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 CORRECTED IMPRESSIONS 
 
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 Corrected Impressions 
 
 ESSAYS ON VICTORIAN WRITERS 
 
 BY 
 
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 LONDON 
 
 WILLIAM HEINE MANN 
 
 1895 
 
 4-l'S'6L
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 HTHESE Critical Notes differ a little in 
 scheme and aim from anything that 
 their writer has hitherto attempted. The shape 
 r^ tvhich they take was partly suggested, as is 
 r- observed in one of them, by some remarks of 
 Mr. A. J. Balfour's at the Literary Fund Dinner 
 of 1893, in London. It occurred to me then 
 *? that a kind of foreshortened review of the im- 
 t pressions, and the corrections of them, which 
 the great Victorian writers had produced or 
 undergone in my own case during the last thirty 
 years might not be an absolutely uninteresting 
 sample of " how it has struck a contemporary." 
 It was not practically possible to execute this
 
 iv Preface. 
 
 without some reference to the progress of gen- 
 eral as well as of individual opinion. But care 
 has been taken to maintain as far as possible 
 the genuineness of the individual impression, 
 past as well as present. To do this it was neces- 
 sary rather to give heads of a study of the 
 authors than the completed study itself, and 
 rather to say too little than to say too much ; 
 but at the same time not to refrain from a 
 certain amount of personal detail. Some of 
 the earlier papers have appeared in the Indian 
 Daily News, and the four last in the New 
 York Critic; but none have been printed in 
 
 England. 
 
 G. S.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 " I. Thackeray . i 
 
 '- II. Thackeray {concluded) ii 
 
 ''III. Tennyson 21 
 
 / IV. Tennyson {concluded) 31 
 
 ''V. Carlyle 41 
 
 ^VI. Carlyle {concluded) , 50 
 
 VII. Mr. Swinburne 60 
 
 VIII. Mr. Swinburne (6W«t/«rtfe^/) . .• . . 70 
 
 IX. Macaulay 79 
 
 X. Macaulay (concluded) 88 
 
 XI. Browning 98 
 
 ^ XII. Browning {concluded) .107 
 
 ^XIII. Dickens . 117 
 
 " XIV. Dickens {concluded) 127 
 
 XV. Matthew Arnold ...... 138 
 
 XVI. Matthew Arnold {concluded) . . . 148 
 
 /
 
 VI 
 
 Contents. 
 
 ; PAGE 
 
 « i' 
 
 ' XVII. Three Mid-Century Novelists - . 157 
 
 y XVIII. Three Mid-Century Novelists icon- 
 eluded) 168 
 
 XIX. Mr. William Morris 178 
 
 XX. Mr. William Morris {concluded) . . i88 
 
 XXI. Mr. Ruskin 198 
 
 XXII. Mr. Ruskin (concluded) 209
 
 CORRECTED IMPRESSIONS 
 
 I. 
 
 THACKERAY. 
 
 TN a certain now rather antiquated school of 
 theology, the word "use" was employed 
 with a special application, denoting the adjust- 
 ment of a given text, fact, or other thing to 
 beneficent moral purposes. I like to make a 
 use of critical humility out of the fact that there 
 was a time when I did not like Thackeray. It 
 was a very short time in itself, and it was a very 
 long time ago ; but from about, so far as I can 
 remember, my fifteenth year to my seventeenth, 
 it existed. The circumstances were extenuat- 
 ing. It so happened that, almost ever since I 
 could read, I had been brought up on Dickens, 
 and had known little or nothing of his great 
 rival in the English fiction of the middle of the 
 century, except that he was his rival I believe
 
 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 the first thing that I ever read of Mr. Thackeray's 
 was " Philip," as it came out in the Cornhill ; 
 the next, " Vanity Fair." Neither, it will proba- 
 bly be admitted, was the best possible introduc- 
 tion to the subject for a green taste. I now 
 think considerably better of "Philip" than 
 some professed Thackerayans do ; but I should 
 hardly quarrel very fiercely with anybody who 
 failed to relish it. And I do not think that 
 any boy — at least any boy who is genuine, 
 and has not prematurely learnt to feign liking 
 for what he thinks he ought to like — can 
 really enjoy " Vanity Fair." The full beauty 
 of Becky (I can honestly say that I always 
 saw some of it) is necessarily hidden from 
 him ; he cannot taste the majesty of the 
 crowning scene with Lord Steyne, or the even 
 finer, though less dramatic, negotiations which 
 avert the duel ; his knowledge of life is insuffi- 
 cient to allow him to detect the magnificent 
 thoroughness and the more magnificent irony 
 of the general treatment. On the other hand, 
 he is sure, if he is good for anything, to be 
 disgusted with the namby-pambyness of Amelia,
 
 Thackeray. 3 
 
 with the chuckle-headed goodness of Dobbin, 
 with the vicious nincompoopery and the selfish- 
 ness of George Osborne. For these are things 
 which, though experience may lead to the re- 
 tractation of an opinion that any of the three is 
 unnatural, leave on some tolerably mature judg- 
 ments the impression that they are one-sided 
 and out of composition, if not of drawing. 
 
 But this could not last long: after a few 
 months, " Pendennis " came in my way. I took 
 it, I remember very well after thirty years, out 
 of a certain school library, and I read it, or 
 began to read it (an exceedingly reprehensible 
 practice) on my way home, which lay through 
 Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. If any 
 of the persons into whose arms I walked are 
 still alive, I humbly ask their pardon. Even if 
 they had not now mostly been changed long 
 ago for others, it would be superfluous to 
 extend forgiveness to the Park seats which 
 avenged these innocents on my own knees. It 
 may to some people seem odd, and to others 
 shocking, that "The Newcomes" threw me at 
 first rather back. It had its revenge later,
 
 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 though. To this day I confess that I think 
 Ethel rather shadowy, and not wholly attractive ; 
 Clive something of what his own day would 
 have called a young tiger; and the Colonel him- 
 self, despite his angelic quaUties and immortal 
 end, now and then (it is dreadful, but it must 
 be said) a very little silly. But " Esmond " 
 and "The Virginians" together, with their in- 
 comparable picture of Beatrix, — the only true 
 picture of a woman conceived in nature and 
 sublimed to the seventh heaven by art, in 
 youth and age alike, that prose fiction con- 
 tains, — made me live Mr. Thackeray's Pro- 
 testant to be. All my old prejudices vanished. 
 " The wreck was total," as a celebrated epitaph 
 of the last century has it. ** There was no mis- 
 take about this fellow," to alter slightly a great 
 phrase in one of the novelist's own very best 
 scenes. 
 
 But when you have thus " got salvation " in 
 matters literary, you do not, if the gods have 
 made you at all critical, proceed to mere indis- 
 criminate adoring. What you do proceed to 
 is reading, at first indiscriminate, then tolerably
 
 Thackeray. 5 
 
 discriminating, and to the enjoyment of analys- 
 ing excellence, never without the possibility of 
 admitting defect, but with a sure consciousness 
 that the man you study is right in the main, 
 and that it will be only in a way for his greater 
 glory if you find out where and wherefore he 
 is sometimes wrong. I shall endeavour to set 
 out the chief results of thirty years' reading 
 and rereading of the books of Thackeray in this 
 spirit, only mentioning further, in the same 
 personal key, that, if there is one scene which 
 finally made me his, it is that — slightly done in 
 appearance, and left to produce its own effect, 
 with the carelessness of supremacy — in which 
 Harry Warrington fails to recognise the portrait 
 of Beatrix. If it is not necessary to have read 
 most of the good novels, I would fain persuade 
 myself that it is not unhelpful to have read vast 
 numbers of the bad, in order to see the gran- 
 deur of this. America, Russia, France (putting 
 Flaubert out of the question), for thirty years 
 and more, have been trying to beat Thackeray's 
 record in this particular field, and they have 
 never come anywhere near him.
 
 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 To the corrupted modern man, what other 
 people say of his subject always has a good 
 deal to do with his impressions of it, though, ii 
 he be critically given, he can generally get rid 
 of any bad effect thereof. He takes account 
 of the sayings, is rather grateful for them, owes 
 to them sometimes certain initial points of view 
 and lines of approach, but is not, strictly speak- 
 ing, much biassed by them. What other people 
 have said about Thackeray has gone through 
 some three or four stages. There was the first, 
 in which they gradually had him forced on their 
 notice, as a man who wrote a good deal for the 
 papers. Some, as we learn from the " Life of 
 Lever," thought he wrote for too many papers, 
 and was not careful enough in his selection of 
 those organs. Others, as we learn from a note 
 to Lockhart's article on " Hook," and those the 
 acutest judges of the day, thought him a very 
 remarkable person indeed. He had almost 
 reached the last decade of his too short life 
 before this opinion, or conflict of opinion, 
 changed, — though it must always be remem- 
 bered that these stages of critical opinion do not
 
 Thackeray. 7 
 
 end each as the other begins, but overlap and 
 interpenetrate one another. He was now recog- 
 nised as one of the greatest writers and one 
 of the greatest novelists of England; he had 
 an ever wider and stronger influence on the 
 coming generation of novelists and of writers ; 
 but it was said that he was dreadfully cynical. 
 This stage too passed, at least as a prevailing 
 and recognised stage, and he entered (as most 
 men do who die comparatively young) by the 
 gates of death into something like a full enjoy- 
 ment of the fame which was his due. Of late 
 years, I am told, and I can partly perceive evi- 
 dences of it, he has entered yet another phase. 
 His manner, his language, his atmosphere of so- 
 ciety, are getting a little antiquated for younger 
 readers. Some critics have persuaded them- 
 selves that they see more points in the human 
 soul than he did ; his analysis is not quite 
 thorough-going enough, and so forth. Augustus 
 Z. from New York, and M. Jules from Paris 
 (or Quimper), and Count Caviarovitch from 
 Ostrolenko, have outstripped Mr. William Make- 
 peace. He is a little rococo.
 
 8 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 Let us register these things, and all things. 
 Perhaps, though it may seem an undue mag- 
 nification of the critical office, it is never im* 
 possible for a competent critic to disentangle 
 himself almost wholly from prejudices of all 
 kinds, and to see his subjects, whether they be 
 subjects two thousand years old, or subjects 
 of yesterday, or subjects of to-day, in a fairly 
 white light. The worst of it is that it is so very 
 difficult to decide what other persons will agree 
 to regard as a white light. If their own eye- 
 pieces are not quite achromatic, the whitest light 
 will seem to them coloured, and they will com- 
 plain to that effect. But this difficulty has to 
 be faced. 
 
 Of few writers can it be said with so much 
 confidence as of Thackeray, that he is all of a 
 piece. He wrote, as has been observed, at one 
 time of his life rather miscellaneously, and a 
 great deal of his miscellaneous writing has been 
 preserved. He was a reviewer of all sorts of 
 books, a satiric essayist, a literary critic on the 
 great scale, a social historian, a lecturer, and 
 a novelist. When he was a novelist, he was
 
 Thackeray. o 
 
 very generally all the other things which have 
 been enumerated at the same time ; and it not 
 unfrequently happened that, in the discharge of 
 his miscellaneous functions, he forgot the par- 
 ticular jacket he had on, and wrote in a charac- 
 ter suitable to quite other garments. In "The 
 English Humourists," for instance, and the 
 " Roundabout Papers," he is everything by turns ; 
 and there is hardly one of his novels, from the 
 immaturity of " Catherine " to the uncompleted 
 promise of "Denis Duval," in which the reader 
 who reads with his eyes open does not perceive 
 that he has something much more than a mere 
 novelist to deal with. Not that Thackeray was 
 not a novelist first of all, for if there is one of 
 the pretty numerous gifts which go to make up 
 the novelist which is more indispensable to him 
 than any other, it is the gift of conceiving and 
 projecting character. And this was the essence, 
 the centre, the mainspring, of Thackeray's genius. 
 Whether it was, as a gift, separable from his other 
 peculiar gift of style, is a very intricate question 
 of criticism. But I think the style might have 
 existed without it, and therefore is less distinc-
 
 lO Corrected Impressions. 
 
 tive. Alone among our novelists, if not among" 
 the novelists of the world, Thackeray simply 
 could not introduce a personage, no matter how 
 subordinate, without making him a living crea- 
 ture. He (or she) may be the central figure of 
 a long and complicated novel, or may be intro- 
 duced to say a couple of lines, and never appear 
 again, but Thackeray has no sooner touched 
 him than there is a human being, — an entity. 
 Everybody knows the penalty which is said, in 
 strict Mohammedan theology, to wait upon the 
 rash men of art, that they will have somehow or 
 other to find souls for their creations at the Day 
 of Judgment, or it will go uncommonly ill with 
 them. The prospect must be rather an alarming 
 one for most " makers " of any kind. It need 
 never have troubled Thackeray. He had done 
 it beforehand. He could not introduce a foot- 
 man, saying some half dozen words, "My Lady 
 is gone to Brightzwf," or something of that sort, 
 without presenting the fellow for his trouble with 
 life and immortahty.
 
 II. 
 
 THACKERAY (concluded). 
 
 TT is perhaps worth while to expand a little 
 -*- that general view of Thackeray's literary 
 gifts which has been put above. It must be 
 remembered that his literary history is decid- 
 edly peculiar. He died (as men go) young; 
 and he began regular — not merely casual or 
 amateur — literary composition very young in- 
 deed. He had dabbled in journalism at Cam- 
 bridge, and there was not I think any time after 
 his undergraduate period at which he did not 
 more or less practise it. Yet he was getting 
 on for his fortieth year when *• Vanity Fair " in 
 its complete form for the first time forced him 
 upon the notice of the public as a person who 
 could not be any longer neglected. Of course, 
 looking backwards, we think nowadays that 
 we can detect the excellence which the world 
 then first recognised in much earlier pieces.
 
 12 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 The maddening practice of republishing works 
 in collected editions without giving their original 
 dates (a practice for which, if I were dictator, I 
 would saw any editor or publisher through 
 between two boards) makes it not always easy 
 without elaborate researches to " place " his ear- 
 lier works exactly. But he certainly had a good 
 ten years' practice in regular harness to all sorts 
 of vehicles, before in 1846 the first instalments 
 of "Vanity Fair" proclaimed him as beyond all 
 doubt or question a master. 
 
 There are few more interesting things than 
 to survey all this early work, — the Tales, the 
 Burlesques, the Christmas Stories, the Re- 
 views, the Sketch Books, the what not. It is 
 excessively difficult to decide whether it is real 
 critical acumen or ex post facto wiseacre-ishness 
 which makes one fancy that it is possible to 
 detect the true Thackeray even in the very earli- 
 est period of the novitiate. But I do not think 
 that I myself ever read a single volume with 
 greater interest than that which I felt in the 
 supplement to his collected works published 
 more than twenty years after his death under
 
 Thackeray. ij 
 
 the title of " Miscellaneous Essays, etc." It was 
 not that there was anything exactly new in it, 
 for probably all the faults and certainly all the 
 merits could have been paralleled from the work 
 previously issued with the author's own reimpri- 
 mattir. But these were scattered in different 
 volumes. Here they were all in juxtaposition ; 
 and as these papers are " impressions," it is not 
 impertinent to add that the time of their appear- 
 ance was particularly interesting as correcting 
 and strengthening my own notions of Thackeray. 
 It so happened that for other purposes I had 
 just been refreshing and extending my know- 
 ledge of the journalism and magazine work which 
 immediately preceded or accompanied this simi- 
 lar work of his. I had been reading with some 
 care the principal B/ackwood and Fraser men, the 
 latter Thackeray's own colleagues, the former 
 beyond all doubt his and their models. It is 
 only such a comparison and contrast as this 
 which can ever bring out the real and indepen- 
 dent value of a new writer. In the course of a 
 good many years' critical reading of literature, I 
 have constantly been struck by this or that trait
 
 14 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 in a man only to discover by fuller reading not 
 so much that he borrowed or plagiarised it from 
 somebody else (for instances of actual plagiarism 
 are very rare and as a rule of very little impor- 
 tance) as that it was "in the air" at the time. 
 But if you compare this miscellaneous work — 
 originally undistinguished and at all times not 
 much considered — of Thackeray with the work 
 of Wilson, of De Quincey, of his own editor 
 Maginn, and of others, you will very soon begin 
 to make distinctions and mark advances. There 
 are of course many likenesses, many copyings 
 of tricks and mannerisms, many condescendences 
 of this kind and that. When Thackeray, in a 
 very sound and agreeable article on " Greenwich 
 and Whitebait" in Colbiirn for July, 1844, enter- 
 tained his readers with a procession nominatim 
 of landlords and waiters carrying certain dishes, 
 he was consciously or unconsciously repeating 
 an old trick of the " Noctes Ambrosianae " 
 which had attained almost to years of discre- 
 tion as he wrote. But in that very article (one 
 by no means of his very best) the most careless 
 reader who can take notice at all will remark
 
 Thackeray. 1 5 
 
 evidences of an " eye on the object," of a 
 satiric comprehension of Hfe, which is nowhere 
 in Wilson, nowhere in Maginn, nowhere in De 
 Quincey, nowhere in their contemporaries, — 
 which, omitting touches in Scott, had not been 
 presented in English literature since Fielding. 
 Such a reader will find too a style which is 
 strange and new, — not indeed in Thackeray 
 himself, for touches of it may be found seven 
 years earlier in his very earliest work, but as 
 compared with others, — a quiet faculty of say- 
 ing remarkable things and leaving them to 
 make their own effect, a sort of urbane ease, 
 an unforced combination of the points of view 
 of the man of letters and the man of the world. 
 And perhaps it may be remembered that Field- 
 ing also wandered about in alien paths of litera- 
 ture long before he found his true way, and that 
 in his Miscellanies also are the strangest antici- 
 pations and revealings of his future powers. 
 
 Although, therefore, these early works, includ- 
 ing even the famous " Sketch Books " and such 
 things as the "Hoggarty Diamond," are amaz- 
 ingly unequal and contain some things almost
 
 i6 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 bad, they also contain intrinsic attraction enough 
 to content, I should say, the most uncritical 
 reader who knows good things when he sees 
 them, while for critical attraction I think they 
 positively grow on one. 
 
 But there are two ends, according to the 
 proverb, to some if not all subjects ; and it is not 
 seldom asked whether there was not a decline 
 as well as a growth of Thackeray's powers, and 
 whether anything but "Vanity Fair," " Pen- 
 dennis," " The Newcomes," and " Esmond " can 
 be considered to present that power at its height. 
 It is impossible not to observe, in passing, what 
 a genius that must be as to which it is matter of 
 dispute whether anything has to be added to 
 such a literary baggage as that of the four books 
 just enumerated. The least of them would be 
 a passport to and a provision for eternity ; and 
 we are inquiring whether the gentleman has 
 any more titles and any more luggage than all 
 four. Let me only say that I am more and 
 more convinced that he has : that he has others 
 even besides "The Four Georges," "The English 
 Humourists," and the " Roundabout Papers,"
 
 Thackeray. 17 
 
 which even his most grudging critics would in 
 the same good-natured manner allow. I have 
 never quite understood the common deprecia- 
 tion of " The Virginians," which contains things 
 equal, if not superior, to the very finest of its 
 author's other work, and includes the very 
 ripest expression of his philosophy of life. 
 For though indeed I do not approve a novel 
 more because it contains the expression of a 
 philosophy of life, others do. So, too, the 
 irregularity and formlessness of plot which char- 
 acterised most of Thackeray's work undoubtedly 
 appear in it; but then, according to the views 
 of our briskest and most modern critics, plot is 
 a very subordinate requisite in a novel, and may 
 be very well dispensed with. Here again I do 
 not agree, and I should say that Thackeray's 
 greatest fault was his extreme inattention to 
 construction, which is all the more remarkable 
 inasmuch as he was by no means a very rapid 
 or an extremely prolific writer. But if both 
 these faults were infinitely greater than they are, 
 I should say that the perfect command of char- 
 acter and the extraordinary criticisms of life
 
 1 8 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 which " The Virginians " contains save it, and 
 not merely save it, but place it far above al- 
 most everything outside its writer's own work. 
 " Lovel the Widower," amusing as it is, falls 
 admittedly on a lower plane, and I do not know 
 that its earlier dramatic form, " The Wolves and 
 the Lamb," is not its superior. But " Philip " 
 is, I believe, the great stumbling-block. I have 
 owned that it was so to me in my green, un- 
 knowing youth. Nor in a rather gray and at 
 least partially knowing age could I attempt to 
 put it on a level with the others, despite a crowd 
 of admirable scenes and incidents. Sometimes 
 I have thought that Thackeray's infallible eye 
 for life played him a trick from which less alert 
 and more blear-eyed talents were free. His 
 own generation was passing, but he could not 
 help catching something of the way of the gen- 
 eration that was growing up. The consequence 
 is that the manners and speech of Philip here 
 are as bewildering as the actual chronology, — 
 which refers to Mr. Anthony Trollope as an ob- 
 ject of the hero's admiration at a time when, 
 comparing other things, it is certain that Mr.
 
 Thackeray. 19 
 
 Trollope had not even made his first literary 
 ventures. Philip is neither a young man of 
 1830 nor a young man of i860, nor, as Arthur 
 Pendennis and Henry Esmond are in their dif- 
 ferent ways, a young man of all time adjusted to 
 a particular date. He is neither one thing nor 
 the other. And when he talks about " the kids 
 and Char," I could almost call him — but what 
 I could almost call him is too terrible to put to 
 paper. 
 
 Yet even of this book, the most dubious of 
 the later, as of " Catherine," the most dubious 
 of the earlier, we may say. Who but Thackeray 
 could have written it? and, even after thirty 
 years' reading, How shall we be grateful enough 
 to Thackeray for having written it? For here, 
 as nowhere else except in Fielding himself, is a 
 world of fictitious personages who are all alive, 
 who cannot, for the very life of them, say or do 
 anything unnatural. Why that should be per- 
 manently charming in art which is frequently 
 tedious in nature is hard, is perhaps impossible 
 to tell, and certainly there is no need to discuss 
 the question here. But the fact is a fact beyond
 
 20 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 question, and it is in this fact mainly that the 
 certainty of Thackeray's appeal consists. A 
 favourable impression of him, once reached, 
 whether by happy chance or sufficient study, is 
 a 7ie varietur^ never more to be corrected or 
 altered.
 
 III. 
 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 AT the Literary Fund dinner of 1893 Mr. 
 Arthur Balfour, in an unusually interesting 
 speech for that occasion, hinted that he was not 
 himself able to take quite so ni,uch pleasure in 
 what is called Victorian Literature — the litera- 
 ture of which the late Lord Tennyson in verse, 
 and Mr. Carlyle in prose, were the unquestioned 
 chiefs — as some other persons appeared to do. 
 He suggested that this might have been due to 
 his being born a little too late. If the cause 
 assigned is a vera causa, it is one of some inter- 
 est to me. For I happen to have been born not 
 quite three years before Mr. Balfour, and there- 
 fore I ought to have been exposed to very much 
 the same " skiey influences " in point of time. 
 
 Yet I do not think that any one can ever 
 have had and maintained a greater admiration 
 for the author of "The Lotos-Eaters" than I
 
 22 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 have. This admiration was born early, but it 
 was not born full grown. I am so old a Ten- 
 nysonian that though I can only vaguely remem- 
 ber talk about " Maud " at the time of its first 
 appearance, I can remember the " Idylls " them- 
 selves fresh from the press. I was, however, a 
 little young then to appreciate Tennyson, and it 
 must have been a year or two later that I began 
 to be fanatical on the subject. Yet there must 
 have been a little method in that youthful mad- 
 ness, — some criticism in that craze. A great 
 many years afterwards I came across the decla- 
 ration of Edward Fitzgerald, one of the poet's 
 oldest and fastest friends, • to the effect that 
 everything he had written after 1842 was a 
 falling off. That of course was a crotchet. 
 Fitzgerald, like all men of original but not very 
 productive genius who live much alone, was a 
 crotcheteer to the nth. But it has a certain 
 root of truth in it; and as I read it I remem- 
 bered what my own feelings had been on read- 
 ing " Enoch Arden," the first volume that came 
 out after I had enrolled myself in the sacred 
 band. It was just at the end of my fresh-
 
 Tennyson. 23 
 
 man's year; and I bought a copy of the book 
 (for which there had been some waiting, and a 
 tremendous rush) on my way home from the 
 prize-giving of my old school. To tell the truth, 
 I was a little disappointed. For " Enoch Arden " 
 itself, as a whole, I have never cared, despite the 
 one splendid passage describing the waiting in 
 the island ; nor for " Aylmer's Field " ; nor for 
 divers other things. " The Voyage " was of 
 the very best, and " In the Valley at Canterets/' 
 and one or two other things. " Boadicea " was 
 an interesting experiment. But on the whole 
 one was inclined to say. Where is ** The Lo- 
 tos-Eaters"? Where is the "Dream of Fair 
 Women"? Where is "The Palace of Art"? 
 
 Perhaps they were nowhere ; perhaps only 
 in the very best things of the " Ballads " of 1880, 
 and one or two later, did the poet ever touch the 
 highest points of his first fine raptures. But he 
 never failed, even to his death day, to show that 
 he was the author of these raptures, and that he 
 could still go very near, if not absolutely up to 
 them, when he chose. It has, however, been a 
 constant criticfil amusement of mine to try to
 
 24 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 find out if possible whether this impression was 
 a mere fallacy of youth, and if so how far. And 
 some of the results of the inquiry which has 
 been going on more or less ever since I turned 
 through the Marble Arch into Hyde Park, and 
 took " Enoch Arden " out of my pocket on that 
 summer day, may not improperly form the sub- 
 ject of this and another of these papers. For 
 the inevitable post-mortem depreciation has set 
 in in reference to this great poet already, and it 
 may not be uninteresting to others to see how 
 it strikes a contemporary who had prepared 
 himself for it. 
 
 Readers, and I hope they are many, of 
 Maginn's " Story without a Tail " will remember 
 the various reasons assigned for taking a dram, 
 until the candid narrator avowed that he took it 
 *' because he liked a dram." It is undoubtedly 
 natural to humanity to disguise to itself the 
 reasons and nature of its enjoyments ; but I do 
 not know that it exhibits this possibly amiable 
 and certainly amusing weakness more curiously 
 or more distinctly in any matter than in the 
 matter of poetry. Men will try to persuade
 
 Tennyson. 25 
 
 themselves, or at least others, that they read 
 poetry because it is a criticism of life, because 
 it expresses the doubts and fears and thoughts 
 and hopes of the time, because it is a substitute 
 for religion, because it is a relief from serious 
 work, because and because and because. As a 
 matter of fact, they (that is to say those of them 
 who like it genuinely) read it because they like 
 it, because it communicates an experience of 
 half-sensual, half-intellectual pleasure to them. 
 W/ijy it does this no mortal can say, any more 
 than he can say why the other causes of his 
 pleasures produce their effect. How it does, it 
 is perhaps not quite so hard to explain ; though 
 here also we come as usual to the bounding-wall 
 of mystery before very long. And it is further 
 curious to note that the same kind of prudery 
 and want of frankness comes in here once more. 
 It often makes people positively angry to be 
 told that the greatest part, if not the whole, of 
 the pleasure-giving appeal of poetry lies in its 
 sound rather than in its sense, or, to speak with 
 extreme exactness, lies in the manner in which 
 the sound conveys the sense. No " chain of ex-
 
 26 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 tremely valuable thoughts " is poetry in itself: it 
 only becomes poetry when it is conveyed with 
 those charms of language, metre, rhyme, ca- 
 dence, what not, which certain persons disdain. 
 
