Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN ] 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 PARKER a SON, LI 
 
 EH6LISH FORUGS BOOKSI 
 27. BROAD STREET. OXFORD
 
 y. 'f'jf/t.4,tts/- -faoddt".
 
 ESSAYS FROM THE 
 "GUARDIAN."
 
 40O copies of this book have 
 been printed on Van Gelder 
 hand-made paper and the type 
 distributed.
 
 ESSAYS FROM THE 
 "GUARDIAN" BY 
 WALTER PATER 
 
 PRINTED FOR THOMAS B. MOSHER AND 
 PUBLISHED BY HIM AT 45 EXCHANGE 
 STREET PORTLAND MAINE MDCCCXCVII
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PR 
 
 5)1 
 NOTE. 
 
 N reprinting Walter Pater's con- 
 tributions to The Guardian it 
 had been well, one may not un- 
 reasonably suppose, to have assumed that 
 the American reader would feel an inter- 
 est in possessing these nine anonymous 
 essays. To limit the impression to one 
 hundred copies, and those not for sale, 
 simply resulted in placing the book out of 
 ordinary reach, unless reissued, as it now 
 is, in an edition sufficiently large to make 
 it no longer introuvable. 
 
 The privately printed volume was beau- 
 tifully done at The Chiswick Press. Our 
 reprint, short of absolute photographic 
 reproduction, is in facsimile, as far as type, 
 paper and binding can make it. The
 
 vi Note. 
 
 portrait is from the lithograph by Rothen- 
 stein, and is here given for the first time. 
 
 This is not the place for a bibliography 
 of Pater's works, but in a very full review 
 of these Essays, (The Athenaum, June 12, 
 1897), eleven uncollected articles are cited 
 by the reviewer ; and it is quite possible 
 that the list, which we append, will admit 
 of future additions. 
 
 1. ' The Complete Poetical Works of 
 William Wordsworth ' edited by J. Mor- 
 ley. (Athenceum^ January 26, 1889.) 
 Signed. 
 
 2. ' Correspondance de Gustave Flau- 
 bert.' (Deuxieme Serie, 1850-1854.) 
 (Athenceum, August 3, 1889.) Signed. 
 
 3. J. A. Symonds's ' Renaissance in 
 Italy : The Age of the Despots.' (Acad- 
 emy, July 31, 1875.) Signed. 
 
 4. M. Jules Lemaitre's ' Serenus, and 
 other Tales.' (Macmillan 1 s Magazine, 
 November, 1887.) Unsigned. 
 
 5. The Life and Letters of Flaubert. 
 (Pall Mall Gazette, August 25, 1888.) 
 Signed.
 
 Note. vii 
 
 6. Fabre's 'Toussaint Galabru ' (Nine- 
 teeth Century, April, 1889.) Signed. 
 
 7. Lilly's ' Century of Revolution.' 
 (Nineteenth Century, December, 1889.) 
 Signed. 
 
 8. A Poet with something to say : 
 Mr. Arthur Symons's ' Days and Nights.' 
 (Pall Mall Gazette, March 23, 1889.) 
 Unsigned. 
 
 9. < It is Thyself.' (Pall Mai! Gazette, 
 April 15, 1889.) Unsigned. 
 
 10. ' Dorian Gray.' (jBookman, Novem- 
 ber, 1891.) Signed. 
 
 n. Mr. George Moore as an Art 
 Critic. (Daily Chronicle, June 10, 1893.) 
 Signed. 
 
 To the foregoing contributions should 
 be added : 
 
 12. Introduction to 'The Purgatory of 
 Dante Alighieri by C. L. Shadwell. (Pur- 
 gatorio I XXVII.) ' London, 1892. 
 Signed.
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 THE "GUARDIAN 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER PATER 
 
 LATE FELLOW OF BRAZENOSE COLLEGE 
 
 LONDON 
 
 PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION 
 
 AT THE CHISWICK PRESS 
 
 1896
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 T has been discovered, through 
 the kindness of the present editor 
 of the "Guardian," Mr. D. C. 
 Lathbury, that Walter Pater contributed 
 to the pages of that newspaper nine anony- 
 mous articles. So distinguished an interest 
 attaches to everything which proceeded 
 from the fastidious pen of the great critic 
 that it has been thought worth while to 
 preserve these nine essays, although their 
 positive value may be slight. They are 
 crumbs from the table of his delicate and 
 never copious feast, and it is to the inner 
 circle of his friends that they are here 
 offered.
 
 Xll 
 
 Preface. 
 
 The sisters of Mr. Pater have courteously 
 expressed their approval of the present 
 reprint, and, in doing so, have remarked 
 that it is not their present intention to 
 add any portion of it to their brother's 
 published works. 
 
 its
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 1. ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 2. AMIEL'S " JOURNAL INTIME" 
 
 BROWNING 
 
 PAOB 
 I 
 
 43 
 
 4. " ROBERT ELSMFRE " ...... 57 
 
 5. l ' THEIR MAJESTIES' SERVANTS" . . 77 
 
 6. WORDSWORTH ......... 97 
 
 7. FERDINAND FABRE ....... 115 
 
 8. THE"CONTES"OF M. AUGUSTIN FILON 133 
 
 9. MR. GOSSE'S POEMS ....... 149
 
 I. 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 FEBRUARY 17, 1886.
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 FOUR BOOKS FOR STUDENTS OF 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 'PIE making of an anthology of 
 English prose is what must have 
 occurred to many of its students, 
 by way of pleasure to themselves,or of profit 
 to other persons. Such an anthology, the 
 compass and variety of our prose literature 
 being considered, might well follow exclu- 
 sively some special line of interest in it ; 
 exhibiting, for instance, what is so obviously 
 striking,its imaginative power, or its (legiti- 
 mately) poetic beauty, or again, its philoso- 
 phical capacity. Mr. Saintsbury's well-con- 
 sidered " Specimens of English Prose Style, 
 from Malory to Macaulay " (Kegan Paul), a
 
 4 Essays from 
 
 volume, as we think, which bears fresh 
 witness to the truth of the old remark that 
 it takes a scholar indeed to make a good 
 literary selection, has its motive sufficiently 
 indicated in the very original " introductory 
 essay," which might well stand, along with 
 the best of these extracts from a hundred 
 or more deceased masters of English, as 
 itself a document or standard, in the matter 
 of prose style. The essential difference 
 between poetry and prose " that other 
 beauty of prose" in the words of the 
 motto he has chosen from Dryden, the 
 first master of the sort of prose he prefers : 
 that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden. It is a 
 consideration, undoubtedly, of great import- 
 ance both for the writer and the critic ; in 
 England especially, where, although, (as 
 Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in 
 correction of an imperfectly informed 
 French critic of our literature,) the radical 
 distinction between poetry and prose has 
 ever been recognized by its students, yet the 
 imaginative impulse, which is perhaps the 
 richest of our purely intellectual gifts, has
 
 the " Guardian"' 1 5 
 
 been apt to invade the province of that 
 tact and good judgment, alike as to matter 
 and manner, in which we are not richer 
 than other people. Great poetry and great 
 prose, it might be found, have most of their 
 qualities in common. But their indispens- 
 able qualities are different.or even opposed ; 
 and it is just the indispensable qualities of 
 prose and poetry respectively, which it is 
 so necessary for those who have to do with 
 either to bear ever in mind. Order.precision, 
 directness, are the radical merits of prose 
 thought ; and it is more than merely 
 legitimate that they should form the 
 criterion of prose style, because within the 
 scope of those qualities, according to Mr. 
 Saintsbury, there is more than just the 
 quiet, unpretending usefulness of the bare 
 sermo pedestris. Acting on language, those 
 qualities generate a specific and unique 
 beauty "that other beauty of prose" 
 fitly illustrated by these specimens, which 
 the reader needs hardly be told, after what 
 has been now said, are far from being a 
 collection of "purple patches."
 
 6 Essays from 
 
 Whether or not he admits their practical 
 cogency, an attentive reader will not fail to 
 be interested in the attempt Mr. Saintsbury 
 has made to give technical rules of metre 
 forthe production of the true prose rhythm. 
 Any one who cares to do so might test the 
 validity of those rules in the nearest possible 
 way, by applying them to the varied ex- 
 amples in this wide survey of what has 
 been actually well done in English prose, 
 here exhibited on the side of their strictly 
 prosaic merit their conformity, before all 
 other aims, to laws of a structure primarily 
 reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose 
 structure,or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury 
 conceives it, has been always, or even 
 generally, the ideal, even of those chosen 
 writers here in evidence. Elizabethan prose, 
 all too chaotic in the beauty and force 
 which overflowed into it from Elizabethan 
 poetry, and incorrect with an incorrectness 
 which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at 
 all : then, in reaction against that, the 
 correctness of Dryclen, and his followers 
 through the eighteenth century, determin-
 
 the " Guardian" 7 
 
 ing the standard of a prose in the proper 
 sense, not inferior to the prose of the 
 Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great 
 age in France : " and, again in reaction 
 against this, the wild mixture of poetry 
 and prose, in our wild nineteenth century, 
 under the influence of such writers as 
 Dickens and Carlyle : such are the three 
 periods into which the story of our prose 
 literature divides itself. And Mr. Saints- 
 bury has his well-timed, practical sugges- 
 tions, upon a survey of them. 
 
 If the invasion of the legitimate sphere 
 of prose in England by the spirit of poetry 
 weaker or stronger, has been something far 
 deeper than is indicated by that tendency 
 to write unconscious blank verse, which has 
 made it feasible to transcribe about one- 
 half of Dickens's otherwise so admirable 
 " Barnaby Rudge " in blank-verse lines, a 
 tendency (outdoing our old friend M. 
 Jourdain) commoner than Mr- Saintsbury 
 admits, such lines being frequent in his 
 favourite Dryden ; yet, on the other hand, 
 it might be maintained, and would be main-
 
 8 Essays from 
 
 tained by its French critics,that our English 
 poetry has been too apt to dispense with 
 those prose qualities, which, though not the 
 indispensable qualities of poetry, go, never- 
 theless, to the making of all first-rate poetry 
 the qualities, namely, of orderly structure, 
 and such qualities generally as depend upon 
 second thoughts. A collection of specimens 
 of English poetry, for the purpose of ex- 
 hibiting the achievement of prose excel- 
 lences by it (in their legitimate measure) is a 
 desideratum we commend to Mr.Saintsbury. 
 It is the assertion, the development, the 
 product of those very different indispens- 
 able qualities of poetry, in the presence 
 of which the English is equal or superior to 
 all other modern literature the native, 
 sublime, and beautiful, but often wild and 
 irregular, imaginative power in English 
 poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare, with 
 which Professor Minto deals, in his "Char- 
 acteristics of English Poets " (Blackwood), 
 lately reprinted. That his book should 
 have found many readers we can well 
 understand, in the light of the excellent
 
 the " Guardian"' 1 9 
 
 qualities which, in high degree, have gone 
 to the making of it : a tasteful learning, 
 never deserted by that hold upon con- 
 temporary literature which is so animat- 
 ing an influence in the study of what 
 belongs to the past. Beginning with an 
 elaborate notice of Chaucer, full of the 
 minute scholarship of our day, he never 
 forgets that his subject is, after all, poetry. 
 The followers of Chaucer,ancl the precursors 
 of Shakespeare, are alike real persons to 
 him old Langland reminding him of 
 Carlyle's "'Gospel of Labour." The product 
 of a large store of reading has been here 
 secreted anew for the reader who desires to 
 see, in bird's-eye view, the light and shade 
 of a long and varied period of poetic 
 literature, by way of preparation for 
 Shakespeare, (with a full essay upon whom 
 the volume closes, )explaining Shakespeare, 
 so far as he can be explained by literary 
 antecedents. 
 
 That powerful poetry was twin-brother 
 to a prose, of more varied, but certainly of 
 wilder and more irregular power than the
 
 io Essays from, 
 
 admirable, the typical, prose of Dryden. 
 In Dryden, and his followers through the 
 eighteenth century, we see the reaction 
 against the exuberance and irregularity of 
 that prose, no longer justified by power, 
 but cognizable rather as bad taste. But 
 such reaction was effective only because 
 an age had come the age of a negative, or 
 agnostic philosophy in which men's minds 
 must needs beli mi ted to the superficialities of 
 things, with a kind of narrowness amounting 
 to a positive gift. What that mental attitude 
 was capable of, in the way of an elegant, 
 yet plain-spoken, and lifelike delineation of 
 men's moods and manners, as also in the way 
 of determining those moods and manners 
 themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, 
 and harmonious,can be seen nowhere better 
 than in Mr. Austin Dobson's " Selections 
 from Steele " (Clarendon Press) prefaced 
 by his careful " Life." The well-known 
 qualities of Mr. Dobson's own original work 
 are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and 
 discrimination we may look for in a collec- 
 tion likethis,in which the random lightnings
 
 the " Guardian" 1 1 
 
 of the first of the essayists are grouped 
 undercertain heads "Character Sketches," 
 "Tales and Incidents," "Manners and 
 Fashions," and the like so as to diminish, 
 for the general reader, the scattered effect 
 of short essays on a hundred various 
 subjects, and give a connected, book-like 
 character to the specimens. 
 
 Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded 
 in putting himself, and his way of taking 
 the world for this pioneer of an every- 
 body's literature had his subjectivities 
 into books. What a survival of one long- 
 past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from 
 Richmond to London " ! What truth to 
 the surface of common things, to their 
 direct claim on our interest ! yet with what 
 originality of effect in that truthfulness, 
 when he writes, for instance : 
 
 " I went to my lodgings, led by a light, 
 whom I put into the discourse of his private 
 economy, and made him give me an account 
 of the charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a 
 family that depended upon a link." 
 
