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 The Torch
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS - SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 EIGKT LECTURES ON RACE POWER IN LITERATURE 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE 
 
 THE LOWELL INSTITUTE OF BOSTON 
 MCMIII 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 AUGESCITNT ALIAB GENTES, ALIAE MINUTTNTtTR, 
 INQUE BREVI 8PATIO MITTANTUR 8AE0LA ANIMANTTTM 
 ET QUASI CUR80RK8 VXTAI LAMPADA TRADUNT 
 
 Nefa gorft 
 
 THE MACMH^LAN COMPANY 
 
 1912 
 
 All righU reserved
 
 COPTKIGHT, 1905, 
 
 By McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 
 
 Published October, 1905. Reprinted February, 1912. 
 
 Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 '} ^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 BAl^TA BARBARA COLLEGE LlBRARl! 
 
 ^^/b 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PASS 
 
 Man and the Race 3 
 
 The Language of all the World .... 33 
 
 The Titan Myth (I) 57 
 
 The Titan Myth (II) 81 
 
 Spenser 113 
 
 Milton 139 
 
 Wordsworth 165 
 
 Shelley 193
 
 The Torch
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 
 It belongs to a highly developed race to become, in a 
 true sense, aristocratic — a treasury of its best in practi- 
 cal and spiritual types, and then to disappear in the sur- 
 rounding tides of men. So Athens dissolved hke a pearl 
 in the cup of the Mediterranean, and Rome in the cup 
 of Europe, and Judaea in the cup of the Universal Com- 
 munion. Though death is the law of all life, man touches 
 this earthen fact with the wand of the spirit, and trans- 
 forms it into the law of sacrifice. Man has won no vic- 
 tory over his environment so sublime as this, finding in 
 his mortal sentence the true choice of the soul and in the 
 road out of Paradise the open highway of eternal life. 
 Races die; but the ideal of sacrifice as the highest race- 
 destiny has seldom occurred to men, though it has been 
 suggested both by devout Jews and by devout Irishmen 
 as the divinely appointed organic law of the Hebrew 
 and the Celt. In the general view of men the extinction 
 
 [3]
 
 THE TORCH 
 of a race partakes of the unreasoning finality of 
 nature. 
 
 The vital flow of life has this in common with disease 
 — that it is self -limited ; the fever runs its course, and 
 bums away. "All thoughts, all passions, all deUghts," 
 have this history. In the large arcs of social being, move- 
 ments of the human spirit, however embracing and pro- 
 found, obey the same law of the limitation of specific 
 energy. Revolutions, reforms, re-births exhaust their 
 fuel, and go out. Races are only greater units of man; 
 for a race, as for an individual, there is a time to die ; and 
 that time, as history discloses it, is the moment of per- 
 fection. This is the largest fact in the moral order of the 
 world ; it is the centre of providence in history. In the life 
 of the human spirit the death of the best of its achieving 
 elements, in the moment of their consummation, is as 
 the fading of the flower of the field or the annual fall of 
 the leaves of the forest in the natural world ; and unless 
 this be a sacrificial death, it were wantonness and waste 
 like the deaths of nature ; but man and his works are su- 
 pernatural, and raised above nature by an imperishable 
 relation which they contain. Race-history is a perpetual 
 celebration of the Mass. The Cross initials every page 
 with its broad gold, and he whose eye misses that letter 
 has lost the clue to the meaning. I do not refer to the self- 
 devotion of individuals, the sacred fives of the race. I 
 
 [4]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 speak of the involuntary element in the life of nations, or 
 what seems such on the vast scale of social Ufe. Always 
 some great culture is dying to enrich the soil of new har- 
 vests, some civilization is crumbling to rubbish to be the 
 hill of a more beautiful city, some race is spending itself 
 that a lower and barbarous world may inherit its stored 
 treasure-honse. Although no race may consciously de- 
 vote itself to the higher ends of mankind, it is the pre- 
 rogative of its men of genius so to devote it ; nor is any 
 nation truly great which is not so dedicated by its war- 
 riors and statesmen, its saints and heroes, its thinkers 
 and dreamers. A nation's poets are its true owners; and 
 by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its 
 real possessions to strangers and aUens. 
 
 This dedication of the energy of a race by its men of 
 genius to the higher ends of mankind is the sap of all the 
 world. The spiritual life of mankind spreads, the spir- 
 itual unity of mankind grows, by this age-long surrender 
 of privilege and power into the hands of the world's new 
 men, and the leavening of the mass by the best that has 
 anywhere arisen in it, which is thus brought about. The 
 absorption of aristocracies in democracies, the dissolu- 
 tion of the nobler product in inferior environments, the 
 salutary death of cultures, civilizations, breeds of men, 
 is the strict line on which history, drawing the sundered 
 parts of the earth slowly together, moves to that great 
 
 [5]
 
 THE TORCH 
 consummation when the best that has at any time been 
 in the world shall be the portion of every man born into 
 it. If the old English blood, which here on this soil gave 
 birth to a nation, spread civiUzation through it, and cast 
 the orbit of its starry course in time, is destined to be 
 thus absorbed and lost in the nation which it has formed, 
 we should be proud and happy in such a fate ; for this is 
 to wear the seal of God's election in history. Nay, if the 
 aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a 
 world of the coloured races of the earth, I for one should 
 only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial 
 idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of 
 mankind. 
 
 Unless this principle is strongly grasped, unless there 
 be an imperishable relation in man and his works which 
 they contain, and which, though it has other phases, here 
 appears in this eternal salvage stored up in a slowly per- 
 fecting race, history through its length and breadth is a 
 spectacle to appall and terrify the reason. The perpetual 
 flux of time — 
 
 " Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes 
 Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance " — 
 
 is a mere catastrophe of blood and error unless its 
 mighty subverting and dismaying changes are related to 
 sometliing which does not pass away with dethroned 
 
 [6]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 gods, abandoned empires and repealed codes of law and 
 morals. But in the extinction of religions, in imperial rev- 
 olutions, in the bloody conflict of ideas, there is one 
 thing found stable ; it is the mind itself, growing through 
 ages. That which in its continuity we call the human 
 spirit, abides. Men, tribes, states disappear, but the 
 race-mind endures. A conception of the world and an 
 emotional response thereto constitute the life of the race- 
 mind, and fill its consciousness with ideas and feeUngs, 
 but in these there is no element of chance, contingency 
 or frailty; they are master-ideas, master-emotions, 
 clothed with the power of a long reign over men, and im- 
 posing themselves upon each new generation almost 
 with the yoke of necessity. What I designate as the race- 
 mind — the sole thing permanent in history — is this 
 potentiality of thought and feeling, in any age, realizing 
 itself in states of mind and habits of action long estab- 
 lished in the race, deeply inherited, and slowly modified. 
 The race-mind is the epitome of the past. It contains all 
 human energy, knowledge, experience, that survives. It 
 is the resultant of millions of lives whose earthly power 
 it stores in one deathless force. 
 
 This race-mind is simply formed. Life presents cer- 
 tain permanent aspects in the environment, which gen- 
 erate ways of behaviour thereto, normal and general 
 among men. The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-field,
 
 THE TORCH 
 a battle-ground; and thence arises through human con- 
 tact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of tillage, 
 or agriculture, ways of fighting, or miUtary tactics and 
 strategy, and these are incorporated in individuals as 
 habits of life. The craftsman has the mind of his craft. 
 Life also presents certain other permanent internal apti- 
 tudes in the soul, whence arisest the mind of the artist, 
 the inventor, the poet. But this cast of mind of the math- 
 ematician or of the painter is rather a phase of individual 
 Hfe. In the larger unit of the race, environment and apti- 
 tude working together in the historic life of ages develop 
 ideas, moods and energies characteristic of the race in 
 which they occur. In the sphere of ideas, freedom is in- 
 dissolubly linked with the EngHsh, righteousness with 
 the Hebrew; in the temperamental sphere, a signal in- 
 stance is the Celtic genius — mystery, twilight, super- 
 natural fantasy, lamentation, tragic disaster — or the 
 Greek genius, definiteness, proportioned beauty, or- 
 dered science, philosophic principle; and, in the sphere 
 of energy, land and gold hunger, and that strange soul- 
 hunger — hunger to possess the souls of men — which 
 is at the root of all propagandism, have been motive 
 powers in many races. 
 
 Thus, in one part or another of time and place, and 
 from causes within and without, the race, coming to its 
 best, flowers in some creative hope, ripens in some shap- 
 
 [8]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 ing thought, glows in some resistless enthusiasm. Each 
 of these in its own time holds an age in its grasp. They 
 seize on men and shape them in multitudes to their will, 
 as the wind drives the locusts ; make men hideous ascet- 
 ics, send them on forlorn voyages, devote them to the 
 block and the stake, make Argonauts, Crusaders, Lol- 
 lards of them, fill Europe in one age with a riot of revo- 
 lution and in the next with the camps of tyrannic power. 
 These ideas, moods, energies have mysterious potency; 
 they seem to possess an independent being ; though, like 
 all the phenomena of life-energy they are self-limited, 
 the period of their growth, culmination and decline ex- 
 tends through generations and centuries ; they seem less 
 the brood of man's mind than higher powers that feed on 
 men. They are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses — 
 fanatics, martyrs, dupes; they doom whole peoples to 
 glory or shame; in the undying battle of the soul they 
 are the choosers of the slain. Though they proceed from 
 the human spirit, they rule it; and in Ufe they are the 
 spiritual presences which are most closely unveiled to 
 the apprehension, devotion and love of men. 
 
 The race-mind building itself from immemorial time 
 out of this mystery of thought and passion, as genera- 
 tion after generation kneels and fights and fades, takes 
 unerringly the best that anywhere comes to be in the 
 world, holds to it with the chng of fate, and lets all else 
 
 [9]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 fall to oblivion; out of this best it has made, and still 
 fashions, that enduring world of idea and emotion into 
 which we are born as truly as into the natural world. It 
 has a marvellous economy. 
 
 "One accent of the Holy Ghost 
 The heedless world ha^ never lost." 
 
 Egypt, India, Greece and Rome, Italy, the English, 
 France, America, the Turk, the Persian, the Russian, 
 the Japanese, the Chinese, the Negro feed its pure tra- 
 dition of what excellence is possible to the race-mind, 
 and has grown habitual in its being; and, as in the old 
 myth, it destroys its parent, abolishing all these diflFer- 
 ences of climate, epoch and skull. The race-mind unifies 
 the race which it preserves ; that is its irresistible line of 
 advance. It wipes out the barriers of time, language and 
 country. It undoes the mischief of Babel, and restores 
 to mankind one tongue in which all things can be under- 
 stood by all men. It fuses the Bibles of all nations in one 
 wisdom and one practice. It knocks off the tribal fetters 
 of caste and creed; and, substituting thought for blood 
 as the bond of the world, it slowly Uberates that free 
 soul, which is one in all men and common to all man- 
 kind. To free the soul in the individual life, and to ac- 
 comphsh the unity of mankind — that is its work. 
 To share in this work is the peculiar and characteris- 
 [10]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 tic office of literature. This fusion of the nations of the 
 earth, this substitution of the thought-tie for the blood- 
 tie, this enfranchisement of the soul, is its chief func- 
 tion; for Hterature is the organ of the race-mind. That 
 is why literature is immortal. Though man's inheritance 
 is bequeathed in many ways — the size and shape of the 
 skull, the physical predisposition of the body, oral tradi- 
 tion, monumental and artistic works, institutions — civ- 
 iUzation ever depends in an increasing degree upon litera- 
 ture both for expression and tradition; and whatever 
 other forms the race-mind may mould itself into, litera- 
 ture is its most universal and comprehensive form. That 
 is why literature is the great conservator of society. It 
 shares in the life of the race-mind, partakes of its nature, 
 as language does of thought, corresponds to it accurate- 
 ly, duplicates it, is its other-self. It is through literature 
 mainly that we know the race-mind, and come to pos- 
 sess it ; for though the term may seem abstract, the thing 
 is real. Men of genius are great in proportion as they 
 share in it, and national literatures are great in propor- 
 tion as they embody and express it. Bruntiere, the pres- 
 ent critic of France, has recently announced a new liter- 
 ary formula. He declares that there is a European 
 literature, not the combined group of national litera- 
 tures, but a single literature common to European civil- 
 ization, and that national literatures in their periods of 
 
 [11]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 culmination, are great in proportion as they coincide for 
 the time being with this common literature, feed it, and, 
 one after another taking the lead, create it. The declara- 
 tion is a gleam of self-consciousness in the unity of Eu- 
 rope. How slowly the parts of a nation recognize the 
 integrity of their territory and the community of their in- 
 terests is one of the constant lessons of history; the 
 Greek confederation, the work of Alfred or of Bis- 
 marck, our own experience in the Revolutionary period 
 illustrate it; so the unity of Europe is still half -obscure 
 and dark, though Catholicism, the Renaissance, the Re- 
 formation, the Revolution in turn flashed this unity 
 forth, struggling to reahze itself in the common civiHza- 
 tion. The literature of Europe is the expression of this 
 common genius — the best that man has dreamed or 
 thought or done, has found or been, in Europe — now 
 more brilUant in one capital, now in another as the life 
 ebbs from state to state, and is renewed; for, though it 
 fail here or there, it never ceases. This is the burning of 
 the race-mind, now bright along the Seine, the Rhine 
 and the Thames, as once by the Ganges and the Tiber. 
 The true unity of literature, however, does not lie in the 
 literature of Europe or of India or of antiquity, or in any 
 one manifestation, but in that world-Uterature which is 
 the organ of the race-mind in its entire breadth and 
 wholeness. The new French formula is a brilliant appli- 
 
 [12]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 cation, novel, striking and arresting, of the old and fa- 
 miliar idea that civilization in its evolution in history is a 
 single process, continuous, advancing and integral, of 
 which nations and ages are only the successive phases. 
 The life of the spirit in mankind is one and universal, 
 burns with the same fires, moves to the same issues, 
 joins in a single history ; it is the race-mind realizing it- 
 self cumulatively in time, and mainly through the inher- 
 iting power of great literature. 
 
 I have developed this conception of the race-mind at 
 some length because it is a primary idea. The nature of 
 literature, and the perspective and interaction of partic- 
 ular literatures, are best comprehended in its light. I em- 
 phasize it. The world-literature, national literatures, 
 individual men of genius, are what they are by virtue of 
 sharing in the race-mind, appropriating it and identify- 
 ing themselves with it ; and what is true of them, on the 
 great scale and in a high degree, is true also of every 
 man who is bom into the world. A man is a man by par- 
 ticipating in the race-mind. Education is merely the pro- 
 cess by which he enters it, avails himself of it, absorbs it. 
 In the things of material civilization this is plain. All the 
 callings of men, arts, crafts, trades, sciences, professions, 
 the entire round of practical life, have a body of knowl- 
 edge and method of work which are like gospel and 
 ritual to them; apprentice, journeyman and master are 
 
 [13]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 the stages of their career; and if anything be added, 
 from Ufe to life, it is on a basis of ascertained fact, of or- 
 thodox doctrine and fixed practice. I suppose technical 
 education is most uniform, and by definiteness of aim 
 and economy of method is most efficient; and in the pro- 
 fessions as well as in the arts and crafts competition 
 places so high a premium on knowledge and skill that 
 the mastery of all the past can teach is compulsory in a 
 high degree. Similarly, in society, the material unities 
 such as those which commerce, manufacturing, bank- 
 ing establish and spread, are soonest evident and most 
 readily accepted; so true is this that the peace of the 
 world is rather a matter of finance than of Christianity. 
 These practical activities and the interests that spring 
 out of them lie in the sphere of material civilization ; but 
 the race-mind, positive, enduring and beneficent as it is 
 in that sphere, is there parcelled out and individualized, 
 and gives a particular and almost private character to 
 man and classes of men, and it seeks a material good. 
 There is another and spiritual sphere in which the soul 
 which is one and the same in all men comes to self- 
 knowledge, has its training, and achieves its mastery of 
 the world. Essential, universal manhood is found only 
 here; for it is here that the race-mind, by participation in 
 which a man is a man, enfranchizes the soul and gives to 
 it the citizenship of the world. Education in the things of 
 
 [14]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 the spirit is often vague in aim and may seem wasteful in 
 method, and it is not supported by the thrust and impet- 
 us of physical need and worldly hope ; but it exists in all 
 men in some measure, for no one born in our civilization 
 is left so savage, no savage born in the wild is left so 
 primitive but that he holds a mental attitude, however 
 obscure, toward nature, man and God, and has some 
 discipHne, however initial, in beauty, love and religion. 
 These things he in the sphere of the soul. It is, neverthe- 
 less, true that the greatest inequaUties of condition exist 
 here, and not in that part of hfe where good is measured 
 by the things of fortune. The difference between the out- 
 cast and the milhonaire is as nothing to that between the 
 saint and the criminal, the fool and the knower, the boor 
 and the poet. It is a blessing in our civiUzation, and one 
 worthy of the hand of Providence, that if in material 
 things justice be a laggard and disparities of condition 
 be hard to remedy, the roads to church and school are 
 public highways, free to all. This charter of free educa- 
 tion in the hfe of the soul, which is the supreme oppor- 
 tunity of an American life, is an open door to the treas- 
 ury of man's spirit. There whosoever will shall open the 
 book of all the world, and read and ponder, and shall 
 enter the common mind of man which is there contained 
 and avail of its wisdom and absorb its energies into his 
 own and become one with it in insight, power and hope, 
 
 [15]
 
 THE TORCH 
 and ere he is aware shall find himself mingling with 
 the wisest, the holiest, the loveliest, as their comrade and 
 peer. He shall have poet and sage to sup with him, and 
 their meal shall be the bread of Ufe. 
 
 What, then, is the position of the youth — of any man 
 whose infinite fife Hes before him — at his entrance on 
 this education, on this attempt to become one with the 
 mind of the race ? and, to neglect the material side of Ufe, 
 what is the process by which he begins to Uve in the 
 spirit, and not as one new-born, but even in his youth 
 sharing in the wisdom and disciphned power of a soul 
 that has hved through all human ages — the soul of 
 mankind? We forget the beginnings of life; we forget 
 first sensation, first action, and the unknown magic by 
 which, as the nautilus builds its shell, we built out of 
 these early elements this world of the impalpable blue 
 walls, the ocean and prairie floors, and star-sown space, 
 each one of us for ourselves. There is a thought, which I 
 suppose is a commonplace and may be half-trivial, but 
 it is one that took hold of me in boyhood with great te- 
 nacity, and stirred the sense of strangeness and marvel in 
 life; the idea that all I knew or should ever know was 
 through something that had touched my body. The 
 ether-wave envelopes us as the ocean, and in that small 
 surface of contact is the sphere of sensibility — of light, 
 sound, and the rest — out of which arises the world 
 
 [16]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 which each one of us perceives. It seems a fantastic con- 
 ception, but it is a true one. For me the idea seemed 
 to shrink the world to the dark envelope of my own 
 body. It served, however, to initiate me in the broader 
 conception that the soul is the centre, and that hfe — the 
 world — radiates from it into the enclosing infinite. 
 Wordsworth, you remember, in his famous image of our 
 infancy presents the matter differently; for him the in- 
 fant began with the infinite, and boy and man Uved in an 
 ever narrowing world, a contracting prison, Uke that 
 fabled one of the Inquisition, and in the end Ufe became 
 a thing common and finite : 
 
 "Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
 Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 
 Upon the growing boy, 
 But he beholds the light, and whence it flows ^ 
 He sees it in his joy: 
 
 At length the man perceives it die away. 
 And fade into the light of common day." 
 
 This was never my own conception, nor do I think it is 
 natural to many men. On the contrary, hfe is an expan- 
 sion. The sense of the larger world comes first, perhaps, 
 in those unremembered years when the sky ceases to be 
 an inverted bowl, and lifts off from the earth. The ex- 
 perience is fixed for me by another half-childish memory, 
 the familiar verses of Tom Hood in which he de- 
 
 [17]
 
 THE TORCH 
 scribes his early home. You will recall the almost nur- 
 sery rhymes: 
 
 "/ remember, I remember 
 
 The fir-trees dark and high; 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 
 Were close against the sky; 
 It was a childish ignorance. 
 
 Bid now 't is little joy 
 To know I 'm farther off fram Heaven 
 
 Than wJien I was a boy.'' 
 
 Sentiment in the place of philosophy, the thought is the 
 same as Wordsworth's, but the image is natural and 
 true. The noblest image, however, that sets forth the 
 spread of the world, is in that famous sonnet by an ob- 
 scure poet, Blanco White, describing the first time that 
 the sun went down in Paradise: 
 
 " Mysterious night! when our first parent knew 
 Thee from report divine, and heard thy name. 
 Did he not tremble for this lovely frame. 
 
 This glorious canopy of light and blue? 
 
 Yet, 'neath the curtain of translucent dew. 
 Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
 Hesperus with the host of heaven came. 
 
 And lo! creation widened in mans view." 
 
 The theory of Copernicus and the voyage of Columbus 
 are the great historical moments of such change in the 
 
 [18]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 thoughts of men. As travel thus discloses the amplitude 
 of the planet and science fills the infinite of space for the 
 learning mind, history in its turn peoples the "dark 
 background and abysm of time. " But more marvellous 
 than the unveiling of time and space, is that last revela- 
 tion which unlocks the inward world of idea and emotion, 
 and gives sohdity to life as by a third dimension. It is 
 this world which is the realm of imaginative literature; 
 scarcely by any other interpreter shall a man come into 
 knowledge of it with any adequacy ; and here the subject 
 draws to a head, for it is by the operation of Uterature in 
 this regard that the race-mind takes possession of the 
 world. 
 
 We are plunged at birth in medias res, as the phrase is, 
 into the midst of things — into a world already old, of old 
 ideas, old feelings, old experience, that has drunk to the 
 lees the wisdom of the preacher of Ecclesiastes, and re- 
 news in millions of lives the Ufe that has been lived a 
 milUon times ; a world of custom and usage, of imme^ 
 morial habits, of causes prejudged, of insoluble prob- 
 lems, of philosophies and orthodoxies and things es- 
 tabUshed; and yet, too, a world of the undiscovered. 
 The youth awakes in this world, intellectually, in Utera- 
 ture; and since the literature of the last age is that on 
 which the new generation is formed, he now first comes 
 in contact with the large Ufe of mankind in the Utera- 
 
 [19]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 ture of the last century. It is an extraordinary miscella- 
 neous literature, varied and copious in matter, full of 
 conflicting ideas, cardinal truths, and hazardous guesses; 
 and for the young mind the problem of orientation — 
 that is of finding itself, of knowing the true East, is 
 difficult. Literature, too, has an electric stimula- 
 tion, and in the first onrush of the intellectual life brings 
 that well-known storm and stress which is the true 
 awakening; with eager and delighted surprise the soul 
 feels fresh sensibilities and unsuspected energies rise in 
 its being. It is a time of shocks, discoveries, experiences 
 that change the face of the world. Reading the poets, the 
 youth finds new dynamos in himself. A new truth un- 
 seals a new faculty in him ; a new writer unlooses a new 
 force in him; he becomes, like Briareus, hundred- 
 handed, like Shakspere, myriad -minded. So like a 
 miracle is the discovery of the power of hfe. 
 
 Let me illustrate the experience in the given case — 
 the literature of the nineteenth century. It will all fall 
 under three heads: the world of nature's frame, the 
 world of man's action, the world of God's being. Na- 
 ture is, in the first instance, a spectacle. One may se^ the 
 common sights of earth, and still have seen Httle. The 
 young eye requires to be trained in what to see, what to 
 choose to see out of the vague whole, and so to see his true 
 self reflected there in another form, for in the same land- 
 
 [20]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 scape the farmer, the military engineer, the painter see 
 each a different picture. Burns teaches the young heart 
 to see nature reahstically, definitely, in hard outhne, and 
 always in association with human Ufe — and the pres- 
 ence of animals friendly and serviceable to man, the Ufe 
 of the farm, is a dominant note in the scene. Byron 
 guides the eye to elemental grandeur in the storm and 
 in the massiveness of Alp and ocean. Shelley brings out 
 colour and atmosphere and evokes the luminous spirit 
 from every star and dew-drop and dying wave. Tenny- 
 son makes nature an artist's easel where from poem to 
 poem glows the frescoing of the walls of life. Thus 
 changing from page to page the youth sees nature with 
 Burns as a man who sympathizes with human toil, with 
 Byron as a man who would mate with the tempest, with 
 Slielley as a man of almost spiritualized senses, with 
 Tennyson as a man of artistic luxury. Again, nature is an 
 order, a law in matter, such as science conceives her; and 
 this phase appears inceptively in "Queen Mab "and ex- 
 plicitly in " In Memoriam," and many a minor poem of 
 Tennyson, not the less great because minor in his work, 
 in which alone the scientific spirit of the age has found 
 utterance equal to its own sublimity. Yet, again, nature 
 is a symbol, an expression of truth itself in another 
 medium than thought; and so, in minute ways. Burns 
 moralized the " Mountain Daisy, " and Wordsworth the 
 
 [21]
 
 THE TORCH 
 "Small Celadine;" and, on the grand scale, Shelley 
 mythologized nature in vast oracular figures of man's 
 faith, hope, and destiny. And again, nabure is a moulding 
 influence so close to human life as to be a spiritual pres- 
 ence about and within it. This last feeling of the partici- 
 pation of nature in hfe is so fundamental that no master 
 of song is without it ; but, in this group, Wordsworth is 
 pre-eminent as its exponent, with such directness, cer- 
 tainty and power did he seize and express it. What he 
 saw in his dalesmen was what the mountains had made 
 them; what he told in " Tintern Abbey " was nature 
 making of him; what he sang in his lyric of ideal 
 womanhood was such an intimacy of nature with wo- 
 man's being that it was scarcely to be divided from her 
 spirit. The power which fashions us from birth, sustains 
 the vital force of the body, and feeds its growing func- 
 tions, seems to exceed the blind and mute region of mat- 
 ter, and feeding the senses with colour, music and de- 
 Hght shapes the soul itself and guides it, and supports 
 and consoles the child it has created in mortality. I do 
 not overstate Wordsworth's sense of this truth ; and it is 
 a truth that twines about the roots of all poetry like a 
 river of life. It explains to the growing boy something in 
 his own history, and he goes on in the paths he has begun 
 to follow, it may be with touches of vague mystery but 
 with an expectant, receptive and responsive heart. In 
 
 [22]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 regard to nature, then, the youth's Ufe under the favour 
 of these poets appreciates her in at least these four ways, 
 artistically, scientifically, symbolically and spiritually, 
 and begins to fix in moulds of his own spirit that miracle 
 of change, the Protean being of matter. 
 
 To turn to the world of man's fife, the simplest gain 
 from contact with this literature of which I am speaking 
 is in the education of the historic sense. Romance discov- 
 ered history, and seeking adventure and thriving in what 
 it sought, made that great find, the Middle Ages, which 
 the previous time looked on much as we regard the civili- 
 zation of China with mingled ignorance and contempt. 
 It found also the Gael and the Northmen, and many an 
 outlying region, many a buried tract of time. In Scott's 
 novels characteristically, but also in countless others, in 
 the rescued and revived ballad of England and the North, 
 and in the renewed forms of Greek imagination, the his- 
 toric sense is strongly drawn on, and no reader can es- 
 cape its culture, for the place of history and its inspira- 
 tional power in literature is fundamental in the spirit of 
 the nineteentTi century. But what most arrests the young 
 heart, in this world of man's life, is those ideas which we 
 sum up as the Revolution, and the principle of democ- 
 racy which is primary in the literature of the last age. 
 There the three great words — liberty, fraternity and 
 equality — and the theory that in Shelley was so bum- 
 
 [23]
 
 THE TORCH 
 ing an enthusiasm and in Byron so passionate a force, 
 are still aflame ; and the new feeling toward man which 
 was implicit in democracy is deeply planted in that 
 aspect of fraternity which appears in the interest in the 
 common lot, and in that aspect of liberty which appears 
 in the sense of the dignity of the individual. Burns, Scott, 
 Dickens illustrate the one; Byron, Shelley and Carlyle 
 the other. The literature of the great watchwords, the 
 literature of the life of the humble classes, the literature 
 of the rebellious individual will — the latter flashing out 
 many a wild career and exploding many a startling the- 
 ory of how life is to be lived — are the very core and sub- 
 stance of the time. The application of ideas to life in the 
 large, of which Rousseau was so cardinal an example, 
 opens an endless field in a century so rich in discovery, 
 so active in intellect and so plastic in morals; and here 
 one may wander at will. Here is matter for a Ufetime. 
 But without particularizing, it is plain how variously, 
 how profoundly and vividly through this literature the 
 mind is exercised in the human world, takes on the 
 colour, picturesqueness and movement of history, builds 
 up the democratic social faith and develops the energy 
 of individual freedom, and becomes a place for the ca- 
 reer of great ideas. 
 
 There remains the world of God's being, or to vary 
 the phrase in sympathy with the mode of approach char- 
 
 [24]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 acteristic of the nineteenth century, the world in "vrhich 
 God is. It may be broadly stated that the notion of 
 what used to be called an absentee God, a far-off Ruler 
 overseeing by modes analogous to human administra- 
 tion the affairs of earth as a distant province, finds no 
 place in this literature of the last age. The note of thought 
 is rather of the intimacy of God with his creation and 
 with the soul of man. God is known in two ways; as an 
 idea in the intellect and as an experience in the emo- 
 tions ; and in poetry the two modes blend, and often 
 blur where they blend. Their habitual expression in the 
 great poets of the age is in pantheistic forms, but this is 
 rather a matter of form than of substance. The imma- 
 nence of the divine is the root-idea ; in Wordsworth it is 
 an immanence of sublime power, seized through com- 
 munion with nature; in Shelley, who was more pro- 
 foundly human, it is an immanence of transcendent love, 
 seized through his sense of the destiny of the universe 
 that carries in its bosom the glory of life ; in Tennyson, 
 in whom the sense of a veiled intellect was more deep, 
 it is an immanence of mystery in both the outer and the 
 inner world. In other parts of the field, God is also con- 
 ceived in history, and there immanent as Providence. 
 His immanence in the individual — a matter dark to 
 any thought — is most explicitly set forth by Emerson. 
 It is perhaps generally considered that in the literature 
 
 [25]
 
 THE TORCH 
 of the ninteenth century there is a large sceptical and 
 atheistic element ; but this is an error. Genius by its own 
 nature has no part in the spirit that denies ; it is positive, 
 affirms and creates. Its apparent denials will be found to 
 be partial, and affect fragments of a dead past only ; its 
 denials are, in reality, higher and more universal affirm- 
 ations. If Wordsworth appears to put nature in the place 
 of God, or Shelley love, or Keats beauty, they only affirm 
 that phase of the divine which is nighest to their 
 own apprehension, affection and delight. Their experi- 
 ence of the divine governs and blends with their intel- 
 lectual theory, sometimes, as I have said, with a blur of 
 thought. Each one's experience in these things is for 
 himself alone, and private; the ways of the Spirit no 
 man knows ; but it is manifest that for the opening mind, 
 whether of youth or of older years, the sense of eternity, 
 however dehcate, subtle and silent is its realm, is fed 
 nobly, sweetly and happily, by these poets in whom the 
 spirit of man crying for expression unlocks the secrecy 
 of its relations to the infinite. 
 