 This being so, and the mere matter of all 
 poetry — to wit, the appearances of nature and 
 the thoughts and feelings of man — being un- 
 alterable, it follows that the difference between 
 poet and poet will depend upon the manner of 
 each in applying language, metre, rhyme, ca- 
 dence, and what not to this invariable material. 
 If the poet follows some one else's manner, he 
 may be agreeable, but will not be great ; if he is 
 great, he will have a distinctly new and original 
 manner of his own. It sometimes happens, 
 too, that he will have a manner so new and so 
 original that his time will be at first deaf to it. 
 We have all heard of the strange objections 
 which even Coleridge, who might have been 
 thought most likely of all living men to appre- 
 ciate Tennyson, made (though he did not fail 
 wholly in his appreciation) to the new poet's 
 manner. I knew a much lesser but even more 
 curious and far more recent instance myself.
 
 Tennyson. 27 
 
 A boy of eighteen or nineteen, altogether aver- 
 age except that he had, I think, some Eurasian 
 strain in him, neither a dunce nor a genius and 
 decidedly fond of reading, once took out of a 
 library the " Poems," — //z^ " Poems," that is to 
 say the volume containing everything before 
 the " Idylls " except " Maud," " The Princess," 
 and " In Memoriam." After a day or so he 
 returned it, saying sadly to the librarian that 
 "he could not read it. It was just like prose." 
 Had he been Dr. Johnson he would probably 
 have said that " the rhymes were harsh and the 
 numbers unpleasing," just as the Doctor did of 
 "Lycidas." 
 
 To us, of course, on the other hand, the whole 
 or the greatest charm of Tennyson comes from 
 the fact that he affects us in exactly the oppo- 
 site way. But I think there is a certain excuse 
 for the laughers of 1830, for Coleridge, and for 
 my Eurasian schoolfellow. I am sure at least 
 that I myself read Tennyson and liked him (for 
 I always liked him) for several years before his 
 peculiar and divine virtue dawned upon me. It 
 has never set or paled since, and I am as sure
 
 28 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 as I can be that if I were to live to be a Struld- 
 brug (which Heaven forbid) one of the very 
 last things of the kind that I should forget or 
 lose my relish for would be this. But compara- 
 tively few people, I think, have ever fully recog- 
 nized how extremely original this virtue of his 
 is. The word " great " is most irritatingly mis- 
 used about poets; and we have quite recently 
 found some persons saying that " Tennyson is 
 as great as Shakespeare," and other people 
 going into fits of wrath, or smiling surprise with 
 calm disdain, at the saying. If what the former 
 mean to say and what the latter deny is that 
 Tennyson has a supreme and peculiar poetic 
 charm, then I am with the former and against 
 the latter. He has : and from the very fact of 
 his having it he will not necessarily be appre- 
 ciated at once, and may miss appreciation 
 altogether with some people. 
 
 The recent publication anew of the earliest 
 " Poems by Two Brothers " has been especially 
 useful in enabling us to study this charm. In 
 these poems it is absolutely nowhere : there is 
 not from beginning to end in any verse, whether
 
 Tennyson. 29 
 
 attributed to Alfred, Frederick, or Charles, one 
 suggestion even of the witchery that we Tenny- 
 sonians associate with the work of the first- 
 named. It appears dimly and distantly — so 
 dimly and distantly that one has to doubt 
 whether we recognise it by anything but a "fal- 
 lacy of looking back" — in "Timbuctoo," in 
 " The Lovers' Tale " quite distinctly, but uncer- 
 tainly ; and with much alloy in the pieces which 
 the author later labelled as "Juvenilia." 
 
 It is true that these " Juvenilia " have been a 
 good deal retouched, and that much of the 
 really juvenile work on which the critics were 
 by no means unjustly severe has been left out. 
 But the charm is there. Take the very first 
 stanza of " Claribel." You may pick holes in 
 the conceit which makes a verb " I low-lie, thou 
 low-liest, she low-lieth," and you may do other 
 things of the same kind if you like. But who 
 ever wrote hke that before? Who struck that 
 key earlier? Who produced anything like the 
 slow, dreamy music of the variations in it? 
 Spenser and Keats were the only two masters 
 of anything in the remotest degree similar in
 
 3© Corrected Impressions. 
 
 English before. And yet it is perfectly inde- 
 pendent of Spenser, perfectly independent of 
 Keats. It is Tennyson, the first rustle of the 
 " thick-leaved, ambrosial " murmuring which was 
 to raise round English lovers of poetry a very 
 Broceliande of poetical enchantment for sixty 
 years to come during the poet's life, and after 
 his death for as long as books can speak and 
 readers hear.
 
 IV. 
 
 TENNYSON (cojicludedy 
 
 T BELIEVE that, in so far as the secret of a 
 -*- poet can be discovered and isolated, the se- 
 / cret of Tennyson lies in that slow and dreamy 
 music which was noticed at the end of the last 
 paper ; and I am nearly sure that my own ad- 
 miration of him dates from the time when I 
 first became aware of it. " Claribel," of course, 
 is by no means a very effective example ; though 
 the fact of its standing in the very forefront 
 of the whole work is excessively interesting. 
 The same music continued to sound — with infi- 
 nite variety of detail, but with no breach of 
 general character — from " Claribel " itself to 
 " Crossing the Bar." At no time was Tennyson 
 a perfect master of the quick and lively meas- 
 ures; and in comparison he very seldom af- 
 fected them. He cannot pick up and return 
 the ball of song as Praed — another great master
 
 32 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 of metre if not quite of music, who preceded 
 him by seven years at Trinity — did, still less 
 as Praed partly taught Mr. Swinburne to do. 
 There is nothing in Tennyson of the hurrying 
 yet never scurrying metre of "At a Month's 
 End," or the Dedication to Sir Richard Burton. 
 His difficulty in this respect has not improved 
 " The Charge of the Light Brigade," and it is 
 noticeable that it impresses a somewhat grave 
 and leisurely character even on his anapaests,' — 
 as for instance in the " Voyage of Maeldune." 
 If you want quick music you must go else- 
 where, or be content to find the poet not at his 
 best in it. 
 
 But in the other mode of linked and long- 
 drawn out sweetness he has hardly any single 
 master and no superior: 
 
 " ,At midnight the moon cotneth 
 And looketh down alone," 
 
 There again the despised " Claribel " gives 
 us the cue. And how soon and how miracu- 
 lously it was taken up, sustained, developed, va- 
 ried, everybody who knows Tennyson knows.
 
 Tennyson. 33 
 
 " Mariana " is the very incarnation, the very- 
 embodiment in verse of spell-bound stagnation, 
 that is yet in the rendering beautiful. The 
 " Recollections of the Arabian Nights " move 
 something sprightlier, but the " Ode to Mem- 
 ory," by far the greatest of the " Juvenilia," re- 
 lapses into the visionary gliding. Even in " The 
 Sea Fairies" and "The Dying Swan," the oc- 
 casional dactyls and anapaests rather slide than 
 skip ; and the same is the case with the best 
 lines in " Oriana " and (naturally enough) with 
 the whole course of the " Dirge." All the ideal 
 girl-portraits except " Lilian " (the least worthy 
 of them) have this golden languor, which is so 
 distinctly the note of the earlier poems that it 
 is astonishing any one should ever have missed 
 it. Yet, as I have said, I believe I missed it 
 myself for some time, and certainly, judging 
 from their criticisms, contemporaries of the 
 poet much cleverer than I never seem to have 
 heard it at all. 
 
 When the great collection came it must have 
 been hard still to miss it; yet how little the 
 
 English public even yet was attuned is shown 
 
 3
 
 34 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 by the fact that both then and since one of the 
 most popular things has been " The May Queen," 
 which, if anything of Tennyson's could be so, 
 I should myself be disposed to call trumpery. 
 " The Lady of Shalott " is very far from 
 trumpery, and perhaps the poet's very happiest 
 thing not in a languid measure; but even "The 
 Lady of Shalott " does not count among the 
 poems that established Tennyson's title to the 
 first rank among English poets. " The Lotos- 
 Eaters," " The Palace of Art," " A Dream of 
 Fair Women," " CEnone," " Ulysses," (though 
 perhaps it will be said that I ought not to in- 
 clude blank verse pieces,) all have the trailing 
 garments of the night, not the rush and skip 
 of dawn; and though there are some exceptions 
 among the rightly famous lyrics, such as " Sir 
 Galahad " and the admirable piece of cynicism 
 in " The Vision of Sin," they are exceptions. 
 Even " Locksley Hall " canters rather than 
 gallops, and the famous verses in " The Brook " 
 are but a tour de force. 
 
 But it would be impossible here to go 
 through the whole of the poet's work- He can
 
 Tennyson. 35 
 
 do many things ; but he always (at least to my 
 taste) does his best in lyric to slow music. 
 And I doubt whether any one will again pro- 
 duce this peculiar effect as he has produced it. 
 It must be evident, too, how much this faculty of 
 slow and stately verse adds to the effect of " In 
 Memoriam." If the peculiar metre of that 
 poem is treated (as I have known it treated by 
 imitators) in a light and jaunty fashion — to 
 quick time, so to speak — the effect is very 
 terrible. But Tennyson has another secret than 
 this for blank verse. This is the secret of the 
 paragraph, which he alone of all English poets 
 shares with Milton in perfection. There is little 
 doubt that he learnt it from Milton, but the 
 effect is quite different, though the means re- 
 sorted to are necessarily much the same in 
 both cases, and include in both a very care- 
 ful and deliberate disposition of the full stop 
 which breaks and varies the cadence of the 
 line ; the adoption when it is thought necessary 
 of trisyllabic instead of dissyllabic feet; and 
 the arrangement of a whole block of verses 
 so that they lead up to a climax of sense and
 
 36 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 sound in the final line. Almost the whole secret 
 can be found in one of the earliest and per- 
 haps the finest of his blank verse exercises, the 
 " Morte d'Arthur," but examples were never 
 wanting up to his very last book. 
 
 These two gifts, that of an infinitely varied 
 slow music and dreamy motion in lyric and 
 that of concerted blank verse, with his almost 
 unequalled faculty of observation and phrasing 
 as regards description of nature, were, I think, 
 the things in Tennyson which first founded 
 Tennyson-worship in my case. And these, I am 
 sure, are what have kept it alive in my case, 
 though I have added to them an increasing 
 appreciation of his wonderful skill in adjusting 
 vowel values. His subjects matter little : I do 
 not know that subject ever does matter much 
 in poetry, though it is all important in prose. 
 But if I have been right in my selection of his 
 chief gifts, it will follow almost as the night the 
 day that the vague, the antique, and to some 
 extent the passionate, must suit him better 
 than the modern, the precise, the meditative. 
 Not that Tennyson is by any means as some
 
 Tennyson. 37 
 
 misguided ones hold, a shallow poet; the ex- 
 quisite perfection of his phrase and his horror 
 of jargon have deceived some even of the 
 elect on that point, just as there have been 
 those who think that Plato is shallow because 
 he is nowhere unintelligible, and that Berkeley 
 cannot be a great philosopher because he is 
 a great man of letters. But art, romance, 
 distant history (for history of a certain age 
 simply becomes romance), certainly suit him 
 better than science, modern life, or argument. 
 Vast efforts have been spent on developing 
 schemes of modernised Christianity out of " In 
 Memoriam " ; but the religious element in that 
 poem is as consistent with an antiquated ortho- 
 doxy as with anything new and undogmatic; 
 and the attraction of the poem is in its human 
 affection, in its revelation of the House of 
 Mourning, and above all in those unmatched 
 landscapes and sketches of which the poet is 
 everywhere prodigal. 
 
 It is perhaps (if I may refine still further on 
 the corrections of impressions which years of 
 study have left) in the combination of the faculty 
 
 4/,^g6
 
 38 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 of poetical music with that of poetical picture 
 drawing that the special virtue of Tennyson lies. 
 There have been poets, though not many, who 
 could manage sound with equal skill ; and there 
 have been those, though not many, who could 
 bring with a few modulated words a visual picture 
 before the mind's eye and almost the eye of the 
 body itself with equal sureness and success. 
 But there have hardly been any, outside the very 
 greatest Three or Four, who could do both these 
 things at the same time in so consummate a 
 fashion. The very musical poets are too apt to 
 let the sharp and crisp definition of their picture 
 be washed away in floods of sound ; the very 
 pictorial poets to neglect the musical accompani- 
 ment. Tennyson never commits either fault. 
 The wonderful successions of cartoons in the 
 '* Palace " and the " Dream " exhibit this in his 
 very earliest stage. If any one has ever in this 
 combination of music, draughtsmanship, and 
 colour equalled him who wrote, 
 
 '* One seemed all dark and red, a tract of sand, 
 j4nd some one pacing there alone, 
 IVho paced for ever in a glimmering land. 
 Lit with a low large moon,"
 
 ennyson. 39 
 
 I do not know him. The first stanza of " The 
 Lotos-Eaters " has the same power of filling eye 
 and ear at once, so that it is almost impossible to 
 decide whether you hear the symphony or see 
 the picture most clearly. And at the very other 
 extreme of the poet's poetical life, in those 
 famous lines which united all competent suffrages 
 (though one egregious person I remember 
 called them " homely " and divers wiseacres puz- 
 zled over the identity of the "pilot" and the 
 propriety of his relation of place toward the 
 " bar "), this master faculty again appeared. 
 
 " IVitb such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
 Too full for sound or foam" 
 
 are words which make the very picture, the 
 very foamless swirl, the very soundless volume 
 of sound, which they describe. 
 
 No ! In the impressions given by such a poet 
 as this, when they have been once duly and fairly 
 received, there can be no correction, except a 
 better and better appreciation of him as time 
 goes on. The people who have liked what was 
 not best, or have not liked what was best, may 
 grow weary of well admiring. Those who look
 
 40 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 rather at the absence of faults than at the pres- 
 ence of beauties may point to incongruities and 
 mediocrities, to attempts in styles for which the 
 poet had little aptitude, to occasional relapses 
 from the grand manner to the small mannerism, 
 and so forth. But those whose ears and eyes 
 (if not, alas ! their lips) Apollo has touched, 
 will never make any mistake about him. They 
 may as in other — as in all — cases be more or 
 fewer as time goes on : there may be seasons 
 when the general eye grows blind and the general 
 ear deaf to his music and his vision. But that 
 will not matter at all. So long as the unknown 
 laws which govern the presentation of beauty in 
 sight and sound last, beauty will be discovered 
 here just as we ourselves after two thousand 
 years find it in the ancient tongues which we 
 cannot even pronounce with any certainty that 
 we are nearer to the original than Mr. Hamer- 
 ton's little French boy was when he tried to 
 vocalise that very stanza of ** Claribel " to which 
 I have referred above.
 
 V. 
 
 CARLYLE. 
 
 T BELIEVE it will be generally admitted that 
 -*- there is nowadays no more distinct sign of a 
 man's having reached the fogey, and of his 
 approaching the fossil, stage of intellectual 
 existence than the fact that he has an ardent 
 admiration for Carlyle. I have collected this 
 inference from a large number of observations ; 
 and, if I am not mistaken, have seen it more than 
 once definitely laid down as a starting point and 
 premiss by the younger sort. This is not only 
 interesting in itself, but also and perhaps still 
 more as an instance of the truth of the ancient 
 saying that old age cometh upon a man without 
 his perceiving it. For it was but, so to speak, 
 the other day that to admire Carlyle was still a 
 mark, not indeed of intense or daring innovation 
 (that stage was over when the present writer 
 was in his nurse's arms), but yet of heresy and
 
 42 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 opposition to the settled precepts of the sages. 
 It cannot be said that up to Carlyle's own death 
 the constituted authorities in things literary and 
 intellectual were ever fully reconciled to his style, 
 his thought, or his general attitude; and great 
 as is the influence which — especially perhaps 
 during the third quarter of the century — he 
 exercised over individuals, no party in politics, 
 no school in letters or philosophy, ever could 
 claim him or stomach him, as a whole stomachs 
 a whole. 
 
 It is the proudest memory of my own life 
 that a person of distinction once said to me 
 in a rage, " You like Carlyle because he has 
 made you more of a Tory than the Devil had 
 made you already." But without admitting or 
 denying the justice of this soft impeachment in 
 the individual case, it is quite certain that Tories 
 as a class did not like Mr. Carlyle, nor he them. 
 They did not like him because of his flings and 
 crotchets on separate parts of their creed; he 
 did not like them because, I think, he knew 
 himself to be one of them and yet would not 
 confess it. The average mid-century Liberal, on
 
 Carlyle. 4j 
 
 the other hand, could not help — unless he was 
 a very dull or a very clever man indeed — regard- 
 ing Mr. Carlyle as something like Antichrist, a 
 defender of slavery, a man whose dearest delight I 
 it was to gore and toss and trample the sweetest 
 and most sacred principles of the Manchester / 
 school ; a stentorian scoffer who roared sarcasms 
 over Progress and Perfectibility, and to whom 
 House of Commons, manufacturing centres, Great 
 Exhibitions, and so forth, were only different kinds 
 of filthy and futile bauble shops. It was impos- 
 sible, I say, that the mid-century Liberal, whether 
 his Liberalism was of the common-sense type of 
 Macaulay, or the doctrinaire type of Mill, or the 
 sentimental type of Dickens, should do anything 
 but regard Carlyle as a kind of hippopotamus, 
 ravaging and trampling the fair fields of promise. 
 But the curious thing is that no reaction of the 
 usual kind has come to his rescue. The parties, 
 or the names, (for I own that I see uncommonly 
 little difference between Tories and Liberals 
 now,) that represent the modifications of pub- 
 lic opinion by the results of the Second and 
 Third Reform Bills, have not gone as a rule
 
 44 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 nearer to, but farther from Carlyle's ideal. It is 
 impossible to imagine anything more anti-Car- 
 lyHan than the washy semi-Socialism, half sen- 
 timental, half servile, which is the governing 
 spirit of all but a very few politicians to-day. 
 Nor is it surprising that a world which, whether 
 with tongue in cheek or not, praises, blesses, and 
 magnifies " democracy," should be enthusiastic 
 in favour of a prophet whose relation to demo- 
 cracy was pretty exactly the relation of Elijah 
 to Baal. Add to this the existence of a con- 
 siderable literary class which takes very little 
 interest in politics, a good deal in art (for which 
 Carlyle cared absolutely nothing), and most of 
 all in mere literature (which he always attempted 
 to scorn and snub), and it is not very surprising 
 that Carlyle is not popular nowadays with our 
 youth, and that to admire him is, as I have said, 
 the mark of a fogey and a fossil. 
 
 So be it. Yet the fossil is a thing that abides, 
 and has not even Mr. Thackeray sung the joys 
 of being a fogey? At any rate, as for me and 
 my intellectual house, we intend to continue to 
 serve Carlyle. Whether it be due to those pre-
 
 Carlyle. 4^ 
 
 liminary operations of the Devil, to which my 
 friend referred, or to some other reason, I can- 
 not remember a period at which the reading of 
 Carlyle was not to me as the reading of some- 
 thing that one had always thought but had never 
 been able to express. It was a lucky accident, 
 no doubt, that I began at the beginning, to wit, 
 with " Sartor Resartus," which I remember read- 
 ing at so early an age that a great part of it 
 must have been the merest Abracadabra to me. 
 But there is nothing like providing children 
 (accidentally, if possible) with good abracada- 
 bras which as they grow up shall become clear 
 to them. If anybody had preached Carlyle to 
 me, I dare say I should have been much longer 
 before the honey in that lion won my tongue, 
 but as it was the process of discovery was sure, 
 if not excessively rapid. The " Cromwell " did 
 indeed a little stick in my gizzard until I was 
 old enough to discover the truth that Carlyle's 
 particular fads and fancies are, as a rule, matters 
 of no particular importance, and that his gen- 
 eral attitude is the pearl of price. And by 
 some happy chance the " Latter Day Pam-
 
 46 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 phlets " did not come in my way till I had 
 already begun to take a considerable interest in 
 politics. That book, with all its divagations, all 
 its extravagances, all its occasional lapses of 
 taste and unadvised speaking about things which 
 Carlyle miscomprehended, partly owing to edu- 
 cation and partly owing to pride, seems to me the 
 very gospel of English politics in modern times, 
 a sort of modern " Politicus " in the spirit and 
 tone of which every Englishman should strive 
 to soak and saturate himself. It seemed to me 
 so then : it has never failed to seem so since. 
 
 It is, I think, the mistake of demanding a 
 positive gospel instead of negative warnings in 
 the first place, and in the second the inability to 
 appreciate " the humour of it " to the full, which 
 have been at the root of most recent deprecia- 
 tion of Carlyle, though no doubt also reaction 
 
 V from the violent mannerisms of his style and a 
 not ungenerous but rather unintelligent disgust 
 at the inordinately voluminous and very ill- 
 managed personal revelations of his life must 
 also be allowed for. People have insufficiently 
 
 \ appreciated the symbolism which plays so very
 
 Carlyle. 47 
 
 large a part in his work. The two largest indi- 
 vidual parts of that work are occupied, the one 
 with an apotheosis from the point of view of a 
 denouncer of cant of a man who canted against 
 despotism his way to the headship of the Com- 
 monwealth of England, and then continued to 
 cant as a despot to the day of his death, the 
 other with the glorification of a selfish and sor- 
 did scoundrel whose chief merits were that he 
 had an indomitable will, and could have written a 
 sincere and forcible treatise De Cotitemptu Vitce. 
 But, by a paradox which I have never been able 
 to make up my mind whether to attribute to a 
 completely or a partially humoristic view, the 
 Cromwell and the Frederick of Carlyle, though 
 he has delineated them for the benefit of other 
 people with a fidelity and a vigour of bio- 
 graphical art beside which even Boswell, even 
 Lockhart, are tame and shadowy, are as objects 
 of admiration pure symbols. The unctuous 
 butcher of Tredagh, who pretended to revenge 
 the massacres committed by the Irish of 1641 
 on a garrison which he knew to consist very 
 largely of pure English troops, the filibuster of
 
 48 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 Silesia and the fribble of Rheinsberg, who had 
 all vices but those that are amiable and hardly 
 any virtues but those which are unattractive, live 
 as they lived in his pages. Nobody but a mere 
 idiot can accuse Carlyle of garbling out a damn- 
 ing or foisting in a flattering trait. And yet all 
 the while he is glorifying and extolling in the 
 one a symbol of upright humanity, in the other 
 a symbol of patriotic heroism. 
 
 These apparent contradictions run throughout 
 not only these books, but a great part of Carlyle's 
 other works, and they seem to have been too 
 much for many. " Am I to admire a brute like 
 Frederick?" says, and says not ungenerously, 
 the neophyte. " I won't do anything of the 
 kind ! " And he does not see that what he is 
 required to admire is — not the actual Frederick 
 who was a kind of crowned bandit in public life, 
 and in private a harsh master, a fickle friend, a 
 stingy patron, a man of the worst possible taste 
 in aesthetics and ethics, spiteful, treacherous, 
 mean — but a Frederick who is a kind of ab- 
 straction of the Ruler, a personified and incar- 
 nate Government. Indeed, the fact of this being
 
 Carlyle. 49 
 
 practically Carlyle's last book, and the only one 
 which he wrote for a very large public, with the 
 further facts of its enormous size, of its being 
 written in a sort of short-hand of mannerism 
 and of its containing besides the panegyric of 
 Frederick himself, the apology at least of his 
 father, must be admitted to have been unfortu- 
 nate, and to have accounted to some extent for 
 that sudden falling off of Carlylians which has 
 been noted. For it so happened that the very 
 generation which in the natural course of things 
 grew up prepared to be his admirers was, to 
 speak vernacularly, choked off by the issue of 
 this huge and not altogether grateful history 
 for years running. No book probably could be 
 worse to begin a study of Carlyle upon. 
 
 And this, I think, is a pretty full account of 
 the various adverse influences to which the Car- 
 lylian impressions of a man who began Carlyle, 
 as I did, thirty or five and thirty years ago, have 
 been exposed in the mean time. It will take 
 another paper to say something of the effect, 
 whether of correction or confirmation, that they 
 have undergone in consequence.
 
 VI. 
 
 CARLYLE {concluded). 
 
 TT will perhaps have appeared already from 
 -■- what was said in the last paper that, after 
 having passed through, or at least been con- 
 temporary with, all the fluxes and gusts of opin- 
 ion there mentioned, I am an impenitent and 
 hardened Carlylian. Of course a great deal has 
 to be added to Carlyle, and, as has been already 
 admitted and asserted, something has to be 
 taken away from him — in the sense that no man 
 in his senses would attempt to indorse every 
 particular Carlylian utterance. He was often 
 bihous ; he was not seldom blind ; and as for his 
 strange contemporary and counterpart across 
 the Channel, who for half a dozen years less at 
 the beginning, and half a dozen more at the 
 end, represented the French genius just as 
 Carlyle did the English, it was almost impossi- 
 ble for him not to caricature and reduce to the
 
 Carlyle. 51 
 
 absurd his own views and formulas, though he 
 and Victor Hugo achieved this result in very 
 different ways. The Carlylians pure and simple, 
 though they included some men of genius such 
 as were at different times Kingsley and Mr. 
 Ruskin and Mr. Froude, were apt to be rather 
 terrible as well as brilliant examples. When 
 they were not brilliant th'ey were terrible purely. 
 They are not very rampant now, and it would 
 be unkind to specify them by name ; but it may 
 be most frankly confessed that " middle-class 
 Carlylese " was one of the worst dialects ever 
 known, both in form and in matter. 
 
 Indeed, there are not inconsiderable regions 
 of interest where Carlyle does not count. For 
 the whole domain of the plastic arts he seems to 
 have had no kind of fancy or faculty. Even in 
 literature, though at his best and in his earlier 
 days, when he had not begun to "pontify " and 
 in the solitude of Craigenputtock took real 
 trouble to master his subjects, he attained the 
 very first rank as a literary critic, there were 
 large gaps and rents in his faculty of apprecia- 
 tion. He seems to have wanted — a want which
 
 52 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 I fear is more common than is allowed to appear 
 — all affection, all sense of any kind for poetry 
 as poetry. Some of the greatest expression on 
 things which he did care for is to be found in 
 poets, and then he cared for them ; but it was 
 not as poets. The same exactly may be said of 
 his attitude to prose fiction. Except on the 
 purely mathematical side, he did not, I think 
 care much for science. For all forms of the- 
 ology he had a disdain which was partly igno- 
 rant and a mere expression of personal distaste, 
 partly I fear a form of personal arrogance. In 
 philosophy itself I do not know that he was very 
 great on the purely metaphysical side. But, like 
 Henry the Eighth, he " loved a man," and I am 
 not quite sure that (in this respect not resem- 
 bling that sovereign) he qualified the affection 
 by any others. Such a historian on the bio- 
 graphical and anthropological side the world 
 has never seen. To his own contemporaries he 
 was often foolishly and scandalously unjust; 
 and probably nothing has done him so much 
 harm with those who are apt to fly off at tan- 
 gents when special points of their own fancy are
 
 Carlyle. 53 
 
 touched, as his posthumous depreciations of 
 Lamb, of De Quincey, of Newman, and of oth- 
 ers as different in their different ways as these. 
 But when he got hold of " a man " in history, it 
 seems to me that it was absolutely impossible 
 for him to miss hitting off that man to the life. 
 And he could in the same way seize a period, a 
 movement, a set of incidents, with a grasp of 
 which I am sure it is enough, and I do not think 
 that it is too much, to say that the result was 
 Gibbon without his obstinate superficiality, and 
 Thucydides without his disappointing asceticism 
 in rhetoric and eloquence. 
 