 It was one of his peculiarities, he tells
 
 I 2 Essays from 
 
 us, to live by the eye far more than by any 
 other sense (a peculiarity, perhaps, in an 
 Englishman), and this is what he sees at 
 the early daily service then common in 
 some City churches. Among those who 
 were come only to see or be seen, "there 
 were indeed a few in whose looks there 
 appeared a heavenly joy and gladness upon 
 the entrance of a new day, as if they had 
 gone to sleep with expectation of it." 
 
 The industrious reader, indeed, might 
 select out of these specimens from Steele, 
 a picture, in minute detail, of the character- 
 istic manners of that time. Still, beside, or 
 only a little way beneath, such a picture of 
 passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows 
 really deal with is the least transitory 
 aspects of life, though still merely aspects 
 those points in which all human nature, 
 great or little, finds what it has in com- 
 mon, and directly shows itself up. The 
 natural strength of such literature will, of 
 course, be in the line of its tendencies ; in 
 transparency, variety, and directness. To 
 the unembarrassing matter, the unem-
 
 the "Guardian" 13 
 
 barrassed style ! Steele is, perhaps, the 
 most impulsive writer of the school to which 
 he belongs ; he abounds in felicities of im- 
 pulse. Yet who can help feeling that his 
 style is regular because the matter he deals 
 with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, 
 limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and 
 unambitious in its speculative flight ? Even 
 in Steele himself we may observe with 
 what sureness of instinct the men of that 
 age turned aside at the contact of anything 
 likely to make them, in any sense, forget 
 themselves. 
 
 No one indicates better than Charles 
 Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred Ainger 
 has done such good service, the great and 
 peculiar change which was begun at the 
 end of the last century, and dominates our 
 own ; that sudden increase of the width, 
 the depth, the complexity of intellectual 
 interest, which has many times torn and 
 distorted literary style, even with those 
 best able to comprehend its laws. In "Mrs. 
 Leicester's School, with other Writings in 
 Prose and Verse" (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger
 
 14 Essays from 
 
 has collected and annotated certain remains 
 of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to 
 lie unknown to the present generation, in 
 forgotten periodicals or inaccessible re- 
 prints. The story of the Odyssey, abbre- 
 viated in very simple prose, for children 
 of all ages will speak for itself. But the 
 garland of graceful stories which gives 
 name to the volume, told by a party of 
 girls on the evening of their assembling at 
 school, are in the highest degree charac- 
 teristic of the brother and sister who were 
 ever so successful in imparting to others 
 their own enjoyment of books and people. 
 The tragic circumstance which strengthened 
 and consecrated their natural community 
 of interest had, one might think, something 
 to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even 
 of their most humorous writing, touching 
 often the deepest springs of pity and awe, 
 as the way of the highest humour is a way, 
 however, very different from that of the 
 humorists of the eighteenth century. But 
 one cannot forget also that Lamb was early 
 an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth: of
 
 the " Guardian" 15 
 
 Wordsworth, the firstcharacteristic povverof 
 the nineteenth century, his essay on whom, 
 in the "Quarterly Review," Mr. Ainger here 
 reprints. Wouldthathecouldhave reprinted 
 it as originally composed, and ungarbled 
 by Gifford, the editor ! Lamb, like Words- 
 worth, still kept the charm of a serenity, 
 a precision, unsurpassed by the quietest 
 essayist of the preceding age. But it might 
 have been foreseen that the rising tide of 
 thought and feeling, on the strength of 
 which they too are borne upward, would 
 sometimes overflow barriers. And so it hap- 
 pens that these simple stories are touched, 
 much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, 
 with tragic power. Dealing with the begin- 
 nings of imagination in the minds of child- 
 ren, they record, with the reality which a 
 very delicate touch preserves from anything 
 lugubrious, not those merely preventible 
 miseries of childhood over which some 
 writers have been apt to gloat, but the con- 
 tact of childhood with the great and in- 
 evitable sorrows of life, into which children 
 can enter with depth, with dignity, and
 
 1 6 Essays from 
 
 sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic 
 greatness, to the discipline of the heart. 
 Let the reader begin with the"Sea Voyage," 
 which is by Charles Lamb ; and, what 
 Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the 
 "Father's \Vedding-Day," by his sister 
 Mary. 
 
 The ever-increasing intellectual burden 
 of our age is hardly likely to adapt itself to 
 the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and 
 limited, literary instruments of the age of 
 Queen Anne. Yet Mr. Saintsbury is cer- 
 tainly right in thinking that, as regards 
 style, English literature has much to do. 
 Well, the good quality of an age, the defect 
 of which lies in the direction of intellectual 
 anarchy and confusion, may well be eclec- 
 ticism : in style, as in other things, it is 
 well always to aim at the combination of as 
 many excellences as possible opposite ex- 
 cellences, it may be, those other beauties 
 of prose. A busy age will hardly educate 
 its writers in correctness. Let its writers 
 make time to write English more as a 
 learned language ; and completing that
 
 the " Guardian'' 1 17 
 
 correction of style which had only gone a 
 certain way in the last century, raise the 
 general level of language towards their 
 own. If there be a weakness in Mr. Saints- 
 bury's view, it is perhaps in a tendency to 
 regard style a little too independently of 
 matter. And there are still some who 
 think that, after all, the style is the man ; 
 justified, in very great varieties, by the 
 simple consideration of what he himself has 
 to say, quite independently of any real or 
 supposed connection with this or that lite- 
 rary age or school. Let us close with the 
 words of a most versatile master of English 
 happily not yet included in Mr. Saints- 
 bury's book a writer who has dealt with 
 all the perturbing influences of our century 
 in a manner as classical, as idiomatic, as 
 easy and elegant, as Steele's : 
 
 " I wish you to observe," says Cardinal 
 Newman, " that the mere dealer in words 
 cares little or nothing for the subject which 
 he is embellishing, but can paint and gild 
 anything whatever to order ; whereas the 
 artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his 
 c
 
 1 8 Essays from the " Guardian." 
 
 great or rich visions before him, and his 
 only aim is to bring out what he thinks or 
 what he feels in a way adequate to the 
 thing spoken of, and appropriate to the 
 speaker."
 
 II. 
 
 AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME." 
 
 MARCH 17x11, 1886. 
 
 f
 
 AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME." 
 
 " Amiel's Journal." The " Journal Intime" 
 of Henri-Fr^ddric Amiel. Translated, 
 with an Introduction and Notes, by 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two vols. Mac- 
 millans. 
 
 ERTAIN influential expressions 
 of opinion have attracted much 
 curiosity to Amiel's " Journal In- 
 time," both in France, where the book has 
 already made its mark, and in England, 
 where Mrs. Humphry Ward's translation 
 is likely to make it widely known among 
 all serious lovers of good literature. Easy, 
 idiomatic,correct,this English version reads 
 like an excellent original English work, and 
 gives fresh proof that the work of transla-
 
 22 Essays from 
 
 tion, if it is to be done with effect, must be 
 done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. 
 Ward, original literary gifts, are willing to 
 make a long act of self-denial or self-efface- 
 ment for the benefit of the public. In this 
 case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of 
 self-effacement, for the accomplished trans- 
 lator has prefaced "Amiel's Journal " by an 
 able and interesting essay of seventy pages 
 on Amiel's life and intellectual position, 
 And certainly there is much in the book, 
 thus effectively presented to the English 
 reader, to attract those who interest them- 
 selves in the study of the finer types of 
 human nature, of literary expression, of 
 metaphysical and practical philosophy ; to 
 attract, above all, those interested in such 
 philosophy, at points where it touches upon 
 questions of religion, and especially at the 
 present day. 
 
 Henri-Fr6dric Amiel was born at 
 Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both his 
 parents at the age of twelve, his youth was 
 necessarily " a little bare and forlorn," and 
 a deep interest in religion became fixed in
 
 the " Guardian'' 23 
 
 him early. His student days coming to an 
 end, the years which followed, from 1842 
 to 1848 WanderjaJire, in which he visited 
 Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal 
 towns of Germany seem to have been the 
 happiest of his life. In 1849 ne became a 
 Professor at Geneva, and there is little more 
 to tell of him in the way of outward events. 
 He published some volumes of verse ; to 
 the last apparently still only feeling after 
 his true literary metier. Those last seven 
 years were a long struggle against the 
 disease which ended his life, consumption, 
 at the age of fifty- three. The first entry 
 in his "Journal" is in 1848. From that 
 date to his death, a period of over twenty- 
 five years, this "Journal " was the real 
 object of all the energies of his richly-en- 
 dowed nature : and from its voluminous 
 sheets his literary executors have selected 
 the deeply interesting volumes now pre- 
 sented in English. 
 
 With all its gifts and opportunities it 
 was a melancholy life melancholy with 
 something not altogether explained by the
 
 24 Essays from 
 
 somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed 
 in the " Journal," nor by the consumptive 
 tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, 
 causing him from a very early date to be 
 much preoccupied with the effort to recon- 
 cile himself with the prospect of death, 
 and reinforcing the far from sanguine 
 temperament of one intellectually also 
 a poitrinaire. 
 
 You might think him at first sight only 
 an admirable specimen of a thoroughly 
 well-educated man, full, of course, of the 
 modern spirit ; stimulated and formed by 
 the influences of the varied intellectual 
 world around him ; and competing, in his 
 turn, with many very various types of con- 
 temporary ability. The use of his book to 
 cultivated people might lie in its affording 
 a kind of standard by which they might 
 take measure of the maturity and pro- 
 ducible quality of their own thoughts on a 
 hundred important subjects. He will write 
 a page or two, giving evidence of that 
 accumulated power and attainment which, 
 with a more strenuous temperament, might
 
 the " Guardian? 25 
 
 have sufficed for an effective volume. Con- 
 tinually, in the "Journal, "we pause over 
 things that would rank for beauties among 
 widely different models of the best French 
 prose. He has said some things in Pascal's 
 vein not unworthy of Pascal. He had a 
 right to compose "Thoughts:" they have 
 the force in them which makes up for their 
 unavoidable want of continuity. 
 
 But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to 
 do, we look below the surface of a very 
 equable and even smoothly accomplished 
 literary manner, we discover, in high degree 
 of development, that perplexity or com- 
 plexity of soul, the expression of which, so 
 it be with an adequate literary gift, has its 
 legitimate, because inevitable, interest for 
 the modern reader. Senancour and Maurice 
 de Guerin in one, seem to have been sup- 
 plemented here by a larger experience, a 
 far greater education, than either of them 
 had attained to. So multiplex is the result 
 that minds of quite opposite type might 
 well discover in these pages their own 
 special thought or humour, happily ex-
 
 26 Essays from 
 
 pressed at last (they might think) in pre- 
 cisely that just shade of language them- 
 selves had searched for in vain. And with 
 a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, 
 those varieties of tendency are apt to pre- 
 sent themselves as so many contending 
 persons. The perplexed experience gets 
 the apparent clearness, as it gets also the 
 animation, of a long dialogue ; only, the 
 disputants never part company, and there 
 is no real conclusion. "This nature," he 
 observes, of one of the many phases of 
 character he has discovered in himself, " is, 
 as it were, only one of the men which exist 
 in me. It is one of my departments. It 
 is not the whole of my territory, the whole 
 of my inner kingdom ; " and again, " there 
 are ten men in me, according to time, place, 
 surrounding, and occasion ; and, in my 
 restless diversity, I am for ever escaping 
 myself." 
 
 Yet, in truth, there are but two men in 
 Amiel two sufficiently opposed person- 
 alities, which the attentive reader may 
 define for himself ; compare with, and try
 
 the u Guardian? 27 
 
 by each other as we think, correct also 
 by each other. There is the man, in him 
 and in these pages, who would be "the 
 man of disillusion," only that he has never 
 really been " the man of desires ; " and who 
 seems, therefore, to have a double weari- 
 ness about him. He is akin, of course, to 
 Obermann, to Ren, even to Werther, and, 
 on our first introduction to him, we might 
 think that we had to do only with one 
 more of the vague " renunciants," who in 
 real life followed those creations of fiction, 
 and who, however delicate, interesting as 
 a study, and as it were picturesque on 
 the stage of life, are themselves, after all, 
 essentially passive, uncreative, and there- 
 fore necessarily not of first-rate importance 
 in literature. Taken for what it is worth, 
 the expression of this mood the culture of 
 ennui for its own sake is certainly carried 
 to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the 
 completer, the positive, soul, which will 
 merely take that mood into its service (its 
 proper service, as we hold, is in counter- 
 action to the vulgarity of purely positive
 
 28 Essays from 
 
 natures) is also certainly in evidence in 
 Amiel's "Thoughts" that other, and far 
 stronger person, in the long dialogue ; the 
 man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for 
 the renunciation, but for the reception 
 and use, of all that is puissant, goodly, 
 and effective in life, and for the varied 
 and adequate literary reproduction of it ; 
 who, under favourable circumstances, or 
 even without them, will become critic, or 
 poet, and in either case a creative force; 
 and if he be religious (as Amiel was 
 deeply religious) will make the most of 
 "evidence," and almost certainly find a 
 Church. 
 
 The sort of purely poetic tendency in 
 his mind, which made Amiel known in his 
 own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, 
 seems to be represented in these volumes 
 by certain passages of natural descrip- 
 tion, always sincere, and sometimes rising 
 to real distinction. In Switzerland it is 
 easy to be pleased with scenery. But the 
 record of such pleasure becomes really 
 worth while when, as happens with Amiel,
 
 the " Guardian? 29 
 
 we feel that there has been, and with 
 success, an intellectual effort to get at the 
 secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure ; 
 to define feeling, in this matter. Here is 
 a good description of an effect of fog, 
 which we commend to foreigners resident 
 in London : 
 
 " Fog has certainly a poetry of its own 
 a grace, a dreamy charm. It does for the 
 daylight what a lamp does for us at night ; 
 it turns the mind towards meditation ; it 
 throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as 
 it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters 
 and disperses us ; mist draws us together 
 and concentrates us it is cordial, homely, 
 charged with feeling. The poetry of the 
 sun has something of the epic in it ; that of 
 fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pan- 
 theism is the child of light ; mist engenders 
 faith in near protectors. When the great 
 world is shut off from us, the house becomes 
 itself a small universe. Shrouded in per- 
 petual mist, men love each other better ; 
 for the only reality then is the family, and, 
 within the family.the heart; and the greatest
 
 30 Essays from 
 
 thoughts come from the heart so says the 
 moralist." 
 
