of beauty, there may be similar 
 aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 133 
 
 nature, in organic relation to the whole of 
 life. 
 
 These several parts of our being are not inde- 
 pendent of one another, but are in the closest 
 alliance. They act conjointly and with one result 
 in the single soul in which they find their unity 
 as various energies of one personal power. It 
 cannot be that contradiction should arise among 
 them in their right operation, nor the error of 
 one continue undetected by the others ; that the 
 base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful 
 in reality, is impossible. In the narrow view 
 the lust of the eye and the pride of life may 
 seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of 
 the inward world they take on ugliness ; in the 
 moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the 
 backward reach of memory they take on pain ; 
 to assert eternity against the moment, to see 
 life in the whole, to live as if all of life were 
 concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of 
 the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, 
 all together. To represent a villain as attrac- 
 tive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents 
 the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived 
 by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but 
 he was not so to Milton's imagination. " The
 
 134 HEART OF MAN 
 
 infernal Serpent " is the first name the poet 
 gives him ; and though sublime imagery of 
 gloom and terror is employed to depict his 
 diminished brightness and inflamed malice, 
 Milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him 
 to the eye, as when in Paradise he is surprised 
 at the ear of Eve " squat like a toad " ; and 
 when he springs up in his own form there, as 
 the " grisly king," he mourns most his beauty 
 lost; neither is his resolute courage long ad- 
 mirable. To me, at least, so far from having 
 any heroic quality, he seems always the malign 
 fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent re- 
 venge. In all great creations of art it is neces- 
 sary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, 
 reasonpand joy should be preserved. 
 
 It is true that the supremacy of law in this 
 inward world, so constituted, is less realized than 
 in the physical world ; but even in the latter the 
 wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent 
 thing, and in some parts of nature it is still 
 lightly felt, especially in those which touch the 
 brain most nearly, while under the stress of ex- 
 ceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional 
 religious beliefs it often breaks down. But if 
 the order of the material universe seems now a
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 136 
 
 more settled thing than the spiritual law of the 
 soul, once the case was reversed; God was 
 known and nature miraculous. It must be 
 remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness 
 of faith, that we are born bodily into the physi- 
 cal world and are forced to live under its law; 
 but life in the spiritual world is more a matter 
 of choice, at least in respect to its degree ; its 
 phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our 
 development and growth, on our living habitu- 
 ally and intelligently in our higher nature, the 
 laws of which as communicated to us by other 
 minds are in part prophecies of experience not 
 yet actual in ourselves. It is the touchstone of 
 experience, after all, that tries all things in both 
 worlds, and experience in the spiritual world 
 may be long delayed ; it is power of mind that 
 makes wide generalizations in both ; and the con- 
 ception of spiritual law is the most refined as 
 perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts. 
 The expansion of the conception of ideal lit- 
 erature so as to embrace these other aspects, in 
 addition to that of rational knowledge which has 
 thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires 
 us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, 
 joy, and conscience, in which, though generali-
 
 136 HEART OP MAN 
 
 zation remains its intellectual method, it does 
 not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is 
 not enough to show that the creative reason in 
 its intellectual process employs that common 
 method which is the parent of all true know- 
 ledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which 
 is the divine order in the soul, holds the pri- 
 macy among man's faculties; the story were 
 then left half told, and the better part yet to 
 come. To enlighten the mind is a great func- 
 tion ; but in the mass of mankind there areTew 
 who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on 
 the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. 
 Idealism does not confine its service to the 
 narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a, 
 second and greater office, which is to charm 
 the soul. So characteristic of it is this power, 
 so eminent and shining, that thence only springs 
 the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing 
 from the word itself. Idealism, indeed, by the 
 garment of sense does not so much clothe 
 wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the Greek 
 sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic 
 folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, 
 and she imposes upon man no harder task than 
 the mere beholding of that sight
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 137 
 
 " Virtue in her shape how lovely," 
 
 which since it first abashed the devil in Para- 
 dise makes wrong-doers aware of their deform- 
 ity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating 
 might, such fascination for all finer spirits, 
 that they have ever believed with their master, 
 Plato, that should truth show her countenance 
 unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would 
 worship and follow her. 
 
 The images of Plato those images in which 
 alone he could adequately body forth his intui- 
 tions of eternity present the twofold attitude 
 of our nature, in mind and heart, toward the 
 ideal with vivid distinctness ; and they illus- 
 trate the more intimate power of beauty, the 
 more fundamental reach of emotion, and the 
 richness of their mutual life in the soul. Un- 
 der the aspect of truth he likens our know- 
 ledge of the ideal to that which the prisoners 
 of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; 
 under the aspect of beauty he figures our love 
 for it as that of the passionate lover. As truth, 
 again, taking up in his earliest days what 
 seems the primitive impulse and first thought of 
 man everywhere and at all times, under the 
 image of the golden chain let down from the
 
 138 HEART OF MAN 
 
 throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly 
 origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by 
 divine inspiration possessing the poet as its pas- 
 sive instrument ; and later, bringing in now the 
 cooperation of man in the act, he again pre- 
 sents the ideal as known by reminiscence of 
 the soul's eternal life before birth, which is 
 only a more defined and rationalized concep- 
 tion of inspiration working normally instead 
 of by the special act and favour of God. As 
 beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm 
 evoked by the ideal in the image of the chari- 
 oteer of the white and black horses mastering 
 them to the goal of love. In these various 
 ways the first idealist thought out these dis- 
 tinctions of truth and beauty as having a real 
 community, though a divided life in the mind 
 and heart ; and, as he developed, and this is 
 the significant matter, the poet in him con- 
 trolling his speech told ever more eloquently 
 of the charm with which beauty draws the soul 
 unto itself, fqr to the poet beauty is nearer than 
 truth. It is the persuasion with which he sets 
 forth this charm, rather than his speculation, 
 which has fastened upon him the love of later 
 ages. He was the first to discern in truth and
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 139 
 
 beauty equal powers of one divine being, and 
 thus to effect the most important reconciliation 
 ever made in human nature. 
 
 So, too, from the other great source of the 
 race's wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that 
 though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to 
 lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be 
 healed; for every ray of that outward loveli- 
 ness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to 
 the heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, 
 and incited to seek virtue with true desire. 
 Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the 
 poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitive- 
 ness. At the height of Hebrew genius in the 
 personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive 
 grace, the noble beauty of the present life incar- 
 nated in his acts and words, the divine reality 
 on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world 
 removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean 
 hill. The years lived under the Syrian blue 
 were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty 
 which has since shone in its purity on men's 
 gaze. It is this loveliness which needs only 
 to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions 
 are enlisted ; and, however we may slight them 
 in practice, the habit of emotion more than the
 
 140 HEART OF MAN 
 
 habit of mind enters into and fixes inward 
 character. More men are saved by the heart 
 than by the head; more youths are drawn to 
 excellence by noble feelings than are coldly 
 reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. 
 Some there are among men so colourless in blood 
 that they embrace the right on the mere calcu- 
 lation of advantage, but they seem to possess 
 only an earthly virtue ; some, beholding the 
 order of the world, desire to put themselves in 
 tune with nature and the soul's law, and these 
 are of a better sort; but most fortunate are 
 they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not 
 in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to 
 implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light 
 of her face as it first comes to them with ripen- 
 ing years in the sweet and noble nature of those 
 they grow to love and honour among the living 
 and the dead. For this is Achilles made brave, 
 that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it 
 were little to see the story of Pelops' line if the 
 emotions were not awakened, not merely for a 
 few moments of intense action of their own 
 play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow 
 of the creative imagination has been once men- 
 tioned in the point that it is often more ab-
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 141 
 
 sorbed in the beauty and passion than in the 
 intellectual significance of its work ; here, cor- 
 respondingly, it is by the heart to which it 
 appeals rather than by the mind it illumines 
 that it takes hold of youth. 
 
 What, then, is the nature of this emotional 
 appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, 
 pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? 
 It is the keystone of the inward nature, that 
 which binds all together in the arch of life. 
 Emotion has some ground, some incitement 
 which calls it forth ; and it responds with most 
 energy to beauty. In the strictest sense beauty 
 is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured 
 space and appeals to the eye ; it is in space what 
 plot is in time. Like plot, it is deeply engaged 
 in the outward world ; it exists in the sensuous 
 order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order 
 in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the 
 body beautiful, as Spenser thought, the mood, 
 the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the 
 like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, 
 feature, and attitude. It is primarily an out- 
 ward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of 
 personality, is an inward thing ; what the neces- 
 sary sequence of events, the chain of causation,
 
 142 HEART OF MAN 
 
 is to plot, its cardinal idea, that the neces- 
 sary harmony of parts, the chime of line and 
 colour, is to beauty ; thus beauty is as inevitable 
 as fate, as structurally planted in the form and 
 colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal 
 movement. And as plot has its characteristic 
 unity in the impersonal order of God's will, 
 shown in time's event, so beauty has its char- 
 acteristic unity in the same order shown in 
 the visible creation of space. It is true that 
 all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and 
 are conditioned, as is said, by human modes 
 of perception ; but within the limits of the 
 relativity of all our knowledge, beauty is ini- 
 tially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and 
 though the structure of the human eye arranges 
 the harmonies of line and colour, it is no more 
 than as the form of human thought arranges 
 cause and effect and other primary relations 
 in things; beauty does not in becoming hu- 
 manly known cease to be known as a thing 
 external, independent of our will, and imposed 
 on us from without. It is this outward real- 
 ity, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and 
 painting add in their types to the interpre- 
 tation they otherwise give of personality, and
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 143 
 
 often in them this physical element is pre- 
 dominant; and in the purely decorative arts 
 it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in 
 the realm of beauty, personality altogether dis- 
 appears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted 
 in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its 
 Creator ; for the reflection which the presence 
 of man may cast upon nature as his shadow is 
 not expressive of any true personality there 
 abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of 
 Narcissus into the brook. The pleasure which 
 the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its 
 general delight in order of any sort ; and visible 
 artistic form as abstracted from the world of 
 space is merely a species of organic form and 
 is included in it. 
 
 The eye, however, governs so large a part of 
 the sensuous field, the idea of beauty as a unity 
 of space-relations giving pleasure is so simple, 
 and the experience is so usual, that the word 
 has been carried over to the life of the more 
 limited senses in which analogous phenomena 
 arise, differing only in the fact that they exist 
 in another sense. Thus in the dominion of the 
 ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty 
 of music ; but the life of the minor senses,
 
 144 HEART OF MAN 
 
 touch, taste, and smell, is composed of too 
 simple elements to allow of such combination 
 as would constitute specific form in ordinary 
 apprehension, though in the blind and deaf 
 the possibility of high and intelligible com- 
 plexity in these senses is proved. Similarly, 
 the term is carried over to the invisible and 
 inaudible world of the soul within itself, and 
 we speak of the beauty of Sidney's act, of 
 Romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the 
 beauty of holiness, and, in a still more re- 
 mote sphere, of the beauty of a demonstration 
 or a hypothesis ; by this usage we do not so 
 much describe the thing as convey the charm 
 of the thing. This charm is more intimate and 
 piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice 
 in visible loveliness or in heard melodies ; but 
 to the spiritually minded it may be as close and 
 penetrating in the presence of what is to them 
 dearer than life and light, and is beheld only by 
 the inner eye. It is this charm, whether flow- 
 ing from the outward semblance or shining from 
 the unseen light, that wins the heart, stirs emo- 
 tion, wakes the desire to be one with this order 
 manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and 
 the body of things, to go out toward it in love,
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 145 
 
 to identify one's being with it as the order 
 of life, mortal and immortal ; last the will 
 quickens, and its effort to make this order pre- 
 vail in us and possess us is virtue. The act 
 through all its phases is, as has been said, one 
 act of the soul, which first perceives, then loves, 
 and finally wills. Emotion is the intermediary 
 between the divine order and the human will; 
 it responds to the beauty of the one and directs 
 the choice of the other, and is felt in either 
 function as love controlling life in the new 
 births of the spirit. 
 
 The emotion, to return to the world of art, 
 which is felt in the presence of imaginary 
 things is actual in us; but tho attempt is 
 made to fix upon it a special character differ- 
 entiating it from the emotion felt in the pres- 
 ence of reality. One principle of difference 
 is sought in the point that in literature, or 
 in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no 
 action ; it has no outlet, and is without prac- 
 tical consequences ; the will is paralyzed by the 
 fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of 
 events, and in the case of the object of beauty 
 in statue or painting by the impossibility of 
 possession. The world of art is thus thought
 
 146 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of as one of pure contemplation, a place of 
 escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the 
 incompleteness that beset all action. It is true 
 that the imagined world creates special condi- 
 tions for emotion, and that the will does not act 
 in respect to that world; but does this imply 
 any radical difference in the emotion, or does 
 it draw after it the consequence that the will 
 does not act at all ? Checked emotion, emotion 
 dying in its own world, is common in life ; and 
 so, too, is contemplation as a mode of approach 
 to beauty, as in landscape, or even in human 
 figures where there is no thought of any other 
 possession than the presence of beauty before 
 the eye and soul ; escape, too, into a sphere of 
 impersonality, in the love of nature or the 
 spectacle of life, is a common refuge. Art 
 does not give us new faculties, generate un- 
 known habits, or in any way change our nature ; 
 it presents to us a new world only, toward 
 which our mental behaviour is the same as in 
 the rest of life. Why, then, should emotion, 
 the most powerful element in life, be regarded 
 as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has 
 thus far appeared as a life in purer energy and 
 higher intensity of being than life itself ?
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 147 
 
 The distinction between emotion depicted 
 and that felt in response must be kept in mind 
 to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present 
 at the same time. In^JLitei'ature^emotion may 
 be set forth as a phase of the character or as 
 a term in the plot ; it may be a single moment 
 of high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged 
 experience as in a drama ; it may be shown in 
 the pure type of some one passion as in Romeo, 
 or in the various moods of a rich nature as in 
 Hamlet ; but, whether it be predominant or 
 subordinate in any work, it is there treated in 
 the same way and for the same purpose as 
 other materials of life. What happens when 
 literature gives us, for instance, examples of 
 moral experience? It informs the mind of the 
 normal course of certain lines of action, of the 
 inevitable issues of life ; it breeds habits of right 
 thinking in respect to these ; it is educative, and 
 though we do not act at once upon this know- 
 ledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared 
 to act. So, when, literature presents examples 
 of emotional experience, it informs us of the 
 nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and 
 results, its value in character, its influence on 
 action, the modes of its expression; it breeds 
 
 MMBMWMM
 
 148 HEAET OF MAN 
 
 habits of right thinking in respect to these, and 
 is educative ; and, just as in the preceding case, 
 though we do not act at once upon this know- 
 ledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared 
 to act. Concurrently with emotions thus objec- 
 tively presented there arises in us a similar 
 series of emotions in the beholding; by sym- 
 pathy we ourselves feel what is before us, the 
 emotions there are also in us in proportion as 
 we identify ourselves with the character; or, 
 in proportion as our own individuality asserts 
 itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of 
 hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for 
 the character or of terror in the feeling that 
 what has happened to one may happen to us 
 in our humanity. We are taught in a more 
 intimate and vital way than through ideas 
 alone ; the lesson has entered into our bosoms ; 
 we have lived the life. Literature is thus far 
 more powerfully educative emotionally than 
 intellectually ; and if the poet has worked with 
 wisdom, he has bred in us habits of right feel- 
 ing in respect to life, he has familiarized our 
 hearts with love and anger, with compassion 
 and fear, with courage, with resolve, has exer- 
 cised us in them upon their proper occasions
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 14C 
 
 and in their noble expression, has opened to us 
 the world of emotion as it ought to be in show- 
 ing us that world as it is in men with all its 
 possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruc- 
 tion. This is the service which literature per- 
 forms in this field. Imagination shows us a 
 scheme of emotion attending the scheme of 
 events and presents it in its general connection 
 with life, in simple, powerful, and complete ex- 
 pression, on the lines of inevitable law in its 
 sphere. We go out from the sway of this im- 
 agined world, more sensitive to life, more acces- 
 sible to emotion, more likely and more capable, 
 when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to 
 carry that feeling out into an act. In all litera- 
 ture the knowledge gained objectively, whether 
 of action or emotion, is a preparation for life ; 
 but this intimate experience of emotion in con- 
 nection with an imagined world is a more vital 
 preparation, and enters more directly, easily, 
 and effectually into men's bosoms. 
 
 Two particular phases of this educative power 
 should be specifically mentioned. The objective 
 presentation of emotion in literature, as has 
 been often observed, corrects the perspective of 
 our own lives, as does also the action which it
 
 150 HEART OF MAN 
 
 envelops ; and by showing to us emotion in 
 intense energy, which by this intensity corre- 
 sponds to high type and important plot, and in 
 a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary 
 life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and 
 more justly to estimate the petty trials, the 
 vexations, the insignificant experiences of our 
 career; we see our lives in a truer relation to 
 life in general, and avoid an overcharged feel- 
 ing in regard to our private fortune. And, sec- 
 ondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is 
 educative in the point that by this outlet we go 
 out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, 
 and become one with man in general. This is 
 an escape ; but not such as has been previously 
 spoken of, for it is not a retreat. There is no 
 escape for us, except into the lives of others. 
 In nature it is still our own face we see ; and 
 before the ideal creations of art we are still 
 aware, for all our contemplation, of the inef- 
 fable yearning of the thwarted soul, of the 
 tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, 
 which is the measure of our separation there- 
 from, and is fundamental in the poetic tempera- 
 ment. This is that pain, which Plato speaks of 
 the pain of the growing of the wings of the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 151 
 
 spirit as they unfold. But in passing into the 
 lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in 
 taking on ourselves the burden of humanity, we 
 escape from our self-prison, we leave individ- 
 uality behind, we unite with man in common ; 
 so we die to ourselves in order to live in lives 
 not ours. In literature, sympathy and that 
 imagination by which we enter into and com- 
 prehend other lives are most trained arid devel- 
 oped, made habitual, instinctive, and quick. It 
 begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not 
 only one with our nature intellectually, but in 
 all ways ; it is the path of the spirit in all 
 things. Moreover, emotion is in itself simple ; 
 it does not need generalization, it is the same 
 in all. It is rather a means of universalizing 
 the refinements of the intellect, the substantive 
 idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in 
 an elementary, primitive feeling which they call 
 forth. Poetry, therefore, especially deals, as 
 Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affec- 
 tions, the elementary passions of mankind ; and, 
 whatever be its intellectual contents of nature 
 or human events, calls these emotions forth as 
 the master-spirit of all our seeing. Emotion is 
 more fundamental in us than knowledge ; it
 
 152 HEART OF MAN 
 
 is more powerful in its working; it underlies 
 more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, 
 and in most of us it rules, as it influences in 
 all. It is natural, therefore, to find that its 
 operation in art is of graver importance than 
 that of the intellectual faculty so far as the 
 broad power of art over men is concerned. 
 
 Another special point arises from the fact 
 that some emotions are painful, and the ques- 
 tion is raised how in literature painful emotions 
 become a pleasure. Aristotle's doctrine in re- 
 spect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity 
 and terror, is well known, though variously in- 
 terpreted. He regards such emotions as a dis- 
 charge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, 
 in consequence of which their disturbing pres- 
 ence is less likely to recur in actual life ; it is 
 as if emotional energy accumulated, as vital 
 force is stored up and requires to be loosed in 
 bodily exercise ; but this, except in the point 
 that pity and terror, if they do accumulate in 
 their particular forms latently, are specifically 
 such as it is \vise to be rid of, does not differ- 
 entiate emotion from the rest of our powers in 
 all of which there is a similar pleasure in exer- 
 cising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 163 
 
 liability of immediate recurrence ; this belongs 
 to all expenditure of life. It is not credible to 
 me that painful emotion, under the illusions of 
 art, can become pleasurable in the common 
 sense; what pleasure there is arises only in 
 the climax and issue of the action, as in case 
 of the drama when the restoration of the order 
 that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs ; 
 in other words, in the presence of the final 
 poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed 
 elements of life. But here we come upon 
 darker and mysterious aspects of our general 
 subject, now to be slightly touched. Tragedy 
 dealing with the discords of life must present 
 painful spectacles ; and is saved to art only by 
 its just ending. Comedy, which similarly deals 
 with discords, is endurable only while these 
 remain painless. Both imply a defect in order, 
 and neither would have any place in a perfect 
 world, which would be without pity, fear, or 
 humour, all of which proceed from incongruities 
 in the scheme. Tragedy and comedy belong 
 alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or 
 ridiculous types of character and disorderly 
 events, to the confusion, ignorance, and igno- 
 minies of mankind ; the refinement of both is a
 
 154 HEART OF MAN 
 
 mark of progress in both art and civilization, 
 and foretells their own extinction, unless indeed 
 the principle of evil be more deeply implanted 
 in the universe than we fondly hope; pathos 
 and humour, which are the milder and the 
 kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must 
 also cease, for both are equally near to tears. 
 But before leaving this subject it is interesting 
 to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of 
 tragedy, where it was little thought of, the ap- 
 peal is made to man's whole nature as here out- 
 lined the plot replying to reason, the scene 
 to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emo- 
 tions, and poetic justice to the will, which thus 
 finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy 
 of the moral law in all tragic art. 
 
 This, then, being the nature of the ideal world 
 in its whole range commensurate with our be- 
 ing, and these the methods of its intellectual 
 and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the 
 world of art in itself, and especially its genesis 
 out of life. The method by which it is built up 
 has long been recognized to be that of imitation 
 of the actual, as has been assumed hitherto in 
 the statement that all art is concrete. But the 
 concrete which art creates is not a copy of the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 155 
 
 concrete of life ; it is more than this. The mind 
 takes the particulars of the world of sense into 
 itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a 
 new particular, which does not exist in nature ; 
 it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined 
 instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or 
 to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imi- 
 tation gives has been often and diversely ana- 
 lyzed ; it may be that of recognition, or that of 
 new knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if 
 the original were present, or that of delight in 
 the skill of the artist, or that of interest in see- 
 ing how his view differs from our own, or that 
 of the illusion created for us ; but all these 
 modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an 
 exact copy of the original, and they do not 
 characterize the artistic imitation in any way to 
 differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It is that 
 element which artistic imitation adds to actual- 
 ity, the difference between its created concrete 
 and the original out of which that was devel- 
 oped, which gives the special delight of art to 
 the mind. It is the perfection of the type, the 
 intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of 
 the plot, it is the pure and intelligible form 
 disclosed in the phases and movement of life, dis-
 
 156 HEART OF MAN 
 
 engaged and set apart for the contemplation of 
 the mind, it is the purging of the sensual eye, 
 enabling it to see through the mind as the mind 
 first saw through it, which renders the world of 
 art the new vision it is, the revelation accom- 
 plished by the mind for the senses. If the world 
 of art were only a reduplication of life, it would 
 give only the pleasures that have been men- 
 tioned; but its true pleasure is that which it 
 yields from its supersensual element, the reason 
 which has entered into it with ordering power. 
 In the world thus created there will remain the 
 imperfections which are due to the limitation of 
 the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice. 
 
 It will be said at once that all these concrete 
 representations necessarily fail to realize the 
 artist's thought, and are inadequate, inferior in 
 exactness, to scientific and philosophic know- 
 ledge ; in a measure this is true, and would be 
 important if the method of art were demonstra- 
 tive, instead of being, as has been said, experi- 
 mental and inductive. So, too, all thinkers, 
 using the actual world in their processes, are at 
 a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the 
 quantities of the chemist, the measurements of 
 the astronomer, are inexact approximations to
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 157 
 
 their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an em- 
 bodiment in mortal images, is subject to the con- 
 ditions of mortality. Hence arises its human 
 history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and 
 decline in successive ages. The course of art 
 is known ; it has been run many times ; it is a 
 simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensi- 
 ble form being rudely controlled by the artist's 
 hand ; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, 
 the form being adequate to the thought, a trans- 
 parent expression ; last, it is decadent, the form 
 being more than the thought, dwarfing it by 
 usurping attention on its own account. The 
 peculiar temptation of technique is always to 
 elaboration of detail ; technique is at first a 
 hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a 
 caprice ; and always as it goes on it loses sight 
 of the general in its rendering, and dwells with 
 a near eye on the specific. Nor is this attention 
 to detail confined to the manner; the hand of 
 the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no 
 longer the great types of manhood, the impor- 
 tant fates of life, the primary emotions in their 
 normal course, that are in the foreground of 
 thought, but the individual is more and more, the 
 sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling.
 