 Such is the nature of the contact of the mind with 
 literature by means of which it enters on its race inheri- 
 tance of idea and emotion, takes possession of the stored 
 results, clothes itself with energies whose springs are in 
 the earUest distance of time, and builds up anew for it- 
 self the whole and various world as it has come to be 
 
 [26]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 known by man in his age-long experience. The illus- 
 tration I have employed minimizes the constancy, the 
 completeness, the vastness of the process ; for it takes no 
 account of other disciplines, of religious tradition and 
 practice, of oral transmission, and of such universal and 
 intimate formative powers as mere language. But it will 
 be found on analysis that all of these depend, in the 
 main, on hterature in the broad sense; and, in the educa- 
 tion of the soul in the higher hfe, the awakening, the re- 
 veahng and upbuilding force Ues, I am persuaded, in the 
 pecuhar charge of hterature in which the race-mind has 
 stamped an image of itself. 
 
 It is obvious that what I have advanced, brings the 
 principle of authority into a cardinal place in life, and 
 clothes tradition with great power. It might seem that 
 the individual in becoming one with the race-mind has 
 only to endue himself with the past as with a garment, to 
 take its mould with the patience of clay, and to be in the 
 issue a recast of the past, thinking old thoughts, feeling 
 old emotions, doing old actions, in pre-established ways. 
 But this is to misconceive the process by which the in- 
 dividual effects this union ; he does not take the impress 
 of the race-mind as the wax receives the imprint of the 
 seal. This union is an act of life, a process of energy, joy 
 and growth, of self-expression; here learning is living, 
 and there is no other way to know the doctrine than to do 
 
 [27]
 
 THE TORCH 
 its will; so the race-mind is not copied, but is perpetu- 
 ally re-bom in men, and the world which each one of us 
 thus builds for himself out of his preferred capacities, 
 memories and desires — our farmer's, engineer's, 
 painter's world, as I have said — is his own original and 
 unique world. There is none like it, none. Originality 
 consists in this re-birth of the world in the young soul. 
 This world, nevertheless, the world of each of us, is not 
 one of wilfulness, fantasy and caprice; if, on the one 
 hand, it is such stuff as dreams are made of, on the other 
 it is the stuff of necessity. It has a consistency, a law and 
 fate, of its own, which supports, wields and sustains it. 
 Authority is no more than the recognition of and obedi- 
 ence to this underlying principle of being, whose will is 
 disclosed to us in man's life so far as that life in its 
 wholeness falls within our view; in knowledge of this 
 will all wisdom consists, of its action in us all experience 
 is woven, and in union with it all private judgment is 
 confirmed. Authority, truly interpreted, is only another 
 phase of that identity of the soul in all men by virtue of 
 which society exists, and especially that intellectual 
 state arises, that state which used to be called the repub- 
 lic of letters and which is the institution of the race-mind 
 to be the centre, the home and hope of civilization in all 
 ages — that state where the unity of mankind is accom- 
 plished in the spiritual unities of science, art and love. 
 
 [28]
 
 MAN AND THE RACE 
 To sum up these suggestions which I have thought it 
 desirable to offer in order that the point of view taken in 
 these lectures might, perhaps, be plain, I conceive of 
 history as a single process in which through century 
 after century in race after race the soul of man proceeds 
 in a progressive comprehension of the universe and evo- 
 lution of its own humanity, and passes on to each new 
 generation its accumulated knowledge and developed 
 energies, in their totality and without loss, at the acme 
 of achievement. I conceive of this inheriting and be- 
 queathing power as having its life and action in the race- 
 mind. I conceive of literature as an organ of the race- 
 mind, and of education as the process by which the in- 
 dividual enters into the race-mind, becomes more and 
 more man, and in the spiritual life mainly by means of 
 literature. I conceive of the body of men who thus live 
 and work in the soul as constituting the intellectual 
 state, that republic of letters, in which the race-mind 
 reaches, from age to age, its maximum of knowledge 
 and power, in men of genius and those whose lives they 
 illumine, move and direct; the unity of mankind is the 
 ideal end of this state, and the freeing of the soul which 
 takes place in it is its means. I conceive of the progres- 
 sive life of this state, in civilization after civilization, as 
 a perpetual death of the best, in culture after culture, for 
 the good of the lower, a continuing sacrifice, in the history 
 
 [29]
 
 THE TORCH 
 of humanity, of man for mankind. And from this mys- 
 tery, though to some it may seem only the recourse of in- 
 tellectual despair, I pluck a confident faith in that im- 
 perishable relation which man and his works contain, 
 and which though known only in the continuity of 
 the race-mind, I am compelled to believe, has eternal 
 reality. 
 
 [SO]
 
 The Torch 
 n
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 
 The language of literature is the language of all the 
 world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the 
 notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech 
 which constitutes the various tongues of the earth, and 
 conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of 
 all men. Words are intermediary between thought and 
 things. We express ourselves really not through words, 
 which are only signs, but through what they signify — 
 through things. Literature is the expression of Ufe. The 
 question, then, is — what things has literature found 
 most effectual to express Ufe, and has therefore habitu- 
 ally preferred ? and what tradition in consequence of this 
 habit of preference has been built up in all literatures, 
 and obtained currency and authority in this pro- 
 vince of the wider realm of all art ? It is an 
 interesting question, and fu)idamental for any one 
 who desires to appreciate literature understandingly. 
 
 [33]
 
 THE TORCH 
 Perhaps you will permit me to approach it somewhat 
 indirectly. 
 
 You are all familiar with something that is called 
 poetic diction — that is, a selected language specially 
 fitted for the uses of poetry; and you are, perhaps, not 
 quite so familiar with the analogous feature in prose, 
 wliich is now usually termed preciosity, or preciousness 
 of language, that is, a highly refined and aesthetic diction, 
 such as Walter Pater employs. The two are constant 
 products of language that receives any Uterary cultiva- 
 tion, and they are sometimes called diseases of language. 
 Thus, in both early and late Greek there sprang up Ut- 
 erary styles of expression, involving the preference of 
 certain words, constructions and even cadences, and the 
 teaching of art in these matters was the business of the 
 Greek rhetorician ; so in Italy, Spain, and France, in the 
 Renaissance, similar styles, each departing from the 
 common and habitual speech of the time, grew up, and 
 in England you identify this mood of language in Ehza- 
 beth's day as Euphuism. The phenomenon is common, 
 and belongs to the nature of language. Poetic diction, 
 however, you perhaps associate most clearly with the 
 mannerism in language of the eighteenth century in 
 England, when common and so-called vulgar words were 
 exiled from poetry, and Gray, for example, could not 
 speak of the Eton schoolboys as playing hoop, but only 
 
 134 1
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 
 as " chasing the rolling circles' speed, " and when, to use 
 the stock example, all green things were " verdant. " This 
 is fixed in our memory because Wordsworth has the 
 credit of leading an attack on the poetic diction of that 
 period, both critically in his prefaces and practically in 
 his verse ; he went to the other extreme, and introduced 
 into his poetry such homely words as "tub," for ex- 
 ample ; he held that the proper language of poetry is the 
 language of common Ufe. So Emerson in his addresses, 
 you remember, had recourse to the humblest objects foi- 
 illustration, and shocked the formaUsm of his time by 
 speaking of " the meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan. " 
 He was applying in prose the rule of Wordsworth in 
 poetry. Walt Whitman represents the extreme of this use 
 of the actual language of men. But if you consider the 
 matter, you will see that tliis choice of the homely word 
 only sets up at last a fashion of homeliness in the place of 
 a fashion of refinement, and breeds, for instance, dia- 
 lect poets in shoals ; and often the choice is really not of 
 the word, but of the homely thing itself as the object of 
 thought and expressive image of it; and in men so great 
 as Emerson and Wordsworth the practice is a proof of 
 that sympathy with common life which made them both 
 great democrats. But in addition to the diction that 
 characterizes an age, you must have observed that 
 in every original writer there grows up a particular 
 
 [35]
 
 THE TORCH 
 vocabulary, structure and rhythm that he affects and 
 that in the end become his mannerism, or distinct- 
 ive style, so marked that you recognize his work by its 
 stamp alone, as in Keats, Browning, and Swinburne in 
 poetry, and in Arnold in prose. In other words there is at 
 work in the language of a man, or of an age even, a con- 
 stant principle of selection which tends to prefer certain 
 ways and forms of speech to others, and in the end de- 
 velopes a language characteristic of the age, or of the 
 man. 
 
 This principle of selection, whether it works toward 
 refinement or homeliness, operates in the same way. It 
 must be remembered — and it is too often forgotten — 
 that the problem of any artistic work is a problem of 
 economy. How to get into the two hours' traflfic of the 
 stage the significance of a whole fife, of a group of fives ; 
 how to pack into a sixteen-line lyric a dramatic situation 
 and there sphere it in its own emotion; how to rouse 
 passion and pour it in a three-minute poem, fike Shel- 
 ley's " Indian Air " — all these are problems in economy, 
 by which speed, condensation, intensity are gained. 
 Now words in themselves are colourless, except so far as 
 their musical quality is concerned ; but the thing that a 
 word stands for has a meaning of its own and usually a 
 meaning charged with associations, and often this asso- 
 ciative meaning is the primary and important one in its 
 
 [36]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 use. A rose, for example, is but the most beautiful of 
 flowers in itself, but it is so charged with association in 
 men's Hves, and still more heavily charged with long use 
 of emotion in literature, that the very word and mere 
 name of it awakes the heart and sets a thousand mem- 
 ories unconsciously vibrating. This added meaning is 
 what I am accustomed to term an overtone in words; 
 and it is manifest that, in view of the necessity for econ- 
 omy in poetic art, those words which are the richest and 
 deepest in overtone will be preferred, because of the 
 speed, certainty and fullness they contain. The question 
 will be what overtones in Hfe appeal most to this or that 
 poet ; he will reproduce them in his verse ; Pope will use 
 the overtones of a polished society, Wordsworth and 
 Emerson those of humble hfe. Now our larger question 
 is what overtones are characteristically preferred in 
 great literature, in what objects do they most inhere, 
 and in what way is the authoritative tradition of litera- 
 ture, as respects its means of expression, thus built up ? 
 It goes without saying that all overtones are either of 
 thought or feeling. What modes of expression, then, 
 what material objects, what forms of imagination, what 
 abstract principles of thought, are most deeply charged 
 with ideas and emotions ? It will be agreed that, as a 
 mere medium, music expresses pure emotion most di- 
 rectly and richly; music seems to enter the physical 
 
 [37]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 frame of the body itself, and move there with the warmth 
 and instancy of blood. The sound of words, therefore, 
 cannot be neglected, and in the melody and echo of 
 poetry sound is a cardinal element; yet, it is here only 
 the veining of the marble, it is not the material itself. In 
 the objects which words summon up, there is sometimes 
 an emotional power as direct and immediate as that of 
 music itself, as for example, in- the great features of na- 
 ture, the mountains, the plains, the ocean, which awe 
 even the savage mind. But, in general, the emotional 
 power of material objects is lent to them by association, 
 that is by the human use that has been made of them, as 
 on the plain of Marathon, to use Dr. Johnson's old illus- 
 tration, it is the thought of what happened there that 
 makes the spectator's patriotism "gain force" as he 
 surveys the scene. This human use of the world is the 
 fountain of significance in all imaginative and poetic 
 speech; and in the broad sense history is the story of 
 this human use of the world. 
 
 History is so much of past experience as abides in 
 race-memory; and underUes race-hterature in the same 
 way that a poet's own experience underUes his expres- 
 sion of life. I do not mean that when a poet unlocks his 
 heart, as Shakspere did in his sonnets, he necessarily 
 writes his own biography; in the poems he writes there 
 may be much of actual event as in Burns's love-songs, or 
 
 [38]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 little as in Dante's " New Life." Much of a poet's experi- 
 ence takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is 
 oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the 
 power, the purity and height of his utterance may not 
 seldom be the greater because experience here uses the 
 voices of desire. " All I could never be, " in Browning's 
 plangent line, has been the mounting strain of the sub- 
 limest and the tenderest songs of men. All Ireland could 
 never be, thrills and sorrows on her harp's most resonant 
 string, and is the master-note to which her sweetest 
 music ever returns. All man could never be makes the 
 sad majesty of Virgil's verse. As with a man, what a na- 
 tion strongly desires is no small part of its life, and is the 
 mark of destiny upon it, whether for failure or success; 
 so the note of world-empire is heard in the latest 
 English verse, and the note of humanity — the service 
 of all men — has always been dominant in our own. His- 
 tory, then, must be thought of, in its relation to litera- 
 ture, as including the desire as well as the performance 
 of the race. 
 
 History, however, in the narrowest sense, lies close to 
 the roots of imaginative literature. The great place of 
 history and its inspirational power in the literature of 
 the last century I have already referred to ; it is one of the 
 most important elements in the extraordinary reach and 
 range of that splendid outburst of imagination through- 
 
 [39]
 
 THE TORCH 
 out Europe. Aristotle recognized the value of history as 
 an aid to the imagination, at the very moment that he 
 elevated poetry above history. In that necessary econo- 
 my of art, of which I spoke, it is a great gain to have 
 well-known characters and familiar events, such as 
 Agamemnon and the "Trojan War," in which much is 
 already done for the spectator before the play begins. 
 So our present historical novelists have their stories half- 
 written for them in the minds of their readers, and es- 
 pecially avail themselves of an emotional element there, 
 a patriotism, which they do not have to create. The use 
 of history to the imagination, however, goes farther than 
 merely to spare it the pains of creating character and in- 
 cident and evoking emotion. It assists a Uterary move- 
 ment to begin with race-power much as a poet's or — 
 as in Dickens's case — a novelist's own experience aids 
 him to develop his work, however much that experience 
 may be finally transformed in the work. Thus the novel 
 of the last age really started its great career from Scott's 
 historic sense working out into imaginative expression, 
 and in a lesser degree from so minor a writer as Miss 
 Edgeworth in whose Irish stories — which were con- 
 temporary history — Scott courteously professed to 
 find his own starting point. It is worth noting, also, that 
 the Ehzabethan drama had the same course. Shakspere 
 following Marlowe's example developed from the his- 
 
 [40]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 torical English plays, in which he worked in Scott's 
 manner, into his full control of imagination in the purely 
 ideal sphere. History has thus often been the handmaid 
 of imagination, and the foster-mother of great hterary 
 ages. Yet to vary Aristotle's phrase — poetry is all his- 
 tory could never be. 
 
 It appears to me, nevertheless, that history underlies 
 race-literature in a far more profound and universal way. 
 History is mortal : it dies. Yet it does not altogether die. 
 Elements, features, fragments of it survive, and enter 
 into the eternal memory of the race, and are there trans- 
 formed, and — as we say — spiritualized. Literature is 
 the abiding-place of this transforming power, and most 
 profits by it. And to come to the heart of the matter, 
 there have been at least three such cardinal trans- 
 formations in the past. 
 
 The first transformation of history is mythology. I do 
 not mean to enter on the vexed question of the origin of 
 mythologies ; and, of course, in referring to history as its 
 ground, I include much more than that hero-worship 
 such as you will find elaborated or invented in Carlyle's 
 essay on Odin, and especially I include all that experi- 
 ence of nature and her association with human toil and 
 moods that you will find delineated with such marvellous 
 subtleness and fullness in Walter Pater's essay on 
 Dionysus. In mythology, mankind preserved from his 
 
 [41]
 
 THE TORCH 
 primitive experience of nature, and his own heroic past 
 therein, all that had any lasting significance; and, al- 
 though all mythologies have specific features and a par- 
 ticular value of their own, yet the race, coming to its best, 
 as I have said, bore here its perfect blossom in Greek 
 mythology. I know not by what grace of heaven, by 
 what felicity of blend in climate, blood and the fortune 
 of mortal life, but so it was that the human soul put forth 
 the bud of beauty in the Greek race; and there, at the 
 dawn of our own intellectual civilization and in the first 
 sunrise of our poetry in Homer, was found a world filled 
 with divine — with majestic and lovely figures, which 
 had absorbed into their celestial being and forms the 
 power of nature, the splendour and charm of the ma- 
 terial sphere, the fructifying and beneficient opera- 
 tions of the external universe, the providence of the state 
 and the inspiration of all arts and crafts, of games and 
 wars and song ; each of these deities was a flashing centre 
 of human energy, aspiration, reliance — with a realm 
 and servants of its own ; and mingling with them in fair 
 companionship was a company of demi-gods and heroes, 
 of kings and princes, and of golden youths, significant of 
 the fate of all young fife — Adonis, Hippolytus, Orestes. 
 This mythologic world was near to earth, and it mixed 
 with legendary history, such history as the " Iliad " con^ 
 tained, and also with the private and pubhc life of the 
 
 [42]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 citizens, being the ceremonial religion of the state. It was 
 all, nevertheless, the transformation that man had accom- 
 pUshed of his own past, his joys and sorrows, his labours, 
 his insights and desires, the deeds of his ancestors, — the 
 human use that he had made of the world. This was the 
 body of idea and emotion to which the poet appealed 
 in that age, precisely as our historical novehsts now ap- 
 peal to our own knowledge of history and pre-estab- 
 ished emotion with regard to it, our patriotism. Here 
 they found a language already full charged with emotion 
 and intelligence, of which they could avail themselves, 
 and speaking which they spoke with the voices of a 
 thousand years. Nevertheless, it was at best a language 
 like others, and subject to change and decay in expres- 
 sive power. The time came when, the creative impulse in 
 mythology having ceased and its forms being fixed, the 
 mythic world lay behind the mind of the advancing race 
 which had now attained conceptions of the physical 
 universe, and especially ideas of the moral Ufe, which 
 were no longer capable of being held in and expressed 
 by the mythic world, but exceeded the bounds of ear- 
 lier thought and feeling and broke the ancient moulds. 
 Then it was that Plato desired to exile the poets and their 
 mythology from the state. He could not be content, 
 either, with a certain change that had occurred ; for the 
 creative power in mythology having long ceased, as I 
 
 [43]
 
 THE TORCH 
 have said, the imagination put forth a new function — a 
 meditative power — and brooding over the old fables of 
 the world of the gods discovered in them, not a record 
 of fact, but an allegorical meaning, a higher truth which 
 the fable contained. Mythology passed thus into an em- 
 blematic stage, in which it was again long used by man- 
 kind, as a language of universal power. Plato, however, 
 could not free himself from the mythologic habit of im- 
 agination so planted in his race, and found the most ef- 
 fective expression for his ideas in the myths of his own 
 invention which he made up by a dexterous and poetic 
 adaptation of the old elements; and others later than 
 Plato have found it hard to disuse the mythologic lan- 
 guage ; for, although the old religion as a thing of faith and 
 practice died away, it survived as a thing of form and 
 feature in art, as a phase of natural symbolism and of 
 inward loveliness of action and passion in poetry, as a 
 chapter of romance in the history of the race ; and the 
 modern Uteratures of Europe are, in large measure, 
 unintelhgible without this key. 
 
 The second great transformation of history is chivalry. 
 Here the phenomenon is nearer in time and hes more 
 within the field of observation and knowledge ; it is pos- 
 sible to trace the stages of the growth of the story of Ro- 
 land with some detail and precision; but, on the other 
 hand, the Arthur myth reaches far back into the be- 
 
 [44]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 ginnings of Celtic imagination, and all such race-myths 
 tend to appropriate and embody in themselves the char- 
 acteristic features both of one another and of whatever is 
 held to be precious and significant in history or even in 
 classical and Eastern legend. The true growth, however, 
 is that feudal culture, which we know as knighthood, 
 working out its own ideal of action and character and 
 sentiment on a basis of bravery, courtesy, and piety, 
 and thereby generating patterns of knighthood, typical 
 careers, and in the end an imaginative interpretation of 
 the purest spiritual Hfe itself in the various legends of 
 the Holy Grail. As in the pagan world the forms and 
 fables of mythology and their interaction downward with 
 the human world furnished the imaginative interpreta- 
 tion of life as it then was, so for the mediaeval age, the 
 figures and tales of chivalry and their interaction upward 
 with the spiritual world of Christianity, and also with the 
 magic of diabolism round about, furnished the imagina- 
 tive interpretation of that later hfe It was this new body 
 of ideas and emotion in the minds of men that the me- 
 diaeval poets appealed to, availed themselves of, and so 
 spoke a language of imagery and passion that was a 
 world-language, charged as I have said with the thought 
 and feeling, the tradition, of a long age. What happened 
 to the language of mythology, happened also to this lan- 
 guage; it lost the power of reahty, and men arose who, 
 
 [45]
 
 THE TORCH 
 being in advance of its conceptions of life, desired to ex- 
 ile it, denounce it or laugh it out of existence, like 
 Ascham in England, and Cervantes in Spain. It also 
 suffered that late change into an allegorical or emble- 
 matic meaning, and had a second life in that form as in 
 the notable instance of Spenser's "Faerie Queene." It 
 also could not die, but — just as mythology revived 
 in the Alexandrian poets for a season, and fed Theo- 
 critus and Virgil — chivalry was re-bom in the last cen- 
 tury, and in Tennyson's Arthur, and in Wagner's " Par- 
 sifal " lived again in two great expressions of ideal life. 
 
 The third great transformation of history is contained 
 in the Scriptures. The Bible is, in itself, a singularly 
 complete expression of the whole life of a race in one 
 volume — its faith and history blending in one body of 
 poetry, thought and imaginative chronicle. It contains a 
 celestial world in association with human events ; its pa- 
 triarchs are like demi-gods, and it has heroes, legends, 
 tales in good numbers, and much romantic and passion- 
 ate hfe, on the human side, besides its great stores of 
 spirituality. In literary power it achieves the highest in 
 the kinds of composition that it uses. It is as a whole, 
 regarded purely from the human point of view, not un- 
 fairly to be compared in mass, variety, and scope of ex- 
 pression, with mjlhology and chivalry as constituting a 
 third great form of imaginative language; nor has its his- 
 
 [46]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 tory been dissimilar in the Christian world to which it 
 came with something of that same remoteness in time and 
 reality that belonged equally to mythology and chivalry. 
 It was first used in a positive manner, as a thing of fact 
 and solid belief; but there soon grew up, you remember, 
 in the Christian world that habit of finding a hidden 
 meaning in its historical record, of turning it to a parable, 
 of extracting from it an allegorical signification. It be- 
 came, not only in parts but as a whole, emblematic, and 
 its interpretation as such was the labour of centuries. 
 This is commonly stated as the source of that universal 
 mood of allegorizing which characterized the mediaeval 
 world, and was as strongly felt in secular as in religious 
 writers. Its historical tales, its theories of the uni- 
 verse, its cruder morals in the Jewish ages, have been 
 scoffed at, just as was the case with the Greek myth, from 
 the Apostate to Voltaire and later; but how great are its 
 powers as a language is seen in the completeness with 
 which it tyrannized over the Puritan life in England and 
 made its liistory, its ideas, its emotions the habitual and 
 almost exclusive speech of that strong Cromwellian age. 
 In our country here in New England it gave the mould 
 of imagination to our ancestors for two whole centuries. 
 A book, which contains such power that it can make 
 itself the language of life through so many centuries and 
 in such various peoples is to be reckoned as one of the 
 
 [47]
 
 THE TORCH 
 greatest instruments of race-expression that man 
 possesses. 
 
 Mythology, chivalry, the Scriptures are the tongues of 
 the imagination. It is far more important to know them 
 than to learn French or German or Italian, or Latin or 
 Greek; they are three branches of that universal lan- 
 guage which though vainly sought on the lips of men is 
 found in their minds and hearts. To omit these in edu- 
 cation is to defraud youth of its inheritance ; it is like de- 
 stroying a long-developed organ of the body, hke putting 
 out the eye or silencing the nerves of hearing. Nor is it 
 enough to look them up in encyclopaedias and notes, and 
 so obtain a piecemeal information; one must grow fa- 
 miliar with these forms of beauty, forms of honour, forms 
 of righteousness, have something of the same sense of 
 their reality as that felt by Homer and Virgil, by the 
 singer of " Roland " and the chronicler of the " Mort d' 
 Arthur," by St. Augustine, and St. Thomas. He must 
 form his imagination upon these idealities, and load his 
 heart with them; else many a masterpiece of the human 
 spirit will be lost to him, and most of the rest will be im- 
 paired. If one must know vocabulary and grammar 
 before he can understand the speech of the mouth, much 
 more must he know well mythology, chivalry and Bible- 
 lore before he can take possession of the wisdom that the 
 race-mind has spoken, the beauty it has moulded life 
 
 [48]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 into, as a thing of passion and action, the economy of 
 lucid power it has achieved for perfect human utterance, 
 in these three fundamental forms of a true world-lan- 
 guage. The literature of the last century is permeated 
 with mythology, chivalry and to a less degree with 
 Scripture, and no one can hope to assimilate it, to re- 
 ceive its message, unless his mind is drenched with these 
 same things ; and the further back his tastes and desires 
 lead him into the literature of earlier times, the greater 
 will be his need of this education in the material, the 
 modes and the forms of past imagination. 
 
 It may be that a fourth great tongue of the imagina- 
 tion is now being shaped upon the living lips of men in 
 the present and succeeding ages. If it be so, this will be 
 the work of the democratic idea, which is now still at the 
 beginning of its career; but since mythology and chivalry 
 had their development in living men, it is natural to 
 suppose that the human force is still operative in our 
 own generation as it once was in those of Hellenic and 
 mediaeval years. The characteristic literature of de- 
 mocracy is that of its ideas, spiritualized in Shelley, and 
 that of the common lot as represented in the sphere of 
 the novel, spiritualized most notably in Victor Hugo. In 
 our own country it is singular to observe that the demo- 
 cratic idea, though eflScient in politics, does not yet es- 
 tablish itself in imaginative literature with any great 
 
 [49]
 
 THE TORCH 
 power of brilliancy, does not create great democratic 
 types, or in any way express itself adequately. This 
 democratic idea, in Dickens for example, uses the ex- 
 perience of daily life, that is, contemporary history, or at 
 least it uses an artistic arrangement of such experience ; 
 but the novel as a whole has given us in regard to the 
 common lot, rather a description of life in its variety than 
 that concentrated and essential significance of life which 
 we call typical. If democracy in its future course should 
 evolve such a typical and spiritualized embodiment of 
 itself as chivalry found in Arthur and the Round 
 Table, or as the heroic age of Greece found in Achilles 
 and the Trojan War, or as the genius of Rome found 
 in Aeneas and his fortunes, then imagination — race- 
 imagination will be enriched by this fourth great instru- 
 ment ; but this is to cast the horoscope of too distant an 
 hour. I introduce the thought only for the sake of includ- 
 ing in this broad survey of race-imagination that expe- 
 rience of the present day, that history in the contempo- 
 rary process of being transformed, out of which the mass 
 of the books of the day are now made. 
 
 Let me recur now to that principle of selection which 
 through the cumulative action of repeated preferences of 
 phrase and image fixes a habit of choice which at last 
 stamps the diction of a man, a school or an age. It is 
 plain that in what I have called the transformation of 
 
 [50]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 
 history, of which literature is the express image, there is 
 the same principle of selection which, working through 
 long periods of race-Hfe, results at last in those ideaUties 
 of persons and events in which inhere most powerfully 
 those overtones of beauty, honour and righteousness 
 that the race has found most precious both for idea 
 and emotion ; and to these are to be added what I have 
 had no time to include and discuss, the idealities of 
 persons and events found outside mythology, chivalry 
 and Scripture, in the work of individual genius like 
 Shakspere, which nevertheless have the same ground 
 in history, in experience, that in them is similarly 
 transformed. Life-experience spiritualized is the formula 
 of all great literature ; it may range from the experience 
 of a single Ufe, like Sidney's in his sonnets to that of an 
 empire in Virgil's " Aeneid, " or of a religion in Dante's 
 " Comedy. " In either case the formula which makes 
 it literature is the same. I have illustrated the point 
 by the obvious spiritualizations of history. Race- 
 life, from the point of view of literature, results at last 
 in these moulds of imagination, and all else though 
 slowly, yet surely, drops away into oblivion. In truth, it 
 is only by being thus spiritualized that anything human 
 survives from the past. The rose, I said, has been so dip- 
 ped in human experience that it is less a thing of nature 
 than a thing of passion. In the same way Adonis, Jason 
 
 [51]
 
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 and Achilles, Roland and Arthur, Lancelot, Percival and 
 Galahad, Romeo and Hamlet have drawn into them- 
 selves such myriads of human Uves by admiration and 
 love that from them everything material, contemporary 
 and mortal has been refined away, and they seem to all 
 of us hke figures moving in an immortal air. They have 
 achieved the eternal world. To do this is the work of art. 
 It may seem a fantastic idea, but I will venture the say- 
 ing of it, since to me it is the truth. Art, I suppose, you 
 think of as the realm and privilege of selected men, of 
 sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, men of genius and 
 having something that has always been called divine in 
 their faculty; but it appears to me that art, hke genius, 
 is something that all men share, that it is the stamp of the 
 soul in every one, and constitutes their true and imma- 
 terial life. The soul of the race, as it is seen in history 
 and disclosed by history, is an artist soul; its career is an 
 artistic career; its unerring selective power expels from 
 its memory every mortal element and perserves only the 
 essential spirit, and thereof builds its ideal imaginative 
 world through which it finds its true expression ; its more 
 perfect comprehension of the world is science, its more 
 perfect comprehension of its own nature is love, 
 its more perfect expression of its remembered 
 Ufe is art. Mankind is the grandest and surest 
 artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, 
 
 [52]
 
 THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE WORLD 
 an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the 
 beautiful soul. 
 