 It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is 
 speaking, as, in what follows, of Swiss frost : 
 
 " Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor 
 blossoming plum-trees and peach-trees ! 
 What a difference from six years ago, when 
 the cherry-trees, adorned in their green 
 spring dress and laden with their bridal 
 flowers, smiled at my departure along the 
 Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy 
 threw great gusts of perfume into my 
 face ! " The weather is seldom talked of 
 with so much real sensitiveness to it as in 
 this : 
 
 " The weather is rainy, the whole atmo- 
 sphere grey; it is a time favourable to 
 thought and meditation. I have a liking 
 for such days as these ; they revive one's 
 converse with oneself and make it possible 
 to live the inner life : they are quiet and 
 peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We 
 are nothing but thought, but we feel our life 
 to its very centre. Our very sensations turn 
 to reverie. It is a strange state of mind ;
 
 the " Guardian"" 31 
 
 it is like those silences in worship which are 
 not the empty moments of devotion, but 
 the full moments, and which are so because 
 at such times the soul, instead of being 
 polarized, dispersed, localized, in a single 
 impression or thought, feels her own totality 
 and is conscious of herself." 
 
 " Every landscape," he writes, " is, as it 
 were, a state of the soul : " and again, " At 
 bottom there is but one subject of study ; 
 the forms and metamorphoses of mind : all 
 other subjects may be reduced to that ; all 
 other studies bring us back to this study." 
 And, in truth, if he was occupied with the 
 aspects of nature to such an excellent 
 literary result, still, it was with nature only 
 as a phenomenon of the moral order. His 
 interest.after all, is, consistently, that of the 
 moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, 
 from predilection, with the sort of literary 
 work which stirs men stirstheirintellect 
 through feeling ; and with that literature, 
 especially, as looked at through the means 
 by which it became capable of thus com- 
 manding men. The powers, the culture, of
 
 32 Essays from 
 
 the literary producer : there, is the centre 
 of Amiel's curiosity. 
 
 And if we take Amiel at his own word, 
 we must suppose that but for causes, the 
 chief of which were bad health and a not 
 long life, he too would have produced monu- 
 mental work, whose scope and character 
 he would wish us to conjecture from his 
 "Thoughts." Such indications there cer- 
 tainly are in them. He was meant we 
 see it in the variety, the high level both of 
 matter and style, the animation, the gravity, 
 of one after another of these thoughts on 
 religion, on poetry,on politics in the highest 
 sense; on their most abstract principles, and 
 on the authors who have given them a per- 
 sonal colour; on the genius of those authors, 
 as well as on their concrete works; on out- 
 lying isolated subjects, such as music, and 
 special musical composers he was meant, 
 if people ever are meant for special lines of 
 activity, for the best sort of criticism, the 
 imaginative criticism ; that criticism which 
 is itself a kind of construction, or creation, 
 as it penetrates, through the given literary
 
 the " Guardian? 33 
 
 or artistic product, into the mental and 
 inner constitution of the producer, shaping 
 his work. Of such critical skill, cultivated 
 with all the resources of Genevain the nine- 
 teenth century,he hasgiven in this "Journal" 
 abundant proofs. Corneille, Cherbuliez ; 
 Rousseau, Sismondi ; Victor Hugo, and 
 Joubert ; Mozart and Wagner all who are 
 interested in these men will find a value in 
 what Amiel has to say of them. Often, as 
 for instance in his excellent criticism of 
 Quinet, he has to make large exceptions ; 
 limitationsjskilfully effected by the way, in 
 the course of a really appreciative estimate. 
 Still, through all, what we feel is that we 
 have to do with one who criticises in this 
 fearlessly equitable manner only because he 
 is convinced that his subject is of a real 
 literary importance. A powerful, intel- 
 lectual analysis of some well-marked sub- 
 ject,in such form as makes literature endur- 
 ing, is indeed what the world might have 
 looked for from him : those institutes of 
 aesthetics, for instance, which might exist, 
 after Lessing and Hegel, but which cer- 
 D
 
 34 Essays front 
 
 tainly do not exist yet. " Construction," 
 he says artistic or literary construction 
 " rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas ! 
 also, "upon will." The instinct, at all events, 
 was certainly his. And over and above 
 that he had possessed himself of the art of 
 expressing, in quite natural language, very 
 difficult thoughts; those abstract and meta- 
 physical conceptions especially, in which 
 German mind has been rich, which are bad 
 masters, but very useful ministers towards 
 the understanding, towards an analytical 
 survey,of all that the intellect has produced. 
 But something held him back : not so 
 much a reluctancy of temperament, or of 
 physical constitution (commonenoughcause 
 why men of undeniable gifts fail of com- 
 mensurate production) but a cause purely 
 intellectual -the presence in him, namely, 
 of a certain vein of opinion; that other, con- 
 stituent but contending, person, in his com- 
 plex nature. "The relation of thought to 
 action," he writes, " filled my mind on wak- 
 ing, and I found myself carried towards a 
 bizarre formula, which seems to have some-
 
 the " Guardian." 35 
 
 thing of the night still clinging about it. 
 Action is but coarsened thought" That is 
 but an ingenious metaphysical point, as he 
 goes on to show. But, including in "action" 
 that literary production in which the line of 
 his own proper activity lay, he followed 
 followed often that fastidious utterance to 
 a cynical and pessimistic conclusion. Maia, 
 as he calls it, the empty ''Absolute" of the 
 Buddhist,the "Infinite," the "All,"of which 
 thoseGerman metaphysicians he lovedonly 
 too well have had so much to say : this was 
 for ever to give the go-by to all positive, 
 finite, limited interests whatever. The 
 vague pretensions of an abstract expression 
 acted on him with all the force of aprejudice. 
 "The ideal," he admits, " poisons for me all 
 imperfect possession ; " and again, " The 
 Buddhist tendency in me blunts the faculty 
 of free self-government, and weakens the 
 power of action. I feel a terror of action 
 and am only at ease in the impersonal, 
 disinterested, and objectiveline of thought." 
 But then, again, with him " action " meant 
 chiefly literary production. He quotes with
 
 36 Essays from 
 
 approval those admirable words from 
 Goethe, " In der Beschrankung zeigt sich 
 erst der Meister;" yet still always finds him- 
 self wavering between " frittering myself 
 away on theinfinitely little, and longingafter 
 what is unknown and distant." There is, 
 doubtless, over and above the physical con- 
 sumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of 
 sentiment in this touchingconfession. Still, 
 what strengthened both tendencies wasthat 
 metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," 
 the false intellectual conscience. " I have 
 always avoided what attracted me, and 
 turned my back upon the point where 
 secretly I desired to be; " and, of course, 
 that is not the way to a free and generous 
 productivity, in literature, or in anything 
 else ; though in literature, with Amiel at all 
 events, it meant the fastidiousness which is 
 incompatible with any but the very best 
 sort of production. 
 
 And as that abstract condition of Maia, 
 to the kind and quantity of concrete literary 
 production we hold to have been originally 
 possible for him ; so was the religion he
 
 the " Guardian^ 37 
 
 actually attained, to what might have been 
 the development of his profoundly religious 
 spirit, had he been able to see that the old- 
 fashioned Christianity is itself buttheproper 
 historic development of the true " essence " 
 of the New Testament. There, again, is 
 the constitutional shrinking,through a kind 
 of metaphysical prejudice, from the con- 
 crete that fear of the actual in this case, 
 of the Church of history; to which the 
 admissions, which form so large a part of 
 these volumes, naturally lead. Assenting, 
 on probable evidence, to so many of the 
 judgments of the religious sense, he failed 
 to see the equally probable evidence there is 
 for the beliefs,thepeculiar directionof men's 
 hopes, which complete those judgments 
 harmoniously, and bring them into connec- 
 tion with the facts, the venerable institutions 
 of the past with the lives of the saints. 
 By failure,as we think,of that historic sense, 
 of which he could speak so well, he got no 
 further in this direction than the glacial 
 condition of rationalistic Geneva. " Philo- 
 sophy," he says, "can never replace re-
 
 38 Essays front 
 
 ligion." Only, one cannot see why it might 
 not replace a religion such as his: a religion, 
 after all, much like Seneca's. " I miss 
 something," he himself confesses, "common 
 worship, a positive religion, shared with 
 other people. Ah ! when will the Church 
 to which I belong in heart rise into being ?" 
 To many at least of those who can detect 
 the ideal through the disturbing circum- 
 stances which belong to all actual institu- 
 tions in the world, it was already there. 
 Pascal, from considerations to which Amiel 
 was no stranger, came to the large hopes 
 of the Catholic Church ; Amiel stopped 
 short at a faith almost hopeless ; and by 
 stopping short just there he really failed, 
 as we think, of intellectual consistency, and 
 missed that appeasing influence which his 
 nature demanded as the condition of its full 
 activity, as a force, an intellectual force, in 
 the world inthe special businessof his life. 
 "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, 
 by way of a counsel of perfection in the 
 matter of culture, " but give to your life 
 unity, and bring the unforeseen within the
 
 the " Guardian? 39 
 
 lines of your plan." Bring, we should add 
 the Great Possibility at least within the 
 lines of your plan your plan of action or 
 production ; of morality ; especially of your 
 conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel 
 too, be it remembered (we are not afraid to 
 repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's 
 vein not unworthy of Pascal. 
 
 And so we get only the " Journal." 
 Watching in it, in the way we have sug- 
 gested, the contention of those two men, 
 those two minds in him, and observing how 
 the one might have ascertained and cor- 
 rected the shortcomings of the other, we 
 certainly understand, and can sympathize 
 with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect 
 of a life which seemed to have been but 
 imperfectly occupied. But, then, how ex- 
 cellent a literary product, after all, the 
 " Journal " is. And already we have found 
 that it improves also on second reading. 
 A book of " thoughts " should be a book 
 that may be fairly dipped into, and yield 
 good quotable sayings. Here are some of 
 its random offerings :
 
 40 Essays from 
 
 " Look twice, if what you want is a just 
 conception ; look once, if what you want is 
 a sense of beauty." 
 
 " It is not history which teaches con- 
 science to be honest ; it is the conscience 
 which educates history. Fact is corrupting 
 it is we who correct it by the persistence 
 of our ideal." 
 
 "To do easily what is difficult for others 
 is the mark of talent. To do what is im- 
 possible for talent is the mark of genius." 
 
 " Duty has the virtue of making us feel 
 the reality of a positive world, while at the 
 same time detaching us from it." 
 
 "As it is impossible to be outside God, 
 the best is consciously to dwell in Him." 
 
 " He also (the Son of Man), He above 
 all, is the great Misunderstood, the least 
 comprehended." 
 
 " T\\Q pensee writer is to the philosopher 
 what the dilettante is to the artist." 
 
 There are some, we know, who hold that 
 genius cannot, in the nature of things, be 
 "sterile;" that there are no "mute" Miltons, 
 or the like. Well ! genius, or only a very
 
 the " Guardian? 41 
 
 distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel 
 nursed so jealously did come into evidence. 
 And the reader, we hope, sees also already 
 how well his English translator has done 
 her work. She may justly feel, as part at 
 least of the reward of a labour which must 
 have occupied much time, so many of the 
 freshest hours of mind and spirit, that she 
 has done something to help her author in 
 the achievement of his,however discouraged 
 still irrepressible,desire, by giving additional 
 currency to a book which the best sort of 
 readers will recognize as an excellent and 
 certainly very versatile companion, not to 
 be forgotten.
 
 III. 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 NOVEMBER gxn, 1887.
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 " An Introduction to the study of Brown- 
 ing." By Arthur Symons. Cassells. 
 
 'HETHER it be true or not that 
 Mr. Browning is justly charge- 
 able with "obscurity" with a 
 difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the 
 intrinsic difficulty of his matter it is very 
 probable that an Introduction to the 
 study of his works, such as this of Mr. 
 Symons, will add to the number of his 
 readers. Mr. Symons' opening essay on the 
 general characteristics of Mr. Browning is 
 a just and acceptable appreciation of his 
 poetry as a whole, well worth reading, even 
 at this late day. We find in Mr.Symons the 
 thoughtful and practised yet enthusiastic 
 student in literature in intellectual pro-
 
 46 Essays from 
 
 blems ; always quiet and sane, praising Mr. 
 Browning with tact, with a real refinement 
 and grace , saying well many things which 
 every competent reader of the great poet 
 must feel to be true ; devoting to the subject 
 he loves a critical gift so considerable as to 
 make us wish for work from his hands of 
 larger scope than this small volume. His 
 book is, according to his intention, before 
 all things a useful one. Appreciating 
 Mr. Browning fairly, as we think, in all 
 his various efforts, his aim is to point 
 his readers to the best, the indisputable, 
 rather than to the dubious portions of his 
 author's work. Not content with his own 
 excellent general criticism of Mr. Brown- 
 ing, he guides the reader to his works, 
 or division of work, seriatim, making of 
 each a distinct and special study, and 
 giving a great deal of welcome informa- 
 tion about the poems, the circumstances 
 of their composition, and the like, with 
 delightful quotations. Incidentally, his In- 
 troduction has the interest of a brief but 
 effective selection from Mr. Browning's
 
 the " Guardian^ 47 
 
 poems ; and he has added an excellent bio- 
 graphy. 
 
 Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. 
 Symons for reckoning Mr.Bro\vning,among 
 English poets,second to Shakespeare alone 
 " He comes very near the gigantic total 
 of Shakespeare." The quantity of his work? 
 Yes ! that too, in spite of a considerable 
 unevenness, is a sign of genius. "So large, 
 indeed, appear to be his natural endow- 
 ments that we cannot feel as if even thirty 
 volumes would have come near to exhaust- 
 ing them." Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. 
 Browning has been a multitude of persons ; 
 only (as Shakespeare's only untried style 
 was the simple one) almost never simple 
 ones ; and certainly he has controlled them 
 all to profoundly interesting artistic ends 
 by his own powerful personality. The 
 world and all its action, as a show of 
 thought, that is the scope of his work. It 
 makes him pre-eminently a modern poet 
 a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly edu- 
 cated, modern world, which, having come 
 to the end of all direct and purely external
 
 48 Essays from 
 
 experiences, must necessarily turn for its 
 entertainment to the world within : 
 
 "The men and women who live and 
 move in that new world of his creation are 
 as varied as life itself; they are kings and 
 beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, 
 poets, painters, musicians.priests and Popes, 
 Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, 
 princesses, dancers with the wicked witchery 
 of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the 
 devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls 
 and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, 
 cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and 
 bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritual- 
 ists, heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, 
 rabbis, persons of quality and men of low 
 estate men and women as multiform as 
 nature or society has made them." 
 
 The individual, the personal, the con- 
 crete, as distinguished from, yet revealing 
 in its fulness, the general, the universal 
 that is Mr. Browning's chosen subject- 
 matter : " Every man is for him an 
 epitome of the universe, a centre of crea- 
 tion." It is always the particular soul, and
 
 the ' Guardian." 49 
 
 the particular act or episode, as the flower 
 of the particular soul the act or episode 
 by which its quality comes to the test in 
 which he interests us. With him it is 
 always "a drama of the interior, a tragedy 
 or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how 
 each soul becomes conscious of itself." In 
 the Preface to the later edition of " Sor- 
 dello," Mr. Browning himself told us that 
 to him little else seems worth study except 
 the development of a soul, the incidents, 
 the story, of that. And, in fact, the intel- 
 lectual public generally agrees with him. 
 It is because he has ministered with such 
 marvellous vigour, and variety, and fine 
 skill to this interest, that he is the most 
 modern, to modern people the most impor- 
 tant, of poets. 
 
 So much for Mr. Browning's matter ; for 
 his manner, we hold Mr. Symons right in 
 thinking him a master of all the arts of 
 poetry. "These extraordinary little poems," 
 says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola " 
 and ' Porphyria's Lover" 
 
 "Reveal not only an imagination of in- 
 
 J O 
 
 E
 
 50 Essays front 
 
 tense fire and heat,but an almost finished art 
 a power of conceiving subtle mental com- 
 plexities with clearness and of expressing 
 them in a picturesque form and in perfect 
 lyric language. Each poem renders a single 
 mood, and renders it completely." 
 
 Well, after all, that is true of a large por- 
 tion of Mr. Browning's work. A curious, 
 an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some 
 extent an experimenter in rhyme or metre, 
 often hazardous. But in spite of the 
 dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of 
 the idiosyncrasy, the true and native colour 
 of his multitudinous dramatis persona, or 
 monologists, Mr. Symons is right in laying 
 emphasis on the grace, the finished skill, 
 the music, native and ever ready to the 
 poet himself tender, manly, humorous, 
 awe-stricken when speaking in his own 
 proper person. Music herself, the analysis 
 of the musical soul, in the characteristic 
 episodes of its development is a wholly new 
 range of poetic subject in which Mr. Brown- 
 ing is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells 
 us :
 
 the " Guardian" 5 1 
 
 " When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it 
 is recorded that he debated within himself 
 whether he should not become a painter or 
 a musician as well as a poet. Finally, 
 though not, I believe, for a good many 
 years, he decided in the negative. But the 
 latent qualities of painter and musician had 
 developed themselves in his poetry, and 
 much of his finest and very much of his 
 most original verse is that which speaks the 
 language of painter and musician as it had 
 never before been spoken. No English 
 poet before him has ever excelled his utter- 
 ances on music, none has so much as rivalled 
 his utterances on art. ' Abt Vogler ' is the 
 richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in 
 the language. It is not the theories of the 
 poet, but the instincts of the musician, that 
 it speaks. ' Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha,' 
 another special poem on music, is unparal- 
 leled for ingenuity of technical interpreta- 
 tion : ' A Toccata of Galuppi's ' is as rare a 
 rendering as can anywhere be found of the 
 impressions and sensations caused by a 
 musical piece ; but 'Abt Vogler' is a very
 
 52 Essays from 
 
 glimpse into the heaven where music is 
 born." 
 
 It is true that " when the head has to be 
 exercised before the heart there is chilling 
 of sympathy." Of course, so intellectual a 
 poet (and only the intellectual poet, as we 
 have pointed out, can be adequate to 
 modern demands) will have his difficulties. 
 They were a part of the poet's choice 
 of vocation, and he was fully aware of 
 them : 
 
 " Mr. Browning might say, as his wife 
 said in an early preface, I never mistook 
 pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor 
 leisure for the hour of the poet as indeed 
 he has himself said, to much the same effect, 
 in a letter printed many years ago : I never 
 pretended to offer such literature as should 
 be a substitute for a cigar or a game at 
 dominoes to an idle man." 
 
 " Moreover, while a writer who deals 
 with easy themes has no excuse if he is not 
 pellucid to a glance, one who employs his 
 intellect and imagination on high and hard 
 Questions has a ri^ht to demand a corre-
 
 the '" Guardian" 53 
 
 spending closeness of attention, and a right 
 to say with Bishop Butler, in answer to a 
 similar complaint : ' It must be acknow- 
 ledged that some of the following discourses 
 are very abstruse and difficult, or, if you 
 please, obscure ; but I must take leave to 
 add that those alone are judges whether or 
 no, and how far this is a fault, who are 
 judges whether or no, and how far it might 
 have been avoided those only who will be 
 at the trouble to understand what is here 
 said, and to see how far the things here in- 
 sisted upon, and not other things, might 
 have been put in a plainer manner.' " 
 
 In Mr. Symons's opinion " Pippa Passes " 
 is Mr. Browning's most perfect piece of 
 work, for pregnancy of intellect, combined 
 with faultless expression in a perfectly 
 novel yet symmetrical outline :' and he is 
 very likely right. He is certainly right in 
 thinking "Men and Women," as they for- 
 merly stood, Mr.Browning's most delightful 
 volumes. It is only to be regretted that in 
 the later collected edition of the works 
 those two magical old volumes are broken
 
 54 Essays from, 
 
 up and scattered under other headings. 
 We think also that Mr. Symons in his high 
 praise does no more than justice to the 
 "Ring and the Book." The ." Ring and 
 the Book " is at once the largest and the 
 greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the cul- 
 mination of his dramatic method, and the 
 turning-point more decisively than " Dra- 
 matis Personse " of his style. Yet just here 
 he rightly marks a change in Mr. Brown- 
 ing's manner : 
 
 " Not merely the manner of presentment, 
 the substance, and also the style and versi- 
 fication have undergone a change. I might 
 point to the profound intellectual depth of 
 certain pieces as its characteristic, or, 
 equally, to the traces here and there of an 
 apparent carelessness of workmanship ; or, 
 yet again, to the new and very marked par- 
 tiality for scenes and situations of English 
 and modern rather than mediaeval and 
 foreign life." 
 
 Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later 
 work is, full of intellect, alive with excellent 
 passages (in the first volume of the " Dra-
 
 the " Guardian." 55 
 
 matic Idyls " perhaps more powerful than 
 in any earlier work) ; notwithstanding all 
 that, we think the change here indicated 
 matter of regret. After all, we have to 
 conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of 
 those who stand in or behind the range of 
 volumes on our book-shelves ; and our 
 ideal Browning would have for his entire 
 structura 1 type those two volumes of " Men 
 and Women " with " Pippa Passes." 
 
 Certainly, it is a delightful world to 
 which Mr. Browning has given us the key, 
 and those volumes a delightful gift to our 
 age-record of so much that is richest in the 
 world of things, and men, and their works 
 all so much the richer by the great in- 
 tellect, the great imagination, which has 
 made the record, transmuted them into im- 
 perishable things of art : 
 
 " ' With souls should souls have place ' 
 this, with Mr. Browning,is something more 
 than a mere poetical conceit. It is the 
 condensed expression of an experience, a 
 philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers of 
 his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the
 
 56 Essays from the " Guardian"' 
 
 selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream- 
 palace ; he has fared up and down among 
 men, listening to the music of humanity, 
 observing the acts of men, and he has sung 
 what he has heard, and he has painted 
 what he has seen. Will the work live ? we 
 ask ; and we can answer only in his own 
 words 
 
 It lives, 
 If precious be the soul of man to man."
 
 IV. 
 ROBERT ELSMERE. 
 
 MARCH 28xH, 1888.
 
 ROBERT ELSMERE. 
 
 'HOSE who, in this bustling age, 
 turn to fiction not merely for a 
 little passing amusement, but for 
 profit, for the higher sort of pleasure, will do 
 well, we think (after a conscientious perusal 
 on our own part) to bestow careful reading 
 on "Robert Elsmere." K chef d'auvreoi that 
 kind of quiet evolution of character through 
 circumstance, introduced into English 
 literature by Miss Austen, and carried to 
 perfection in France by George Sand (who 
 is more to the point, because, like Mrs. 
 Ward, she was not afraid to challenge 
 novel-readers to an interest in religious 
 questions) it abounds in sympathy with 
 people as we find them, in aspiration to- 
 wards something better towards a certain
 
 60 Essays from 
 
 ideal in a refreshing sense of second 
 thoughts everywhere. The author clearly 
 has developed a remarkable natural apti- 
 tude for literature by liberal reading and 
 most patient care in composition com- 
 position in that narrower sense which is 
 concerned with the building of a good 
 sentence ; as also in that wider sense, 
 which ensures, in a work like this, with so 
 many joints, so many currents of interest, 
 a final unity of impression on the part of 
 the reader, and easy transition by him from 
 one to the other. Well-used to works of 
 fiction which tell all they have to tell in 
 one thin volume, we have read Mrs. Ward's 
 three volumes with unflagging readiness. 
 For, in truth, that quiet method of evolu- 
 tion, which she pursues undismayed to the 
 end, requires a certain length iness ; and the 
 reader's reward will be in a secure sense 
 that he has been in intercourse with no 
 mere flighty remnants, but with typical 
 forms, of character, firmly and fully con- 
 ceived. We are persuaded that the author 
 mis:ht have written a novel which should
 
 the u Guardian." 61 
 
 have been all shrewd impressions of society, 
 or all humorous impressions of country 
 life, or all quiet fun and genial caricature. 
 Actually she has chosen to combine some- 
 thing of each of these with a very sincerely 
 felt religious interest ; and who will deny 
 that to trace the influence of religion upon 
 human character is one of the legitimate 
 functions of the novel ? In truth, the 
 modern "novel of character" needs some 
 such interest, to lift it sufficiently above 
 the humdrum of life ; as men's horizons are 
 enlarged by religion, of whatever type it 
 may be and we may say at once that the 
 religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, 
 though avowedly 4i broad," is not really the 
 broadest. Having conceived her work 
 thus, she has brought a rare instinct for 
 probability and nature to the difficult task 
 of combining this religious motive and all 
 the learned thought it involves, with a very 
 genuine interest in many varieties of 
 average mundane life. 
 
 We should say that the author's special 
 ethical gift lay in a delicately intuitive
 
 62 Essays from 
 
 sympathy, not, perhaps, with all phases 
 of character, but certainly with the very 
 varied class of persons represented in these 
 volumes. It may be congruous with this, 
 perhaps, that her success should be more 
 assured in dealing with the characters of 
 women than with those of men. The men 
 who pass before us in her pages, though 
 real and tangible and effective enough, 
 seem, nevertheless, from time to time to 
 reveal their joinings. They are composite 
 of many different men we seem to have 
 known, and fancy we could detach again 
 from the ensemble and from each other. 
 And their goodness, when they are good, 
 is well ! a little conventional ; the kind 
 of goodness that men themselves discount 
 rather largely in their estimates of each 
 other. Robert himself is certainly worth 
 knowing a really attractive union of man- 
 liness and saintliness, of shrewd sense and 
 unworldly aims, and withal with that 
 kindness and pity the absence of which so 
 often abates the actual value of those other 
 gifts. Mrs. Ward's literary power is some-
 
 the " Guardian" 63 
 
 times seen at its best (it is a proof of her 
 high cultivation of this power that so it 
 should be) in the analysis of minor 
 characters, both male and female. Richard 
 Leyburn, deceased before the story begins, 
 but warm in the memory of the few who 
 had known him, above all of his great-souled 
 daughter Catherine, strikes us, with his 
 religious mysticism, as being in this way 
 one of the best things in the book : 
 
 " Poor Richard Leyburn ! Yet where 
 had the defeat lain ? 
 