 Take, for instance, " The French Revolution." 
 It has been to me an inexhaustible joy for twenty 
 or thirty years past to read the excellent per- 
 sons who, in English and French and German, 
 have undertaken to " correct " Carlyle. They 
 have demonstrated in I dare say the most suffi- 
 cient and triumphant way that he sometimes 
 represents a thing as having happened at two 
 o'clock on Thursday when it actually hap- 
 pened on Tuesday at three o'clock. They 
 have, I believe, made some serious emenda-
 
 54 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 tions in the number of leagues travelled and 
 the menu of the meals eaten by Louis the Six- 
 teenth on his way to and from Varennes, But 
 have they to the satisfaction of the phronimos, 
 the Aristotelian intelligent person, altered or 
 destroyed one feature in the Carlylian picture 
 of the uprising and of the Terror? Not they. 
 On the contrary, the greatest of them all, M. 
 Taine, after protesting against Carlyle in his 
 youth came to tread in Carlyle's very steps in 
 his age. And it could not be otherwise. The 
 French Revolution of Carlyle is the French 
 Revolution as it happened, as it was. The 
 French Revolution of the others is the French 
 Revolution dug up in lifeless fragments by 
 excellent persons with the newest patent pick- 
 axes. I do not know whether this extraordinary 
 
 - historico-biographical faculty can be in any way 
 connected, after the fashion of cause and effect, 
 with his other great quality, his peculiar way of 
 
 ^ treating ethics and politics, the only subjects in 
 which he seems to have taken a thorough inter- 
 est. Man to him was indeed a " political beast " 
 in the old phrase, extending the meaning to eth-
 
 Carlyle. 55 
 
 ics as the Greeks themselves would have done. 
 Here again there were no doubt gaps, especially 
 that huge one of his complete incapacity to 
 enter into the very important division of human 
 sentiment, which is called for shortness love. 
 Of "the way of a man with a maid" Carlyle 
 never showed much comprehension, nor in it 
 much interest, which is doubtless a pity. But of 
 the way of a man in political society he showed 
 a very great comprehension indeed, as well as of 
 that other way which his forefathers would have 
 called " walking with God," that is to say, of per- 
 sonal conduct and attitude towards the fortunes - 
 and mysteries of life. 
 
 It is here that his gift of many-coloured and 
 many-formed language was applied most re- 
 markably and perhaps most profitably. As has 
 been said, or hinted, above, it is not to Carlyle 
 that you must go for positive precepts of any ^ 
 kind. But as a negative teacher he has few 
 equals. "Don't funk; don't cant; don't gush; 
 don't whine ; don't chatter ; " — these and some 
 others like them were his commandments, and I 
 do not know where to look for a better set of
 
 56 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 their kind. But they were elementary and trivial 
 in reference to certain larger and vaguer pre- 
 cepts of the Carlylian decalogue or myriologue. 
 The two greatest of these, as it seems to me, are, 
 " Never mistake the amount, infinitesimal if not 
 ■minus, of your own personal worth and impor- 
 tance in this world," on the one hand, and 
 "Never care for any majority of other infini- 
 tesimals who happen to be against you," on the 
 other. Ever since 1789 at least, the idol from 
 which men should have prayed to be kept, and 
 which has been growing year by year and dec- 
 ade by decade, is the worship of the majority ; 
 and the cream, the safest and soundest part of 
 the Carlylian doctrine, is : " Don't care one rap, 
 or the ten-thousandth part of one rap, for the 
 majority. You may be — you very likely are 
 — a fool yourself; but it is as nearly as possible 
 certain that the majority of the majority are 
 fools, and therefore, though you need not neces- 
 sarily set yourself against them, you are abso- 
 lutely justified in neglecting them." "Do your 
 duty," which he also preached, is of course a 
 more strictly virtuous doctrine, and it is also a
 
 Carlyle. 57 
 
 much older one. But it is open to the retort, 
 "Yes, but what is my duty?" which is never 
 specially easy and often extremely difficult to 
 answer. Nor is it more specially suited for this 
 day than for any other. But " Don't worship 
 the majority " is the very commandment needed 
 in the nineteenth century, and likely, it would 
 seem, to be needed still more in the twentieth. 
 Even if, as it rarely may be, the majority is 
 right, the fact that it is the majority does not 
 make it so, and when there is no reason for 
 believing it to be right except that it is the ma- 
 jority, then that is reason sufficient for electing 
 to regard it as wrong. 
 
 This anti-democratic tone and temper — en- 
 forced and fed, it may be, in his own case, by 
 too much indulgence in the luxury of scorn,- 
 by too much contempt for his fellows, by too - 
 unsocial a view of life — was, as it seems to 
 me, what Carlyle had to teach and did teach. 
 His applications of it in particular may not 
 always have been wise, but they were made 
 always with the most astonishing diable au 
 corps, and in a style which, though I should
 
 58 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 be very sorry to see it generally imitated, and 
 though it was sometimes very nearly bad, was 
 at its best surpassed by no style, either in Eng- 
 lish or in any other language, for pure force and 
 intense effect, — full of lights and colours, now 
 as fierce as those of fire, now as tender as those 
 of fire also, — full of voices covering the whole 
 gamut from storm to whisper. Whether the 
 great volume of his work, the exceptions, the 
 inequalities, the crotchets and lacks of catholi- 
 city in it, will seriously injure that work with 
 posterity is of course very difficult to say. 
 Work which requires, as this does, a certain 
 initiation and novitiate, perhaps also a certain 
 pre-established harmony of temper and taste, 
 is always heavily weighted in competing for 
 the attention of posterity. But I hope at least 
 that Carlyle will continue even in the evil days 
 to inspire some with determination malignum 
 Bpemere vulgtis ; and I feel nearly sure that when 
 the tide turns, as it must some day, and the rule 
 of the best and fewest, not of the most and worst, 
 again becomes the favourite, his works will sup- 
 ply texts for the orthodox as they now do for
 
 Carlyle. 59 
 
 heretics. At any rate, I am sure that no one 
 who ever goes to them will miss the splendours 
 of pure literature which illuminate their rugged 
 heights and plateaus, and that some at least will 
 recognize and rejoice in the high air of love for 
 poble things and contempt for things base which 
 sweeps over and through them.
 
 VII. 
 
 MR. SWINBURNE. 
 
 T DO not suppose that anybody now alive 
 -*- (I speak of lovers of poetry) who was not 
 alive in 1832 and old enough then to enjoy the 
 first perfect work of Tennyson, has had such a 
 sensation as that which was experienced in the 
 autumn of 1866 by readers of Mr. Swinburne's 
 " Poems and Ballads." And I am sure that no 
 one in England has had any such sensation since. 
 The later revelation had indeed been preceded 
 by more signs and tokens than the earlier. 
 Tennyson's first work had passed unknown or 
 had been laughed at; at least two remarkable 
 volumes (not to mention " The Queen Mother" 
 and *' Rosamond ") had already revealed to fit 
 readers what there was in Mr. Swinburne. The 
 chorus in " Atalanta," " Before the beginning of 
 years," had attracted the highest admiration 
 from impartial and unenthusiastic judges, while
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 6i 
 
 it had simply swept younger admirers off their 
 legs with rapture ; and the lyrics of " Chaste- 
 lard " had completed the effect in the way of 
 exciting, if not of satisfying, expectation. 
 
 Now we were told, first, that a volume of ex- 
 traordinarily original verse was coming out; 
 now, that it was so shocking that its publisher 
 repented its appearance ; now, that it had been 
 reissued, and was coming out after all. The 
 autumn must have been advanced before it did 
 come out, for I remember that I could not obtain 
 a copy before I went up to Oxford in October, 
 and had to avail myself of an expedition to 
 town to " eat dinners " in order to get one. 
 Three copies of the precious volume, with 
 " Moxon " on cover and " John Camden Hot- 
 ten " on title page, accompanied me back that 
 night, together with divers maroons for the 
 purpose of enlivening matters on the ensuing 
 Fifth of November. The book was something 
 of a maroon in itself as regards the fashion in 
 which it startled people; and perhaps with 
 youthful readers the hubbub did it no harm. 
 We sat next afternoon, I remember, from
 
 62 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 luncheon time till the chapel bell rang, reading 
 aloud by turns in a select company " Dolores " 
 and '' The Triumph of Time," " Laus Veneris " 
 and "Faustine," and all the other wonders of 
 the volume. There are some who say that after 
 such a beginning critical appreciation is impos- 
 sible, — the roses bloom too aggressively by the 
 not at all calm Bendemeer when it is read again, 
 and the pathetic and egotistic fallacies hide the 
 truth from sight. If it were so, it were little 
 use attempting to " correct impressions " in this 
 or any similar matter. But I do not think so 
 meanly of the human intellect. There is prac- 
 tically nothing for which it is impossible to 
 " allow," nothing which may not be " ruled 
 out." And though I feel that the maroons 
 and the memories would make me a shame- 
 fully biassed judge of Mr. Swinburne person- 
 ally, that I should if I were on a jury let him 
 off on any accusation, and if I were a judge 
 give him the smallest possible sentence the 
 law allowed, a critical opinion of his works is 
 a different matter. Everybody must keep a 
 conscience and mind it somewhere; and, for
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 63 
 
 my part, I pride myself on keeping and mind- 
 ing it here. 
 
 Yet I have no hesitation in saying that after 
 these years I find myself disposed to alter very 
 little of the estimate which I made of the 
 " Poems and Ballads " as we read them " midst 
 triptychs and Madonnas," as another poet sings, 
 on that November Sunday. Mr. Swinburne 
 has done a very great deal of work since, and 
 I suppose not his wildest admirer would main- 
 tain that it has all or most of it been at the 
 level of the best parts of the "Poems and 
 Ballads." There are even, I believe, as there 
 usually are, archaics in Swinburnianism who 
 hold that it has never been really merry since 
 "Atalanta" itself; and, on the other hand, 
 there are more sober Swinburnians who per- 
 haps question whether the poet's very best has 
 been seen except at intervals and in some- 
 what small proportion since the second " Poems 
 and Ballads" of 1878. Nor is it necessary to 
 spend much time in displaying the faults of 
 this most captivating of the poets of the second 
 half of the nineteenth century in England. The
 
 64 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 danger of them, and to some extent the damage 
 of them, was seen in his very earliest work. 
 The astonishing fertility of his command of 
 language and of metre, the vast volume and 
 variety of his verbal music, were almost peril- 
 ously near to "carrying him away" then, and 
 no doubt have more and more actually done 
 so. I do not think that Mr. Swinburne has 
 ever written a single piece of verse that can be 
 called bad, or that does not possess qualities 
 of poetry which before his day would have 
 sufficed to give any man high poetical rank. 
 But he has always wanted discipline who never 
 wanted music or eloquence ; and the complaint 
 that his readers sometimes find themselves 
 floating on and* almost struggling with a cata- 
 ract of mere musical and verbal foam-water 
 is not without foundation. Of late years, too, 
 his extraordinary command of metre has led 
 him to make new and ever new experiments 
 in it which have been too often mere tours de 
 fores, to plan sea-serpents in verse in order 
 to show how easily and gracefully he can make 
 them coil and uncoil their enormous length,
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 6r 
 
 to build mastodons of metre that we may- 
 admire the proportion and articulation of their 
 mighty limbs. In other words, he has some- 
 times, nay, too often, forgotten the end while 
 exulting in his command of the means. 
 
 And yet, if we take the very latest of his 
 works, how vast an addition to the possibilities 
 of poetical delight do we see in it when com- 
 pared with what English readers already had 
 forty years ago, or even thirty! Although 
 Mr. Swinburne's indebtedness to the late Laure- 
 ate is of course immense, as must have been 
 that of any man born when he was born, it 
 happened most fortunately that his natural 
 genius inclined him to the mode exactly 
 opposite to Tennyson's. I have already en- 
 deavoured to show in these papers that, 
 though that great poet could sing in divers 
 tones, he always most inclined, and was most 
 happily inspired when he did incline, to the 
 mode of slow and languid singing. Mr. Swin- 
 burne's most natural gift is exactly the other 
 way. His muse can " toll slowly " when she 
 chooses; but she has always an impulse to 
 
 5 .
 
 66 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 quicken, and is almost always happiest in quick 
 time. Take, for instance, that famous poem al- 
 ready referred to, the great " Atalanta " chorus. 
 It is stately enough, and certainly not very 
 frolic in tone. But what a race and rush there 
 is about it! What a thunder and charge of 
 verse ! It is almost impossible even to read 
 it slowly. Take again the not less exquisite 
 song in " Chastelard," " Between the sundown 
 and the sea." Here there is an appearance 
 of languor; there are no trisyllabic feet, none 
 of the extraneous aids to, or signs of, rhythmi- 
 cal speed. And yet the measure hurries rather 
 than lags, the rhymes seem to invite each other 
 to respond and speed the response, the begin- 
 nings of the lines catch up and send on the 
 ends, the ends generate fresh beginnings almost 
 before they have ceased. So in the two mag- 
 nificent pieces that come almost on the thresh- 
 old of the "Poems and Ballads" the same 
 irrepressible impulse may be observed. The 
 quatrain in which " Laus Veneris " is written 
 is one of the least lightly moving in appear- 
 ance of all English measures, and yet it too
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 67 
 
 grows tumultuous ; while the intricate and mas- 
 sive stanza of " The Triumph of Time " swells 
 and swings like a wave. 
 
 In these cases the poet's idiosyncrasy is to 
 some extent working against and subduing 
 forms which do not lend themselves readily 
 to it But where the forms are congenial, the 
 effect is too remarkable to have escaped even 
 the most careless remark: and these pieces 
 have in consequence supplied the most popu- 
 lar if not the most characteristic of Mr. 
 Swinburne's poems. In that wonderful metre 
 of " Dolores " and the Epilogue to the first 
 " Poems and Ballads " which Mr. Swinburne 
 adapted from Praed by shortening the last line, 
 "the sound of loud water" and "the flight 
 of the fires" both embody themselves in 
 words. The mighty rush of the " Hymn to 
 Proserpine," the galloping charge of the " Song 
 in Time of Revolution," the dancing measures of 
 " Rococo," and many others, attain what, speak- 
 ing in jargon, one might call the maximum 
 velocity of any British poet. It is sometimes, 
 as, for instance, in " A Song in Time of Revo-
 
 68 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 lution," very nearly impossible to make speech 
 accompany the words at the rate which seems 
 as if it were required. You gabble and stumble 
 in trying to keep up with the poet's speed. 
 And by degrees Mr. Swinburne developed and 
 perfected that faculty of his which has been 
 already noticed, — the faculty of arranging his 
 measures in a sort of antiphony, where, as in 
 very quick chanting, the alternate lines seem 
 to catch up their forerunners almost before 
 these have finished. 
 
 The two best examples of this curious gift 
 known to me, and two of the very best things 
 he has ever done, are the poems in the second 
 volume of " Poems and Ballads," entitled " At 
 a Month's End " and the " Dedication to Cap- 
 tain Richard Burton." I have sometimes had a 
 fancy that I should like to hear 
 
 " The night last night was strange and shaken. 
 More strange the change ofyoti and me, 
 
 Once more for the old love's lace forsaken 
 We went down once more towards the sea," 
 
 with these unmatched passages which follow the 
 lines,
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 69 
 
 " j4s a star sees the sun and falters. 
 Touched to death hj> diviner eyes, 
 j4s on the old gods' untended altars 
 
 The old fire of withered worship dies'* 
 
 sung by alternate semi-choruses, the second 
 tripping up the first a little. Nor is such a 
 motion as this, 
 
 " Nine years have risen and eight years set 
 Since there by the well-spring our hands on it met" 
 
 to be found anywhere in English poetry earlier. 
 The verse does not merely run, it spins, gyrat- 
 ing and revolving in itself as well as proceeding 
 on its orbit: the wave as it rushes on has 
 eddies and backwaters of live interior move- 
 ment. All the metaphors and similes of water, 
 light, wind, fire, all the modes of motion, inspire 
 and animate this astonishing poetry.
 
 VIII. 
 
 MR. SWINBURNE {concluded^ 
 
 NOW if there is any truth in the view which 
 was given in the last paper of Mr. Swin- 
 burne's poetical virtue, it will be seen at once 
 that there is a special danger of uncritical 
 admiration of him. The charm of the latest — 
 let us hope not the last — of the Laureates is 
 not an impetuous charm : it does not take you 
 by a coitp de main; but it never lets you go 
 when it has once taken you. Has this other 
 kind of poetical assault, this ivresse de M. 
 Swinburiie, (to borrow the phrase ivresse de 
 Victor Hugo which was long ago used of the 
 great French poet who was the God of Mr. 
 Swinburne's idolatry,) the opposite defect of 
 its opposite quality? Does it hold you with a 
 grasp as insecure as the first onset of it is tem- 
 pestuous? Is Mr. Swinburne a poetical Prince 
 Rupert? There are some who say so. I seem
 
 Mr. Swinburne. yi 
 
 to remember words of a very distinguished per- 
 son, my own contemporary, about a man's 
 " forgetting the Poems and Ballads he used to 
 spout." All I can say is that I myself do not 
 do anything of the kind. There are, as I take 
 it, three kinds of literary lovers, as perhaps of 
 other. There are those who only love one or a 
 very few things and cleave to it or them. Per- 
 haps this is the most excellent way, though I 
 own I do not think so. There are the incon- 
 stants who love and who ride away. And there 
 are those who are polygamous but faithful; 
 that is to say, who constantly add to their loves, 
 but never drop, forget, or slight the old. I 
 boast myself to be of the last. In fact, why 
 should a rational lover of poetry ever tire of 
 Mr. Swinburne? That poet may have done 
 things not wholly worthy of him, but no one is 
 obliged to read them. He may have, even in >• 
 his best things, been sometimes led astray by 
 want of judgment in politics or religion or 
 philosophy, by undue flux of language or of 
 verse. But these things can be ignored or 
 skipped. The virtue of the virtuous part re-
 
 72 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 mains ; and I dare swear that it will be found at 
 the second reading and the tenth and the hun- 
 dredth as distinct as at the first by those who 
 can get beyond and above mere novelty. 
 
 It is, if not the most philosophical, one of the 
 most effectual of tests to consider a very strong 
 literary mannerism or manner in its imita- 
 tions. Mr, Swinburne, Heaven knows, has been 
 imitated enough. Kingsley says somewhere 
 that Amyas Leigh's companions proved the 
 presence of mosquitoes on the Magdalena ** as 
 well as wretched men could." Reviewers did 
 the same with the influence of Mr. Swinburne. 
 For years his metres, his phrasing, his alliter- 
 ation, his repetition of words, were the very 
 cophinus and fceniim of the poetaster, the sole 
 equipment and furniture with which he started 
 his dreadful trade. And did one poetaster or 
 poet during all these years achieve anything 
 with them that was not either designed or un- 
 conscious parody and that was worth anything? 
 Not one stanza, not one line. Some of the 
 designed parodies were very funny; some of 
 the undesigned ones funnier still. But that is a
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 73 
 
 proof of excellence, not of inferiority. It is 
 when a thing is imitable, not when it is paro- 
 diable, that it stands confessed as second-rate. 
 And Mr. Swinburne, like other poets on the 
 right side of the line, is not imitable, — at any 
 rate, he has not been imitated. They have 
 gotten his fiddle but not his rosin: they can 
 pile on alliteration, and be biblical in phrase, 
 and trench on things forbidden in subject, and 
 make a remarkably dull Italian into a god, 
 and a great but not rationally great Frenchman 
 into a compound of Shakespeare and Plato. 
 They can write lines in twenty-seven syllables 
 or thereabouts if necessary ; but they can't write 
 poetry. Mr. Swinburne can and does. 
 
 There are, no doubt, several differences be- 
 tween poetical and other intoxication, but per- 
 haps the chief difference is this. You can test 
 the strength of the liquids odious to Sir Wilfred 
 Lawson in two ways, — by dipping a Sykes's 
 hydrometer in them, or by actually imbibing and 
 waiting to see whether they " get you forrarder." 
 In the case of poetry, only the latter test is avail- 
 able : you are yourself the hydrometer. Conse-
 
 74 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 quently it is exceedingly difficult to refer matters 
 to any common standard. " This is this to me 
 and that to thee." And it is nowhere so difficult 
 as in the case of a poet like Mr. Swinburne, whose 
 poetical appeal consists wholly or mainly in this 
 quality of impassioning and exhilarating. He 
 does not tell a story very well ; his strictly dra- 
 matic faculty is not, I think, put by better judges 
 of drama than I am very high. He is not a 
 poetical schoolman and a poetical satirist like 
 Dryden, nor a poetical epigrammatist and con- 
 versationalist like Pope. What is more remark- 
 able considering his century, he is not by any 
 means consummate or even eminent as a painter 
 in words. His sea-pieces put aside, it may be 
 said of his descriptions that, beautiful as they are, 
 they are rather decorative or conventional than 
 strictly pictorial, they do not bring the actual 
 sights before the eyes with the simple force of 
 Tennyson, or with the elaborate and complex 
 force of Rossetti and Mr. Morris. What he is 
 first of all is an absolutely consummate artist in 
 word-music of the current and tempestuous kind, 
 and an unfailing player on those moods of passion
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 75 
 
 or of thought which are akin to his own. And 
 if he fails in either of these two branches of his 
 appeal, I should say that it must be not so much 
 his fault as that of his audience. Music requires 
 an ear to hear as well as a voice to sing it ; and 
 when Mr. Guppy remarked that " there are 
 chords in the human breast," his aposiopesis 
 might have been filled as well as in any other 
 way by the words " which, if their quality be not 
 of the right kind, will fail to respond to the very 
 deftest player." It may possibly be a fault of 
 Mr. Swinburne's that he lends himself rather ill 
 to mere dispassionate admiration. I doubt my- 
 self whether any poet of a very high class can 
 be dispassionately appreciated : but certainly he 
 cannot. You must, to quote one of his own 
 finest passages, be somewhat in the mood to 
 
 " Hear through star-proof trees 
 The tempest of the Thjades," 
 
 or you must be in the mood of reaction after 
 such a hearing, in order to enjoy him fully. 
 "And what for no?" There is no senaUis con- 
 sv-lUim de Bacchanalibus as far as books are con- 
 cerned; and I confess a certain contempt for
 
 76 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 any one who cannot get excited over print and 
 paper. 
 
 And after all there is a vast residuum when this 
 merely personal excitement (which from my own 
 experience I should say is quite as likely to 
 be felt a little before fifty as a little after twenty) 
 has subsided. There is the astonishing revela- 
 tion of the metrical powers of English: for, 
 though we knew them to be infinite before, this 
 of itself does not take the very least thing off 
 from the blush of each fresh instalment of the 
 infinite surprises. There is the endless amuse- 
 ment of analysing the means (as to a certain 
 limited effect is possible) by which these musi- 
 cal and emotional effects are produced. There 
 is the pleasure of tracing what is, in so literary 
 and scholarly a poet as Mr. Swinburne, the 
 great and complicated indebtedness to the mas- 
 ters of Greece and of Rome, of Italy and of 
 France, but most of all to those of England. 
 And there is what is most delightful of all to 
 the true lover of poetry and literature, the de- 
 light of finding out how much it is impossible 
 to account for.
 
 Mr. Swinburne. 77 
 
 For to this we always come, and in this I 
 believe consists the greatest and most lasting 
 enjoyment of every kind of beauty. If you ever 
 could find out exactly why it is beautiful, the 
 thing would become scientific and cease to be 
 interesting. But you cannot, and so there is at 
 once the joy of possession and the ardour of the 
 unattained. You read for the first, the twentieth, 
 or the hundredth time "The Garden of Proser- 
 pine," or " Ilicet," or " A Wasted Vigil." There 
 is the first stage of pleasure, a purely uncritical 
 enjoyment. Then there is the second stage, 
 in which you sit down and take your critical 
 paper and pencil, and put down: metre so 
 much ; alliteration so much ; ingenious disposi- 
 tion of vowel sounds so much ; criticism of life 
 so much; pathetic fancy so much; to having 
 read it when SHE was present, or absent, or 
 cross, or kind, or something, so much ; literary 
 reminiscence so much. And then there is the 
 third, when you have totted these items up and 
 found that they do not come to anything like 
 the real total, that there is an infinite balance of 
 attraction and satisfaction which you cannot ex-
 
 yS Corrected Impressions. 
 
 plain, which is fact, but an unsolved, unanalysed, 
 ultimate fact. The poetry which has come to 
 mean this to a lover of poetry never gets stale, 
 never loses charm, never seems the same, or 
 rather, always being the same in one way, is 
 always fresh in another. 
 
 Among such poetry I, for my part, rank a 
 very large proportion of Mr. Swinburne's ear- 
 lier work, and not a very little of his later. If 
 it were ever going to pall on me, I think it 
 pretty certainly must have palled by this time. 
 And what is more, there is the comforting 
 reflection that anything in which one has taken 
 delight so long is secure from palling by the 
 very fact. The accumulation of delighted re- 
 membrance is a delight in itself: what has been 
 has been, and therefore must ever continue to 
 be. The constantly repeated thought and sen- 
 sation has become an entity, a thing in itself, a 
 possession for ever, by the very dint of having 
 been so long and so often possessed.
 
 IX. -■ -^ 
 
 , , ^ 
 
 ■n 
 
 MACAULAY. 
 
 'TPHERE are not many deities who find a 
 ■^ place in every Pantheon or are represented 
 by attributes in every system of monotheism. 
 But of these is Nemesis; and of Nemesis I do 
 not hesitate to proclaim myself a devout and 
 fearful worshipper. The great name which 
 stands at the head of this paper is perhaps in 
 literary history something of an example of 
 her power. Such a hero-of-Dr.-Smiles, such a 
 Selfelpista (as the Italians I believe call it), has 
 never been known since the lucky literary men 
 of the Age of Anne, whom he himself described 
 in some of his boldest and most effective strokes. 
 Macaulay, though not low-born, was born quite 
 in the middle class ; he inherited nothing worth 
 speaking of; and he did not devote himself to 
 any of the ordinary paying professions. Whether 
 — a circumstance over which his biographers
 
 8o Corrected Impressions. 
 
 skim rather lightly — he did definitely rat at 
 an early period of life from Toryism to Liber- 
 alism does not very much matter. He was born 
 a Liberal of the type which he was to do so 
 much to multiply and foster ; and if his hoisting 
 of that flag was a little prompted by considera- 
 tions of probable profit, we may very well set 
 the thing off against a very similar incident in 
 the career of Canning in the generation before, 
 and agree to say nothing about it. 
 