 It appears, then, that the language of literature in the 
 race is a perfected nature and a perfected manhood and 
 a perfected divinity, so far as the race at the moment can 
 see toward perfection. The life which literature builds 
 up ideally out of the material of experience is not wholly 
 a past life, but there mingles with it and at last con- 
 trols it the life that man desires to live. Fullness of Uf e — 
 that fullness of action which is poured in the epic, that 
 fullness of passion which is poured in the drama, that 
 fullness of desire that is poured in the lyric — the hfe 
 of which man knows himself capable and realizes as the 
 opportunity and hope of life — this is the hfe that liter- 
 ature enthrones in its dream. You have heard much of 
 the will to believe and of the desire to Hve : literature is 
 made of these two, warp and woof. Race after race be- 
 lieves in the gods it has come to know and in the heroes 
 it has borne, and in what it wishes to beheve of divine 
 and human experience ; and the Hfe it thus ascribes to its 
 gods and to its own past is the life it most ardently desires 
 to live. Literature, which records this, is thus the chief 
 witness to the nobility, the constancy and instancy of 
 man's effort for perfection. What wonder, then, if in his 
 sublimest and tenderest song there steals that note of 
 melancholy so often struck by the greatest masters in 
 
 [53]
 
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 the crisis and climax of their works, and which, when so 
 struck, has more of the infinite in it, more of the human 
 in it, than any other in the slowly triumphant theme ! 
 
 To sum up — the language of Uterature is experience ; 
 the language of race-hterature is race -experience, or his- 
 tory, the human use that the race has made of the worid. 
 The law appears to be that history in this sense is slowly 
 transformed by a refining and spiritualizing process into 
 an imaginative worid, such as the worid of mythology, 
 chivalry or the Scriptures, and that this world in turn 
 becomes emblematic and fades away into an expression 
 of abstract truth. The crude beginning of the process is 
 seen in our historical fiction; the height of it in Arthur 
 or in Odin ; the end of it in the symbolic or allegoric in- 
 terpretation of even so human a book as Virgil's " Ae- 
 neid. " Human desire for the best enters into this process 
 with such force that the record of the past slowly 
 changes into the prophecy of the future, and out of the 
 passing away of what was is built the dream of what 
 shall be; so arises in race-life the creed of what man 
 wishes to believe and the dream of the life he desires to 
 live; this human desire for belief and for life is, in the 
 final analysis, the principle of selection whose operation 
 has been sketched, and on its validity rests the validity 
 and truth of all literature. 
 
 [54]
 
 The Torch 
 m
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 I 
 
 I propose to-night to illustrate by the specific example of 
 the Titan Myth how it is that Greek mythology is a 
 tongue of the imagination — a living tongue of the uni- 
 versal imagination of men. 
 
 The Titan Myth — I wonder what it means to you ? 
 The Titans were the earliest children of the earth, elder 
 than the Greek gods even, and were the sons of the 
 the Earth, their mother. You perhaps think of them as 
 mere giants, such as Jack killed -— mediaeval monsters 
 of the kin of Beauty and the Beast. Think of them 
 rather as majestic forms, with something of the sweep 
 and mystery of those figures you may remember out of 
 Ossian and his misty mountains, with the largeness and 
 darkness of the earth in them, a massive dim-featured 
 race, but with an earthly rather than celestial grandeur, 
 embodiments of mighty force dull to beauty, intelligence, 
 light. When Zeus, the then young Olympian, was bom, 
 
 [57]
 
 THE TORCH 
 and with him the other deities of the then new divine 
 world and when he dethroned his father, and put the new 
 gods in possession of the universe, these children of the 
 old regime, misliking change, took the father's part, and 
 warred on the usurper of ancient power, and were over- 
 thrown by his lightnings, and mountains were piled on 
 them; and now you may read in Longfellow of Encela- 
 dus, the type and image of their fate, buried under 
 ^tna whose earthquakes are the struggling of the great 
 Titan beneath. This was the war of the Titans and the 
 gods. One of the Titans, however, stood apart from the 
 rest, being wiser than they. Prometheus made friends 
 with Zeus, but his fortune was not less grievous to him; 
 for when he saw that Zeus took no account of men — " of 
 miserable men, " but yearned to destroy them from the 
 face of the earth, he took pity on mankind, and stole for 
 them the celestial fire and gave it to them, for until then 
 man had lived a life of mere nature, without knowledge, 
 or any arts, not even that of agriculture. Prometheus was 
 the fire-bringer; and, bringing fire, he brought to men all 
 the uses of fire, such as metal -working, for example, and 
 in a word he gave to mankind its entire career, the long 
 labour of progressive civilization, and the life of the 
 spirit itself which is kindled, as we say, from the Pro- 
 methean spark within. It was but a step for the Pagan 
 imagination, at a later stage, to think of this patron of 
 
 [58]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 mankind as the creator of men, since he was the fosterer 
 of their Uves ; it was said that he had made clay images, 
 and moistened these with holy water, so that they be- 
 came living creatures — men. Zeus was angered by this 
 befriending of the human race; and he flung Prome- 
 theus upon a mountain of the Caucasus, chained him 
 there, and planted a vulture to eat always on his entrails ; 
 and in the imagination of men there he hangs to this day. 
 Yet there was one condition on which he might be re- 
 leased and again received into heaven. He alone knew 
 the secret of the fall of Zeus — the means by which it 
 would be brought about ; and if he would tell this secret, 
 so that Zeus might avoid the danger as was possible, and 
 thereby his unjust reign become perpetual, Prometheus 
 might save himself. But the Titan so loved justice that he 
 kept silence, knowing that in the course of ages at last 
 Zeus would fall. This was the myth of Prometheus. 
 
 Of the aspects which the entire legend presents in 
 literature, there are three which stand out. I shall ask 
 you to consider the first as the cosmic idea — the idea of 
 the law of human progress that it contains. To the Greek 
 mind the development of the universe consisted in the 
 supplanting of a lower by a higher power, under the will 
 of a supreme fate or necessity which was above both 
 gods and men: after Uranus was Chronos, after Chro- 
 nos was Zeus, after Zeus there would be other gods. The 
 
 [59]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Greeks were themselves a higher power in their world, 
 and as such had conquered the Persians; theirs was the 
 victory of light over darkness, of civilization over bar- 
 barism, and therefore on the walls of their great temple, 
 the Parthenon, which was the embodiment of their spir- 
 itual consciousness as a race, they depicted three great 
 mythic events symbolizing the victory of the higher 
 power — that is, the war of the Centaurs and the Lapi- 
 thee, of the Athenians and the Amazons, and of the gods 
 and the Titans. This cosmic idea — the Greek concep- 
 tion of progress — it is more convenient to delay to the 
 next lecture. Secondly, I shall ask you to consider the 
 conception of the friend of man suffering for his sake — 
 one that without irreverence may be designated as the 
 Christ-idea. This phase of the myth naturally has re- 
 ceived less development in literature, inasmuch as the 
 ideas and emotions it embodies find expression inevit- 
 ably and almost exclusively in the symbol of the Cross 
 and the life that led up thereto. But for those who, in the 
 chances of time have stood apart from the estabhshed 
 faith of Christendom, and have not seldom encountered 
 the creed and practice of their age in persecution, being 
 victims for the sake of reason — for these men, the 
 figure of Prometheus has been in the place of the Cross, 
 an image of themselves, their prototype. The expres- 
 sion of this particular idea, however, has been sUght 
 
 [60]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 in literature; but it naturally appears there, and Pro- 
 metheus has come to be the characteristic symbol of the 
 pecuhar suffering of genius; so Longfellow uses it 
 in his " Prometheus. " 
 
 "All is but a symbol painted 
 
 Of the Poet, Prophet, Seer; 
 Only those are crowned and sainted 
 Who with grief have been acquainted. 
 
 Making nations nobler, freer." 
 
 Under this aspect Prometheus is the martyr of humanity. 
 Thirdly, I shall ask you to consider the conception of 
 Prometheus, not as an individual, but as identified with 
 mankind, as mankind itself suffering in all its race-life 
 and throughout its history, wretched, tyrannized over by 
 some dark and unjust necessity, yet unterrified, reso- 
 lute, invincible in its faith in that 
 
 "One far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves" 
 
 The imagination, age after age, finds in Prometheus such 
 a symbol of man's race-fife. This is to conceive of Pro- 
 metheus as the idea of humanity. 
 
 iEschylus fixed the form of the Titan for the imagin- 
 ation and surrounded it with the characteristic scene. 
 He nailed Prometheus in chains riveted into the rock, the 
 
 [61]
 
 THE TORCH 
 vast desolate cliffs of the Caucasus, an indistinct and 
 mighty figure, frosted with the night and watching the 
 stars in their courses with lidless eyes, the dark vulture 
 hovering in his bosom. Perhaps I can make the scene 
 more real to you by a passage from a letter of a friend 
 who last spring was in that solitude. " All the forenoon, " 
 he says, "I have been travelling forward beneath the 
 giant wall of the frosty Caucasus. The snow-clad plain 
 serves as a dazzling foreground to the towering rugged 
 peaks so sharply defined in steel white and dull black 
 wherever the snow leaves the beetling rock bare. The 
 gorges and ravines which are here and there visible look 
 like old-time scars of jagged wounds on the sullen face of 
 the mountains. The dreary solitude of the scene is very 
 impressive. Far off yonder in the distance I can picture 
 the chill and desolate vulture-peak where Prometheus, 
 in his galling chains, longed for the day to give peace to 
 ' starry -kirtled night' (if I remember my ^Eschylus 
 rightly) and yearned for the sun to arise and dispell the 
 hoar-frost of dawn. It all comes up again before my 
 mind in this far-away solitary region. " Tliither to this 
 scene, that my friend describes, came with comfort or 
 counsel the daughters of the Ocean, and old Oceanus 
 himself, the Titan's brother, and lo on her wanderings, 
 and Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, to make terms with 
 Prometheus, or to inflict new tortures should he refuse. 
 
 [62]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 But Prometheus remained the resolute and faithful suf- 
 ferer : there stretched on the rock he would await the sure 
 coming of that justice which is above even the heavens 
 of Zeus and contains and orders even them. It is a sub- 
 lime moral situation. Who could ever forget that figure, 
 once stamped on his imagination, though but a school- 
 boy ? So Byron remembered his Harrow days : " Of the 
 ' Prometheus ' of vEschylus, " he says : " I was passionate- 
 ly fond as a boy. It was one of the Greek dramas we used 
 to read three times a year at Harrow. Indeed, it and the 
 Medea were the only ones, except the ' Seven Against 
 Thebes,' which pleased me. The ' Prometheus,' if not ex- 
 actly in my plan has always been so much in my head 
 that I well understand how its influences have passed 
 into all I have done. " It goes with this acknowledg- 
 ment, and bespealvs the critic's acute penetration, to 
 find Jeffrey affirming that there is no work of modem 
 literature that more than Byron's " Manfred " ap- 
 proaches the " Prometheus " of iEschylus. Byron only 
 illustrates the fascination that this myth has for the 
 race; the world will never let go of this symbol of 
 itself. 
 
 The moment and the cause, the invincible resolution 
 denying the will of the apparent gods of the hour in 
 obedience to the higher light within, are the same that 
 have nailed all martyrs to the cross, sent patriots to rot 
 
 [63]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 in prisons, and borne on the leaders of all forlorn hopes 
 in their death-charges, and of these the history of the last 
 century gives many a modern instance. In our own 
 time Siberia has been one vast Caucasus; I remember 
 when not long ago its name was Crete ; and now 't is 
 Macedonia — they are all tracts of that desolation that 
 swallows up in its voiceless solitude and buries from the 
 ears of God and man the human cry. In the mind and 
 memory of the race there are two great mountains ; over 
 against Sinai towers the peak of the Caucasus with per- 
 petual challenge; yet they are twin peaks — one, the 
 mount of faith in God, the other, the mount of faith in 
 man. You know how the race, from time to time, as great 
 moods sweep over it — the mood of asceticism, or of 
 Christian chivalry, or of world-conquest, sets up some 
 historic figure as the type and expression of this mood — 
 some St. Francis, or PhiUp Sidney, or Napoleon; this is 
 because the race sees in these men a greater image of it- 
 self in those particular moods. So, in a more abstract way 
 the race takes some part of its self-consciousness — say, 
 its perception of what is evil in its own heart — and puts 
 it outside of itself so as to see it better, projects or ob- 
 jectifies itself, as we say, in an image, Hke Mephisto- 
 pheles ; it sees in Mephistopheles itself in a certain mood 
 — a mood of mocking denial of all good. So, in its own 
 history and memory the race perceives that often its 
 
 [64]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 greatest men, those who have been its civihzers, have 
 been victims of the powers of their day, and have served 
 the race and carried on its Hfe by fidehty to their own 
 hearts and the truth in them in spite of the utmost suf- 
 fering that could be inflicted on them. The race thinks of 
 these men as constituting its own hfe, gathers and blends 
 them in one being and finds that being — the type that 
 stands for its continuous hfe — in Prometheus. In him 
 the race projects — as I have said — or objectifies itself 
 in the mood of suffering the worst for the good of men, 
 with undismayed courage and unbroken will. Prome- 
 theus is man as he knows himself in history, the im- 
 mortal sufferer under injustice bringing even by his 
 sorrows the higher justice that shall at last 
 prevail — he is this figure set clear and separate 
 before the mind: he is the idea of humanity, 
 conceived in the characteristic act of its noblest Hfe — 
 he is mankind. 
 
 I dwelt in the last lecture on the treasure that the race- 
 imagination possesses in the Greek myths, as a means of 
 expression; in the whole inheritance of our literature 
 there is nothing that the poet finds so great a gift as these 
 forms and tales of the mythic world in which the work 
 of creation is already half done for him, and the storing 
 of ideas and emotions has been accomplished, so that 
 with a word he can release in the mind the flood of mean- 
 
 [65]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 ing they contain, as if he pushed an electric button; they 
 are to him what the common law is to a lawyer — the 
 stored results of the past, in experience and principle; 
 he has only to adopt them into his human verse, as he 
 adopts into his verse of nature the Andes and Ararat. It 
 was not surprising that such a tale as the Titan Myth 
 should be among the chief memories of the race, never 
 wholly forgotten; yet it waited for its moment. After the 
 first mention of it in literature three thousand years went 
 by, before the moment came. Then the French Revolu- 
 tion struck its hour. It is true that the myth stirred in the 
 Renaissance when all things Greek revived, and Cal- 
 deron, the great Spanish poet, treated some minor as- 
 pects of it; but, in and about the Revolution, it was 
 handled repeatedly by great poets who strove to recast 
 the story and use it to express the ideas and emotions 
 of their own age. Goethe in his youth, and the Germans 
 — Herder and Schlegel, each wrote a Prometheus; in 
 Italy Monti took the subject; in England Landor and 
 Byron touched it lightly, and Keats and Shelley made it 
 the matter of great poems ; and later, in France, where 
 Voltaire had approached it, Victor Hugo and Edgar 
 Quinet elaborated it; nor do these names exhaust the 
 list of those who in the last century made it a principal 
 theme of verse. This re-birth was a natural one ; for the 
 French Revolution, which you remember Wendell 
 
 [66]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 Phillips in his great Harvard speech described as "the 
 most unmixed blessing that ever befell mankind " — 
 the French Revolution was rooted in the idea of hu- 
 manity and was the cause of humanity. Moreover, the 
 Revolution has a Titanic quality in itself; there is the 
 feeling of large earth-might in the struggle of the heavy 
 masses of the darkened people, peasant-born; and in 
 their revolt against the kingdoms of the world whose 
 serfs they were, there was the sense of a strife with the 
 careless luxury of the unjust gods; there was in the 
 wretchedness of the European peoples the state of man 
 that Prometheus pitied when he rebuked Zeus for taking 
 no account of men — "of miserable men;" and in the 
 tumult and ardour and invincible faith of the Revolu- 
 tion there was both the Titanic atmosphere and the 
 Promethean spirit. Shelley was the poet through whom 
 the Uterary expression of the Revolution was to be 
 poured. It is necessary to mark the time precisely. The 
 Revolution had flamed, and in Napoleon, whom more 
 than one poet celebrated as the Prometheus of the age, 
 had apparently flamed out. The Revolution, as a poUti- 
 cal idea seemed to have failed, and Europe sank back 
 into the arms of king and priest. It was then that these 
 great Englishmen, Byron and Shelley, in their youth 
 took up the fallen cause and bore it onward in their 
 hands till Byron died for it in the war of Greek Inde- 
 
 [67]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 pendence and Shelley, having sung his song, sank in the 
 waters of the Mediterranean Sea. 
 
 Shelley came to this subject naturally and through 
 years of unconscious preparation ; and when the moment 
 of creation came, he felt the Titanic quahty, that I 
 spoke of, in the Revolution, felt the Promethean security 
 of victory it contained — felt, too, the Promethean suf- 
 fering which was the heart of mankind as he saw it sur- 
 veying Europe in his day, and knew it in his own bosom 
 as well. He conceived of Prometheus as mankind, of his 
 history and fate as the destiny of man ; and being full of 
 that far sight of Prometheus which saw the victorious 
 end — being as full of it as the wheel of Ezekiel was full 
 of eyes — he saw, as the centre of all vision, Prometheus 
 Unbound — the millennium of mankind. He imagined 
 the process of that great liberation and its crowning 
 prosperities. This is his poem. In this poem the Revolu- 
 tion as a moral idea reached its height; that is what 
 makes it, from the social point of view, the race-point 
 of view, the greatest work of the last century in creative 
 imagination — for it is the summary and centre, in the 
 world of art, of the greatest power in that century — the 
 power of the idea of humanity. I shall present only the 
 cardinal phases of the dramatic situation, in the poem, 
 and of the moral idea by which it is solved. 
 
 The poem opens in the Caucasus, with Prometheus 
 [68]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 bound to the rock, an indistinct figure such as I have de- 
 scribed him ; his form is left undefined — he is a voice in 
 the vast soHtudes; and his first speech, which discloses 
 the situation, makes you aware of physical suffering, 
 mental anguish, an undismayed and patient will, an un- 
 conquerable faith — these are the qualities which make 
 him an elemental being and characterize him at once. It 
 is an J^schylean speech, phrases from ^schylus are 
 welded into it; but the moral grandeur of Prometheus — 
 all, that is, except the historical and physical features of 
 the scene — bears the creative mark of Shelley's own 
 sublimity of conception. 
 
 *' Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits 
 But One, who throng those bright and rolling loorlds 
 Which Thou and I alone of living things 
 Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth 
 Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou 
 Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise. 
 And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts. 
 With fear and self-contempt and barren hope. 
 Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate. 
 Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn 
 O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. 
 Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours. 
 And moments aye divided by keen pangs 
 Till they seemed years, torture and solitude. 
 Scorn and despair, — these are m,ine empire: — 
 
 [69]
 
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 More glorious far than thai which thou surveyest 
 From thine unenvied throne, O, Mighty God! 
 Almighty, Imd I deigned to share the shame 
 Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here 
 Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain. 
 Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; vjithoid herb. 
 Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. 
 Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! 
 
 " No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure. 
 I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt ? 
 I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun, 
 Has it not seen ? The Sea, in storm or calm. 
 Heaven s ever-changing Shadow, spread below. 
 Have its deaf waves not heard my agony? 
 Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever! 
 
 " The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears 
 Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains 
 Eat with their burning cold into my bones. 
 Heaven s winged hound, polluting from thy lips 
 His beak in poison not his own, tears up 
 My heart; and shapeless sights come wandering by. 
 The ghastly people of the realm of dream, 
 Mocking me: and the Earthquake-fiends are charged 
 To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds 
 When the rocks split and close again behind: 
 While from their loud abysses howling throng 
 The genii of the storm, urging the rage 
 Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. 
 [70]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 And yet to me welcome is day and night. 
 
 Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn. 
 
 Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs 
 
 The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead 
 
 The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom 
 
 — As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim — 
 
 Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood 
 
 From these pale feet, which then might trample thee 
 
 If they disdained not such a prostrate slave. 
 
 Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin 
 
 Will hunt thee undefended through the wide Heavenl 
 
 How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror. 
 
 Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief 
 
 Not exultation, for I hate no more. 
 
 As then ere misery made me wise. The curse 
 
 Once breathed on thee I would recall. Ye Mountains, 
 
 Whose many-voiced Echoes, through the mist 
 
 Of cataracts, flung the thunder of that spell! 
 
 Ye icy Springs, stagnant with wrinkling frost. 
 
 Which vibrated to hear me, and then crept 
 
 Shuddering through India! Thou serenest Air, 
 
 Through which the Sun walks burning without beams! 
 
 And ye swift Whirlwinds, who on poi.sed wings 
 
 Hung mute and moveless o'er yon hushed abyss. 
 
 As thunder, louder than your own, made rock 
 
 The orbed world! If then my words had power. 
 
 Though I am changed so that aught evil wish 
 
 Is dead within; although no memory be 
 
 Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! 
 
 What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak." 
 
 [71]
 
 THE TORCH 
 Prometheus's character, you observe, is developed in 
 the point that he no longer hates Zeus, but is filled with 
 pity for liim. Later in the scene the Furies enter, to tor- 
 ure the Titan with new torments. What torments will be 
 the most piercing to the suffering spirit of man — the 
 spirit that suffers in advancing human welfare ? Will it 
 not be the fact that the gifts he has given man have 
 proved evil gifts, and that in the effort for perfection 
 man has but the more heaped on himself damnation ? 
 The thought is found in many treatments of the myth: 
 Themis warned Prometheus that in aiding man with 
 fire and the arts he only increased man's woes. It is the 
 old pessimistic thought that civilization is a curse — 
 that the only growth of the soul is growth in the capacity 
 for pain, for disillusion, for despair. Shelley introduces 
 it in quite the Promethean spirit — as a thing, which if it 
 be, is to be borne. What were the two characteristic 
 failures of human hope in Shelley's eyes ? The capital 
 instances ? They were the failure of Christianity to bring 
 the millennium, and the failure of the French Revolu- 
 tion in the same end — and not only their failure to 
 bring the millennium, but, on the contrary, their in- 
 fluence in still further confounding the state of mankind 
 and flooding the nations with new miseries. The Furies 
 show these two failures to Prometheus in vision. The 
 passage is somewhat involved as the vision is successive- 
 
 [72]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 ly disclosed through the words of the chorus of Furies, 
 of the attendant sisters lone and Panthea, and of Pro- 
 metheus, but I will endeavour to make it plain : 
 
 " Chorus 
 " TJie pale stars of the morn 
 Shine on a misery, dire to be borne. 
 Dost thou faint, mighty Titan? We laugh thee to scorn. 
 Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken dst for man? 
 Then was kindled within him a thirst which oidran 
 Those perishing waters; a thirst of fierce fever, 
 Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever 
 One came forth of gentle worth 
 Smiling on the sanguine earth; 
 His words outlived him, like swift poison 
 Withering up trxdh, peace, and pity. 
 Look! where round the wide horizon 
 Many a million-peopled city 
 Vomits smoke in the bright air. 
 Mark that otdcry of despair! 
 'T is his mild and gentle ghost 
 Wailing for the faith he kindled: 
 Look again, the flames almost 
 To a gloxv-worms lamp have dwindled: 
 The survivors round the embers 
 Gather in dread. 
 
 Joy, joy, joy! 
 Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers y 
 And the future is dark, and the present is spread 
 Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head. 
 
 [73]
 
 THE TORCH 
 " Semichorus I 
 
 " Drops of bloody agony flow 
 From his white and quivering brow. 
 Grant a little respite now: 
 See a disenchanted nation 
 Springs like day from desolation; 
 To Truth its state is dedicate. 
 And Freedom leads it forth, her mate; 
 A legioned band of linked brothers 
 Whom Love calls children — 
 
 " Semichorus II 
 
 "'Tis another's: 
 See how kindred murder kin : 
 'T is the vintage time for death and sin: 
 Blood, like new wine, bubbles within: 
 Till Despair smothers 
 The struggling world, which slaves and tyrants vnn. 
 
 [all, the Furies vanish, except one] 
 loNE. Hark, sister! what a low yet dreadful groan 
 Quite unsuppressed is tearing up the heart 
 Of the good Titan, as storms tear the deep, 
 And beasts hear the sea moan in inland caves. 
 Darest thou observe how the fiends torture him? 
 Panthea. Alas! I looked forth tvnce, but will no more. 
 loNE. What didst thou see ? 
 Panthea. A woful sigM: a youth 
 With patient looks nailed to a crucifix. 
 Ione. What next? 
 
 [74]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 Panthea. The heaven around, the earth below 
 
 Was peopled with thick shapes of human death. 
 
 All horrible, and wrought by human hands, 
 
 And some appeared the work of human hearts. 
 
 For men were slowly killed by frowns and smiles: 
 
 And other sights too foul to speak and live 
 
 Were wandering by. Let us not tempt worse fear 
 
 By looking forth: those groans are grief enough. 
 
 Fury. Behold an emblem: those who do endure 
 
 Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap 
 
 Thousandfold torment on themselves and him. 
 
 Prometheus. Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; 
 
 Close those wan lips; let that thorn-wounded brow 
 
 Stream not with blood; it mingles with thy tearsl 
 
 Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death. 
 
 So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix. 
 
 So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. 
 
 O, horrible! Thy name I will not speak. 
 
 It hath become a curse. I see, I see 
 
 The wise, the mild, the lofty, and the just. 
 
 Whom thy slaves hate for being like to thee. 
 
 Some hunted by fold lies from their heart's hcmte. 
 
 An early-chosen, late-lamented home; 
 
 As hooded ounces cling to the driven hind; 
 
 Some linked to corpses in unwholesome cells: 
 
 Some — Hear I not the multitude laugh loud ? — 
 
 Impaled in lingering fire: and mighty realms 
 
 Float by my feet, like sea-uprooted isles. 
 
 Whose sons are kneaded down in common blood 
 
 By the red light of their own burning home.s: 
 
 [75]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Fury. Blood thou canst see, and fire; and canst hear groans; 
 
 Worse things, unheard, unseen, remain behind. 
 
 Prometheus. Worse? 
 
 Fury. In each human heart terror survives 
 
 The ruin it has gorged: the loftiest fear 
 
 All tJiat they would disdain to think were true: 
 
 Hypocrisy and custom, make their minds 
 
 The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. 
 
 They dare not devise good for mans estate. 
 
 And yet they knotv not that they do not dare. 
 
 The good want poioer, hut to weep barren tears. 
 
 The powerfid goodness want: worse need for them. 
 
 The wise want love; and those who love want tcisdom; 
 
 And all best things are thus confused to ill. 
 
 Many are strong and rich, and would be just. 
 
 But live among their suffering fellow-men 
 
 As if none felt: they know not what they do. 
 
 Prometheus. Thy words are like a cloud of vnngM snakes; 
 
 And yet I pity those they torture not. 
 
 Fury. Thou pitiest them? I speak no more! [Vanishes] 
 
 Prometheus. Ah woe! 
 
 Ah woe! Alas! pain, pain ever, for ever! 
 
 I close my tearless eyes, hut see more clear 
 
 Thy works within my woe-illumbd mind. 
 
 Thou subtle tyrant! Peace is in the grave. 
 
 The grave hides all things beautiful and good: 
 
 I am a God and cannot find it tJiere, 
 
 Nor would I seek it: for, though dread revenge. 
 
 This is defeat, fierce king, not victory. 
 
 The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul 
 
 [76]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 With new endurance, till the hour arrives 
 When they shall be no types of things which are. 
 Panthea. Alas! what sawest thou? 
 Prometheus. There are two woes: 
 To speak, and to behold; thou spare me one. 
 Names are there, Nature's sacred watchwords, they 
 Were borne aloft in bright emblazonry; 
 The nations thronged around, and cried aloud. 
 As tvith one voice, Truth, liberty, and love! 
 Suddenly fierce confusion fell from heaven 
 Among them: there was strife, deceit, and fear. 
 Tyrants rushed in, and did divide the spoil. 
 This was the shadow of the truth I saw." 
 
 The victory of Prometheus is in his declaration that 
 he pities those who are not tortured by such scenes. He 
 had already disclosed this pitiful heart in his first 
 speech; and, desiring to hear the curse he had originally 
 launched on Zeus, and being gratified in this wish by the 
 Earth, he had revoked it: 
 
 " It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; 
 Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. 
 I wish no living thing to suffer pain." 
 
 Thus he had forgiven his great enemy. 
 
 As I read the play, this forgiveness of Zeus by Pro- 
 metheus makes the predestined hour of the downfall of 
 Zeus. The chariot bears aloft the new principle of su- 
 
 [77]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 preme being, a higher and younger-born principle, 
 which exceeds that which Zeus embodied, just as Zeus 
 had in his birth been a higher principle than the old 
 reign contained; and Zeus is flung headlong, like Luci- 
 fer, into the abyss of past things. Thus Shelley, as is the 
 universal way of genius, had created a great work by 
 fusing in it two divergent products of the human spirit 
 — the Hellenic idea of a higher power superseding the 
 lower, and the Christian idea that this power was one of 
 non-resistance, of forgiveness, of love. The reign of love 
 now begins in the poem: Prometheus is released and 
 wedded with Asia, who stands for the spirit of nature, 
 in which marriage is typified the union of the human 
 soul with nature, the harmony of man and nature, and 
 he shares in the millennium which is thus estabhshed on 
 earth. 
 
 At the end, you cbserve,the Titan Myth drops away; 
 it does not appear in the last acts ; for in it there was no 
 such completion of the Promethean faith as Shelley de- 
 scribes. 
 
 And here I might end the discussion of Shelley's 
 handling of the myth ; but I cannot refrain from direct- 
 ing your attention to the marvellous power of the myth 
 which could so blend the Greek and Christian genius, 
 and contain the passion of the French Revolution 
 issuing in the highest and most extreme forms of Chris- 
 
 [78]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 tian ethics — in non-resistance, that is, and in the for- 
 giveness of enemies. I say nothing of the practical wis- 
 dom of this doctrine; what is it, but the old verses ? 
 
 " But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil ; hut whosoever 
 shall smite thee on thy right cheeky turn to him the other 
 also : " 
 
 but I desire that you should identify this wisdom with 
 its m jment of utterance. The French Revolution — 
 the Revolution of the Terror and the block, of the 
 burnt chateaux and the Napoleonic wars, was over and 
 done with; Shelley, in whom its spirit burnt as the 
 pure flame, had rejected its methods, while holding to 
 its ideals. He had lifted it from a political to a moral 
 cause: he had abandoned the sword as its Evangel, 
 and he put persuasion in the place of force, and love 
 in the place of hate, and the genius of victory which he 
 invoked was the conversion of society by the stricken 
 cheek and the lost cloak. The idea of humanity was the 
 fountain of his thought and I he armour of his argument. 
 I will not refrain from saying that the idea of a suffer- 
 ing humanity, which finds the path of progress in invin- 
 cible opposition to the ruling gods of the hour in the faith 
 in greater divinities to come, is properly crowned and 
 consecrated by tliis doctrine, that patient forgiveness of 
 the wrong is the essence of victory over it, and the sure 
 
 [79]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 road to its downfall. But the significance of such a myth 
 is not to be exhausted by one poet, or by one treatment ; 
 and in my next lecture I shall take up the work of Keats, 
 Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel, in interpreting hfe, as 
 they conceived it, by the same formula. 
 