 "'Was he happy in his school life?' 
 Robert asked gently. ' Was teaching what 
 he liked ? ' 
 
 " ' Oh ! yes, only ' Catherine paused 
 
 and then added hurriedly, as though drawn 
 on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy 
 of his look, ' I never knew anybody so good 
 who thought himself of so little account. 
 He always believed that he had missed 
 everything, wasted everything, and that 
 anybody else would have made infinitely 
 more out of his life. He was always 
 blaming, scourging himself. And all the
 
 64 Essays from 
 
 time he was the noblest, purest, most de- 
 voted ' 
 
 "She stopped. Her voice had passed 
 beyond her control. Elsmere was startled 
 by the feeling she showed. Evidently he 
 had touched one of the few sore places in 
 this pure heart. It was as though her 
 memory of her father had in it elements of 
 almost intolerable pathos, as though the 
 child's brooding love and loyalty were in 
 perpetual protest even now after this lapse 
 of years against the verdict which an over- 
 scrupulous, despondent soul had pro- 
 nounced upon itself. Did she feel that he 
 had gone uncomforted out of life even by 
 her even by religion ? Was that the 
 sting ? " 
 
 A little later she gives the record of his 
 last hours : 
 
 "'Catherine! Life is harder, the nar- 
 rower way narrower than ever. I die' 
 and memory caught still the piteous long- 
 drawn breath by which the voice was 
 broken 'in much much perplexity about 
 manv things. You have a clear soul, an
 
 the " Guardian" 65 
 
 iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring 
 them safe to the day of account.'" 
 
 And then the smaller some of them, 
 ethically, very small women; Lady 
 Wyrinstay, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh ; above all, Robert's delightful Irish 
 mother, and Mrs. Darcy ; how excellent 
 they are ! Mrs. Darcy we seem to have 
 known, yet cannot have enough of, rejoiced 
 to catch sight of her capital letter on the 
 page, as we read on. In truth, if a high 
 and ideal purpose, really learned in the 
 school of Wordsworth and among the 
 Westmorland hills which Mrs. Ward de- 
 scribes so sympathetically, with fitting dig- 
 nity and truth of style, has accompanied 
 the author throughout; no less plain, per- 
 haps more pleasing to some readers, is the 
 quiet humour which never fails her, and 
 tests, while it relieves, the sincerity of her 
 more serious thinking: 
 
 " At last Mrs. Darcy fluttered off, only, 
 
 however, to come hurrying back with little, 
 
 short, scudding steps, to implore them all 
 
 to come to tea with her as soon as possible 
 
 F
 
 66 Essays from 
 
 in the garden that was her special hobby, 
 and in her last new summer-house. 
 
 " ' I build two or three every summer,' 
 she said ; ' now there are twenty-one ! 
 Roger laughs at me,' and there was a mo- 
 mentary bitterness in the little eerie face; 
 ' but how can one live without hobbies ? 
 That's one then I've two more. My 
 album oh, you w///all write in my album, 
 won't you ? When I was young when I 
 was Maid of Honour' and she drew her- 
 self up slightly ' everybody had albums. 
 Even the dear Queen herself! I remember 
 how she made M. Guizot write in it; some- 
 thing quite stupid, after all. Those hobbies 
 the garden and the album are quite 
 harmless, aren't they? They hurt nobody, 
 do they?' Her voice dropped a little, 
 with a pathetic expostulating intonation 
 in it, as of one accustomed to be re- 
 buked." 
 
 Mrs. Ward's women^ as we have said, 
 are more organic, sympathetic, and really 
 creative, than her men, and make their 
 vitality evident by becoming, quite natu-
 
 the " Guardian" 67 
 
 rally, the centres of very life-like and 
 dramatic groups of people, family or social ; 
 while her men are the very genii of isola- 
 tion and division. It is depressing to see 
 so really noble a character as Catherine 
 soured, as we feel, and lowered, as time 
 goes on, from the happy resignation of the 
 first volume (in which solemn, beautiful, 
 and entire, and so very real, she is like a 
 poem of Wordsworth) down to the mere 
 passivity of the third volume, and the 
 closing scene of Robert Elsmere's days, 
 very exquisitely as this episode of unbe- 
 lieving yet saintly biography has been 
 conceived and executed. Catherine cer- 
 tainly, for one, has no profit in the develop- 
 ment of Robert's improved gospel. The 
 " stray sheep," we think, has by no means 
 always the best of the argument, and her 
 story is really a sadder, more testing one 
 than his. Though both alike, we admit it 
 cordially, have a genuine sense of the 
 eternal moral charm of " renunciation," 
 something even of the thirst for mar- 
 trydom, for those wonderful, inaccessible,
 
 68 Essays from 
 
 cold heights of the " Imitation," eternal also 
 in their aesthetic charm. 
 
 These characters and situations,pleasant 
 or profoundly interesting, which it is good 
 to have come across, are worked out, not in 
 rapid sketches, nor by hazardous epigram, 
 but more securely by patient analysis ; 
 and though we have said that Mrs. Ward 
 is most successful in female portraiture, 
 her own mind and culture have an unmis- 
 takable virility and grasp and scientific 
 firmness. This indispensable intellectual 
 process, which will be relished by admirers 
 of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by 
 the sense of a charming landscape back- 
 ground, for the most part English. Mrs. 
 Ward has been a true disciple in the school 
 of Wordsworth, and really undergone its 
 influence. Her Westmorland scenery is 
 more than a mere background ; its spiritual 
 and, as it were, personal hold on persons, as 
 understood by the great poet of the Lakes, 
 is seen actually at work, in the formation, in 
 the refining, of character. It has been a 
 stormy day :
 
 the " Guardian" 69 
 
 " Before him the great hollow of High 
 Fell was just coming out from the white 
 mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight 
 lay across its upper end, and he caught a 
 marvellous apparition of a sunlit valley 
 hung in air, a pale strip of blue above it, a 
 white thread of stream wavering through it, 
 and all around it and below it the rolling 
 rain-clouds." 
 
 There is surely something of " natural 
 magic " in that ! The wilder capacity of 
 the mountains is brought out especially in 
 a weird story of a haunted girl, an episode 
 well illustrating the writer's more imagina- 
 tive psychological power ; for, in spite of 
 its quiet general tenour, the book has its 
 adroitly managed elements of sensation 
 witness the ghost, in which the average 
 human susceptibility to supernatural ter- 
 rors takes revenge on the sceptical Mr. 
 Wendover,and the love-scene with Madame 
 de Netteville, which, like those other excit- 
 ingpassages,reallyfurthers the development 
 of the proper ethical interests of the book. 
 The Oxford episodes strike us as being not
 
 70 Essays from 
 
 the author's strongest work, as being com- 
 paratively conventional, coming, as they do, 
 in a book whose predominant note is reality. 
 Yet her sympathetic command over, her 
 power of evoking, the genius of places, is 
 clearly shown in the touches by which she 
 brings out the so well-known grey and 
 green of college andgarden toucheswhich 
 bring the real Oxford to the mind's eye 
 better than any elaborate description for 
 the beauty of the place itself resides also 
 in delicate touches. The book passes 
 indeed, successively, through distinct, 
 broadly conceived phases of scenery, 
 which, becoming veritable parts of its 
 texture, take hold on the reader, as if in 
 an actual sojourn in the places described. 
 Surrey its genuine though almost sub- 
 urban vvildness, with the vicarage and the 
 wonderful abode, above all, the ancient 
 library of Mr. Wendover, all is admirably 
 done, the landscape naturally counting for 
 a good deal in the development of the pro- 
 foundly meditative, country-loving souls of 
 Mrs. Ward's favourite characters.
 
 the " Guardian" 71 
 
 Well ! Mrs. Ward has chosen to use all 
 these varied gifts and accomplishments for 
 a certain purpose. Briefly, Robert Elsmere, 
 a priest of the Anglican Church, marries a 
 very religious woman ; there is the perfec- 
 tion of "mutual love;" at length he has 
 doubts about "historic Christianity;" he 
 gives up his orders ; carries his learning, his 
 fine intellect, his goodness, nay, his saintli- 
 ness, into a kind of Unitarianism ; the wife 
 becomes more intolerant than ever ; there 
 is a long and faithful effort on both sides, 
 eventually successful, on the part of these 
 mentally divided people, to hold together ; 
 ending with the hero's death, the genuine 
 piety and resignation of which is the crown- 
 ing touch in the author's able, learned, and 
 thoroughly sincere apology for Robert 
 Elsmere's position. 
 
 For good or evil, the sort of doubts which 
 troubled Robert Elsmere are no novelty in 
 literature, and we think the main issue of 
 the " religious question " is not precisely 
 where Mrs. Ward supposes that it has 
 advanced, in more senses than one, beyond
 
 72 Essays from 
 
 the point raised by Kenan's "Vie de Jsus." 
 Of course, a man such as Robert Elsmere 
 came to be ought not to be a clergyman of 
 the Anglican Church. The priest is still, 
 and will, we think, remain, one of the 
 necessary types of humanity ; and he is 
 untrue to his type, unless, with whatever 
 inevitable doubts in this doubting age, he 
 feels, on the whole, the preponderance in it 
 of those influences which make for faith. 
 It is his triumph to achieve as much faith 
 as possible in an age of negation. Doubt- 
 less, it is part of the ideal of the Anglican 
 Church that, under certain safeguards, it 
 should find room for latitudinarians even 
 among its clergy. Still, with these, as with 
 all other genuine priests, it is the positive 
 not the negative result that justifies the 
 position. We have little patience with 
 those liberal clergy who dwell on nothing 
 else than the difficulties of faith and the 
 propriety of concession to the opposite 
 force. Yes ! Robert Elsmere was certainly 
 right in ceasing to be a clergyman. But it 
 strikes us as a blot on his philosophical
 
 the " Guardian" 73 
 
 pretensions that he should have been both 
 so late in perceiving the difficulty, and then 
 so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so 
 great and complex a question. Had he pos- 
 sessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific 
 temper he would have hesitated. This is 
 not the place to discuss in detail the theo- 
 logical position very ably and seriously 
 argued by Mrs. Ward. All we can say is 
 that, one by one, Elsmere's objections may 
 be met by considerations of the same genus, 
 and not less equal weight, relatively to a 
 world so obscure, in its origin and issues, as 
 that in which we live. 
 
 Robert Elsmere was a type of a large 
 class of minds which cannot be sure that 
 the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, 
 doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to 
 recognize our doubts, to locate them, 
 perhaps to give them practical effect. It 
 may be also a moral duty to do this. But 
 then there is also a large class of minds 
 which cannot be sure it is false minds of 
 very various degrees of conscientiousness 
 and intellectual power, up to the highest.
 
 74 Essays from 
 
 They will think those who are quite sure it 
 is false unphilosophical through lack of 
 doubt. For their part, they make allowance 
 in their scheme of life foragreat possibility, 
 and with some of them that bare concession 
 of possibility (the subject of it being what it 
 is) becomes the most important fact in the 
 world. The recognition of it straightway 
 opens wide the door to hope and love ; 
 and such persons are, as we fancy they 
 always will be, the nucleus of a Church. 
 Their particular phase of doubt, of philo- 
 sophic uncertainty, has been the secret of 
 millions of good Christians, multitudes of 
 worthy priests. They knit themselves to 
 believers, in various degrees, of all ages. 
 As against the purely negative action of 
 the scientific spirit, the high-pitched Grey, 
 the theistic Elsmere, the "ritualistic priest," 
 the quaint Methodist Fleming, both so 
 admirably sketched, present perhaps no 
 unconquerable differences. The questionof 
 the day is not between one and another of 
 these, but in another sort of opposition,well 
 defined by Mrs. Ward herself, between
 
 the " Guardian." 75 
 
 "Two estimates of life the estimate 
 which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, 
 and which is for ever making the visible 
 world fairer and more desirable in mortal 
 eyes ; and the estimate of Saint Augustine." 
 
 To us, the belief in God, in goodness at 
 all, in the story of Bethlehem, does not rest 
 on evidence so diverse in character and 
 force as Mrs. Ward supposes. At his death 
 Elsmere has started what to us would be a 
 most unattractive place of worship, where 
 he preaches an admirable sermon on the 
 purely human aspect of the life of Christ. 
 But we think there would be very few such 
 sermons in the new church or chapel, for 
 the interest of that life could hardly be 
 very varied, when all such sayings as that 
 " though He was rich, for our sakes He 
 became poor" have ceased to be applicable 
 to it. It is the infinite nature of Christ 
 which has led to such diversities of genius 
 in preaching as St. Francis, and Taylor, 
 and Wesley. 
 
 And after all we fear we have been unjust 
 to Mrs. Ward's work. If so, we should
 
 76 Essays from the " Guardian." 
 
 read once more, and advise our readers to 
 read, the profoundly thought and delicately 
 felt chapter chapter forty-three in her 
 third volume in which she describes 
 the final spiritual reunion, on a basis of 
 honestly diverse opinion, of the husband 
 and wife. Her view, we think, could hardly 
 have been presented more attractively. For 
 ourselves we can only thank herfor pleasure 
 and profit in the reading of her book, which 
 has refreshed actually the first and deepest 
 springs of feeling, while it has charmed the 
 literary sense.
 
 V. 
 
 THEIR MAJESTIES' 
 SERVANTS. 
 
 JUNE 27TH, 1888.
 
 THEIR MAJESTIES' 
 SERVANTS. 
 
 "Annals of the English Stage.fromThomas 
 Betterton to Edmund Kean." By Dr. 
 Doran, F.S.A. Edited and revised by 
 Robert W. Lowe. John C. Nimmo. 
 
 HOSE who care for the history of 
 the drama as a branch of litera- 
 ture, or for the history of that 
 general development of human manners 
 of which the stage has been always an 
 element and a very lively measure or index, 
 will be grateful to Mr. Lowe for this re- 
 vised and charmingly illustrated edition of 
 Dr. Doran's pleasant old book. Three 
 hundred years and more of a singularly 
 varied and vivacious sort of history ! it
 
 8o Essays from 
 
 was a bold thing to undertake ; and Dr. 
 Doran did his work well did it with 
 adequate "love." These "Annals of the 
 English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to 
 Edmund Kean," are full of the colours of 
 life in their most emphatic and motley 
 contrasts, as is natural in proportion as the 
 stage itself concentrates and artificially 
 intensifies the character and conditions of 
 ordinary life. The long story of " Their 
 Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes 
 from age to age an agreeable addition to 
 those personal memoirs Evelyn's, and the 
 like which bring the influence and charm 
 of a visible countenance to the dry tenour 
 of ordinary history, and the critic's work 
 upon it naturally becomes, in the first place, 
 a mere gathering of some of the flowers 
 which lie so abundantly scattered here and 
 there. 
 