 168 HEART OF MAN 
 
 This tendency to detail, which is the hall- 
 mark of realism, constitutes decline. It arises 
 partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, 
 from the search for novelty of subject and 
 sensation, from the special phenomena of a 
 decaying society; but, however manifold may 
 be the causes, the fact of decline consists in 
 the lessened scope of the matter and the in- 
 creased importance of the form, both resulting 
 in luxuriant detail. Ideas as they lose gener- 
 ality gain in intensity, but in the history of art 
 this has not proved a compensation. In Greece 
 the three stages are clearly marked both in mat- 
 ter and manner, in ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and 
 Euripides ; in England less clearly in Marlowe, 
 Shakspere, and Webster. How monstrous in 
 the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet 
 more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, 
 Ford. In Greek sculpture, passing into con- 
 vulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed 
 voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the ro- 
 mantic poetry of this century with us, the same 
 stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tenny- 
 son in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are 
 aware of the style ; but both Virgil and Ten- 
 nyson remain classic in matter, in universality,
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 159 
 
 and the elemental in man. Browning in sub- 
 stance is Euripidean, being individualistic, psy- 
 chologic, problematic, with special pleading; 
 classicism had departed from him, and left not 
 even the style behind. The great opposition 
 lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know 
 ourselves in others ? Then art which is widely 
 interpretative of the common nature of man 
 results. Is it to know others as different 
 from ourselves ? Then art which is specially 
 interpretative of abnormal individuals in ex- 
 traordinary environments results. This is the 
 opposition between realism and idealism, while 
 both remain in the limits of art, as these terms 
 are commonly used. It belongs to realism 
 to tend to the concrete of narrow application, 
 but with fulness of special trait or detail. It 
 belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of 
 broad application, but without peculiarity. The 
 trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the 
 other, in the individual, are the extremes of 
 realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost 
 superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and 
 virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are 
 the goal of a nation's effort. Race-ideas, or 
 generalizations of a compact and homogeneous
 
 160 HEART OF MAN 
 
 people summing up their serious interpretations 
 of life, their moral choices, their aspiration and 
 hope in the lines of effort that seem to them 
 highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; 
 when these are expressed they are the Greek 
 spirit, the Roman genius, great types of human- 
 ity on the impersonal, the national scale. As 
 these historic generalizations dissolve in national 
 decay, art breaks up in individual portrayal of 
 less embracing types; the glorification of the 
 Greek man in Achilles yields place to the cor- 
 ruptions of the homunculus ; and in general 
 the literature of nationality gives way to the 
 unmeaning and transitory literal are of a society 
 interested in its vices, superstitions, and sensa- 
 tions. In each age some genius stands at the 
 centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid 
 its planetary stars ; such was Dante, such Virgil, 
 such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races that 
 present the spectacle of a double-sun in their 
 history, as the Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, 
 the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet, 
 all this enormous range of life and death, this 
 flowering in centuries of the human spirit in its 
 successive creations, reposes finally on the more 
 or less general nature of the concretes used in
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 161 
 
 its art, on their broad or narrow truth, on their 
 human or individualistic significance. The dif- 
 ference between idealism and realism is not 
 more than a question which to choose. At the 
 further end and last remove, when all art has 
 been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies 
 impressionism, which, by its nature, is a single 
 phase at a single moment as seen by a single 
 being ; but even then, if the mind be normal, if 
 the phase be veritable, if the moment be that of 
 universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal, 
 the artistic work remains ideal ; but on the 
 other hand, it is usually the eccentric mind, the 
 abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation 
 that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, 
 as a term, the vanishing-point of realism into 
 the moment of sense. 
 
 The world of art, to reach its last limitation, 
 through all this wide range is in each creation 
 passed through the mind of the artist and 
 presented necessarily under all the conditions 
 of his personality. His nature is a term in the 
 process, and the question of imperfection or of 
 error, known as the personal equation, arises. 
 Individual differences of perceptive power in 
 comprehending what is seen, and of narrative
 
 162 HEART OF MAN 
 
 skill, or in the plastic and pictorial arts of 
 manual dexterity, import this personal element 
 into all artistic works, the more in proportion 
 to the originality of the maker and the fulness 
 of his self-expression. In rendering from the 
 actual such error is unavoidable, and is practi- 
 cally admitted by all who would rather see for 
 themselves than take the account of a witness, 
 and prefer the original to any copy of it, though 
 they thereby only substitute their own error for 
 that of the artist. This personal error, how- 
 ever, is easily corrected by the consensus of 
 human nature. 
 
 The differences in personality go far deeper 
 than this common liability of humanity to 
 mere mistakes in sight and in representation. 
 The isolating force that creates a solitude 
 round every man lies in his private experi- 
 ence, and results from his original faculties 
 and the special conditions of his environment, 
 his acquired habits of attending to some things 
 rather than others open to him, the choices he 
 has made in the past by which his view of 
 the world and his interest in it have been de- 
 termined. Memory, the mother of the Muses, 
 is supreme here ; a man's memory, which
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 163 
 
 is the treasury of his chosen delights in life, 
 characterizes him, and differentiates his work 
 from that of others, because he must draw on 
 that store for his materials. Thus a man's 
 character, or, what is more profound, his tem- 
 perament, acting in conjunction with the mem- 
 ory it has built up for itself, is a controlling 
 force in artistic work, and modifies it in the 
 sense that it presents the universal truth only 
 as it exists in his personality, in his apprehen- 
 sion of it and its meaning. 
 
 Genius is this power of personality, and 
 exists in proportion as the man differs from 
 the average in ways that find significant ex- 
 pression. This difference may proceed along 
 two lines. It may be aberration from normal 
 human nature, due to circumstances or to in- 
 herent defect or to a thousand causes, but 
 existing always in the form of an inward per- 
 version approaching disease of our nature ; 
 such types of genius are pathological and may 
 be neglected. It may, on the other hand, be 
 development of normal human nature in high 
 power, and it then exists in the form of in- 
 ward energy, showing itself in great sensitive- 
 ness to outward things, in mental power of
 
 164 HEART OF MAN 
 
 comprehension, in creative force of recombina- 
 tion and expression. Of genius of this last 
 sort the leaders of the human spirit are made. 
 The basis of it is still human faculty dealing 
 with the universe the same faculty, the 
 same universe, that are common to mankind; 
 but with an extraordinary power, such that it 
 can reveal to men at large what they of them- 
 selves might never have arrived at, can ad- 
 vance knowledge and show forth goals of 
 human hope, can in a word guide the race. 
 The isolation of such a nature is necessarily 
 profound, and intense loneliness has ever been 
 a characteristic of genius. The solvent of all 
 personality, however, lies at last in this fact 
 of a common world and a common faculty for 
 all, resulting in an experience intelligible to 
 all, even if unshared by them. The humanity 
 of genius constitutes its sanity, and is the 
 ground of its usefulness ; though it lives in iso- 
 lation, it does so only as an advanced outpost 
 may ; it expects the advent of the race behind 
 and below it, and shows there its signal and 
 sounds there its call. Its escape from person- 
 ality lies in its identifying itself with the com- 
 mon order in which all souls shall finally be
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 166 
 
 merged and be at one. The limitations of 
 genius are consequently not so much limita- 
 tions as the abrogation of limits in the ordinary 
 sense ; its originality of insight, interpretation, 
 and expression broadens the human horizons 
 and enriches the fields within them; it tells 
 us what we may not have known or felt or 
 guessed, but what we shall at last understand. 
 Thus, as the theory of art is most fixed in 
 the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexi- 
 ble in the doctrine of personality, through 
 which that order is most variously set forth 
 and illustrated. Imitation, so far from becom- 
 ing a defective or false method because of 
 personality, is really made catholic by it, and 
 gains the variety and breadth that character- 
 izes the artistic world as a whole. 
 
 The element of self which thus enters into 
 every artistic work has different degrees of 
 importance. In objective art, it is clear that it 
 enters valuably in proportion as the universe is 
 seized by a mind of right reason, of profound 
 penetration, of truthful imagination ; and if 
 the work be presented enveloped in a subjective 
 mood, while it remains objective in contents, as 
 in Virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply
 
 106 HEART OF MAN 
 
 as to be a main part of it, then the mood must 
 be one of those felt or capable of being felt 
 universally, the profound moods of the medi- 
 tative spirit in grand works, the common moods 
 of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. 
 In proportion as society develops, whether in 
 historic states singly or in the progress of 
 mankind, the direct expression of self for its 
 own sake becomes more usual ; literature be- 
 comes more personal or purely subjective. If 
 the poet's private story be one of action, it is 
 plain that it has interest only as if it were 
 objectively rendered, from its being illustra- 
 tive of life in general; so, too, if the felt 
 emotion be given, this will have value from 
 its being treated as typical ; and, in so far 
 as the intimate nature of the poet is variously 
 given as a whole in his entire works, it has 
 real importance, has its justification in art, 
 only in so far as he himself is a high normal 
 type of humanity. The truth of the matter is, 
 in fact, only a detail of the general proposition 
 that in art history has no value of its own as 
 such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and 
 his nature and career, like that of any character 
 or event in history, have no artistic value beyond
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 167 
 
 their universal significance. In such self-por- 
 traiture there may be sometimes the depicting of 
 a depraved nature, such as Villon ; but such a 
 type takes its place with other criminal types 
 of the imagination, and belongs with them in 
 another sphere. 
 
 This element of self finds its intense expres- 
 sion in lyrical love-poetry, one of the most 
 enduring forms of literature because of its ele- 
 mentariness and universality ; but it is also 
 found in other parts of the emotional field. 
 In seeking concrete material for lyrical use the 
 poet may take some autobiographical incident, 
 but commonly the world of inanimate nature 
 yields the most plastic mould. It is a mar- 
 vellous victory of the spirit over matter when 
 it takes the stars of heaven and the flowers of 
 earth and makes them utter forth its speech, 
 less as it seems in words of human language 
 than in the pictured hieroglyph and symphonic 
 movement of natural things ; for in such poetry 
 it is not the vision of nature, however beautiful, 
 that holds attention ; it is the colour, form, and 
 imisic of things externalizing, visualizing the 
 inward mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. 
 Nature is emptied of her contents to become
 
 168 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. The 
 poet's method is that of life itself, which is first 
 awakened by the beauty without to thought 
 and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by 
 that beauty and absorbing it. He identifies 
 himself with the objects before him through 
 his joy in them, and entering there makes 
 nature translucent with his own spirit. 
 
 Shelley's Ode to the West Wind is the emi- 
 nent example of such magical power. The 
 three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are 
 first brought into a union through their connec- 
 tion with the west wind ; and, the wind still 
 being the controlling centre of imagination, the 
 poet, drawing all this limitless and majestic 
 imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous 
 approaches identifies himself at the climax of 
 feeling with the object of his invocation, 
 
 " Be thou me, impetuous one ! " 
 
 and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in 
 a lyric burst of personality, in which, while the 
 body of nature is retained, there is only a 
 spiritual meaning. So Burns in some songs, 
 and Keats in some odes, following the same 
 method, make nature their own syllables, as of
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 169 
 
 some cosmic language. This is the highest 
 reach of the artist's power of conveying through 
 the concrete image the soul in its pure emo- 
 tional life ; and in such poetry one feels that 
 the whole material world seems lent to man to 
 expand his nature and escape from the solitude 
 in which he is born to that divine union to 
 which he is destined. The evolution of this 
 one moment of passion is lyric form, whose 
 unity lies in personality exclusively, however 
 it may seem to involve the external world 
 which is its imagery, its body lifted from 
 the dust, woven of light and air, but alive only 
 while the spirit abides there. And here, too, as 
 elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may 
 rise, it must be one to which man can follow, 
 to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. Nor is it 
 only nature which thus suffers irpiritualization 
 through the stress of imagination interpreting 
 life in. definite and sensible forms of beauty, 
 but the imagery of action also may be similarly 
 taken possession of, though this is rare in merely 
 lyrical expression. 
 
 The ideal world, then, to present in full sum- 
 mary these views, is thus built up, through 
 personality in all its richness, by a perfected imi-
 
 170 HEART OF MAN 
 
 tation of life itself, and is set forth in universal 
 unities of relation, causal or formal, to the intel- 
 lect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in 
 its outward, aspects ; and thereby delighting the 
 desire of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it 
 generates joy, and thence is born the will to 
 conform one's self to this order. If, then, this 
 order be conceived as known in its principles 
 and in operation in living souls, as existing in 
 its completeness on the simplest scale in an 
 entire series of illustrative instances but with- 
 out multiplicity, if it be conceived, that is, as 
 the model of a world, that would be to know 
 it as it exists to the mind of God ; that would 
 be to contemplate the world of ideas as Plato 
 conceived it seen by the soul before birth. 
 That is the beatific vision. If it be conceived 
 in its mortal movement as a developing world 
 on earth, that would be to know " the plot of 
 God," as Poe called the universe. Art en- 
 deavours to bring that vision, that plot, however 
 fragmentarily, upon earth. It is a world of 
 order clothing itself in beauty, with a charm 
 to the soul, such is our nature, operative 
 upon the will to live. It is preeminently a vis- 
 ion of beauty. It is true that this beauty which
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 171 
 
 thus wins and moves us seems something added 
 by the mind in its great creations rather than 
 anything actual in life ; for it is, in fact, height- 
 ened and refined from the best that man has 
 seen in himself, and it partakes more of hope 
 than of memory. Here is that woven robe of 
 illusion which is so hard a matter to those who 
 live in horizons of the eye and hand. Yet as 
 idealism was found on its mental side harmo- 
 nious with reason in all knowledge, and on 
 its emotional side harmonious with the heart 
 in its outgoings, so this perfecting tempera- 
 ment that belongs to it and most characterizes 
 it, falls in with the natural faith of mankind. 
 Idealism in this sense, too, existed in life before 
 it passed into literature. The youth idealizes 
 the maiden he loves, his hero, and the ends 
 of his life ; and in age the old man idealizes 
 his youth. Who does not remember some 
 awakening moment when he first saw virtue 
 and knew her for what she is? Sweet was 
 it then to learn of some Jason of the golden 
 fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some 
 dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was 
 a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall 
 never be felt again; but who knows not that
 
 172 HEART OF MAN 
 
 such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the 
 young heart in noble feelings is the source 
 of most of good that abides in us as years 
 go on? In such boyish dreaming the soul 
 learns to do and dare, hardens and supples 
 itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here 
 is its palaestra. Who would blot these from his 
 memory? who choke these fountain-heads, re- 
 membering how often along life's pathway he 
 has thirsted for them? Such moments, too, 
 have something singular in their nature, and 
 almost immortal, that carries them echoing far 
 on into life where they strike upon us in 
 manhood at chosen moments when least ex- 
 pected; some of them are the real time in 
 which we live. It was said of old that great 
 men were creative in their souls, and left their 
 works to be their race ; these ideal heroes have 
 immortal souls for their children, age after age. 
 Shall we in our youth, then, in generous emula- 
 tion idealize the great of old times, and honour 
 them as our fair example of what we most 
 would be? Shall we, in our hearts, idealize 
 those we love, so natural is it to believe in 
 the perfection of those we love, and even if 
 the time for forgiveness comes, and we show
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 173 
 
 them the mercy that our own frailty teaches us 
 to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since 
 love continues only in the persuasion of perfec- 
 tion yet to come, and is the tenderer because 
 it comes with struggle? Whether in our acts 
 or our emotions shall we give idealism this 
 range, and deny it to literature which discloses 
 the habits of our daily practice in more perfec- 
 tion and with greater beauty? There we find 
 the purest types to raise and sustain us; to 
 direct our choice, and reenforce us with that 
 emotion, that passion, which most supports the 
 will in its effort. There history itself is taken 
 up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole 
 past of human emotion and action contained 
 and shown forth with convincing power. Nor 
 is it only with the natural habit of mankind 
 that idealism falls in, but with divine command. 
 Were we not bid be perfect as our Father in 
 heaven is perfect ? And what is that image of 
 the Christ, what is that world-ideal, the height 
 of human thought, but the work of the creative 
 reason, not of genius, not of the great in 
 mind and fortunate in gifts, but of the race 
 itself, in proud and humble, in saint and sinner, 
 in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast
 
 174 HEART OF MAN 
 
 range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts 
 live embodied in that great tradition, the 
 supreme and perfected pattern of mankind? 
 
 Is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood 
 in all this ? that men were never such as the 
 heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to 
 breathe mortal air ? by indulging our emotions, 
 do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in 
 cynicism or despair? Why, then, should we 
 not boldly affirm that the falsehood is rather 
 in us, in the defects by which we fail of per- 
 fection, in our ignorant error and voluntary 
 wrong ? that in the ideal, free as it is from the 
 accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is 
 of the common truth, lies, as Plato thought, the 
 only reality, the truth which outlasts us all? 
 But this may seem a subtle evasion rather than 
 a frank answer. Let us rather say that idealism 
 is one of the necessary modes of man's faith, 
 brings in the future, and assumes the reality 
 of that which shall be actual ; that the reality 
 it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak 
 in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. I 
 believe that ideal character in its perfection is 
 potentially in every man who is born into the 
 world. We forecast the future in other parts
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 176 
 
 of life ; why should we not forecast ourselves ? 
 Would he not be thought foolish who should 
 refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, 
 because he does not already hold the wealth 
 to be gained? The ideal is our infinite riches, 
 more than any individual or moment can hold. 
 To refuse it is as if a man should neglect his 
 estate because he can take but a handful of it 
 in his grasp. It is the law of our being to 
 grow, and it is a necessity that we should have 
 examples and patterns in advance of us, by 
 which we can find our way. There is no false- 
 hood in such anticipation ; there is only a faith 
 in truth instead of a possession of it. Will you 
 limit us to one moment of time and place ? will 
 you say to the patriot that his country is a geo- 
 graphical term ? and when he replies that rather 
 is it the life of her sons, will you point him to 
 human nature as it seems at the period, to cor- 
 ruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and 
 tell him that is our actual America? Will he 
 not rather say that his America is a great past, 
 a future whose beneficence no man can sum ? 
 Is there any falsehood in this ideal country that 
 men have ever held precious ? Did Pericles lie 
 in his great oration, and Virgil in his noble
 
 17tf HEART OF MAN 
 
 poem, and Dante in his fervid Italian lines? 
 And as there are ideals of country, so also of 
 men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the 
 lover, the citizen, and beside each of us does 
 there not go one who mourns over our fall 
 and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall 
 not leave us till we die ; an ideal self, who is 
 our judgment? and if it be yet answered that 
 this in truth is so, and might be borne but for 
 the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall 
 we not reply that the quack does not discredit 
 the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art 
 of politics, and no more does the fool in all his 
 motley the art of literature. 
 
 Must I, however, come back to my answer, 
 and meet those who aver that however stimu- 
 lating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be 
 remembered that in the world at large there is 
 nothing corresponding to ideal order, to poetic 
 ethics, and that to set these forth as the su- 
 premacy of what ought to be is to misrepresent 
 life, to raise expectations in youth never to be 
 realized, to pervert practical standards, and in 
 brief to make a false start that can be fruit- 
 ful only in error, in subsequent suffering of 
 mind, and with material disadvantage ? I must
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 177 
 
 be frank : I own that I can perceive in Nature 
 no moral order, that in her world there is no 
 knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in 
 general her order often breaks upon man's life 
 with mere ruin, irrational and pitiful ; and I ac- 
 knowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the 
 social, and its invasion in the individual, life 
 of man. But, again, were we so situated that 
 there should be no external divine order ap- 
 parent to our minds, were justice an accident 
 and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer, there 
 would still remain in us that order whose work- 
 ings are known within our own bosom, that law 
 \vhich compels us to be just and merciful in 
 order to lead the life that we recognize to be 
 best, and the whole imperative of our ideal, 
 which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us, 
 irrespective of what future attends us in the 
 world. Ideal order as the mind knows it, the 
 mind must strive to realize, or stand dis- 
 honoured in its own forum. Within us, at 
 least, it exists in hope and somewhat in reality, 
 and following it in our effort, though we come 
 merely to a stoical idea of the just man on 
 whom the heavens fall, we should yet be nobler 
 than the power that made us souls betrayed.
 
 178 HEART OF MAN 
 
 But there is no such difference between the 
 world as it is and the world as ideal art pre- 
 sents it. 
 
 What, then, is the difference between art and 
 nature? Art is nature regenerate, made per- 
 fect, suffering the new birth into what ought to 
 be ; an ordered and complete world. But this 
 is the vision of art as the ultimate of good. 
 Idealism has also another world, of which 
 glimpses have already appeared in the course 
 of this argument, though in the background. 
 In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to 
 general statement as is good, and there is in the 
 strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal 
 statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in 
 more partial ways in lago, Macbeth, Richard 
 III. In the emotional sphere also there is the 
 throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and pre- 
 sented as the element in which these characters 
 have their being. Even in the sphere of the 
 will, who shall say that man does not know- 
 ingly choose evil as his portion? So, too, as 
 the method of idealism in the world of the good 
 tends to erect man above himself, the same 
 generalizing method in the world of the evil 
 tends to degrade human nature below itself;
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 179 
 
 the extremes of the process are the divine and 
 the devilish ; both transcend life, but are devel- 
 oped out of it. The difference between these 
 two poles of ideality is that the order of one is 
 an order of life, that of the other an order of 
 death. Between these two is the special prov- 
 ince of the human will. What literature, what 
 all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or 
 the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking 
 into account the whole range, the mixed world 
 becoming what it ought to be in its evolution 
 from what it is, and the laws of that progress. 
 Hence tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or 
 more broadly humour, on the other hand, have 
 their great place in literature ; for they are 
 forms of the intermediate world of conflict. I 
 speak of the spiritual world of man's will. We 
 may conceive of the world optimistically as 
 a place in which all shall issue in good and 
 nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by 
 alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, 
 the will in its voluntary and individual action 
 may save or lose the soul at its choice. We 
 may think of God as conserving all, or as 
 permitting hell, which is death. We do not 
 know. But as shown to us in imagination,
 
 180 HEART OF MAN 
 
 idealism, which is the race's dream of truth, 
 hovers between these two worlds known to us 
 in tendency if not in conclusion, the world 
 of salvation on the one hand, in proportion as the 
 order of life is made vital in us, the world of 
 damnation on the other hand, in proportion as 
 the order of death prevails in our will ; but thf 
 main effort of idealism is to show us the war 
 between the two, with an emphasis on the be- 
 coming of the reality of beauty, joy, reason, and 
 virtue in us. Not that prosperity follows right- 
 eousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, 
 in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a 
 right will is her message ; how we, striving for 
 eternal life, may best meet the chances and the 
 bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding 
 care ; ideal characters, or those ideal in some 
 trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environ- 
 ment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism 
 from ignoring the actual state of man that it 
 most affirms its pity and evil by setting them 
 in contrast with what ought to be, by showing 
 virtue militant not only against external enemies 
 but those inward weaknesses of our mortality 
 with its passion and ignorance, which are our 
 most undermining and intimate foes. Here is
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 181 
 
 no false world, but just that world which is our 
 theatre of action, that confused struggle, rep- 
 resented in its intelligible elements in art, that 
 world of evil, implicit in us and the universe, 
 which must be overcome ; and this is revealed 
 to us in the ways most profitable for our instruc- 
 tion, who are bound to seek to realize the good 
 through all the strokes of nature and the folly 
 and sin of men. Ideal literature in its broad 
 compass, between its opposed poles of good and 
 evil, is just this : a world of order emerging 
 from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue 
 and joy, emerging from the chaos of things that 
 are, in selected and typical examples. 
 