 From almost his earliest manhood Macaulay's 
 life was a sort of cascade of fallings on his feet. 
 He came just at the period when clear, brilliant, 
 confident, and rather shallow review-writing was 
 at its best paid and most honoured apogee. He 
 came at the time when there were still rotten 
 boroughs to bring forward a young man of 
 talent, and when a young man of talent could 
 make his position sure by denouncing the 
 rotten boroughs on which he had risen. In 
 the Reform Bill debates there was no young 
 man of anything like his talent on the other 
 side, and the one young or youngish man who 
 would have been too much for him in posi-
 
 Macaulay. 8i 
 
 tion and natural eloquence, as well as a fair 
 match for him in scholarship and knowledge, 
 Stanley, was by historical accident on the same 
 side. In society he coincided with the period 
 of breakfasts, and belonged to a party in which 
 there was nobody to match him as talker 
 except Sydney Smith, who was getting old. 
 When it was necessary to provide for him- 
 self solidly, the least troublesome and most 
 paying of all appointments left for any one to 
 obtain came in his way. He stayed in India 
 long enough to pick up a competence and not 
 long enough to damage his health. He had no 
 tastes, either domestic or luxurious, which could 
 interfere with this independence, or impose on 
 him a longer servitude. He came home and set- 
 tled down to his own ideal life : a little politics, 
 a great deal of historical literature, and as much 
 society as he chose, without any obligations of 
 family estate or office to force more on him. 
 His great history fell on the very nick of time 
 to suit its merits, and the famous twenty thou- 
 sand pound cheque symbolised at once those 
 merits and their reward. And then too he had
 
 82 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 the crowning felicity of an opportune death. 
 Had Macaulay lived to the age of Lord Sher- 
 brooke, something like Lord Sherbrooke's fate 
 might — indeed I think must — have been his, 
 though the few years' difference between them 
 must have given him a slight advantage. It is 
 almost terrible to think of the feelings of the 
 man who prophetically described Mr. Gladstone 
 half a century ago, when he found himself face 
 to face with the choice of ceasing to be a Liberal 
 or becoming a Gladstonian. 
 
 Yet Nemesis has been even with him (as she 
 always is) for all these good things, and for the 
 enormous popularity which was partly their 
 result and partly their complement. Almost 
 immediately after his death began a steady dead 
 set of critical depreciation, which, unhasting, 
 unresting, has attacked him ever since and which 
 for some years past has spread from the critics 
 to the vulgar. The decriers of Macaulay have 
 been a strangely miscellaneous band. It was 
 not to be expected that the Tories whom he 
 affected to despise should like him ; or that the 
 Evangelicals, who regarded hvm as a renegade,
 
 Macaulay. 83 
 
 and the Dissenters, who looked on him as the 
 inheritor of the wicked wit of Sydney Smith, 
 should love him. But he managed to attract 
 hosts of enemies of the most heterogeneous 
 kinds. It used to be a tradition in Oxford (I 
 never saw the passage and I apologise to Mr. 
 Smith if it is not true) that Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 even in the fullest days of his LiberaHsm called 
 Macaulay " a shallow scoundrel." Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold, as is well known, exhausted his elegant 
 quiver on the " Lays of Ancient Rome," and was 
 evidently often thinking of Macaulay when he 
 denounced the British Philistine. The tribe of 
 Dryasdust hated him because he was not merely 
 an omnivorous reader but a brilliant writer ; and 
 the devotees of historical philosophy could not 
 forgive him his obstinate superficiality and the 
 calm assumption which accompanied it that there 
 was nothing beneath the surface. Although one 
 considerable Mediaevalist, Mr. Freeman, used to 
 take his part, for reasons not very difficult of 
 discovery, it was impossible for any other stu- 
 dent of the older ages not to resent the bland 
 ignoring of something like a thousand years of
 
 84 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 English history which made Macaulay constantly 
 infer, and sometimes almost say, that nobody 
 need look beyond the Great Rebellion. 
 
 Also I am afraid it must be said, though it will 
 make one devoted Macaulayan who is a great 
 friend of mine wroth, that the number of Macau- 
 lay's enemies in a certain sense is sure to in- 
 crease by just so many people as undertake a 
 serious study of any person or period with whom 
 or which he has dealt. It is the general if not 
 the universal result in such cases that the inquir- 
 ers declare that Macaulay, if not thoroughly dis- 
 honest, is at least thoroughly untrustworthy. It 
 is not that he is a partisan, — history without 
 partisanship is to my fancy, in the old phrase of 
 King Henry the Fifth, like " beef without mus- 
 tard." Nor is it that he is, in history, deliber- 
 ately unfair. In his anonymous work, where a 
 man ought to be most careful, I fear he some- 
 times was. Some of the imputations on Croker 
 in the " Boswell " Essay are utterly inexcusable, 
 even if we did not know, as we do, that the 
 reviewer took up the book he intended to review 
 with a determination to " slate " it. But having
 
 Macau lay. 85 
 
 had occasion to examine more than one part of 
 the " History " carefully and documents in hand, 
 I do not think that this sort of unfairness is often 
 to be found there. Unfortunately, another sort 
 which is common in the " Essays " is common 
 also in the " History. " I do not hold that Ma- 
 caulay, unless (as in the Warren Hastings case) 
 he was himself misled by his authorities, ever 
 advances against his " black beasts " anything 
 which is positively untrue. I do not urge that 
 he often suppresses, in a way with which much 
 fault can be found, anything which makes in 
 their favour. But he has a less gross, perhaps, 
 but a worse and more dangerous fault than any 
 of these. He is constantly misleading by in- 
 nuendo suggestive of the false, by epithets, by 
 generalisations, by rhetorical extensions of the 
 actual fact or text. He finds in his document, 
 let us say, that A. on not certain authority was 
 accused on a particular occasion of doing or 
 saying such and such a thing. This trans- 
 lates itself in the pages of the History into 
 a general charge against A. of being notori- 
 ously in the habit of saying or doing it. A
 
 86 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 particular phrase is reported of a particular 
 person: Macaulay always turns it to "men 
 began to say," or something of that kind. In 
 short, the most careful student, the most expe- 
 rienced critic, never quite knows where to have 
 this great historian on a subject which he, the 
 student or critic, has not yet examined for him- 
 self; and when he does examine for himself he 
 too often has to ask himself, Is it possible that 
 these colourings and baits to the unwary, these 
 suppressions by dint of shading, and suggestions 
 by careless scattering of adjectives and adverbs, 
 can have been made without a deliberate parti 
 prisy without the aim of the advocate whose 
 admitted and professional privilege it is to throw 
 dust in the eyes of the jury if he possibly can? 
 
 Something else has to be added. They have 
 made Macaulay into school-books, and it is well 
 known that, if it be possible to instil disgust and 
 horror of an author into all but the few whom 
 the not perhaps quite equal Jove of literature 
 has specially loved, it can be done most easily 
 and completely by setting them to learn him 
 at school.
 
 Macaulay. 87 
 
 And so my Lord Macaulay of late — though 
 I do not know that the great heart of the people 
 has yet been affected about him, or that that 
 Australian book-shelf of which we have all heard 
 has yet been denuded of the " Essays " — has 
 begun to fall rather on evil days. The set 
 against him has spread from the highest to the 
 lowest rank of critics; the lady novelist has 
 lifted up what it may be almost improper to 
 call her heel against him; you see superior 
 gibes to his address in those curious periodicals 
 of scraps and patches which appear more than 
 anything else to satisfy the literary hunger and 
 thirst of the end of the nineteenth century. It 
 is whispered, apropos of the miserable Mont- 
 gomery, and in connection with the present in- 
 fluentially supported movement for roasting all 
 reviewers gratis, that Macaulay was one of the 
 wicked critics who delight to "slate" good 
 authors. Fond as we are nowadays of rehabili- 
 tations, the rehabilitator has not come to him. 
 In short. Nemesis is upon him: the deferred 
 discount of that twenty thousand pound cheque 
 has to be paid, and it is heavy.
 
 X. 
 
 MACAULAY {concluded). 
 
 T DO not know that there have been any very 
 -*- striking vicissitudes in my own opinions of 
 Macaulay. I used to dehght in the " Essays " 
 when I was a young boy, and I do not deh'ght 
 in them much less now that I am neither a boy 
 nor young. But I think I always had a kind of 
 inkling of the defects, which has gained in pre- 
 cision and definiteness, but has not, I think, 
 deepened much. I still think that, on any sub- 
 ject which Macaulay has touched, his survey is 
 unsurpassable for giving a first bird's-eye view, 
 and for creating interest in the matter. Of course 
 for those readers who have what is called " the 
 faith of the charcoal-burner," who must be per- 
 mitted to repose absolute implicit reliance on 
 every detail of the narrative,- every clause of the 
 creed set before them, or who else will be mis-
 
 Macaulay, 89 
 
 erable, Macaulay is the most dangerous of all 
 possible guides. But it must be an exceedingly 
 moderate intelligence which does not pretty 
 quickly perceive the classes and kinds of subject 
 on which he is to be taken with grains of salt, 
 an exceedingly sluggish and clumsy intellect 
 which cannot apply these grains with sufficient 
 discretion. 
 
 And he certainly has not his equal anywhere 
 for covering his subject in the pointing-stick 
 fashion. You need not — you had much bet- 
 ter not — pin your faith on his details, but 
 his Pisgah sights are admirable. Hole after 
 hole — a very sieveful of holes indeed — has 
 been picked in the " Clive " and the " Has- 
 tings," the "Johnson" and the "Addison," the 
 " Frederick " and the " Horace Walpole." Yet 
 every one of these papers contains sketches, sum- 
 maries, precis, which have not been made obso- 
 lete or valueless by all the work of correction in 
 detail. As a literary critic, again, Macaulay is 
 far from impeccable. His sympathies were not 
 very wide, and they were apt to be conditioned 
 by attractions and repulsions quite other than
 
 go Corrected Impressions. 
 
 literary. Although he had had a strictly classi- 
 cal education, although he early showed remark- 
 able mastery of literary form himself, it cannot 
 be said that this form was ever the object of any 
 but a very subordinate share of his attention. 
 It is amazing, when one has long been familiar 
 with his essay — an extremely interesting one — 
 on Temple, and then comes to be familiar with 
 Temple's own work, to find how little Macaulay 
 seems to have relished or realised Temple's 
 purely literary excellence. He was a good 
 Italian scholar and something of a Dantist; yet 
 his remarks on the second of the three great 
 poets of the world are wofully narrow and in- 
 adequate. I feel morally certain that he could 
 not have been the Miltonian that he was if 
 Milton had been a Cavalier and a Churchman ; 
 and I doubt whether it was not necessary for 
 him to make up his mind (as he did on next to 
 no evidence) that Bunyan served in the Parlia- 
 mentary army before he could give a voice to 
 his admiration of "The Pilgrim's Progress." 
 Even when politics did not interfere, it is obvi- 
 ous that his interest in literature as a round of
 
 Macaulay. 91 
 
 sketches of ethics, of manners, of political life in 
 the wide sense, altogether overtops his interest 
 in it as literature. On Spenser, he has, as 
 everybody knows, fallen into one of his rare 
 blunders of fact. He had read, as he had read 
 everything, the minor Elizabethans; but they 
 excite no rapture in him. It is admitted that 
 he has made Bacon, no very deep metaphysi- 
 cian at best, shallower and more exoteric still 
 in his exposition of him. It is " man in relation 
 to the Town " that he, like his beloved Addison, 
 really cares for. 
 
 Enough was said in the former paper on this 
 subject of the defects of Macaulay as a his- 
 torian ; and indeed they are not deniable by 
 any competent judge who is not for the nonce 
 a mere advocate. But the merit which has been 
 allowed to his Essays, that of extraordinarily 
 vivid presentation of the subject, must be allowed 
 here to a still greater degree, inasmuch as it is 
 shown on a far greater scale and in much more 
 diflficult matter. With part of the period which __j 
 Macaulay's History covers I happen, as has been 
 said, to have acquainted myself in considerable
 
 92 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 detail and by going to the original authorities. 
 Nobody can possibly be more opposed to 
 Macaulay's general views on the politics of that 
 period than I am. And yet I am disposed to 
 think and say, without the least conscious iiiten- 
 tion of paradox and with much deliberate guard- 
 ing against it, that of no other period of English 
 history does an idea so clear, vivid, and on the 
 whole accurate exist in so large a number of 
 people, and that this is due to Macaulay. The 
 fact is that the power of making historical 
 periods and transactions real and living is an 
 exceedingly rare power, and that Macaulay had 
 it. Since his day we have had a numerously 
 attended school of historians who have gone 
 beyond even Macaulay in book-devouring, who 
 have as a rule confined themselves more than 
 he did to single periods, and who have some- 
 times exhausted their powers of picturesque 
 writing and their readers' patience in severely 
 accurate detail. Not one of them, to my think- 
 ing, has achieved the success of making his 
 period living and actual as Macaulay has. The 
 picturesque people hide the truth with their
 
 Macaulay. 9j 
 
 flashes and their flourishes. The Dryasdusts 
 dole it out in such cut and dried morsels, 
 with such a lack of art, such a tedious tyranny 
 of document and detail, that the wood al- 
 most literally becomes invisible because of the 
 trees. 
 
 As for the " Lays of Ancient Rome," and the 
 not very numerous but very remarkable minor 
 verse which completes them, the history of that 
 division of Macaulay's works is the most start- 
 ling and the best known of all. When the 
 " Lays " first appeared, they took the world by 
 storm, and they held it for many years pretty 
 well unquestioned. Nobody in his senses, of 
 course, ever took them for the highest poetry : 
 they cannot in that respect pretend to vie even 
 with their own author's curious fragment on 
 '* The Last Buccaneer," or his exquisite " Jaco- 
 bite's Epitaph." But in one of the kinds of 
 poetry just below the very highest they ex- 
 hibited accomplishment and mastery quite won- 
 derful, and gave the poetical satisfaction to 
 thousands, and probably millions, who were not 
 fitted to receive it from higher things. Then
 
 94 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 arose Mr. Matthew Arnold and denounced them 
 as " pinchbeck," and the large number of per- 
 sons who about five and twenty years ago were 
 convinced that to get " culture " you must go 
 to Mr. Arnold, at once echoed " pinchbeck," 
 and vowed that they had never thought them 
 anything else. Those, however, who had not 
 exactly waited for Mr. Arnold to form their 
 opinions of classical and romantic perfection, 
 were not, I think, much disturbed by this con- 
 tempt. And in fact "pinchbeck" is about the 
 unluckiest epithet that Mr. Arnold could have 
 selected. Pinchbeck in the literal sense pre- 
 tends to be gold, and pinchbeck in the trans- 
 ferred sense means anything which pretends 
 to be something it is not. Now the " Lays " 
 pretend to be nothing that they are not; they 
 aim at nothing more than a rattling spirited 
 presentation in easy ballad rhyme of pictu- 
 resquely told incidents. There is no doubt 
 plenty of pinchbeck in English verse. There 
 is the pinchbeck that imitates Greek tragedy 
 and the pinchbeck that imitates mediaeval im- 
 agery; there is pinchbeck which would fain be
 
 Macau lay. 95 
 
 French and pinchbeck which would fain be phi- 
 losophical. I am not quite certain that some of 
 Mr. Arnold's own verse, exquisite as is the best 
 of it, is not pinchbeck in its affectation of a sort 
 of pseudo-philosophic attitude dashed with scep- 
 tical modernism, and corrected by classic form. 
 But there is no pinchbeck in the " Lays," be- 
 cause there is no pretence. Gold perhaps they 
 are not ; silver I think they are ; copper an un- 
 kind or partial judgment may call them. But 
 not twenty Mr. Arnolds shall ever persuade me 
 that they are base metal, — metal which shams 
 a higher stuff. 
 
 I think the publication of Sir George Trevel- 
 yan's excellent life of his uncle began a reaction 
 in favour of Macaulay, and I think that reaction, 
 though not very sudden or violent, is solidly 
 founded and will go on. The pedants indeed 
 are, I hear, raging at him more than ever ; but 
 they can do little harm ; and the average half- 
 educated journalist has begun to leave off think- 
 ing it fine to sneer at him. He will never of 
 course regain the position that he held during 
 the Jast decade of his own life and for a few
 
 g6 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 years afterwards : and I should be sorry if he 
 did. For his thought was no doubt distinctly 
 dorn^ and sometimes almost vulgar; his style 
 was sometimes flashy and almost always defi- 
 cient in the finest distinction ; he was a terribly 
 partial historian; and in every department of 
 literature he was insensible to, and incapable 
 of recognising, nuances, half-tones, delicate con- 
 trasts, subtle gradations. But on the other 
 hand he had that rarest and most precious 
 power of attracting his readers to, and inter- 
 esting them in, subjects that were not merely 
 frivolous or ephemeral ; his mental attitude was 
 sturdy, honest, shrewd ; he had a stout and no- 
 ble patriotism; his very partisanship, his very 
 advocacy, had something manly and downright 
 in its unfeigned and unmistakable character; 
 and fatiguing as his "snip-snap" sometimes 
 is, utterly disgusting as are imitations of it, yet 
 any one who speaks of Macaulay's style with 
 contempt seems to me to proclaim himself 
 fatally and finally as a mere "one-eyed man" 
 in literary appreciation. Of the merits and 
 defects of that curious generation of middle-
 
 Macaulay. ^y 
 
 class Liberalism which flourished in England 
 from 1830 to i860, he is probably the most 
 striking example ; and even if he were not this, 
 he is a very great man of letters, and an almost 
 unsurpassed leader to reading. |
 
 XI. 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 TT WHENEVER it happens to me to write 
 ' ^ about Robert Browning, I am always a 
 little apprehensive of the fate of the Trimmer. 
 I have loved and admired his work for full thirty 
 years ; but I do not belong to any of the four 
 parties wherein most of mankind are included 
 as regards him. There are those who were 
 Browningites from the first, or almost the first, 
 and have been faithful all through, — a race 
 now naturally diminishing by efflux of time. 
 There are those who began to like him after 
 he himself began to be fashionable, and who, 
 whether they have gone the whole way with the 
 Browning Society or not, regard him as one of 
 the greatest of poets and philosophers. There 
 are those who, from the sturdy English stand- 
 point, have always been unable to tolerate him 
 at all, at whatever time he was presented to
 
 Browning. gg 
 
 them. And there are those who, though chrono- 
 logically contemporaries of the rage for him, 
 either had other rages which kept them from 
 appreciating him, or are young enough (not 
 necessarily in years) to think him already vi'eux 
 jeu. All these are more or less "prevailing 
 parties," as Lord Foppington says, and can 
 encourage one another by dint of fellowship. 
 
 But my case is a little different. It so hap- 
 pened that Browning never fell in my way when 
 I was a boy, except in very small and casual 
 extracts. These I owed, I think, chiefly to that 
 godsend to the youth of the late fifties and early 
 sixties. Dr. Holden's " Foliorum Silvula," which, 
 if it was the occasion of much deplorable Greek 
 and Latin verse, must have laid the foundation 
 of acquaintance with the very best of English. 
 I cannot remember reading a single volume of 
 Browning as a volume before I became an un- 
 dergraduate. But the collected edition of his 
 Poems appeared almost directly afterwards, and 
 I got it, while no long time passed before the 
 appearance of "Dramatis Personse." Then I 
 became very much addicted to Browning, and
 
 lOO Corrected Impressions. 
 
 used to read him night and day. I have never 
 myself quite understood what people meant 
 and still sometimes seem to mean by the " ob- 
 scurity," the " difficulty " of " Sordello." It is 
 distinctly breathless and it is unduly affected ; 
 but if anybody has got a brain at all, that brain 
 ought not to be very much exercised in fol- 
 lowing the fortunes of Sordello and Taurello, 
 Alberic and Ezzelin, Adelaide and the rest. It 
 appeared to me that " Paracelsus " did n't prove 
 much, and like " Sordello " was breathless, while 
 I did not and do not care much more for Aprile 
 than for Paul Dombey. But who could miss 
 the splendid, and for its date, wholly novel 
 poetry of it? The plays were mainly a bore — 
 I have scarcely ever read a serious play younger 
 than the seventeenth century that was not more 
 or less of a bore to me — but there too the poet 
 appeared. And as for " Men and Women," and 
 the " Lyrics," and so forth, there was no possi- 
 ble mistake about them, when they were at their 
 best. I never loved the most popular pieces 
 much. " Ghent to Aix " is only a tour de force, 
 and I can remember that when as a boy I first
 
 Browning. loi 
 
 heard of it I thought that the good man rode to 
 Aix in Provence (which would have been some- 
 thing hke a ride), and was desperately disap- 
 pointed at the actual achievement. In " Count 
 Gismond " there is a passage of four and a half 
 lines which is good enough for anything, but the 
 rest is no great matter. " The Glove " contains 
 other lines which stick in the memory, but the 
 moral is mainly rubbish, and Marot was a poet. 
 And so on and so on. But I had never read, 
 and I have never read, anything like even the 
 least of half a hundred of the others in its best 
 parts. " Christina " (what devil ever tempted 
 Mr. Browning to run the double lines of the 
 earlier version into single ones?); "In a Gon- 
 dola " and " The Last Ride together," which I 
 will uphold for two of the best love poems of 
 the century, be the others what they may, the 
 last named being perhaps the very best that we 
 have produced for two hundred years ; " Mes- 
 merism " and " Porphyria's Lover," a pair on 
 a plane only a little lower; the first stanza of 
 " Meeting at Night," in which Browning has for 
 once met and matched his great contemporary
 
 I02 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 and rival on his own ground; the delightful 
 rococo of "Women and Roses"; yet another 
 pair, "Life in a Love" and "Love in a Life"; 
 " Love among the Ruins " and " Two in the Cam- 
 pagna," which ought, like so many of Brown- 
 ing's poems, to be taken together ; " Prospice," 
 great among the greatest, and such a quiet 
 essence of heroic combativeness that I never 
 could understand how my friend Mr. Henley 
 failed to include it in his "Lyra Heroica"; 
 " Childe Roland," best of its own class, though 
 "The Flight of the Duchess" runs it hard; 
 and crowning the whole " Rabbi ben Ezra " ; — 
 these were things (and I have not mentioned a 
 quarter of my own favourites) to set the blood 
 coursing rarely. And yet, though I believe I 
 love and loved them with a sum that twenty 
 thousand members of Browning Societies could 
 not make up, I never could and cannot now 
 call myself exactly a Browningite. Even then, 
 even in his heyday, the man (it is surely per- 
 missible to use slang of one who used so 
 much) "jawed" at times; he was not to be 
 depended upon for certainty of taste or touch ;
 
 Browning. 103 
 
 he would drop hideous negligences or more 
 hideous outrages of intention in the middle of 
 a masterpiece; it was clear that he wanted to 
 teach; and so forth. 
 
 The works which followed " Dramatis Per- 
 sonae " were not very well suited to convert a 
 half-hearted though at times intense worshipper 
 of this kind into a whole-hearted one. I am 
 told that "The Ring and the Book" did actu- 
 ally bring about that change which its author 
 anticipated in the famous address to the British 
 public who " might like him yet." I cannot say 
 that it brought about a contrary change in me. 
 A man does not once appreciate to the full 
 "The Last Ride together," or "Love among 
 the Ruins," and get tired of them afterwards. 
 But I own that this huge poem itself gave me 
 little pleasure. Of course there are fine things 
 in it, and the traits of " criticism of life " as well 
 as the achievements of poetical expression are 
 often admirable. But it is so tyrannously long 
 without any action ; so mercilessly voluble with- 
 out much justification for the volubility ; it heis 
 such a false air of wisdom and philosophy
 
 104 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 which is after all not particularly recondite or 
 novel, — that I remember thinking of " Porphy- 
 ria's Lover," and wishing that some one had 
 applied that person's drastic procedure to the 
 poet on his own principles. 
 
 Nevertheless I persevered, much enduring, 
 and except "Red Cotton Nightcap Country," 
 which I do not believe I have ever read through 
 yet, and "People of Importance," which I 
 missed by accident and have never picked up, 
 I do not believe there is a volume or a line of 
 Browning's that I have not read. It was tribu- 
 lation mostly in those days, but there was 
 comfort sometimes. " Fifine " is really a great 
 book (the Browningites, I am told, do not like 
 it), and there are gleanings even in the volumes 
 where Mr. Browning thought to make up for a 
 not wholly perfect knowledge of Greek by call- 
 ing a Nymph a " numph." And at the evening 
 time there was light. Even in the darkest days 
 of the Condones ad Vulgus Browningense ap- 
 peared flashes of the old splendour, never seen 
 on any other land or sea; the final poem of 
 " PachJarotto" was an almost flawless gem, and
 
 Browniner. 
 
 g- 105 
 
 the latest volumes of all, especially " Asolando," 
 showed a v/onderful recovery. It was a case of 
 eripitur persona, manet res. The mask that the 
 Browning Society had admired, and that had 
 been constantly touched up and made more 
 mask-like to please it, fell off, and Browning — 
 not in his first vigour, not as when he wrote " In 
 a Gondola" or "After," but still Browning — 
 reappeared. 
 
 It is of course a very great misfortune to be 
 thus constitutionally unable to be " in the tune." 
 In 1863 one ran the risk of being thought an 
 affected and presumptuous youth for saying 
 that, whatever faults " Sordello " might have, it 
 was not half so obscure as even then one of Mr. 
 Gladstone's speeches was, and that "The Last 
 Ride together " was worth the weight of the lady 
 and her lover and their horses in gold. In 1883 
 one ran the risk of being dismissed as a griz- 
 zling fossil because one failed to admire volume 
 after volume of blank-verse "jaw," where for the 
 most part mannerism took the place of thought 
 and facile ruggedness that of originality. I am 
 not sure that in 1894 the light, light wheel is not 
 
 \
 
 io6 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 already on the point of turning again, and that 
 anybody who admires Browning at all will not 
 be soon despised as something or other — it 
 really does not much matter what. Neverthe- 
 less, as there are nearly always the seven thou- 
 sand or thereabouts who have not bowed the 
 knee to the Baal of any particular moment, 
 who do not take their admirations or their dis- 
 likes at the stall which happens to be prescribed 
 by fashion, it may not be impertinent to ex- 
 amine a little further the reasons which have 
 made one person of the class a lover of Brown- 
 ing who was never a Browningite, — a critic of 
 Browning, who never would join in the cry 
 about " harshness " and " obscurity," and all the 
 rest of it. If outsiders do indeed see most of 
 the game, such a one should at any rate have 
 been able to see a little of it ; and perhaps even 
 his enthusiasm may cease to be suspected when 
 it is taken in conjunction with his objections.
 
 XII. 
 BROWNING {concluded'). 
 
 I DO not know that there is any English 
 writer to whom the motto Qiialis ab in- 
 cepto may be applied with more propriety than 
 to Robert Browning, — any whose works are 
 more intimately connected with his life. I am 
 not one of those who take a very great interest 
 in the biography of poets, and I think that its 
 importance as illustrating their works has been 
 as a rule exaggerated. But certainly, if a toler- 
 ably instructed student of books and men were 
 set the problem of Browning's works without 
 any knowledge of Browning's life, it would not 
 give him much trouble to lay down the main 
 lines of the latter. A man who had had to 
 write for a living, or to devote himself to writ- 
 ing in the intervals of any regular occupation, 
 could hardly have produced so much and have 
 produced it with such a complete disregard of
 
 io8 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 the public taste and the consequent chances of 
 profit. A man who had had the advantages 
 of that school and university education which 
 as a rule happens to the upper and upper- 
 middle classes of Englishmen would hardly 
 have produced his work with such an entire 
 disregard of authority as well as of popularity. 
 The first influence was no doubt wholly good, 
 for, copy-books notwithstanding, the instances 
 of men who without private means or practical 
 sinecures have produced large quantities of 
 very fine poetry are very rare, and for the last 
 couple of ceuturies almost non-existent. The 
 circumstances of Browning's education, on the 
 other hand, no doubt had a good influence as 
 well as a bad. It is open to any one to contend 
 that his natural genius was too irregular, too 
 recalcitrant to the file, to have admitted the 
 labour of that instrument; and that therefore, 
 if he had had a classical and critical taste im- 
 planted in him, the struggle of the two would 
 have condemned him to silence. But it is quite 
 certain that his worst faults are exactly those 
 of a privately educated middle-class English-
 
 Browning. 109 
 
 man, and it is of the very highest interest to 
 compare his career and performance in this 
 respect with the career and performance of 
 Mr. Ruskin, who was in many respects his 
 analogue in genius and circumstances, but 
 whose sojourn at Oxford gave just the differ- 
 entiating touch. 
 