 I have left myself a moment to bring forward two 
 considerations which may prove suggestive. The first is 
 the analogy between Hebrew and Greek myths in the 
 point that whereas in Eden the eating of the fruit of the 
 knowledge of good and evil, whereby man became as 
 God, was the occasion of man's ills, so in the myth of 
 Greece the sharing of men in the divine fire was the cause 
 of the sorrows of civihzation. The second is that in the 
 drama of the Book of Job there is a strong likeness to the 
 situation in Prometheus, in the point that there is no 
 action, but only a passive suffering in the principal 
 character; and that in this suffering there is a dissent 
 from the wisdom of Divine ways ; that Job holds to liis 
 integrity and faith in his own righteousness in the face of 
 all disaster and all argument, in quite the Promethean 
 spirit, obdurately ; and that he has the Promethean faith 
 in the issue. The situation lies in the verse : 
 
 " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will 
 maintain my ways before him." 
 
 The dignity of the human soul is dramatically up- 
 held at the great climax of Job's final assertion of 
 
 [80]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 his righteousness; and the situation is solved only 
 by the voice from the whirlwind declaring that as 
 nature is a mystery, much more must human life find 
 mystery as an element of its being. But in this great 
 drama — one of the marvellous works of human genius 
 — though there is the presence of unjust sujBFering, of 
 human integrity, and of a final victory of the right — 
 there is no such clear presentation of the idea and its 
 operation, as is found in the Promethean legend — the 
 idea formulated in this myth by the race out of its 
 knowledge of its own hfe, not as a dramatic incident 
 such as Job's, but as a pervading and constant law — 
 the idea that the progress of man hes in an immortal 
 suffering, an invincible endurance of the injustice of 
 the present world, in anticipation of the absolute justice 
 known only to the prophetic heart within. This idea is a 
 natural product of man's reflection on his history, a 
 natural interpretation of his experience ; and he finds it 
 imaginatively embodied in Prometheus more ade- 
 quately and humanly than elsewhere. It has entered into 
 thousands of lives in this last century of the Revolution, 
 with both illumination and courage; sharing in this idea, 
 and the Ufe which is led in obedience to it, the humblest 
 of men shares in the sublimity of the great Titan. 
 
 [811
 
 The Torch 
 
 IV
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 n 
 
 The importance of history in literature can hardly be 
 emphasized too much. I have not hesitated to speak of 
 mythology and chivalry, and even of the Scriptures, as 
 transformations of history, and of imaginative literature 
 as the spiritual after-hfe both of historical events and con- 
 ditions in the narrow sense, and of general human ex- 
 perience in the broad sense. I have directed attention 
 also to the influence of history in a more direct way, in 
 the literature of the last century — to its inspirational 
 power there; out of it came, in particular, the pictur- 
 esqueness of the historical novel; and, inasmuch as the 
 romantic spirit of the century explored all lands and 
 times for new material, and eagerly absorbed all that 
 travel or research brought forward new to the European 
 mind, it naturally happened that the conception of his- 
 torical humanity became one of rich variety ; the formula 
 — " many men, many minds " — received unending illus- 
 
 [85]
 
 THE TORCH 
 tration, and it might be thought that the result would 
 have been to impress on the race a sense of hopeless di- 
 versity in its members rather than of unbroken unity. 
 But history had this inspirational power, not only in Ut- 
 erature, but in philosophy; the mind of man was stimu- 
 lated to find in all this new mass of different detail a 
 single principle that would explain and reconcile the ap- 
 parent confusion — to frame, that is, a philosophy of 
 history. Herder, the German writer, was one of the most 
 influential of the great men who attacked this problem ; 
 he gave his life to it. At the dawn of a new age, you 
 know, there is often a singular phenomenon: men of 
 genius arise, with a poetical cast of mind, and they are 
 prophetic of the new day because they show forth some 
 single idea or mood of it though they do not grasp the 
 whole; they catch like morning clouds, some the red, 
 some the gold, some the purple ray, but none of them 
 gives that one white light which will prevail when the day 
 is fully come. An outburst of poetry — the prevalence of a 
 poetical view of things — is the sign of an advance along 
 the whole Une. Herder was a man of this kind ; and it is 
 easy now to say that his method was imperfectly scien- 
 tific, and that his imagination and desire led him astray. 
 Nevertheless he had one of those minds which, if it does 
 not build a system squared of solid timber, flings seeds 
 on every wind like a living tree. His intellect was capa- 
 
 [8G]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 cious, and in the attempt he made to include all things in 
 his philosophizing he seems an anticipation of Herbert 
 Spencer; in his theorizing, too, students find innumer- 
 able thoughts — that are half -guesses — which are al- 
 most the words of Darwin. He was, thus, you see, in the 
 true path of advance; he caught the first gleams of the 
 new hour of time. He was interested, over and above all 
 else, in humanity and its destiny as disclosed in history. 
 He saw in history the working of a law of beneficence 
 and justice, which though it might not seem such when 
 viewed in its means, always and unfailingly is such when 
 viewed in its end; thus from the concourse and struggle 
 of forces in civilization there is always issuing the slow 
 triumph of reason. This was what Herder conceived as 
 the law of progress ; and is the view taken in his leading 
 prose works, the "Ideas on the History of Mankind" 
 and the " Letters for the Furtherance of Humanity," 
 which are still great and fruitful books. At the very end 
 of a life spent thus in meditation on the career of man in 
 civilization, Herder set forth his faith in the principle of 
 progress in a series of dramatic scenes built out of the 
 myth of Prometheus. He identified the fire which was 
 the Titan's characteristic gift to mortals, as civilization, 
 and saw in it the two-fold symbol — first, of the arts 
 themselves, secondly, of that divine soul which restlessly 
 excites and spurs on all the powers of man. 
 
 [87]
 
 THE TORCH 
 I will sketch very briefly the story as Herder tells it. 
 Prometheus has been long chained to the rock, and (as 
 in Shelley's poem) time has ripened and softened his 
 heart, partly because he knows that liis work is prosper- 
 ing among men. In the first scene he hears a distant song 
 of victory, and voices announce to him that reason fruc- 
 tifies the earth. In later scenes, first the daughters of the 
 Ocean and old Oceanus himself come complaining that 
 mankind disturbs the sea with ships, changes the course 
 of the waters by dams and canals, and brings the ends of 
 the earth together with commerce; but Prometheus re- 
 plies, prophesying : — 
 
 "T/ie sea which girds the earth shall he the mediator and 
 peace-maker of the nations." 
 
 Then the Dryads, daughters of the earth come, with a 
 similar tale; but Prometheus tells them that in the end 
 man will make a garden of the earth; and other mytho- 
 logical characters enter, each with its tale, Ceres, the 
 goddess of harvest, who works with man — and Bac- 
 chus, the giver of the vine: at last Hercules and Theseus 
 release the Titan, all go before Themis, the goddess of 
 justice who judges the cause between Prometheus and 
 the gods, and gives the decision for Prometheus. Pallas 
 then leads to Prometheus Agatia, the pure spirit of hu- 
 manity, and the drama ends. You see the work is little 
 
 [88]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 more than a series of picturesque classical tableaux, in 
 which the victory of man through reason is set forth 
 with a maintenance of self-sacrifice, perseverance, pa- 
 tience, social labour and love as the essential elements of 
 the moral ideal. 
 
 A few years before, Schlegel had produced a Prome- 
 theus in the form of a poem, in the same realm of his- 
 tory but with much less scenic elaboration. In it he 
 describes the Golden Age before the Titan War, the deso- 
 late state of man after Zeus came to the throne, and how 
 Prometheus made of clay a new race, and animated the 
 clay with the heavenly fire. Themis reproves him for this 
 act, and foretells the sorrows of this Promethean man — 
 this being of divine desire chained to the earth and tyr- 
 annized over by the thought of the past and of the future 
 alike. But Prometheus believes, he says, that good will 
 not die, that the toil of one generation will help the next, 
 that human will reduces life to order and human action 
 subdues nature; and that out of the midst of oppos- 
 ing principles civilization grows to more and more. 
 The law of progress is stated with sure optimism: 
 though there may be ages of terror and apparent de- 
 generation, yet the immortal principle of good in the 
 race is such that it passes invulnerable through all 
 history, and accomplishes the work of civilization. The 
 poem is no more than a reply to the sad prophecy of 
 
 [89]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Themis, and perhaps incidentally to such reaction- 
 aries as saw in the Reign of Terror and the Revolution 
 generally the denial of progress and of the social 
 ideal. 
 
 But in the sphere of history, one of the latest rework- 
 ings of the myth, the Prometheus of Quinet, the French 
 poet, contains the most interesting variation. He con- 
 ceived firmly the unity of history; and in obedience to this 
 conception he endeavoured to unite the Greek myth with 
 Christianity, not ethically as Shelley did, but historically. 
 " If Prometheus " — he says in his preface — " is the 
 eternal prophet, as his name indicates, each new age of 
 humanity can put new oracles in the mouth of the Titan. 
 Perhaps there is no character so well fitted to express the 
 feelings — the premature and half melancholy desires 
 
 — in which our age is enchained." In this spirit he wrote 
 a drama in three parts: the first depicts the creation of 
 man by Prometheus, the gift of fire — that is, the soul 
 
 — and the beginning of life in sorrow. The second part 
 depicts the suffering of Prometheus on Caucasus, in 
 which the foreknowledge of the fall of Zeus becomes a 
 prophecy of Christ's coming. The third act depicts the 
 advent of Christianity. The Archangels, Raphael and 
 Michael descend on Caucasus, and release Prometheus, 
 who rises transfigured; the gods of Olympus prostrate 
 themselves before him and the angels, and pray in vain 
 
 [90]
 
 THE TITAJ^ MYTH 
 for life. Then Prometheus has a singular thought which 
 to me is the most dramatic in the play: as he listens to 
 the death-song of the gods, his mind is clouded with a 
 doubt : — will not the new divinity also pass away ? — 
 and does he not already see a new Caucasus before him 
 in the distant time ? — will he not be bound again ? — 
 The angels comfort him, and he ascends to heaven ; but 
 as he disappears in that hierarchy of celestial peace and 
 love, he still wears the shadow of thought — for he re- 
 members that on earth men still suffer. This attempt at a 
 true synthesis of the Greek and Christian imagination — 
 in behalf of the unity of history — is a most interesting 
 illustration of the spirit of the century; which was on the 
 whole a century of peace-making between the great his- 
 toric elements of spiritual civilization, a drawing to- 
 gether and harmonizing of religions, philosophies and 
 half-developed and fragmentary doctrines, by virtue of 
 the identical principle they contain; or as Herder said, 
 in consequence of that symmetry of human reason 
 which makes all nobler minds tend to think the same 
 thoughts. 
 
 Interesting as the historical point of view is, it is plain 
 that the myth loses something of its poetical quality, be- 
 comes pure allegory, becomes almost mechanical ; it be- 
 comes, in fact, what is called poetical machinery, a hard 
 and fast means of figurative expression. The characters 
 
 [91]
 
 THE TORCH 
 in Herder and Schlegel move like marionettes, and you 
 hear the voice of the author apart from his work. Let us 
 turn to a mind in which the myth really was alive again, 
 with creative as well as expressive power — the mind of 
 Keats. In his " Hyperion," the tale is of the Titans im- 
 mediately after their overthrow; they have been de- 
 throned from power, Saturn is an exile hiding in the 
 deep glens, but their ruin is still incomplete; Hyperion 
 still is lord in the sun, and the others are at liberty to 
 gather for a great council. In order to display the idea of 
 Keats, let me approach it indirectly. The point of view 
 which he takes has much affinity with science — more, 
 that is, than with either history or ethics. Modem the- 
 ories of evolution have accustomed our minds to the 
 conception of an original state of the universe, vast, 
 homogeneous, undiversified, simple; out of this — to 
 adopt the nebular theory — slowly great masses con- 
 glomerated, gathered into sun and planets; and out of 
 these arose finally living things on a smaller scale but of 
 higher perfection of being. Now if you will think of 
 man's progressive conceptions of the divinity as some- 
 thing similar to this, as parallel to it, you will have 
 Keats's idea. In the beginning were the vast, vague, un- 
 defined, half-unconscious beings, like Uranus, the heav- 
 ens, and Gaia, the earth, and Chronos, time; to them 
 succeeded the more conscious and half-humanized 
 
 [92]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 brood of the Titans, like the sun and planets, as it were; 
 last came the gods of Olympus, in the perfection of full 
 humanity, and on the physical scale of man in form, 
 feature and spirit. The change from the Titanic to the 
 Olympian rule, was like the change from one geological 
 age of vast forms of brute and vegetable life to another 
 of smaller but nobler species. The higher principle dis- 
 places the lower, according to that Greek idea of pro- 
 gress which I have described; and this successive dis- 
 placement of the lower by the higher is the law of devel- 
 opment in the Universe. 
 
 In Keats's poem, Oceanus, speaking to the Titans 
 in council as the wisest of them all, sets forth the matter 
 plainly, and I should like you to notice how the concep- 
 tion of a progressive order in nature (not as hitherto in 
 civilization merely) and the conception of the necessity 
 of accepting truth, bear the mark of the scientific spirit. 
 Oceanus thus speaks : — 
 
 We fall by course of Nature's law, not force 
 Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, tJum 
 Hast sifted well the atom-universe; 
 But for this reason, that thou art the King, 
 And only blind from sheer supremacy. 
 One avenue was shaded from thine eyes. 
 Through which I wander d to eternal truth. 
 And first, as thou wast not tlie first of powers, 
 
 [93]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 So art thou not the last; it cannot be. 
 
 Thou art not the beginning nor the end. 
 
 From chaos and parental darkness came 
 
 Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil. 
 
 That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends 
 
 Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came, 
 
 And with it light, and light engendering 
 
 Upon its own producer, forthwith touched 
 
 The whole enormous matter into life. 
 
 Upon that very hour, our parentage. 
 
 The Heavens and the Earth, were manifest: 
 
 Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race. 
 
 Found ourselves ruling new and beaideous realms. 
 
 Now comes the pain of truth, to whom H is pain; 
 
 O folly! for to bear all naked trxdhs. 
 
 And to envisage circumstance, all calm. 
 
 That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! 
 
 As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far 
 
 Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; 
 
 And as we show beyond tlud Heaven and Earth 
 
 In form and shape compact and beaidiful. 
 
 In will, in action free, companionship. 
 
 And thousand other signs of purer life; 
 
 So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
 
 A power more strong in beauty, born of us 
 
 And fated to excel us, as we pass 
 
 In glory that old Darkness: nor are we 
 
 Thereby more conquered, than by us the rule 
 
 Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil 
 
 Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed 
 
 [94]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 And feedeth still, more comely than itself? 
 Can it deny the chiefdom of green groves? 
 Or shall the tree be envious of the dove 
 Because it cooeth, and hath snowy wings 
 To wander wherewithal and find its joys? 
 We are such forest-trees, and our fair boughs 
 Have bared forth, not pale solitary doves, 
 Bid eagles golden- feathered, who do tower 
 Above us in their beauty, and must reign 
 In right thereof; for 't is the eternal law 
 That first in beauty should be first in might: 
 Yea, by that law, another race may drive 
 Our conquerors to mourn as we do now. 
 Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, 
 My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face? 
 Have ye beheld his chariot, foam'd along 
 By noble wingM creatures he Imth made? 
 I saw him on the calmed waters scud, 
 Wiih such a glow of beauty in his eyes. 
 That it enforced me to bid sad farewell 
 To all my empire; farewell sad I took. 
 And hither came, to see how dolorous fate 
 Had wrought upon ye; and hoiv I might best 
 Give consolation in this woe extreme. 
 Receive the truth, and let it be your balm." 
 
 It appears, then, that the new principle of being, in 
 whose advent lay the ruin of the old world, is beauty. 
 
 "'T is the eternal law 
 That first in beauty should be first in might." 
 
 [95]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 This is, as you know, Keats's distinctive mark — the 
 perception and adoration of beauty. What love was to 
 Shelley, that beauty was to Keats — the open door to 
 divinity ; he saw life as a form of beauty. And he means 
 what he says — not that beauty has strength as an added 
 quahty, but that beauty is strength, and reigns in its own 
 right. This rise of the Olympians was beauty's moment 
 of birth in the minds of men; this birth was a revelation, 
 like a new rehgion, and it is presented as such by Keats 
 in a two-fold way. First it is a revelation to the Titans. 
 You have seen how Oceanus on beholding the new god 
 of the sea, gave up the rule over it. So Clymene, who 
 describes herself — 
 
 "O Father, I am here the simplest voice" — 
 
 tells her experience: 
 
 " / stood upon a shore, a pleasant shore. 
 Where a sweet clime was breathed from a land 
 Of fragrance, quietjiess, and trees, and flowers. 
 Full of calm joy it was, as I of grief; 
 Too full of joy and soft delicious warmth; 
 So that I felt a movement in my heart 
 To chide, and to reproach that solitude 
 With songs of misery, music of our woes; 
 And sat me down, and took a mouthed shell 
 And murmur' d into it, and made melody — 
 O melody no more! for while I sang, 
 [96]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 And with poor skill let pass into the breeze 
 
 The dull shell's echo, from a bowery strand 
 
 Just opposite, an island of the sea. 
 
 There came enchantment with the shifting wind. 
 
 Thai did both drown and keep alive my ears. 
 
 I threw my shell away upon the sand, 
 
 And a wave ftlVd it, as my sense was fllVd 
 
 With that new blissful golden melody. 
 
 A living death was in each gush of sounds. 
 
 Each family of rapturous hurried notes. 
 
 That fell, one after one, yet all at once. 
 
 Like pearl beads dropping sudden from their string: 
 
 And then another, then another strain. 
 
 Each like a dove leaving its olive perch, 
 
 With music winged instead of silent plumes 
 
 To hover round my head, and make me sick 
 
 Of joy and grief at once. Grief overcame. 
 
 And I was stopping up my frantic ears. 
 
 When, past all hindrance of my trembling hands, 
 
 A voice came sweeter, sweeter than all tune. 
 
 And still it cried, 'Apollo! young Apollo! 
 
 The morning -bright Apollo! young Apollo!' 
 
 I fled, it followed me, and cried, 'Apollo!' " 
 
 Beauty is also a revelation to the gods themselves in 
 their own bosoms where it has sprung into hfe. The pas- 
 sage in which Apollo's awakening is described — full 
 of a poet's personal touches of his own experience in 
 coming into possession of himself — is one of the most 
 impassioned in all Keats's writing: 
 
 [97]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 ' Together had he left his mother fair 
 And his twin-sister sleeping in their bower. 
 And in the morning twilight wandered forth 
 Beside the osiers of a rivulet, 
 Fidl ankle-deep in lilies of the vale. 
 The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars 
 Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush 
 Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle 
 There was no covert, no retired cave 
 Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves. 
 Though scarcely heard in many a green recess. 
 He listen d, and he wept, and his bright tears 
 Went trickling down the golden bow he held. 
 Thus with half-shut siiffusM eyes he stood. 
 While from beneath some cumbrous boughs hard by 
 With solemn step an awful Goddess came. 
 And there was purport in her looks for him. 
 Which he with eager guess began to read 
 Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said: 
 'How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea? 
 Or hath that antique mien and robhd form 
 Moved in these vales invisible till now? 
 Sure I have heard those vestments siveeping o'er 
 The fallen leaves, when I have sat alone 
 In cool mid- for est. Surely I have traced 
 The rustle of those ample skirts about 
 These grassy solitudes, and seen the flowers 
 Lift up their heads, and still the whisper passed. 
 Goddess! I have beheld those eyes before, 
 And their eternal calm, and all thai face 
 
 [08]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 Or I have dream' d.' — * Yes,' said the supreme shape, 
 
 * Thou hast dreamed of me; and awaking up 
 
 Didst find a lyre all golden by thy side. 
 
 Whose strings touch'd by thy fingers, all the vast 
 
 Unwearied ear of the whole universe 
 
 Listen d in pain and pleasure at the birth 
 
 Of such new tuneful wonder. Is 't not strange 
 
 That thou shouldst weep, so gifted? Tell me, youth. 
 
 What sorrow thou canst feel; for I am sad 
 
 When thou dost shed a tear: explain thy griefs 
 
 To one who in this lonely isle hath been 
 
 The watcher of thy sleep and hours of life. 
 
 From the young day when first thy infant hand 
 
 Plucked witless the weak flowers, till thine arm 
 
 Could bend that bow heroic to all times. 
 
 Show thy heart's secret to an ancient Power 
 
 Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones 
 
 For prophecies of thee, and for tJie sake 
 
 Of loveliness new-born.' — Apollo then. 
 
 With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes. 
 
 Thus answered, while his white melodious throat 
 
 ThrobVd with the syllables: — ''Mnemosyne! 
 
 Thy name is on my tongue, I know not how; 
 
 Why should I tell thee what thou so well seest? 
 
 Why should I strive to show what from thy lips 
 
 Would come no mystery? For me, dark, dark. 
 
 And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes: 
 
 I strive to search wherefore I am so sad. 
 
 Until a melancholy numbs my limbs; 
 
 And then upon the gra^s I sit, and moan, 
 
 [99]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Like one who once had wings. — O why should I 
 
 Feel cursed and thwarted, when the liegeless air 
 
 Yields to my step aspirant? why should I 
 
 Spurn the green turf as hateful to my feet? 
 
 Goddess benign, point forth some unknown thing: 
 
 Are there not other regions than this isle? 
 
 What are the stars? There is tfie sun, the sunt 
 
 And the most patient brilliance of the moon! 
 
 And stars by thousands! Point me out the way 
 
 To any one particular beauteous star. 
 
 And I will flit into it with my lyre. 
 
 And make its silvery splendour pant with bliss 
 
 I have heard the cloudy thunder: Where is power? 
 
 Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity 
 
 Makes this alarum in the elements. 
 
 While I here idle listen on the shores 
 
 In fearless yet in aching ignorance? 
 
 O tell me, lonely Goddess, by thy harp. 
 
 That waileth every morn and eventide. 
 
 Tell me why thu^ I rave, about these groves! 
 
 Mute thou remainest. — Mute! yet I can read 
 
 A wondrous lesson in thy silent face: 
 
 Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. 
 
 Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions. 
 
 Majesties, sovran voices, agonies. 
 
 Creations and destroyings, all at once 
 
 Pour into the wide hollows of my brain. 
 
 And deify me, as if some blithe wine 
 
 Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk. 
 
 And so become immortal.' — Thus the God, 
 
 [100]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 While his enkindled eyes, with level glance 
 
 Beneath his white soft temples, steadfast kept 
 
 Trembling with light upon Mnemosyne. 
 
 Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush 
 
 All the immortal fairness of his limbs: 
 
 Most like the struggle at the gate of death; 
 
 Or liker still to one who should take leave 
 
 Of pale immortal death, and with a pang 
 
 As hot as death 's is chill, with fierce convulse 
 
 Die into life: so young Apollo anguished: 
 
 His very hair, his golden tresses famed 
 
 Kept undulation round his eager neck. 
 
 During tlie pain Mnemosyne upheld 
 
 Her arms as one who prophesied. — At length 
 
 Apollo shriek' d; — and lo! from all his limbs 
 
 Celestial. . . ." 
 
 The birth-cry of Apollo was the death-cry of Keats: 
 there the golden pen fell from his hands, and the poem 
 — a fragment — ends. 
 
 There is one detail in Keats's work, which though it is 
 subsidiary, deserves mention because it completes the 
 reality of the Titan Myth in an important way. In all the 
 other writers, whom I have named, you do not get any 
 idea of the Titans physically, you do not see them as Ti- 
 tans. In Shelley, and the rest, Prometheus is essentially a 
 man; he has human proportion; in Keats Prometheus 
 does not appear at all. But Keats has realized the Ti- 
 tanic figures to the imagination as distinct and noble 
 [101] 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 ftAJNTA BARBARA COLLEGE UBRARt
 
 THE TORCH 
 forms ; they have the massi veness of limb and immobil- 
 ity of feature that we associate with Egyptian art, with 
 the Sphinxes and the Memnons; yet each is character- 
 ized differently; Saturn, Oceanus, Enceladus, Thea, 
 Mnemosyne are individualized, and especially Hype- 
 rion is set forth, in ways of grandeur. The subject would 
 require more illustration than I can now give it ; but let 
 me cite the very remarkable figure which is found in the 
 second version of " Hyperion," a version that is as full of 
 Dante as the first one is of Milton. The figure is that of 
 Moneta, the solitary and ageless priestess of the temple 
 of the Titans, " sole goddess of its desolation," who gives 
 the poet the vision of the past. 
 
 " And yet I had a terror of her robes, 
 And chiefly of the veils that from her brow 
 Hung pale, and curtain d her in mysteries. 
 That made my heart too small to hold its blood. 
 This saw that Goddess, and with sacred hand 
 Parted the veils. Then saw I a wan face. 
 Not pind by human sorrows, but bright-blanched 
 By an immortal sickness which kills not; 
 It works a constant change, which happy death 
 Can put no end to; deathwards progressing 
 To no death was that visage; it had past 
 The lily and the snow; and beyond these 
 I m,v^t not think now, though I saw that face. 
 But for her eyes I should have fled away; 
 [102]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 
 They held me hack with a benignant light, 
 
 Soft, mitigated by divinest lids 
 
 Half-clos'd, and visionless entire they seem'd 
 
 Of all external things; they saw me not. 
 
 But in blank splendour beam'd, like the mild moon. 
 
 Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not 
 
 What eyes are upward cast." 
 
 A similar imaginative power to that shown here per- 
 vades Keats 's conceptions of the Titans, and distin- 
 guishes his work from all others as a creation in the vis- 
 ible world of the imagination such as is not elsewhere to 
 be found. Here only is the Titan world made nobly real. 
 I fear to weary you with this long catalogue of the va- 
 rious modern forms of the Titan Myth, but it is neces- 
 sary to develop the theme. I must say at least a word 
 about Goethe's " Prometheus." It is only a brief frag- 
 ment of a drama, and belongs to his youth. He was but 
 twenty -four when he experimented with it. In the scenes 
 which we possess, Prometheus is the maker of the clay 
 images to which he gives life by the aid of Pallas — that 
 is, really, by his own intelligence. He launches them as 
 men in the career of civilization by declaring to them the 
 principle of property; he tells one to build a house, and 
 to the question whether it will be for the man himself or 
 for everybody, Prometheus answers it shall be the man's 
 own private possession and dwelling; he declares also 
 [103]
 
 THE TORCH 
 the principle of retaliatory justice, saying on the occa- 
 sion of the first theft, that he whose hand is against every 
 one, every one's hand shall be against him; and he an- 
 nounces the fact and meaning of the first death. The 
 drama does not proceed further. Its significance lies in 
 two points ; in the first place it is easy to see in Prome- 
 theus's attitude toward his clay images and his lan- 
 guage about them a reflection of the young poet's own 
 state of mind toward the mental beings whom he creates 
 — a reflection, that is, of the pride and glory of genius in 
 imaginary creation. Secondly, and more importantly, 
 the drama exhibits the intense desire of the young Goe- 
 the for complete individual independence. In the answer 
 Prometheus makes to the messenger of Zeus, who re- 
 monstrates with him, the central point is that Prome- 
 theus feels he is a god hke Zeus, and wants freedom to 
 do his will in his own realm as Zeus does in Olympus. 
 Let Zeus keep his own, and let me keep my own, he 
 says ; he would rather his clay images should never live 
 than be subjects of Zeus, for being still unborn, they are 
 still free; Uberty is the true good, and men, made by him, 
 shall be embodiments of his own independent spirit. In 
 all this is the prophecy of Goethe's own life. To me Goe- 
 the is the type of the man who wants to be let alone ; and 
 he accomplished his desire in a supremely selfish tran- 
 quillity, in which he used life to develop himself, 
 [104]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 sacrificed all things to himself, was at once the model 
 and the condemnation of self-culture so pursued. In his 
 young Prometheus there is this impatient cry for indi- 
 vidual hberty, as a basis of life; and I discern little else 
 significant in it. I must also spare a word for Victor 
 Hugo's "Titan." The poem is in the "Legend of the 
 Ages." This Titan is not Prometheus, or any other in- 
 dividual Titan, but is all of them in one, the giant, con- 
 ceived as one. He is, of course, mankind — earth-born 
 man, conceived as in scientific history, burrowing his 
 way out of the planet itself — a massive mediseval crea- 
 ture, gross and violent, tearing his path through cave 
 and grotto, till at last he emerges and sees the stars. This 
 giant is clearly a symbol of man rising from his crude 
 earthUness of nature and barbaric ages up to the sight 
 and knowledge of the heavenly world. It is a type of pro- 
 gress, as science and history jointly conceive the evolu- 
 tion of humanity. 
 
 I have sufficiently illustrated how the Titan Myth in 
 its variety has been employed to embody and express the 
 idea of a progressive humanity in many aspects as it has 
 appeared to different poets. The idea of progress is in 
 our civilization a continuing and universal idea; and 
 Prometheus is a continuing and universal image of its 
 nature — the race-image of a race-idea. The Prome- 
 thean situation is inherent in the law of human progress, 
 [105]
 
 THE TORCH 
 however viewed, whether historically or scientifically or 
 ethically, or in any other way. Emerson says 
 
 " The fiend that man harries. 
 Is Love of the Best." 
 