 A history of the English stage must 
 necessarily be in part a history of one of 
 the most delightful of subjects old Lon- 
 don, of which from time to time we catch 
 extraordinary glimpses in Dr. Doran's
 
 the " Guardian" 81 
 
 pages. From 1682 to 1695, as if the Re- 
 storation had not come, there was but one 
 theatre in London. In Charles I.'s time 
 Shoreditch was the dramatic quarter of 
 London par excellence : 
 
 "The popular taste was not only there 
 directed towards the stage, but it was a 
 district wherein many actors dwelt, and 
 consequently died. The baptismal re- 
 gister of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, con- 
 tains Christian names which appear to 
 have been chosen with reference to the 
 heroines of Shakespeare ; and the record 
 of burials bears the name of many an old 
 actor of mark whose remains now lie with- 
 in the churchyard." 
 
 Earlier and later, the Surrey side of the 
 Thames was the favourite locality for play- 
 houses. The Globe was there, and the 
 Bear-garden, represented in Mr. Lowe's 
 luxurious new edition by delightful wood- 
 cuts. For this new edition adds to the 
 original merits of the work the very sub- 
 stantial charm of abundant illustrations, 
 first-rate in subject and execution, and of 
 G
 
 82 Essays from 
 
 three kinds copper-plate likenesses of 
 actors and other personages connected with 
 theatrical history ; a series of delicate, 
 picturesque, highly detailed woodcuts of 
 theatrical topography, chiefly the little old 
 theatres ; and, by way of tail-pieces to the 
 chapters, a second series of woodcuts of a 
 vigour and reality of information, within 
 very limited compass, which make one 
 think of Callot and the German " little 
 masters," depicting Garrick and other 
 famous actors in their favourite scenes. 
 
 In the vignettes of the Bear-garden and 
 the Swan Theatre, for instance, the artist 
 has managed to throw over his minute 
 plate a wonderful air of pleasantness, a 
 light which, though very delicate, is very 
 theatrical. The river and its tiny craft, 
 the little gabled houses of the neighbour- 
 hood, with a garden or two dropped in, 
 tell delightfully in the general effect. They 
 are worthy to rank with Cruikshank's illus- 
 trations of "Jack Sheppard " and the 
 " Tower of London," as mementoes of the 
 little old smokeless London before the
 
 the " Guardian^ 83 
 
 century of Johnson, though that, too, as 
 Dr. Doran bears witness, knew what fogs 
 could be. Then there is the Fortune 
 Theatre near Cripplegate, and, most charm- 
 ing of all, two views street and river 
 fronts the Duke's Theatre, DorsetGarden, 
 inFleet Street,designed by Wren, decorated 
 by Gibbons graceful, na'ive, dainty, like 
 the work of a very refined Palladio, work- 
 ing minutely, perhaps more delicately than 
 at Vicenza, in the already crowded city on 
 the Thames side. 
 
 The portraits of actors and other thea- 
 trical celebrities range from Elizabeth, 
 from the melodramatic costumes and faces 
 of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, to 
 the conventional costumes, the rotund ex- 
 pression, of the age of the Georges, mask- 
 ing a power of imaginative impersonation 
 probably unknown in Shakespeare's day. 
 Edward Burbage, like Shakespeare's own 
 portrait, is, we venture to think, a trifle 
 stolid. Field Nathaniel Field, author of 
 " The Fatal Dowry," and an actor of repu- 
 tation in his singular costume, and with
 
 84 Essays from 
 
 a face of perhaps not quite reassuring 
 subtlety, might pass for the original of 
 those Italian, or Italianized, voluptuaries 
 in sin which pleased the fancy of Shake- 
 speare's age. Mixed up with many strik- 
 ing, thoroughly dramatic physiognomies, it 
 must be confessed that some of these por- 
 traits scarcely help at all to explain the 
 power of the players to whom they be- 
 longed. That, perhaps, is what we might 
 naturally expect ; the more, in proportion 
 as the dramatic art is a matter in which 
 many very subtle and indirect channels 
 to men's sympathy are called into play. 
 Edward Alleyn, from the portrait preserved 
 at his noble foundation at Dulwich, like a 
 fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength and 
 delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, 
 soul, finding time for sentiment, Prynne 
 (included, we suppose, in this company, 
 like the skull at the feast) as a likable if 
 somewhat melancholic young man ; while 
 Garrick and his wife playing cards, after 
 Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice 
 young people. On the other hand, the tail-
 
 the " Guardian" 85 
 
 pieces, chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove 
 what a wonderful natural variety there was 
 in Garrick's soul, and are well worth com- 
 parative study. Noticeable again, among 
 the whole-plate portraits, is the thoroughly 
 reassuring countenance of Steele, the sin- 
 gularly fine heads of John, Charles, and 
 Fanny Kemble, while the certainly plain, 
 pinched countenance of William Davenant 
 reminds one of Charles Kean, and might 
 well have lighted up, as did his, when the 
 soul came into it, into power and charm, as 
 the speaking eyes assure us even in its 
 repose. 
 
 The Renaissance inherited the old foolish 
 prejudice of Roman times, when, although 
 thewritersof plays were the intimatefriends 
 of emperors, the actors were thought in- 
 famous. Still, on the whole, actors fared 
 better in England than in Romanist France, 
 where Moliere was buried with less cere- 
 mony than a favourite dog. Very different 
 was the treatment of the eminent Mrs. 
 Oldfield, who died in 1730 : 
 
 " Poor ' Narcissa ' after death (says Wai-
 
 86 Essays from 
 
 pole) was attired in a Holland nightdress, 
 with tuckerand double ruffles of Brunswick 
 lace,of which latter material she also wore a 
 headdress, and a pair of new kid gloves. 
 In this dress the deceased actress received 
 such honour as actress never received be- 
 fore, nor has ever received since. The lady 
 lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber. 
 Had she been really a queen the public 
 could not have thronged more eagerly to 
 the spectacle ; and after the lying in state 
 there was a funeral of as much ceremony 
 as has been observed at the obsequies of 
 many a queen. There were anthems and 
 prayers and a sermon ; and Dr. Parker, 
 who officiated, remarked, when all was over, 
 to a few particular friends, and with some 
 equivocation, as it seems to me, that he 
 ' buried her very willingly, and with much 
 satisfaction.' " 
 
 Yet even in England players had need 
 of powerful protectors. " Wit," said Ches- 
 terfield, opposing an unjust licensing Act, 
 " Wit, my lords ! is the property of those 
 who have it, and too often the only pro-
 
 the " Guardian" 87 
 
 perty they have to depend on." Wit, in 
 deed, with the other gifts that make good 
 company, has largely gone with theatrical 
 talents, too often little to the benefit of the 
 gifted persons. Theatrical society, rather 
 than the theatre, has made the lives of 
 actors as we see them in these volumes, in 
 many cases so tragic, even sordidly tragic. 
 If misery and madness abound in stage 
 life, so also does an indomitable cheerful- 
 ness, always at least a cheerful countenance. 
 Dr. Doran's book abounds, as might be 
 expected, with admirable impromptus and 
 the like ; one might collect a large posy of 
 them. Foote, seeing a sweep on a blood- 
 horse, remarked, " There goes Warburton 
 on Shakespeare ! " When he heard that 
 the Rockingham Cabinet was fatigued to 
 death and at its wits' end, he exclaimed 
 that it could not have been the length of 
 the journey which had tired it. Again, 
 when Lord Carmarthen, at a party, told 
 him his handkerchief was hanging from 
 his pocket, Foote replaced it with a " Thank 
 you, my lord ; you know the company
 
 88 Essays from 
 
 better than I." Jevon, a century earlier, 
 was in the habit of taking great liberties 
 with authors and audience. He made 
 Settle half mad and the house ecstatic 
 when having, as Lycurgus, Prince of China, 
 to "fall on his sword" he placed it flat 
 on the stage, and, falling over it, " died," 
 according to the direction of the acting 
 copy. Quaint enough, but certainly no in- 
 stance of anybody's wit, is the account of 
 how a French translation of a play of 
 Vanbrugh not architect of Blenheim only, 
 but accomplished in many other ways 
 appeared at the Odeon, in 1862, with all 
 fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of 
 Voltaire recently discovered. The Vol- 
 tairean wit was found as "delightful in this 
 as in the last century." 
 
 Of Shakespeare on the stage Dr. Doran 
 has a hundred curious things to note: 
 that Richard the Third, for instance, who 
 has retained a so unflattering possession of 
 the stage, was its " first practically useful 
 patron." We see Queen Elizabeth full of 
 misgiving at a difficult time at the popu-
 
 the " Guardian" 89 
 
 larity of Richard the Second : " The depo- 
 sition and death of King Richard the 
 Second." " Tongues whisper to the Queen 
 that this play is part of a great plot to 
 teach her subjects how to murder kings." 
 It is perhaps not generally known that 
 Charles Shakespeare, William's brother, 
 survived till the Restoration. Oldys says, 
 a propos of the restoration of the stage at 
 that time : 
 
 " The actors were greedily inquisitive 
 into every little circumstance, more espe- 
 cially in Shakespeare's dramatic character, 
 which his brother could relate of him. But 
 he, it seems, was so stricken in years, and 
 possibly his memory so weakened by in- 
 firmities, that he could give them but little 
 light into their inquiries; and all that 
 could be recollected from him of his brother 
 Will in that station was the faint, general, 
 and almost lost ideas he had of having once 
 seen him act a part in one of his own 
 comedies, wherein being present to per- 
 sonate a decrepit old man, he wore a long 
 beard, and appeared so weak and drooping
 
 90 Essays from 
 
 and unable to walk, that he was forced to 
 be supported and carried by another person 
 to a table, at which he was seated among 
 some company who were eating, and one of 
 them sang a song." 
 
 This description applies to old Adam in 
 " As You Like It." Many are the evidences 
 that Shakespeare's reputation had from 
 time to time a struggle to maintain itself. 
 James Howard, in Pepys's day 
 
 " Belonged to the faction which affected 
 to believe that there was no popular love 
 for Shakespeare, to render whom palatable 
 he arranged ' Romeo and Juliet ' for the 
 stage, with a double denouement one 
 serious, the other hilarious. If your heart 
 were too sensitive to bear the deaths of the 
 loving pair, you had only to go on the 
 succeeding afternoon to see them wedded, 
 and set upon the way of a well-assured 
 domestic felicity." 
 
 In 1678 Rymer asserted (was it un- 
 designedly a true testimony to the acting 
 of his time ?) that Shakespeare had depicted 
 Brutus and Cassius as " Jack Puddins."
 
 the " Guardian? 91 
 
 Here, as in many another detail, we are 
 reminded, of course, of the difference be- 
 tween our own and past times in mimic as 
 in real life. For Prynne one of the great 
 horrors of the stage was the introduction of 
 actresses from France by Henrietta Maria, 
 to take the place of young male actors of 
 whom Dr. Doran has some interesting 
 notices. Who the lady was who first trod 
 the stage as a professional actress is not 
 known, but her part was Desdemona. And 
 yet it was long after that 
 
 "Edward Kynaston died (in 1712). He 
 lies buried in the churchyard of St. Paul's, 
 Covent Garden. If not the greatest actor 
 of his day, Kynaston was the greatest of 
 the ' boy-actresses.' So exalted was his 
 reputation ' that/ says Downes, ' it has 
 since been disputable among the judicious, 
 whether any woman that succeeded him 
 so sensibly touched the audience as he.' ' 
 
 In Charles II. 's time it was a custom to 
 return the price of admission to all persons 
 who left the theatre before the close of the 
 first act. Consequently, many shabby per-
 
 92 Essays from 
 
 sons were wont to force their way in with- 
 out paying, on the plea that they did not 
 intend to remain beyond the time limited. 
 Hence much noisy contention, to the great 
 discomfort even of Royalty. The brawl- 
 ing, drinking habits of the time were even 
 more discomforting. An angry word, passed 
 one April evening of 1682 between the son 
 of Sir Edward Bering and a hot-blooded 
 young Welshman, led to recrimination and 
 sword-drawing. The two young fellows 
 not having elbow-room in the pit, clambered 
 on to the stage, and fought there, to the 
 greater comfort of the audience, and with 
 a more excited fury on the part of the 
 combatants. The mingling of the public 
 with the players was a practice which so 
 annoyed the haughty French actor, Baron, 
 that to suggest to the audience the ab- 
 surdity of it, he would turn his back on 
 them for a whole act, and play to the 
 audience on the stage. Sometimes the 
 noise was so loud that an actor's voice 
 would scarcely be heard. It was about 
 1710 that the word encore was intro-
 
 the " Guardian'" 93 
 
 duced at the operatic performances in 
 the Haymarket, and very much objected 
 to by plain-going Englishmen. It was 
 also the custom of some who desired the 
 repetition of "a song to cry Altra volta ! 
 Altra vo It a ! 
 