 Allow however, as we may, less or more in- 
 fluence to these things, I think it will hardly 
 be denied that the effect manifested itself very 
 early, and that even by the appearance of 
 ** Bells and Pomegranates " prediction of their 
 author's characteristics and career as a whole 
 was pretty easy. It certainly had become so 
 by the time that I myself, as I have said, 
 was " entered " in Browning. It was obvious 
 on the credit side that here was a man with 
 an almost entirely novel conception of poeti- 
 cal vocabulary and style, with a true and won- 
 derful lyrical gift, with a faculty of argument 
 and narrative in verse which, diametrically as 
 it was opposed in kind to the Drydenian tra- 
 dition, had been in kind and volume unsur- 
 passed since Dryden, and with an enormous
 
 no Corrected Impressions. 
 
 range and versatility of subject. He could, it 
 was clear, not merely manipulate words and 
 verse in a manner almost suggesting prestidigi- 
 tation, but was also much more than a mere 
 word- and metre-monger. On certain sides of 
 the great problem of life he could think with 
 boldness and originality, if not with depth : the 
 depth of Mr. Browning's thought belongs to the 
 same mistaken tradition as his obscurity, and 
 reminds me of those inky pools in the limestone 
 districts which look and are popularly reputed 
 to be bottomless till somebody tries them and 
 finds them to be about nineteen foot two. He 
 had above all a command of the most univer- 
 sally appealing, if not also the loftiest, style of 
 poetry, — that which deals with love, — hardly 
 equalled except by the very greatest, and not 
 often excelled even by them. 
 
 But these great merits were accompanied 
 by uncommon and sometimes very ugly de- 
 fects. It was obvious that his occasional ca- 
 cophonies and vulgarities were not merely an 
 exaggeration of his recognition of the truth 
 that the vernacular can be made to impart
 
 Browning. 1 1 1 
 
 vigour, and that discords and degradations 
 of scale and tone heighten and brighten musi- 
 cal effects. They were at any rate sometimes 
 clearly the result of a combination of indo- 
 lence and bad taste, — indolence that would not 
 take the trouble to remove, bad taste that did 
 not fully perceive the gravity of the blemishes 
 that wanted removing in his very finest pas- 
 sages. There was also that most fatal defect 
 which the ill-natured fairy so often annexes 
 to the gifts of vigorous and fertile command 
 of language, — an excessive voluminousness 
 and volubility. Lastly there was the celebrated 
 " obscurity," which taken to pieces and judged 
 coolly was simply the combined result of the 
 good and bad gifts just mentioned. Mr. Brown- 
 ing had plenty to say on whatsoever subject he 
 took up ; he had a fresh, original, vigorous 
 manner of saying it; he was naturally inclined 
 to and had indulged his inclination for odd 
 and striking locutions ; he was very allusive ; 
 and he was both impatient of the labour of 
 correction and rather insensitive to the neces- 
 sity of it. Hence what he himself has rather
 
 112 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 damagingly called in a probably unintentional 
 satire and caricature of himself the " monstr' 
 inform* ingens-horrendous demoniaco-seraphic 
 penman's latest piece of graphic " which occurs 
 so often in his work, which the admirers take 
 for something very obscure but very precious, 
 requiring the aid of Browning dictionaries and 
 so forth, which the honest public gapes at, 
 from which the primmer kind of academic 
 critic turns away disgusted, and which more 
 catholic and tolerant appreciation regards, if 
 not exactly with disgust, certainly with regret 
 and disapproval. 
 
 Now it was practically certain that when, from 
 such a man, the very last restraining or dissuad- 
 ing checks in the shape of public disapproval or 
 (more powerful still) indifference were removed, 
 he would take the bit in his teeth and run away 
 with himself This was what Browning practi- 
 cally did in the score of volumes in improvised 
 blank verse chiefly, but also in other metres, 
 which he poured forth after 1868. The greater 
 part of this matter I feel tolerably confident 
 that futurity will relegate to the same shelf
 
 Browning. 113 
 
 with Southey's epics and Dryden's plays. In- 
 deed, I myself would much rather read the 
 worst of either group than " Prince Hohen- 
 stiel Schwangau," or the "Balaustion" books. 
 But if the said posterity is well served by its 
 editors, from time to time certain things will 
 be rescued from even this part, and, added to 
 the earlier harvest, will form a poetical corpus 
 not by any means contemptible in respect of 
 bulk even when ranked with the sheaves of 
 pretty fertile poets, and full of admirable if 
 rarely perfect poetry. Few philosophical poets 
 have lived long — Lucretius and Dante are 
 the only great exceptions — and I am as cer- 
 tain as it is not rash to be that Mr. Browning 
 in his philosophical pieces will not rank with 
 these. Indeed, it was not much of a philoso- 
 phy, this which the poet half echoed from and 
 half taught to the second half of the nineteenth 
 century. A sort of undogmatic Theism height- 
 ened by a very little undogmatic Christianity ; 
 a theory of doing and living more optimist 
 than Carlylism and less fantastic than Ruskin- 
 ism, but as vague and as unpractical as either ;
 
 114 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 a fancy for what is called analogy and a mar- 
 vellous gift of rhetorical exposition, — these 
 made it up. It looks vast enough and various 
 enough in form and colour at a distance; it 
 shrinks and crumbles up pretty small when 
 you come to examine it. 
 
 But a poet is always saved by his poetry, 
 and of that, thank Heaven, Mr. Browning had 
 plenty to secure his salvation. Those volumes 
 of selections by which in an even narrower 
 compass than that already hinted at he is per- 
 haps destined to live most securely and long- 
 est (though the second wants refreshing and 
 rearranging) display a perfect Aurora Borealis 
 of poetical flashes of the intensest luminosity 
 and the most endless variety of colour. The 
 sabre-and-stirrup clang of the i rhymes in 
 "Through the Metidja"; the astonishingly 
 various music and imagery of the songs of " In 
 a Gondola " ; the steady hopeless swing — too 
 full of passion for rant — of " The Last Ride" ; 
 the strange throbbing measure of " Mesmer- 
 ism"; and a hundred other things which I 
 must not mention lest after the string given
 
 Browning. 115 
 
 in the last paper I be accused of mere cata- 
 logue-making ; — these are the things which 
 generation after generation of lovers of poetry 
 will read and rejoice in, just as we now read 
 and rejoice in Donne and Marvell, and the 
 rest of the seventeenth century lyrists. In- 
 deed, I sometimes wonder whether on one of 
 their sides Browning did not come nearer to 
 these than Coleridge or Shelley, Keats or Ten- 
 nyson. For if he had not the finest seven- 
 teenth century magic in remoteness of matter 
 and melody of form, he had the odd ups and 
 downs, the queer admixture of ore and dross, 
 the want of criticism, the incompleteness which 
 mark all but one or two of our seventeenth 
 century men. 
 
 And if any one must needs, to complete his 
 idea of a great poet, have something more than 
 poetry and passion, than music and moonlight, 
 I shall at least allow that Browning's life philos- 
 ophy, if exposed to the criticisms made above, 
 did once or twice, notably in the above-mentioned 
 " Rabbi ben Ezra," receive a very noble and 
 lasting enshrinement and expression. A little
 
 ii6 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 optimist perhaps, but certainly not with the 
 optimism which blinks the facts of life ; a little 
 pantheistic, as perhaps are all the great religions 
 and all the great philosophies when you come 
 to examine them from certain points of view and 
 mood ; a trifle unsubstantial, as divine philoso- 
 phy must always be. But full of a generous 
 and indomitable spirit, free from the whining 
 and cavilling to which poetic philosophy so 
 often inclines ; throbbing with that remem- 
 brance of delight which is perhaps better than 
 any delight itself; not covetous but not despair- 
 ing of more ; content to comprehend as far as 
 may be, to labour as much as need be, to hope 
 as much as is rational, — the philosophy in short 
 of a poet who is also a man, which duplicate 
 advantage poets have not always possessed.
 
 XIII. 
 
 DICKENS. 
 
 THERE are few comparatively recent writers 
 about whom it is more difficult to write 
 at the present moment than it is to write about 
 Dickens. Current public opinion about him 
 seems to have got into a kind of tangle, and 
 there are as many as four or five distinct views 
 regarding him, all of which are held by con- 
 siderable parties, each including some who 
 deserve consideration quite independent of the 
 numbers of their companions. There are — 
 perhaps least numerous at the moment, but 
 including, I fancy, a larger genuine number 
 of genuine adherents than some of the other 
 parties would admit — the old thorough Dick- 
 ens worshippers, who more or less represent 
 the public that Dickens himself took by storm. 
 These have a relish for his fun, and are not too 
 critical over his pathos; they are not revolted 
 by, or at least can pardon, and sometimes they
 
 ii8 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 directly sympathise with, his eccentric and ill- 
 reasoned politics and sociology; they do not 
 care to inquire too curiously into his formal pe- 
 culiarities of plot and management ; they do not 
 cavil at, perhaps they enjoy, his style. Some 
 of them indeed, who have literary gifts, follow 
 him more or less directly to this day. Then, to 
 take as nearly as I can their chronological suc- 
 cessors, there are those who, admitting that he 
 was a genius, feeling a genuine enjoyment of his 
 humour, and allowing him a great amount of 
 credit for marvellous inventive power, dwell 
 strongly on all the excepted points just hinted 
 at, and in addition resent not merely the extraor- 
 dinary topsy-turvyness and the sharp limits of 
 his power of delineation of character, but also 
 that quality in him which can only be called 
 vulgarity, though I admit all the objections 
 which are often urged against the use of that 
 word as itself vulgar. This class is not by any 
 means a homogeneous one, and the degrees in 
 which its members allow the positive or credit 
 side to overcome the negative or debit in their 
 general estimate are extremely various.
 
 Dickens. 
 
 119 
 
 But independent of these two parties, at least 
 three more, among men mostly, but not ahvays, 
 younger than the members of the other two, 
 admit of definition more or less exact. There , 
 are those who are simply "tired of Dickens," 
 who resent the frequency with which his char- 
 acters have passed into the range of newspaper 
 quotation and parallel, who would like to " turn 
 the page," who are in fact bored by him. There 
 is a still larger body among the very young who 
 think him out of date in more than time, and 
 who wonder how anybody can even think of 
 Dickens when he might read Mr. Hardy and 
 Mr. Meredith. And there is a small body again, 
 very heterogeneously composed, but including 
 some persons of wit if also of crotchet, who would 
 if they could exalt Dickens as a great demo- 
 cratic genius, as one who made his way without 
 and in spite of education, fashion, powerful con- 
 nections, and so forth, and vindicated the rights 
 of the faculties of genius pure and simple. 
 
 There is something of an egg- or sword- 
 dance in the attempt at a criticism of Dickens 
 amid these delicate and dangerous differences
 
 I20 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 of opinion. But perhaps we shall find that ad- 
 herence to the personal and historical side of 
 the matter here, as elsewhere, will help us not a 
 little. It has, I believe, been held by the fanciful, 
 that a man of tolerably healthy mind, who does 
 not allow himself to be hampered by prejudice 
 or crotchet, usually goes through a kind of mi- 
 crocosm of all possible opinions about his sub- 
 ject ; and though this may be something of an 
 exaggeration, it is also something of a truth. 
 
 I began myself very young (at ten or twelve 
 years old, I should think) with " Pickwick," 
 and I own that I should not to this day think 
 much of any one who began at about that age 
 with " Pickwick " and did not adore it. I will 
 add, that I should not think very much of any- 
 one who materially altered his opinion of " Pick- 
 wick," however many years he might live and 
 however many times he might read it afterwards. 
 Years will indeed bring the philosophic mind to 
 this extent, that one perceives more and more 
 the extremely artificial character of the Pick- 
 wickian world. But then a boy does not take the 
 Pickwickian world for a natural one. He simply
 
 Dickens. 121 
 
 does not think of it either as natural or unnat- 
 ural; and when the sense of its artificiality 
 comes on him, it destroys nothing, it brings 
 about no disillusion, it only adds a certain con- 
 dition to his view. I do not think that to this 
 day I ever allow more than a year or two to 
 pass without reading " Pickwick " through from 
 beginning to end ; and I cannot perceive any 
 marked diminution in the satisfaction with which 
 I do so. As Mr. Boswell, in one of his inimit- 
 able compromises between the simpleton and 
 the sage, somewhere remarks, ** I seldom expe- 
 rience less disappointment in any scheme of 
 happiness I trace out." And this, I think, is 
 the very hardest test to which anything, literary 
 or other, can be put. It is all very well to say 
 that youthful enjoyment induces a strong delu- 
 sion, and that we rather refuse to acknowledge 
 a diminution than actually experience an equal- 
 ity. If this be so, why do other things in which 
 I used to take quite as much delight as in " Pick- 
 wick" fail to give me the same pleasure now? 
 No; I shall maintain that this impossible and 
 burlesque epopee of the four friends has a
 
 122 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 quality in it which belongs only to the literature 
 which is pre-eminently good in a kind just short 
 of the highest. 
 
 But, it will be said, " Pickwick " is not all 
 Dickens, and all Dickens is not " Pickwick," 
 both of which propositions are most undeniably 
 true. In leaving them one leaves the only spot 
 of ground in the subject where a perfectly fair 
 and equal fight is possible between admirers 
 and contemners. You like " Pickwick " or you 
 do not, and there 's an end on 't. Except as 
 regards some of the inserted stories, it is all of 
 a piece. But this could never be said again of 
 any of the author's later works. I am not old 
 enough to have been contemporary, at least in 
 a state of intelligence, with any of the greater 
 of these as they are generally reckoned. I do, 
 indeed, remember seeing the parts of "Bleak 
 House " in the booksellers' windows ; but I did 
 not read it till long after. I remember distinctly 
 failing to appreciate *' Hard Times," which I 
 think rather better of now; and "A Tale of 
 Two Cities," which I like worse every time I 
 manage to read it. Of " Great Expectations "
 
 Dickens. 123 
 
 I thought as a boy, and I think as a man, much 
 better than most people did, or I believe do ; 
 and though I cannot believe that we lost much 
 by the non-completion of " Edwin Drood," there 
 is no doubt " the true Dickens " in parts of " Our 
 Mutual Friend." But for that true Dickens in 
 its quiddity we must no doubt look farther back 
 even than " Bleak House," He achieved indeed 
 in the latter days with Louisa and Estella some- 
 thing more like live girls than the wax models 
 which under the names of Rose Maylie and 
 Kate Nickleby, and so forth, he had been con- 
 tented to exhibit in the earlier. The life phi- 
 losophy of " Great Expectations," though not 
 very extensive or thorough, is the sanest and 
 the truest he has expressed. The dreary man- 
 nerism which appears in " Bleak House," which 
 simply floods "Little Dorrit" and " Hard Times," 
 and which seldom retires for long in any of the 
 later books, is relieved by Mr. Guppy and his 
 friends, by Afifery Flintwinch, by Jo Gargery 
 and by Herbert Pocket, by the dolls' dress- 
 maker, by a dozen other persons and a thousand 
 or a myriad touches and flashes. But when we
 
 124 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 think of Dickens and do not think of " Pick- 
 wick " only, we do not think of these. It was 
 in the forties and earliest fifties that he made 
 his fame with "Nickleby" and "The Old Curios- 
 ity Shop," with •' Barnaby Rudge " and " Martin 
 Chuzzlewit," with " Copperfield " and " Dom- 
 bey," and it is with these that he must keep or 
 lose it. 
 
 And yet how difficult it is to arrive at any 
 settled and connected view, much more at any 
 view that shall command anything like a general 
 assent about even these books ! In looking, for 
 instance, for a date just now, I found in a most 
 respectable book of reference the statement that 
 " Agnes is perhaps the most charming character 
 in the whole range of fiction." Ag7ies ! No 
 decent violence of expletive, no reasonable arti- 
 fice of typography, could express the depths of 
 '.my feelings at such a suggestion. It is an ob- 
   servation almost too hackneyed to be repeated 
 that our fathers thought Little Nell and Lit- 
 tle Paul almost excruciatingly pathetic, while 
 the whole of my own generation has chiefly 
 yawned over them. I am told that the weeping
 
 Dickens. 125 
 
 time is coming again soon; but this I take 
 leave to doubt. As a terrorist and a manufac- 
 turer of Villains with a capital V, Dickens has 
 I believe from the first been exposed to the 
 doubts and sneers of callous heretics. Marks 
 and Ralph Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge's rather 
 incomprehensible and very murderous father, 
 Jonas Chuzzlewit, Carker the impossible, have 
 never had the first good fortune of Paul and 
 Nell, though they have fully shared their later 
 decadence. 
 
 And the case of the novelist's social satire 
 is not very different. Dickens was so essen- 
 tially the middle-class Englishman of his own 
 generation pbis genius, that he could not fail to 
 carry great numbers of his readers with him in 
 his onslaughts on workhouses and public offices, 
 on Chancery and the manufacturing system. 
 But some at least of those readers would have 
 been abnormally stupid if they had not per- 
 ceived from the first the exaggeration and the 
 one-sidedness which pervaded these attacks, and 
 the astonishingly vague and unpractical char- 
 acter of the optimism which inspired such alter-
 
 126 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 natives as the novelist suggested or seemed to 
 suggest. Reading in parts might obscure the 
 frequent incoherence and improbability of the 
 stories. But except among those readers who 
 had themselves no more knowledge of the sub- 
 ject than their author, it was impossible that 
 many, even from the first, should not be struck 
 with the almost inconceivable ignorance of all 
 the upper and a large part of the middle class 
 of society which his books displayed. The so- 
 called lower classes and part of the shop-keeper 
 rank he knew, as the French say, " like his 
 hand." Of actors he could tell and of attorneys, 
 and he knew a barrister in court, though hardly 
 out of it. But his soldiers, I mean his soldier- 
 officers, his clergymen, his scholars, his miscel- 
 laneous gentlemen, much more his baronets and 
 his peers, were like nothing that lives and moves 
 on any part of the earth except the boards of 
 the stage. And so from the very earliest times 
 there was dissidence about him, dissidence from 
 which I must if I can in another paper endeav- 
 our, if not to extract some argument, at any 
 rate to make clear my own view.
 
 XIV. 
 
 DICKENS {concluded^. 
 
 T REMEMBER reading a good many years 
 -■■ ago, in a description (doubtless intended to 
 be sarcastic) of an academic critic by a critic 
 who was not academic, the item, " He likes the 
 fun of Dickens." A person who only " liked 
 the fun of Dickens," it was hinted (indeed I am 
 not sure that it was not subsequently inculcated 
 explicitly), was a nasty cynic, a superfine and 
 unsympathetic disdainer of pathos and popular 
 sentiment. I am afraid that I underlay then, 
 and must still underlie, the ban of this condem- 
 nation. I should indeed not be disposed to 
 deny now that Dickens has other claims besides 
 mere fun. I say " now," because there was a 
 period when I was younger and more unbal- 
 anced in judgment, and when, reserving appre- 
 ciation of " Pickwick " and the Pickwickian parts
 
 128 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 of its fellows, I was disposed to place their au- 
 thor unduly low. At this period I once sold a 
 complete set of the paper-bound issue of the 
 works which came out in the late sixties for half 
 a crown, — ostensibly and to some extent really 
 as a testimony of opinion as to the literary 
 value of the matter. This was fantastic, if not 
 positively foolish ; but it was even at the time 
 not quite sincere, and such sincerity as there 
 was in it vanished very soon. 
 
 What may be said, I think with perfect criti- 
 cal truth, about Dickens is, that although he has 
 a good deal besides " his fun," nothing that he 
 has is of unalloyed excellence except that fun. 
 I have seen him praised for wit ; but I should 
 say that when he is really funny he is always 
 humourous, but never witty. When he attempts 
 wit it is apt to land him in the dreary regions of 
 the Circumlocution Office and other dry places 
 wherein an over-strained satire prowls and barks. 
 But in his own region of partly observed, partly 
 exaggerated humour of the fantastic kind, his 
 felicity is astonishing. Although his subjects 
 are often technically " low " enough in all con-
 
 Dickens. i2q 
 
 science, he never here deserves the epithet 
 " vulgar " from those who know how to use that 
 dangerous adjective. It is only when he ap- 
 proaches the delineation of gentility or attempts 
 the attitude of philosophic satire that he exhibits 
 traces of the one unpardonable thing ; and his 
 vulgarest book, his one book tainted with in- 
 curable and hopeless vulgarity, is his " Child's 
 History of England." 
 
 But though this terrible fault — a fault awkward 
 to speak of inasmuch as the mere mention of it 
 infuriates those who do not themselves feel its 
 presence — does exist in Dickens to a most 
 unpleasant extent, the strange alloy which, as 
 has been noted, pervades all his work except 
 that in pure fantastic humour, is by no means 
 wholly due to it. The cause thereof, however, 
 is perhaps something which aggravated his vul- 
 garity, to wit, his unfortunate want of early 
 education and training except of the most hap- 
 hazard and self-helping kind. He appears to 
 have been, as an editor, an extremely severe 
 critic of other men's work, and he certainly did 
 not take his own lightly. Yet he seems to have 
 
 9
 
 130 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 been more destitute of the faculty of self criti- 
 cism than any person of whom I can think who 
 possessed anything like his powers of creation. 
 It is evident from the storm passage in " David 
 Copperfield," and some others, that he was quite 
 capable of writing a kind of half sober, half 
 ornate, and distinctly old-fashioned style, which 
 has very considerable merit and is not justly 
 exposed to any reproach on the score of taw- 
 driness, want of elegance, or absence of propor- 
 tion. Yet for once that he will content himself 
 with this, he will indulge a score of times in a 
 kind of trumpery strained melodramatic rant, 
 which is as little impressive, as completely dis- 
 gusting, as the antics of a North Asian or North 
 American sorcerer. He will spoil the admirable 
 vigour of his descriptive faculty at crises by 
 plastering and daubing this rant over the scenes, 
 and change a shudder to a yawn by simply 
 overdoing it. It is this inability to know where 
 to stop which in like fashion has brought dis- 
 credit on his pathos. He really had pathos ; 
 but he could not be content with a moderate 
 dose of it, and must needs froth and whip and
 
 Dickens. 131 
 
 be-devil it till it becomes half insipid, half ful- 
 some. Just the same, again, may be said of his 
 mere mannerisms of style and figure, though it 
 is fair to allow that in his very last years, unless 
 we may suspect a probable relapse in " Edwin 
 Drood," he made a rather remarkable recovery 
 from the depths to which he had fallen in " Little 
 Dorrit" and " Hard Times." In these the dam- 
 nable iteration about Panks the " tug," and the 
 figure of Louisa as Mrs. Sparsit sees it going 
 down the descent, and other similar things, are 
 almost enough to make the gorge rise. In his 
 political and social satire, in his amiable optimist 
 life-philosophy, in his marvellous egotism, in a 
 dozen other characteristics of his, this same 
 utter absence of the sense of limit appears, 
 and is the secret of his failures. He will put 
 on the stage a clumsy lay figure like Sir John 
 Chester and a perfectly human being like Mrs. 
 Varden with equal composure, and with an 
 equally undoubting faith that both are quite 
 as they should be. 
 
 There are, I believe, some people who would 
 extend this unreality even to his humorous crea-
 
 132 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 tions. I cannot do this. Of course in his later 
 years the stream naturally ran with a good 
 deal less of volume and with somewhat less 
 sparkle and sprightliness than it showed at first. 
 But I, at least, can discover no very great decline 
 in strict quality between Mr. Jingle and the 
 dolls' dressmaker's papa, between Dick Swivel- 
 ler and Joe Gargery. There may be something 
 of the " irreparable outrage of years " in the 
 later figures, but they are of one kith and one 
 kin with the earlier. No doubt such things as 
 the machinations of Mr. Boffin, and the exclama- 
 tions he utters in the effort to carry them through, 
 are inexpressibly tedious and dull. But then it 
 is a grave error to class these with the efforts of 
 Dickens's own native humour at all. They belong 
 to the Banks business noticed above, — to the 
 strange, mechanical, wooden-legged method of 
 dot-and-go-one progression with which he chose 
 at all times to alternate the easy flight of his nat- 
 ural wings. They belong to the false Dickens, 
 the black horseman, the Mr. Hyde of the organ- 
 ism, as distinctly as do the Markses and the 
 Ralph Nicklebys, the washy pathetics and the
 
 Dickens. 
 
 IJ3 
 
 windy politics, the leather-and-prunella peers, 
 and the good-young-person heroines. 
 
 It is quite different with the group, or rather 
 army, of immortal grotesques, who, with the 
 elder Mr. Weller for their general, and his son 
 for chief of the staff, have now travelled the 
 Journey from this World to the Next for a good 
 many years, and are, I think, tolerably safe of 
 their journey's end. Although, or because, 
 extravagance is of their essence, we seldom — 
 I hardly ever — feel them to be extravagant. 
 So unerring has been the genius of their author, 
 so perfectly has he arranged them in the particu- 
 lar key to which they belong, that the jars and 
 false notes which alone could throw them out 
 never occur. It is true, and is perhaps a ne- 
 cessary complement and corollary of this other 
 truth, that they are never completely human. 
 They have admirably human traits, they utter 
 the wisest saws and the most modern instances, 
 the touches of nature which their author gives 
 them and which they exhibit are of the finest. 
 Certainly they are not inhuman, but they are, I 
 think, decidedly extra-human. They belong to
 
 134 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 a world not much, but definitely and unmistak- 
 ably, different from the actual. It has been 
 pointed out before now that the two great con- 
 temporaries, Dickens and Balzac, each possessed 
 this singular gift as it may be called from one 
 point of view, this singular failing as it may be 
 called from another. They both draw with 
 u nerring fa ithfulness characters which they have 
 themselves invented ; they fill a universe^ which 
 they have themselves created. The creation of 
 Dickens is indeed somewhat fantastic and shad- 
 ovv'y beside that of Balzac, a magic lantern show 
 rather than a human comedy; but, on the other 
 hand, individual figures of the English master's 
 have a vividness and vigour of life exceeding 
 anything in the French. Yet in Dickens, even 
 more than in Balzac, we feel the constant pres- 
 ence of the theatre, — of the boards and the 
 lamps, — the property man and the prompter. 
 Take, for instance, the guests of the immortal 
 " Swarry " in " Pickwick," one of the greatest and 
 liveliest things that Dickens has done. They 
 have the most delightful touches ; they act their 
 parts with remarkable verve : and yet we feel
 
 Dickens. 
 
 135 
 
 that they are not real footmen. None of them 
 
 — nobody at all like them — ever opened a door 
 to us or took away a coat from us. Whereas 
 Thackeray with much less elaborate effort has 
 created more than one of their brethren, — J. J.'s 
 papa, the precious footman of Sir Francis Clav- 
 ering who objected to and avoided a " holterca- 
 tion," and others — whom we know to have been 
 
 — to be — alive. They are hanging on behind 
 carriages at actual drawing-rooms, and carrying 
 with or without a sense of offended dignity 
 actual coals to real fires. Those about Mr. 
 John Smauker never did anything of the sort 
 except in the Theatre Royal, Kennaquhair. 
 