 It follows from this that what remains in 
 the world of observation in personality or ex- 
 perience, whether good or evil, whether par- 
 ticular or general, not yet coordinated in 
 rational knowledge as a whole, all for which 
 no solution is found, all that cannot be or has 
 not been made intelligible, must be the sub- 
 ject-matter of realism in the exact use of that 
 term. This must be recorded by literature, or 
 admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to 
 the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery 
 therefore is the special sphere of realism.
 
 182 HEART OF MAN 
 
 The borderland of the unknown or the irre- 
 ducible is its realm. This old residuum, this 
 new material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, 
 too, realism in this sense characterizes ages of 
 expansion of knowledge such as ours. The 
 new information which is the fruit of our wide 
 travel, of our research into the past, has en- 
 larged the problem of man's life by showing 
 us both primitive and historical humanity in 
 its changeful phases of progress working out 
 the beast ; and this new interest has been ree'n- 
 forced by the attention paid, under influences 
 of democracy and philanthropy, to the lower 
 and baser forms of life in the masses under 
 civilization, which has been a new revelation of 
 persistent savagery in our midst. Here realism 
 illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge 
 which may hereafter be reduced to orderliness 
 by idealistic processes, for idealism is the organ- 
 izer of all knowledge. But apart from this 
 incoming of facts, or of laws not yet harmo- 
 nized in the whole body of law, for which we 
 may have fair hope that a synthesis will be 
 found, there remains forever that residuum of 
 which I spoke, which has resisted the intelli- 
 gence of man, age after age, from the first
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 183 
 
 throb of feeling, the first ray of thought ; that 
 involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, that 
 impotent pain, the human debris of the social 
 process, which is a challenge to the power 
 of God, and a cry to the heart of man that 
 broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but 
 hear. In this region the near affinity of realism 
 to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its 
 necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, 
 the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the 
 infamies of heredity, criminal education, and 
 successful malignity, eating into the being as 
 well as controlling the fortune of their victims, 
 is manifest; and what answer has ever been 
 found to the interrogation they make? It is 
 not merely that particular facts are here irrec- 
 oncilable ; but laws themselves are discernible, 
 types even not of narrow application, which 
 have not been brought into any relation with 
 what I have named the divine order. Millions 
 of men in thousands of years are included in 
 this holocaust of past time, eras of savagery, 
 Assyrian civilizations, Christian butcheries, the 
 Czar yet supreme, the Turk yet alive. 
 
 And how is it at the other pole of mystery, 
 where life rises into a heavenly vision of eter-
 
 184 HEART OF MAN 
 
 nities of love to come? There is no place for 
 realism here, where observation ceases and our 
 only human outlook is by inference from prin- 
 ciples and laws of the ideal world as known 
 to us; yet what problems are we aware of? 
 Must, to take the special problem of art, 
 must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since 
 of it warp and woof are woven all our possi- 
 bilities of communication, all our capabilities 
 of knowledge? it is our language and our 
 memory alike. Must God be still thought of 
 in the image of man, since only in terms of 
 our humanity can we conceive even divine 
 things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as 
 the Greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of 
 spiritual bliss as Christians fashion saint, angel, 
 and archangel ? These are rather philosophical 
 problems. But in art, as at the realistic end 
 of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a 
 part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the un- 
 forgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at 
 the idealistic end admit the representation of 
 the celestial after human models, and feel it, 
 even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The 
 mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is 
 a hope ; at its nadir, it is a fear. We do not
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 185 
 
 know. But within the narrow range of the 
 intelligible and ordered world of art, which 
 has been achieved by the creative reason of 
 civilized man in his brief centuries and along 
 the narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens 
 to the western world, we do know that for 
 the normal man born into its circle of light 
 the order of life is within our reach, the order 
 of death within reach of us. Shut within 
 these limits of the victory of our intellect and 
 the upreaching of our desires and the warfare 
 of our will, we assert in art our faith that the 
 divine order is victorious, that the righteous 
 man is not forsaken, that the soul cannot suffer 
 wrong either from others or from nature or 
 from God, that the evil principle cannot pre- 
 vail. It is faith, springing from our experience 
 of the working of that order in us ; it transcends 
 knowledge, but it grows with knowledge ; and 
 ideal literature asserts this faith against nature 
 and against man in all their deformity, as the 
 centre about which life revolves so far as it 
 has become subject to rational knowledge, to 
 beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the 
 will to live. 
 
 Can the faith of which idealism is the holder
 
 186 HEAKT OF MAN 
 
 of the keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect 
 as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, 
 exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man 
 were perfect in knowledge and saw the universe 
 as we believe God sees it, he would behold it 
 as an artistic whole even now? Would it be 
 that beatific vision, revolving like God's kalei- 
 doscope, momentarily falling at each new ar- 
 rangement into the perfect unities of art? and 
 is our world of art, our brief model of such a 
 world in single examples of its scheme, only 
 a way of limiting the field to the compass of 
 human faculties that we may see within our 
 capacities as God sees, and hence have such 
 faith? Is art after all a lower creation than 
 nature, a concession to our frail powers? Has 
 idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or 
 must we see the evil principle encamped here, 
 confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving 
 joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death 
 for its victims, and the hell of final destruction 
 spreading beneath its sway? so that the world 
 as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of 
 God exercised in Omnipotence, but a human 
 opportunity of union with or separation from the 
 ideal order in conflict with the order of death.
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 187 
 
 I recall Newman's picture : " To consider the 
 world in its length and breadth, its various his- 
 tory, the many races of men, their starts, their 
 fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, 
 and then their ways, habits, governments, forms 
 of worship ; their enterprises, their aimless 
 courses, their random achievements and ac- 
 quirements, the impotent conclusion of long- 
 standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken 
 of a superintending design, the blind evolution 
 of what turn out to be great powers or truths, 
 the progress of things, as if from unreasoning 
 elements, not toward final causes, the great- 
 ness and littleness of man, his far-reaching 
 aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over 
 his futurity, the disappointments of life, the 
 defeat of good, the success of evil, physical 
 pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and in- 
 tensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the cor- 
 ruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that 
 condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet 
 exactly described in the Apostle's words, ' hav- 
 ing no hope and without God in the world,' - 
 all this is a vision to dizzy and appall ; and in- 
 flicts upon the mind the sense of a profound 
 mystery which is absolutely beyond human
 
 188 HEART OF MAN 
 
 solution." In the face of such a world, even 
 when partially made intelligible in ideal art, 
 dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which 
 would have it that the universe is in God's eyes 
 a perfect world ? I can find no warrant for it in 
 ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort 
 arises in us to win to that world in the convic- 
 tion that it is not indifferent in the sight of 
 heaven whether we live in the order of life or 
 that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a 
 triumph of that order itself which increases and 
 prevails in us, is a bringing of Christ's kingdom 
 upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind 
 a function of the world's progress, and were its 
 goal achieved would cease ; for life would then 
 itself be one with art, one with the divine order. 
 So much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement 
 that art made perfect denies progress and is its 
 ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal art 
 presents it, is a prophecy which enlists us as 
 soldiers militant in its fulfilment. Its optimism 
 is that of the issue, and may be that of the pro- 
 cess ; but it surely is not that of the state that 
 now is in the world. 
 
 It thus appears more and more that art is 
 educative; it is the race's foreknowledge of
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 189 
 
 what may be, of the objects of effort and the 
 methods of their attainment under mortal con- 
 ditions. The difficulty of men in respect to 
 it is the lax power they have to see in it the 
 truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the 
 continuous reality of the things of the mind in 
 opposition to the accidental and partial reality 
 of the things of actuality. They think of it as 
 an imagined instead of as the real world, the 
 model of that which is in the evolution of that 
 which ought to be. In history the climaxes of 
 art have always outrun human realization; its 
 crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests 
 of the never-attained ; but they still make on in 
 their mass to the yet rising wave, which shall 
 be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cos- 
 mopolitan civilization which we hope for, the 
 elements of the past, yet surviving from the 
 accomplishment of single famous cities and 
 great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, 
 expressing the spiritual uplifting to God of the 
 reconciled and unified nations of the earth. 
 
 There remains but one last resort ; for it will 
 yet be urged that the impossibility of any scien- 
 tific knowledge of the spiritual order is proved 
 by the transience of the ideals of the past ; one
 
 190 HEART OF MAN 
 
 is displaced by another, there is no permanence 
 in them. It is true that the concrete world, 
 which must be employed by art, is one of sense, 
 and necessarily imports into the form of art its 
 own mortality ; it is, even in art, a thing that 
 passes away. It is also true that the world of 
 knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, 
 is in process of being known, and necessarily 
 imports into the contents of art its errors, its 
 hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind ; it is 
 a thing that grows more and more, and in grow- 
 ing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. Let 
 us consider the form and the contents separately. 
 The element of mortality in the form is included 
 in the transience of imagery. The poet uses the 
 world as he knows it, and reflects in successive 
 ages of literature the changing phases of civili- 
 zation. The shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the 
 warrior, the trader yield to him their language 
 of the earth, the battle, and the sea ; from the 
 common altar he learns the speech of the gods ; 
 the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits 
 of men, and what is believed of the supernatural 
 are the great storehouses of imagery. The fact 
 that it is at first a living act or habit that the 
 poet deals with, gives to his work that original
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 191 
 
 vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of con- 
 temporaneousness, which characterizes early 
 literatures, as in Homer or the Song of Roland : 
 even the marvellous has in them the reality of 
 being believed. This imagery, however, grows 
 remote with the course of time; it becomes 
 capable of holding an inward meaning without 
 resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; 
 it becomes spiritualized. The process is the 
 same already illustrated in lyric form as an ex- 
 pression of personality ; but here man universal 
 enters into the image and possesses it imperson- 
 ally on the broad human scale. The pastoral 
 life, for example, then yields the forms of art 
 which hold either the simple innocence of 
 happy earthly love, as in Daphnis and Chloe, 
 or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as 
 in Bion's dirge, or the shepherding of Christ in 
 his church on earth, as in many an English 
 poet ; the imagery has unclothed itself of actu- 
 ality and shows a purely spiritual body. 
 
 This growing inwardness of art is a main 
 feature of literary history. It is illustrated on 
 the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the 
 beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, 
 is the subject; then war for a cause, which en-
 
 192 HEART OF MAN 
 
 nobles it beyond the power of personal prowess 
 and justifies it as an element in national life ; 
 next, war for love, which refines it and builds 
 the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the 
 will of courtesy ; last, war for the soul's salva- 
 tion, which is unseen battle within the breast. 
 Achilles, -ZEneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross 
 Knight are the terms in this series ; they mark 
 the transformation of the most savage act of 
 man into the symbol of his highest spiritual 
 effort. Nature herself is subject to this inward- 
 ness of art ; at first merely objective as a condi- 
 tion, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, 
 condition of human life, she becomes the wit- 
 ness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty 
 and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and 
 its tender care for all creatures, as in the 
 Scriptures; and at last the words of our Lord 
 concentrate, in some simple flower, the pro- 
 foundest of moral truths, that the beauty of 
 the soul is the gift of God, out of whose eternal 
 law it blossoms and has therein its ever living 
 roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and 
 sweetness: "Consider the lilies of the field, 
 how they grow : they toil not, neither do they 
 spin : and yet I say unto you that even Solomon
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 193 
 
 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of 
 these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O 
 ye of little faith?" Such is the normal devel- 
 opment of all imagery ; its actuality limits it, 
 and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is 
 only by virtue of this that man can retain the 
 vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue 
 to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, 
 of chivalry, and romance. The imagery is, in 
 truth, a background, whose foreground is the 
 ideal meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the 
 worlds of heaven and hell, have their place in 
 art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact 
 irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization 
 of human events. Its transience, then, cannot 
 matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility 
 through changes of time, place, and custom, 
 and becomes a dead language. It follows that 
 that imagery which keeps close to universal 
 phases of nature, to pursuits always necessary 
 in human life, and to ineradicable beliefs in 
 respect to the supernatural, is most permanent 
 as a language ; and here art in its most im- 
 mortal creations returns again to its omni- 
 present character as a thing of the common 
 lot.
 
 194 HEART OF MAN 
 
 The transience of the contents of art may be 
 of two kinds. There is a passing away of error, 
 as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss 
 need not detain attention. What is really in 
 issue is the passing away of the authority of 
 precept and example fitted to one age but not 
 to another, as in the case of the substitution of 
 the ideal of humility for that of valour, owing 
 to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. 
 The contents of art, its general ideals, repro- 
 duce the successive periods of our earth-history 
 as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. 
 A parallel exists in the subject-matter of the 
 sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are 
 similar statements of past phases of the evolu- 
 tion of the earth, its aspects in successive 
 stages. Or, to take a kindred example, just as 
 the planets in their order set forth now the 
 history of our system from nascent life to .com- 
 plete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit 
 man's stages from savagery to such culture as 
 has been attained. They have more than a de- 
 scriptive and historical significance ; they retain 
 practical vitality because the unchangeable ele- 
 ment in the universe and in man's nature is in 
 the main their subject-matter. It is not merely
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 195 
 
 that the child repeats in his education, in some 
 measure at least, the history of the race, and 
 hence must still learn the value of bravery and 
 humility in their order ; nor that in the mass of 
 men many remain ethically and emotionally in 
 the characteristic stages of past culture ; but 
 these various ideals of what is admirable have 
 themselves identical elements, and in those 
 points in which they differ respond to native 
 varieties of human capacity and temperament. 
 The living principles of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, 
 and Christian thought and feeling are at work 
 in the world, still formative ; it is only by such 
 vitality that their results in art truly survive. 
 There has been an expansion of the field, and 
 some rearrangement within it; but the evolu- 
 tion of human ideals has been, in our civiliza- 
 tion, the growth of one spirit out of its dead 
 selves carrying on into each reincarnation the 
 true life that was in the form it leaves, and 
 which is immortal. The substance in each 
 ideal, its embodiment of what is cardinal in 
 all humanity, remains integral. The alloy of 
 mortality in a work of art lies in so much of 
 it as was limited in truth to time, place, coun- 
 try, race, religion, its specific and contemporary
 
 196 HEART OF MAN 
 
 part; so great is this in detail that a strong 
 power of historical imagination, the power to 
 rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of 
 culture, like the study of a dead language ; 
 an interpretative faculty, the power to trans- 
 late into terms of our knowledge what was 
 stated in terms of different beliefs, must go 
 with this ; and also a corrective power, if the 
 work is to be truly useful and enter into our 
 lives with effect. Such an alloy there is in 
 nearly all great works even ; much in Homer, 
 something in Virgil, a considerable part of 
 Dante, and an increasing portion in Milton 
 have this mixture of death in them ; but if by 
 keeping to the primary, the permanent, the 
 universal, they have escaped the natural body 
 of their age, the substance of the work is still 
 living; they have achieved such immortality 
 as art allows. They have done so, not so much 
 by the personal power of their authors as by 
 their representative character. These ideal 
 works of the highest range, which embody in 
 themselves whole generations of effort and rise 
 as the successive incarnations of human imagi- 
 nation, are products of race and state, of world- 
 experience and social personality ; they differ,
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 197 
 
 race from race, civilization from civilization, 
 Hebrew or Greek, Pagan or Christian, just as 
 on the individual scale persons differ ; and they 
 are solved, as personality in its individual form 
 is solved, in the element of the common reason, 
 the common nature in the world and man, 
 which they contain, in man, 
 
 " Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless " ; 
 
 in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are 
 freed from mortality, they are mutually intel- 
 ligible and interchangeable, they survive, 
 racial and secular states and documents of a 
 spiritual evolution yet going on in all its stages 
 in the human mass, still barbarous, still pagan, 
 still Christian, but an evolution which at its 
 highest point wastes nothing of the past, holds 
 all its truth, its beauty, its vital energy, in a 
 forward reach. 
 
 The nature of the changes which time brings 
 may best be illustrated from the epic, and thus 
 the opposition of the transient and permanent 
 elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly 
 shown. Epic action has been defined as the 
 working out of the Divine will in society; 
 hence it requires a crisis of humanity as its
 
 198 HEART OF MAN 
 
 subject, it involves the conflict of a higher 
 with a lower civilization, and it is conducted 
 by means of a double plot, one in heaven, the 
 other on earth. These are the characteris- 
 tic epic traits. In dealing with ideas of such 
 importance, the poets in successive eras of civili- 
 zation naturally found much adaptation to new 
 conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh 
 difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic 
 development. The idea of the Divine will, the 
 theory of its operation, and the conception of 
 society itself were all subject to change. Epics 
 at first are historical ; but, sharing with the 
 tendency of all art toward inwardness of mean- 
 ing, they become purely spiritual. The one 
 thing that remains common to all is the notion 
 of a struggle between a higher and a lower, 
 overruled by Providence. They have two sub- 
 jects of interest, one the cause, the other the 
 hero through whom the cause works; and 
 between these two interests the epic hovers, sel- 
 dom if ever identifying them and yet preserv- 
 ing their dual reality. 
 
 The Iliad has all the traits that have been 
 mentioned, but society is still loose enough in 
 its bonds to give the characters free play ; it is,
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 199 
 
 in the main, a hero-epic. The ^Eneid, on the 
 contrary, exhibits the enormous development 
 of the social idea; its subject is Roman do- 
 minion, which is the will of Zeus, localized in 
 the struggle with Carthage and with Turnus, 
 but felt in the poem pervasively as the general 
 destiny of Rome in its victory over the world ; 
 and this interest is so overpowering as to make 
 JEneas the slave of Jove and almost to extin- 
 guish the other characters ; it is a state-epic. 
 So long as the Divine will was conceived as 
 finding its operation through deities similar to 
 man, the double plot presented little difficulty ; 
 but in the coming of Christian thought, even 
 with its hierarchies of angels and legions of 
 devils, the interpretation became arduous. In 
 the Jerusalem Delivered the social conflict 
 between Crusader and infidel is clear, the 
 historical crisis in the wars of Palestine is 
 rightly chosen, but the machinery of the heav- 
 enly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, 
 and is by itself ineffectual in inspiring a true 
 belief. So in the Lusiads, while the conflict 
 and the crisis, as shown in the national energy 
 of colonization in the East, are clear, the 
 machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts
 
 200 HEART OF MAN 
 
 to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all 
 credibility. 
 
 In the Paradise Lost arises the spiritual epic, 
 but still historically conceived; the crisis chosen, 
 which is the fall of man in Adam, is the most 
 important conceivable by man ; the powers en- 
 gaged are the superior beings of heaven and hell 
 in direct antagonism ; but here, too, the machin- 
 ery of the heavenly plot is handled with much 
 strain, and, however strongly supported by the 
 Scriptures, has little convincing power. The 
 truth is that the Divine will was coming to be 
 conceived as implicit in society, being Provi- 
 dence there, and operating in secret but normal 
 ways in the guidance of events, not by special 
 and interfering acts ; and also as equally impli- 
 cit in the individual soul, the influence of the 
 Spirit, and working in the ways of spiritual law. 
 One change, too, of vast importance was an- 
 nounced by the words " The Kingdom of Heaven 
 is within you." This transferred the very scene 
 of conflict, the theatre of spiritual warfare, from 
 an external to an internal world, and the social 
 significance of such individual battle lay in its 
 being typical of all men's lives. The Faerie 
 Queeiie, the most spiritual poem in all ways in
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETKY 201 
 
 English, is an epic in essence, though its action 
 is developed by a revolution of the phases of 
 the soul in succession to the eye, and not by the 
 progress of one main course of events. The 
 conflict of the higher and the lower under 
 Divine guidance in the implicit sense is there 
 shown ; the significance is for mankind, though 
 not for a society in its worldly fortunes; but 
 there is little attempt to externalize the heav- 
 enly power in specific action in superhuman 
 forms, though in mortal ways the good knights, 
 and especially Arthur, shadow it forth. The 
 celestial plot is humanized, and the poem be- 
 comes a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way ; 
 though the knight's achievement is also an 
 achievement of God's will, the interest lies in 
 the Divine power conceived as man's moral 
 victory. In the Idyls of the King there are 
 several traits of the epic. There is the central 
 idea of the conflict between the higher and 
 lower, both on the social and the individual 
 side ; the victory of the Round Table would 
 have meant not only pure knights but a regen- 
 erate state. Here, however, the externalization 
 of the Divine will in the Holy Grail, and, as 
 in the Christian epic generally, its confusion oil
 
 202 HEART OF MAS 
 
 the marvellous side with a world of enchant- 
 ment passing here into the sensuous sphere of 
 Merlin, are felt to be inadequate. The war of 
 " soul with sense " was the subject-matter, as 
 was Spenser's ; the method of revolution of its 
 phases was also Spenser's; but the two poems 
 differ in the point that Spenser's knight wins, 
 but Tennyson's king loses, so far as earth is 
 concerned ; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as 
 in Milton Adam loses, yet the final triumph of 
 the cause is known and felt as a divine issue of 
 the action though outside the poem, so Arthur 
 is saved to the ideal by virtue of the faith he 
 announces in the New Order coming on, for it 
 is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades 
 the poem in many details, but here at its heart ; 
 for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his 
 own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero 
 of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised 
 again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom 
 of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared 
 except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous 
 and merciful retrieval from beyond the barriers 
 of the world to come. But in showing the 
 different conditions of the modern epic, its 
 spirituality, its difficulties of interpreting in
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 203 
 
 sensuous imagery the working of the Divine 
 will, its relaxed hold on the social movement 
 for which it substitutes man's universal nature, 
 and the mist that settles round it in its latest 
 example, sufficient illustration has been given 
 of the changes of time to which idealism is sub- 
 ject, and also of the essential truth surviving in 
 the works of the past, which in the epics is the 
 vision of how the ends of God have been accom- 
 plished in the world and in the soul by the 
 union of divine grace with heroic will, the 
 interpretation and glorification of history and 
 of man's single conflict in himself age after age, 
 asserting through all their range the supremacy 
 of the ideal order over its foes in the entire 
 race-life of man. 
 