 The dream of this Best, and the will to bring it down to 
 earth — the struggle with the temporary ruling worse 
 that is in the world and must be dethroned — the proud 
 and resolute suffering of all that such a present world 
 can inflict — the faith in the final victory, are the Pro- 
 methean characteristics; but the human spirit, in the 
 nature of the case, must forever be in bonds ; its succes- 
 sive hberations are partial only, and in the disclosure of 
 a forever fairer dream in the future, lies also the dis- 
 closure of new bonds, for the present is always a state of 
 chains in view of the to-morrow; and for man there is 
 always to-morrow. The great words that seem the keys 
 of progress, such as reason, love, beauty, are only sym- 
 bols of an infinite series in Ufe — a series that never ends. 
 Such is the abstract statement that progress involves the 
 idea of humanity as a Promethean sufferer. But the race, 
 which requires picturesque and vivid images of its high- 
 est faith, hope and thought, comes to its poets, like the 
 human child, and says ever and ever — " Tell me a story : 
 tell me a story about myself." And the poet tells the race 
 a new story about itself — like the mother of Marius 
 [106]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 when she told him of "the white bird which he must 
 bear in his bosom across the crowded market-place — 
 his soul." Each poet tells this new story to the child 
 about itself — a story it did not know before, and the 
 child believes the story and increases knowledge and Ufe 
 with it. The question the race asks, in this Myth, is 
 " what is most divine in me ? " " What is the god in me ? " 
 — and Shelley answers, it is all-enduring and all-for- 
 giving love toward all; and Herder answers that it is rea- 
 son, Keats that it is beauty, Goethe that it is Uberty, and 
 Hugo that it is immense triumphant toil; and each in 
 giving his answer tells the story of the old gods and the 
 younger gods, and the wise Titan who knew yet other 
 gods that should come. And the race listens to these tales 
 because it hears in them its own voice speaking. Men of 
 genius are men, like other men; but their genius, if I 
 may use an obvious comparison, is like the reflector in 
 front of the Ught-house flame — in all directions but one 
 it is a common flame, but in that one direction along 
 which the reflector magnifies, glorifies and speeds its 
 radiance, it is the shining of a great light. Look at men 
 of genius, as you find them in biography, and they seem 
 ordinary persons of daily affairs; but if you can catch 
 sight of genius through that side which is turned out to 
 the infinite as to a great ocean, you will see, I will not 
 say the man himself, but the use God makes of the man. 
 [107]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 That use is to reveal ourselves to ourselves, to show what 
 human nature is and can do, to unlock our minds, our 
 hearts, all our energies, for use. We admire and love 
 such men because they are more ourselves than we are, 
 the undeveloped, often unknown selves that in us are 
 but partially born. " What is most divine in me } " is the 
 question the race puts; and perhaps it is true (though 
 the statement may be startling), that as soon as man dis- 
 covers a god in himself, all external gods fall from their 
 thrones — and this is the meaning of the myth. But 
 again, what is this but the old verse — 
 
 " The kingdom of heaven is within you?" 
 
 That realized, the old gods may go their ways. It is 
 reaUzed, perhaps, for one of its modes, in tliis way: 
 that as the being of beauty is entire and perfect in 
 the grass that flourishes for a summer, or in the rose 
 of dawn that fades even while it blossoms, so the power 
 of moral ideas enters, entire and perfect, into our 
 being, and, as I said, the humblest of men suffering for 
 man's good as he conceives it shares in the moral sub- 
 limity of Prometheus. What is thus within man — the 
 thing that is most divine — is certainly the medium by 
 which man approaches the divinity, and through which 
 he beholds it, in any living way. It belongs to Puritan- 
 ism, as a mood of mind, to be impatient of any external 
 [108]
 
 THE TITAN MYTH 
 thing between the soul and the divinity ; it will have the 
 least of any such material element in its spiritual sight 
 and communion ; it sees god by an inner vision. Mediums 
 of some sort there must be between human nature and 
 its idea of the divine ; and it seems to me that our inner 
 vision by which the Puritan spirit reaches outward and 
 upward is the vision of imagination transfiguring history 
 to saints and martyrs in their holy living and holy dying, 
 transfiguring all human experience to the idealities of 
 poetry. Mankind seeing itself more perfect in St. Fran- 
 cis, in Philip Sidney, in all men of spiritual genius, 
 makes them a part of this inner vision — and, rank over 
 rank, above them the perfection of Arthur and Parsifal, 
 and still more high the perfection of reason, beauty, and 
 love in their element. In this hierarchy of human daring, 
 dreaming, desiring is the only beatific vision that human 
 eyes ever immediately beheld — the vision of what is 
 most divine in man. What I maintain is that, humanly 
 speaking, in the search for God one path by which the 
 race moves on is through this inner vision of ideal per- 
 fections in its own nature and its own experience, which 
 it has fixed and illuminated in these imaginative figures, 
 these race-images of race-ideas. 
 
 [109 J
 
 The Torch 
 V
 
 SPENSER 
 
 The general principle which I have endeavoured to set 
 forth in the first four lectures is that mankind in the 
 process of civilization stores up race-power, in one or an- 
 other form, so that it is a continually growing fund ; and 
 that literature, pre-eminently, is such a store of spiritual 
 race-power, derived originally from the historical life or 
 from the general experience of men, and transformed by 
 imagination so that all which is not necessary falls away 
 from it and what is left is truth in its simplest, most vivid 
 and vital form. Thus I instanced mythology, chivalry, 
 and the Scriptures as three such sifted deposits of the 
 past; and I illustrated the use poetry makes of such race- 
 images and race-ideas by the example of the myth of the 
 Titans. In the remaining four lectures I desire to ap- 
 proach the same general principle of the storing of race- 
 power from the starting-point of the individual author 
 — to set forth Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Shel- 
 [113]
 
 THE TORCH 
 ley, not in their personality but as race-exponents, and 
 to show that their essential greatness and value are due 
 to the degree in which they availed themselves of the 
 race-store. You may remember that I defined education 
 for all men as the process of identifying oneself with the 
 race-mind, entering into and taking possession of the 
 race-store; and the rule is the same for men of genius as 
 for other men. You find, consequently, that the greatest 
 poets have always been the best scholars of their times 
 — not in the encyclopaedic sense that they knew every- 
 thing, but in the sense that they possessed the living 
 knowledge of their age, so far as it concerns the human 
 soul and its history. They have always possessed what is 
 called the academic mind — that is, they had a strong 
 grasp on literary tradition and the great thoughts of 
 mankind, and the great forms which those thoughts had 
 taken on in the historic imagination. Virgil is a striking 
 example of such a poet, perfectly cultivated in all the ar- 
 tistic, philosophic, literary tradition as it then was: 
 Dante and Chaucer are similar instances; and, in Eng- 
 lish, Spenser, Milton, Gray, Shelley and Tennyson con- 
 tinue the line of those poets in whom scholarship — the 
 academic tradition — is an essential element in their 
 worth. It ought not to be necessary to bring this out so 
 clearly; for it is obvious that men of genius, in the pro- 
 cess of absorbing the race-store, by the very fact become 
 [114]
 
 SPENSER 
 
 scholarly men, men of intellectual culture, though in 
 consequence of their genius they neglect all culture ex- 
 cept that which still has spiritual life in it. This is so ele- 
 mentary a truth in literature that the index to the im- 
 portance of an author is often his representative power 
 — the degree to which he sums up and delivers the hu- 
 man past. How large a tract of time, what extent of 
 knowledge, what range of historical emotion — does his 
 mind drain ? These are initial questions. And in literary 
 history, you know, there are here and there minds, so 
 central to the period, such meeting points of different 
 ages and cultures, that they resemble those junctions on 
 a railway map which seem to absorb all geography into 
 their own black dots. The greatest poets are just such 
 centres of spiritual history; where ancient and modem 
 meet, where classicism and medisevalism, Christianity 
 and paganism. Renaissance and Reformation and Rev- 
 olution meet — there is the focus, for the time being, of 
 the soul of man ; and it is at that point that genius devel- 
 opes its transcendent power. 
 
 Spenser was such a mind. I spoke in the first lecture 
 of that law of progress which involves the passing away 
 of a civilization at the moment of its perfection and the 
 death of that breed of men who have brought it to its 
 height. Spenser was the poet of a dying race and a dying 
 culture; in his work there is reflected and embodied a 
 [115]
 
 THE TORCH 
 climax in the spiritual life of humanity to which imag- 
 nation gives form, beauty, and passion. In this respect 
 I am always reminded of Virgil when I read him; for 
 Virgil used, like Spenser, the romanticism of a receding 
 past to express his sense of human life, and he was re- 
 lated to his materials in much the same way. The Myth 
 of Arthur lay behind Spenser as the Myth of Troy lay 
 behind Virgil in the mist of his country's origins; the 
 Italians of the Renaissance, Ariosto, and Tasso, were a 
 school for Spenser much as the Alexandrian poets had 
 been for Virgil ; and as in Virgil mythology and Homeric 
 heroism and the legend of the antique Italian land be- 
 fore Rome blended in one, and became the last flower- 
 ing of the pre-Christian world in what is, perhaps, the 
 greatest of all world-poems, the "iEneid, " so in Spenser 
 chivalry, medisevalism and the new birth of learning in 
 Europe blended, and gave us a world-poem of the 
 Christian soul, in which mediaeval spirituality — as it 
 seems to me — expired. Spenser resembled Virgil, too, 
 in his moment; he was endeavouring to create for Eng- 
 land a poem such as Italy possessed in Ariosto's and 
 Tasso's epics, to introduce into his country's literature 
 the most supreme poetic art then in the world, just as Vir- 
 gil was attempting to instil into the Roman genius the im- 
 aginative art of Greece. He resembled Virgil again in his 
 poetic education inasmuch as he formed his powers and 
 [116]
 
 SPENSER 
 first exercised them in pastoral verse, in the " Shephard's 
 Kalendar" as Virgil did in his "Eclogues"; and he re- 
 sembled Virgil still more importantly in that his theme 
 was the greatest known to him — namely, the empire of 
 the soul, as Virgil's was the empire of Rome. Spenser, 
 then, when he came to his work is to be looked on as a 
 master of all literary learning, a pioneer and planter of 
 poetic art in his own country, and a poet who used the 
 world of the receding past as his means of expressing 
 what was most real to him in human life. 
 
 The work by which he is remembered is " The Fserie 
 Queene, " and in it all that I have said meets you at the 
 threshold. Perhaps the first, and certainly the abiding 
 impression the poem makes, is of its remoteness from 
 life. Remoteness, you know, is said to be a necessary 
 element in any artistic effect — such as you feel in look- 
 ing at Greek statues or Italian Madonnas or French 
 landscapes. This remoteness of the artistic world the 
 poem has, in large measure: its country is no physical 
 region known to geography, but is that land of the plain 
 where Knights are always pricking, of forests and streams 
 and hills that have no element of composition, and es- 
 pecially of a horizon like the sea's, usually lonely, but 
 where anything may appear at any time : it is a land like 
 a dream; and what takes place there at any moment is 
 pictorial, and can be painted. But the quality of re- 
 [117]
 
 THE TORCH 
 moteness, so noticeable in the poem and to which I re- 
 fer, is not that of artistic atmosphere and setting. It 
 arises largely from the remoteness of history in the poem, 
 felt in the constant presence of outworn things, of by- 
 gone characters, ways and inci-dents; and the im- 
 pression of intricacy that the poem also makes at first, 
 the sense of confusion in it, is partly due to this same 
 presence of the unfamiliar in most heterogeneous variety. 
 This miscellaneousness is the result of Spenser's com- 
 prehensive inclusion in the poem of all he knew, that is, 
 of the entire literary tradition of the race within his 
 ken. Thus you find, at the outset, Aristotle's scheme of 
 the moral virtues, and Plato's doctrine of the unity of 
 beauty and wisdom, on the philosophical side; and for 
 imagery out of the classics, here are Plato, Proserpina, 
 and Night, the house of Morpheus, the bleeding tree, 
 the cloud that envelopes the fallen warrior and allows 
 him to escape, the journey in Hades, the story of " Hip- 
 polytus, " and fauns, satyrs and other minor mythologi- 
 cal beings. You find, also, out of mediaeval things, the 
 method of the poem which is the characteristic mediaevaJ 
 method of allegory, and in imagery dragons, giants, 
 dwarfs, the hermit, the magician, the dungeon, the wood 
 of error, the dream of Arthur, the holy wells, the Sara- 
 cen Knights, the House of Pride, the House of Holi- 
 ness, and many more; and, in these lists, I have cited 
 [118]
 
 SPENSER 
 instances only from the first of the six books. A similar 
 rich variety of matter is to be found, consisting of the 
 characteristic belongings of Renaissance fable. This 
 multiplicity of imaginative detail, being as it is a sum- 
 mary of all the poetical knowledge of previous time, is 
 perplexing to a reader unfamiliar with the literature 
 before Spenser, and makes the poem seem really, and not 
 merely artistically remote. Here appears most clearly the 
 fact which I emphasize, that the" Faerie Queene" depicts 
 and contains a receding world, a dying culture; for it is 
 to be borne in mind that to Spenser and his early readers 
 these things were not then so remote ; medisevalism was 
 as near to him as Puritanism is to us, and the thoughts^ 
 methods, aims, language and imagery of the Renaissance 
 as near as the Revolution is to us. In that age, too, 
 chivalry yet lingered, at least as a spectacle, and other 
 materials in the poem that now seem to us like stage- 
 machinery were part and parcel of real life. The tourney 
 was still a game of splendid pleasure and display at the 
 Court of Elizabeth; the masque-procession, so constant 
 in one or another form in the poem, was a fashion of 
 Christmas mummery, of the Court Masque, and of 
 city processions ; the physical aspect and furniture of the 
 poem were, thus, not wholly antiquated; and on the 
 side of character, it is easy to read between the lines the 
 presence of Spenser's own noble friends — and no one 
 [119]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 in that age was richer in noble friendship — the pres- 
 ence, I mean, of the just Lord Grey, the adventurous 
 Raleigh, and the high-spirited Philip Sidney. The ele- 
 ment of historical remoteness must, therefore, be 
 thought of as originally much less strong than now, and 
 one which the passage of time has imported into the 
 poem very largely. 
 
 We are, perhaps, too apt to think that our own age is 
 one in which great heterogeneousness of knowledge, 
 of thought and principle and faith, is a distinctive trait; 
 but we are not the first to find our race-inheritance a 
 confusion of riches, and a tentative electicism the best 
 we can compass in getting a philosophy of our own. 
 Every learned and open mind, in the times of the flowing 
 together of the world's ideas, has the same experience. 
 Spenser, being a receptive mind and standing at the 
 centre of the ideas of the world then, was necessarily 
 overwhelmed with the variety of his knowledge; but he 
 faced the same problem that Milton, Gray, Shelley, and 
 Tennyson in their time met; the problem of how to re- 
 duce this miscellaneousness of matter to some order, to 
 reconcile it with his own mind, to build up out of it his 
 own world. It is the same problem that confronts each 
 one of us, in education; in the presence of this race- 
 inheritance, so vast, so apparently contradictory and 
 diverse — how to take possession of it, to make it ours 
 [120]
 
 SPENSER 
 vitally, to have it enter into and take possession of us. 
 Spenser is an admirable example of this situation, for in 
 his poem the opposition between the race-mind and the 
 individual is clearly brought out in the point that he con- 
 verges all this imagery, knowledge and method in 
 order to set forth the individual's hfe. Spenser states his 
 purpose in the preface: "The general end," he says, 
 "of all the Book is to fashion a gentleman, or noble 
 person, in vertuous and gentle discipline. " It is the very 
 problem before each of us in education: "to fashion a 
 gentleman. " Spenser's plan, in portraying how this is to 
 be done, is a very simple one. By a gentleman he 
 means a man of Christian virtue, perfected in all the 
 graces and the powers of human nature. The educa- 
 tion required is an education in the development of 
 the virtues, as he named them — Holiness, Temper- 
 ance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy; he illus- 
 trates the development of each virtue, one in each Knight, 
 and sends each Knight forth on an adventure in the 
 course of which the Knight meets and overcomes the 
 characteristic temptations of the virtue which he em- 
 bodies. This was the plan of the poem, which, however, 
 the poet found it easier to formulate than to follow with 
 precision. The main fact stands out, however, that Spen- 
 ser used all his resources of knowledge and art, miscel- 
 laneous as they were, for the single purpose of showing 
 [121]
 
 THE TORCH 
 how the soul comes to moral perfection in the Christian 
 world. You see there is nothing contemporary or remote 
 or by -gone in the problem: that is universal and un- 
 changing; but in answering it Spenser used an imagin- 
 ative language that to many of us is like a lost tongue. 
 Shall we, then, let the allegory go, as Lowell advised, 
 content that it does not bite us, as he says .'' I cannot 
 bring myself to second that advice. Though I am as 
 fond of the idols of poetry for their own sake as any one, 
 yet I have room for idols of morality and philosophy 
 also — let us have as many idols as we can get, is my 
 way: and to leave out of our serious-minded Spenser 
 what was to the poet himself the core of his meaning — 
 its spirituality — is too violent a measure, and bespeaks 
 such desperate dullness in the allegory as I do not find 
 in it. To read the poem for the beauty of its surface, and 
 to let the noble substance go, is, at all events, not the way 
 to understand it as a focus of race-elements and a store 
 of race-power, as a poem not of momentary deUght, but 
 of historical phases of knowledge, culture and aspira- 
 tion, a poem of the thoughtful human spirit brooding 
 over its long inheritance of beauty, honour, and virtue. 
 
 Of course, I cannot in an hour convey much of an 
 
 idea of so great a poem, so various in its loveliness, so 
 
 profound in significance, so diversified in merely literary 
 
 interest. I shall make no attempt to tell its picturesque 
 
 [122]
 
 SPENSER 
 and wandering story, to describe its characters, or to ex- 
 plain what marvellous lives they led in that old world of 
 romance. But I shall try to show, in general terms, cer- 
 tain aspects of it as a poem that presents hfe in a uni- 
 versal, vital, and never-to-be-antiquated way, such as it 
 seemed to one of the most noble-natured of English- 
 men, in a great age of human effort, thought and ac- 
 complishment. 
 
 Among the primary images under which life has been 
 figured, none is more universal and constant than that 
 into which the idea of travel enters. To all men at all 
 times hfe has been a voyage, a pilgrimage, a quest. 
 Spenser conceived of it as the quest, the peculiar image 
 of chivalry, but not as the quest for the Grail or any 
 other shadowy symbol on the attainment of which the 
 quest was ended in a mystic solution. The quest of his 
 Knights is for self-mastery; and it is achieved at each 
 forward step of the journey. You remember that in the 
 lecture on Prometheus I illustrated the way in which 
 man takes a certain part of his nature — the evil prin- 
 ciple — and places it outside of himself, calls it Mephis- 
 topheles, and so deals with it artistically ; in Spenser, the 
 temptation which each Knight is under is his worser 
 self, as we say, so taken and placed outside as his enemy 
 whom he overcomes; thus, Guy on, the Knight of tem- 
 perance, overcomes the various forms of anger, of 
 [ 123 ]
 
 THE TORCH 
 avarice, and of voluptuousness, which are merely, in 
 fact, his other and worser selves; in each victory he 
 gathers strength for the next encounter, and so ends 
 perfecting himself in that virtue. Life — that is to say, 
 the quest — has a goal in self-mastery, that is progres- 
 sively reached by the Knight at each new stage of his 
 struggle. The atmosphere of Hfe — so conceived as a 
 spiritual warfare — is broadly rendered; it is, for ex- 
 ample, always a thing of danger, and this element is 
 given through the changing incident, the deceits prac- 
 tised on the Knights, the troubles they fall into, often 
 unwittingly, and undeservedly, their constant need to be 
 vigilant and to receive succor. The secret, the false, the 
 insidious, are as often present as is the warfare of the 
 open foe. Again, this life is a thing of mystery. However 
 clear we may try to make life, however positive in mind 
 we are and armed against illusions, it still remains true 
 that mystery envelopes life. I do not mean the mystery 
 of thought, of the unknown, but the mystery of life itself. 
 Spenser conceives this mystery as the action, friendly or 
 inimical, of a spiritual world round about man, a su- 
 pernatural world ; and he renders it by means of enchant- 
 ment. I dare say that to most readers the presence of en- 
 chantment, both evil and good, is a hindrance to the ap- 
 preciation of the poem and impairs its reality to their 
 minds. Arthur, you know, has a veiled shield; but its 
 [124]
 
 SPENSER 
 bared radiance will overthrow of itself any foe. This 
 seems like an unfair advantage, and takes interest from 
 the poem. Such enchanted weapons may be regarded as 
 symbolic of the higher nature of the cause in which they 
 are employed, of its inward power, and possibly of the 
 true powers of the heroes, their spiritual force, and it may 
 be that this emphasis on the spirituality of their force is 
 the true reason for the introduction of the symbol; for 
 these are not only Knights human, but Knights Chris- 
 tian and clothed with a might which is not of this world. 
 Such an explanation, though plausible, seems mechani- 
 cal; the truth which it contains is that the enchanted 
 arms do not denote a higher degree of physical strength, 
 as if the Knights had rifles instead of spears, but a dif- 
 ference of spiritual power. It is, however, much more 
 clear that by the realm of enchantment in the poem is 
 figured the interest which the supernatural world takes 
 in man's conflict — the mediaeval idea that God and his 
 angels are on one side and the devil and his angels are 
 on the other; and the presence of enchantment in the 
 poem is a means of expressing this belief. The reality of 
 divine aid against devilish machination is thus sym- 
 bolized; but in one particular this aid is so important a 
 matter that Spenser introduces it in a more essential and, 
 in fact, in a human way. To Spenser's mind, no man 
 could save himself, or perfect himself in virtue even, 
 [125]
 
 THE TORCH 
 without Divine Grace; this was the doctrine he held, 
 and, therefore, he made Arthur the special repre- 
 sentative and instrument of Grace, and at each point of 
 the story where the Knight cannot retrieve him- 
 self from the danger into which he had fallen, Arthur 
 appears with his glorious arms for the rescue. The pres- 
 ence of mystery in life, too, is not only thus felt in the 
 atmosphere of enchantment and in the signal acts of res- 
 cue by Arthur, but it also envelopes the cardinal ab- 
 stract ideas of the poem — such ideas, I mean, as wis- 
 dom in Una, and as chastity in Britomart, to whose 
 beauty (which is of course, the imaging forth of the 
 special virtue of each) is ascribed a miraculous power of 
 mastery, as in Una's case over the Lion and the foresters, 
 and in Britomart's case over Artegal. 
 
 " And he himself e long gazing there upon, 
 At last fell humbly downe upon his knee. 
 And of his wonder made religion, 
 
 Weening some heavenly goddesse he did see." 
 
 This is that radiance which Plato first saw in the counte- 
 nance of Truth, such that, he said, were Truth to come 
 among men unveiled in her own form, all men would 
 worship her. So Spenser, learning from Plato, presents 
 the essential loveliness of all virtue as having inherent 
 power to overcome — precisely, you will remember, as 
 [126]
 
 SPENSER 
 
 Keats describes the principle of beauty in " Hyperion " 
 as inherently victorious. 
 
 The idea of life as a quest, with an atmosphere of 
 danger and mystery, and presided over by great princi- 
 ples such as wisdom, grace, chastity, so clad in loveliness 
 to the moral sense that they seem like secondary forms 
 of Divine being — these are fundamental conceptions 
 in the poem, its roots, so to speak, and they belong in 
 the ethical sphere. But Spenser was the most poetically 
 minded of all English poets; he not only knew that 
 however true and exalted his ideas of life might be, they 
 must come forth from his mind as images, but he also by 
 nature loved truth in the image more than in the ab- 
 stract; and he therefore approached truth through the 
 imagination rather than through the intellect. That is to 
 say, he was a poet, first and foremost; and wove his 
 poem of sensuous effects. Sensibility to all things of sense 
 was his primary endowment ; he was a lover of beauty, 
 of joy, and his joy in beauty reached such a pitch that he 
 excels all English poets in a certain artistic voluptu- 
 ousness of nature, which was less rich in Milton and less 
 pure in Keats, who alone are to be compared with him, 
 as poets of sensuous endowment. It is seldom that the 
 artistic nature appears in the English race; it belongs 
 rather to the southern peoples, and especially to Italy; 
 but when it does arise in the English genius, and blends 
 [127]
 
 THE TORCH 
 happily there with the high moral spirit which is a more 
 constant English trait — especially when it blends with 
 the Puritan strain, it seems as if the young Plato had 
 been bom again. Both Milton and Spenser were Puri- 
 tans who were lovers of beauty; and Spenser showed 
 Milton that way of grace. No language can exaggerate 
 the extent to which Spenser was permeated with this sen- 
 suousness of temperament, and he created the body of 
 his poem out of it — the colour, the picture, the incident, 
 figures and places, the atmosphere, the cadence and the 
 melody of it. You feel this bodily delight in the very fall 
 of the lines, interlacing and sinuous, with Italian soft- 
 ness, smoothness, and slide. You feel it in his love of 
 gardens and streams; in his love of pictured walls, and 
 all the characteristic adornments of Renaissance art; in 
 his grouping of human figures in the various forms of the 
 masque ; in his descriptions of wealth and luxury, of the 
 bower of bliss, of the scenes of mythology; in every part 
 of the poem the flowing of this fount of beauty is the one 
 unfailing thing. It came to him from the Italian Renais- 
 sance, of course. It is the Renaissance element in the 
 poem; and with it all the other elements are sufiFused. 
 The worship of beauty, as it was known in all objects 
 of art, and in all poetry which had formed itself, in de- 
 scription and motive, on objects of art, was perhaps its 
 centre; but, in Spenser, it exceeded such bounds, and, 
 [128]
 
 SPENSER 
 though taken from the Renaissance, it was given a new 
 career in Puritanism. For the singular thing about this 
 sensuous sensibiUty in Spenser, this artistic voluptu- 
 ousness in the sight and presence of beauty, is that it 
 remained pure in spirit. In Renaissance poetry, using 
 the same chivalric tradition as Spenser, this spirit has 
 ended in Ariosto's " Orlando " — a poem of cynicism, as 
 it seems to me. It is to the honour of the moral genius of 
 the English that the Renaissance spirit in poetry, in their 
 tongue, issued in so nobly different a poem as "The 
 Fserie Queene. " This was because, as I say, the Renais- 
 sance worship of beauty was gi ven a new career by Spenser 
 in Puritanism, Perhaps I can best illustrate the matter 
 by bringing forward what was one of Spenser's noblest 
 points. He raised this worship of beauty to the highest 
 point of ideality by having recourse to the tradition of 
 chivalry in its worship of woman, and blended the two 
 in a new worship of womanhood. I think it will be agreed 
 that, although Spenser's romance is primarily one of 
 the adventures of men, it is his female characters that 
 live most vividly in the memory of the reader. These 
 characters are, indeed, very simple and elementary ones; 
 they are not elaborated on the scale to wliich the novel 
 has accustomed our minds; but they are of the same 
 kind, it seems to me, as Shakspere's equally simple 
 types of womanhood — such as Cordelia, Imogen, Mi- 
 [129]
 
 THE TORCH 
 randa — of which they were prophetic. What I desire to 
 bring out, however, is not their simplicity, but the fact 
 that they enter the poem to ennoble it, to raise it in 
 spiritual power, and to strengthen the heroes in their 
 struggles. In this respect, as I think, Spenser did a new 
 thing. In the epic, generally, woman comes on the scene 
 only to impair the moral quality and the manly actions of 
 the hero : such was Dido, you remember, in the "^Eneid," 
 and Eve in " Paradise Lost, " and the same story, with 
 slight qualifications holds of other epic poems. It is a 
 high distinction that in Spenser womanhood is presented, 
 not as the source of evil, its presence and its temptation, 
 but as the inspiration to life for such Knights as Artegal, 
 the Red-Cross Knight, and others; and, furthermore, 
 the worship of beauty, which they found in the worship of 
 womanhood, is in Spenser hardly to be distinguished 
 from the worship of those principles, which I have de- 
 scribed as secondary forms of Divine being — the prin- 
 ciples of wisdom, chastity and the Hke. I find in these 
 idealities of womanhood the highest reach of the poem, 
 and in them blend harmoniously the chivalric, artistic 
 and moral elements of Spenser's mind. And as we feel in 
 Spenser's men the near presence of such friends as Lord 
 Grey, Raleigh and Sidney, it is not fanciful to feel here 
 the neighbourhood of Elizabethan women — such as 
 she of whom Jonson wrote the great epitaph: 
 [130]
 
 SPENSER 
 
 " Underneath this sable hearse 
 Lies the subject of all verse; 
 Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. 
 Death, ere thou hast slain another 
 Learned and fair and good as she. 
 Time shall throw a dart at thee." 
 
 With this supreme presence of womanhood in "The 
 Faerie Queene" goes the fact that warfare as such is a 
 disappearing element ; it is less prominent, and it inter- 
 ests less, than might be expected. This is because, just 
 as beauty in all its forms is spiritualized in the poem, so 
 is war; the war here described is the inner warfare of the 
 soul with itself; it is all a symbol of spiritual struggle, 
 and necessarily it seems less real as a thing of outward 
 event. The poem is one of thought, essentially; its ac- 
 tion has to be interpreted in terms of thought before it is 
 understood; it is, in truth, a contemplative poem, and 
 its mood is as often the artistic contemplation of beauty, 
 as the ethical contemplation of action. These are the two 
 poles on which the poem moves. Yet they are opposed 
 only in the analysis, and to our eyes ; in Spenser's poem, 
 and in his heart they were closely united, for virtue 
 was to him the utmost of beauty, and its attainment 
 was by the worship of beauty; so near, by certain 
 aptitudes of emotion towards the supreme good, 
 did he come to Plato, his teacher, and is therefore 
 [131]
 
 THE TORCH 
 to be fitly described, in this regard, as the disciple 
 of Plato. 
 
 I wonder whether, as I have been speaking, the poem 
 and its author grow more or less remote to you. Spenser 
 — this philosophical Platonist, tliis Renaissance artist, 
 this Puritan moralist — does he seem more or less cred- 
 ible ? Was it not a strange thing that he should think that 
 the abstract development of a Christian soul, however 
 picturesquely presented, was an important theme of 
 poetry ? Yet it is true, that the most purely poetical of 
 English poets, and one of the most cultivated minds of 
 Europe in his time, had this idea; and in EUzabeth's 
 reign — that is, in a period of worldly and mascuUne ac- 
 tivity, of immense vigour, in the very dawn and sun- 
 burst of an England to wliich our American imperial 
 dream is but a toy of fancy — in that Elizabethan, that 
 Shaksperian age, Spenser chose as the theme of highest 
 moment the formation of a Christian character. I have 
 spoken of the artistic remoteness of his poem, and of the 
 remoteness of his literary tradition, its classical, me- 
 diaeval and Renaissance matter and method ; but there is 
 a third remoteness by which it seems yet more distant — 
 the remoteness of its spirituality. In the days about and 
 before Spenser there was great interest in the question 
 of character in the upper classes; what were the quali- 
 ties of a courtier was debated over and over in every civ- 
 [132]
 
 SPENSER 
 ilized country, and the books written about it are still 
 famous books and worth reading. Spenser took this 
 Renaissance idea — what is the pattern of manhood ? 
 — and — just as in the case of the worship of beauty — 
 gave it a career in Puritanism. The question became — 
 what is a Christian soul, perfected in human experience ? 
 What are its aims, its means, its natural history ? What 
 is its ideal life in this world of beauty, honour, service ? 
 And this question he debated in the six books of his half- 
 completed poem, which has made him known ever since 
 as the poet's poet. The Knight of the" Faerie Queene" is 
 the Renaissance courtier Christianized — that is all. 
 Here is the final spiritualization of the long result of 
 chivalry as an ideal of manly life. That is the curious 
 thing — that the result is, not merely moral, but spirit- 
 ual. 
 