 Yet this, as it seems to me, has a certain 
 advantage. I was surprised to see it suggested 
 the other day that " Pickwick " is losing its pro- 
 priety of atmosphere. I should have thought 
 that, except to the very oldest men now living, 
 it had long lost all that it ever had. I am not 
 young, and, as I have said, I began to read 
 " Pickwick " very early. But, by that time, the 
 coaches and the hackney coaches, the domestic 
 suppers and the London taverns that were not
 
 ij^ Corrected Impressions. 
 
 mere gin palaces, were things of the past. Nor 
 even when they were not can I think that to 
 close observers Dickens can ever have seemed 
 a realist. He was too glaringly fantastic, phan- 
 tasmagoric, theatrical, for that. Save in a few 
 externals and in his politics, which, thank 
 Heaven, hardly appear in " Pickwick " itself at all, 
 he is of no particular time, though his knowledge 
 of part of human nature is enough to make 
 him sufficiently of all. His peculiar variety of 
 humour has often been described as, or attrib- 
 uted to, animal spirits. This does not seem to 
 me fully adequate, for there is something much 
 more than mere animal spirits therein. There is 
 a quaint and fantastic habit of brain, an immense 
 observation of the ways of men, even a certain 
 though a limited sense of the irony of life. And 
 the zest and character of this are perhaps height- 
 ened by the exclusions and the short-comings 
 which accompany it. There is no sense of 
 poetry, none of mystery, hardly any of religion, 
 in Dickens. Passion has a merely rudimentary 
 and infantile expression ; art and literature next 
 to none ; philosophy none at all ; history, sci-
 
 Dickens. 
 
 137 
 
 ence, many other things, hardly any. And 
 perhaps these lacks, these absences, helped to 
 concentrate the force and presence of what is 
 present, so as to intensify its marvellous humour- 
 istic quality.
 
 XV. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 AMONG the subjects of these papers there 
 is hardly one in regard to whom I can 
 speak in the tone of " How it struck a con- 
 temporary," to the same extent as I can with 
 regard to Mr. Matthew Arnold. Not of course 
 that I can claim to have been a contemporary 
 of Mr. Arnold's in the strict sense ; for he had 
 taken his degree before I was born, and was 
 an author before I was able to spell. But I 
 can lay claim to having seen the birth of his 
 popularity, its whole career till his death, the 
 stationary state which preceded and succeeded 
 that death, and something like a commencement 
 of the usual depreciation and spoliation which 
 so surely follows. For Mr. Arnold's reputation 
 made no very early or general way with the 
 public, however high it may have been with his 
 private friends, and with a small circle of (chiefly
 
 Matthew Arnold. ija 
 
 University) readers of poetry. A University 
 Professorship has not very often been the occa- 
 sion of attracting public attention to a man in 
 England; but it may be said with some con- 
 fidence that the remarkable " Lectures on Trans- 
 lating Homer" were the first which drew to Mr. 
 Arnold the notice of the world. He was then 
 nearly forty, and he was several years over that 
 Age of Wisdom when the " French Eton " and 
 still more the " Essays in Criticism " fascinated 
 the public with a double mannerism of speech 
 and thought in prose, and set it inquiring about 
 the author's verse. 
 
 Most young men of twenty who had any taste 
 for English letters when the " Essays " appeared 
 fell in love with them, I believe, at once and 
 desperately, with the more or less natural con- 
 sequence of getting tired of them, if not pos- 
 itively disliking them, afterwards. My own 
 admiration for them was, to the best of my 
 remembrance, a good deal more lukewarm at 
 first ; and though it has never got any colder 
 since, and has, I think, a little increased in tem- 
 perature, it never has been, and I do not think
 
 140 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 it ever will be, at boiling point. I may give 
 some reasons for this later, for the moment let 
 us be historical. 
 
 It was undoubtedly one of those happy coin- 
 cidences which, according to the optimist, hap- 
 pen to all of us who really deserve them, that 
 just after the reading public had awakened to 
 the sense that there was a very piquant and re- 
 markable writer of English prose wrapped in 
 the coat of one whom it had hitherto regarded, 
 if at all, as a composer of elegant, but rather 
 academic verse, the great political change of 
 1867 happened, and a reign of sharp social and 
 political changes began. I do not think myself 
 that the revolution of 1868-1874 has ever been 
 fully estimated, and I have always thought 
 it half an advantage and half a disadvantage 
 that I was myself resident out of London during 
 : the whole of that time. The looker-on sees the 
   drift of the game more clearly, but he appre- 
 ciates the motives and aims of those who take 
 part in it less fully than the players. During 
 these years Mr. Arnold seemed to have a great 
 part before him. Everything (following his
 
 Matthew Arnold. 141 
 
 father's famous definition of LiberaHsm) " was 
 an open question," and the Apostle of Culture 
 with his bland conviction, first, that most things 
 were wrong in England, and, secondly, that he 
 was born to set them right, and with a singu- 
 larly stimulating and piquant style to help him, 
 had an unusually clear field. 
 
 As a matter of fact, Mr. Arnold did help to 
 produce a considerable effect on the public. 
 But it was an effect chiefly negative as far as 
 the public was concerned, and it cannot be said 
 to have been altogether happy as regards him- 
 self. To the finest flowers of his production, 
 such as the delightful whimsy of " Friendship's 
 God," little attention was paid : the good pub- 
 lic. Populace, Philistines, and Barbarians alike, 
 could not make out what the devil Mr. Arnold 
 was driving at. His formulas, after pleasing for 
 a while, were seen to be rather empty things ; 
 his actual politics, if he had any, (a point on 
 which I have always entertained doubts,) ap- 
 peared to be totally unpractical ; and he had not 
 the chance which Mr. Mill and Mr. Morley en- 
 joyed or suffered, of showing whether a sojourn
 
 142 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 in the House could practicalise them. Un- 
 luckily too for him, he allowed his energies to 
 drift almost wholly into the strange anti-theo- 
 logical kind of theology which occupied him for 
 nearly ten years, which at first brought on him 
 much odium and never attained for him much 
 reputation, which appears to me, I confess, to 
 have palpably stiffened and dulled his once mar- 
 vellous lissomeness and brilliancy of thought, 
 and which is now abandoned to cheap beginners 
 in undogmatism alike by the orthodox and the 
 unorthodox of some mental calibre. 
 
 Then for another ten years Mr. Arnold settled 
 slowly back again, under the disadvantages just 
 referred to, into his proper line of poet, literary 
 and miscellaneous essayist, and mild satirist of 
 society. Once in verse, in the exquisite lines 
 entitled "Westminster Abbey" (I would they 
 had had a better subject, not than the Abbey, 
 but than Dean Stanley), once or twice in prose, 
 as in the famous charge on the Shelleyites and 
 other things, the Apostle of Sweetness and 
 Light appeared at his very best; and perhaps 
 he was never, except in the wondrous muddle-
 
 Matthew Arnold. 143 
 
 headedness of the " Irish Essays," far below it. 
 But in all the works of this time, though the 
 positive dulness of the phase of which " St. 
 Paul and Protestantism" is perhaps the Nadir 
 never reappeared, there is, to me at least, a sense 
 of two drawbacks. There is a failing fineness of 
 power in a man whose power had at its best 
 been nothing if not fine, a growing heaviness 
 of touch, a sleight of words that becomes a 
 trick, a damnable iteration, an occasional pas- 
 sage from agreeable impertinence to something 
 else that is not agreeable. And there is, on the 
 other hand, an obvious disgust and dissatisfac- 
 tion at the very results which he had hoped and 
 helped to attain. It was impossible that Mr. 
 Arnold should accept democracy with anything 
 but the wryest of faces ; and he must have found 
 the new Pharisees of undogmatism whom his 
 religious musings had brought about suggestive 
 of another work by the same author as " Reli- 
 gious Musings," — the " Ode to a Young Ass." 
 The Young Ass has begun to kick at Mr. 
 Arnold now, I see, as the fashion of him passeth 
 away.
 
 144 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 But it was never possible for any competent 
 person, however much he might find to dislike 
 in this fascinating and irritating writer, to fail 
 in recognition of his extraordinary powers. 
 One might wince at the almost unbelievable 
 faults of taste which he, arbiter elegantiarum 
 as he was, would not unfrequently commit; 
 frown at the gaudy tricks of a mannerism quite 
 as bad as those which he was never weary of 
 denouncing ; demur to his misleading and snip- 
 snap phrases about " criticism of life," " lucid- 
 ity," " grand style," and what not. There were 
 a great many things that he did not know or 
 did not fancy; and like most of us, no doubt, 
 he was very apt to think that what he did not 
 know was not worth the knowing, and that 
 only very poor and unhappy creatures could 
 like what he did not fancy. 
 
 Now all these things are specially bad prepa- 
 rations for the task of the critic ; and perhaps 
 Mr. Arnold's critical abilities, if not overrated, 
 were wrongly estimated. It was difficult to 
 praise too highly the expression of his criticism 
 when it was at its best; but it was easy to
 
 Matthew Arnold. i^c 
 
 set the substance too high. Even his subtlety 
 and his acuteness, two faculties in regard to 
 which I suppose his admirers would put him 
 highest, were rather more apparent than real, 
 and were constantly blunted and fettered by the 
 extraordinary narrowness and crotchettiness of 
 his range of sympathies. He was always 
 stumbling over his own formulas; and he not 
 unfrequently violated his own canons. At least 
 I am myself quite unable to reconcile that doc- 
 trine of confining ourselves to " the best," which 
 it seems rules out the " Chanson de Roland " 
 and makes Shelley more remarkable as a let- 
 ter-writer than as a poet, with the attention 
 paid to Senancour and the Gu^rins. 
 
 The real value of Mr. Arnold as a critic — 
 apart from his indirect merit of providing much 
 delightful English prose shot with wit and 
 humour, and enclosing endless sweetmeats if 
 not solids of sense — consisted chiefly in the 
 comparative novelty of the style of literary 
 appreciation which he adopted, and in the stimu- 
 lus which he accordingly gave to literary study. 
 
 Since Hazlitt, we had been deficient in critics 
 
 lo
 
 146 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 who put appreciation before codification; and 
 Hazlitt himself was notoriously untrustworthy 
 through caprice. The following of Sainte-Beuve 
 saved Mr. Arnold from both errors to some 
 extent, but to some extent only. Though well 
 read, he was not extremely learned ; and though 
 acute, he was the very reverse of judicial. He 
 had fortunately been brought up on classical 
 literature, to which he pinned his faith ; and it 
 is impossible that any one with this advantage 
 should be a literary heretic of the worst descrip- 
 tion. But he constantly committed the fault 
 of Shylock in regard to his classics. What was 
 not in the classical bond, what " was not so 
 expressed," could not be good, could not at 
 least be of the best. Now I will yield to no 
 man in my respect for the classics; and I do 
 not think that, at least as far as the Greeks are 
 concerned, any one will ever do better the 
 things that they did. But it is absurd to sup- 
 pose or maintain that the canon of literary 
 perfections was closed when the Muses left 
 Philemon's house. 
 
 Mr. Arnold, then, as a critic seemed to me
 
 Matthew Arnold. 147 
 
 at first, and has ahvays seemed to me, flawed 
 with these very faults of freak and crotchet 
 against which he was never tired of protest- 
 ing, and, though a very useful alterative, stim- 
 ulant, and check, not a good model, and a still 
 worse oracle. I should say of him, and I 
 think I have always recked my own rede from 
 1865 to the present day in this respect, " Ad- 
 mire, enjoy, and be thankful for Mr. Arnold as 
 a critic; but be careful about imitating him, 
 and never obey him without examination." 
 Of Mr. Arnold as a poet there is much more 
 to be said.
 
 XVI. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD {concluded). 
 
 *' I ^HE book in which I first made acquaint- 
 ■^ ance with any considerable quantity of 
 Mr. Arnold's poetry was the so-called second 
 edition of the " Poems," containing the first 
 issue of the celebrated Preface: perhaps the 
 best piece of criticism (though I do not agree 
 with its main position) that the author ever did. 
 The book in which one has first made full ac- 
 quaintance with a poet is like no other book ; 
 it has the charm of one of the two kisses 
 celebrated by the Spanish folk-song. Yet I 
 venture to think — divorcing criticism as much 
 as possible from any pathetic or egotistic fal- 
 lacy — that the collection was and is an ex- 
 tremely favourable one for the purpose of 
 doing full but friendly justice to Mr. Arnold's 
 poetical talent For it was the selected collec- 
 tion of a good deal of separately written and
 
 Matthew Arnold. 149 
 
 published work, made by a man who was in 
 the very prime of his intellectual strength, who 
 was " commencing critic" after a youth of 
 poetry, and who was not yet tempted by any 
 excessive public favour to spare his critical 
 faculty on himself. A few excellent and many 
 interesting things were written afterwards, and 
 there is of course a certain historical attrac- 
 tion in juveniliay such as the full form of 
 " Empedocles," and other things which were 
 only restored later. But the best things of 
 all are there, — the best sonnets, " Requiescat," 
 " The Church of Brou," " Tristram and Iseult," 
 " Sohrab and Rustum," "The Forsaken Mer- 
 man," '• The Strayed Reveller," and " Switzer- 
 land," — this last without its most unfortunate 
 coduy " The Terrace at Berne," When I find 
 myself ranking Mr. Arnold higher as a poet 
 than some do whose opinions I respect, I always 
 endeavour to make sure that the cause is noth- 
 ing illegitimate connected with this first ac- 
 quaintance. And I do not think it is. For, 
 though he himself would not have admitted 
 it, a poet is to be judged by his best things,
 
 150 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 by his flashes, by his highest flights ; and there 
 are more of these to be found in this volume 
 than in all the rest of Mr. Arnold's verse. 
 
 It is on the whole, however, that we must 
 correct our impressions if necessary, and a very 
 curious and interesting study " the whole " is 
 in Mr. Arnold's case. I still like to try first 
 to raise and then to correct the impressions 
 of a new-comer, taking the standard edition 
 as it too comes. He must, I should think, be 
 staggered and disappointed by the respecta- 
 ble but imitative Wordsworthianism of the 
 first two sonnets, *' Quiet Work " and " To a 
 Friend." But the Shakespeare piece is truly 
 magnificent, and as Dryden's famous sentence 
 has said the best and most final thing about 
 Shakespeare in prose, so has Mr. Arnold said 
 the best and most final thing in verse. Then 
 we relapse heavily, to be uplifted again after 
 pages by the strains, a little Wordsworthian 
 still but freed from Wordsworthian wooden- 
 ness, of " Mycerinus " with its splendid close. 
 But the problem and puzzle — a problem and 
 a puzzle which in thirty years I do not pretend
 
 Matthew Arnold. 151 
 
 to have solved — of the Arnoldian inconsistency 
 and inequaUty meet us full in "The Church 
 of Brou." Part I. is prosaic doggerel which 
 any smart boy of sixteen could have written 
 at any time during this century. Part II. is a 
 little better. And then Part III. is poetry, — 
 poetry not indeed free from Wordsworthian 
 and Miltonic echoes, but poetry indisputable, 
 marmoreal, written for all time. " A Modern 
 Sappho " drops to Moore, and not very good 
 Moore ; and then with " Requiescat " we are 
 in upper air again. It is not faultless; it has 
 lapses, flatnesses, cliches, but it is one of the 
 great lyrical dirges of English. 
 
 I should have no room to go through the rest 
 of the Poems, especially of the Early Poems, 
 with this minuteness. It must suffice to say 
 that everywhere we find these strange ups and 
 downs ; — now rhymes almost descending to 
 the cockney level of Mrs. Browning at her unin- 
 telligible worst, now curious little pedantries of 
 expression, now things that show that the poet's 
 craftsmanship altogether fails him, now affecta- 
 tions and imitations of every sort and kind.
 
 152 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 And hard by we shall find nobilities of thought 
 and phrase that could only be the work of a 
 poet, and almost a very great poet. 
 
 In considering the longer narrative poems we 
 must remember Mr. Arnold's pet theory that 
 ** all depends on the subject," that the epic and 
 the drama stand high above all other forms of 
 poetry, and so forth. I own that they do not 
 interest me greatly, despite the magnificent close 
 of " Sohrab and Rustum," or that sudden lyric 
 burst which lightens the darkness of " Tristram 
 and Iseult": 
 
 " IVhat voices are these on the clear night air ? 
 IVhat lights in the court ? what steps on the stair ? " 
 
 The truth is that Mr. Arnold had neither the nar- 
 rative nor (to take in " Merope ") the dramatic 
 gift. For to possess either you must possess 
 the other power of "keeping your own head 
 out of the memorial," and that he could never 
 do. Nevertheless it is something wonderful that 
 he should be as bad as he sometimes is. And 
 the inequality is the same in his ballads. " St. 
 Brandan," with a magnificent and not wholly 
 unsuccessful strain in it, is yet not quite a sue-
 
 Matthew Arnold. 153 
 
 cess. " The Neckan " is not much above Mrs. 
 Hemans. But "The Forsaken Merman" is 
 very nearly supreme. He is not popular now, 
 I believe, and certainly he might not have been 
 written if there had been no Tennyson ; but he 
 is good, — good all through, good in sentiment, 
 good in music, good (which is the rarest thing 
 in poetry) in composition, not easily surpassable 
 in finale. The man who wrote " The Forsaken 
 Merman " was a poet sans phrase. 
 
 "Then," says the Advocatus Diaboli, "how 
 did he come to write some other things, or at 
 least to print and publish them?" And to this 
 question I can give no answer. " Switzerland " 
 is to me the same insoluble puzzle that it was a 
 quarter of a century ago, and more, because of 
 the coda above referred to. It contains one 
 unsurpassed and not often matched piece of 
 poetry, the famous " Isolation," or " To Mar- 
 guerite continued," which begins: 
 
 "Yes; in the sea of life enisled^ 
 
 It contains flashes and scraps elsewhere not 
 far below this. And it also contains common-
 
 1^4 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 place coxcombry, second and tenth hand rhet- 
 oric, cheap philosophising, indistinct description, 
 enough to damn half a dozen minor poets. 
 
 Once more the filling of the sheets warns me 
 that I must not proceed in this analysis. " The 
 Scholar Gipsy " I would fain think nearly fault- 
 less, and fain hope that it is not old Oxford 
 prejudice that makes me think it so. "Faded 
 Leaves," " Growing Old," and a dozen other sad 
 descants of the later time, have a real and not 
 only an affected strain of the true, the great 
 Melancholia. " Dover Beach," though I do not 
 in the least agree with it, and though the met- 
 aphor of the retreating tide is a singularly 
 damaging one for the poet's meaning (for qui 
 dit ebb dit flood), has a majestic music. And 
 there are many others I could mention. But of 
 mentioning there must be an end, that we may 
 conclude somewhat more generally. 
 
 What then were the causes which made the 
 work of a man of, as it seems to me, undoubted 
 and real original poetic faculty, of great scholar- 
 ship and apparently severe taste, a professed 
 critic and undoubtedly a lover of much that is
 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 155 
 
 best in poetry, so unreal, so trivial often, so 
 rarely spontaneous and inevitable? I have 
 already said that in repeated readings I have 
 never been able quite to satisfy myself about 
 these causes, I cannot quite make out why the 
 critic did not say to the poet, " It will never do 
 to publish verse like this and this and this and 
 this," or why the poet did not say to the critic, 
 " Then we will make it worth publishing," and 
 proceed to do so. I cannot (for the other re- 
 corded instances, the chief of which is Gray, are 
 not quite to the point) understand how a poetic 
 faculty which could yield " The Forsaken Mer- 
 man," the best things of the " Switzerland," the 
 Shakespeare sonnet, the finales of " Mycerinus " 
 and " Sohrab and Rustum," with not a little else, 
 should have been such a barren and intermittent 
 spring. The only possible explanation — which 
 is rather a statement of the facts than an inter- 
 pretation of them — - is that Mr. Arnold's spring 
 of poetry though fine was actually faint, that he 
 was from the very outset a thoroughly literary 
 writer, more sensitive to influences than fertile 
 in original impulse, and that the considerable
 
 156 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 though somewhat late access of popularity after 
 he had come to forty years turned his head a 
 little, and induced him to disinter and refather 
 things which, after the wise example of Lord 
 Tennyson and the threat of Sir Anthony Abso- 
 lute, he would have done well to unbeget, utterly 
 refusing to rebeget them. 
 
 Be this as it may, Mr. Arnold's poetical po- 
 sition is remarkable in our literature, and not 
 wholly benign in its influence. He provides 
 for those who know and love letters an interest- 
 ing and admirable example of a literary poet. 
 He provides for those who can apppreciate 
 poetry some exquisite notes nowhere else heard, 
 and not to be resigned even if the penalty for 
 hearing them were twenty times as great. But 
 he provides also a most dangerous model. For 
 he may seem to suggest, and has, I think, already 
 ! suggested to some, that the acquisition by dint 
 " of labour of a certain " marmoresque " dignity of 
 thought and phrase will atone for the absence 
 of that genius which cometh not with labour, 
 neither goeth with the lack of it.
 
 XVII. 
 
 THREE MID-CENTURY NOVELISTS. 
 
 CHARLOTTE BRONTE. GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 
 ^ I ^HERE are, I suppose, no Victorian novel- 
 -*- ists, putting very recent names with whom 
 I do not here meddle out of the question, who 
 have approached the popularity of Dickens and 
 Thackeray more nearly than Charlotte Bronte, 
 George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. They are 
 at the present moment in three different stages 
 of the experience which popular novelists go 
 through when they die, and it may be a little 
 interesting to examine their case from the point 
 of view of the present papers. 
 
 The author of " Jane Eyre " has had one 
 indisputable reward for the shortness of her 
 brilliant career. She has become a classic ; she 
 has been recently reprinted as such with authors 
 the youngest of whom was her senior by nearly
 
 158 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 half a century; and though it cannot be said 
 that she had ever quite fallen out of even popu- 
 lar knowledge, any one with a tolerably sharp 
 eye for criticism must have perceived that not 
 a few readers come to her, as they come to a 
 classic, with a more or less respectful igno- 
 rance. She was protected from that most un- 
 gracious stage of depreciation which attacks 
 many of her kind immediately after, if not even 
 before, their death, first by the earliness of that 
 event in her case, and secondly by the fact that 
 it happened at a peculiar period. In 1855 the 
 English world had not yet become literary; 
 and though I do not know that the quality of 
 the best literary criticism was much better or 
 much worse than it is now, the volume of it was 
 infinitely smaller. There were far fewer news- 
 papers; and the young person who, on the 
 strength of a modern education, a comfortable 
 confidence in his own judgment, and a hand-book 
 or two of authorities quotable and pillageable, 
 commences critic, existed in smaller numbers, 
 and had very much fewer openings. Moreover, 
 Currer Bell had held one of those literary posi-
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 159 
 
 tions which expose the holder to more hardships 
 at first than afterwards. She belonged to no 
 school; she was not involved in any literary- 
 parties ; she rose with few rivals, and she died 
 before she had time to create any. So that, 
 though she had great difficulties in making her 
 way, and was subjected to some unfair and 
 ungenerous comments at first, when she had 
 begun to make that way she had little direct 
 detraction to fear. 
 
 I do not think that she was exactly what can 
 be called a great genius, or that she would ever 
 have given us anything much better than she 
 did give ; and I do not think that with critical 
 reading " Jane Eyre " improves, or even holds 
 its ground very well. It has strength, or at 
 any rate force; it has sufficient originality of 
 manner ; it has some direct observation of life 
 within the due limits of art ; and it has the pi- 
 quancy of an unfashionable unconventionality 
 at a very conventional time. These are good 
 things, but they are not necessarily great ; and it 
 is to me a very suspicious point that quite the best 
 parts of Charlotte Bronte's work are admittedly
 
 i6o Corrected Impressions. 
 
 something like transcripts of her personal ex- 
 perience. It is very good to be able to record 
 personal experience in this pointed and vivid 
 way; and perhaps few great creators, if any, 
 have been independent of personal experience. 
 But they have for the most part transcribed it 
 very far ofT ; and they have intermixed the tran- 
 scription with a far larger amount of direct ob- 
 servation of others, and of direct imagination or 
 creation. Those who have not done so fall into 
 the second or lower place, and do not often rise 
 out of it. This is an experience for confirma- 
 tion of which I can, I think, confidently appeal 
 to all competent reviewers and most competent 
 editors. A book appears, or an article is sent 
 in, wherein this or that incident, mood, charac- 
 ter, what not, is treated with distinct vigour and 
 freshness. The reviewer praises, and looks with 
 languid interest tempered by sad experience for 
 the second book ; the editor accepts, and looks 
 with eagerness tempered by experience still 
 more fatal for the second article. Both come, 
 and lo ! there is either a distinct falling off from, 
 or a total absence of, the first fine rapture. I
 
 Three Mid- Century Novelists. 16 1 
 
 think Charlotte Bronte is the capital example 
 of this familiar fact, in a person who has actually 
 attained to literature. 
 
 Not that she never did anything good after 
 " Jane Eyre." I think better than most people 
 seem to have done of " Shirley," somewhat less 
 well perhaps of '* Villette " and " The Professor." 
 But in all, from " Jane Eyre " itself downward, 
 there is that rather fatal note of the presence 
 and apparent necessity of the personal experi- 
 ence. It is portrait painting or gettre, not crea- 
 tive art of the unmistakable kind, and in the one 
 case where there seems to be a certain projec- 
 tion of the ideal, the egregious Mr. Rochester, 
 even contemporary opinion — thankful as it was 
 for a variation of type from the usual hero with 
 the chiselled nose, the impeccable, or, if pecca- 
 ble, amiable character, and the general nullity 
 — recognised at once that the ideal was rather 
 a poor one. It was as much of a schoolgirl's or 
 a governess's hero as any one of Scott's or 
 Byron's. It is quite true that Rochester is not 
 merely ugly and rude, but his ugliness and his 
 
 rudeness are so much of him! And though 
 
 II
 
 i62 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 Jane herself is much more than an underbred 
 little hussy, I fear there is underbreeding and 
 hussyness in her, where she is not a mere photo- 
 graph. I used to think, years ago, that the finest 
 touch in all Miss Bronte's work is where the 
 boy in " Shirley " makes up his mind to ask 
 Caroline for a kiss as the price of his services, 
 and does not. I am not much otherwise minded 
 now. 
 