 Out of these changes of time, in response to 
 the varying moods of men in respect to the 
 world they inhabit, arise those phases of art 
 which are described as classical and roman- 
 tic, words of much confusion. It has been at- 
 tempted to distinguish the latter as having an 
 element of remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity ; 
 but to me, at least, classical art has the same 
 remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the 
 same curiosity as romantic art. If I were to
 
 204 HEART OF MAN 
 
 endeavour to oppose them I should say that 
 classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in 
 form, it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emo- 
 tion absorbed by itself, it definitely guides the 
 will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it 
 has richness and intricacy of form not fully com- 
 prehended, it suggests more than it satisfies, it 
 stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it 
 invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is 
 whole in itself and lives in the central region, 
 the white light, of that star of ideality which is 
 the light of our knowledge ; romanticism bor- 
 ders on something else, the rosy corona round 
 about our star, carrying on its dawning power 
 into those unknown infinities which embosom 
 the spark of life. The two have always existed 
 in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient 
 literature being large. But owing to the dis- 
 closure of the world to us in later times, to the 
 deeper sense of its mysteries which are our 
 bounding horizons round about, and especially 
 to the impulse given to emotion by the opening 
 of the doors of immortality by Christianity to 
 ,thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, 
 the romantic element has been more marked in 
 modern art, has in fact characterized it, being
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 206 
 
 fed moreover by the ever increasing inwardness 
 of human life, the greater value and opportunity 
 of personality in a free and high civilization, and 
 by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of 
 such masses of human experience as our obser- 
 vation now controls. The romantic temper is 
 inevitable in men whose lives are themselves 
 thought of as, in form, but fragments of the life 
 to come, which shall find their completion an 
 eternal task. It is the natural ally of faith which 
 it alone can render with an infinite outlook ; 
 and it is the complement of that mystery which 
 is required to supplement it, and which is an 
 abiding presence in the habit of the sensitive 
 and serious mind. Yet in classical art the defi- 
 nite may still be rendered, the known, the con- 
 quered. Idealism has its finished world therein ; 
 in romanticism it has rather its prophetic work. 
 Such, then, as best I can state it in brief and 
 rapid strokes, is the world of art, its methods, 
 its appeals, its significance to mankind. Ideal- 
 
 f* MHMHBA 
 
 ism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of 
 the commonplace. Its realm lies in the com- 
 mon lot of men; its distinction is to embrace 
 truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of 
 experience and personality, the primary, element-
 
 203 HEART OF MAN 
 
 ary, equally shared fates, passions, beliefs of the 
 race. Shakspere, our great example, as Cole- 
 ridge wisely said, " kept in the highway of life." 
 That is the royal road of genius, the path of 
 immortality, the way ever trodden by the great 
 who lead. I have ventured to speak at times of 
 religious truth. What is the secret of Christ's 
 undying power? Is it not that he stated uni- 
 versal truth in concrete forms of common expe- 
 rience so that it comes home to all men's bosoms ? 
 Genius is supreme in proportion as it does that, 
 and becomes the interpreter of every man who 
 is born into the world, makes him know his 
 brotherhood with all, and the incorporation of 
 his fate in the scheme of law, and ideal achieve- 
 ment under it, which is the common ground of 
 humanity. Ideal literature is the treasury of 
 such genius in the past ; here, as I said in the 
 beginning, the wisdom of the soul is stored ; 
 and art, in all its forms, is immortal only in so 
 far as it has done its share in this same labour of 
 illumination, persuasion, and command, forecast- 
 ing the spirit to be, companioning the spirit that 
 is, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal 
 order actual in ourselves. 
 
 What, then, since I said that it is a question
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 207 
 
 how to live as well as how to express life, 
 what, then, is the ideal life? It is to make 
 one's life a poem, as Milton dreamed of the 
 true poet ; for as art works through matter and 
 takes on concrete and sensible shape with its 
 mortal conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in 
 material action, and, suffering a similar fate, 
 sinks into limitations and externals of this 
 world and this flesh, through which it must 
 live. In such a life, mortal in all ways, to 
 bring down to earth the vision that floats in the 
 soul's eyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to 
 the poet's gaze, incorporating it in deed and 
 being, and to make it prevail, so far as our lives 
 have power, in the world of our life, is the task 
 set for us. To disengage reason from the con- 
 fusion of things, and behold the eternal forms 
 of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transi- 
 tory sights of our eyes, and behold the eternal 
 forms of sense; so to act that the will within 
 us shall take on this form of reason and our 
 manifest life wear this form of beauty; and, 
 more closely, to live in the primary affections, 
 the noble passions, the sweet emotions, 
 
 " Founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, 
 Relations dear, and all the charities 
 Of father, son, and brother, "
 
 208 HEART OF MAN 
 
 and also in the general sorrows of mankind, 
 thereby, in joy and grief, entering sympatheti- 
 cally into the hearts of common men; to keep 
 in the highway of life, not turning aside to the 
 eccentric, the sensational, the abnormal, the 
 brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must 
 come within our vision, in their place only by 
 the edges of true life ; and, if, being men, we 
 are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the resto- 
 ration of broken order, learning also in such 
 bitterness better to understand the dark conflict 
 forever waging in the general heart, the terror 
 of the heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of 
 our battle, the pathos that looks down even 
 from blue skies that have kept watch o'er 
 man's mortality, so, even through failure, to 
 draw nearer to our race ; this, as I conceive it, 
 is to lead the ideal life. It is a message 
 blended of many voices of the poets whom 
 Shelley called, whatever might be their calam- 
 ity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it 
 rises from all lands, all ages, all religions; it 
 is the battle-cry of that one great idea whose 
 slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of 
 our long civilization, seeking to realize in de- 
 mocracy the earthly, and in Christianity the
 
 A NEW DEFENCE OF POETRY 209 
 
 heavenly, hope of man, the idea of the com- 
 munity of the soul, the sameness of it in all 
 men. To lead this life is to be one with man 
 through love, one with the universe through 
 knowledge, one with God through the will; 
 that is its goal, toward that we strive, in that 
 we believe. 
 
 And Thou, O Youth, for whom these lines are 
 written, fear not ; idealize your friend, for it is 
 better to love and be deceived than not to love 
 at all ; idealize your masters, and take Shelley 
 and Sidney to your bosom, so shall they serve 
 you more nobly and you love them more sweetly 
 than if the touch and sight of their mortality 
 had been yours indeed ; idealize your country, 
 remembering that Brutus in the dagger-stroke 
 and Cato in his death-darkness knew not the 
 greater Rome, the proclaimer of the unity of 
 our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher 
 of our church, and died not knowing, but do 
 you believe in the purpose of God, so shall you 
 best serve the times to be; and in your own 
 life, fear not to act as your ideal shall com- 
 mand, in the constant presence of that other 
 self who goes with you, as I have said, so shall
 
 210 HEART OF MAN 
 
 you blend with him at the end. Fear not 
 either to believe that the soul is as eternal as 
 the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall 
 forever pursue that divine beauty which has 
 here so touched and inflamed you, for this is 
 the faith of man, your race, and those who were 
 fairest in its records. And have recourse 
 always to the fountains of this life in litera- 
 ture, which are the wells of truth. How to live 
 is the one matter; the wisest man in his ripe 
 age is yet to seek in it ; but Thou, begin now 
 and seek wisdom in the beauty of virtue and 
 live in its light, rejoicing in it ; so in this world 
 shall you live in the foregleam of the world to 
 come.
 
 DEMOCRACY
 
 DEMOCRACY 
 
 DEMOCRACY is a prophecy, and looks to the 
 future ; it is for this reason that it has its 
 great career. Its faith is the substance of 
 things hoped for and the evidence of things 
 unseen, whose realization will be the labour of 
 a long age. The life of historic nations has 
 been a pursuit toward a goal under the im- 
 pulse of ideas often obscurely comprehended, 
 world-ideas as we call them, which they 
 have embodied in accomplished facts and in 
 the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting 
 through ages ; and as each nation has slowly 
 grown aware of the idea which animated it, 
 it has become self-conscious and conscious of 
 greatness. That men are born equal is still a 
 doctrine openly derided ; that they, are born 
 free is not accepted without much nullifying 
 limitation ; that they are born in brotherhood 
 is less readily denied. These three, the revo- 
 lutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are 
 213
 
 214 HEART OF 
 
 the substance of democracy, if the matter be well 
 considered, and all else is bat consequence. 
 
 It might seem gmgnlar that man should 
 
 ever have found oat this creed, as that physical 
 life could invent the brain, since the struggle 
 for existence in primitive and early times was 
 so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and 
 aggrandising principle, in states as well as 
 between races. In most parts of the world 
 the first true governments were tyrannies, 
 patriarchal or despotic ; and where liberty was 
 indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. 
 Aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance 
 save in Greeks, and serfdom was incorporated 
 in the northern tribes as soon as they began 
 to be socially organized. Some have alleged 
 that religious equality was an Oriental idea, 
 and borrowed from the relation of subjects to 
 an Asiatic despot, which paved the way for 
 it; some attribute civil equality to the Roman 
 law; some find the germ of both in Stoical 
 morals. But so great an idea as the equality 
 of man reaches down into the past by a thou- 
 sand roots. The state of nature of the savage 
 in the woods, which our fathers once thought 
 a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to
 
 DEMOCRACY 215 
 
 a freeman's life; but such a condition is 
 rather one of private independence than of 
 the grounded social right that democracy con- 
 templates. How the ideas involved came into 
 historical existence is a minor matter. Democ- 
 racy has its great career, for the first tame, 
 in our national being, and exhibits here most 
 purely its formative powers, and unfolds des- 
 tiny on the grand scale. Nothing is more in- 
 cumbent on us than to study it, to turn it 
 this way and that, to handle it as often and 
 in as many phases as possible with lively curi- 
 osity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy 
 assumption that so elementary a thing is com- 
 prehended because it seems simple. Funda- 
 mental ideas are precisely those with which 
 we should be most familiar. 
 
 Democracy is not merely a political experi- 
 ment ; and its governmental theory, though so 
 characteristic of it as not to be dissociated 
 from it, is a result of underlying principles. 
 There is always an ideality of the human spirit 
 in all its works, if one will search them, which 
 is the main thing. The State, as a social 
 aggregate with a joint life which constitutes 
 it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of
 
 216 HEART OF MAN 
 
 human conviction, desire, and tendency, with a 
 common basis of wisdom and energy of action, 
 seeking to realize life in accordance with its 
 ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what 
 life should be ; and government is no more 
 than the mode of administration under which 
 it achieves its results both in national life and 
 in the lives of its citizens. All society is a 
 means of escape from personality, and its limi- 
 tations of power and wisdom, into this larger 
 communal life ; the individual, in so far, loses 
 his particularity, and at the same time inten- 
 sifies and strengthens that portion of his life 
 which is thus made one with the general life 
 of men, that universal and typical life which 
 they have in common and which moulds them 
 with similar characteristics. It is by this fusion 
 of the individual with the mass, this identifi- 
 cation of himself with mankind in a joint activ- 
 ity, this reenforcement of himself by what is 
 himself in others, that a man becomes a social 
 being. The process is the same, whether in 
 clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, political par- 
 ties, or the all-embracing body of the State. 
 It is by making himself one with human nature 
 in America, its faith, its methods, and the con-
 
 DEMOCRACY 217 
 
 trolling purposes in our life among nations, and 
 not by birth merely, that a man becomes an 
 American. 
 
 The life of society, however, includes various 
 affairs, and man deals with them by different 
 means ; thus property is a mode of dealing 
 with things. Democracy is a mode of dealing 
 with souls. Men commonly speak as if the 
 soul were something they expect to possess 
 in another world ; men are souls, and this is 
 a fundamental conception of democracy. This 
 spiritual element is the substance of democracy, 
 in the large sense ; and the special governmental 
 theory which it has developed and organized, 
 and in which its ideas are partially included, 
 is, like other such systems, a mode of admin- 
 istration under which it seeks to realize its 
 ideal of what life ought to be, with most speed 
 and certainty, and on the largest scale. What 
 characterizes that ideal is that it takes the soul 
 into account in a way hitherto unknown ; not 
 that other governments have not had regard 
 to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spiritu- 
 ality that gives the law and rules the issue. 
 Hence, a great preparation was needed before 
 democracy could come into effective control of
 
 218 HEART OF MAN 
 
 society. Christianity mainly afforded this, in 
 respect to the ideas of equality and fraternity, 
 which were clarified and illustrated in the 
 life of the Church for ages, before they en- 
 tered practically into politics and the general 
 secular arrangements of state organization ; the 
 nations of progress, of which freedom is a con- 
 dition, developed more definitely the idea of 
 liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts 
 of men. Democracy belongs to a compara- 
 tively late age of the world, and to advanced 
 nations, because such ideas could come into 
 action only after the crude material necessi- 
 ties of human progress illustrated in the 
 warfare of nations, in military organizations for 
 the extension of a common rule and culture 
 among mankind, and in despotic impositions 
 of order, justice, and the general ideas of civ- 
 ilization had relaxed, and a free course, by 
 comparison at least, was opened for the higher 
 nature of man in both private and public action. 
 A conception of the soul and its destiny, not 
 previously applicable in society, underlies de- 
 mocracy ; this is why it is the most spiritual 
 government known to man, and therefore the 
 highest reach of man's evolution; it is, in
 
 DEMOCRACY 219 
 
 fact, the spiritual element in society expressing 
 itself now in politics with an unsuspected and 
 incalculable force. 
 
 Democracy is contained in the triple state- 
 ment that men are born free, equal, and in 
 brotherhood ; and in this formula it is the 
 middle term that is cardinal, and the root of all. 
 Yet it is the doctrine of the equality of man, by 
 virtue of the human nature with which he is 
 clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as 
 an obvious absurdity, and provocative more of 
 laughter than of argument. What, then, is 
 this equality which democracy affirms as the 
 true state of all men among themselves? It is 
 our common human nature, that identity of the 
 soul in all men, which was first inculcated by 
 the preaching of Christ's death for all equally, 
 whence it followed that every human soul was 
 of equal value in the eyes of God, its Creator, 
 and had the same title to the rites of the 
 Christian Church, and the same blessedness of 
 an infinite immortality in the world to come ; 
 thence we derived it from the very fountain of 
 <5ur faith, and the first true democracy was that 
 which levelled king and peasant, barbarian and 
 Roman, in the communion of our Lord, Yet
 
 220 HEART OF MAN 
 
 nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequal- 
 ities at birth itself as make our peremptory 
 charter of the value of men's souls seem a play 
 of fancy. There are men of almost divine 
 intelligence, men of almost devilish instincts, 
 men of more or less clouded mind ; and they 
 are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped 
 into them heredity, circumstance, and the physi- 
 cal conditions of sanity, morality and whole- 
 someness, in the body which is her work. Such 
 differences do exist, and conditions vary the 
 world over, whence nature, which accumulates 
 inequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin 
 shrieks against our creed." But we have not 
 now to learn for the first time that nature, 
 though not the enemy of the human spirit, is 
 indifferent to all the soul has erected in man's 
 own realm, peculiar to humanity. What has 
 nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom or 
 of fraternity ? Man's life to her is all one, tyrant 
 or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous 
 or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her im- 
 perative physical conditions of life, the mortal 
 thing, are conformed to ; society itself is not 
 her care, nor civilization, nor anything that 
 belongs to man above the brute. Her word,
 
 DEMOCRACY 221 
 
 consequently, need not disturb us ; she is not 
 our oracle. It rather belongs to us to win 
 further victory over her, if it may be, by our 
 intelligence, and control her vital, as we are 
 now coming to control her material, powers 
 and their operation. 
 
 This equality which democracy affirms the 
 identity of the soul, the sameness of its capaci- 
 ties of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment 
 draws after it as a consequence the soul's right 
 to opportunity for self-development by virtue 
 of which it may possess itself of what shall be 
 its own fulness of life. In the inscrutable 
 mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters 
 on an unequal struggle, made such both by 
 inherent conditions and by external limitations, 
 in individuals, classes, and races ; but the de- 
 termination of democracy is that, so far as may 
 be, it will secure equality of opportunity to 
 every soul born within its dominion, in the 
 expectation that much in human conditions 
 which has hitherto fed and heightened in- 
 equality, in both heredity and circumstance, 
 may be lessened if not eradicated ; and life 
 after birth is subject to great control. This is 
 the meaning of the first axiom of democracy,
 
 222 HEART OF MAN 
 
 that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, 
 and its early cries "an open career," and "the 
 tools to him who can use them." In this effort 
 society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature ; 
 for in human history the accumulation of the 
 selfish advantage of inequality has told with as 
 much effect as ever it did in the original struggle 
 of reptile and beast; and in our present complex 
 and extended civilization a slight gain over the 
 mass entails a telling mortgage of the future 
 to him who makes it and to his heirs, while effi- 
 ciency is of such high value in such a society 
 that it must needs be favoured to the utmost ; 
 on the other hand a complex civilization en- 
 courages a vast variety of talent, and finds a 
 special place for that individuation of capacity 
 which goes along with social evolution. The 
 end, too, which democracy seeks is not a same- 
 ness of specific results, but rather an equiva- 
 lence ; and its duty is satisfied if the child of 
 its rule finds such development as was possible 
 to him, has a free course, and cannot charge 
 his deficiency to social interference and the 
 restriction of established law. 
 
 The great hold that the doctrine of equality 
 has upon the masses is not merely because it
 
 DEMOCRACY 223 
 
 furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, 
 which is a logic they may be dimly conscious 
 of, but that it establishes their title to such 
 good in human life as they can obtain, on 
 the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. 
 What other claim, so rational and noble in 
 itself, can they put forth in the face of what 
 they find established in the world they are born 
 into ? The results of past civilization are still 
 monopolized by small minorities of mankind, 
 who receive by inheritance, under natural and 
 civil law, the greater individual share of mate- 
 rial comfort, of large intelligence, of fortunate 
 careers. It does not matter that the things 
 which belong to life as such, the greater bless- 
 ings essential to human existence, cannot be 
 monopolized ; all that man can take and appro- 
 priate they find preoccupied so far as human 
 discovery and energy have been able to reach, 
 understand, and utilize it ; and what proposi- 
 tion can they assert as against this sequestering 
 of social results and material and intellectual 
 opportunity, except to say, " we, too, are men,"' 
 and with the word to claim a share in such parts 
 of social good as are not irretrievably pledged 
 to men better born, better educated, better
 
 224 HEART OF MAN 
 
 supplied with the means of subsistence and 
 the accumulated hoard of the past, which has 
 come into their hands by an award of fortune ? 
 It is not a fanciful idea. It is founded in 
 the unity of human nature, which is as certain 
 as any philosophic truth, and has been pro- 
 claimed by every master-spirit of our race time 
 out of mind. It is supported by the universal 
 faith, in which we are bred, that we are chil- 
 dren of a common Father, and saved by one 
 Redeemer and destined to one immortality, and 
 cannot be balked of the fulness of life which 
 was our gift under divine providence. I em- 
 phasize the religious basis, because I believe 
 it is the rock of the foundation in respect to 
 this principle, which cannot be successfully 
 impeached by any one who accepts Christian 
 truth ; while in the lower sphere, on worldly 
 grounds alone, it is plain that the immense 
 advantage of the doctrine of equality to the 
 masses of men, justifies the advancement of it 
 as an assumption which they call on the issue 
 in time to approve. 
 
 It is in this portion of the field that democ- 
 racy relies most upon its prophetic power. 
 Within the limits of nature and mortal life
 
 DEMOCRACY 225 
 
 the hope of any equal development of the soul 
 seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment ex- 
 tends, in men of the same race and community 
 it appears to me that the sameness in essen- 
 tials is so great as to leave the differences ines- 
 sential, so far as power to take hold of life and 
 possess it in thought, will, or feeling is in ques- 
 tion. I do not see, if I may continue to speak 
 personally, that in the great affairs of life, in 
 duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, 
 the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is 
 any great difference among those of the same 
 community ; and this is reasonable, for the per- 
 manent relations of life, in families, in social 
 ties, in public service, and in all that the belief 
 in heaven and the attachments to home bring 
 into men's lives, are the same ; and though, in 
 the choicer parts of fortunate lives, assthetic 
 and intellectual goods may be more important 
 than among the common people, these are less 
 penetrating and go not to the core, which re- 
 mains life as all know it a thing of affection, 
 of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it 
 may be of human use. Is it not reasonable, 
 then, on the ground of what makes up the sub- 
 stance of life within our observation, to accept 
 Q
 
 226 HEART OF MAN 
 
 this principle of equality, fortified as it is by 
 any conception of heaven's justice to its crea- 
 tures? and to assume, if the word must be used, 
 the principle primary in democracy, that all 
 men are equally endowed with destiny? and 
 thus to allow its prophetic claim, till disproved, 
 that equal opportunity, linked with the service 
 of the higher to the lower, will justify its 
 hope ? At all events, in this lies the possibility 
 of greater achievement than would otherwise 
 be attained within our national limits ; and what 
 is found to be true of us may be extended to 
 less developed communities and races in their 
 degree. 
 
 The doctrine of the equality of mankind by 
 virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent, 
 right to equality of opportunity for self-devel- 
 opment as a part of social justice, establishes a 
 common basis of conviction, in respect to man, 
 and a definite end as one main object of the 
 State ; and these elements are primary in the 
 democratic scheme. Liberty is the next step, 
 and is the means by which that end is secured. 
 It is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly 
 secondary to equality in importance. Every 
 State, every social organization whatever, im-
 
 DEMOCRACY 227 
 
 plies a principle of authority commanding obe- 
 dience ; it may be of the absolute type of 
 military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in 
 constitutional monarchies ; but some obedience 
 and some authority are necessary in order that 
 the will of the State may be realized. The 
 problem of democracy is to find that principle 
 of authority which is most consistent with the 
 liberty it would establish, and which acts with 
 the greatest furtherance and the least interfer- 
 ence in the accomplishment of the chief end in 
 view. It composes authority, therefore, of per- 
 sonal liberty itself, and derives it from the con- 
 sent of the governed, and not merely from their 
 consent but from their active decree. The social 
 will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not 
 of men ; particular wills enter into it, and make 
 it, so constituted, themselves in a larger and 
 external form. The citizen has parted with no 
 portion of his freedom of will ; the will of the 
 State is still his own will, projected in unison 
 with other wills, all jointly making up one sum, 
 the authority of the nation. This is social 
 self-government, not the anarchy of individ- 
 uals each having his own way for himself, but 
 government through a delegated self, if one
 
 228 HEART OF MAN 
 
 may use the phrase, organically combined with 
 others in the single power of control belonging 
 to a State. This fusion is accomplished in the 
 secondary stage, for the continuous action of 
 the State, by representation, technically ; but, 
 in its primary stage and original validity, by 
 universal suffrage ; for the characteristic trait 
 of democracy is that in constituting this au- 
 thority, which is social as opposed to personal 
 freedom, personal freedom existing in its 
 social form, it includes every unit of will, and 
 gives to each equivalence. Democracy thus 
 establishes the will of society in its most uni- 
 versal form, lying between the opposite extremes 
 of particularism in despotism and anarchy ; it 
 owns the most catholic organ of authority, and 
 enters into it with the entire original force of 
 the community. 
 
 This universal will of democracy is distin- 
 guished from the more limited forms of states 
 partially embodying democratic principles by 
 the fact that nothing enters into it except man 
 as such. The rival powers which seek to en- 
 croach upon this scheme, and are foreign ele- 
 ments in a pure democracy, are education, 
 property, and ancestry, which last has its claim
 
 DEMOCRACY 229 
 
 as the custodian of education and property and 
 the advantages flowing from their long posses- 
 sion; the trained mind, the accumulated capital, 
 and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in 
 its most intense and efficient personal form are 
 summed up in these, and would appropriate to 
 themselves in the structure of government a 
 representation not based on individual manhood 
 but on other grounds. If it be still allowed 
 that all men should have a share in a self- 
 government, it is yet maintained that a share 
 should be granted, in addition, to educated 
 men and owners of property, and to descend- 
 ants of such men who have founded per- 
 manent families with an inherited capacity, 
 a tradition, and a material stake. Yet these 
 three things, education, property, and an- 
 cestry, are in the front rank of those ine- 
 qualities in human conditions which democracy 
 would minimize. They embody past custom 
 and present results which are a deposit of the 
 past; they plead that they found men wards 
 and were their guardians, and that under their 
 own domination progress was made, and all that 
 now is came into being ; but they must show 
 farther some reason in present conditions under
 
 230 HEART OF MAN 
 
 democracy now why such potent inequalities 
 and breeders of inequality should be clothed 
 with governing power. 
 