 Even indirectly the history of the stage 
 illustrates life, and affords many unex- 
 pected lights onhistoricalcharacters. Oliver 
 Cromwell, though he despised the stage, 
 could condescend to laugh at, and with, 
 men of less dignity than actors. Buffoonery 
 was not entirely expelled from his other- 
 wise grave court. Oxford and Drury Lane 
 itself dispute the dignity of giving birth to 
 Nell Gwynne with Hereford, where a mean 
 house is still pointed out as the first home 
 of this mother of a line of dukes, whose 
 great-grandson was to occupy the neigh- 
 bouring palace as Bishop of Hereford for 
 forty years. At her burial in St. Martin's- 
 in-the-Fields, Archbishop Tenison preached 
 the sermon. When this was subsequently 
 made the ground of exposing him to the 
 reproof of Queen Mary, she remarked that
 
 94 Essays from 
 
 the good doctor, no doubt, had said nothing 
 but what the facts authorized. 
 
 "Who should act genteel comedy per- 
 fectly," asks Walpole, "but people of fashion, 
 that have sense ? " And, in truth, the 
 seventeenth century gave many ladies to 
 the stage, Mrs.Barry being the most famous 
 of them. Like many eminent actors, she 
 was famous for the way in which she would 
 utter one single expression in a play. Dr. 
 Doran gives some curious instances from 
 later actors. " What mean my grieving 
 subjects?" uttered in the character of Queen 
 Elizabeth, was invested by her with such 
 emphatic grace and dignity as to call up 
 murmurs of approbation which swelled into 
 thunders of applause. Her noble head is 
 here engraved after Kneller, like the head 
 of a magnificent visionary man. 
 
 Should we really care for the greatest 
 actors of the past could we have them 
 before us ? Should we find them too dif- 
 ferent from our accent of thought,of feeling, 
 of speech, in a thousand minute particulars 
 which are of the essence of all three ? Dr.
 
 the " Guardian^ 95 
 
 Doran's long and interesting records of the 
 triumphs of Garrick.and other less familiar, 
 but in their day hardly less astonishing, 
 players, do not relieve one of the doubt. 
 Garrick himself, as sometimes happens 
 with people who have been the subject of 
 much anecdote and other conversation, 
 here as elsewhere, bears no very distinct 
 figure. One hardly sees the wood for the 
 trees. On the other hand, the account of 
 Betterton, " perhaps the greatest of English 
 actors," is delightfully fresh. That intimate 
 friend of Dryden, Tillotson, Pope, who 
 executed a copy of the actor's portrait by 
 Kneller which is still extant, was worthy 
 of their friendship ; his career brings out 
 the best elements in stage life. The stage 
 in these volumes presents itself indeed not 
 merely as a mirror of life, but as an illus- 
 tration of the utmost intensity of life, in the 
 fortunes and characters of the players. 
 Ups and downs, generosity, dark fates, the 
 most delicate goodness, have nowhere been 
 more prominent than in the private exist- 
 ence of those devoted to the public mimicry
 
 g6 Essays from the " Guardian." 
 
 of men and women. Contact with the 
 stage, almost throughout its history, pre- 
 sents itself as a kind of touchstone,to bring 
 out the bizarrerie, the theatrical tricks and 
 contrasts, of the actual world.
 
 VI. 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 FEBRUARY 27x11, 1889. 
 
 H
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 " The Complete Poetical Works of William 
 Wordsworth." With an Introduction 
 by John Morley. Macmillans. 
 
 "The Recluse." By William Words- 
 worth. Macmillans. 
 
 " Selections from Wordsworth." By Wil- 
 liam Knight and other Members of the 
 Wordsworth Society. With Preface and 
 Notes. Kegan Paul. 
 
 HE appearance, so close to each 
 other, of Professor Knight's care- 
 ful and elaborately annotated 
 " Selections from William Wordsworth," 
 of Messrs. Macmillan's collected edition 
 of the poet's works, with the first book of 
 the " Recluse," now published for the first 
 time, and of an excellent introductory essay
 
 ioo Essays from 
 
 by Mr. John Morley, forms a welcome proof 
 that the study of the most philosophic of 
 English poets is increasing among us. 
 Surely nothing could be better, hardly any- 
 thing more directly fitted than a careful 
 reading of Wordsworth, to counteract the 
 faults and offences of our busy generation, 
 in regard both to thought and taste, and to 
 remind people, amid the enormous expan- 
 sion, at the present time, of all that is 
 material and mechanical in life, of the 
 essential value, the permanent ends, of life 
 itself. In the collected edition the poems 
 are printed with the dates, so far as can be 
 ascertained, in the order of their composi- 
 tion an arrangement which has indisput- 
 able recommendations for the student of 
 Wordsworth's genius ; though the former 
 method of distributing his work into large 
 groups of subject had its value, as throwing 
 light upon his poetic motives, and more 
 especially as coming from himself. 
 
 In his introductory essay Mr. Morley has 
 dwelt strongly on the circumstance of 
 Wordsworth's remarkable personal happi-
 
 the " Guardian" 101 
 
 ness, as having had much to do with the 
 physiognomy of his poetic creation a 
 calm, irresistible, well-being almost mystic 
 in character, and yet doubtless connected 
 with physical conditions. Long ago De 
 Quincey noted it as a strongly determinant 
 fact in Wordsworth's literary career, point- 
 ing, at the same time, to his remarkable 
 good luck also, on the material side of life. 
 The poet's own flawless temperament, his 
 fine mountain atmosphere of mind (so to 
 express it), had no doubt a good deal to do 
 with that. What a store of good fortune, 
 what a goodly contribution to happiness, 
 in the very best sense of that term, is really 
 involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical 
 temperament ; especially, in the case of a 
 poet a great poet who will, of course, 
 have to face the appropriate trials of a 
 great poet. 
 
 Coleridge and other English critics at 
 the beginning of the present century had a 
 great deal to say concerning a psychological 
 distinction of much importance (as it ap- 
 peared to them) between the fancy and the
 
 IO2 Essays from 
 
 imagination. Stripped of a great deal of 
 somewhat obscure metaphysical theory, 
 this distinction reduced itself to the cer- 
 tainly vital one, with which all true criticism 
 more or less directly has to do, between the 
 lower and higher degrees of intensity in the 
 poet's conception of his subject, and his 
 concentration of himself upon his work. 
 It was Wordsworth who made most of this 
 distinction, assuming it as the basis for the 
 final classification (abandoned, as we said, 
 in the new edition) of his poetical writ- 
 ings. And nowhere is the distinction more 
 realizable than in Wordsworth's own work. 
 For though what may be called professed 
 Wordsworthians, including Matthew Ar- 
 nold, found a value in all that remains of 
 him could read anything he wrote, " even 
 the 'Thanksgiving Ode,' everything, I 
 think, except 'Vaudracour and Julia,'" 
 yet still the decisiveness of such selections 
 as those made by Arnold himself, and now 
 by Professor Knight, hint at a certain very 
 obvious difference of level in his poetic 
 work.
 
 the " Guardian" 103 
 
 This perpetual suggestion of an absolute 
 duality between his lower and higher 
 moods, and the poetic work produced in 
 them, stimulating the reader to look below 
 the immediate surface of his poetry, makes 
 the study of Wordsworth an excellent exer- 
 cise for the training of those mental powers 
 in us, which partake both of thought and 
 imagination. It begets in those who fall 
 in with him at the right moment of their 
 spiritual development, a habit of reading 
 between the lines, a faith in the effect of 
 concentration and collectedness of mind on 
 the right appreciation of poetry, the expec- 
 tation that what is really worth having in 
 the poetic order will involve, on their part, 
 a certain discipline of the temper not less 
 than of the intellect. Wordsworth meets 
 them with the assurance that he has much 
 to give them, and of a very peculiar kind, 
 if they will follow a certain difficult way, 
 and seems to possess the secret of some 
 special mental illumination. To follow 
 that way is an initiation, by which they will 
 become able to distinguish, in art, speech,
 
 IO4 Essays from 
 
 feeling, manners, in men and life generally, 
 what is genuine, animated, and expressive 
 from what is only conventional and deriva- 
 tive, and therefore inexpressive. 
 
 A very intimate sense of the expressive- 
 ness of outward things, which ponders, 
 listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less 
 developed consciousness passed lightly by, 
 is an important element in the general 
 temper of our modern poetry. Critics of 
 literary history have again and again re- 
 marked upon it ; it is a characteristic which 
 reveals itself in many different forms, but 
 is strongest and most sympathetic in what 
 is strongest and most serious in modern 
 literature ; it is exemplified by writers as 
 unlike Wordsworth as the French roman- 
 ticist poets. As a curious chapter in the 
 history of the human mind, its growth 
 might be traced from Rousseau and St. 
 Pierre to Chateaubriand, from Chateau- 
 briand to Victor Hugo ; it has no doubt 
 some obscure relationship to those pan- 
 theistic theories which have greatly occu- 
 pied people's minds in many modern read-
 
 the " Guardian" 105 
 
 ings of philosophy ; it makes as much 
 difference between the modern and the 
 earlier landscape art as there is between 
 the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine 
 mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or 
 Romney. Of this new landscape sense the 
 poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary 
 and central exposition ; he is more exclu- 
 sively occupied with its development than 
 any other poet. Wordsworth's own char- 
 acter, as we have already observed, was 
 dominated by a certain contentment, a sort 
 of naturally religious placidity, not often 
 found in union with a poetic sensibility so 
 active as his ; and this gentle sense of well- 
 being was favourable to the quiet, habitual 
 observation of the inanimate, or imperfectly 
 animate, world. His life of eighty placid 
 years was almost without what, with most 
 human beings, count for incidents. His 
 flight from the active world, so genially 
 celebrated in this newly published poem of 
 "The Recluse;" his flight to the Vale of 
 Grasmere, like that of some pious youth to 
 the Chartreuse, is the most marked event
 
 io6 Essays from 
 
 of his existence. His life's changes are 
 almost entirely inward ones ; it falls into 
 broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat 
 monotonous, spaces ; his biographers have 
 very little to tell. What it really most 
 resembled, different as its superficies may 
 look, is the career of those early mediaeval 
 religious artists, who, precisely because 
 their souls swarmed with heavenly visions, 
 passed their fifty or sixty years in tranquil, 
 systematic industry, seemingly with no 
 thoughts beyond it. This placid life deve- 
 loped in Wordsworth, to an extraordinary 
 degree, an innate sensibility to natural 
 sights and sounds the flower and its 
 shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its 
 echo. The poem of " Resolution and Inde- 
 pendence " is a storehouse of such records ; 
 for its fulness of lovely imagery it may be 
 compared to Keats's "Saint Agnes' Eve." 
 To read one of his greater pastoral poems 
 for the first time is like a day spent in 
 a new country ; the memory is crowded 
 for a while with its precise and vivid in- 
 cidents :
 
 the " Guardian'' 107 
 
 " The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze, 
 On some grey rock : 
 The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, 
 And the bleak music from that old stone wall : 
 In the meadows and the lower ground, 
 Was all the sweetness of a common dawn : 
 And that green corn all day is rustling in thine 
 ears ! " 
 
 Clear and delicate at once as he is in the 
 outlining of visible imagery, he is more 
 finely scrupulous still in the noting of 
 sounds ; he conceives of noble sound as 
 even moulding the human countenance to 
 nobler types, and as something actually 
 "profaned" by visible form or colour. He 
 has a power likewise of realizing and con- 
 veying to the consciousness of his reader 
 abstract and elementary impressions, 
 silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness, 
 or, again, the whole complex sentiment of 
 a particular place, the abstract expression 
 of desolation in the long white road, of 
 peacefulness in a particular folding of the 
 hills. 
 
 That sense of a life in natural objects, 
 which in most poetry is but a rhetorical
 
 io8 Essays from 
 
 artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the as- 
 sertion of what was for him almost literal 
 fact. To him every natural object seemed 
 to possess something of moral or spiritual 
 life, to be really capable of a companion- 
 ship with man, full of fine intimacies. An 
 emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not 
 to the moving leaves or water only, but to 
 the distant peak arising suddenly, by some 
 change of perspective, above the nearer 
 horizon of the hills, to the passing space of 
 light across the plain, to the lichened 
 Druidic stone even, for a certain weird 
 fellowship in it with the moods of men. 
 That he awakened " a sort of thought in 
 sense" is Shelley's just estimate of this 
 element in Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 It was through nature, ennobled in this 
 way by the semblance of passion and 
 thought, that the poet approached the 
 spectacle of human life. For him, indeed, 
 human life is, in the first instance, only an 
 additional, and as it were incidental 
 grace, upon this expressive landscape. 
 When he thought of men and women, it
 
 the " Guardian? 109 
 
 was of men and women as in the presence 
 and under the influence of those effective 
 natural objects, and linked to them by 
 many associations. Such influences have 
 sometimes seemed to belittle those who are 
 the subject of them, at the least to be 
 likely to narrow the range of their sym- 
 pathies. To Wordsworth, on the contrary, 
 they seemed directly to dignify human 
 nature, as tending to tranquillize it. He 
 raises physical nature to the level of human 
 thought, giving it thereby a mystic power 
 and expression ; he subdues man to the 
 level of nature, but gives him therewith a 
 certain breadth and vastness and solem- 
 nity. 
 
 Religious sentiment, consecrating the 
 natural affections and rights of the human 
 heart, above all that pitiful care and awe 
 for the perishing human clay of which 
 relic-worship is but the corruption, has 
 always had much to do with localities, 
 with the thoughts which attach themselves 
 to definite scenes and places. And what 
 is true of it everywhere is truest in those
 
 no Essays from 
 
 secluded valleys, where one generation 
 after another maintains the same abiding- 
 
 O 
 
 place ; and it was on this side that Words- 
 worth apprehended religion most strongly. 
 Having so much to do with the recogni- 
 tion of local sanctities, the habit of con- 
 necting the very trees and stones of a par- 
 ticular spot of earth with the great events 
 of life, till the low walls, the green mounds, 
 the half-obliterated epitaphs, seemed full 
 of oracular voices, even the religion of 
 those people of the dales appeared but as 
 another link between them and the solemn 
 imageries of the natural world. And, 
 again, this too tranquillized them, by 
 bringing them under the rule of traditional, 
 narrowly localized observances. " Grave 
 livers," they seemed to him under this 
 aspect, of stately speech, and something 
 of that natural dignity of manners which 
 underlies the highest courtesy. 
 