 Twenty years ago it required, if not a genuine 
 strength of mind, at any rate a certain amount 
 of " cussedness," not to be a George-Eliotite. 
 All, or almost all, persons who had " got cul- 
 ture " admired George Eliot, and not to do so 
 was to be at best a Kenite among the chosen 
 people, at worst an outcast, a son of Edom and 
 Moab and Philistia. Two very different cur- 
 rents met and mingled among the worshippers 
 who flocked in the flesh to St. John's Wood, or 
 read the books in ecstasy elsewhere. There 
 was the rising tide of the aesthetic, revering the 
 creator of Tito. There was the agnostic herd, 
 faithful to the translator of Strauss and the
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 163 
 
 irregular partner of Mr. G. H. Lewes. I have 
 always found myself most unfortunately indis- 
 posed to follow any fashion, and I never re- 
 member having read a single book of George 
 Eliot's with genuine and whole-hearted admira- 
 tion. Yet an experience which I once went 
 through enables me, I think, to speak about 
 her at least without ignorance. When " Daniel 
 Deronda" appeared, my friend, the late Dr. 
 Appleton, asked me to review it for the Acad- 
 emy. My hands were the reverse of full at 
 the time, and as there were some books of the 
 author's which I had not read, and others which 
 I had not read for some time, I thought it might 
 be worth while to get an entire set and read it 
 through in chronological order, and so " get the 
 atmosphere " before attacking that Ebrew Jew. 
 I have spent many days with less pleasure and 
 less profit than those which I spent on this task. 
 And when I had finished it, I came to an opinion 
 which I have since seen little reason to change. 
 Something of what has been already said 
 about Charlotte Bronte will apply also to this 
 very different contemporary and craftsfellow of
 
 164 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 hers. Neither of them seems to have had in 
 any great degree the male faculties of creation 
 and judgment. Both, and Miss Evans especially, 
 had in no ordinary degree the female faculty of 
 receiving, assimilating, and reproducing. Dur- 
 ing a long and studious youth she received and 
 assimilated impressions of persons, of scenes, of 
 books. At a rather belated crisis of feeling she 
 experienced what I suppose must be called 
 Love, and at the same time was exposed to a 
 fresh current of thought, such as it was. She 
 travelled and enriched her store ; she frequented 
 persons of distinction and was influenced by 
 them. And then it came out in novels, at first 
 pretty simple, and really powerful; then less 
 simple, but ingeniously reproductive of certain 
 phases of thought and sentiment which were 
 current ; last of all reflective of hardly anything 
 (save in scattered and separate scenes where she 
 always excelled) except strange crotchets of 
 will-worship, which she had taken up to replace 
 the faith that she had cast out, but that was 
 evidently more or less necessary to her. 
 She began with those " Scenes of Clerical
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 165 
 
 Life," which some very fervent worshippers of 
 hers, I believe, put at the head of all her work 
 in merit as in time, but which I should rank 
 decidedly below the best parts of " Adam Bede " 
 and the wonderful opening of " Silas Marner." 
 Then came the great triumph, "Adam Bede," 
 itself. Of course it is extremely clever ; but no 
 one who calls himself a critic can afford to for- 
 get the circumstances in which it appeared. 
 Dickens's best work was done, and his man- 
 nerism was already disgusting some readers. 
 Thackeray, though at his very best, had not 
 reached full popularity, and was entirely differ- 
 ent in style and subject Charlotte Bronte was 
 dead or dying, — I forget which; there was 
 nobody else who could even pretend to the first 
 class. How could "Adam Bede" fail? 
 
 "The Mill on the Floss" was not likely, the 
 circumstances being still the same, to diminish 
 the author's vogue, and I suppose it is her best 
 book, though it may not contain her best scenes. 
 The objection which is often made and still 
 oftener felt to the repulsiveness of Maggie's wor- 
 ship of a counter-jumping cad like Stephen, is
 
 1 66 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 somewhat uncritical. I suspect that most women 
 resent it, because they feel the imputation to 
 be true : and most men out of a not wholly dis- 
 similar feeling which acts a little differently. 
 " Silas Marner " again has qualities of greatness, 
 though the narrative and characters are slight 
 for a book. But between these earlier novels 
 and the later batch a great gulf is fixed. Hardly 
 after " Silas " do we find anything, except in 
 patches and episodes, that is really " genial " in 
 George Eliot's work. " Felix Holt " and " Mid- 
 dlemarch " are elaborate studies of what seemed 
 to the author to be modern characters and soci- 
 ety, — studies of immense effort and erudition 
 not unenlightened by humour, but on the whole 
 dead. " Romola " is an attempt — still more 
 Herculean, and still more against the grain — to 
 resuscitate the past. As for " Daniel Deronda," 
 it is a kind of nightmare, — a parochial and gro- 
 tesque idea having thoroughly mastered the 
 writer and only allowed her now and then to get 
 free in the character of Grandcourt and (less 
 often) in that of Gwendolen. I think "Theo- 
 phrastus Such " has met with rather undeserved
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 167 
 
 contempt, due to the fact that " Deronda " had 
 already begun to sap the foundations of its au- 
 thor's popularity. The poems are laboured and 
 thoroughly unpoetical expositions of crotchet , 
 and theory. The essays are neither better nor 
 worse than a vast number of essays by quite 
 second-rate authors, 
 
 I must collect, in the old sense, the results of 
 this in another paper, which will also give me 
 room to speak of Mr. Trollope.
 
 XVIII. 
 
 THREE MID-CENTURY NOVELISTS 
 {concluded). 
 
 •' I ^HE brief sketch of the history of George 
 -*- Eliot's work from the outside which was 
 given at the end of the last paper might almost 
 carry with it, to a wary and experienced mind, 
 a forecast of the progress of George Eliot's 
 reputation. But there was another influence 
 of the first importance which has not yet been 
 noticed, I never knew anything personally of 
 Mr. G. H. Lewes. But he was certainly a very 
 clever man : and as a literary trainer, with a view 
 to the present success of the still more clever 
 companion whom accident threw in his way, he 
 was really consummate. I think George Eliot 
 might possibly have occupied a higher place in 
 literary history if she had never met him at all ; 
 but it is rather more probable that she might 
 have occupied none whatever. As it was, he
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 169 
 
 managed to put her literary faculties in a kind 
 of forcing-house. The anonymity which was 
 maintained over the " Scenes of Clerical Life " 
 and "Adam Bede," may have been at first unin- 
 tentional, but its effect both on the public and 
 the producer was no doubt stimulating in the 
 highest degree. When it had been dropped, 
 Mr, Lewes fell at once with extraordinary tact 
 into the way of life which best suited the forte 
 and the foible of Miss Evans. He gave her 
 assiduous personal attention and a sort of sham 
 position as the head of a family. He did not 
 overwork her, and he administered plenty of the 
 foreign travel and home atmosphere of literary 
 society which she liked. He fended off all but 
 favourable reviews, and while dexterously sur- 
 rounding her with a court of faithful devotees 
 protected her from any rough contact with the 
 give-and-take of the world. All these things 
 worked together with her own unquestioned 
 endowments, not merely to bring her money 
 and fame, but actually to stimulate her pro- 
 ductive faculties to the highest possible point 
 in a certain way.
 
 lyo Corrected Impressions. 
 
 In a certain other way the result was disas- 
 trous. She never lived in the open. Her first 
 intellectual expansion had taken place in a nar- 
 row clique of Unitarian Nonconformity ; and she 
 had but exchanged it for one little wider, of 
 agnostic and anti-theological journalism. Her 
 last twenty or five and twenty years were spent 
 in a close conservatory, receiving adulation from 
 others, and brooding over her own negative 
 creed. The nearest analogue that I can think 
 of to her among the greater names of fiction is 
 , Richardson, to whose work hers has indeed a 
 striking resemblance in more ways than one. 
 But even Richardson lived in a healthier time 
 and was exposed to healthier influences. No- 
 body *' rattled her shutters," to take Thack- 
 eray's excellent metaphor, as Fielding rattled 
 Richardson's. She had no experience of active 
 business, such as the printer had, with ruthless 
 customers, prosaic workmen, and the like, to give 
 her a taste of the actual world. And so there 
 was, even from the first, a taint of the morbid 
 and the unnatural upon her. The flowers forced 
 from her in this non-natural atmosphere and by
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 171 
 
 this non-natural treatment had, as is customary 
 in such cases, no small Mat and attraction at 
 first, but their colour and their form grew less 
 and less lifelike as time went on, and their 
 inherent weakness caused them to fade sooner 
 and sooner. That this would have been the 
 case anyhow I do not doubt, but the Nemesis 
 of the liaison with Lewes exhibited itself in an 
 even more unmistakable fashion than this. The 
 scientific phraseology to which he himself was 
 more or less sincerely devoted invaded his com- 
 panion's writing with a positive contagion, and 
 what many independent critics had been saying 
 for years became the public voice on the appear- 
 ance of " Daniel Deronda." Coterie admiration 
 lasted a little longer; and that popular reflex 
 which a well-engineered fame always brings 
 with it, a little longer still. And then it all 
 broke down, and for some years past George 
 Eliot, though she may still be read, has more 
 or less passed out of contemporary critical ap- 
 preciation. There are, of course, a few obsti- 
 nate and " know-nothing " worshippers ; perhaps 
 there are some who kept their heads even in the
 
 172 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 heyday, and who can now say sunt lachrymee 
 rerum, as they contemplate a fame once so 
 great, in part so solidly founded, and yet now 
 to a greater extent than strict justice can ap- 
 prove almost utterly vanished away. 
 
 The vicissitudes of Mr. Anthony Trollope's 
 reputation are less striking and perhaps less in- 
 structive than those of George Eliot's, for there 
 can be very little doubt that Miss Evans had 
 genius, and I never met more than one compe- 
 tent critic (a personal friend, by the way, of the 
 author of "The Warden") who thought that 
 Mr. Trollope had. But he had immense fertility, 
 and if not immense, very great talent ; and his 
 career is in consequence something of a warning. 
 Unless I mistake very greatly, no novelist towards 
 .the end of the sixties was in greater demand at 
 the circulating libraries, and by the editors and 
 publishers of magazines which published serial 
 novels, than Mr. Trollope ; and certainly no one 
 ever set himself to satisfy that demand with 
 greater energy or in a more business-like spirit
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 173 
 
 He probably did himself no good with the pub- 
 lic or the critics by the quaint frankness of his 
 avowals in his Autobiography as to the strictly 
 professional fashion — so many hours per day, 
 and so many words per hour — in which he did 
 his " chores." And certainly there was a time 
 when the public altogether failed to respond to 
 his endeavours to please them. His last half- 
 dozen, if not his last dozen novels, were I believe 
 indifferent pecuniary successes ; and I remember 
 very well the difficulties under which I found 
 myself when I had to criticise more than one of 
 them. For it is, I think, a law of the Medes 
 and Persians, "Never speak evil of man or 
 woman who has given you pleasure," and I 
 admit that in the days of the " Chronicles of 
 Barset," Mr. Trollope gave me a very great deal 
 of pleasure. But it is also a law of honest criti- 
 cism never to say what you do not think, though 
 it is by no means necessary to say all that you 
 do think, and it was not easy to reconcile these 
 two laws in the late seventies and early eighties 
 with regard to Mr. Anthony Trollope. 
 
 He seems indeed to me to be the most remark-
 
 174 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 able example we have yet seen of a kind of writer 
 who I suppose is destined to multiply as long as 
 the fancy for novel-reading lasts. Only a few 
 months ago it fell to my lot to read through the 
 work of a famous amuseur of this kind in the gen- 
 eration before Mr. Trollope's, a man as famous 
 as himself in his own day, and of gifts certainly 
 more varied and perhaps not less considerable. 
 And the resemblance between Theodore Hook 
 and Anthony Trollope struck me, I own, forcibly 
 and rather terribly. Hook is of course at a 
 much greater disadvantage with a reader of the 
 present day — at least with a reader of my stand- 
 ing — than is Trollope. Much of him is pos- 
 itively obsolete, while in Trollope's case the 
 mere outward framework, the ways and language 
 of society, the institutions, customs, and atmos- 
 phere of daily life, have not had time to alter 
 very strikingly, if at all. Trollope too, did not 
 attempt the purely comic vein, as did Hook; 
 and the purely comic vein, unless it be absolutely 
 transcendent, and of the first class, is that which 
 dries soonest. 
 
 But still they are of the same general kind,
 
 Three Mid- Century Novelists. 175 
 
 and their motto, the motto of their kind, is Meite, 
 Tekel. I do not even think that any one is ever 
 again likely to attain even so high a rank in it as 
 Mr. Trollope's. Most have got the seed, and the 
 flower has become common accordingly, I do 
 not know that I myself ever took Mr. Trollope 
 for one of the immortals; but really between 
 i860 and 1870 it might have been excusable 
 so to take him. In "Barchester Towers," es- 
 pecially, there are characters and scenes which 
 go uncommonly near the characters and scenes 
 that do not die. Years later the figure of Mr. 
 Crawley and the scene of the final vanquishing 
 of Mrs. Proudie simulate, if they do not possess, 
 immortal quality. And in the enormous range 
 of the other books earlier and later it would not 
 be difficult to single out a number — a very 
 considerable number — of passages not greatly 
 inferior to these. From almost the beginning 
 until quite the end, Mr. Trollope — whether by 
 diligent contemplation of models, by dexterous 
 study from the life, or by the mere persistent 
 craftsman's practice which turns out pots till it 
 turns them out flawlessly — showed the faculty
 
 176 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 of constructing a thoroughly readable story. 
 You might not be extraordinarily enamoured 
 of it ; you might not care to read it again ; you 
 could certainly feel no enthusiastic reverence 
 for or gratitude to its author. But it was emi- 
 nently satisfactory ; it was exactly what it held 
 itself out to be; it was just what men and 
 women had sent to Mudie's to get. Perhaps 
 there is never likely to be very much, and still 
 less likely to be too much, of such work about 
 the world. 
 
 And yet even such work is doomed to pass, 
 — with everything that is of the day and the 
 craftsman, not of eternity and art. It was 
 not because Mr. Trollope had, as I believe he 
 had in private life, a good deal of the genial 
 Philistine about him, that his work lacks the 
 certain vital signs. We have record of too 
 " many artists, up to the very greatest, who took 
 no romantic or sacerdotal view of their art, and 
 who met the demand of the moment as regu- 
 larly and peaceably as might be. You will no 
 more avoid failure by systematic unbusiness- 
 likeness, than you will secure success by strict
 
 Three Mid-Century Novelists. 177 
 
 attention to business. The fault of the Trol- 
 lopian novel is in the quality of the Trollopian 
 art. It is shrewd, competent, not insufficiently 
 supported by observation, not deficient in more 
 than respectable expressive power, careful, in- 
 dustrious, active enough. But it never has the 
 last exalting touch of genius, it is every-day, 
 commonplace, and even not infrequently vulgar. 
 These are the three things that great art never 
 is ; though it may busy itself with far humbler 
 persons and objects than Mr. Trollope does, 
 may confine itself even more strictly than he 
 does to purely ordinary occurrences, may shun 
 the exceptional, the bizarre, the outre, as rigidly 
 as Miss Austen herself. Indeed, there is a very 
 short road to vulgarity by affecting these last 
 three things ; and I think since Mr. Trollope's 
 time it has been pretty frequently trodden by 
 those who are hastening to the same goal of 
 comparative oblivion which, I fear, he has al- 
 ready reached. 
 
 12
 
 XIX. 
 
 MR. WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 T THINK it probable that no long poem has 
 -*- for many years — indeed, since the disuse 
 of buying such poems by tens of thousands in 
 the days of our grandfathers — sold so well as 
 "The Earthly Paradise"; and I believe that, 
 though none of Mr. Morris's subsequent works 
 has equalled this in popularity, they have none 
 of them lacked a fair vogue. Yet it has always 
 seemed to me that not merely the general, but 
 even the critical public ranks him far below his 
 proper station as a poet. 
 
 The way in which I made my own first 
 acquaintance with him was very odd; and I 
 have never been able fully to explain it. As 
 a boy of certainly not more than fourteen I used, 
 like other boys, to take in periodicals addressed 
 pueris if not virginibus, and in one of these, the 
 title of which I cannot remember, I can very
 
 Mr. William Morris. 179 
 
 distinctly mind me of seeing an editorial notice 
 of a poem which had been sent in, dealing with 
 a " tall white maid " and other things and per- 
 sons. This poem was, as I afterwards found 
 out, and as all Morrisians will recognize, " The 
 Sailing of the Sword," which must just have 
 appeared, or have been just about to appear, in 
 Mr. Morris's first volume, " The Defence of 
 Guinevere." This volume came out in 1858, — 
 an annus mirabilis, in which some of the best 
 wine of the century was made on the Douro, 
 and in the Gironde, and on the C6te d'Or, and 
 which seems to have exercised a very remark- 
 able influence on the books and persons born 
 in it. The persons of 1858 had a singular knack 
 of being clever or charming, or both; and the 
 books (as biographers and bibliographers have 
 before noticed) were unusually epoch-making. 
 
 Of these I do not myself rank " The Defence 
 of Guinevere " least high. " The Sailing of the 
 Sword " — the manner of the insertion of which 
 in my Boys^ Magazine, or whatever it was called, 
 remains an insoluble mystery to me — is, no 
 doubt, not one of the best. But I remember
 
 i8o Corrected Impressions. 
 
 when some years afterwards I bought the little 
 brown book — nightingale-colour — from Slatter 
 and Rose's counter at Oxford for a price which 
 would not buy it now, that I took it back to my 
 rooms and read it straight through with an 
 ecstasy of relish not surpassed by anything 
 I have ever known of the kind. Persons of 
 sober and classical tastes fought very shy of 
 " Guinevere " at her first appearance ; and even 
 some of those who loved her then have fallen 
 off now. Why should a man speak about a 
 " choosing-cloth " ? What were these strange 
 scraps of mediaeval French ? Who could make 
 sense of "The Blue Closet" or "Two Red 
 Roses across the Moon"? Indeed, this latter 
 very harmless and spirited ditty — of which I 
 once offered to write a symbolic defence in any 
 required number of pages, and which I still love 
 wildly — had the faculty of simply infuriating 
 the grave and precise. Oxford and Cambridge 
 have not in my time produced better scholars, 
 who are also humourists, or humourists who are 
 also scholars, than the present Sir Frederick 
 Pollock and the present Bishop of Colombo.
 
 Mr. William Morris. i8i 
 
 and I believe it to be no improper revealing of 
 secrets to say that they both at least used to 
 abominate it. Perhaps (I hope so) they do not 
 now. As for the incident, when the orange fell 
 " And in came marching the ghosts of those 
 who were slain at the war," I should like to 
 bring up the men from the south gate and have 
 a fleet horse ready at that postern, before setting 
 it even now before some very respectable per- 
 sons. And then it would have been more dan- 
 gerous still. 
 
 For my part I loved the book at once with 
 a love full-grown and ardent; nor do I think 
 that that love has decreased an inch in stature 
 or a degree in heat since. Of course there 
 are very obvious faults and foibles. The ar- 
 chaic mannerism may be here and there over- 
 done, even in the eyes of those who are well 
 enough inclined thereto; the attention to pic- 
 torial and to musical effect may sometimes seem 
 paid at the expense of sense. The title-poem 
 is in parts obscure and wordy; "Sir Peter 
 Harpdon's End," another most important piece, 
 would gain a great deal by cutting down ; the
 
 1 82 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 expression sometimes lacks crispness and finish; 
 the verse is sometimes facile and lax. But all 
 this is redeemed and more than redeemed by 
 the presence of the real, the true, the indefin- 
 able and unmistakable spirit of poetry. And 
 this spirit wears, as it does at all its more 
 remarkable appearances in the world, a distinct 
 and novel dress. Although the so-called Ro- 
 mantic movement had been going on more or 
 less for a hundred years — had been going on 
 vigorously and decidedly for sixty or seventy 
 — when Mr. Morris wrote, only one or two 
 snatches of Coleridge and Keats had caught the 
 peculiar mediaeval tone which the Prse-Raphael- 
 ites in poetry, following the Prae-Raphaelites in 
 art, were now about to sound. Even " La Belle 
 Dame Sans Merci," that wonderful divination 
 in which Keats hit upon the true and very 
 mediaeval, as elsewhere upon the true and very 
 classical spirit, is an exception, a casual in- 
 spiration rather than a full reflection. And 
 let it be remembered that when Mr. Morris 
 began to write, the brother poets (who after- 
 wards a little eclipsed him, perhaps, both with
 
 Mr. William Morris. 183 
 
 the public and the critics) had published nothing 
 (though Mr. Rossetti's sugared sonnets might 
 be handed about among his private friends), 
 and that the painter who is more than any one 
 Mr. Morris's yoke-fellow, Sir Edward Burne- 
 Jones, was hardly out of leading-strings. 
 
 " The Defence of Guinevere," indeed, was not 
 Mr. Morris's first, not even his first published, 
 work. He contributed largely to that very 
 remarkable and now very inaccessible miscel- 
 lany. The Oxford and Caynbridge Magazine, his 
 chief work being, I believe, a delightful romance 
 called "The Hollow Land," which I read, all 
 unknowing its authorship, at the age of sixteen, 
 and liked, but not to loving. "The Hollow 
 Land " was, as I remember it, after more than 
 thirty years, a little, a very little, incoherent 
 and apocalyptic — with painters who painted 
 God's judgments in purple and crimson, and' 
 a heroine of the appropriate name of Swan- 
 hilda. I decline to recognize any real incohe- 
 rency in " The Defence of Guinevere." The 
 whole book is, of course, saturated with the 
 spirit of the Arthurian legends, of which I be-
 
 184 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 lieve Mr. Morris was even then a great student, 
 both in French and in English. Nor do I think 
 that any one who does not know the originals, 
 and has not gone through a considerable study 
 of mediaeval romance, can fully estimate the 
 marvellous manner in which he has not merely 
 galvanized or copied, but revivified and recreated 
 the tone and sense of them. For — the warn- 
 ing has often been given, but it wants repetition 
 still — it is quite a mistake to think that either 
 Scott earlier, or Lord Tennyson later, effected 
 this revivification, magnificent as the work of 
 both is. Scott was an ardent lover of the Mid- 
 dle Ages ; but he was, after all, a man born well 
 within the eighteenth century. Tennyson had 
 read his Mallory faithfully; but he was not 
 born much within the nineteenth. It took the 
 work of these very men to create the atmos- 
 phere — to get ready the stage — in which and 
 on which Mr. Morris and Sir Edward Burne- 
 Jones could appear. 
 
 That stage, that atmosphere, must always, 
 I suppose, find a public either enthusiastic in 
 welcome or vehement in refusal. It is not easy
 
 Mr. William Morris. 185 
 
 to be merely indifferent to the works of these 
 artists, though it is possible merely to gape at 
 them in uncomprehending wonder. "Pastiche" 
 will cry the one side; "unmeaning and overdone 
 archaism; sentimental maundering; indiffer- 
 ence to the gains and the aims of modernism ; 
 art too literary ; literature too pictorial ; illiberal 
 and pusillanimous relapse on a mainly imagi- 
 nary past; deficiency in realism; reliance on 
 trick and cliche^ I may be excused from set- 
 ting in array against these terms of excessive 
 and uncritical depreciation a counter list of 
 equally excessive appreciation and praise. But 
 I think myself that the school in question — 
 especially the poet and the painter just coupled 
 — have discovered, or rather rediscovered, the 
 way to one of the Paradises of Art, of which 
 I shall not say much more in this place than 
 that to my judgment it seems a true and gen- 
 uine Paradise, and, to my taste, one delicious 
 and refreshing to an extent not excelled by any 
 other. To me personally, no other division of 
 literature or of art has the qualities of a " Vale 
 of Rest" as mediseval literature and mediaeval
 
 1 86 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 art have ; while the renaissance of both, at the 
 hands of Mr. Morris and his friends, seems to 
 me a true renaissance, not by any means a 
 copy, possessing the quahties of its originals 
 in a slightly altered and perhaps even more 
 effective form. 
 
 It has a fashion of delight, standing in the 
 most marked and interesting contrast with those 
 fashions which may be noticed in other poets of 
 the period. Like the Tennysonian charm, it is 
 dreamlike ; but the character of the dreams is 
 distinct. There is more action, more story, in 
 them ; and at the same time there is a double 
 and treble dose of the vague and the mystical 
 in colour, form, and sound. In Tennyson there 
 is still a sort of remnant of eighteenth-century 
 nettet^, of classical clearness of outline. It is 
 only with Mr. Morris and his friends or follow- 
 ers that we get into the true Romantic vague. 
 "^ When Mr. Lang selected Mr. Morris as the chief 
 English example of poetry which oversteps the 
 border line between mere sound and sense, 
 he did justly. But it is also necessary to take 
 count in Mr. Morris of that extraordinarily
 
 Mr. William Morris. 187 
 
 decorative spirit which always makes him ac- 
 company his music with limning. He is the 
 very embodiment of mediaeval poetry as we ^^"r^? 
 meet it in the well known opening of the w-// 
 " Romance of the Rose " and a thousand other 
 places, — a noise of musical instruments accom- 
 panying an endless procession of allegorical or 
 purely descriptive imagery. Between William 
 of Lorris and William Morris there are six 
 hundred years of time, a single letter in spell- 
 ing, and in spirit only a greater genius, the 
 possession of a happier instrument of language, 
 and a larger repertory of subject and style in 
 the later singer. 
 
 5^
 
 XX. 
 
 MR. WILLIAM MORRIS {concluded). 
 
 THERE are certain of one's literary as of 
 one's other loves the progress of which 
 is not wholly satisfactory to a person of sensi- 
 bility. There may be no actual " writing out; " 
 no positive and undeniable deterioration; but 
 "the second temple is not like the first," later 
 pressures do not repeat the effect of the first 
 sprightly runnings. I at least have never felt 
 this with Mr. William Morris. I never met him 
 in the flesh, or exchanged letters with him, or 
 heard very much about him personally; and 
 si qtdd id est, I think his politics very nearly 
 childish, and much more than very nearly 
 mischievous. But I know no man of letters 
 of my time who has been so thoroughly sat- 
 isfactory all through to the critical lover of 
 letters. To the critical lover, I say advisedly 
 And yet it must be not quite the ordinary
 
 Mr. William Morris. 189 
 
 sort of critic who shall do Mr. Morris full 
 justice. For his faults are exactly of those 
 which the critic who looks only at the stop- 
 watch will least pardon; and his merits are 
 perhaps of those which the critic who looks 
 only at the stop-watch will least appreciate. 
 
 In the last division of this paper I have given 
 some remarks on his work as it appeared up to 
 and including " The Defence of Guinevere." 
 His next stroke was a stroke of genius, and it 
 was, also, as strokes of genius are not always, a 
 stroke of good luck. The hubbub about Mr. 
 Swinburne's " Poems and Ballads " had made 
 general and popular what had before been only 
 partial and esoteric, — an interest in the new 
 schools of Prae-Raphaelite art and letters which 
 had already fixed in various ways strong holds 
 on the Universities, especially Oxford. But 
 "The Life and Death of Jason, a Poem by 
 William Morris, London, Bell and Daldy, 1867," 
 which lies beside me with its red buckram 
 weathered to orange on the back, but otherwise 
 much as I bought it at its earliest appearance, 
 hit the bird on both wings. It gave a perfect
 
 190 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 Romantic treatment. It chose a perfect classi- 
 cal subject. It was not possible, as it has been 
 since, for any one to accuse the artist of too 
 much archaic mannerism in the mediaeval and 
 Scandinavian manner; it was not possible, on 
 the other side, for any one not to recognize 
 that here was an almost entirely new fashion 
 of telling a story in verse. It was new, but 
 it was not ancestorless ; few things are. It 
 had in its genealogy not merely Keats, but 
 Wither and Browne. But the result, as hap- 
 pens sometimes in well-bred steeds, was a 
 far more spirited and individual product than 
 any of its forbears. Mr. Morris did to the 
 heroic couplet what Milton and Wordsworth 
 did to blank verse. He broke it up, changed 
 its centres of gravity, subjected it to endless 
 varieties of enjamhement or overlapping. It 
 was his main care to end a paragraph, to be- 
 gin a speech, in the middle of a couplet or 
 a line. Yet he never was harsh, and he was 
 seldom — he was sometimes — over fluent. The 
 thing took by storm that portion of the public 
 which has scholarship as well as taste. And
 
 Mr. William Morris. 191 
 
 it deserved to take it. I do not think my- 
 self that there is any one passage quite so ex- 
 quisite in it as the " Nymph's Song to Hylas," 
 which Mr. Morris (either desirous not to let 
 it be whelmed in a long narrative, or trying 
 experiments on the public memory) republished 
 twenty years after in " Songs by the Way." But 
 it is all more or less exquisite, and it was then 
 all more or less novel. 
 