 Universal suffrage is the centre of the dis- 
 cussion, and the argument against it is twofold. 
 It is said that, though much in the theory of 
 democracy may be granted and its methods 
 partially adopted, men at large lack the wis- 
 dom to govern themselves for good in society, 
 and also that they control by their votes much 
 more than is rightfully their own. The opera- 
 tion of the social will is in large concerns 
 of men requiring knowledge and skill, and 
 it has no limits. In state affairs education 
 should have authority reserved to it, and cer- 
 tain established interests, especially the rights 
 of property, should be exempted from popular 
 control ; and the effectual means of securing 
 these ends is to magnify the representatives of 
 education and property to such a degree that 
 they will retain deciding power. But is this 
 so ? or if there be some truth in the premises, 
 may it not be contained in the democratic 
 scheme and reconciled with it ? And, to begin 
 with, is education, in the special sense, so 
 important in the fundamental decisions which
 
 DEMOCEACY 281 
 
 the suffrage makes? I speak, of course, of 
 literary education. It may well be the case 
 that the judgment of men at large is suffi- 
 ciently informed and sound to be safe, and is 
 the safest, for the reason that the good of 
 society is for all in common, and being, from 
 the political point of view, in the main, a mate- 
 rial good, comes home to their business and 
 bosoms in the most direct and universal way, 
 in their comfort or deprivation, in prosperity 
 and hard times, in war and famine, and those 
 wide-extended results of national policies which 
 are the evidence and the facts. Politics is very 
 largely, and one might almost say normally, a 
 conflict of material interests ; ideas dissociated 
 from action are not its sphere ; the way in 
 which policies are found immediately to affect 
 human life is their political significance. On 
 the broad scale, who is a better judge of their 
 own material condition and the modifications 
 of it from time to time, of what they receive 
 and what they need from political agencies, 
 than the individual men who gain or suffer by 
 what is done, on so great a scale that, combined, 
 these men make the masses? Experience is 
 their touchstone, and it is an experience univer-
 
 232 HEART OF MAN 
 
 sally diffused. Education, too, is a word that 
 will bear interpretation. It is not synonymous 
 with intelligence, for intelligence is native in 
 men, and, though increased by education, not 
 conditioned upon it. Intelligence, in the limited 
 sphere in which the unlearned man applies it, 
 in the things he knows, may be more powerful, 
 more penetrating, comprehensive, and quick, in 
 him, than in the technically educated man; for 
 he is educated by things, and especially in those 
 matters which touch his own interests, widely 
 shared. The school of life embodies a com- 
 pulsory education that no man escapes. If 
 politics, then, be in the main a conflict of 
 material interests broadly affecting masses of 
 men, the people, both individually and as a 
 body, may well be more competent to deal with 
 the matter in hand intelligently than those 
 who, though highly educated, are usually some- 
 what removed from the pressure of things, and 
 feel results and also conditions, even widely 
 prevalent, at a less early stage and with less 
 hardship, and at best in very mild forms. Be- 
 sides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains 
 that are required to diagnose a political situa- 
 tion so much as stomachs. The sphere of
 
 DEMOCRACY 233 
 
 ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is 
 really limited ; in the main, politics is, as 
 has been said, the selfish struggle of material 
 interests in a vast and diversified State. 
 
 Common experience furnishes a basis of polit- 
 ical fact, well known to the people in their state 
 of life, and also a test of any general policy once 
 put into operation. The capacity of the people 
 to judge the event in the long run must be 
 allowed. But does broad human experience, 
 however close and pressing, contain that fore- 
 cast of the future, that right choice of the 
 means of betterment, or even knowledge of 
 the remedy itself, which belong in the proper 
 sphere of enlightened intelligence? I am not 
 well assured that it is not so. The masses have 
 been long in existence, and what affects them 
 is seldom novel ; they are of the breed that 
 
 through 
 
 " old experience do attain 
 
 To something like prophetic strain." 
 
 The sense of the people, learning from their 
 fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast 
 amount of wisdom in common life, and more 
 surely than in others the half -conscious tenden- 
 cies of the times ; for in them these are vital
 
 234 HEART OF MAN 
 
 rather than reflective, and go on by the force of 
 universal conditions, hopes, and energies. In 
 them, too, intelligence works in precisely the 
 same way as in other men, and in politics pre- 
 cisely as in other parts of life. They listen to 
 those they trust who, by neighbourhood, by sym- 
 pathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual 
 share in it, by superior powers of mind and a 
 larger fund of information, are qualified to be 
 their leaders in forming opinion and their 
 instruments in the policy they adopt. These 
 leaders may be called demagogues. They may 
 be thought to employ only resources of trickery 
 upon dupes for selfish ends ; but such a view, 
 generally, is a shallow one, and not justified by 
 facts. It is right in the masses to make men 
 like themselves and nigh to them, especially 
 those born and bred in their own condition of 
 life, their leaders, in preference to men, how- 
 ever educated, benevolent, and upright, who 
 are not embodiments of the social conditions, 
 needs, and aspirations of the people in their 
 cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and 
 to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader 
 among themselves. Such a man is a true chief 
 of a party, who is not an individual holding
 
 DEMOCRACY 285 
 
 great interests in trust and managing them 
 with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own 
 superior brain ; he is the incarnation, as a 
 party chief, of other brains and wills, a rep- 
 resentative exceeding by far in wisdom and 
 power himself, a man in whom the units of 
 society, millions of them, have their govern- 
 mental life. No doubt he has great qualities 
 of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, 
 tact, efficient power, in order to become a 
 chief ; but he leads by following, he relies on 
 his sense of public support, he rises by virtue 
 of the common will, the common sense, which 
 store themselves in him. Such the leaders of 
 the people have always been. 
 
 If this process and it is to be observed 
 that as the scale of power rises the more lim- 
 ited elements of social influence enter into the 
 result with more determining force be appar- 
 ently crude in its early stages, and imperfect at 
 the best, is it different from the process of 
 social expansion in other parts of life? Wher- 
 ever masses of men are entering upon a rising 
 and larger life, do not the same phenomena 
 occur? in religion, for example, was there not 
 a similar popular crudity, as it is termed by
 
 236 HEART OF MAN 
 
 some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the 
 Methodist movement, in the Presbyterian move- 
 ment, in the Protestant movement, world- wide? 
 Was English Puritanism free from the same 
 sort of characteristics, the things that are un- 
 refined, as belong to democratic politics in 
 another sphere ? The method, the phenomena, 
 are those that belong to life universal, if life be 
 free and efficient in moving masses of men 
 upward into more noble ranges. Men of the 
 people lead, because the people are the stake. 
 On the other hand, educated leaders, however 
 well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they 
 are not rooted deeply in the popular soil. 
 Literary education, it must never be forgotten, 
 is not specially a preparation for political good 
 judgment. It is predominantly concerned, in 
 its high branches, with matters not of immediate 
 political consequence with books generally, 
 science, history, language, technical processes 
 and trades, professional outfits, and the mani- 
 fold activity of life not primarily practical, or 
 if practical not necessarily political. Men of 
 education, scholars especially, even in the field 
 of political system, are not by the mere fact 
 of their scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted
 
 DEMOCRACY 287 
 
 to take part in the active leadership of politics, 
 unless they have other qualifications not neces- 
 sarily springing from their pursuits in learning ; 
 they are naturally more engaged with ideas in 
 a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas 
 which are in reality as much a part of life as of 
 thought ; and the method of dealing with these 
 vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has 
 a specialty of its own. 
 
 It must be acknowledged, too, that in the 
 past, the educated class as a whole has com- 
 monly been found to entertain a narrow view; 
 it has been on the side of the past, not of the 
 future; previous to the revolutionary era the 
 class was not though it is now coming to 
 be a germinating element in reform, except 
 in isolated cases of high genius which foresees 
 the times to come and develops principles by 
 which they come ; it has been, even during our 
 era, normally in alliance with property and an- 
 cestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, 
 and like them is deeply engaged in the estab- 
 lished order, under which it is comfortable, en- 
 joying the places there made for its functions, 
 and is conservative of the past, doubtful of the 
 changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a
 
 238 HEART OF MAN 
 
 note of despair. I do not forget the great excep- 
 tions; but revolutions have come from below, 
 from the masses and their native leaders, how- 
 ever they may occasionally find some prep- 
 aration in thinkers, and some welcome in 
 aristocrats. The power of intellectual educa- 
 tion as an element in life is always overvalued ; 
 and, within its sphere, which is less than is 
 represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and 
 arrogance of its own; and, being without any 
 necessary connection with love or conscience, 
 it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, 
 or selfish force in politics and events, even 
 when well acquainted with the field of poli- 
 tics, as ever were any of the forms of dema- 
 gogy in the popular life. Intelligence, in the 
 form of high education, can make no authorita- 
 tive claim, as such, either by its nature, its 
 history, or, as a rule, its successful examples in 
 character. The suffrage, except as by natural 
 modes it embodies the people's practical and 
 general intelligence, in direct decisions and in 
 the representatives of themselves whom it 
 elects to serve the State, need not look to 
 high education as it has been in the privi- 
 leged past, for light and leading in matters
 
 DEMOCEACY 239 
 
 of fundamental concern ; education remains 
 useful, as expert knowledge is always useful 
 in matters presently to be acted on ; but in 
 so far as it is separable from the business of 
 the State, and stands by itself in a class not 
 servants of the State and mainly critical and 
 traditionary, it is deserving of no special polit- 
 ical trust because of any superiority of judgment 
 it may allege. In fact, education has entered 
 with beneficent effect into political life with 
 the more power, in proportion as it has become 
 a common and not a special endowment, and the 
 enfranchisement of education, if I may use the 
 term, is rather a democratic than an aristocratic 
 trait. Education, high education even, is more 
 respected and counts for more in a democracy 
 than under the older systems. But in a democ- 
 racy it remains true, that so far as education 
 deserves weight, it will secure it by its own 
 resources, and enter into political results, as 
 property does, with a power of its own. There, 
 least of all, does it need privilege. Education is 
 one inequality which democracy seems already 
 dissolving. 
 
 What suffrage records, in opposition it may 
 be to educated opinion, as such, is the mental
 
 240 HEART OF MAN 
 
 state of the people, and their choices of the men 
 they trust with the accomplishment of what is 
 to be done. If the suffrage is exposed to defect 
 in wisdom by reason of its dulness and igno- 
 rance, which I by no means admit, the remedy 
 lies not in a guardianship of the people by the 
 educated class, but in popular education itself, 
 in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general 
 information which, in conjunction with sound 
 morals, is all that is required for the comprehen- 
 sion of the great questions decided by suffrage, 
 and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the 
 decisions into effect. The vast increase of this 
 kind of intelligence, bred of such schools and 
 such means for the spread of political informa- 
 tion as have grown up here, has been a meas- 
 ureless gain to man in many other than political 
 ways. No force has been so great, except the 
 discussion of religious dogma and practice 
 under the Reformation in northern nations, 
 in establishing a mental habit throughout the 
 community. The suffrage also has this invalu- 
 able advantage, that it brings about a substitu- 
 tion of the principle of persuasion for that of 
 force, as the normal mode of dealing with 
 important differences of view in State affairs ;
 
 DEMOCRACY 241 
 
 it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech, 
 and the preservative of that great element of 
 liberty, and progress under liberty, which is not 
 otherwise well safe-guarded. It is also a con- 
 tinuous thing, and deals with necessities and 
 disagreements as they arise and by gradual 
 means, and thus, by preventing too great an 
 accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, 
 containing in itself the right of revolution in a 
 peaceable form under law. It is, moreover, a 
 school into which the citizen is slowly re- 
 ceived ; and it is capable of receiving great 
 masses of men and accustoming them to polit- 
 ical thought, free and efficient action in political 
 affairs, and a civic life in the State, breeding in 
 them responsibility for their own condition and 
 that of the State. It is the voice of the people 
 always speaking; nor is it to be forgotten, 
 especially by those who fear it, that the ques- 
 tions which come before the suffrage for settle- 
 ment are, in view of the whole complex and 
 historic body of the State, comparatively few ; 
 for society and its institutions, as the fathers 
 handed them down, are accepted at birth and 
 by custom and with real veneration, as our 
 birthright, the birthright of a race, a nation,
 
 242 HEART OF MAN 
 
 and a hearth. The suffrage does not under- 
 take to rebuild from the foundations ; the 
 people are slow to remove old landmarks ; but 
 it does mean to modify and strengthen this 
 inheritance of past ages for the better accom- 
 plishment of the ends for which society exists, 
 and the better distribution among men of the 
 goods which it secures. 
 
 Fraternity, the third constituent of democ- 
 racy, enforces the idea of equality through its 
 doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea 
 of liberty, which thus becomes more than an 
 instrument for obtaining private ends, is in- 
 spired with a social spirit and has bounds 
 set to its exercise. Fraternity leads us, in 
 general, to share our good, and to provide 
 others with the means of sharing in it. This 
 good is inexhaustible, and makes up welfare 
 in the State, the common weal. It is in the 
 sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humani- 
 tarian ideas, and those expressions of the social 
 conscience which we call moral issues, gener- 
 ally arise, and enter more or less completely 
 into political life. In denning politics as, in 
 the main, a selfish struggle of material inter- 
 ests, this was reserved, that, from time to time,
 
 DEMOCRACY 243 
 
 questions of a higher order do arise, such as that 
 of slavery in our history, which have in them 
 a finer element; and, though it be true that 
 government has in charge a race which is yet 
 so near to the soil that it is never far from want, 
 and therefore government must concern itself 
 directly and continuously with arrangements 
 for our material welfare, yet the higher life 
 has so far developed that matters which con- 
 cern it more intimately are within the sphere 
 of political action, and among these we reckon 
 all those causes which appeal immediately to 
 great principles, to liberty, justice, and man- 
 hood, as things apart from material gain or 
 loss, and in our consciousness truly spiritual ; 
 and such a cause, preeminently, was the war 
 for the Union, heavy as it was with the fate 
 of mankind under democracy. In such crises, 
 which seldom arise, material good is subor- 
 dinated for the time being, and life and prop- 
 erty, our great permanent interests, are held 
 cheap in the balance with that which is their 
 great charter of value, as we conceive our 
 country. 
 
 Yet even here material interests are not far 
 distant. Such issues are commonly found to
 
 244 HEART OF MAN 
 
 be involved with material interests in conflict, 
 or are alloyed with them in the working out; 
 and these interests are a constituent, though, it 
 may be, not the controlling matter. It is com- 
 monly felt, indeed, that some warrant of mate- 
 rial necessity is required in any great political 
 act, for politics, as has been said, is an affair 
 of life, not of free ideas ; and without such a 
 plain authorization reform is regarded as an 
 invasion of personal liberty of thought, expres- 
 sion, or action, which is the breeding-place of 
 progressive life and therefore carefully guarded 
 from intrusion. In proportion as the material 
 interests are less clearly affected injuriously, a 
 cause is removed into the region of moral 
 suasion, and loses political vigour. Religious 
 issues constitute the extreme of political action 
 without regard to material interests, wars of 
 conversion being their ultimate, and they are 
 more potent with less developed races. For 
 this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere 
 of fraternity lies generally outside of politics, 
 in social institutions and habits, which political 
 action may sometimes favour as in public chari- 
 ties, but which usually rely on other resources 
 for their support. On occasions of crisis, how-
 
 DEMOCRACY 246 
 
 ever, a great idea may marshal the whole 
 community in its cause ; and, more and more, 
 the cause so championed under democracy is 
 the spiritual right of man. 
 
 But fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal 
 of sovereignty in that principle of persuasion 
 which has been spoken of already, and in that 
 substitution of it for force, in the conduct of 
 human affairs, which democracy has made, as 
 truly as it has replaced tyranny with the au- 
 thority of a delegated and representative lib- 
 erty. Persuasion, in its moral form, outside of 
 politics, which is so largely resorted to in a 
 community that does not naturally regard the 
 imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but 
 believes virtue should be voluntary in the 
 man and decreed by him out of his own soul, 
 need not be enlarged upon here ; but in its 
 intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind 
 and will necessarily precedent to political action, 
 it may be glanced at, since law thus becomes 
 the embodied persuasion of the community, and 
 is itself no longer force in the objectionable 
 sense ; even minorities, to which it is adversely 
 applied, and on which it thus operates like tyr- 
 anny, recognize the different character it bears
 
 246 HEART OF MAN 
 
 to arbitrary power as that has historically been. 
 But outside of this refinement of thought in 
 the analysis, the fact that the normal attitude 
 of any cause in a democracy is that men must 
 be persuaded of its justice and expediency, 
 before it can impose itself as the will of the 
 State on its citizens, marks a regard for men as 
 a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the 
 highest consequence in State affairs, and with 
 a broad overflow of moral habit upon the rest 
 of life. 
 
 That portion of the community which is not 
 reached by persuasion, and remains in opposi- 
 tion, must obey the law, and submit, such is the 
 nature of society ; but minorities have acknowl- 
 edged rights, which are best preserved, per- 
 haps, by the knowledge that they may be useful 
 to all in turn. These rights are more respected 
 under democracy than in any other form of 
 government. The important question here, 
 however, is not the conduct of the State toward 
 an opposition in general, which is at one time 
 composed of one element and at another time 
 of a different element, and is a shifting, change- 
 able, and temporary thing ; but of its attitude 
 toward the more permanent and inveterate
 
 DEMOCRACY 247 
 
 minority existing in class interests, which are 
 exposed to popular attack. The capital in- 
 stance is property, especially in the form of 
 wealth ; and here belongs that objection to the 
 suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the 
 effect that, since the social will has no limits, 
 to constitute it by suffrage is to give the people 
 control of what is not their own. Property, 
 reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the 
 great source of inequality in the State and the 
 continuer of it, and gives rise perpetually to 
 political and social questions, attended with 
 violent passions ; but it is an institution com- 
 mon to civilization, it is very old, and it is 
 bound up intimately with the motive energies 
 of individual life, the means of supplying soci- 
 ety on a vast scale with production, distribu- 
 tion, and communication, and the process of 
 taking possession of the earth for man's use. 
 Its social service is incalculable. At times, 
 however, when accumulated so as to congest 
 society, property has been confiscated in enor- 
 mous amounts, as in England under Henry 
 VIII., in France at the Revolution, and in 
 Italy in recent times. The principle of para- 
 mount right over it in society has been estab-
 
 248 HEART OF MAN 
 
 lished in men's minds, and is modified only by 
 the social conviction that this right is one to be 
 exercised with the highest degree of care and 
 on the plainest dictates of a just necessity. 
 Taxation, nevertheless, though a power to de- 
 stroy and confiscate in its extreme exercise, 
 normally takes nothing from property that is 
 not due. It is not a levy of contributions, but 
 the collection of a just debt ; for property and 
 its owners are the great gainers by society, 
 under whose bond alone wealth finds security, 
 enjoyment, and increase, carrying with them 
 untold private advantages. Property is deeply 
 indebted to society in a thousand ways ; and, 
 besides, much of its material cannot be said to 
 be earned, but was given either from the great 
 stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, 
 conferring privilege, or from the overflowing 
 increments of social progress. If it is natu- 
 rally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if 
 it has to be subjected to control, if its duties 
 have to be thrust upon it oftentimes, it has 
 such powers of resistance that there need be 
 little fear lest it should suffer injustice. Like 
 education, it has great reserves of influence, 
 and is assured of enormous weight in the life
 
 DEMOCRACY 249 
 
 of the community. Other vested interests 
 stand in a similar relation to the State. These 
 minorities, which are important and lasting ele- 
 ments in society, receive consideration, and 
 bounds are set to liberty of dealing adversely 
 with them in practice, under that principle of 
 fraternity which seeks the good of one in all 
 and the good of all in one. 
 
 Fraternity, following lines whose general 
 sense has been sufficiently indicated, has, in 
 particular, established out of the common fund 
 public education as a means of diffusing intel- 
 lectual gain, which is the great element of 
 growth even in efficient toil, and also of ex- 
 tending into all parts of the body politic a 
 comprehension of the governmental scheme and 
 the organized life of the community, fusing its 
 separate interests in a mutual understanding 
 and regard. It has established, too, protection 
 in the law, for the weak as against the strong, 
 the poor as against the rich, the citizen as 
 against those who would trustee the State for 
 their own benefit ; and, on the broad scale, it 
 provides for the preservation of the public 
 health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all 
 children, and in a thousand humane ways per-
 
 250 HEART OF MAN 
 
 meates the law with its salutary justice. It 
 has, again, in another great field, established 
 toleration, not in religion merely, but of opin- 
 ion and practice in general ; and thereby largely 
 has built up a mutual and pervading faith in 
 the community as a body in all its parts and 
 interests intending democratic results under 
 human conditions ; it has thus bred a habit of 
 reserve at moments of hardship or grave diffi- 
 culty, a respect that awaits social justice giv- 
 ing time for it to be brought about, which as 
 a constituent of national character cannot be 
 too highly prized. 
 
 The object of all government, and of every 
 social system is, in its end and summary, to 
 secure justice among mankind. Justice is the 
 most sacred word of men ; but it is a thing 
 hard to find. Law, which is its social instru- 
 ment, deals with external act, general condi- 
 tions, and mankind in the mass. It is not, 
 like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms ; its 
 knowledge extends no farther than to what 
 shall illuminate the nature of the event it 
 examines ; it makes no true ethical award. It 
 is in the main a method of procedure, largely 
 inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied
 
 DEMOCRACY 251 
 
 to recurring states of fact ; it is a reasonable 
 arrangement for the peaceful facilitation of hu- 
 man business of all social kinds , and to a con- 
 siderable degree it is a convention, an agreement 
 upon what shall be done in certain sets of cir- 
 cumstances, as an approximation, it may be, to 
 justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous 
 solution of difficulties. This is as true of its 
 criminal as of its civil branches. Its concern 
 is with society rather than the individual, and 
 it sacrifices the individual to society without 
 compunction, applying one rule to all alike, 
 with a view to social, not individual, results, on 
 the broad scale. Those matters which make 
 individual justice impossible, especially the 
 element of personal responsibility in wrong- 
 doing, how the man came to be what he is and 
 his susceptibility to motives, to reason and to 
 passion, in their varieties, and all such con- 
 siderations, law ignores in the main question, 
 however it may admit them in the imperfect 
 form in which only they can be known, as 
 circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. 
 This large part of responsibility, it will seem 
 to every reflective moralist, enters little into 
 the law's survey; and its penalties, at best,
 
 262 HEART OF MAN 
 
 are "the rack of this rude world." Death 
 and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for 
 the protection of society, not for reformation, 
 though the philanthropic element in the State 
 may use the period of imprisonment with a 
 view to reformation ; nor in the history of the 
 punishment of crime, of the vengeance as such 
 taken on men in addition to the social protec- 
 tion sought, has society on the whole been less 
 brutal in its repulse of its enemies than they 
 were in their attack, or shown any eminent 
 justice toward its victims in the sphere of their 
 own lives. It is a terrible and debasing record, 
 up to this century at least, and uniformly cor- 
 rupted those who were its own instruments. 
 It was the application of force in its most 
 material forms, and dehumanized those upon 
 whom it was exercised, placing them outside 
 the pale of manhood as a preliminary to its 
 work. The lesson that the criminal remains 
 a man, was one taught to the law, not learned 
 from it. On the civil side, likewise, similar 
 reservations must be made, both as regards its 
 formulation and operation. The law as an 
 instrument of justice is a rough way of dealing 
 with the problems of the individual in society,
 
 DEMOCRACY 253 
 
 but it is effective for social ends ; and, in its 
 total body and practical results, it is a priceless 
 monument of human righteousness, sagacity, 
 and mercy, and though it lags behind opinion, 
 as it must, and postpones to a new age 
 the moral and prudential convictions of the 
 present, it is in its treasury that these at 
 last are stored. 
 
 If such be the case within the law, what in- 
 difference to justice does the course of events 
 exhibit in the world at large which comes under 
 the law's inquisition so imperfectly! How con- 
 tinuous and inevitable, how terrible and pitiful 
 is this aspect of life, is shown in successive 
 ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in 
 poem, drama, and tale, in which the noble na- 
 ture through some frailty, that was but a part, 
 and by the impulse of some moment of brief 
 time, comes to its wreck ; and, in connection 
 with this disaster to the best, lies the action of 
 the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering 
 and injury upon his victims and all that is theirs. 
 What is here represented as the general lot 
 of mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied 
 world-wide in the lives and fortunes of man- 
 kind, an inestimable amount of injustice al-
 
 254 HEART OF MAN 
 
 ways present. The sacrifice of innocence is in 
 no way lessened by aught of vengeance that 
 may overtake the wrong-doer ; and it is con- 
 stant. The murdered man, the wronged woman, 
 can find no reparation. What shall one say 
 of the sufferings of children and of the old, 
 and of the great curse that lies in heredity and 
 the circumstances of early life under depraved, 
 ignorant, or malicious conditions ? These bru- 
 talities, like the primeval struggle in the rise 
 of life, seem in a world that never heard the 
 name of justice. The main seat of individual 
 justice and its operation is, after all, in the 
 moral sense of men, governing their own con- 
 duct, and modifying so far as possible the mass 
 of injustice continually arising in the process 
 of life, by such relief as they can give by per- 
 sonal influence and action both on persons and 
 in the realm of moral opinion. 
 