 The spiritual life, in this sense, is far removed from 
 our literature; it is so, because it is far removed from the 
 general thought of men. The struggle men now think of 
 as universal and typical of life, is not the clashing of 
 spear and shield on any field of tourney, nor the fencing 
 of the soul with any supernatural foe, seeking its dam- 
 nation: it is the mere struggle for existence, with the 
 survival of the fittest as the result : a scientific idea, and 
 one that centres attention on the things of this world. 
 This increases the sense in mankind of the materialism 
 [133]
 
 THE TORCH 
 of human life and the importance of its mortal interests. 
 Commerce seconds science in defining this struggle as a 
 competition of trade, a conflict, on the larger scale, of 
 tariff wars, a race for special privilege and open oppor- 
 tunity in new countries. Science and trade are almost 
 as large a part of life now as righteousness was in Mat- 
 thew Arnold's day: he reckoned it, I believe, at three- 
 quarters. The result is that mankind is surrounded with 
 a different scheme of thought, meditation and effort 
 from that of Spenser's age. He was near the ages, that we 
 call the ages of faith : he was not far from the old Catho- 
 lic idea of discipline; he was not enfranchised from su- 
 pematuralism in Reformation dogmas; he lived when 
 men still died for their religion ; — all of which is to say 
 that the idea of the spiritual in man's life and its im- 
 portance, was nigh and close to him. In our literature 
 there is much presentation of moral character, in the 
 sense of the side that a man turns toward his fellow 
 beings in society: in Scott, Thackeray and in Dickens, 
 George Eliot — to name the greatest, this is found ; but 
 such spiritual character as Spenser made the subject 
 of his meditation and picturing is not found. In the his- 
 tory of literature, the hero of action has always ended by 
 developing into the saintly ideal : so it was in Paganism 
 from Achilles to ^Eneas ; so it was in medisevalism from 
 Roland and Lancelot to Arthur, Galahad and Parsifal; 
 [134]
 
 SPENSER 
 and in this chivalric tradition Spenser is the last term. 
 Will our moral ideal, as it is now flourishing, show a 
 similar course — has our literature of the democratic 
 movement, now in its early stages, the making of such a 
 saint in it — that is, of the man to whom God only is 
 real ? — as Paganism and medisevalism in their day 
 evolved ? 
 
 Spenser, then, being so remote from us, in all ways — 
 the question is natural, why read his poem at all ? Be- 
 cause it is the flower of long ages : because you command 
 in it as in a panorama the poetical tradition of all the 
 great imaginative literature in previous centuries, classi- 
 cal, mediaeval and Renaissance; because you see how 
 Spenser, by his appropriation of these elements became 
 himself the Platonist, the artist, the moralist, and fused 
 all in the passion for beauty on earth and in the heavens 
 above, and so centred his whole nature toward God; 
 and what took place in him may take place, according 
 to its measure, in us. For, though the thoughts of men 
 change from century to century, and one guiding prin- 
 ciple yields to another, and the ideal life is built up in 
 new ways in successive generations, yet the soul's life 
 remains, however cast in new forms of the old passion 
 for beauty and virtue. If Spenser be a poet's poet, as 
 they say, let him appeal to the poet in you — for in 
 every man there is a poet; let him appeal in his own way, 
 [Voo]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 as a teacher of the spiritual hfe; and, if my wish might 
 prevail, let him come most home to you and receive inti- 
 mate welcome as the Puritan lover of beauty. 
 
 [136]
 
 VI
 
 MILTON 
 
 Milton is a great figure in our minds. He is a very lonely 
 figure. For one thing, he has no companions of genius 
 round him; there is no group about him, in his age. 
 Again, he was a blind old man, and there is something in 
 bhndness that, more than anything else, isolates a man; 
 and in his case, by strange but powerful contrast, his 
 blindness is enlarged and glorified by the fact that he 
 saw all the glory of the angels and the Godhead as no 
 other mortal eye ever beheld them, and the fact that he 
 was blind makes the vision itself more credible. And 
 thirdly he has impressed himself on men's memories as 
 unique in character; and, in his age defeated and given 
 o'er, among his enemies exposed and left, with the Puri- 
 tan cause lost, he is the very type and pattern of a great 
 spirit in defeat — imprisoned in his bhndness, poor, neg- 
 lected, yet still faithful and the master of liis own integ- 
 rity; for us, almost as much as a poet, he remains the 
 [139]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 intellectual champion of human liberty. So through cen- 
 turies there has slowly formed itself this lonely figure in 
 our minds as our thought of Milton, and as Caesar is a 
 universal name of imperial power, the name of Milton 
 has become a synonym of moral majesty. But it was not 
 thus that he was thought of in his own times. There is no 
 evidence that Cromwell or the other important men of 
 the state knew that Milton was greater than they, or that 
 he was truly great at all ; to them he was pre-eminently 
 a secretary in the state department. The next generation 
 of poets — Dryden — called him "the old schoolmas- 
 ter," you remember. In his earUer years he appealed to 
 the taste of a few cultivated and travelled gentlemen, 
 like Sir Henry Wotton, as a graceful and noble-lan- 
 guaged poet; but it was a full generation after his death 
 that he was accepted into the roll of the great, by Addi- 
 son in the " Spectator, " and the next century was well on 
 its way before he was imitated by new men as the Eng- 
 lish model of blank verse. In the literary tradition of 
 England, however, he is now estabhshed, and for all of 
 us he stands apart, a majestic memory, as I have said, 
 touched with the sublimity of his subject and with the 
 sublimity of his own character. There is, too, in our 
 thoughts of him, something grim, something of the 
 sterner aspect of historical Puritanism; the softness of 
 Spenser, the softness of his youth, had gone out of him, 
 [140]
 
 MILTON 
 and he had all the hardness of man in him — he was 
 trained down to the last ounce — he was austere. Yet I 
 love to recall his youth — you remember the fair boy- 
 face of the first portrait — a face of singular beauty; and 
 you know his pink and white complexion was such at 
 the University that he was called " the Lady of Christ's" ; 
 and, in those first years of his poetizing, he was deep in 
 the loveliest verse of Greece and Italy, in Pindar and 
 Euripides, in Petrarch and Tasso, as well as in Shaks- 
 pere and Spenser who were his English masters. He was 
 a young humanist — filled to overflowing with the new 
 learning and its artistic products, a lover of them and of 
 music, and of everything beautiful in nature — he was 
 especially a landscape-lover. Even then the clear spirit 
 — the white soul — somewhat too unspotted for human 
 affections to cling about, it may be — was there; you 
 hear it singing in the high and piercing melody of the 
 "Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which 
 happily is usually a child's first knowledge of him ; a cer- 
 tain loofness of nature he has, and nowhere do you find 
 in his English verse — nor do I find it in his Latin verse 
 where it is sometimes thought to be — nowhere do you 
 find the note of friendship, of that companionableness 
 which is often so charming a trait in the young lives of 
 the poets. But within his own reserves — and perhaps 
 the more precious and refined for that very reason — 
 
 [141]
 
 THE TORCH 
 there was the same sensuous delight in the artistic things 
 of sense, in natural beauty, in romantic charm, in the 
 lines of the old poets, that there was in Spenser; and in 
 this he was, as we mark Uterary descent, the child of 
 Spenser, though of course it was fed in him from other 
 sources and in larger measure, too. For he was a better 
 scholar than Spenser — his times allowed him to be — 
 and he had a far more powerful intellect. But, in these 
 years of his milder and happier youth, when he was liv- 
 ing in the country in his long studies — he was a student 
 at ease till thirty — and when he was travelhng in Italy, 
 he was in the true path of Spenser and the Renais- 
 sance, the path of beauty. Thus he writes in a letter 
 to a friend — "What besides God has resolved concern- 
 ing me, I know not, but this at least : He has instilled into 
 me at all events a vehement love of the beautiful. Not 
 with so much labour as the fables have it, is Ceres said 
 to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as I am wont 
 day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful 
 through all the forms and faces of things (for many are 
 the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me 
 on as with certain assured traces." This is that same 
 creed of Plato that entered so deeply into Spenser — 
 the faith in the divine leading of beauty. How permanent 
 its doctrine was in Milton's mind will appear later; but 
 here its presence is to be observed, because it gives to 
 [142]
 
 MILTON 
 Milton the true quality and atmosphere of his lost 
 youth, and also marks the great difference in tone and 
 temper between the earlier poems — so golden phrased, 
 so melUfluous, so happy — and the poems of his age, the 
 " Paradise Lost " and " Regained " and the " Samson." 
 In " Comus," more particularly in " L' Allegro " and " II 
 Penseroso," is the young Milton — he that the fair- 
 haired boy grew into, the humanist student, the writer 
 of ItaUan sonnets, the "landscape-lover, lord of lan- 
 guage " — before Cromwell's age laid its heavy and 
 manhood-enforcing hand on the poet who chose first to 
 serve his country. 
 
 But it is the poet of whom I am to speak ; and, perhaps, 
 before entering on the subject of his verse, it may be well 
 first to endeavour to mark his place more precisely in 
 English poetry and to account, partially at least, for its 
 historical distinction. A poet, so great as Milton, you 
 may be sure, occupies some point of vantage in history ; 
 he embodies some cUmax in the intellectual or artistic 
 affairs of the world; and in Milton's case there are, I 
 think, two historical considerations not commonly 
 brought forward. I have had a good deal to say about 
 allegory. It was the characteristic literary form of the 
 Middle Ages ; and the substitution of the direct story of hu- 
 man life in its place is one of the traits of modern times. 
 You remember that the English drama, beginning from 
 [143]
 
 THE TORCH 
 miracle plays and moralities and passing through the 
 stage of historical plays came finally in Shakspere to a 
 representation of human life as it is in the most direct 
 manner. Those of you who saw the play of "Every- 
 man " last year have a very vivid idea of what allegory is 
 in a drama, and how such a drama differs from " Romeo 
 and Juliet." In " Everyman " abstract principles are per- 
 sonified, and their play in life illustrated ; in " Romeo and 
 Juliet," the passions and virtues are in the form of char- 
 acter, are humanized as we say, are there not as abstract 
 principles but as human forces. The development of 
 English drama from an allegorical mode of presenting 
 life and character to a human realization of them in men 
 and women culminated in Shakspere, who thus stood at 
 a historic moment of climax in the evolution of his art. 
 Now, you easily recognize the likeness of such an alle- 
 gorical play as " Everyman " to Spenser's " Faerie 
 Queene," in its method of personifying the virtues and 
 the temptations. Religious narrative poetry remained 
 allegorical, and mediaeval in artistic method, not only in 
 Spenser, but in his successors, such as the Fletchers. 
 Milton was the first English poet to humanize complete- 
 ly the characters and events of religious story, to put the 
 religious scheme and view of the world into the form of 
 human things, and to expel from the work the abstract 
 allegorical element wholly. Thus he is related to pre- 
 [144]
 
 MILTON 
 vious narrative religious poetry in England precisely as 
 Shakspere is to the moralities of early drama. He stands 
 at this point of climax in the evolution of his particular 
 branch of poetic art. Religious poetry was sixty years 
 later than dramatic poetry in reaching this perfect hu- 
 manization of its material ; and thus it happens that Mil- 
 ton, though so much younger than the Elizabethans, is 
 commonly thought of as belonging to their company and 
 in fact the last late product of the age of their genius. 
 Secondly, we are accustomed to think of the Renais- 
 sance as on the whole an affair of the southern nations, 
 and especially of Italy; but it was a European move- 
 ment, a wave of thought and peculiar passion that slowly 
 crept up the North, and it reached its furthest point in 
 England, and there, as I think, it reached its highest lit- 
 erary development. Shakspere was the climax of the Re- 
 naissance; its passion for individuality, for a free career 
 for the human soul, and its instinct of the dignity of per- 
 sonal life, were the very forces to unlock most potently 
 dramatic power; and in Shakspere this was accom- 
 plished, and you know how besides he used its material 
 and lived in its atmosphere. Spenser, also, as I said in the 
 last lecture, took the worship of beauty and the idea of 
 the courtier from the Renaissance, spiritualized the one 
 and Christianized the other, and gave them a new career 
 in English Puritanism. Milton is to be associated with 
 [145]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Shakspere and Spenser, as a third and the last great 
 representative of the Renaissance in England, and as 
 there carrying its epic power to a degree of perfection far 
 beyond what it had reached in Italy, exceeding both 
 Ariosto and Tasso ; in him was all the learning and taste 
 of the Renaissance, all its cultivation of individuality 
 and respect for it — in both matter and spirit he belong- 
 ed fundamentally to that movement, and was its latest 
 climax. I therefore define his historical position as being 
 the point at which religious poetry was completely hu- 
 manized in England, and at which the Renaissance 
 spirit generally as a European movement culminated in 
 epic poetry. 
 
 " Paradise Lost " is the poem by which Milton lives. 
 Fond as we may be of his younger verse, and apprecia- 
 tive of the eloquence of " Paradise Regained " and of the 
 tragic simplicity of "Samson Agonistes," yet popular 
 judgment is to be followed in finding in " Paradise Lost " 
 the true centre of Milton's genius. Every poet who 
 achieves a single great poem puts his whole mind into it, 
 empties his mind and tells all he knows ; his felicity is to 
 find a subject which permits him to do this ; such was the 
 course of Homer and Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Goethe, to 
 name a few and Milton was no exception to the rule. 
 He included in his poem the entire history of the universe 
 from the heaven which was before creation to the millen- 
 [146]
 
 MILTON 
 nium which shall be the consummation of all things; 
 and, in this great sphere of action he chose as the objec- 
 tive point the moral relation of mankind to God, cer- 
 tainly the highest subject in importance; and in elabor- 
 ating his work he used all the wealth of his literary 
 knowledge and culture, the entire literary tradition of 
 the race, just as Spenser did — only more broadly; 
 whatever, either in matter or method, there was service- 
 able in past literature — Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Ital- 
 ian, and English — all this Milton used. He grasped 
 and constructed the subject with great mental power 
 and artistic skill; although, in minor parts, his conven- 
 tional machinery and devices have been attacked, the 
 leading lines of his construction stand clear of criticism. 
 He really took three great themes, any one of which 
 would have furnished forth a poem, and blended them 
 together with such dexterity that they are seldom sepa- 
 rated even in analysis — so perfect is the unity of the re- 
 sulting whole. In the first place, you recognize at once in 
 "Paradise Lost" a Christian adaptation of the Titan 
 Myth. The rebellion of the angels is conceived as a war 
 of the Titans against the gods ; and is treated in accord- 
 ance with Greek imagination as a conflict in which the 
 mountains were used as weapons : — 
 
 From their foundations, loosening to and fro, 
 They plucked the seated hills, with all their load, 
 [147]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops 
 Uplifting, bore them in their hands. Amaze 
 Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host 
 When coming towards them so dread they saw 
 The bottom of the mountains upward turned — 
 Themselves invaded next, and on their Jieads 
 Main promontories flung, which in the air 
 Came shadowing: — ... 
 So hills amid the air encountered hills — 
 . . . — horrid confusion heaped 
 Upon confusion roseT 
 
 Satan on the flood of hell is conceived as of Titanic 
 form: 
 
 " With head uplift above the wave, and eyes 
 That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides 
 Prone on the flood, extended long and large. 
 Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge 
 As whom the fables name of monstrous size, 
 Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, 
 Briar eos or Typhon" — 
 
 and you recall how he reared himself from ofiF the fiery 
 lake, and took his station on the shore, with the ponder- 
 ous shield whose "broad circumference hung on his 
 shoulders like the moon," and stayed his steps with his 
 tall spear — 
 
 " To equal which the tallest pine 
 Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast 
 Of some great ammiral, were but a wand; " 
 [148]
 
 MILTON 
 
 and there summoning his squadrons loomed over them 
 like the sun " in dim eclipse, disastrous twilight shed- 
 ding on half the nations." Such is Satan's figure at the 
 first, and it is by such images of Titanic darkened gran- 
 deur that his form is most vividly remembered. I have 
 spoken of the difficulty the poets have had in defining 
 the forms of the Titans to the eye. Milton solves the 
 problem by ascribing to the devil and his angels no deter- 
 minate form; they are, so to speak, collapsible and ex- 
 tensible at will ; and they take the appropriate scales of 
 proportion in whatever scene they are placed. 
 
 It is common to tliink of Satan as the true hero of the 
 poem, and as an imaginative figure he certainly occupies 
 the foreground ; yet to Milton he was a hateful being, and 
 I am convinced that familiarity with the poem takes 
 from him that admiration which properly should belong 
 to the hero, and at the end he is clearly felt as the object 
 of repulsive evil, whom Milton meant him to be. Mil- 
 ton's method, after presenting Satan in sombre but ma- 
 jestic form, is gradually to debase liim to the eye as well 
 as to the mind. Here the treatment sets him apart from 
 any conception of the Titan Prometheus in bonds; for 
 Prometheus is never felt to be debased even physically 
 by the punishment of Jove. The first revolt of the reader's 
 mind from its initial admiration for Satan takes place, I 
 think, acutely in the scene at the gate of hell when he 
 [149]
 
 THE TORCH 
 meets Sin and Death. The association of Satan with such 
 horrible beings as they are represented to be, and the 
 knowledge that his intimacy with them is that of father- 
 hood, shocks the mind with ugUness — ugliness that is 
 almost bestial in its effect. When he reaches the new 
 earth, after his address to the Sun, he is seen transformed 
 in countenance — 
 
 " Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face 
 Thrice changed with pale — ire, envy and despair. 
 Which marred his borrowed visage — " 
 
 and soon he is "squat Uke a toad" at the ear of Eve; 
 whence touched by the young angel's spear, he rises 
 "the grisly King," so changed from his heavenly self 
 that he is unrecognized. Then, after one more grand Ti- 
 tanic figuring of his might — the most impressive of all 
 — as he opposes Gabriel : — 
 
 "On the other side, Satan, alarmed. 
 Collecting all his might, dilated stood. 
 Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved: 
 His stature reached the sky, and on his crest 
 Sat Horror plumed; — " 
 
 after this unforgetable and heroic figure, Milton dis- 
 misses him from the poem in the scene in hell, where, re- 
 turning after his triumph to take the applause of his host, 
 he is, in the moment of his highest boasting, transformed 
 [150]
 
 MILTON 
 into the serpent with all his followers in like forms — a 
 scene so repellent that perhaps none has been more ad- 
 versely commented on. This gradual degradation of Sa- 
 tan, in his form, is, it seems to me, a cardinal point in the 
 poem. It is to be associated with Milton's idea of beauty 
 — that Platonic idea which I mentioned. The first ob- 
 servation of Satan in hell is the lost brightness of Beelze- 
 bub whom he addresses: 
 
 " 7/ thou beest he — but oh, how fallen! how changed 
 From him, xoho, in the happy realms of light 
 Clothed with transcendant brightness, didst outshine 
 Myriads, though bright! — " 
 
 When he comes to the new creation, the radiance of the 
 sun reminds him of the same change in himself, and 
 when the young angel surprises him in Eden, it is his 
 lost beauty that he mourns. 
 
 " So spake the cherub: and his grave rebuke. 
 Severe in youthful beauty, added grace 
 Invincible, abashed the Devil stood 
 And felt how aivful goodness is, and saw 
 Virtue in her shape how lovely — saio, and pined 
 His loss; but chiefly to find here observed 
 His lustre visibly impaired. " 
 
 The power of beauty over him is the last vescige of his 
 lost nobility. Thus in Eden gazing on Adam and Eve, 
 he says, — 
 
 [151]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 " Whom my thoughts pursue 
 With wonder, and could love: so lively shines 
 In them divine resemblance; " 
 
 and just before the temptation, in the presence of Eve, 
 he felt her beauty to be such that — 
 
 " Thai space the evil One abstracted stood 
 From his own evil, and for the time remained 
 Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed. 
 Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.'^ 
 
 It is only by a recovery of his evil nature that he gains 
 power to go on with his deceit. Such rehcs of faded glory 
 as his brow wore, such relics of the sense of beauty also 
 remained in his spirit. The debasement of his form, cul- 
 minating in the scorpion scene in hell, is — for Milton 
 — one and the same thing with the corruption of his 
 moral nature, and is in fact a principal means of charac- 
 terization; for in each new act Satan takes a new form. 
 There is nothing elsewhere in literature quite like this. 
 It is, however, the peculiar meanness of his revenge 
 which most degrades Satan's character; in his rebellion 
 against God, in his unavailing courage when powers felt 
 and depicted as great are matched against omnipo- 
 tence, in the mere ruin of such tremendous power, there 
 are sublime elements; but in his triumph over mankind 
 there is no true joining of forces for equal encounter — 
 in fact Satan is never brought in contact with Adam di- 
 [152]
 
 MILTON 
 
 rectly — and though Paradise is surrounded with 
 guards and watched over by Uriel in the sun, these are 
 no real defences ; mankind is felt to be unsheltered, the 
 power of Adam and Eve to remain obedient is not so pre- 
 sented as to seem a match for the power of the devil, and 
 Satan consequently appears to triumph over a weak and 
 innocent foe, harmless to him, whom he sacrifices in a 
 malignant spirit of revenge by ignoble and secret ways. 
 In his own character, and apart from man, Satan em- 
 bodies the Renaissance ideal of the freedom of the indi- 
 vidual, of the affirmation of one's own life, of develop- 
 ment of one's powers and qualities and opportunities — 
 he is like a brilliant, unscrupulous, rebellious Itahan 
 prince having his own way with the world he is born 
 into; to conceive of him as resembling an English rebel 
 against the Crown, or at all indebted to that character, 
 except perhaps in the point of resolute defiance, is, I 
 think, to misconceive him altogether, although it is a 
 common view. He was, on the contrary, the Renaissance 
 prince seeking his free career, valuing individual talent 
 and force above everything, the concentration of per- 
 sonal faculty, pride, ambition — and conscienceless in 
 his determination to hve all his life out. In his struggle 
 with omnipotence, he secures respect for certain quali- 
 ties of strength which in alliance with virtue are great 
 quaUties, and even in wickedness do not lose their im- 
 
 [153]
 
 THE TORCH 
 press! veness ; but in his easy triumph over Eve in the 
 Garden, and in its consequences to mankind, he be- 
 comes contemptible in his aim, his method, and his 
 being. 
 
 Certain important diflFerences in the Titan Myth as 
 treated by Milton should be noticed. You observe that 
 the Greek situation is reversed: the angels are the 
 younger race of beings, and according to Greek ideas 
 should have succeeded and thereby have asserted the 
 principle of progress. The angels, however, were de- 
 feated. Of course, there is no room in the scheme of the 
 universe, as Milton conceived it, for any progress — the 
 being and the reign of God are already perfect, and 
 progress is only the salvation of man, that is, a restora- 
 tion of things. Restoration, not Revolution, is Milton's 
 cardinal idea. It follows from this that hell is necessarily 
 the end of the angels ; it is a cul-de-sac, a blind alley — it 
 leads nowhere — it has no future; the poem stops in that 
 direction as if it had run against a wall. The denial of 
 progress has brought everything to a standstill, with eter- 
 nal damnation for the angels and ultimate restoration 
 for mankind. It is here, I think, that modern sympathy 
 parts company with this portion of the poem — that is, 
 with the conception of hell in it. Our thoughts are so 
 pledged to the idea of progress, to the thought of evolu- 
 tion as the law of all created beings, that the notion of 
 [154]
 
 MILTON 
 hell as a kind of sink and prison of the universe finds no 
 place for itself in our minds. The only thing in civiliza- 
 tion that resembles hell is the modem jail, and that we 
 desire most potently to eliminate, in the sense that it shall 
 not be a place that leads nowhere, even for the most hard- 
 ened. I desire, however, only to set sharply over against 
 each other in your minds the Hebrew fixity of Milton's 
 thought and the Greek idea of progress, as they are 
 brought out by the mythic wars of heaven in each case; 
 and to suggest that the failure of the poem to interest the 
 modem mind in hell, except as a spectacle, is connected 
 with the fundamental denial of progress in it, and its 
 departure from the thought of development. 
 
 The second great theme which Milton incorporated 
 into his poem is the Bower of Bliss. This is the theme by 
 means of which love, which next to war is the great sub- 
 ject of poetry, enters into the epic; the hero is with- 
 drawn from battle, and tempted to forget his career in 
 the world, by love for a woman. The importance of the 
 theme, and its relative proportion of interest in the epic 
 as a whole, steadily increased — it was a convenient way 
 of withdrawing the leading character and giving the other 
 heroes an opportunity for display free from his rivalry, 
 it was interesting in itself as opening up the whole field 
 of the romance and tragedy of love, and it was the best 
 kind of an episode to vary the story. Thus the loves of 
 [155]
 
 THE TORCH 
 ^neas for Dido, in the " ^Eneid," and of Armida for Ri- 
 naldo in " Tasso," were represented. For Milton Eden is 
 Bower of Bliss, in this sense. It freed his hand for de- 
 scription of nature in her softest scenes and in the at- 
 mosphere of love. You may recall Tennyson's summary 
 of it, in his lines on Milton ■ — 
 
 " Me rather all that bowery umeliness. 
 The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring. 
 And bloom profuse, and cedar arches 
 Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean 
 Where some refulgent sunset of India, 
 Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean-isUt 
 And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods 
 Whisper in odorcrus heights of even. " 
 
 Here Milton had the characteristic scenery of the Bow- 
 er of Bliss, and he elaborated it with Renaissance rich- 
 ness of luxurious natural detail. The situation was also 
 characteristic, and the power of woman to weaken the 
 moral force of the hero through love was illustrated : the 
 issue only was different, for whereas in the normal epic 
 the hero breaks his bonds and goes back to his career — 
 to the founding of Rome or the capture of Jerusalem — 
 Adam was made the tragic victim of his fall, and with 
 him all mankind. Adam, from every point of view, holds 
 an unenviable position, for a hero: he never, as I have 
 said is brought to a direct encounter with Satan, his 
 [156]
 
 MILTON 
 great enemy, and in this round-about conflict in which 
 he falls through the temptation of Eve his defeat is irre- 
 parable. It is singular to observe that in the only other 
 English poem of epical action — in Tennyson's " Idylls 
 of the King," Arthur is similarly a hero of defeat; the 
 breaking of the Round Table is the catastrophe, brought 
 about by the sin of Guinevere in the orthodox conven- 
 tional way, and Arthur, when he sails away " to heal him 
 of his grievous wound " leaves a lost cause behind him in 
 the world. It would be a curious enquiry — could one 
 answer it — why the two great epic poems of the English 
 represent the cause of the higher life as suffering a tem- 
 porary overthrow in this world. Not to enter upon that, 
 however, I have only time to point out that, as it seems 
 to me, modem sympathy also parts company with Mil- 
 ton in this portion of the poem, inasmuch as it has 
 grown unnatural for us to regard womanhood as the pe- 
 culiar means by which moral character is impaired, and 
 the world lost ; rather we go with Spenser in his convic- 
 tion that womanhood is the inspiration of noble life. The 
 character of Eve as Milton drew it is from a very an- 
 cient world of myth and race-thought: the influence of 
 chivalry on the worldly side, and on the spiritual side 
 the influence of the beatification of motherhood in the 
 Virgin Mary, have profoundly affected and changed the 
 ancient thought, and though not unfelt in Milton they 
 [157]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 have not sufficient power in him to modify essentially 
 the primitive conception of Eve. It is the more unfortu- 
 nate that Milton's own temper, as a husband, was such 
 that he has vigorously emphasized in his poem the infe- 
 riority of woman to man, her natural subjection to him, 
 and in general has left to her only that loveliness and 
 charm which most appealed to him as a poet. 
 
 The third great theme of Milton is a cosmogony — 
 that is, a story of creation : it is told by Raphael to Adam, 
 and it is supplemented by the history of mankind which 
 is shown to Adam prophetically by Michael. It has been 
 the fashion of science to ridicule, as Huxley did, Mil- 
 ton's description of the origin of living creatures ; but as 
 a tale of creation, his story is quite the most consistent 
 and nobly imaginative of any that poets have told, and 
 his panorama of history is effectively unrolled, with 
 comprehensiveness, vigour of thought and vividness of 
 scene. In two respects, nevertheless, modern sympathy 
 parts company with Milton here, too. He adopted as his 
 scheme of the universe of space, you remember, the 
 older or Ptolemaic idea, that the earth is the centre, and is 
 surrounded by the spheres, one inside another, till you 
 reach the outermost or primum mobile. He knew, of 
 course, the Copemican scheme, which we now all hold, 
 when we think of the relation of the earth to the sun and 
 stars. It was, I think, the classical prepossession of his 
 [158]
 
 MILTON 
 mind — his desire for a world limited, closed and clear, 
 like a Greek temple — which led him to adopt this older 
 scheme of the universe. But the result is that the rest of 
 the poem is apt to seem as antiquated as its celestial 
 geography. Again, in his view of history, he necessarily 
 made human history unroll as a consequence of the fall 
 of Adam, and gave an importance to its Biblical events, 
 which they can only retain in a limited way. The centre 
 and movement of history are now so differently con- 
 ceived by the general modem mind that Milton's ac- 
 count of history has little essential interest to the reader. 
 Such, as it lies in my mind, is the composition of the 
 " Paradise Lost " — a Titan Myth, a Bower of Bliss, 
 and a Cosmogony or story of creation and history, 
 blended into one unified poem in which the central event 
 is the fall of Adam. It is a poem of the Renaissance, the 
 last great product of that movement flowering in the far 
 and Puritan North ; it is enriched with all the treasures 
 of the New Learning, softened with all the imaginative 
 graces of humanism; and in the great character of Sa- 
 tan, it presents, on his noble side, the most magnificent 
 embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of free and impe- 
 rious individuality, and on his ignoble side it reflects 
 some of the fairest gleams of Platonic philosophy. I have 
 indicated in what important ways it seems disconnected 
 with the modem mind, in its scientific and historic 
 [159]
 
 THE TORCH 
 schemes, in its primitive view of the evil of womanhood, 
 and in its opposition to the idea of progress. I should 
 perhaps sum this last idea to a point, and say that in the 
 poem the charter of free-will which the Creator gives 
 to the angels and to Adam operates as a limitation on 
 omnipotence; it is impossible for the modern mind to 
 look on the Creator except as the giver of good ; and yet 
 his gift in this poem so operates as to make his omnipo- 
 tence continually manifest in the act of damnation ; it 
 operates to damn the angels through their revolt, to 
 damn Adam through his fall, and to damn mankind 
 through Adam. Within the limits of the action described, 
 the poem is thus from the first line to the last a poem of 
 the damnation of things, in which the fact of final partial 
 restoration is present as an intention and promise only. 
 This is what makes it a poem of past time, and removes 
 it far from the modern mind. For the democratic idea — 
 which is the modern mind — is a power to save : it will 
 have no prisons of vengeance, no servile nor outcast 
 races, no closed gates of hopeless being. "Paradise 
 Lost " is thus set behind us, as an embodiment of a his- 
 torical phase of the Christian idea — like Dante. 
 