 It was soon to be to a certain extent anti- 
 quated by a more splendid production from the 
 same hand. I really do not know that anything 
 combining bulk and excellence to the same 
 extent as " The Earthly Paradise " had ap- 
 peared since Dryden's " Fables," and the " Fa- 
 bles" are but small in bulk compared to the 
 *' Paradise." 
 
 A Paradise it certainly is. It had been her- 
 alded on the fly-leaves of "Jason," and again 
 in its own earlier volumes, not quite in the form 
 which it finally assumed. I have been told that 
 all the defaulting tales exist, and I would I had 
 them. For nothing is wrong in this enormous 
 work. If it is sometimes voluble, it is never
 
 192 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 prosaic ; the setting-pieces, intercalated prefaces, 
 apd epilogues for the several months, are as 
 tljey should be, of the very best; the proem 
 is noble ; and the general contents are sublime. 
 It is hard to seek among the two dozen for the 
 best where all are good. For mere personal 
 liking I should choose, I think, '* The Man born 
 to be King" (which is worth comparing with 
 the simplicity of the old French story), "The 
 Doom of King Acrisius," with the gorgeous 
 sweep of its rendering of the Perseus legend, 
 " The Watching of the Falcon " (a great ser- 
 mon on a great text), " The Land East of the 
 Sun and West of the Moon " (an ideal Romantic 
 tale), its immediate forerunner, *' The Death of 
 Paris" (which will bear comparison with the 
 early and late work of Tennyson himself), and 
 lastly " The Ring given to Venus " and " The 
 Hill of Venus," the first of which pair contains, 
 in the procession of the dead Gods from sea 
 to land, perhaps the very finest thing that Mr. 
 Morris has ever done. If only Sir Edward 
 Burne-Jones would take it for a subject! 
 I suppose there is no douce and reasonable
 
 Mr. William Morris. 193 
 
 Morrisian who will deny that " The Earthly 
 Paradise" marks the apogee of its writer's 
 talent. But it is really surprising to find how 
 flat the trajectory of his genius is, how little 
 he has declined from this its culmination. I 
 have myself heard " Love is Enough " criticised 
 in the statement that " Love is n't enough" ; but 
 this is a clear ignoratio elenchi. The transla- 
 tions, prose and verse, have perhaps attracted 
 more unfavorable criticism than any other part 
 of the work ; and although I am not competent 
 to decide whether Mr. Morris's sagas are or are 
 not unfaithful to their original, I can most 
 frankly admit that Mr. Morris's "^Eneid" is 
 not exactly Virgil, and Mr. Morris's " Odyssey " 
 still less exactly Homer, But it really seems 
 unnecessary to fight over again the endless 
 battle of Translation v. Original. The transla- 
 tion is never the original, and Mr. Morris's sub- 
 stitutes are a great deal better than most But 
 " Sigurd," at a time of life when the poetic tide 
 often runs low in a man, showed that Mr. Morris 
 was as good at practically original work as ever. 
 Indeed, I hardly know another instance of a 
 
 13
 
 194 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 poet well advanced in years, if not old, who 
 attempted a new and very dangerous metre 
 with such extraordinary success. Once get the 
 secret of this cunning mixture of anapaests and 
 trochees, and the varying and voluble melody 
 of it will simply amaze you. 
 
 The last collection of poems proper, " Songs 
 by the Way," contains chiefly gleanings of older 
 years ; and with many delightful things (espe- 
 cially the incomparable " Meeting in Winter ") 
 includes a good deal of Mr. Morris's very 
 Colonel-Newcome-like politics. But a few years 
 ago the indefatigable poet entered on a new 
 course. It must be admitted that the most 
 ingeniously perverse undergraduate could not 
 have selected anything more likely to " disgust 
 the examiners " than the types, etc., of " The 
 House of the Wolfings." Whenever — which 
 is often — I have a mind to read over the 
 "Wood Sun's" perfectly exquisite forecast of 
 Thiodulf's fate, — the best piece of English 
 poetry published for these ten years past except 
 "Crossing the Bar," — I have to lay my ac- 
 count with a pair of smarting eyes for the rest
 
 Mr. William Morris. 195 
 
 of the evening. But in this, and in " The Roots 
 of the Mountains," and most of all in " The 
 Glittering Plain," we have what before Mr. 
 Morris even Kingsley never quite achieved, true 
 sagas, not in the least mosaics ox pastiches from 
 the sagas proper, but " sets " or " cuttings " 
 from them, instinct with genuine life, and repro- 
 ducing with due variation the character of the 
 parent stock. 
 
 In other words, we have in Mr. Morris what 
 we have not had since Chaucer, and what no 
 other nation has had since a time older than 
 Chaucer's, a real trouv^re of the first class — a 
 person of inexhaustible fertility and power in 
 weaving the verse and the prose of romance, 
 and with a purely lyrical gift which even 
 Chaucer did not often show. It is the quality 
 of poetry — much more than the particular 
 forms or the agreeable volume in which it 
 manifests itself — that has always attracted me, 
 and attracts me now as much as ever to this 
 very remarkable writer. The quality of poetry 
 is apt to be, if not strained, drowned when it 
 comes to be written by the ten, the fifty, the
 
 196 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 hundred thousand verses. I have made no 
 laboured calculation ; but I really think that Mr. 
 Morris cannot be very far off, if he has not 
 actually reached or passed, the hundred thou- 
 sand limit. He cannot be said to be quite free 
 from the faults of such prolixity, the loose 
 fluent phrase, the easy amble of movement, 
 the watered and undistinguished description. 
 And yet you shall never read many pages, 
 seldom many lines of his, without finding side by 
 side with these negligences the unmistakable 
 marks which a poet, and only a poet, impresses 
 on his work. From " The Defence of Guine- 
 vere " to the snatches in his latest prose works 
 he has these marks, in phrase, in music, in sug- 
 gestion. And still, charming as are many of 
 the detached pieces to be culled from him, 
 the atmosphere and the tenor of the whole 
 seem to me to be more poetical than any of the 
 parts. All over it is that " making the common 
 as though it were not common" which is the 
 best if not the only existing definition of this 
 indefinable quality. 
 
 So, when I see in the work of certain writers
 
 Mr. William Morris. 197 
 
 whom it is unnecessary to name, and whom I 
 do not allude to otherwise than for the sake 
 of honour, the falling back on strained expres- 
 sion, on flashes of poetical epigram and conun- 
 drum, on scrambles after the grand style and 
 fumblings after the marmoreal, I turn with relief 
 once more to the lambent easy light, the misty 
 lunar atmosphere shot with faint auroral col- 
 ours, the low and magical music, the ever-vary- 
 ing panorama of poetical description and pas- 
 sion and thought that I have known so long, 
 and loved so much, in the writings of the author 
 of " The Earthly Paradise."
 
 XXL 
 
 MR. RUSKIN. 
 
 AFTER the havoc that has been made dur- 
 ing the last four or five years in the 
 ranks of the great seniors of English Literature 
 there is, perhaps, but one name left, if indeed 
 there be one, who shares the first class, in 
 merit and seniority combined, with that of Mr. 
 Ruskin. There is certainly none which has 
 seen, during the lifetime of its owner, such 
 curious vicissitudes of popular repute. It 
 will soon be, if it is not already, fifty years 
 since " A Graduate of Oxford " arose to 
 admonish the British nation of its sins and 
 shortcomings in the matter of art and appre- 
 ciation of art. For some ten years or more 
 after that, Mr. Ruskin was a voice crying in 
 the wilderness, but attracting more and more 
 younger voices to go and cry after him. For 
 about twenty subsequent to this first decade
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 
 
 99 
 
 he was a power, in some of his innumerable 
 lines sweeping public taste more or less with 
 or before him. And then the inevitable 
 reaction which generally waits till after a 
 man's death, but which in his case was has- 
 tened by certain oddities of his own whereon 
 more must be said hereafter, set in with more 
 than its usual severity. Young England, once 
 Mr. Ruskin's disciple in art, has accomplished 
 in regard to him the denial of St, Peter without 
 St. Peter's repentance. It knows not the man ; 
 it will have none of him ; it calls his favourite 
 ideas " the Ruskinian heresy," and labours to 
 set up some quite different thing from Ruskin- 
 ism. And all the while, to those outsiders who 
 can look coolly at the game, it is perfectly 
 obvious that the blasphemers of Mr. Ruskin 
 never could, metaphysically speaking, have 
 come into existence but for Mr. Ruskin him-', 
 self; and that they are, according to the well- 
 known custom of certain savage tribes, eating 
 their father. 
 
 I think I may speak without too great pre- 
 sumption for these outsiders. I have never
 
 200 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 been a Ruskinite, though I have always 
 thought that nobody in our time has touched 
 Mr. Ruskin at his very best as an artist in 
 the flamboyant variety of English prose; and 
 I have never been an anti-Ruskinite, though 
 I know perfectly well what the anti-Ruskinites 
 mean by their fault-finding, and even to a 
 certain extent agree with it. When Mr. Rus- 
 kin began, as above remarked, to cry in 
 the wilderness, it must be admitted by every 
 one who gives himself the trouble to know, 
 that he had a very great and terrible wilderness 
 to cry in. I have never, being as has been said 
 a hopeless outsider, been able to acquiesce in 
 the stereotyped opinion (accepted docilely by 
 a dozen generations of young would-be rebels) 
 that Paris is an artistic Jerusalem, and London 
 an artistic Samaria. But in the second quarter 
 of this century we were in rather a bad way 
 artistically. We had Turner (who was certainly 
 a host, though a very undisciplined host, in 
 himself), we had Etty (who has always seemed 
 to me the prophet in art who has had least 
 honour in this his own country), and we had
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 201 
 
 some others. But for sheer ugliness and lack 
 of artistic feeling in almost all respects, the reign 
 of William the Fourth and the first twenty- 
 years or so of the reign of her present gracious 
 Majesty made what has been subsequently 
 termed a " record " in English history. Archi- 
 tecture had begun to feel a well-intentioned 
 but by no means always wisely directed revival ; 
 music, painting, most sculpture, almost all 
 books, furniture, plate and domestic supdlex 
 generally exhibited a perfectly hopeless level 
 of middle-class banality. I do not know that 
 matters have in all ways improved since. 
 With some things that are much better we 
 have had many things that are much worse. 
 We have had the vicious popularisation of cheap 
 machine-made art ; we have had execrable vul- 
 garities, we have had cant and affectation and 
 pasticke. But, whereas from the thirties to the 
 sixties, it was almost impossible to buy any- 
 thing new that was not complacently hideous, 
 from the sixties to the nineties it has always 
 been possible to buy something new that was 
 at least graceful in intention.
 
 202 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 And this was more the doing of Mr. Ruskin 
 than of any single man. Of course, nothing 
 of the kind is ever the doing of any single man. 
 The Oxford Movement, the Prae-Raphaelites, 
 the '51 Exhibition, — a horrid thing in itself, 
 — the increasing custom of travel abroad, and 
 a dozen other things not only helped, but did 
 much more than any man could do. But Mr. 
 Ruskin did as much as any man could do; 
 and that is a good deal. He had perfect 
 leisure, a considerable fortune, a wonderful 
 literary faculty, an intense love for art. He 
 was gifted by nature with what is the most 
 fortunate gift for a man of genius, the most 
 unfortunate for another, an entire freedom 
 from the malady of self-criticism. , It has 
 never during his long career ever troubled Mr. 
 Ruskin to bethink himself whether he knew 
 what he was talking about, whether he was or 
 was not talking nonsense, whether he was or 
 was not contradicting flatly something that he 
 had said before. This is a great advantage 
 for a prophet in these or any times; and 
 Mr. Ruskin had it.
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 
 
 203 
 
 With such gifts he set himself to work to beat 
 up the quarters of British Philistia, first in the 
 department of art, and then in many another. 
 At first he used Turner and the Prae-Raphael- 
 ites for his battering-rams ; then he was for a 
 season wholly Venetian ; then he spread himself 
 widely into political economy and philosophis- 
 ings of all kinds; then he erected a sort of 
 private pulpit, and in " Fors Clavigera" and 
 other things made almost a religion of his own 
 idiosyncrasy; then, as all men know, he estab- 
 lished himself at his own University and led 
 men captive, as an irreverent one phrased it, 
 by " road-making and rigmarole." Then a fresh 
 band of Philistines, masquerading as the cir- 
 cumcision of Art itself, set upon him and cried 
 shame upon his version of aesthetics, and found 
 fault with the imperfection of his technique, and 
 urged Millet against Turner, and flung studio 
 jargon against lecture-room mysticism. And 
 meanwhile, oddly enough, his despised, and I 
 must say I think rather despicable, Political 
 Economy won the ground that his aesthetics 
 had lost; and all or half of our socialists and
 
 204 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 semi-socialists nowadays talk " Unto this Last," 
 without its mysticism or its eloquence, and with 
 twice its unreason. 
 
 A most odd career: not exactly paralleled, 
 so far as I can remember, and chequered by 
 many things which in this rapid sketch I have 
 had to leave out, such as the singular and very 
 important relations of Mr. Ruskin to Carlyle. 
 A career on which, no doubt, the anathema of 
 the most distinguished of Mr. Ruskin's own 
 Oxford contemporaries may be pronounced 
 to the effect that it is "fantastic and lacks 
 sanity " ; which may be called (if anybody likes) 
 a kind of failure; but which has influenced 
 England in a vast number of different ways 
 as the career of no other man living or lately 
 dead has influenced it. 
 
 It is extremely difficult to criticise Mr. Rus- 
 ^kin, if only for the very simple reason that, 
 ' as has been remarked already, he has never 
 condescended to criticise himself. He once 
 characteristically boasted that he "had never 
 withdrawn a sentence, written since i860, as 
 erroneous in principle." In i860 Mr. Ruskin
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 205 
 
 was nearly forty, and we are to suppose (which, 
 indeed, is self-evident from the complete re- 
 casting of the earlier volumes of " Modern 
 Painters ") that there was a good deal to with- 
 draw before that. But the fact is that, dis- 
 owned or not disowned, all his work in reality 
 bears the same marks, — an intense love of 
 beauty ; a restless desire to theorise on beauti- 
 ful objects ; a vivid imagination ; a rather weak 
 logical gift ; a strong but capricious moral sense ; 
 a knack of succumbing to any tempting current 
 theory; a marvellous command of eloquent 
 prose; and, as must be constantly repeated, 
 
 I an utter absence of critical faculty properly so 
 
 [^called. 
 
 Such a combination with such faculties of 
 expressing it must needs produce work as dis- 
 concerting as it is stimulating. In his inequal- 
 ities of style Mr. Ruskin is very much at one 
 with all practitioners of prose during this cent- 
 ury, and with most during others. But where 
 he is almost unique is in his inequalities of 
 thought and matter. Landor, who is his most 
 easily suggested analogue in this, is not really
 
 2o6 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 a parallel: for Landor's thought is never good 
 for much, it is at best not contemptible, and 
 presents a decent standard tradition from the 
 classics. Mr. Ruskin's is, for the most part, 
 purely original (with the suggestions and adop- 
 tions above noted), and at times it has really 
 marvellous vigour, felicity, and truth. At 
 others, and just as often, it borders on sheer 
 nonsense. It is customary to sneer at the 
 mystico-allegorical theology and philosophy of 
 the Middle Ages. But those who sneer for- 
 get that the men of the Schools were justi- 
 fied by the simple and massive theory that 
 their scheme of divinity, cosmology and an- 
 thropology was eternally and unavoidably true, 
 and that everything not merely might, but 
 must, be brought into harmony with it. Mr. 
 Ruskin's standards, on the other hand, are often 
 mere " will-worship," ideas which he has casu- 
 ally picked up in the state of hypothesis from 
 other men, and which he erects into eternal 
 truths. 
 
 He has, for instance, been reading Mr. Max 
 Miiller, and he promptly reels off that mar-
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 207 
 
 yellous compound of ingenuity and folly, " The 
 Queen of the Air." He has been reading 
 somebody else, and he produces that astonish- 
 ing mixture of namby-pamby guess-work and 
 suggestive thought entitled " The Ethics of 
 the Dust." Although he is scarcely ever 
 wrong in admiration, his dislikes are so capri- 
 cious and so unreasonable, that one is almost 
 safe in saying, "When Mr. Ruskin passes 
 from praise to blame he may, as a rule, be 
 neglected." Nothing is too wild for him to 
 say when he is in his altitudes, and he will 
 gravely propose that certain goods, such as 
 coals and petroleum, shall be sent about only 
 by canal traffic, and the canal boats only towed 
 by men, because "it cannot matter whether 
 they get to their destination sooner or later." 
 He forgets, of course, or rather disdains to con- 
 sider, first, that in certain circumstances men 
 won't tow ; and, secondly, that if some coals or 
 petroleum get to their destination slower than 
 other petroleum or coals, they will sell for less 
 money or not sell at all. Although the youngest 
 school which finds most fault with him has not,
 
 2o8 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 I think, much locus standi for objecting to him, 
 as whimsical and one-sided, he is himself un- 
 doubtedly compact of whim, and it would not 
 need the courage of a Euclid to define him 
 as " a body with one side only." A crotcheteer 
 with a tongue of gold ; an enthusiastic lover of 
 art who systematically ignores some of the first 
 laws of the artist; a political economist who 
 would bankrupt Eldorado and unsettle Sparta; 
 a moralist who does not know the meaning of 
 fairness; and a critic who does not know the 
 meaning of balance, — such is Mr. Ruskin.
 
 XXII. 
 
 MR. RUSKIN (concluded). 
 
 I "NOUGH must have been said in the last 
 -■ — ' paper of the singular weaknesses and 
 contradictions which meet us everywhere in 
 Mr. Ruskin. It remains to say something of 
 their probable causes, and of the merits which 
 accompany, and, as I think, far outweigh them, 
 everywhere but in his dabblings with economics. 
 The sources of Mr. Ruskin's peculiarities, 
 both in merit and defect, appear to me to have 
 Iain as usual in his nature, and to have been de- 
 veloped as usual by his education. This latter 
 (as in the case of that other eccentric Camber- 
 well man, Mr. Browning) was of a home-keep- 
 ing and haphazard kind, very different from the 
 usual up-bringing of well-to-do middle-class 
 youth in England. It is true that Mr. Ruskin, 
 unhke Mr. Browning, went to a University, 
 though, like him, he went to no school; and 
 
 14
 
 2IO Corrected Impressions. 
 
 his comparative chastity of form may be partly 
 ascribed to this frequentation of the Muses. 
 But Christ Church, which does not like to be 
 called a " college " at all, is even now probably 
 the college of both Universities in which the 
 University and, strictly speaking, collegiate in- 
 fluences are weakest; while for a gentleman- 
 commoner in Mr. Ruskin's time they were 
 weaker still. The shaping, moulding, training 
 influence of the ordinary English liberal educa- 
 tion has been abused as well as lauded, and 
 I suppose that it may to a certain extent and 
 in certain cases act as a cramp and a restraint ; 
 •but it certainly acts in a far greater number as 
 a beneficial discipline. Discipline is what Mr. 
 Ruskin has always lacked ; as well in methods of 
 expression as in the serene self-confidence which 
 has enabled him to deliver himself on any and 
 every subject, without any suspicion that he is 
 talking ill-informed nonsense. Discipline Ox- 
 ford did not give, had indeed no full opportunity 
 of giving, to Mr. Ruskin; but she gave him, 
 there can be no doubt, additional inspiration. 
 She nourished in him that passion for architec-
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 211 
 
 ture which no single city in the United King- 
 dom is so richly dowered with the means of 
 exciting and gratifying ; and she, no doubt, 
 also strengthened in him the general Romantic 
 tendency of which he is so characteristic an 
 exponent. 
 
 For the other part of the matter it has long 
 ago seemed to me — I do not know that I have 
 seen it noticed or suggested by anybody else — 
 that the central peculiarity of Mr. Ruskin is a 
 singular and almost unparalleled union of two 
 main characteristics, one of which is usually 
 thought of as specially French, the other as 
 specially English. The first is an irresistible 
 and all-pervading tendency to generalize, — to 
 bring things under what, at any rate, seems 
 a law, to erect schemes, and deduce, and con- 
 nect. The other is the unconquerable ethical 
 tone of all his speculations. To follow out the 
 ramifications of this strangely crossed nature 
 of his would take a very great deal of space, 
 and would partake more of the style of abstract 
 criticism than would perhaps be suitable to this 
 book and plan. But one or two applications
 
 212 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 and corollaries of what has just been said may 
 be indicated. 
 
 Thus it may be pointed out that Mr. Ruskin's 
 extraordinary insensibility to the ludicrous 
 hangs on to both the un-English and the English 
 sides of his intellectual temperament. His 
 mania for generalizing blinds him to the ab- 
 surd on the one side, as we constantly find 
 it doing in Continental thinkers; his insa- 
 tiable appetite for moral applications, and his 
 firm belief in his moral mission blind him, as 
 we find these things do often in Britons. When 
 Mr. Ruskin says that a square leaf on any tree 
 would be ugly, being a violation of the law 
 of growth in trees, we feel at once that we are 
 in the company of an intellectual kinsman of 
 the learned persons whom Moliere satirised. 
 He deprecates expenditure on plate and jewels 
 (while admitting that " noble art may occasion- 
 ally exist in these ") because they are matters 
 of ostentation, a temptation to the dishonest, and 
 so on, — a moral paralogism which would be 
 almost impossible to any one not of British 
 blood.
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 21? 
 
 But I must leave this key to Mr. Ruskin in 
 the hands of the ingenious reader, who will find 
 it do a great deal of unlocking. A man with an 
 ardent sense of duty combined with an ardent 
 desire to do good ; eager to throw everything 
 into the form of a general law, but eager also 
 to give that general law, directly or indirectly, 
 mystically or simply, an ethical bearing and 
 interpretation; extremely fond of throwing his 
 discourse into an apparently argumentative 
 form, but probably more prone than any man 
 of equal talents who has lived during this cen- 
 tury to logical fallacies and illicit processes of 
 every kind, — grasp the man as this, and the 
 works will cease to be a puzzle or an irrita- 
 tion, because the reason of them will at once 
 be plain. 
 
 And it would be a very great pity, indeed, if 
 the Book of Ruskin were to remain to any one 
 merely a closed book, as irritation or as puzzle. 
 For, if these curious volumes are taken with a 
 due amount of rational salt, they cannot fail to 
 enlarge and exercise the tastes and powers of the 
 reader; while, if read simply for enjoyment,
 
 214 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 they will be found to contain the very finest 
 prose (without exception and beyond compari- 
 son) which has been written in English during 
 the last half of the nineteeth century. The 
 great merit of this prose is that it is never, as 
 most of the ornate prose styles of a more recent 
 day are, affected and unnatural. Great pains 
 have been spent on the writing of English prose 
 during the last twenty years — greater, I think, 
 than had been taken for several generations. 
 But the result has almost always had (to my 
 taste at least) something too much of the lamp 
 — a too constant reminder that here the gentle- 
 man did take great pains, that he turned the 
 sentence this way and that to convey an air of 
 distinction, that he picked his words so as to 
 give them, if not quite a new meaning and col- 
 location, at any rate a collocation and meaning 
 as different as possible from that which they had 
 usually had. One thinks far too often of the 
 story of Paul de Saint- Victor (a real artist, too) ' 
 scattering single words about a paper, and then 
 filling in and writing up to them. Our latter-day 
 prose of this kind is sometimes eloquent, but
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 215 
 
 it is rarely elegant; it is sometimes splendid, 
 but it is seldom or never at ease; it is often 
 quaint and rare in embellishment, but it is 
 'seldom or never unconscious of its dress. 
 
 Now, Mr. Ruskin's purple patches — despite 
 a rather too great tendency to run not merely 
 into definitely rhythmical, but into definitely 
 metrical forms — are never laboured, they never 
 suggest effort, strain, or trick. He warms to 
 them naturally, he turns them out without tak- 
 ing his coat off. They are to be found, it is 
 true, mainly, though by no means wholly, in his 
 earlier books. The practice of alternately chat- 
 ting and scolding, to which he unfortunately 
 betook himself some five-and-twenty years ago, 
 is not favourable to the production of fine 
 English, unless the writer can rise to the level 
 of a real scBva indigjiatio. This Mr. Ruskin can 
 seldom do ; and, as has been already noted, his* 
 weaknesses never betray themselves so much as 
 when he is talking of what he does not like. 
 
 But in his early days of enthusiasm he was 
 often magnificent — no lesser word will do. It 
 was some time before I could bring myself
 
 2i6 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 (well knowing what the comparative result 
 would be) to compare the second of the two 
 recent volumes of selections, which cover his 
 whole work, with the early and now precious 
 volume which was published in 1861, and which 
 was perforce confined to the greater and earlier 
 books — the " Modern Painters," the " Stones 
 of Venice," the " Seven Lamps," the " Lectures 
 on Architecture and Painting," and a very few 
 others. In this older volume you will, no doubt, 
 find the crochet and the waywardness, the para- 
 logism and the undue preaching, not, as he once 
 put it, of " the connection between art and 
 human passion" (which is perfectly true and 
 important), but of that between art and its 
 influence on the life of the artist (which is 
 chiefly not to the point). But you will also 
 find far more frequently than later — indeed, 
 in this volume on almost every page — a phras- 
 ing so admirable, a selection of imagery so 
 fertile and felicitous as to compel admiration, 
 even if the matter, instead of being almost 
 always noble (if not always quite sane), were 
 purely wrongheaded or purely unimportant.
 
 Mr. Ruskin. 217 
 
 For more than forty years artists in flamboy- 
 ant prose have been writing after and after 
 the famous description of the Falls of Schafif- 
 hausen in " Modern Painters." Mr. Swinburne, 
 in his " Blake," once very nearly, if not quite, 
 equalled it; all the rest are nowhere. The 
 " Stones of Venice " is crammed with similar 
 passages ; in fact, it is the book of descriptive 
 prose in English, and all others toil after it in 
 vain. 
 
 For happier expressions of crotchety fancy, 
 where shall we look than in the rather numer- 
 ous passages where Mr. Ruskin sets forth his 
 favourite craze that bright colours are virtuous, 
 dark and neutral tints wicked? The thing is 
 false, it is almost silly ; but it is so charmingly 
 put that you chuckle at once with keen pleas- 
 ure and mild scorn. Also, the man can ob- 
 serve, which is the most uncommon of all gifts. 
 The fault of our modern impressionists lies in 
 just this — that the artist seems to think he 
 must empty out of his representation every- 
 thing but the mere individual impression itself, 
 so that he does not really give what he sees,
 
 21 8 Corrected Impressions. 
 
 or what anybody sees, but what is or might 
 be seen with an arbitrary subtraction of allow- 
 ance for the seer's presumed idiosyncrasy. This 
 is as bad as the most slavish convention or the 
 most exaggerated personal crotchet. Now, Mr. 
 Ruskin certainly does not minimise the personal 
 element; yet he can, when he chooses, keep it 
 to its lowest terms. 
 
 But I am outrunning my limits. To sum 
 up the impression side of the matter, — when 
 I was young, Mr. Ruskin's crotchets used to 
 irritate me more than they ought; they now 
 irritate me hardly at all, and only bore me a 
 little. But I think I like his beauties more than 
 ever ; and I am disposed to think, also, that he 
 has brought more folk to art than he has ever 
 bitten with his own heresies about it. 
 
 Printed from American Plates 
 
 Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. 
 
 London &' Edinlmrgh 
 
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