 But, such questions apart, and within the 
 reach of the rude power of the law over men 
 in the mass, where individuality may be neg- 
 lected, there remains that portion of the field 
 in which the cause of justice may be advanced, 
 as it was in the extinction of slavery, the con- 
 fiscation of the French lands, the abolition of
 
 DEMOCRACY 266 
 
 the poor debtor laws, and in similar great meas- 
 ures of class legislation, if you will. I confess 
 I am one of those who hold that society is 
 largely responsible even for crime and pauper- 
 ism, and especially other less clearly denned 
 conditions in the community by which there 
 exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the 
 structure of society itself. The process of free- 
 ing man from the fetters of the past is still in- 
 complete, and democracy is a faith still early in 
 its manifestation ; social justice is the cry under 
 which this progress is made, and, being grounded 
 in material conditions and hot with men's pas- 
 sions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and un- 
 heeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what 
 has democracy been so beneficent to society as 
 in the ways without number that it has opened 
 for the doing of justice to men in masses, for 
 the moulding of safe and orderly methods of 
 change, and for the formation as a part of hu- 
 man character of a habit of philanthropy to 
 those especially whose misfortunes may be 
 partly laid to the door of society itself ? Char- 
 ity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot 
 upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant 
 ills; nor can mercy, however humanely and
 
 256 HEART OF MAN 
 
 wisely exerted, do more than mollify the mis- 
 fortune that abides in the criminal. Social 
 justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such 
 conditions, embodied in institutions and laws, 
 as shall diminish, so far as under nature and 
 human nature is possible, the differences of 
 men at birth, and in their education, and in 
 their opportunity through life, to the end that 
 all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin 
 and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and 
 the hope of happiness. Social justice, so de- 
 nned, under temporal conditions, democracy 
 seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in 
 governmental ways ; some advance has been 
 made ; but it requires no wide survey, nor long 
 examination, to see that what has been accom- 
 plished is a beginning, with the end so far in 
 the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets 
 have sung almost from the dawn of hope. 
 What matters it? It is not only poets who 
 dream ; justice is the statesman's dream. 
 
 Such in bold outline are the principles of 
 democracy. They have been working now for 
 a century in a great nation, not wholly unfet- 
 tered and on a complete scale even with us, but 
 with wider acceptance and broader application
 
 DEMOCRACY 267 
 
 than elsewhere in the world, and with most 
 prosperity in those parts of the country where 
 they are most mastering; and the nation 
 has grown great in their charge. What, 
 in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, 
 so vast, that they stand out like moun- 
 tain ranges, the configuration of a national 
 life? The diffusion of material comfort among 
 masses of men, on a scale and to an amount 
 abolishing peasantry forever ; the dissemina- 
 tion of education, which is the means of life 
 to the mind as comfort is to the body, in no 
 more narrow bounds, but through the State 
 universal, abolishing ignorance ; the develop- 
 ment of human capacity in intelligence, energy, 
 and character, under the stimulus of the open 
 career, with a result in enlarging and concen- 
 trating the available talent of the State to a 
 compass and with an efficiency and diversity 
 by which alone was possible the material sub- 
 jugation of the continent which it has made 
 tributary to man's life ; the planting of self- 
 respect in millions of men, and of respect for 
 others grounded in self-respect, constituting 
 a national characteristic now first to be found, 
 and to be found in the bosom of every child
 
 258 HEART OF MAN 
 
 of our soil, and, with this, of a respect for 
 womanhood, making the common ways safe 
 and honourable for her, unknown before ; the 
 moulding of a conservative force, so sure, so 
 deep, so instinctive, that it has its seat in the 
 very vitals of the State and there maintains as 
 its blood and bone the principles which the 
 fathers handed down in institutions containing 
 our happiness, security, and destiny, yet main- 
 tains them as a living present, not as a dead 
 past ; the incorporation into our body politic of 
 millions of half-alien people, without disturb- 
 ance, and with an assimilating power thai 
 proves the universal value of democracy as a 
 mode of dealing with the rr-.ce, as it now is ; an 
 enthronement of reason as the sole arbiter in a 
 free forum where every man may plead, and 
 have the judgment of all men upon the cause ; 
 a rooted repugnance to use force ; an aversion 
 to war ; a public and private generosity that 
 knows no bounds of sect, race, or climate ; a 
 devotion to public duty that excuses no man 
 and least of all the best, and has constantly 
 raised the standard of character ; a commisera- 
 tion for all unfortunate peoples and warm sym- 
 pathy with them in their struggles ; a love of
 
 DEMOCRACY 259 
 
 country as inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is 
 unparalleled in ardour ; and a will to serve the 
 world for the rise of man into such manhood as 
 we have achieved, such prosperity as earth has 
 yielded us, and such justice as, by the grace of 
 heaven, is established within our borders. Is 
 it not a great work? and all these blessings, 
 unconfined as the element, belong to all our 
 people. In the course of these results, the 
 imperfection of human nature and its institu- 
 tions has been present; but a just comparison 
 of our history with that of other nations, ages, 
 and systems, and of our present with our past, 
 shows that such imperfection in society has 
 been a diminishing element with us, and that 
 a steady progress has been made in methods, 
 measures, and men. No great issue, in a whole 
 century, has been brought to a wrong conclu- 
 sion. Our public life has been starred with 
 illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity, 
 and humanity, and, above all, for justice. Our 
 Presidents in particular have been such men as 
 democracy should breed, and some of them such 
 men as humanity has seldom bred. We are a 
 proud nation, and justly ; and, looking to the 
 future, beholding these things multiplied mill-
 
 260 HEART OF MAN 
 
 ion-fold in the lives of the children of the land 
 to be, we may well humbly own God's bounty 
 which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits 
 of democracy in the new ages of a humaner 
 world. 
 
 It will be plain to those who have read what 
 has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that 
 democracy is for the nation a true embodiment 
 of that life, and wears its characteristics upon 
 its sleeve. In it the individual mingles with 
 the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and 
 mankind itself sums the totality of individual 
 good in a well-nigh perfect way. In it there is 
 the slow embodiment of a future nobly con- 
 ceived and brought into existence on an ideal 
 basis of the best that is, from age to age, in 
 man's power. It includes the universal wisdom, 
 the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of 
 which men climb, and here manhood climbs. 
 It knows no limit ; it rejects no man who wears 
 the form Christ wore ; it receives all into its 
 benediction. Through democracy, more read- 
 ily and more plainly than through any other 
 system of government or conception of man's 
 nature and destiny, the best of men may blend 
 with his race, and store in their common life the
 
 DEMOCRACY 261 
 
 energies of his own soul, looking for as much 
 aid as he may give. Democracy, as elsewhere 
 has been said, is the earthly hope of men ; and 
 they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to 
 mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, 
 and in fact equal in the larger part of human 
 nature, however obstructed by time and cir- 
 cumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the 
 ways of life. On the battle-field or in the sen- 
 ate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to 
 lead an American life is to join heart and soul 
 in this cause.
 
 THE RIDE
 
 THE RIDE 
 
 MYSTERY is the natural habitat of the soul. 
 It is the child's element, though he sees it not ; 
 for, year by year, acquiring the solid and pal- 
 pable, the visible and audible, the things of 
 mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses. 
 and though grown a youth he still looks in- 
 tellectually for things definite and clear. Edu- 
 cation in general through its whole period 
 induces the contempt of all else, impressing 
 almost universally the positive element in life, 
 whose realm in early years at least is sensual. 
 So it was with me : the mind's eye saw all 
 that was or might be in an atmosphere of 
 scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world 
 washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of 
 mystery in man's life is a measure of wisdom 
 in the man ; and, at last, if the mind be open 
 and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in 
 the sage's knowledge or the poet's emotion or 
 such common experience of the world as all
 
 266 HEART OF MAN 
 
 have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in 
 the globed sky or the unlighted spirit. 
 
 I well remember the very moment when a 
 poetical experience precipitated this conviction 
 out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt 
 and deeply distrusted. I was born and bred 
 by the sea ; its mystery had passed into my 
 being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, 
 at least, not to be separated from the moods 
 of my own spirit. But on my first Italian 
 voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tre- 
 mendous billows of a stormy sea, and all was 
 strange and solemn the illimitable tossing 
 of a wave-world, darkening night after night 
 through weird sunsets of a spectral and un- 
 known beauty, enchantments that were door- 
 ways of a new earth and new heavens; and, 
 on the tenth day, when I came on deck in this 
 water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the 
 southernmost of the Azores, and gradually we 
 drew near to it. I shall never forget the 
 strangeness of that sight that solitary island 
 under the sunlit showers of early morning ; it 
 lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists 
 and wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, 
 frequent with many near and distant rain-
 
 THE RIDE 267 
 
 bows that shone and faded and came again as 
 we steamed through them, and the white wings 
 of the birds, struck by the sun, were the whitest 
 objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed 
 by, and I could not have told what it was in 
 that island scene which had so arrested me. 
 But when, some days afterward, at the harbor 
 of Gibraltar I looked upon the magnificent 
 rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of 
 Africa, again I felt through me that unknown 
 thrill. It was the mystery of the land. It was 
 altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new 
 sense of the natural world. Under the wild 
 heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed 
 that on the further side I should find the " far 
 west" that had fled before me beyond the river, 
 the prairies, and the plains ; but there was no 
 such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, 
 as this that saluted me coining landward for the 
 first time from the ocean-world. Since that 
 morning in the Straits, every horizon has been 
 a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to 
 the eye ; and truths have come to me like that 
 lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like 
 the capes and mountain barriers of Africa 
 thrusting up new continents unknown, un-
 
 268 HEART OF MAN 
 
 travelled, of a land men yet might tread as 
 common ground. 
 
 " A poet's mood " I know what once I 
 should have said. But mystery I then accepted 
 as the only complement, the encompassment, 
 of what we know of our life. In many ways 
 I had drawn near to this belief before, and I 
 have since many times confirmed it. One 
 occasion, however, stands out in my memory 
 even more intensely than those I have made 
 bold to mention, one experience that brought 
 me near to my mother earth, as that out of 
 which I was formed and to which I shall return, 
 and made these things seem as natural as to 
 draw my breath from the sister element of air. 
 I had returned to the West ; and while there, 
 wandering in various places, I went to a small 
 town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few 
 hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the 
 mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for 
 the future, had halted its great steel branch 
 sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for 
 no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely 
 with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger 
 friend, five years my junior, in his lonely 
 struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp
 
 THE RIDE 269 
 
 of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at 
 first sight, though not unused to the meagre- 
 ness, crudity, and hardness of such a place ; 
 but there I had come to take the warm wel- 
 come of his hands and look once more into 
 his face before time should part us. He flung 
 his arms about me, with a look of the South 
 in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and 
 the barren scene was like Italy made real for 
 one instant of golden time. 
 
 But if we had wandered momentarily, as if 
 out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, 
 I soon found it was into the frontier of our 
 western border. A herd of Texas ponies were 
 to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them 
 
 wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, 
 who had never known bit or spur ; they were 
 lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked 
 them out, and then led and pulled away to 
 man's life. It was a typical scene : the pen, the 
 hundred ponies bunched together and startled 
 with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose 
 resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace 
 
 athletes in the grain with the gray, close 
 garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark 
 under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver,
 
 270 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, 
 careless, confident, with the ease of the master 
 in his craft, now pulling down a pony without 
 a struggle, and now showing strength and dex- 
 terity against frightened resistance ; but the 
 hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these 
 creatures, so attractive to me at least that every 
 moment my friend's eye was on me, and he 
 kept saying, " They're wild, mind ! " The next 
 morning in the dark dawn we had them in 
 harness, and drove out, when the stars were 
 scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad 
 Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast 
 American land that bore us both, and made us, 
 despite the thousands of miles that stretched 
 between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood 
 and brain, brothers and friends. 
 
 Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shin- 
 ing leaf of my book of memory ! for my eyes 
 were fascinated with the land, in the high blow- 
 ing August wind, full of coolness and upland 
 strength, like new breath in my nostrils ; and 
 forward over the broken country, fenceless, 
 illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed 
 ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer 
 and explorer and prospector had gone before,
 
 THE BIDE 271 
 
 and now the farmer was thinly settling, the 
 new America growing up before my eyes ! and 
 him only by me to make me not a stranger 
 there, with talk of absent friends and old times, 
 though scarce the long age of a college course 
 had gone by, talk lapsing as of old on such 
 rides into serious strains, problems such as the 
 young talk of together and keep their secret, 
 learning life, the troubles of the heart of youth. 
 And if now I recur to some of the themes we 
 touched on, and set down these memoranda, 
 fragments of life, thinking they may be of use 
 to other youths as they were then to us, I 
 trust they will lose no privacy ; for, as I write, 
 I see them in that place, with that noble pros- 
 pect, that high sky, and him beside me whose 
 young listening yet seems to woo them from 
 my breast. 
 
 We mounted the five-mile ridge, and, 
 "Poor Robin," he said, "what of him?" 
 "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," 
 I laughed, "in the soft gray ashes of my 
 blazing hearth. One must live the life before 
 he tells the tale." "I loved his 'awaken- 
 ing.' " he replied, " and I have often thought 
 of it by myself. And will nothing come of
 
 272 HEART OF MAN 
 
 him now?" "Who can tell?" I said, looking 
 hard off over the prairie. " The Muses must 
 care for their own. That ' awakening,' " I went 
 on, after a moment of wondering why the dis- 
 tant stream of the valley was called " the Look- 
 ing-glass," and learning only that such was its 
 name, "was when after the bookish torpor of 
 his mind you remember he called books his 
 opiates he felt the beauty of the spring and 
 the marvel of human service come back on him 
 like a flood. It was the growing consciousness 
 of how little of life is our own. Youth takes 
 life for granted; the hand that smoothed his 
 pillow the long happy years, the springs that 
 brought new blossoms to Ms cheeks, the com- 
 mon words that martyr and patriot have died 
 to form on childish lips, and make them native 
 there with life's first breath, are natural to him as 
 Christmas gifts, and bring no obligation. Our 
 life from babyhood is only one long lesson in 
 indebtedness ; and we best learn what we have 
 received by what we give. This was dawning 
 on my hero then. I recall how he ran the 
 new passion. That outburst you used to like, 
 amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the 
 misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide
 
 THE RIDE 273 
 
 warmth of April breathing with universal mild- 
 ness through the softened air why, you can 
 remember the very day," I said. " It was 
 one " " Yes, I can remember more than 
 that," he interrupted ; " I know the words, or 
 some of them ; what you just said was the old 
 voice tang and colour Poor Robin's voice ; " 
 and he began, and I listened to the words, 
 which had once been mine; and now were his. 
 
 " By heaven, I never believed it. ' Clotho 
 spins, Lachesis weaves, and Atropos cuts,' I 
 said, ' and the poor illusion vanishes ; the loud 
 laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips ; 
 the foolish and the wise, the merciful and the 
 pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the 
 idlers in the market-place, are huddled into 
 one grave, and the heart of Mary Mother and 
 of Mary Magdalen are one dust.' Duly in 
 those years the sun rose to cheer me; the 
 breath of the free winds was in my nostrils ; 
 the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. 
 Spring with its blossomed fruit trees, and the 
 ungarnered summer, gladdened me ; the flame 
 of autumn was my torch of memory, and win- 
 ter lighted my lamp of solitude. Men tilled
 
 274 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to 
 clothe me, and so far as in them was power 
 and in me was need, brought to my doors sus- 
 tenance for the body and whatsoever of divine 
 truth was theirs for my soul. Women minis- 
 tered to me in blessed charities ; and some 
 among my fellows gave me their souls in keep- 
 ing. How true is that which my friend said 
 to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die, 
 ' I tell you, you cannot escape the mercy of 
 God;' and tears coursed down the imbruted 
 face, and once more the human soul, that the 
 ministers of God could not reach, shone in its 
 tabernacle. Now the butterfly has flown in at 
 the tavern-window, and rebuked me. I go out, 
 and on the broad earth the warm sun shines ; 
 the spring moves throughout our northern 
 globe as when first man looked upon it ; the 
 seasons keep their word ; the birds know their 
 pathways through the air; the animals feed 
 and multiply ; the succession of day and night 
 has no shadow of turning ; the stars keep their 
 order in the blue depths of infinite space ; 
 Sirius has not swerved from his course, nor 
 Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere ; nature 
 puts forth her strength in all the vast compass
 
 THE RIDE 275 
 
 of her domain, and is manifest in life that con- 
 tinues and is increased in fuller measures of 
 joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with 
 love in the heart of man. Wiser were the 
 ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made 
 themselves ascetics of the body, but I have 
 been an ascetic of the soul." 
 
 " Eccola! " I said, " was it like that ? But a 
 heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety 
 of thought, as many a Victorian page we have 
 read together testifies. The style tames with 
 the spirit ; and wild blood is not the worst of 
 faults in poets or boys. But I will change old 
 coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, 
 and it is not so very different. There is a 
 good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem 
 to misbehave both at once." In fact, these 
 ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, open 
 world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson 
 of civilization, and unite their private wills in 
 rebellion ; for, while one or the other of them 
 would from time to time fling back his heels 
 and prepare to resist, the other dragged him 
 into the course with the steady pace, and, 
 under hand and voice, they kept going in a
 
 276 HEART OF MAN 
 
 much less adventurous way than I had an- 
 ticipated. And so I read a page or two from 
 the small blank-book in which I used to write, 
 saying only, by way of preface, that the April 
 morning my friend so well remembered marked 
 the time when I began that direct appeal to 
 life of which these notes were the first- 
 fruits. 
 
 The waters of the Looking-glass had been 
 lost behind its bluffs to the west as we turned 
 inland, though we still rose with the slope of 
 the valley ; and now on higher land we saw the 
 open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder 
 configuration than was familiar to me in prairie 
 regions, the rolling of the country being in great 
 swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, 
 this accentuation of the motionless lines of 
 height and hollow, and the general lift of the 
 land, perhaps, was what first gave that life to 
 the soil, that sense of a presence in the earth 
 itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I 
 saw only the outspread region, with here and 
 there a gleam of the grain on side-hills and 
 far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or 
 great stands of Indian corn, acres within acres, 
 and hardly a human dwelling anywhere ; the
 
 THE RIDE 277 
 
 loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primi- 
 tiveness of it, were the elements I remember ; 
 and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse 
 of the blue upper sky, like a separate element 
 lifted in deep color over the gold of harvest, 
 the green of earth, and the touches of brown 
 road and soil. So, with pauses for common 
 sights and things, and some word of comment 
 and fuller statement and personal touches that 
 do not matter now, I read my brief notes of 
 life in its most sacred part. 
 
 "The gift of life at birth is only a little 
 breath on a baby's lips ; the air asks no consent 
 to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses 
 awaken, the mind begins, and the first hand- 
 writing of life is a child's smile; but as boy- 
 hood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives 
 a more intimate sweetness, and manhood ex- 
 pands in richer values, life is not less entirely 
 a gift. As well say a self -born as a self-made 
 man. Nature does not intrust to us her bod- 
 ily processes and functions, and the fountains 
 of feeling within well up, and the forms of 
 thought define, without obligation to man's 
 wisdom; body and soul alike are above his
 
 278 HEART OF MAN 
 
 will our garment of sense comes from no 
 human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit 
 fashioned by any mortal hands; in our prog- 
 ress and growth, too, bloom of health and 
 charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law 
 of grace that went forth with the creative 
 word. Slow as men are to realize the fact 
 and the magnitude of this great grant, and 
 the supreme value of it as life itself in all its 
 abundance of blessings, there comes a time to 
 every generous and open heart when the youth 
 is made aware of the stream of beneficence flow- 
 ing in upon him from the forms and forces of 
 nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour ; 
 he knows, too, the cherishing of human service 
 all about him in familiar love and the large 
 brothering of man's general toil ; he begins to 
 see, shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of 
 the past, its mighty sheltering of mankind in 
 institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its 
 fostering agencies, its driving energies. What 
 a breaking out there is then in him of the emo- 
 tions that are fountain-heads of permanent life, 
 filial love, patriotic duty, man's passion for 
 humanity ! It is then that he becomes a man. 
 Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments,
 
 THE RIDE 279 
 
 the youth should not, in pure thankfulness, 
 find out the Giver of all good! 
 
 "As soon as man thus knows himself a crea- 
 ture, he has established a direct relation with 
 the Creator, did he but realize it, not in mere 
 thought of some temporal creation, some ante- 
 cedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate 
 experience of that continuing act which keeps 
 the universe in being, 
 
 ' Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
 Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,' 
 
 felt and known now in the life which, moment 
 to moment, is his own. The extreme sense of 
 this may take on the expression of the panthe- 
 istic mood, as here in Shelley's words, without 
 any logical irreverence : for pantheism is that 
 great mood of the human spirit which it is,' 
 permanent, recurring in every age and race, as 
 natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley, because of 
 the fundamental character of these facts and 
 the inevitability of the knowledge of them. 
 The most arrogant thought of man, since it 
 identifies him with deity, it springs from that 
 same sense of insignificance which makes hu- 
 mility the characteristic of religious life in all
 
 280 HEART OF MAN 
 
 its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the 
 feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys 
 and the might and grace of life in us, are the 
 mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, 
 may come to think man the passive receptacle 
 of power, and the instrument scarce distin- 
 guishable from the hand that uses it ; the 
 thought is as nigh to St. Paul as to Plato. 
 This intimate and infinite sense of obligation 
 finds its highest expression, on the secular 
 side, and takes on the touch of mystery, in 
 those great men of action who have believed 
 themselves in a special manner servants of God, 
 and in great poets who found some consecration 
 in their calling. They, more than other men, 
 know how small is any personal part in our 
 labours and our wages alike. But in all men 
 life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its in- 
 struments, this gift, this debt ; to continue to 
 live is to contract a greater debt in proportion 
 to the greatness of the life ; it is greatest in the 
 greatest. 
 
 " This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. 
 He who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes 
 it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent 
 in the world's service, feels most constantly this
 
 THE RIDE 881 
 
 power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; 
 he is overwhelmed by it : and how should 
 gratitude for such varied and constant and ex- 
 haustless good fail to become a part of the daily 
 life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in 
 which the value, the power and sweetness of 
 life, is made more plain ? Yet at the same in- 
 stant another and almost contrary mood is twin- 
 born with this thankfulness, the feeling of 
 helplessness. Though the secret and inscruta- 
 ble power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly 
 felt, - 
 
 ' Closer is He than breathing and nearer than 
 hands and feet,' 
 
 though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes 
 this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who 
 can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense 
 with human hope, however firm and irremova- 
 ble may be his confidence in the beneficent 
 order of God? And especially in the more 
 strenuous trials of later ages for Christian per- 
 fection in a world not Christian, and under the 
 mysterious dispensation of nature, even the 
 youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who 
 does not crave companionship, guidance, pro-
 
 282 HEART OF MAN 
 
 tection. Dependent as he feels himself to be 
 for all he is and all he may become, the means 
 of help self-help even and the law of it 
 must be from that same power, whose efficient 
 working he has recognized with a thankful 
 heart. Where else shall he look except to that 
 experience of exaltation during whose continu- 
 ance he plucked a natural trust for the future, 
 a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble 
 readiness to accept the partial ills of life? In 
 life's valleys, then, as on its summits, in the 
 darkness as in the light, he may retain that 
 once confided trust ; not that he looks for mira- 
 cle, or any specific and particularizing care, it 
 may be, but that in the normal course of things 
 he believes in the natural alliance of that arm 
 of infinite power with himself. In depression. 
 in trouble, in struggle, such as all life exhibits, 
 he will be no more solitary than in his hours of 
 blessing. Thus, through helplessness also, he 
 establishes a direct relation with God, which is 
 also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry 
 for aid as in the offering of thanks. The grati- 
 tude of the soul may be likened to that morn- 
 ing prayer of the race which was little more 
 than praise with uplifted hands ; the helpless-
 
 THE RIDE 283 
 
 ness of man is rather the evening prayer of the 
 Christian age, which with bowed head implores 
 the grace of God to shield him through the 
 night. These two, in all times, among all 
 races, under ten thousand divinities, have been 
 the voices of the heart. 
 