 I am aware that the verdict seems adverse to Milton; 
 
 but it is not so in reality, though I desire to make plain 
 
 the fact that " Paradise Lost " is now a historical poem, 
 
 a past event in the imaginative life of the race. But no 
 
 [160]
 
 MILTON 
 words I can use would sufficiently express the admira- 
 tion which this poem excites in me — not merely for its 
 unrivalled music, nor for its style which Matthew Ar- 
 nold thought keeps it alive, but for its construction as an 
 act of intellect, for its sublime imagination in dealing 
 with infinite space, infinite time, and eternity and the 
 beings of eternity; for its beautiful surface in the scenes 
 in Paradise, its idyllic sweetness and charm, the habitual 
 eloquence and noble demeanour in the characters; nor 
 do I find its later books less excellent, in which austere 
 thought and nakedness of idea more appear — the char- 
 acteristics of the poet coming into his own, and content 
 with truth unadorned, simple and plain — the sign and 
 proof, of which "Paradise Regained" and "Samson 
 Agonistes " are greater examples, that as a poet he was 
 perfected. Small in amount, indeed, is the verse that I 
 have read more often; such strength, such exquisiteness, 
 such elevation, he has no rival in, for power and grace, 
 for refinement ; his voice is master of his theme; and he is 
 seated in the heavens of poetry where Shelley saw him — 
 
 " The third among the sons of light." 
 
 [161]
 
 The Torch 
 vn
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 We approach our own times ; and if, hitherto, literature 
 has seemed to us a somewhat far-off thing, a thing of the 
 Greek Myth, of chivalric allegory, of the Renaissance 
 hero, it should now grow near and fast to us as our chief 
 present aid in leading that large race-life of the mind 
 whose end, as I have said, is to free the individual soul. 
 The notion that poetry is a thing remote from life is a 
 singular delusion ; it is more truly to be described as the 
 highway of our days, though we tread it, as children 
 tread the path of innocence, without knowing it. Noth- 
 ing is more constant in the life of boy or man than the 
 outgoing of his soul into the world about him, and this 
 outgoing, however it be achieved, is the act of poetry. 
 It is in the realm of nature that these journeys first take 
 place ; nature is a medium by which the soul passes out 
 into a larger existence; and as nature is very close to all 
 men, perhaps our experience with her offers the most 
 [165]
 
 THE TORCH 
 universal, certainly it offers the most elementary, illus- 
 tration of the poetical Ufe which all men, in some meas- 
 ure lead. Wordsworth is, pre-eminently, a guide in this 
 region; and, as he was less indebted than poets usually 
 are to the great tradition of literature in past ages, 
 poetry in him seems more exclusively a thing of the pres- 
 ent Ufe, contemporary and altogether our own. Such a 
 poet, endeavouring by a conscious reform to renew 
 poetry in his age and bring it home to man's bosom, 
 eUminating the conventional ways, images, and lang- 
 uage even of the poetic past, is necessarily thrown back 
 on nature, in the external world, and on character, in the 
 internal world, for his subject-matter; history, except in 
 contemporary forms, will be far from him, and of myth 
 and chivalry, of Plato and the Italians, though he will 
 have his share, he will have the least possible. This may 
 leave his verse bare and monotonous in quality, but 
 what substance it does contain will have great vitality, 
 for it comes directly from the man. You will observe, 
 however, that his narrower scope of learning, treatment, 
 and theme makes no difference in the essential point 
 of interest. His longest and most deliberate poem — 
 that one into which he tried to empty his entire mind, 
 as I said the other night — " The Prelude," is the history 
 of the formation of his mind, he says ; that is, plainly, his 
 subject is the same as Spenser's — how in our days is a 
 [166]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 human soul brought to its fullness of power and grace ? 
 The manner, the story, the accessories, the entire colour 
 and atmosphere, are changed from what they were in 
 the Ehzabethan times, but the question abides. Spenser 
 is hardly aware that nature has anything to do with 
 forming the soul ; to Wordsworth, nature seems its chief 
 nourishment and fosterer, almost its creator. I desire to 
 illustrate how Wordsworth represented the outgoing of 
 the soul in nature, as a part of its discipline, its educa- 
 tion in life, hke the quest of the Knights in Spenser. 
 
 When you go out to walk alone in a scene of natural 
 beauty, your senses are first excited and interested ; but 
 often there arise in consequence feeUngs and ideas har- 
 monious with the scene, and emotionally touched with 
 it, which gradually absorb your consciousness; and at 
 last you find yourself engaged in a mood — perhaps of 
 memory — from which the external scene has entirely 
 dropped away or round which it is felt only as a nimbus 
 or halo of beauty, or mystery or calm. This happens con- 
 stantly and normally to all of us, and it is an act of 
 poetry ; for it is the very method and secret of the lyric. 
 The poet receiving some impulse through his senses 
 delights in it, and rises by natural harmony to feelings 
 and ideas that belong with such joy, and ends in the 
 higher pleasure to which his senses have served him as 
 the stairway of divine surprise. Such a poem is Bums's 
 [167]
 
 THE TORCH 
 "Highland Mary"; he begins with the outer scene, 
 woods and the summer, and you will notice how at the 
 end all has dropped away except the love in his heart: 
 
 " Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 
 
 The castle o' Montgomery, 
 Green be your woods, and fair your flowers. 
 
 Your waters never drumlie! 
 There simmer first unfald her robes. 
 
 And there the longest tarry; 
 For there I took my last fareweel 
 
 O' my sweet Highland Mary. 
 
 How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk. 
 
 How rich the hawthorn s blossom. 
 As underneath their fragrant shadct 
 
 I clasped her to my bosom! 
 The golden hours, on angel wings. 
 
 Flew o'er me and my dearie; 
 For dear to me, as light and life. 
 
 Was my sweet Highland Mary. 
 
 Wi' monie a vow, and locked embrace. 
 
 Our parting was fu' tender; 
 And, pledging aft to meet again. 
 
 We tore, oursels asunder; 
 But oh! fell death's untimely frost. 
 
 That nipt my flower sae early! 
 Now green 's the sod, and cauld 's the clay. 
 
 That wraps my Highland Mary. 
 [168]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Oh, pale, pale now, those rosy lips, 
 
 I aft hae kissed sae fondly; 
 And closed for aye the sparkling glance. 
 
 That dwelt on me sae kindly! 
 And mouldering now in silent dust. 
 
 That heart that lo'ed me dearly! 
 But still within my bosom's core 
 
 Shall live my Highland Mary." 
 
 His heart has taken the place of all the world as 
 Mary's dwelling. 
 
 This experience, this course of emotional thought, is 
 the habit of the human heart; it is repeated countless 
 times in any man's life. In each case the poem depends 
 only on where we stop our minds. We may stop in the 
 outer scene, and have only beautiful description : we may 
 go on into the mood of imagination or memory, and end 
 there; we may go further, and reach some contact with 
 divine things, vnth. God in nature. It is easy to illustrate 
 the matter from Wordsworth, for he has himself defined 
 these stages. You remember his account of his boyish 
 skating on the ice: 
 
 ** — All shod with steel 
 
 We hissed along the polished ice, in games 
 Confederate, imitative of the chase 
 And woodland pleasures, — the resounding horut 
 The pack loud-bellowing, and the hunted hare. 
 [169]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 So thro2igh the darkness arid the cold we flew. 
 And not a voice was idle: with the din 
 Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud; 
 The leafless trees and every icy crag 
 Tinkled like iron; xohile the distant hills 
 Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
 Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars. 
 Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 
 The orange sky of evening died away. 
 
 Not seldom from the uproar I retired 
 Into a silent hay, — or sportively 
 Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng. 
 To cut across the reflex of a star. 
 Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed 
 Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes. 
 When we had given our bodies to the wind. 
 And all the shadowy banks on either side 
 Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still 
 The rapid line of motion, then at once 
 Have I, reclining back upon my heels. 
 Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs 
 Wheeled by me — even as if the earth had rolled 
 With visible motion her diurnal round! 
 Behind me did they stretch in solemn train. 
 Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched 
 Till all was tranquil as a summer sea" 
 
 Any boy, who has skated on the river, has hved that 
 poem: has had the physical sense of the scene, which 
 arouses in him a certain reverberation of feeling. The 
 [170]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 second stage — that of youth — is as usual, though in 
 Wordsworth it was uncommonly prolonged and in- 
 tense : 
 
 " Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first 
 I came among these hills; when like a roe 
 I hounded o'er the mountains, by the sides 
 Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams. 
 Wherever nature led: more like a man 
 Flying from something that he dreads, than one 
 Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then 
 (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, 
 And their glad animal movements all gone by) 
 To me was all in all. — / cannot paint 
 What then I was. The sounding cataract 
 Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock. 
 The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood. 
 Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
 An appetite: a feeling and a love. 
 That had no need of a remoter charm. 
 By thought supplied, or any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. — Thai time is past. 
 And all its aching joys are now no more. 
 And all its dizzy raptures." 
 
 Here the physical scene is less felt — the excitement, the 
 reverberation, is greater. There is the third stage, to 
 which in this poem he immediately passed on : 
 
 " For I have learned 
 To look on nature, not as in the hour 
 Of thoughtless yovih; but Jiearing oftentimes 
 [171]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 The still, sad music of humanity, 
 
 Nor Iiarsh nor grating, though of ample power 
 
 To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 
 Of elevated ihougJUs; a sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused. 
 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 
 
 And the round ocean, and the living air. 
 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Here the physical scene has become abstract and ele- 
 mental — diaphanous beauty — and he is in the pres- 
 ence of the divine power shining through its veils. Na- 
 ture, beginning with the awe of boyhood, ripening into 
 the passion and high delight of youth, matures in man- 
 hood in the spiritual insight which makes the daily 
 process of life in merely living under the sky and in sight 
 of earthly beauty an act of worship. It is plain, as I said, 
 that the degree to which any man may live Wordsworth's 
 poem depends only on where his mind stops in its ordi- 
 nary human process, whether with the boy on the ice, the 
 youth on the mountains or the man with " the light of 
 setting suns. " In all these cases, you will notice, Words- 
 worth represents the soul as going out from him into 
 the large material sphere. 
 
 [172]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 Wordsworth, however, was acutely conscious of the 
 reaction of nature on mankind, of its formative power 
 over men and their Hves. The idea is most famihar to us 
 as the influence of the environment; and we think of a 
 sea-coast people, like the Greeks, as differing from a 
 mountaineer people, like the Swiss, because of their 
 natural surroundings. The idea, however, is more pre- 
 cise than that. The field which the farmer tills slowly 
 bends his form to itself. You remember Millet's famous 
 painting " The Angelus. " The peasant who is its centre 
 has been physically formed by toiling in the fields where 
 he stands ; you feel as you look, that the landscape itself 
 is summed up, and almost embodied in him, its crea- 
 ture, and the picture is spiritualized, and made a type of 
 our common humanity, by the sound of the Angelus 
 reflected in his prayerful attitude. That is the way that 
 Wordsworth conceived of nature as forming his dales- 
 men and shepherds. There is this landscape quality in 
 all his memorable characters; you think of them, you see 
 them, in connection with the soil. Thus you recall the 
 figure of the Reaper; you see her at her task in the field, 
 and the song she sings : 
 
 " The music in my heart I bore 
 
 Long after it was heard no more" — 
 
 that song unifies the poem and spiritualizes it, precisely 
 [173]
 
 THE TORCH 
 as the prayer does in "The Angelus." So you see 
 "The Leech-Gatherer: " 
 
 " In my mind's eye I seemed to see him face 
 About the weary moors continually 
 Wandering about alone and silently;" — 
 
 So, too, Simon Lee, the old huntsman, and Matthew 
 at his daughter's grave, and Michael, the builder of the 
 sheep-fold, and Ruth, and good Lord Cli£Pord, are 
 landscape figures. 
 
 Wordsworth carried his thought of the formative 
 power of nature beyond this point, and to take at once 
 the characteristic poem, he saw nature forming the soul 
 of a woman : 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower. 
 Then Nature said, * A lovelier fioiver 
 On earth was never sown; 
 This child I to myself will take; 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A lady of my own. 
 
 ^Myself will to my darling be 
 
 Both law and imptdse: and unih me 
 
 The girl, in rock and plain. 
 
 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower. 
 
 Shall fed an overseeing power 
 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 
 [174]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 'She shall be sportive as the fawn 
 Thai toUd with glee across the lawn 
 Or up the mountain springs; 
 And hers shall be the breaihing balm. 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 ' The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 
 To her; for her the willow bend: 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 
 Even in the motions of the storm 
 
 Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
 * The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 
 In many a secret place 
 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round. 
 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 'And vital feelings of delight 
 
 Shall rear her form to stately height. 
 
 Her virgin bosom swell; 
 
 Such thoughts to Lucy I will give 
 
 While she and I together live 
 
 Here in this happy dell.* " 
 
 The poem comes to its climax in the thought that 
 
 "beauty bom of murmuring sound, shall pass into her 
 
 face. " There is nothing extravagant in the idea. You 
 
 [175]
 
 THE TORCH 
 have all seen a face transfigured while listening to mu- 
 sic, or to the sea ; and the thought is that such listening 
 being habitual, the expression becomes habitual, and 
 not only that but the peace and joy and inner harmony, 
 which the expression denotes, have become habitual, 
 that is, parts of character. Wordsworth displays his 
 thought more at length in the "Tintern Abbey" lines, in 
 his counsel to his sister and his confessions of his own 
 life with nature. In consequence of this general attitude 
 of mind toward the educating power of nature, Words- 
 worth held his maxim, that we " can feed this mind of 
 ours with a wise passiveness. " 
 
 He had a faith as perfect as that of the Concord phil- 
 osophers in the alms of the idle hour. And he did not 
 mean merely that thoughts and impressions stream in on 
 one, who expands his petals to the flying pollen of 
 heaven, or that moral instances like the lesson of the 
 Celandine will store his collector's box, but that inti- 
 macy — habitual intimacy with the highest truths of 
 the soul — is reached in this way. He had the impres- 
 sion that childhood was especially susceptible to these 
 influences and revelations; and the glorification of 
 childhood which is a marked trait of his most deeply- 
 felt verse, lies in this neighbourhood of its being to nature 
 and nature's revelations. In his ode on the " Intimations 
 of Immortality " in childhood he pours forth, in the 
 [176]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 most passionate and eloquent phrase, his clearest, 
 most vivid and most penetrating intuitions of the 
 power of nature in these ways, on the boy and the 
 man. 
 
 Such are some of the moods in which Wordsworth 
 conceived the operation of nature on man as moulding 
 both general and individual life, the thoughts and emo- 
 tions of men and women, and the soul of childhood, as if 
 nature were the delegated hand of God to shape our 
 lives, and carried with its touch some power to impart 
 heavenly wisdom. Wordsworth, you observe, had a very 
 primitive mind ; in that act of gazing on setting suns he is 
 not far from being a sun-worshipper : he still can beheve 
 that " every flower enjoys the air it breathes. " He 
 conceives of nature, as an element, in grand lines; and 
 he thinks of the phases of human life even — of its great 
 occupations, its affections and sorrows, almost as if they 
 were parts of nature — even more closely united to it 
 and with greater kindliness than Virgil represented 
 them in the Georgies. This simple, primitive, elemen- 
 tary mind underlies his thought of childhood, too, and 
 it appears, perhaps, most significantly in the fact that 
 when through nature he touches on the boundaries of 
 divine being, he achieves no more than a sense of the 
 presence of God in nature — it is only a silent presence 
 — he does not find, so far as I can see, at any time 
 [177]
 
 THE TORCH 
 the voice of God there. This is the primitive mood of 
 savage and pagan man. 
 
 Perhaps it may be well to consider for a moment the 
 place of nature in modem life, apart from Wordsworth, 
 Lucretius, who first took a scientific view of the world, 
 as a poet, found in nature the inveterate hard foe of 
 mankind : he it was who first saw the careless gods look 
 down upon 
 
 "An ill-used race of men that cleave the soil. 
 Sow the seed and reap the harvest with enduring toil. 
 Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and vnne, and oil. 
 Till they perish." 
 
 Virgil, as I have said, felt rather the kindly co-operation 
 of nature with man in producing the fruits of the field, 
 and the flocks and herds of the hills, to feed and clothe 
 us. Our view is not so much that of Lucretius, of the 
 opposition, but rather of the indifference of nature. She 
 knows not mercy, nor justice, nor chastity, nor any 
 human virtue ; and man in emerging from her world lives 
 in a sphere of thought, conduct, and aspiration to which 
 she is a stranger. Yet, that kindly co-operation that Virgil 
 saw, still continues on the lower levels of life, and the 
 great change is that, whereas of old and in his day the 
 sense of dependence on nature, that is to say on the gods, 
 was habitual and daily, now through the growth of the 
 [178]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 world, that dependence is no longer felt as at all super- 
 natural; the harvest ripens or fails, but we have little 
 thought of the gods therewith; and, in fact, the habitual 
 sense of the dependence of our own bodies on the favour 
 of heaven is a vanishing quality. It is a consequence of 
 this that our life necessarily grows more purely spiritual, 
 and such dependence on the divine as is recognized is a 
 dependence of the soul itself, felt in the contemplative 
 mind and much more in the life of the affections. Na- 
 ture as an intermediary between God and man has lost 
 in importance, through the growth and spread of the 
 idea of the order obtaining in nature as against the idea 
 of nature as a series of special providences in relation to 
 our daily lives. I count this loss as a gain, inasmuch as it 
 throws the soul back on its own higher nature and essen- 
 tial life. But there is another change. Of old the thought 
 was of the earth and toil upon it; that was nature; now 
 our thought of nature is of a force, which we subdue. It 
 has come about through the extraordinary development 
 of mechanical skill. Of old we taught the winds to waft 
 our ships, and the waters to drive our mills ; but now — 
 to take the significant example — we have enslaved the 
 lightning. Nature has become in our thoughts a Cali- 
 ban reduced to civility by being put in bonds. I have 
 much sympathy with theoretic science; with the mind's 
 view of the world — and I recognize its noble results, 
 [179]
 
 THE TORCH 
 not only in philosophic thought, but in much impres' 
 sionistic art. But I have all of a poet's impatience of ap- 
 pUed science. I remember hearing a story years ago of a 
 snail who got mounted on a tortoise: "My!" he said, 
 "how the grass whistles by!" And when I hear people 
 in trolley-cars talk of riding on the wings of the lightning 
 I think of the snail. What is the speed of the lightning to 
 the swiftness of the "wings of meditation and the 
 thoughts of love " that the soul of Hamlet knew ? Is Ni- 
 agara essentially an electric-lighting plant ? I have heard 
 men of science — the same men who told me that 
 Homer never did anything of half the importance of a 
 theorem in mechanics — I have heard them sneer at the 
 old Greek idea that man was the centre of the universe 
 — the Christian idea that Milton had — the idea of 
 George Herbert : 
 
 "Man is one world. 
 And hath another to attend him: — " 
 
 this idea was man's foolish egoism. But is it a larger 
 idea to think of nature as man's Jack-at-all-trades ? 
 For me, I must say, science — applied science — de- 
 grades the conception of nature in narrowing it to the 
 grooves of material use. Yet this is, in general, our mod- 
 em idea — the prevailing idea — of nature. What poem 
 of recent years has been more acclaimed than that in 
 [180]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 which a Scotch Presbyterian engineer found in his en- 
 gine the idea of God ? It is well that he should find the 
 idea there, as it was well in the eighteenth century that 
 the clock-maker should find his idea of God as a clock- 
 maker, since that was the measure of his knowledge of 
 God; but, for all that, the narrowing influence of these 
 scientific conceptions is no less. Hence it is that we fall 
 into the commonest error of men — the error of per- 
 spective, a wrong sense of the proportion of things. Our 
 eyes are fixed on the material uses of nature, and he is 
 great among us who sets her to some new task in cheap- 
 ening steel or facilitating transportation. Now in Words- 
 worth there is nothing of this; he hardly notices, indeed, 
 what to Virgil was so important, her co-operation in 
 agriculture and the life of the farm. Wordsworth restores 
 to us the spiritual use of nature; and the spiritual use 
 that man makes of the world is the really important 
 thing. With that primitive mind of his, he realizes at 
 once the closeness with which we are cradled in nature, 
 the universality of her life round about us : 
 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On tlie cool flowery lap of earth; 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease. 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went oer the sunlit fields again: 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain." 
 [181]
 
 THE TORCH 
 For the least conscious, for the semi-vital among men, 
 nature is the blanket of God round about them; for the 
 most spiritually-minded, nature is the ante-room to His 
 presence, and our way to higher life. In poem after 
 poem Wordsworth illustrates all modes of approach by 
 which on the threshold of nature the soul grows con- 
 scious of itself; especially he shows how nature feeds the 
 mind with beauty through the senses: 
 
 "Sensations sweet 
 Felt in the blood and felt along the heart 
 And passing even into my purer mind ; '* 
 
 and thus is a chief minister to us in that building of our 
 own world — physical, emotional, moral — each one of 
 us for himself, which is the necessary task of all. It is not 
 a machine that we have to make, to hew wood and draw 
 water for us, and carry us from place to place at elec- 
 trical speed ; it is a world that we have to build for our 
 souls to live in and grow through, a world of happy 
 memory, of pure hope, of daily beauty, the world of our 
 habitual selves, and Wordsworth shows what elements 
 for such a world of the soul — for such a daily self — 
 nature provides and what is the art of its construction. 
 To Wordsworth, however, no more than to other poets 
 was nature the whole Ufe : and even to him, if you stop 
 to think about it, nature has no life of her own, but is 
 [182]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 only one mode of the soul's existence and self-con- 
 sciousness. He came back at last, as all do, to man as 
 the only subject that finally interests men. I said that in 
 nature he found only the presence, but not the voice, of 
 God. The voice of God he found in his own bosom, in 
 conscience, in duty, as you remember in his ode to duty 
 he begins: 
 
 " Stem daughter of the voice of God, 
 O duty — if thai name thou love — " 
 
 The second great root of his poetry is character — 
 moral character, and in defining and enforcing its ideals 
 none of our poets is more truly English, more truly of 
 the race to which character is always an engrossing and 
 primary interest. In the poem, called "The Happy 
 Warrior " he deUneated both the public and private as- 
 pects of character, as conceived by the English, with a 
 felicity of phrase and solidity of thought, and also with 
 eloquent distinction, such as to place the poem apart by 
 itself as unique in our literature. The better example, 
 however, for my purposes, is the portrait of a woman — 
 *' She was a phantom of delight, " — the companion-piece 
 to that I have already read — in which he begins from 
 the things of sense, and goes on, in the way I have de- 
 scribed, to the moral, and finally to the spiritual sphere. 
 Here the lyric method of poetry is again illustrated — 
 [183]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 how, starting from the external world it becomes at last 
 purely internal — which is the method, as you recognize, 
 of all poetical life in essence. Apart from abstract char- 
 acter, the sphere of human life which Wordsworth most 
 attended to was of course that humble life of the poor 
 in which he was most interested because they were near 
 to the soil, and, as he thought, nearer on that account to 
 nature's hand. It is, however, a transparent error to 
 think of dalesmen and shepherds as nearer to nature in 
 this sense; it is one of the fallacies of civilized life; for 
 Wordsworth himself is the shining example how much 
 more, in both intimacy and fullness, was his life with 
 nature than that of any other in his generation. Nature 
 is not to be thought of as a kind of agricultural school 
 education, a thing for children and dalesmen; but the 
 same rule that holds of all the gift of life holds here, that 
 the beneficence, the splendour and mystery of the gift, in- 
 creases with the power of him who receives it. Words- 
 worth was the true and faithful poet of lowly lives, and 
 as such he is endeared to humanity; he was the second 
 great democratic poet, succeeding Burns, from whom he 
 learned to be such, as he says; but he comes more di- 
 rectly and intimately into our own lives through his per- 
 sonal force — through his own experience of what nature 
 meant to him. 
 
 In what sense, then, is Wordsworth a race-exponent ? 
 [184]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 Principally and distinctively in the fact that he sums up, 
 illustrates, and amplifies the experience of the race in its 
 direct relation to nature. With that primitive mind on 
 which I have dwelt, he spanned the difference between 
 the eariiest and the latest thought of the race; to liim, in 
 certain moods, nature was animated with a life like our 
 own, he believed it enjoyed its life as we do, and this is 
 primeval belief; at the other end of progress he was as 
 pantheistic as he was animistic here, and saw nature 
 only as another form of divine being. Thus he contem- 
 plated nature almost as the savage and almost as the 
 philosopher, and commanded the whole scope of hu- 
 man thought with relation thereto. He presented nature 
 through this wide range as a discipline of the soul in its 
 development; it is, first, a discipline in beauty, in the 
 power to see and appreciate loveliness, and he especially 
 values this as a means of building up a beautiful mem- 
 ory — perhaps the chief consolation of advancing life. 
 So, in the lines to the " Highland Girl, he writes: " 
 
 " In spots like these it is we prize 
 Our memory; feel that she hath eyes:" 
 
 So he wrote again of that inward eye 
 
 " Which is the bliss of solitude" — 
 
 and illustrates it by the vision of the daffodils ; and in the 
 same spirit counsels his sister: 
 [185]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 " Thy mind 
 Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms. 
 Thy memory be as a dwelling place 
 For all sweet sounds and harmonies." 
 
 Secondly, it is a discipline of the emotions, which nature 
 evokes and exercises. The emotion is represented, nearly 
 always I think, as that reverberation of feeling which I 
 spoke of. Perhaps its most spiritualized example is in 
 Tennyson : 
 
 " Tears, idle tears: I know not wlmt they mean. 
 Tears from, the depth of some divine despair. 
 Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes 
 In looking on the happy autumn fields. 
 And thinking of the days that are no more." 
 
 The reverberation of emotion, here, is the poem. It is 
 this reverberation, truly speaking, which Wordsworth 
 interprets as the sense of the divine presence in nature : 
 
 " A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts" — 
 
 Thirdly, it is a discipline of the moral sense. Here, per- 
 haps, we have most difficulty in going along with Words- 
 worth. When he says: 
 
 " One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man. 
 Of moral evil and of good 
 Than all the sages can: " 
 [186]
 
 WOEDSYv'OHTn 
 when he writes of himself as 
 
 "Well pleased to recognize 
 In nature, and the language of the sense. 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse. 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being" — 
 
 we do not readily understand his meaning. Yet if you rec- 
 ollect his life, as his poems disclose it like a series of an- 
 ecdotes of what happened to him, you see not only how 
 often he returned from his rambles in the hills with a 
 strengthened moral mind in consequence of some lesson 
 he may have derived from some flower or cloud, which 
 spelled out for him in an image of beauty his secret 
 thought, or set up by an initial impulse that train of feel- 
 ing which resulted in meditative moral thought, but how 
 much more often he returned so strengthened by the 
 sight of some human incident, history or character which 
 to him wore the aspect of a fact of nature; for he did not 
 discriminate between nature and its operation in the 
 lives of common folk; all life is necessarily moral, and 
 nature by passing influentially into the lives of his dales- 
 men and shepherds became thereby moral in essence; 
 nature exceeded its bounds here, in the moral sphere, 
 just as in becoming divine it exceeded its bounds in the 
 spiritual sphere. Wordsworth was no pantheist; he had 
 the dews of baptism upon him and remained in the pews 
 [187]
 
 THE TORCH 
 of the establishment all his life; but, both in his panthe- 
 istic verse, and in his verse ascribing moral wisdom to 
 nature, he sincerely described certain experiences of his 
 own in which he derived religious emotion and moral 
 strengthening and enlightenment through his contact 
 with nature and the natural lives of his neighbours on the 
 moors and the hills. Emotion was always mainly fed in 
 him, imaginatively, from the forms of nature; and the 
 strengthening of emotion, and the habit of it, necessar- 
 ily builds up the moral nature of man — it is the mode 
 of its nurture. I am accustomed to say that Keats is a 
 poet to be young with, and that Wordsworth is a poet to 
 grow old with. The element of habit counts for much in 
 such communion with nature as Wordsworth illustrates ; 
 for it is not any flash of thought he brings, any revela- 
 tion of emotional power as a sudden discovery of the 
 soul; the power of nature has begun to steal upon the 
 boy, in his skating or his nutting, or his whistling to the 
 owls, and thereafter it only grows. Meditation, too, is a 
 large element in the habit Wordsworth establishes to- 
 ward nature, and memory, as we have seen, bears a part 
 in it. It follows that, not only is his power over his read- 
 ers cumulative with years, but his attitude toward na- 
 ture must have the force of habit with us before it can 
 render to us what it rendered to him. With the formation 
 of this habit comes that consoling power which lovers 
 [188]
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 of Wordsworth find in his verse, what Arnold called the 
 healing power of nature. I do not myself see any healing 
 power of nature in such instances as Michael, or Ruth, 
 of the affliction of Margaret; there are wounds which na- 
 ture cannot heal, and Wordsworth was sensible of this : 
 he did not, as Arnold says he did, look on "the cloud of 
 mortal destiny " and put it by; no English poet can. But it 
 is true that in the life-long appeal that Wordsworth's 
 verse makes especially to the sober and aging mind by 
 virtue of its equable temper, its moral strength, its 
 simple human breadth of sympathy, as well as by its su- 
 preme rendering of the spiritual uses of nature in our 
 daily lives, its tranquilhzing power is also a main source 
 of its hold on the general heart. 
 
 Such, in its phases, is the discipline of nature for the 
 soul as Wordsworth presents it. The poetic act, as I have 
 said, is the going out of the soul. If we do not fare forth 
 on any quest of the old knightly days, yet all life consists 
 in such a faring forth, in going out of ourselves into 
 some larger world, practically into a club or a church or 
 a college or a political party or a nation — in litera- 
 ture it consists in going out into the race-mind, in any 
 or all its forms, into the life of the race as an idealized 
 past, or as a part of present nature or present humanity. 
 I have illustrated, hitherto, the imaginative or spiritual 
 forms of history, and to-night the imaginative or spiritual 
 
 [189]
 
 THE TORCH 
 forms of nature, in either of which the soul may take its 
 course in the larger life, and going out of itself find the 
 freedom of the universe its own — in beauty, reason, 
 liberty, righteousness, love — the ideal elements to 
 which all paths, whether of history or nature, lead, when 
 imagination is the guide. It remains only to illustrate the 
 same general theory by the example of the poet who 
 dealt most powerfully with human life as a thing of the 
 present as Wordsworth dealt most powerfully with 
 nature in the same way. That is the next, and final, 
 lecture. 
 