 " There is a third mood of direct experience 
 by which one approaches the religious life. 
 Surely no man in our civilization can grow 
 far in years without finding out that, in the 
 effort to live a life obeying his desires and 
 worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with 
 Christ's commands ; and he knows that the 
 promises of Christ, so far as they relate to 
 the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself 
 day by day; he can escape neither the ideal 
 that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in 
 respect to the working of that ideal on others 
 and within himself. He perceives the evil of 
 the world, and desires to share in its redemp- 
 tion ; its sufferings, and would remove them ; 
 its injustice, and would abolish it. He is, by 
 the mere force of his own heart in view of 
 mankind, a humanitarian. But he is more 
 than this in such a life. If he be sincere, he 
 has not lived long before he knows in himself
 
 284 HEART OF MAN 
 
 such default of duty that he recognizes it 
 as the soul's betrayal ; its times and occa- 
 sions, its degrees of responsibility, its character 
 whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its 
 greater or less offence, are indifferent matters ; 
 for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels 
 a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, 
 so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the 
 purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is 
 life that is quick. It may well be, in the 
 world's history in our time, that the suffering 
 caused in the good by slight defections from 
 virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt 
 for definite and habitual crime. Thus none 
 those least who are most hearts of conscience 
 
 escapes this emotion, known in the language 
 of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earli- 
 est moral crisis of the soul ; it is widely felt, 
 
 such is the nature and such the circum- 
 stances of men; and, as a man meets it in 
 that hour, as he then begins to form the habit 
 of dealing with his failures sure to come, so 
 runs his life to the end save for some great 
 change. If then some restoring power enters 
 in, some saving force, whether it be from the 
 memory and words of Christ, or from the
 
 THE RIDE 286 
 
 example of those lives that were lived in 
 the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love 
 and more tender affection enforcing the su- 
 premacy of duty and the hope of struggle, in 
 whatever way that healing comes, it is well; 
 and, just as the man of honest mind has rec- 
 ognized the identity of his virtue with Christ's 
 rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom 
 of its original statement, so now he knows 
 that this moral recovery, and its method, is 
 what has been known on the lips of saint 
 and sinner as the life of the Spirit in man, 
 and even more specially he cannot discrimi- 
 nate it from what the servants of Christ call 
 the life of Christ in them. He has become 
 more than a humanitarian through this experi- 
 ence ; he is now himself one of those whom 
 in the mass he pities and would help ; he has 
 entered into that communion with his kind 
 and kin which is the earthly seal of Christian 
 faith. 
 
 " Yet it seems to me a profound error in life 
 to concentrate attention upon the moral expe- 
 rience here described ; it is but initial ; and, 
 though repeated, it remains only a beginning ; 
 as the vast force of nature is put forth through
 
 286 HEART OF MAN 
 
 health, and its curative power is* an incident 
 and subordinate, so the spiritual energy, of life 
 is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of 
 the soul in so far as it has been made whole. 
 A narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts 
 life, and saddens it both in one's own con- 
 science and in his love for others. Sin is but 
 a part of life, and it is far better to fix our 
 eyes on the measureless good achieved in those 
 lines of human effort which have either never 
 been deflected from right aims, or have been 
 brought back to the paths of advance, which 
 I believe to be the greater part, both in indi- 
 vidual lives of noble intention, and in the 
 Christian nations. Sin loses half its dismay- 
 ing power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, 
 if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter 
 with controlling influence into personal life, 
 and to what a degree ideal destinies are already 
 incarnate in the spirit of great nations. 
 
 "However this may be, I find on examina- 
 tion of man's common experience these three 
 things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct 
 relation between him and God : this spontane- 
 ous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this 
 noble practice, which is, historically, the Chris-
 
 THE RIDE 287 
 
 tian life, and is characterized by its distinc- 
 tive experiences. They are simple elements : a 
 faith in God's being which has not cared fur- 
 ther to define the modes of that being; a 
 hope which has not grown to specify even a 
 Resurrection ; a love that has not concentrated 
 itself through limitation upon any instrumen- 
 tal conversion of the world; but, inchoate as 
 they are, they remain faith, hope, love these 
 three. Are they not sufficient to be the begin- 
 nings of the religious life in the young? To 
 theological learning, traditional creeds, and 
 conventional worship they may seem primitive, 
 slight in substance, meagre in apparel ; but 
 one who is seeking, not things to believe, but 
 things to live, desires the elementary. In 
 setting forth first principles, the elaboration 
 of a more highly organized knowledge may 
 be felt as an obscuration of truth, an impedi- 
 ment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to 
 touch and handle the essential matter; and 
 for this reason a teacher dispenses with much 
 in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a 
 grown man abandons nine-tenths of his vocab- 
 ulary. In the same way, learning as a child, 
 seeking in the life of the soul with God what
 
 288 HEART OF MAN 
 
 is normal, vital, and universal, the beginner 
 need not feel poor and balked, because he 
 does not avail himself as yet of resources that 
 belong to length of life, breadth of scholar- 
 ship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the 
 seer's insight. 
 
 "The spiritual life here defined, elementary 
 as it is, appears inevitable, part and parcel of 
 our natural being. Why should this be sur- 
 prising? Surely if there be a revelation of 
 the divine at all, it must be one independent 
 of external things ; one that comes to all by 
 virtue of their human nature ; one that is 
 direct, and not mediately given through others. 
 Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things 
 told of, but of things experienced. It follows 
 that religion may be essentially free from any 
 admixture of the past in its communication to 
 the soul. It cannot depend on events of a 
 long-past time now disputable, or on books of 
 a far-off and now alien age. These things are 
 the tradition and history of the spiritual life, 
 but not the life. To the mass of men religion 
 derived from such sources would be a belief 
 in other men's experience, and for most of 
 them would rest on proofs they cannot scruti-
 
 THE RIDE 289 
 
 nize. It would be a religion of authority, not 
 of personal and intimate conviction. Just as 
 creation may be felt, not as some far-off event, 
 but a continuing act, revelation itself is a pres- 
 ent reality. Do not the heavens still declare 
 the glory of God as when they spoke to the 
 Psalmist ? and has the light that lighteth every 
 man who is born into the world ceased to burn 
 in the spirit since the first candle was lit on 
 a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory 
 and mercy be an everlasting thing, and inex- 
 tinguishable save in the life itself, then only 
 is that direct relation of man with God, this 
 vital certainty in living truth, living in us, 
 this personal religion, possible. 
 
 " What has reform in religion ever been other 
 than the demolition of the interfering barriers, 
 the deposit of the past, between man and God? 
 The theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in 
 the Church expresses man's need of direct 
 contact with the divine ; the doctrine of tran- 
 substantiation symbolizes it ; and what is 
 Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure 
 spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of 
 man in his loneliness, seeking God face to 
 face? what is its iconoclasm of image and
 
 290 HEART OF MAN 
 
 altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Coun- 
 cils and the Fathers, but the assertion of the 
 noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue 
 of which it demands a freeman's right of audi- 
 ence, a son's right of presence with his father, 
 and believes that such is God's way with his 
 own? This immediacy of the religious life, 
 being once accepted as the substance of vitality 
 in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass 
 of that burden in which scepticism thrives and 
 labours. The theories of the past respecting 
 God's government, no longer possible in a 
 humaner and Christianized age, the impaired 
 genuineness of the Scriptures and all ques- 
 tions of their text and accuracy, even the 
 great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital 
 consequence. A man may approach divine 
 truth without them. Simple and bare as the 
 spiritual life here presented is, it is not open 
 to such sceptical attack, being the fundamen- 
 tal revelation of God bound up in the very 
 nature of man which has been recognized at 
 so many critical times, in so many places and 
 ages, as the inward light. We may safely 
 leave dogma and historical criticism and sci- 
 entific discovery on one side ; it is not in them
 
 THE RIDE 291 
 
 that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the 
 religious emotions as they naturally arise under 
 the influence of life. 
 
 "This view is supported rather than weak- 
 ened by such records of the spiritual life in 
 man as we possess. Man's nature is one ; and, 
 just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the 
 poets from whom we derive direction in our 
 general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated 
 by saintly men and holy women in the special 
 sphere of the soul's life with God. Our nature 
 is one with theirs ; but as there are differences 
 in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all 
 men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their 
 growth ; and, from time to time, men have 
 arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to 
 religious emotions, so developed in religious 
 experience, through instinct, circumstance, and 
 power, that they can aid us by the example 
 and precept of their lives. To them belongs 
 a respect similar to that paid to poets and 
 thinkers. Yet it is because they tell us what 
 they have seen and touched, not what they 
 have heard, what they have lived and shown 
 forth in acts that bear testimony to their 
 words, that they have this power. Such were
 
 292 HEART OF MAN 
 
 St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas 
 a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose 
 life's story has come into our hands ; such Avere 
 the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is 
 the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, 
 fundamental, that preserves their influence in 
 other lives. They help us by opening and 
 directing the spiritual powers we have in 
 common ; and beyond our own experience we 
 believe in their counsels as leading to Avhat 
 we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the 
 life they followed. It is not Avhat they believed 
 of God, but what God accomplished in them, 
 that holds our attention ; and we interpret it 
 only by what ourselves have known of his deal- 
 ing with us. It is life, and the revelation of 
 God there contained, that in others or ourselves 
 is the root of the matter God in us. This is 
 the corner stone." 
 
 The sun was high in the heavens when we 
 ceased talking of these matters and saw in a 
 lowland before us a farmhouse, Avhere we 
 stopped. It was a humble dAvelling almost 
 the humblest partly built of sod, Avith a barn 
 near by, and nothing to distinguish it except
 
 THE RIDE 298 
 
 the sign, "Post Office," which showed it was 
 the centre of this neighborhood, if " the blank 
 miles round about " could be so called. We 
 were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed 
 and cared for, we sat down with the farmer 
 and his wife and the small brood of young 
 children, sharing their noonday meal. It was 
 a rude table and a lowly roof ; but, when I 
 arose, I was glad to have been at such a board, 
 taking a stranger's portion, but not like a 
 stranger. It was to be near the common lot, 
 and the sense of it was as primitive as the 
 smell of the upturned earth in spring ; it had 
 the wholesomeness of life in it. Going out, I 
 lay down on the ground and talked with the 
 little boy, some ten years old, to whom our 
 coming was evidently an event of importance ; 
 and I remember asking him if he ever saw 
 
 a city. He had been once, he said, to 
 
 the hamlet, as I thought it, which we had 
 just left with his father in the farm -wagon. 
 That was his idea of the magnificence of cities. 
 I could not but look at him curiously. Here 
 was the creature, just like other boys, who 
 knew less of the look of man's world than any 
 one I had ever encountered. To him this over-
 
 294 HEART OF MAN 
 
 stretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach 
 of earth, and home, were all of life. What 
 a waif of existence ! but the ponies being 
 ready, we said our good-byes and drove on 
 along fainter tracks, still northward. We 
 talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere 
 the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, 
 lightly humorous, too, which we always had 
 together ; but tiring of it at last, and the boy 
 still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental 
 symbol of that isolated being whom my notes 
 had described, and knowing that I had told but 
 half my story and that my friend would like 
 the rest, I turned the talk again on the serious 
 things, saying and there was nothing surpris- 
 ing in such a change with us "After all, you 
 know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by 
 ourselves. How to enter life and be one with 
 other men, how to be the child of society, and 
 a peer there, belongs to our duty ; and to escape 
 from the solitude of private life is the most 
 important thing for men of lonely thought and 
 feeling, such as meditation breeds. There is 
 more of it, if you will listen again ; " and he, 
 with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful 
 happiness in the new things of life for us,
 
 THE RIDE 205 
 
 new as if they had not been lived a thousand 
 years before, listened like a child to a story, 
 grave as the matter was, which I read again 
 from the memoranda I had made, after that 
 April morning, year by year. 
 
 "Respect for age is the natural religion of 
 childhood ; it becomes in men a sentiment of 
 the soul. An obscure melancholy, the pathos 
 of human fate, mingles with this instinctive 
 feeling. The fascination of the sea, the sub- 
 limity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well 
 as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like 
 them, the mind does not distinguish from eter- 
 nal things, and has ever invested with sacred 
 awe. It is the sense of our mortality that thus 
 exalts nature. Yet before her antiquity merely, 
 veneration is seldom full and perfect; her 
 periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplat- 
 ing their vastness, amazement dissipates our 
 faculties. Rather some sign of human occu- 
 pancy, turning the desert into a neglected gar- 
 den, is necessary to give emotional colour and 
 the substance of thought ; some touch of man's 
 hand that knows a writing beyond nature's 
 can add what centuries could not give, and
 
 296 HEART OF MAN 
 
 makes a rock a monument. The Mediterranean 
 islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, 
 and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed 
 graves, makes England ancestral soil. Nor is 
 it only such landmarks of time that bring this 
 obscure awe ; occupations, especially, awake it, 
 and customary ceremonies, and all that enters 
 into the external tradition of life, handed down 
 from generation to generation. On the West- 
 ern prairies I have felt rather the permanence 
 of human toil than the newness of the land. 
 
 " The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as 
 it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a 
 meditation on death, deep-set far below thought. 
 We behold the sensible conquests of death, and 
 the sight is so habitual, and remains so mys- 
 terious, that it leaves its imprint less in the 
 conscious and reflective mind than in tempera- 
 ment, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden 
 stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; 
 Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities 
 are like broken anchors caught in the sunken 
 reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost relics of 
 their human charge long vanished away. Star- 
 tling it is, when the finger of time has touched 
 what we thought living, and we find in some
 
 THE RIDE 2*97 
 
 solitary place the face of stone. I learned this 
 lesson on the low marshes of Ravenna, where, 
 among the rice-fields and the thousands of 
 white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, 
 from whose ruined sides Christianity, in the 
 face and figure it wore before it put on the 
 form and garb of a world-wide religion, looked 
 down on ine with the unknown eyes of an 
 alien and Oriental faith. ' Stranger, why lin- 
 gerest thou in this broken tomb,' I seemed to 
 hear from silent voices in that death of time ; 
 and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother- 
 Church of Christendom, they go, not to St. John 
 Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims 
 to the low marshes, the white water lilies, the 
 lone Byzantine ruin that even the sea has long 
 abandoned. 
 
 " The Mother-Church? is then this personal 
 religious life only a state of orphanage ? Be- 
 cause true life necessarily begins in the inde- 
 pendent self, must it continue without the 
 sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed 
 guidance of elder wisdom, and man's joint life 
 in common which by association so enlarges 
 and fortifies the individual good ? Why should 
 one not behave with respect to religion as he
 
 298 HEART OF MAN 
 
 does in other parts of life ? It is our habit 
 elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond 
 ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer 
 judgment, a more efficient will enacting our 
 own choice. To obey by force is a childish 
 or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly 
 to accept authority within just limits is the 
 reasonable and practical act of a free man in 
 society ; the recognition of this by a youth 
 marks his attainment of intellectual majority. 
 Authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the 
 commonwealth ; until the youth comprehends 
 it he is a ward ; thereafter he is either a rebel 
 or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the 
 largest measure of freedom society has ever 
 known, there is little fear lest the principle of 
 authority should prove a dangerous element. 
 The right of private judgment, which is, I 
 believe, the vital principle of the intellectual 
 life, is the first to be exercised by our young 
 men who lead that life ; and quite in the spirit 
 of that education which would repeat in the 
 child the history of the race, we are scarce out 
 of the swaddling bands of the primer and cate- 
 chism before we would remove all questions to 
 the court of our own jurisdiction. The mind is
 
 THE RIDE 299 
 
 not a tabula rasa at birth, we learn, but, so soon 
 as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all 
 records copied there. The treasure doors of 
 our fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us ; 
 but we will weigh each gold piece with balance 
 and scale. All that libraries contain, all that 
 institutions embody, all the practice of life 
 which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted 
 as things of use and wont, shall be certified by 
 our scrutiny. So in youth we say, and what 
 results? What do the best become? Incapa- 
 bles, detached from the sap of life, forced to 
 escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension 
 of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and 
 earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; 
 the most we can attain to is an attitude of 
 mind. In view of the vast variety of phases 
 in which even man's great ideas have been 
 held, a sense of indifference among them, a 
 vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 
 ' What is truth? ' ends all. 
 
 "This is the extreme penalty of the heroic 
 sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds ; 
 commonly those who would measure man's large 
 scope by the gauge of their own ability and 
 experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the
 
 300 HEART OF MAN 
 
 fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, 
 and all the various brood of dwarfed life ; but, 
 for most men, the pressure of life itself, which 
 compels them, like Descartes, doubting the 
 world, to live as if it were real, corrects their 
 original method of independence. They find 
 that to use authority is the better part of wis- 
 dom, much as to employ men belongs to prac- 
 tical statecraft ; and they learn the reasonable 
 share of the principle of authority in life. 
 They accept, for example, the testimony of 
 others in matters of fact, and their mental 
 results in those subjects with which such men 
 are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in 
 average human capacity in its own sphere ; 
 and, in particular, they accept provisional opin- 
 ions, especially such as are alleged to be verifi- 
 able in action, and they put them to the test. 
 This is our habit in all parts of secular life 
 in scholarship and in practical affairs. ' If any 
 man will do His will, he shall know of the doc- 
 trine, whether it be of God,' is only a special 
 instance of this law of temporary acceptance 
 and experiment in all life. It is a reasonable 
 command. The confusion of human opinion 
 largely arises from the fact that the greater
 
 THE HIDE 301 
 
 part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient 
 culture or opportunity of those who hold it; 
 and the persistency with which such opinion is 
 argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of 
 many of the permanent differences that array 
 men in opposition. The event would dispense 
 with the argument ; but in common life, which 
 knows far more of the world than it has in its 
 own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of 
 such real solution. It is the distinction of vital 
 religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from 
 true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life 
 open to all. 
 
 "Such authority, then, as is commonly 
 granted in science, politics, or commerce to 
 the past results and expectations of men bring- 
 ing human life in these provinces down to our 
 time and delivering it, not as a new, but as an 
 incomplete thing, into the hands of our genera- 
 tion, we may yield also in religion. The lives 
 of the saints and all those who in history have 
 illustrated the methods and results of piety, 
 their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their 
 warning and encouragement, compose a great 
 volume of instruction, illustration, and educa- 
 tion of the religious life. It is folly to ignore
 
 302 HEART OF MAN 
 
 this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of 
 letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitu- 
 tion ; for, as these are the monuments of past 
 achievement and an advantage we have at our 
 start over savage man, so in religion there are 
 as well established results of life already lived. 
 Though the religious life be personal, it is not 
 more so than all life of thought and emotion ; 
 and in it we do not begin at the beginning of 
 time any more than in other parts of life. We 
 begin with an inheritance of many experiments 
 hitherto, of many methods, of a whole race- 
 history of partial error, partial truth ; and we 
 take up the matter where our fathers laid it 
 down, with the respect due to their earnest 
 toil, their sincere effort and trial, their convic- 
 tions ; and the youth who does not feel their 
 impressiveness as enforcing his responsibility 
 has as nascent a life in religion as he would 
 have, in the similar case, in learning or in 
 citizenship. 
 
 "The question of authority in the religious 
 life, however, is more specific than this, and is 
 not to be met by an admission of the general 
 respect due to the human past and its choicer 
 spirits, and our dependence thereon for the fos-
 
 THE RIDE 303 
 
 tering of instinctive impulses, direction, and 
 the confirmation of our experience. It is or- 
 ganized religion that here makes its claim to 
 fealty, as organized liberty, organized justice 
 do, in man's communal life. There is a joint 
 and general consent in the masses of men with 
 similar experience united into the Church, with 
 respect to the religious way of life, similar to 
 that of such masses united into a government 
 with respect to secular things. The history of 
 the Church with its embodied dogmas the 
 past of Christendom contains that consent ; 
 and the Church founds its claim to veneration 
 on this broad accumulation of experience, so 
 gathered from all ages and all conditions of 
 men as to have lost all traces of individuality 
 and become the conviction of mankind to a 
 degree that no free constitution and no legal 
 code can claim. To substitute the simple faith 
 of the young heart, however immediate, in the 
 place of this hoary and commanding tradition 
 is a daring thing, and may seem both arro- 
 gance and folly ; to stand apart from it, though 
 willing to be taught within the free exercise of 
 our own faculties, abashes us ; and it is neces- 
 sary, for our own self-respect, to adopt some
 
 304 HEART OF MAN 
 
 attitude toward the Church definitely, not as a 
 part of the common mass of race-tradition in 
 a diffused state like philosophy, but as an insti- 
 tution like the Throne or the Parliament. 
 
 " But may it not be pleaded that, however 
 slight by comparison personal life may seem, 
 yet if it be true, the Church must include this 
 in its own mighty sum ; and that what the 
 Church adds to define, expand, and elevate, to 
 guide and support, belongs to growth in spirit- 
 ual things, not to those beginnings which only 
 are here spoken of? And in defence of a pri- 
 vate view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in 
 the organized social life elsewhere, may it not 
 be suggested that the past of Christendom, 
 great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and 
 spiritual insight, and illustrious with triumphs 
 over evil in man and in society, and shining 
 always with the leading of a great light, is yet 
 a human past, an imperfect stage of progress 
 at every era? Is its historic life, with all its 
 accumulation of creed and custom, not a process 
 of Christianization, in which much has been 
 sloughed off at every new birth of the world ? 
 In reading the Fathers we come on states of 
 mind and forms of emotion due to transitory
 
 THE RIDE 305 
 
 influences and surroundings ; and in the his- 
 tory of the Church, we come upon dogmas, 
 ceremonials, methods of work and aims of 
 effort, which were of contemporary validity 
 only. Such are no longer rational or possible ; 
 they have passed out of life, belonging to that 
 body of man which is forever dying, not to the 
 spirit that is forever growing ; and, too, as all 
 men and bodies of men share in imperfection, 
 we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, 
 upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degra- 
 dation, and failure, necessarily to be accounted 
 as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, 
 of evil, in the whole of man's historic life. In 
 view of these obvious facts, and also of the 
 great discrepancies of such organic bodies as 
 are here spoken of in their total mass as the 
 Church, and of their emphasis upon such par- 
 ticularities, is not an attitude of reserve justi- 
 fiable in a young and conscientious heart? It 
 may seem to be partial scepticism, especially as 
 the necessity for rejection of some portion of 
 this embodied past becomes clearer in the 
 growth of the mind's information and the 
 strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful 
 independence. But if much must be cast away,
 
 306 HEART OF MAN 
 
 let it not disturb us; it must be the more in 
 proportion as the nature of man suffers redemp- 
 tion. Let us own, then, and reverence the 
 great tradition of the Church ; but he has 
 feebly grasped the idea of Christ leavening the 
 world, and has read little in the records of 
 pious ages even, who does not know that even 
 in the Church it is needful to sift truth from 
 falsehood, dead from living truth. 
 
 "If, however, a claim be advanced which 
 forbids such a use of reason as we make in 
 regard to all other human institutions, viewing 
 them historically with reference to their con- 
 stant service to mankind and their particular 
 adaptation to a changing social state ; if, as was 
 the case with the doctrine of the Divine Right 
 of Kings, the Church proclaims a commission 
 not subject to human control, by virtue of 
 which it would impose creed and ritual, and 
 assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan 
 thought to God only, then does it not usurp 
 the function of the soul itself, suppress the 
 personal revelation of the divine by taking 
 from the soul the seals of original sover- 
 eignty, remove God to the first year of our era, 
 relying on his mediate revelation in time, and
 
 THE RIDE 307 
 
 thus take from common man the evidence 
 of religion and therewith its certainty, and 
 in general substitute faith in things for the 
 vital faith? If the voice of the Church is 
 to find only its own echo in the inner voice of 
 life, if its evidences of religion involve more 
 than is near and present to every soul by virtue 
 of its birth, if its rites have any other reality 
 than that of the heart which expresses itself in 
 them and so gives them life and significance, 
 then its authority is external wholly and has 
 nothing in common with that authority which 
 free men erect over themselves because it is 
 themselves embodied in an outward principle. 
 If personality has any place in the soul, if the 
 soul has any original office, then the authority 
 that religion as an organic social form may 
 take on must lie within limits that reserve to 
 the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un- 
 borrowed radiance, and to all men its possession, 
 simple or learned, lay or cleric, through their 
 common experience and ordinary faculties in 
 the normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems 
 to me, personal experience cannot be the begin- 
 ning of Christian conviction, the true available 
 test of it, the underlying basis of it as we build
 
 308 HEART OF MAN 
 
 the temple of God's presence within us, and, as 
 I have called it, the vitality of the whole matter. 
 " Within these limits, then, imposed by the 
 earlier argument, what, under such reserves 
 of the great principles of liberty, democracy, 
 and justice in which we are bred and which 
 are forms of the cardinal fact of the value of 
 the personal soul in all men, what to us is 
 the office of the Church ? In theology it de- 
 fines a philosophy which, though an interpre- 
 tation of divine truth, takes its place in the 
 intellectual scheme of theory like other human 
 philosophies, and has a similar value, differing 
 only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which 
 is the most mysterious known to thought. In 
 its specific rites it dignifies the great moments 
 of life birth, marriage, and death with its 
 solemn sanctions ; and in its general ceremonies 
 it affords appropriate forms in which religious 
 emotion finds noble and tender expression ; es- 
 pecially it enables masses of men to unite in one 
 great act of the heart with the impressiveness 
 that belongs to the act of a community, and to 
 make that act, though emotional in a multitude 
 of hearts, single and whole in manifestation; 
 and it does this habitually in the life of its least
 
 THE RIDE 309 
 
 groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life 
 of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the 
 life of entire Christendom by its general feasts 
 of Christmas and Easter, and, though within 
 narrower limits, by its seasons of fasting and 
 prayer. In its administration it facilitates its 
 daily work among men. The Church is thus a 
 mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the 
 forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical 
 action in its executive. Its doctrines, however 
 conflicting in various divisions of the whole vast 
 body, are the result of profound, conscientious, 
 and long-continued thought among its succes- 
 sive synods, which are the custodians of creeds 
 as senates are of constitutions, and whose affir- 
 mations and interpretations have a like weight 
 in their own speculative sphere as these possess 
 in the province of political thought age after 
 age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-cen- 
 turied knowledge of human nature. Its joys 
 and consolations are the most precious inheri- 
 tance of the heart of man. Its saints open our 
 pathways, and go before, following in the ways 
 of the spirit. Its doors concentrate within their 
 shelter the general faith, and give it there a 
 home. Its table is spread for all men. I do
 
 310 HEART OF MAN 
 
 not speak of the Church Invisible, but mean to 
 embrace with this catholicity of statement all 
 organizations, howsoever divided, which own 
 Christ as their Head. Temple, cathedral, and 
 chapel have each their daily use to those who 
 gather there with Christian hearts ; each is a 
 living fountain to its own fold. The village 
 spire, wherever it rises on American or English 
 ground, bespeaks an association of families 
 who find in this bond an inward companion- 
 ship and outward expression of it in a public 
 habit continuing from the fathers down, sancti- 
 fied by the memories of generations gone, and 
 tender with the hope of the generation to come ; 
 and this is of measureless good within such 
 families for young and old alike. It bespeaks 
 also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, 
 friendly, and searching, and growing more and 
 more unconfined ; it bespeaks a rock of public 
 morality deep-set in the foundations of the 
 state. 
 
 "It is true that in uniting with such a 
 Church, under the specific conditions natural to 
 both temperament and residence, a man yields 
 something of private right, and sacrifices in a 
 greater or less degree his personality ; but this
 
 THE RIDE 311 
 
 is the common condition of all social coopera- 
 tion, whether in party action or any union to 
 a common end. The compromise, involved in 
 any platform of principles, tolerates essential 
 differences in important matters, but matters 
 not then important in view of what is to be 
 gained in the main. The advantages of an 
 organized religious life are too plain to be 
 ignored ; it is reasonable to go to the very 
 verge in order to avail of them, both for a 
 man's self and for his efficiency in society, just 
 as it is to unite with a general party in the 
 state, and serve it in local primaries, for the 
 ends of citizenship ; such means of help and 
 opportunities of accomplishment are not to be 
 lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened 
 at the font, naturally accepts the duties de- 
 volved upon him, and stands in his parents' 
 place ; and fortunate I count the youth who, 
 without stress and trouble, undertakes in his 
 turn his father's part. But some there are, born 
 of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is 
 finer than tempered steel, and of the conscience 
 of the mothers which is more sensitive than 
 the bare nerve, the very flower of the Puritan 
 tradition, and my heart goes out to them. And
 
 312 HEART OF MAN 
 
 if there be a youth in our days who feels hesi- 
 tancy in such an early surrender into the bosom 
 of a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm 
 consciences, strong heads, and free hearts ; if 
 primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and 
 blood and is there the large reserve of liberty 
 natural to the American heart ; if the spirit is 
 so living in him that he dispenses with the form, 
 which to those of less strenuous strain is rather 
 a support ; if truth is so precious to him that 
 he will not subscribe to more or less than he 
 believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements 
 speculative and uncertain elements, traditional 
 error, and all that body of rejected doctrine 
 which, though he himself be free from it, 
 must yet be slowly uprooted from the general 
 belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that 
 his native and habitual reticence becomes so 
 sensitive in this most private part of life as 
 to make it here something between God and 
 him only ; if his heart of charity and hand of 
 friendship find out his fellow-men with no in- 
 tervention ; if for these reasons, or any of them, 
 or if from that modesty of nature, which is so 
 much more common in American youth than is 
 believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the
 
 THE RIDE 313 
 
 responsibility before God and man which he 
 incurs, to think himself worthy of such vows, 
 such hopes, such duties, if in any way, being 
 of noble nature, he keeps by himself, let him 
 not think he thereby withdraws from the life of 
 Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he 
 may not still take some portion of its great 
 good. So far as its authority is of the heart 
 only, so far as it has organized the religious 
 life itself without regard to other ends and 
 free from intellectual, historical, and govern- 
 mental entanglements that are supplementary 
 at most, he needs no formal act to be one with 
 its spirit; and, however much he may deny 
 himself by his self-limitation, he remains a 
 Christian." 
 
 There was no doubt about it ; we were lost. 
 The faint tracks in the soil had long ago 
 disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, 
 the draws between the slopes ; and now, 
 for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deep- 
 ened till it was above the wheels and to the 
 shoulders of the ponies. They did not mind; 
 they were born to it. What solitude there was 
 in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand !
 
 314 HEART OF MAN 
 
 What wildness was there ! Only the great 
 blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of 
 lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken 
 and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering 
 with the high wind, and no life but ours shut 
 in among the group of low, close hills all about, 
 in that grassy gulf! The earth seemed near, 
 waiting for us; in such places, just like this, 
 men lost had died and none knew it; half- 
 unconsciously I found myself thinking of 
 Childe Roland's Tower, 
 
 "those two hills on the right 
 Couched," 
 
 and the reality of crossing the prairie in old 
 days came back on me. That halt in the cup 
 of the hills was our limit ; it was a moment of 
 life, an arrival, an end. 
 
 The sun was too low for further adventur- 
 ing. We struck due west on as straight a 
 course as the rugged country permitted, think- 
 ing to reach the Looking-glass creek, along 
 which lay the beaten road of travel back to 
 mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw 
 a house in the distance to which we drove, a 
 humble house, sod- built, like that we had made
 
 THE BIDE 316 
 
 our nooning in. We drove to the door, and 
 called ; it was long before any answer came ; 
 but at last a woman opened the door, her face 
 and figure the very expression of dulled toil, 
 hard work, bodily despair. Alone on that 
 prairie, one would have thought she would 
 have welcomed a human countenance ; but she 
 looked on us as if she wished we would be 
 gone, and hardly answered to our question of 
 the road. She was the type of the abandon- 
 ment of human life. I did not speak to her; 
 but I see her now, as I saw her then, with a 
 kind of surprise that a woman could come to 
 be, by human life, like that. There was no 
 one else in the house ; and she shut the door 
 upon us after one sullen look and one scant 
 sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, 
 and went back to her silence in that green 
 waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on 
 miles. I have often thought of her since, and 
 what life was to her there, and found some 
 image of other solitudes and men and women 
 in them as expansive, as alienating as the 
 wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows de- 
 humanized, and dies. 
 
 We drove on, with some word of this ; and,
 
 316 HEART OF MAN 
 
 eating what we had with us in case of famine, 
 made our supper from biscuit and flask ; and, 
 before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, 
 and turned southward, a splendour of late 
 sunset gleaming over the untravelled western 
 bank, and dying out in red bloom and the 
 purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and 
 on we drove, with a hard road under us, 
 having far to go. At the first farmhouse we 
 watered the willing ponies, who had long suc- 
 cumbed to our control, and who went as if 
 they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under 
 the same strong hand and kindly voice they had 
 felt day-long. It was then I took the reins 
 for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, 
 and felt what so unobservably he had been 
 doing all day with wrist and eye, while he 
 listened. So we drove down, and knew the 
 moon was up by the changed heavens, though 
 yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon 
 our left ; and far away southward, in the even- 
 ing light, lay the long valley like a larger river. 
 We still felt the upland, however, as a loftier 
 air; and always as, when night comes, nature 
 exercises some mysterious magic of the dark 
 hour in strange places, there, as all day long,
 
 THE RIDE 317 
 
 we seemed to draw closer to earth not earth 
 as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and 
 colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, 
 the element, the globe. 
 
 This was in both our minds, and I had 
 thought of it before he spoke after a long 
 pause over the briar pipes that had comraded 
 our talk since morning. " I can't talk of it 
 now," he said ; " it's gone into me in an hour 
 that you have been years in thinking ; but that 
 is what you are to us." I say the things he 
 said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and 
 that trust of love in which these thoughts were 
 born on my lips; all those years, in many a 
 distant place, I had thought for him almost as 
 much as for myself. "You knighted us," he 
 said, "and we fight -your cause," not know- 
 ing that kingship, however great or humble, is 
 but the lowly knights made one in him who by 
 God's grace can speak the word. " I have no 
 doubt it's true, what you say ; but it is differ- 
 ent. I expected it would be ; but we used to 
 speak of nature more than the soul, and of 
 nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remem- 
 ber, began with that." "There is a sonnet of 
 Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells
 
 318 HEART OF MAN 
 
 another tale. But I did not learn it from him. 
 And, besides, what else he has to say is not 
 cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, " that 
 is not cheerful." 
 
 But without repeating the wandering talk of 
 reality with its changeful tones, and how- 
 ever serious the matter might be it was never 
 far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out 
 like sunshine, I told him, as we drove down the 
 dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoul- 
 der near me, how nature is antipodal to the 
 soul ; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, 
 and cares not for the virtues we have erected, 
 for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, 
 and sacrifice, for nothing that is man's except 
 the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if 
 man were a chemical element or a wave-motion 
 of ether that are parts of physics. "I con- 
 vinced myself," I said, " that the soul is not a 
 term in the life of nature, but that nature is 
 in it as a physical vigour and to it an out- 
 ward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a 
 preparation for immortality, whether immor- 
 tality come or not. And I have sometimes 
 thought," I continued, "that on the spiritual 
 side an explanation of the inequalities of
 
 THE RIDE 319 
 
 human conditions, both past and present, may 
 be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly 
 and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and 
 learned, life remains in all its conditions an 
 opportunity to know God and exercise the 
 soul in virtue, and is an education of the 
 soul in all its essential knowledge and facul- 
 ties, at least within Christian times, broadly 
 speaking, and in more than one pagan civili- 
 zation. Material success, fame, wealth, and 
 power birth even, with all it involves of 
 opportunity and fate are insignificant, if the 
 soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that 
 such a thought clears the mystery of the differ- 
 ent lots of mankind ; but it suggests another 
 view of the apparent injustice of the world 
 in its most rigid forms. This, however, is a 
 wandering thought. The great reversal of the 
 law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that 
 whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the 
 strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law 
 requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. 
 Scientific ethics, which would chloroform the 
 feeble, can never succeed until the race makes 
 bold to amend what it now receives as the 
 mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a de-
 
 320 HEART OF MAN 
 
 generate body with a dead soul. Such a code 
 is at issue with true democracy, which requires 
 that every soul, being equal in value in view 
 of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit 
 of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a 
 being in the hands of the secret power that 
 ordained its existence in the hour when nature 
 was constituted to be its mode of birth, con- 
 sciousness, and death. And if the choice must 
 be made on the broad scale, it is our practical 
 faith that the service of the best, even to the 
 point of death, is due to the least in the hope 
 of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are 
 willing that in communities the noblest should 
 die for a cause, we consent 1 o the death of high 
 civilizations, if they spread in some Helleniza- 
 tion of a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric 
 world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if 
 their virtues thereby are disseminated and the 
 social goods they monopolized made common 
 in a people; and to the falling of the flower of 
 man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown 
 on all the winds of the future for the blessing 
 of the world's fuller and more populous life. 
 Such has been the history of our civilization, and 
 still is, and must be till the whole earth's sur-
 
 THE RIDE 321 
 
 face be conquered for mankind, embodied in its 
 highest ideals, personal and social. This is not 
 nature's way, who raises her trophy over the 
 slain ; our trophy is man's laurel upon our 
 grave. So, everywhere except in the physical 
 sphere of life, if you would find the soul's com- 
 mands, reverse nature's will. This superiority 
 to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an 
 element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a 
 sign of ' an ampler ether, a diviner air. ' ' 
 
 So I spoke, as the words came to me, while 
 we were still driving down the dark valley, in 
 deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking 
 out on a levelled world westward, stretching 
 off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit 
 distances of plains beyond the further bank. 
 We turned a great shoulder of the hills, and 
 the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in 
 heaven ; and the southward reach unlocked, 
 and gave itself for miles to our eyes. At the 
 instant, while the ponies came back upon their 
 haunches at the drop of the long descent 
 ahead, we both cried out, " the Looking-glass ! " 
 There it was, about a mile away before and 
 below us, as plain as a pikestaff, a silvery 
 reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the
 
 322 HEART OF MAN 
 
 floor of cloud seen from above among moun- 
 tains, silent, motionless, for all the world like 
 an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there 
 in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently 
 what gave the name to the creek, and I have 
 since noticed the same name elsewhere in the 
 Western country, and I suppose the phe- 
 nomenon is not uncommon. For an hour or 
 more it remained; we never seemed to get 
 nearer to it ; it was an eerie thing the 
 earth-light of the moon on that side, I saw 
 it all the time. 
 
 "The difference you spoke of," I began, with 
 my eyes upon that spectral pool, " is only that 
 change which belongs to life, dissolving like 
 illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not 
 aware of any break ; it is the old life in a 
 higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in 
 the soul especially, seems less a state of being 
 than a thing of transformation, whose successive 
 shapes we wear ; and so far as that change is 
 self-determined," I continued, making almost 
 an effort to think, so weird was that scene 
 before us, " the soul proceeds by foreknow- 
 ledge of itself in the ideal, and wills the change 
 by ideal living, which is not a conflict with the
 
 THE RIDE 323 
 
 actual but a process out of it, conditioned in 
 almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring 
 which entered into the struggle for animal ex- 
 istence even with such enormous modifying 
 power. In our old days, under the sway of 
 new scientific knowledge, we instinctively saw 
 man in the perspective of nature, and then man 
 seemed almost an after-thought of nature ; but 
 having been produced, late in her material his- 
 tory, and gifted with foresight that distinguished 
 him from all else in her scheme, his own evolu- 
 tion gathered thereby that speed which is so 
 perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slow- 
 ness of the orbing of stars and the building of 
 continents. He has used his powers of pre- 
 science for his own ends ; but, fanciful as the 
 thought is, might it happen that through his 
 control of elemental forces and his acquaintance 
 with infinite space, he should reach the point of 
 applying prescience in nature's own material 
 frame, and wield the world for the better ac- 
 complishment of her apparent ends, that, 
 though unimaginable now, would constitute the 
 true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic mo- 
 tions, chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to 
 the moral reason. Unreal as such a thought is,
 
 324 HEART OF MAN 
 
 a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is 
 discernible in the work of some impressionist 
 landscape painters, who present colour and at- 
 mosphere and space without human intention, 
 as a kind of artistry of science, having the same 
 sort of elemental substance and interest that 
 scientific truth has as an object of knowledge, 
 
 a curious form of the beauty of truth." 
 We spoke of some illustrations of this, the 
 
 scene before us lending atmosphere and sugges- 
 tion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's 
 comment. " But," I continued, " what I had in 
 mind to say was concerning our dead selves. 
 The old phrase, life is a continual dying, is 
 true, and, once gone, life is death ; and some- 
 times so much of it has been gathered to the 
 past, such definite portions of it are laid away, 
 that we can look, if we will, in the lake of 
 memory on the faces of the dead selves which 
 once we were." Instinctively we looked on 
 the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that 
 Lake of the Dead Souls I spoke of. I went on 
 after the natural pause, I could not help it, 
 
 "'I was a different man, then,' we say, 
 with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often 
 with better thoughts, and always with a
 
 THE RIDE 325 
 
 feeling of mystery. How old is the youth 
 before he is aware of the fading away of 
 vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels 
 the quick passing of the enthusiasms of open- 
 ing life, as one cause after another, one hero, 
 one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, 
 in turn engages his heart. As time goes on, 
 and life comes out in its true perspective, one 
 thing with another, and he discovers the in- 
 completeness of single elements of ardour in the 
 whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, 
 art, and action in those books and men that 
 had won his full confidence and what he called 
 perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment 
 of pause, as if this growth had in it some- 
 thing irrational and derogatory. The thinkers 
 whose words of light and leading were the 
 precious truth itself, the poets he idolized, the 
 elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand 
 in their places, who better appeal to his older 
 mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment ; 
 and what true validity can these last have in 
 the end? After a decade he can almost see 
 his youth as something dead, his early man- 
 hood as something that will die. The poet, 
 especially, who gives expression to himself,
 
 826 HEART OF MAN 
 
 and puts his life at its period into a book, 
 feels, as each work drops from his hand, that 
 it is a portion of a self that is dead, though 
 it was life in the making ; and so with the 
 embodiments of life in action, the man looks 
 back on past greatness, past romance ; for all 
 life, working itself out desire into achieve- 
 ment dies to the man. Vital life lies always 
 before. It is a strange thought that only by 
 the death of what we now are, can we enter 
 into our own hopes and victories ; that it is 
 by the slaying of the self which now is that 
 the higher self takes life; that it is through 
 such self-destruction that we live. The inter- 
 mediate state seems a waste, and the knowledge 
 that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; 
 but this is the way ordained by which we must 
 live, and such is life's magic that in each 
 stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with 
 trustfulness in itself. It is needful only, how- 
 ever much we outlive, to live more and better, 
 and through all to remain true to the high 
 causes, the faithful loves, the sacred impulses, 
 that have given our imperfect life of the past 
 whatever of nobility it may have ; so shall 
 death forever open into life. But," I ended,
 
 THE RIDE 327 
 
 lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the 
 dark slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the 
 mystic to inquire whence and whither, the wild 
 shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled 
 to excuse its beauty, and happy is he who can 
 live without too much thought of life." 
 
 The sheen of the river had died out, and the 
 creek was only a common stream lit with the 
 high moon, and bordered far off to the west 
 with the low indistinguishable country. We 
 drove in silence down the valley along that 
 shelf of road under the land. The broken 
 bluffs on the left rose into immense slopes of 
 rolling prairie, and magnified by the night at- 
 mosphere into majesty, heavy with deep dark- 
 ness in their folds, stood massive and vast in 
 the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on 
 me and grew with strange insistence the sense 
 of this everlasting mounded power of the earth, 
 like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an 
 element of slower and more awful might. The 
 solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with 
 the blind internal strength of the whirl of the 
 planet through space. Deeper into the shadow 
 we plunged with every echoing tread of the 
 hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence
 
 328 HEART OF MAN 
 
 was about us, unshaped, unlocalized, as in 
 some place of antique awe before the time of 
 temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. 
 If I stretched out my hand I should touch it 
 like the ground. It came out from all the 
 black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct 
 heights, it filled the chill air, it was an en- 
 velopment it would be an engulf ment horse 
 and man we were sinking in it. Then it was 
 most in all my days that I felt dense mys- 
 tery overwhelming me. " O infinite earth," I 
 thought, " our unknowing mother, our unknow- 
 ing grave ! " " What is it ? " he said, feel- 
 ing my wrist straighten where it lay on his 
 shoulder, and the tremor, and the hand seeking 
 him. Was it a premonition ? " Nothing," I 
 answered, and did not tell him ; but he began 
 to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me back 
 to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and 
 loving ways, the excitement of the ride died out, 
 and an hour later, after midnight, we drove 
 into the silent town. We put the ponies up, 
 praising them with hand and voice ; and then he 
 took both my hands in his and said, " The truest 
 thing you ever said was what you wrote me, ' We 
 live each others' lives.' " That was his thanks.
 
 THE RIDE 329 
 
 O brave and tender heart, now long lapped 
 under the green fold of that far prairie in his 
 niche of earth ! How often I see him as in 
 our first days, the boy of seventeen summers, 
 lying on his elbows over his Thackeray, read- 
 ing by the pictures, and laughing to himself 
 hour after hour ; and many a prairie adven- 
 ture, many happy days and fortunate moments 
 come back, with the strength and bloom of 
 youth, as I recall the manly figure, the sensi- 
 tive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. 
 Who of us knows what he is to another? He 
 could not know how much his life entered 
 into mine, and still enters. But he is dead; 
 and I have set down these weak and stam- 
 mering words of the life we began together, 
 not for the strong and sure, but for those 
 who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay 
 hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the 
 hope that some younger comrade of life, though 
 unknown, may make them of avail and find in 
 them the dark leading of a hand.
 
 BY 
 
 LEWIS EDWARDS GATES, 
 
 Assistant Professor of English in Harvard University. 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. $1.50. 
 
 FRANCIS JEFFREY. ASPECTS OF THE 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. ROMANTIC PERIOD OF 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 "Professor Gates is fortunate in his subjects; his 
 subjects are fortunate in his justly discriminating 
 appreciation. The reader is fortunate in his illumi- 
 nating treatment of these notable characters, often 
 misunderstood and disparaged, the brilliant re- 
 viewer, the spiritual rhetorician, the humanistic critic. 
 These masterly Studies should be in the hands of 
 all students of our literature in this century." 
 
 Outlook. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 
 
 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
 
 UCLA-Young Research Library 
 
 PS3351 .H35 
 
 y 
 
 L 009 620 129 8 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 001 284 639 o 
 
 $1 Alt MrtMAL SCHOOL,