 [190]
 
 The Torch 
 
 VIII
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 In lecturing the other night on Wordsworth I did not re- 
 fer to his best-known verses, the half-dozen lines which 
 have more luminousness of language, I think, than any 
 other English words: 
 
 " Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star. 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting. 
 
 And Cometh from afar; 
 Not in entire forgetfulness. 
 And not in utter nakedness. 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 From God, who is our home. " 
 
 ■* Magnificent poetry," said John Stuart Mill, "but 
 very bad philosophy. " However that may be, the lines 
 express the idea, natural to all of us, that we are in some 
 sense heirs of past glory. We are accustomed to think of 
 fieredity, as something founded as it were in past time 
 [193]
 
 THE TORCH 
 under the operation of the laws of natural selection, and 
 stored in us physically; and embryologists say that the 
 long series of physical changes, in consequence of which 
 man finally became in his body the lord of living crea- 
 tures, is reflected with great rapidity in the human em- 
 bryo, so that when the body is bom it has in fact passed 
 through the entire race-history in a physical sense. We 
 are no sooner bom, however, than we enter at once on a 
 new period of heredity, and acquire also with great ra- 
 pidity the mental and moral powers which originally 
 arose slowly in the race through long ages of growth, 
 and we become civilized men by thus appropriating 
 swiftly funds of knowledge and habits of thinking, feel- 
 ing and acting ; this is the education which makes a man 
 contemporary with his time, and perhaps it normally 
 ends in the fact, for most men, that he does what is ex- 
 pected of him, and also feels and thinks what is ex- 
 pected of him. That is the conventional, well brought 
 up, civilized man. 
 
 There is a third sphere of heredity, with which these 
 lectures have been concerned, in which it is more a mat- 
 ter of choice, of temperament and vitality, whether a 
 man will avail himself of it, and appreciate it. Men, 
 generally speaking, are but dimly aware of their powers 
 and capacities outside of the practical sphere; in our 
 growing years we require aid in discovering these ca- 
 [194]
 
 SHELLEY 
 pacities and exercising these powers; we require, as it 
 were, some introduction to ourselves, some encourage- 
 ment to believe we really are the power of man that we 
 are, and some training in finding out vitally what that 
 power of man in us is. This is our use — the earliest — 
 of literature; it interprets us to ourselves. It does this by 
 fixing our attention on some things that we might not 
 have noticed — on natural things of beauty, and by pro- 
 viding appropriate thoughts and stimulating delightful 
 emotion in respect to these things; or it helps us by 
 arousing feeling for the first time, perhaps, with regard 
 to some part of life, and by giving noble expression to 
 such new feeling or to some emotion hitherto vague and 
 indeterminate in our bosom ; and it especially aids us by 
 giving play to our forces in an imaginary world, where 
 both thought and feeling may have a career which 
 would be impossible to us in our narrow world of fact. 
 The poverty of not only the young, but of most men, in 
 spiritual experience, is probably far greater than men 
 of maturity and culture readily conceive; it is possible 
 that the forms of the church even far exceed the capacity 
 of the people to interpret them, just as Dante, or any 
 high work of imagination would. The poets interpret 
 what is forming in us, and offer new objects of contem- 
 plation and emotion in the imaginary world ; they go but 
 a little way before us, for they can be read and under- 
 [195]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 stood only by the light of our own experience; but, 
 hand by hand, one leads us to another till we are in the 
 presence of the greatest. I do not know whether Shaks- 
 pere unlocked his heart, as Wordsworth said, with the 
 key of the sonnet; but I know hterature is the key which 
 unlocks our own bosoms to ourselves ; though, in con- 
 sequence of that respect for the individual life of the 
 soul, which is one of the mysterious marks of man's 
 nature, no hand but our own can turn the lock in its 
 wards. What I described the other night as the poetic 
 act — the going forth of the soul — must be the act of 
 the man himself; but it is through literature that the 
 paths make out — the highways trodden by many feet. 
 As you go out on these great highways of the soul, 
 in Dante, in Shakspere, in Goethe, a strange thing will 
 happen to you: it will seem, in the variety of new ideas, 
 in the flood of new feeling arising in you, that you are 
 changed within, that you have found almost a new self. 
 I remember once when I was studying the now lost art 
 of wood-engraving, looking as I was at hundreds of 
 woodcuts constantly, it happened that when I went out 
 to walk, I saw woodcuts in the landscape; my eye hav- 
 ing grown accustomed to certain line and form-arrange- 
 ments of an artistic sort, naturally picked out of the gen- 
 eral landscape such arrangements, as you make pic- 
 tures in the fire; that is to say, my eye, dwelling on this 
 [196]
 
 SHELLEY 
 feature and neglecting that, composed the landscape, 
 made a picture of it. Now that is the constant act of life. 
 The human soul finds the world a heterogeneous mass 
 of impressions; and it attends to certain things, and 
 neglects others, and composes its picture of life that 
 way; prefers certain memories, certain desires, and so 
 builds its own world, as I have constantly said. It 
 applies this method of composition even to itself. You 
 read Byron, and before you know it you see 
 yourself in Byron's ways, you pick out and favour 
 your Byronic traits, you find you are Byron in your 
 self-portrait; or you read Thackeray and find yourself 
 in "Arthur Pendennis; " or, on the broader scale, you 
 read Greek a good deal, Greek history and art as well 
 as literature, and you find you see the world as a Greek 
 world — or, again, as a French world, as the case 
 may be. The change is a great one, amounting almost to 
 the discovery of a new world and yourself a new self in it. 
 So, in Goethe's life, the Italian journey and the study of 
 the antique made a new and greater Goethe of him. So 
 the mind of Milton, originally English, was Hebraized, 
 Hellenized and Italianized. The discovery of the new 
 self may be often repeated, and each new self enters into 
 and blends with the old selves, and makes your personal- 
 ity, or, at least, gives form to it. So the young Roman 
 poet was Homer and Lucretius and the Alexandrians, 
 [197]
 
 THE TORCH 
 and is Virgil; so the young Italian was Virgil, and is 
 Dante; so the young Englishman was Theocritus, was 
 Catallus, was Keats, and is Tennyson. What is involved, 
 you see, is a kind of mental embryology; just as the phy- 
 sical man sums up rapidly the age-long change from the 
 lowest to the highest creature-life, just as the convention- 
 al man sums up in the same way the ages from barbar- 
 ism to civilization and spans them in his education, so 
 here the soul in its highest life — that free soul that I 
 have spoken of — sums up and spans the difference be- 
 tween the ordinary man and the highest culture the race 
 has ever known, and now holds in his own spirit that ac- 
 cumulation, that power of man, which (by heredity en- 
 tered into of his own choice) makes him an heir of past 
 gloiy — for the splendour, the leading light, the birth- 
 light of which Wordsworth's verse is none too extrava- 
 gant an expression. 
 
 Literature, then, is the key to your own hearts; and 
 going out with the poets you slowly or swiftly evolve new 
 life after new life, and enter partially or fully on that 
 race-inheritance which is not the less real and sure be- 
 cause you must reach out your hand and take it instead 
 of having it stored in your nerves and senses at birth; 
 predispositions to appropriate it are stored even there, 
 but it is a thing of the spirit and must be gathered by the 
 spirit itself. You will, perhaps, pardon one word of 
 [198]
 
 SHELLEY 
 warning. This process that I have described is a vital 
 process, a thing of hfe, and it must be real. There is al- 
 ways at work that selective principle by virtue of which 
 you compose life in the ways most natural to you. It may 
 well happen that some great author does not appeal to 
 you, and the reason is that you have not in yourself the 
 experience to read him by; moreover, being a process of 
 life, this process is one of joy, and if any author, no matter 
 how great, does not give you pleasure, the process is not 
 taking place. Therefore, do not read books that, after a 
 fair trial, give no pleasure; do not read books that are 
 too old, too far in advance of you. If they are really great, 
 they will come in time; but if, for example, Dante's 
 " Inferno " is a weary place to your feet and your soul 
 feels its thousand contaminations, do not stay in such a 
 place; and so of all other books with names of awe. Hon- 
 esty is nowhere more essential than in literary study; 
 hypocrisy, there, may have terrible penalties, not merely 
 in foolishness, but in misfortune; and to lie to oneself 
 about oneself is the most fatal lie. The stages of life 
 must be taken in their order; but finally you will dis- 
 cover the blessed fact that the world of literature is one 
 of diminishing books — since the greater are found to 
 contain the less, for which reason time itself sifts the 
 relics of the past and leaves at last only a Homer for 
 centuries of early Greece, a Dante for his entire age, a 
 [199]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 Milton for a whole system of thought. To understand 
 and appreciate such great writers is the goal; but the 
 way is by making honest use of the authors that appeal 
 to us in the most living ways. The process that I have 
 described is the one by which all men advance and come 
 into their own — men of genius no less than others : for I 
 cannot too often repeat the fundamental truth that the 
 nature and power of the soul, its habits, its laws and 
 growth, are the same in all men; it sometimes happens 
 that a man who goes through the process of this high 
 spiritual life, becoming more and more deeply, vari- 
 ously and potently human, developing this power of 
 man in him, has also a passion for accomplishment — 
 and that is one of the marks of a man of genius. Shelley 
 was such a man; and I desire to present him, as a man 
 with a passion for accomplishment, but also as an extra- 
 ordinarily good illustration of the mode in which a man, 
 through literature, evolves the highest self of which 
 mankind is capable, summing up in his own soul the 
 final results and forward hopes of the race. 
 
 At the outset let me guard against a common mis- 
 conception. Shelley is too often thought of as having 
 something effeminate in his nature. This is due, in great 
 part, to his portrait which with all its beauty, gives an 
 impression of softness, dreaminess and languour; in it 
 there is little characteristically masculine. It is also due, 
 [200]
 
 SHELLEY 
 in some measure, to the preponderance of feeling over 
 thought in his verse, of imagery over idea, and in general 
 of atmosphere over form; his is what we may call a 
 colour-mind. The misconception of Shelley to which I 
 refer is most boldly stated by Matthew Arnold, who 
 called him an "ineffectual angel beating his beautiful 
 wings in the void. " Now nothing could be said of Shel- 
 ley that is more wrong than that. Shelley was a high- 
 spirited, imaginative child; he was a resolute Eton boy 
 — who would not fag, you remember, and being always 
 persistent in rebellion, carried his point; he rode, and 
 shot the covers in his younger days, and was a good 
 pistol-shot, all his life delighting in the practice. He was a 
 very practical man, in business affairs, after he came of 
 age and had learned something of human nature. He 
 was the only man who could handle Byron with tact and 
 reason. He made a very good will. In fact, his practical 
 instinct developed equally with his other qualities. 
 Neither was he a moping poet. He had fits of high 
 spirits — of gaiety; he used habitually to sing to him- 
 self going about the house. As boy and man, both, he 
 was typically English, aristocratically gentle in all his 
 ways and behaviour, only nervous, impulsive, strong, 
 wilful, quick to see, quick to respond — a very deter- 
 mined and active person; and, in fact, manly to the full 
 limit of Enghsh manhood. Perhaps there is always some- 
 [201 ]
 
 THE TORCH 
 thing feminine in poetic beauty — the expression that 
 we see typically in the pictures of St. John the Beloved ; 
 but, apart from that light on his face and that grace in 
 all his ways, Shelley was as manly a man as they ever 
 make in England. 
 
 This being premised, then, one reason why Shelley is 
 so good an illustration of the development of a modern 
 soul is the fact that the record with respect to him is so 
 complete. No human life, with the exception possibly of 
 Lincoln's, has been so entirely exposed to our knowl- 
 edge, from his earliest days: it seems as if nothing of 
 him could ever die, no matter how slight, boyish and 
 trivial it might be. Thus it comes about that we see his 
 forming mind in its first crudities. He was an eager boy, 
 alive, awake, interested, voracious, pressing against the 
 barrier of life for his career. He began with a taste for 
 the most extravagant, melodramatic romance — what 
 was then known as the German tale of wonder, in which 
 the young Sir Walter Scott had also taken much in- 
 terest; it was what we should describe as a dime-novel 
 taste, except that its characters were monks and nuns 
 and alchemists and wandering Jews; Shelley himself 
 wrote two romances and many short and one long poem 
 of this sort by the time he was sixteen years old, and 
 published them moreover. He was always impatient, 
 quick to act, to be doing something. His imagination 
 [202]
 
 SHELLEY 
 was first fed by this sensationalism, and it was also scien- 
 tifically excited by the spectacular side of chemical ex- 
 periments ; and then he began to think — at first it was 
 politics — such things as the freedom of the press, the 
 rights of Catholics, reform; or it was morals — such 
 things as property, marriage; or it was metaphysics — 
 such things as Locke's sensational philosophy, and the 
 ideas of the age. Radical ideas in all their imperfection 
 of newness filled his mind, reform took hold of him. He 
 went to Ireland to make speeches, and made them, dis- 
 tributed tracts, subscribed to funds, helped men who 
 were prosecuted, especially editors, got himself put 
 under observation as a dangerous character; and not yet 
 twenty-one years old. 
 
 There was then little sign of poetic genius in him; he 
 had always written verses, of course, but there is no line 
 of his early writing that indicates any talent even for 
 good verse. But his mind had dipped in life, in thought, 
 in action, and was impregnated with all kinds of power; 
 especially his mind had dipped in ideas — the idea of 
 the perfectibility of mankind, of experimental method in 
 science, of immediate social change in England in such 
 fundamental things as wealth and marriage. He was 
 always a person of convictions rather than opinions ; he 
 wanted to live his thoughts, and together with his great 
 causes he carried about a full assortment of minor mat- 
 [203]
 
 THE TORCH 
 ters, such as vegetarianism, for example. In a word, he 
 began as a Reformer, and he was as complete an in- 
 stance of the type as ever walked even these streets of 
 Boston. But he found language more generally useful 
 than action in standing forth for his ideas; and great 
 command of language having already accrued to him 
 through the incessant hammering of his brains on these 
 ideas, making them malleable and portable and efficient 
 for human use, there came to him also that intenser 
 power of language, that passion of expression which finds 
 its element in noble cadences and vital images of poetry 
 as naturally as a bird flies in the air. Yet the passage 
 from the power of prose to the power of poetry in 
 Shelley is not a very marked advance. What he dis- 
 covered, in writing " Queen Mab, " his first real poem, 
 was the opportunity that poetry gives for unfolding 
 a great deal of matter with logical clearness and 
 eloquent effect, with immense concentration and in- 
 tensity; what he discovered was the economy of 
 poetry, the economy, that is, of art, as a mode of ex- 
 pression; and, in fact, when he had written "Queen 
 Mab " he found — to use the words I have habitually 
 employed — that in its few hundred lines he had emp- 
 tied his mind; he had done what genius always does. 
 The poem, however, was a Reformer's poem; it con- 
 tained a striking rendering of the image of the starry 
 [204]
 
 SHELLEY 
 universe, an account of the history of man's progress, 
 and some delicate poetical machinery in the mere set- 
 ting of the piece. Its true subject was social reform. 
 Five years later he emptied his mind a second time in 
 the poem called " The Revolt of Islam " ; in the interval 
 he had withdrawn more from individual enterprise and 
 special causes in the contemporary world, and had come 
 to realize the power of literature, as greater than any he 
 he could exercise otherwise, in the bringing of a better 
 world on earth; but he still held to political and social 
 reform, and wrote, under the example and in the stanza 
 of Spenser, this allegorical tale of the Revolution and the 
 successful reaction against it then displayed in Europe; 
 the poem remains an inferior poem, in consequence of its 
 material and method; but it contained all that was in 
 Shelley's mind at the time, and was written in the model 
 and method of what was then to him the highest art. 
 Five years again went by, and he again emptied his 
 mind in the " Prometheus Unbound. " 
 
 In the interval great changes had taken place in him. 
 He was still further removed from practical measures of 
 reform — not that he ever lost interest in them — but 
 practical reform requires a machinery that he could not 
 provide; and he now more fully recognized the power of 
 ideas, of eloquence to stir men's hearts, of poetry to em- 
 body images of the ideal with mastering force; and es- 
 [205]
 
 THE TORCH 
 pecially he recognized the fact that practical reform is a 
 thing that from moment to moment results from ab- 
 stract principles which have an eternal being. More- 
 over, he had fallen in with Greek, in this interval, with 
 Greek choral poetry on the one hand, and with Greek 
 Platonic philosophy on the other. His mind was Hellen- 
 ized; like a dark cloud, his soul approached the dark 
 clouds of iEschylus and Plato ; and the contact was an 
 electrical discharge of power : the flash of that discharge 
 was the " Prometheus Unbound." Furthermore, Shelley's 
 poetical faculty had developed marvellous brilliancy, sen- 
 sitiveness, colour, atmosphere, sublimity of form, suf- 
 fusion of beauty, and, all this, with a lyrical volume, in- 
 tensity and penetration of tone, which his earlier verse 
 had not shown. He had become, under the play of life 
 upon him, a poet, so throbbing with the high life of the 
 soul that he seemed like an imprisoned spirit, with 
 the voice of the spirit, calling to men like deep unto deep; 
 and the world seemed to lie before him transfigured, 
 wearing a garment of outward beauty like a new morn- 
 ing, and, in the human breast clothed with freedom, 
 nobility, hope, such as belongs to the forms of millennial 
 days. Shelley had gathered into his heart the power of 
 man that I have been speaking of, and stands forth as its 
 transcendent example in his age. He had dropped from 
 him, like hour-glass sand, the specific things of earlier 
 
 [206]
 
 SHELLEY 
 days, things of the free press, of CathoHc rights, of put- 
 ting reform to the vote, of national association, of 
 Welsh embankments — all things of detail ; and also 
 all lesser principles of property or marriage laws; he 
 had reached the fountains of all these in the single prin- 
 ciple of the love of man for man, which alone he was 
 now interested to preach and spread. He had let go, 
 too, of all revolutionary violence, as anything more than 
 a secondary means of reform, and he clung to the prin- 
 ciple of patience, of forgiveness, of non-resistance, as 
 the appointed means of triumph, as I have already il- 
 lustrated in the treating of " Prometheus". " I have, " 
 he wrote, in his preface," a passion for reforming the 
 world": it was his fundamental energy of life; but re- 
 form for him was not now to be discriminated from the 
 preaching of Christ's Gospel. The boy who had begun 
 with a dime-novel taste had come into such etherialized 
 powers of imagination that the poem of " Epipsychid- 
 ion " is, perhaps, the extreme instance of ideal purity in 
 English; the boy who had begun with Locke's sensa- 
 tionalism had come to be the most Platonic man of his 
 age in his spirituality: the boy who had begun with an 
 indignant challenge to orthodoxy had come to be the 
 voice of Christianity itself in its highest forms of moral 
 command ; the boy, who began as the practical reformer 
 had to come to be the poet, smiting the source of all re- 
 [207]
 
 THE TORCH 
 from in the spirit itself, and using all his powers of 
 thought, imagination, learning, and all the means of art, 
 to set forth the ideals of the spirit in their eternal forms. 
 He had passed through politics, philosophy, religion — 
 through English and French and Greek ideas — 
 through Italian and Spanish imaginative art, and he now 
 summed in himself that power of man which he had 
 lived through in others — it had become his, it had 
 become himself. In the whole course of this development 
 no trait is more important to observe, than his marvel- 
 lous intellectual honesty; he took only what at any mo- 
 ment was capable of living in him ; he gave it free course 
 in his life, outlived it, transmigrated from it, and came to 
 the next stage of higher life, and so won on to the end. 
 
 The development of Shelley was as rapid as it was 
 complete; he was not yet thirty years old when he had 
 become the centre of human power that he was, a centre 
 so mighty that it would be two generations before its 
 influence in the world, and its comparative brilliancy 
 among English poets, could begin to be measured. His 
 genius, we now see, was that of a double personality; he 
 had, so to speak, two selves. First, and primary in him 
 was his social self, his public self, that by which he was 
 a part of mankind, was interested in man, felt for man, 
 suffered in man's general wretchedness in Europe, 
 brooded over his destiny, formulated principles for his 
 [208]
 
 SHELLEY 
 regeneration, and lived in the hopes, the faith, the strug- 
 gle of mankind. The greater works of his mind, which he 
 elaborated with most conscious aim to serve the world, 
 were the ones I have named, "Queen Mab," "The Re- 
 volt of Islam " and " Prometheus Unbound, " with the 
 later, almost episodical choric drama, called " Hellas," 
 whose subject was the Greek Revolution then going on : 
 all these were the expression of his social self. In early 
 life, so absorbed was he in politics, morals, and phil- 
 osophy, that he hardly realized he had any life except in 
 these; but, as years came on him with their load, he de- 
 veloped a personal self, private and individual, the Shel- 
 ley who was alone in the world, on whom fell the burden 
 of discouragement, the penalty of error, the blows of 
 fortune and circumstance, the wounds of the heart; and it 
 was in this self that his poetic power was jBrst put forth ; 
 his sensitiveness, his response to nature, his lyrical en- 
 thusiasm, his aspiration, his melancholy; and he carried 
 over these powers to the expression of his social self, as 
 he carried over all his faculties and resources to that 
 cause. But the home of his poetic genius was in his per- 
 sonal self; and the poems by which he is known as an 
 artist, as a mere human spirit without reference to any 
 special application of its life-work, are those in which the 
 personal self is directly and spontaneously expressed, the 
 " Alastor" being the first, and after it the " Adonais " 
 [209]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 and the " Epipsychidion " ; and in addition to these 
 longer pieces, the short lyrics, odes and stanzas, and the 
 fragments, all of which are effusions, overflowings of his 
 own heart. If the sense of his greatness is most supported 
 by the larger creative works of his imagination, he is most 
 endeared to men by these little poems of love and sor- 
 row, of affection, of joy in nature, and of human regret. 
 The most poignant of them are those in which the aspi- 
 ration is itself a lament — and in them is the intimacy of 
 the poet's heart. It is impossible to close one's eyes to the 
 fact that Shelley, wholly unappreciated as he was by the 
 public, or in private either for that matter, was deeply 
 dejected in his last years; the personal, the artistic self, 
 was always a relatively increasing part of his life, and he 
 occasionally attempted great works, like the " Cenci " or 
 " Charles II, " which had no social significance. Had he 
 lived, it can hardly be doubted he would have become 
 more purely an artist, a creative poet, conceiving the 
 cause of mankind more and more largely as a spiritual 
 rather than an institutional cause, a cause of the re- 
 birth of the soul itself rather than of the re-birth of na- 
 tions. In his personal self one principle reigned supreme 
 — the idea of love; love guided all his actions, and was 
 the impulse of his being — love in all its forms, personal, 
 friendly, humane; by that selective principle that I spoke 
 of he saw life as a form of love. It is here that the true 
 [210]
 
 SHELLEY 
 contact occurs between his personal and his social self, 
 for he made love — the love of man for man — the 
 principle of society regenerated as he pictured it in the 
 "Prometheus." And again, he made love, in the "Ad- 
 onais " the principle of Divine being — that Power, 
 
 " Which wields the world with never-wearied love. 
 Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above." 
 
 Wordsworth found the presence of God in 
 
 " The light of setting suns. 
 And the round ocean and the living air" — 
 
 primarily as something external; Shelley found it pri- 
 marily as something known most intimately and clearly 
 in his own heart. 
 
 A poet of really high rank is seldom a very simple 
 being; he is made up of many elements, some one of 
 which usually has the power of genius, and when that is 
 at work in him, he is great. In Shelley there are at least 
 three such elements; he was a poet of nature, and es- 
 pecially he had the power to vivify nature almost as the 
 Greek did, to give it new mythological being, as in " The 
 Cloud." He was also a poet of man — the thought of 
 man was like a flame in his bosom. And he was a poet of 
 his own heart, putting his own private life into song. A 
 poet is greatest when he can bring all his powers to bear 
 [211]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 in one act — then he gives all of himself at once. Shel- 
 ley most nearly did this, I think, in the " Ode to the West 
 Wind. " The poem arises out of nature, in the triple as- 
 pect of earth, air and ocean, held in artistic unity by the 
 west wind blowing through them; and it becomes at its 
 climax a poem of the hopes of mankind, and of Shelley 
 himself as the centre of them, hke a priest. So he invokes 
 the West Wind to which by his act he has given an imag- 
 inative being as if it were the spirit of the whole visible 
 world of air, earth and sea: 
 
 " Be thou, spirit fierce. 
 My spirit, — Be thou me, impetvmis one! 
 Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
 Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! 
 And, by the incantation of this verse. 
 Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth. 
 Ashes and sparks, — my words among mankind." 
 
 " My words among mankind. " That is not the voice of 
 an ineffectual angel. It is the rallying cry of a great and 
 gallant soul on the field of our conflict. When you read 
 the " Ode to the West Wind," see in it the great ele- 
 ments of nature grandly presented and the cause of 
 mankind in its large passion, and the spirit of Shelley 
 like the creative plastic stress itself that 
 
 " Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there 
 All new successions to the form they wear." 
 [212]
 
 SHELLEY 
 Such are some of the ways in which Shelley entered into 
 the life of men as Wordsworth entered into the life of na- 
 ture, and leads the way for those who have hearts to 
 follow. Dip in life, as he did, with honesty, with enthusi- 
 asm, with faith, and whatever be the starting point at 
 last you emerge on those craggy uplands of abstract and 
 austere beauty and reason and righteousness and Hberty 
 and love — 
 
 '^ Whereto our God himself is sun and moon;" — 
 
 the fountain-heads whence flow all the streams of the 
 ordered life of the vale. I have illustrated this process of 
 life by the idea of the eye composing a picture; so the 
 soul selects its most cherished desires and memories, 
 and comes to be the soul of an artist, or a soldier, or an 
 engineer, as the case may be. Let me vary the illustra- 
 tion, and say that our problem is, in the presence of the 
 world before us lying dull and crude and meaningless at 
 first, to charge certain things in it with our own thought 
 and feeling, and so to give them meaning; thus our fa- 
 miliar rooms of the house, and the fields round about it, 
 for example, gain a power and meaning which is for us 
 only; the stranger does not feel the welcome that the 
 trees of the dooryard give to him who was bom under 
 them. But we find, as our minds go out into life, things 
 already charged with emotion and thought, like the flag 
 [213]
 
 THE TORCH 
 or the cross ; and when the flag is brought to our lips and 
 the cross to our breast, we feel the stored emotion of the 
 nation's life, the stored emotion of Christian sorrow, in 
 the very touch of the symbol ; life — the life of the world 
 pours into us with power. And we find, again, ideas that 
 are similarly already clothed with might — charged with 
 the hearts of whole nations that have prayed for them, 
 with precious lives that have died for them : 
 
 "Names are there, nature's sacred watchwords" — 
 
 liberty, truth, justice; and, if we possess our souls of 
 them, the power of man flows into us as if we held elec- 
 tric handles in our palms; beaded on the poet's verse, 
 dropt from the lips of some rapt orator, they thrill us — 
 and the instancy, the fervour, the inspired power that 
 then wakes along our nerves is, we feel, the most au- 
 thentic sign that we are immortal spirits. And men 
 there are, who seem like nuclei and central ganglions of 
 these ideas, whose personality is so charged with their 
 power that we idolize and almost worship them — what 
 we call hero-worship. Such a man Shelley was, and is, 
 to me. I remember as it were yesterday, when I was a 
 freshman at Harvard, the very hour in that cold library 
 when my hand first closed round the precious volume; 
 and to this day the fragrant beauty of that blossomed 
 [214]
 
 SHELLEY 
 
 May is as the birth of a new hfe; and when I read Words- 
 worth's ode, — 
 
 " Not in entire forgetfulness 
 And not in utter nakedness. 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come" — ■ 
 
 I think of these first days with Shelley. To others it is 
 some other book, some other man — Carlyle, Emer- 
 son, Goethe — whoever it may be : for the selective 
 principle always operates to bring a man to his own ; but 
 in whatever way it comes about, the seeking mind gets 
 connected with these men, books, ideas, symbols, 
 through which it receives the stored race-force of man- 
 kind; so each of us, passing through the forms of de- 
 veloping life, receives the revelation of the world and of 
 himself, grasps the world and is able to express himself 
 through it, to utter his nature, not in language, but in 
 being, in idea and emotion, and becomes more and 
 more completely man, working toward that consumma- 
 tion, which I began by placing before you, of the time 
 when the best that has anywhere been in the world shall 
 be the portion of every man born into it. 
 
 I must crave your patience for yet a final thought, 
 which, though it may be hard to realize, yet, if it be re- 
 alized only at moments, sheds light upon our days. Of 
 all the webs of illusion in which our mortality is en- 
 
 [215]
 
 THE TORCH 
 
 meshed, time is the greatest illusion. This race-store, 
 our inheritance, of which I have been speaking, which 
 vitalized in our lives is race-power. Is not a dead thing, a 
 thing of the past; all that it has of life with us is living. 
 Plato Is not a thing of the past, twenty centuries ago; 
 but a mood, a spirit, an approach to supreme beauty, by 
 the pathway of human love; Spenser's "Red Cross 
 Knight " is not an Elizabethan legend, but the image of 
 the Christian life to-day; and the hopes of man were not 
 burnt away in the fire that consumed Shelley's mortal 
 remains by the bright Mediterranean waves, nor do they 
 sleep with his ashes by the Roman wall; they live in us. I 
 have made much of the idea that all history is at last ab- 
 sorbed in Imagination, and takes the form of the ideal in 
 literature; it is a present ideal. We dip in life, as Shelley 
 did, and we put on in our own personality these forms of 
 which I have been speaking all along — forms of liberty, 
 forms of beauty, forms of reason — of righteousness, of 
 kindliness, of love, of courtesy, of charity, of joy in na- 
 ture, of approach to God — and these forms being pres- 
 sent with us, eternity is with us; they have been shaped 
 in past ages by the chosen among men — by poets, by 
 saints, by dreamers — by Plato, by Virgil, and Dante, 
 by Shakspere and Goethe, who live through them In us ; 
 except in so far as they so live in us, they are dust and 
 ashes ! Babylon is not more a grave. But these ideal 
 [216 J
 
 SHELLEY 
 forms of thought and emotion, charged with the Hfe of 
 the human spirit through ages, are here and now, a 
 part of present hfe, of our hves, as our hves take on these 
 forms ; casting their shadows on time, they raise us, as by 
 the hands of angels, up the paths of being — we are re- 
 leased from the temporal, we lay hold on eternity, and 
 entering on our inheritance as heirs of man's past glory, 
 we begin to lead that life of the free soul among the things 
 of the spirit, which is the climax of man's race-life and 
 the culmination of the soul's long progress through 
 time. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [217]
 
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