 And, seeing man thus as a part of 
 nature, elevated and solemnized in propor- 
 tion as his daily life and occupations 
 brought him into companionship with per-
 
 the " Guardian"" in 
 
 manent natural objects, he was able to ap- 
 preciate passion in the lowly. He chooses 
 to depict people from humble life, because, 
 being nearer to nature than others, they 
 are on the whole more impassioned, cer- 
 tainly more direct in their expression of 
 passion, than other men ; it is for this 
 direct expression of passion that he values 
 their humble words. In much that he said 
 in exaltation of rural life he was but 
 pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that 
 perfect fidelity to one's own inward pre- 
 sentations, to the precise features of the 
 picture within, without which any profound 
 poetry is impossible. It was not for their 
 tameness, but for their impassioned sin- 
 cerity, that he chose incidents and situa- 
 tions from common life, " related in a 
 selection of language really used by men." 
 He constantly endeavours to bring his 
 language nearer to the real language of 
 men ; but it is to the real language of 
 men, not on the dead level of their 
 ordinary intercourse, but in certain select 
 moments of vivid sensation, when this
 
 112 Essays from 
 
 language is winnowed and ennobled by 
 sentiment. There are poets who have 
 chosen rural life for their subject for the 
 sake of its passionless repose ; and there 
 are times when Wordsworth himself extols 
 the mere calm and dispassionate survey 
 of things as the highest aim of poetical 
 culture. But it was not for such pas- 
 sionless calm that he preferred the scenes 
 of pastoral life ; and the meditative poet, 
 sheltering himself from the agitations of 
 the outward world, is in reality only 
 clearing the scene for the exhibition of 
 great emotions, and what he values most 
 is the almost elementary expression of 
 elementary feelings. 
 
 In Wordsworth's prefatory advertise- 
 ment to the first edition of " The Prelude," 
 published in 1850, it is stated that that 
 work was intended to be introductory 
 to "The Recluse": and that "The Re- 
 cluse," if completed, would have consisted 
 of three parts. The second part is " The 
 Excursion." The third part was only 
 planned ; but the first book of the first
 
 the " Guardian" 113 
 
 part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth 
 though in manuscript, it is said, in no great 
 condition of forwardness for the printers. 
 This book, now for the first time printed in 
 extenso (a very noble passage from it found 
 place in that prose advertisement to "The 
 Excursion "), is the great novelty of this 
 latest edition of Wordsworth's poetic works. 
 It was well worth adding to the poet's 
 great bequest to English literature. The 
 true student of his work, who has formu- 
 lated for himself what he supposes to be 
 the leading characteristics of Wordsworth's 
 genius, will feel, we think, a lively interest 
 in putting them to test by the many and 
 various striking passages in what is there 
 presented for the first time.
 
 VII. 
 FERDINAND FABRE. 
 
 "NORINE." PAR FERDINAND FABRE. 
 JUNE i2TH, 1889. 
 
 f
 
 FERDINAND FABRE. 
 
 AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES. 
 
 FRENCH novelist who, with 
 much of Zola's undoubted power, 
 writes always in the interest of 
 that high type of Catholicism which still 
 prevails in the remote provinces of France, 
 of that high type of morality of which the 
 French clergy have nobly maintained the 
 ideal, is worth recommending to the more 
 serious class of English readers. Some- 
 thing of the gift of Francois Millet, whose 
 peasants are veritable priests, of those older 
 religious painters who could portray saintly 
 heads so sweetly and their merely human 
 proteges so truly, seems indeed to have 
 descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre. In the
 
 1 1 8 Essays from, 
 
 "Abb Tigrane," in "Lucifer," and else- 
 where, he has delineated, with wonderful 
 power and patience, a strictly ecclesiastical 
 portraiture shrewd, passionate, somewhat 
 melancholy heads, which, though they are 
 often of peasant origin, are never by any 
 chance undignified. The passions he treats 
 of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, 
 most often their ambitions not the errant 
 humours of the mere man in the priest, 
 but movements of spirit properly incidental 
 to the clerical type itself. Turning to the 
 secular brothers and sisters of these peasant 
 ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly con- 
 trasted with them, M. Fabre shows a great 
 acquaintance with the sources, the effects, 
 of average human feeling; but still in con- 
 tact in contact, as its conscience, its better 
 mind, its ideal with the institutions of 
 religion. What constitutes his distinguish- 
 ing note as a writer is the recognition of 
 the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening 
 masterfully throughout the picture he pre- 
 sents of life, as the only mode of poetry 
 realizable by the poor ; and although, of
 
 the "Guardian" 119 
 
 course, it does a great deal more beside, 
 certainly doing the high work of poetry 
 effectively. For his background he has 
 chosen, has made his own and conveys 
 very vividly to his readers, a district of 
 France, gloomy, in spite of its almonds, its 
 oil and wine, but certainly grandiose. The 
 large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide 
 landscape of the Cevennes, are for his 
 books what the Rhineland is to those 
 delightful authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Cha- 
 trian. In " Les Courbezon," the French 
 " Vicar of Wakefi eld," as Sainte-Beuve de- 
 clared, with this imposing background, the 
 Church and the world, as they shape them- 
 selves in the Cevennes, the priest and the 
 peasant, occupy about an equal share of 
 interest. Sometimes, as in the charming 
 little book we wish now to introduce, un- 
 clerical human nature occupies the fore- 
 ground almost exclusively ; though priestly 
 faces will still be found gazing upon us 
 from time to time. 
 
 In form, the book is a bundle of letters 
 from a Parisian litterateur to the friend of
 
 1 20 Essays from 
 
 his boyhood, now the cure of one of those 
 mountain villages. He is refreshing him- 
 self, in the midst of dusty, sophisticated 
 Paris, with memories of their old, delightful 
 existence vagabonde, libre, agreste, pas- 
 torale in their upland valley. He can 
 appeal safely to the aged cures friendly 
 justice, even in exposing delicacies of sen- 
 timent which most men conceal : 
 
 " As for you, frank, certain of your own 
 mind, joyous of heart, methinks scarce 
 understanding those whose religion makes 
 their souls tremble instead of fortifying 
 them you, I am sure, take things by 
 the large and kindly side of human 
 life." 
 
 The story our Parisian has to tell is 
 simple enough, and we have no intention 
 of betraying it, but only to note some of 
 the faces, the scenes, that peep out in the 
 course of it. 
 
 The gloom of the Cevennes is the im- 
 pression M. Fabre most commonly conveys. 
 In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect 
 of summer, those upland valleys of the
 
 the "Guardian." 121 
 
 Cevennes presenting then a symphony in 
 red, so to call it as in a land of cherries 
 and goldfinches ; and he has a genial power 
 certainly of making you really feel the sun 
 on the backs of the two boys out early for 
 a long ramble, of old peasants resting them- 
 selves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere 
 the end : 
 
 " As we turned a sharp elbow of the 
 stream the aspect of the country changed. 
 It seemed to me entirely red. Cherries in 
 enormous bunches were hanging every- 
 where over our heads. . . . 
 
 " It was a hut, rather low, rather dark. 
 A log of chestnut was smouldering in a 
 heap of ashes. Every object was in its 
 place : the table, the chairs, the plates 
 ranged on the dresser. A fairy, in truth, 
 reigned there,and,bythe touch of her wand, 
 brought cleanliness and order on every side. 
 
 " ' Is it you, Norine ? ' asked a voice from 
 a dark corner,three steps from the fireplace. 
 
 " ' Yes, mon grand, it is I ! The heat 
 was growing greater every moment, and I 
 have taken in the goats.'
 
 122 Essays from 
 
 " Norine unclosed the window. A broad 
 light spread over the floor of beaten earth, 
 like a white cloth. The cottage was illu- 
 minated. I saw an old man seated on a 
 wooden stool in a recess, where an ample 
 serge curtain concealed a bed. He held 
 himself slightly bent, the two hands held 
 forth, one over the other, on the knob of a 
 knotty staff, highly polished. In spite 
 of eighty years, Norine's grandfather le 
 grand, as they say up there had not lost 
 a hair : beautiful white locks fell over his 
 shoulders crisp,thick,outspread. I thought 
 of those fine wigs of tow or hemp with 
 which the distaff of our Prudence was 
 always entangled. He was close shaved, 
 after the manner of our peasants ; and the 
 entire mask was to be seen disengaged, all 
 its admirable lines free, commanded by a 
 full-sized nose, below which the good, thick 
 lips were smiling, full of kindness. The 
 eyes, however, though still clear and soft 
 in expression, had a certain fixity which 
 startled me. He raised himself. His 
 stature seemed to me beyond proportion.
 
 the " Guardian" 123 
 
 He was really beautiful, with the content- 
 ment of his face, straight as the trunk of 
 a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, 
 his shirt of coarse cloth open at the breast, 
 so that one saw the play of the ribs. 
 
 " ' Monsieur le neveu! ' he cried ; ' where 
 are you ? Come to me ! I am blind.' 
 
 " I approached. He felt me, with ten 
 fingers, laying aside his staff. 
 
 " ' And you would not take offence 
 if a poor peasant like me embraced 
 you ? ' 
 
 " ' Quick, Jalaguier ! ' I cried, throwing 
 myself into his arms. 'Quick!' He pressed 
 me till the joints started. Leaned upon 
 his broad chest, I heard the beating of his 
 heart. It beat under my ears with a burden 
 like our bell at Camplong. What powerful 
 vitality in Norine's grand! 'It does an 
 old man good : a good hug ! ' he said, 
 letting me go." 
 
 The boyish visitors are quite ready to 
 sit down there to dinner : 
 
 " With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. 
 Fabre tells us) the meal is what nature
 
 124 Essays front 
 
 meant it to be a few moments for self- 
 recovery after fatigue, a short space of 
 silence of a quite elevated character, almost 
 sacred. The poor human creature has 
 given the sweat of his brow to extort from 
 an ungrateful soil his daily bread ; and 
 now he eats that well-savoured bread in 
 silent self-respect. 
 
 " It is a weary thing to be thinking 
 always of one's work (says the^rtf;^ to the 
 somewhat sparing Norine). We must also 
 think of our sustenance. You are too 
 enduring, my child ! it is a mistake to 
 demand so much of your arms. In truth, 
 le bon Dieu has cut you out after the pat- 
 tern of your dead father. Every morning, 
 in my prayers, I put in my complaint 
 thereanent. My poor boy died from going 
 too fast. He could never sit still when 
 it was a question of gathering a few sous 
 from the fields ; and those fields took and 
 consumed him." 
 
 The boy fancies that the blind eyes are 
 turned towards a particular spot in the 
 landscape, as if they saw :
 
 the " Guardian" 125 
 
 " I often turn my eyes in that direction 
 (the old man explains) from habit. One 
 might suppose that a peasant had the scent 
 of the earth on which he has laboured. I 
 have given so much of the sweat of my 
 brow there towards Rocaillet ! Ang4- 
 lique, my dead wife, was of Rocaillet ; and 
 when she married me, brought a few morsels 
 of land in her apron. What a state they're 
 in now ! thosepoor morsels of land we used 
 to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I ! 
 What superb crops of vetches we mowed 
 then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, 
 our calves ! All is gone to ruin since my 
 blindness, and especially since Ang^lique 
 left me for the churchyard, never to come 
 back.' He paused to my great relief. For 
 every one of those phrases he modulated 
 under the fig-trees more sadly than the 
 Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint 
 overset me was like death." 
 
 That is good drawing, in its simple and 
 quiet way ! The actual scene, however, is 
 cheerfulenough on this earlysummer day 
 a symphony, as we said, in cherries and
 
 126 Essays from 
 
 goldfinches, in which the higher valleys of 
 the Cevennes abound. In fact, the boys 
 witness \hQaccordailles, the engagement, of 
 Norine and Justin Lebasset. The latter is 
 calling the birds to sing good luck to the 
 event : 
 
 " He had a long steady look towards the 
 fruit-trees, and then whistled, on a note at 
 once extremely clear and extremely soft. 
 He paused, watched awhile, recommenced. 
 The note became more rapid, more sono- 
 rous. What an astounding man he was, 
 this Justin Lebasset! Upright, his red beard 
 forward, his forehead thrown back, his eyes 
 on the thick foliage of the cherry-trees, his 
 hands on his haunches, in an attitude of 
 repose, easy, superb, he was like some 
 youthful pagan god, gilded with red gold, 
 on his way across the country like Pan, if 
 he chose to amuse himself by charming 
 birds. You should have seen the enthu- 
 siastic glances with which Norine watched 
 him. Upright she too, slim, at full height, 
 inclining from time to time towards Justin 
 with a movement of irresistible fascination,
 
 the " Guardian' 127 
 
 she followed the notes of her mate ; and 
 sometimes, her lips half opening, added 
 thereto a sigh something of a sigh, an 
 aspiration, a prayer, towards the goldfinch, 
 withdrawn into the shadows. 
 
 " The leaves were shaken in the clear, 
 burning green ; and, on a sudden, a multi- 
 tude of goldfinches, the heads red in the 
 wind, the wings half spread, were fluttering 
 frombranch to branch. I could have fancied, 
 amid the quivering of the great bunches of 
 fruit, that they were cherries on the wing. 
 Justin suffered his pipe to die away : the 
 birds were come at his invitation, and per- 
 formed their prelude." 
 
 It is forty years afterwards that the 
 narrator, now a man of letters in Paris, 
 writes to his old friend, with tidings of 
 Justin and Norine: 
 
 " In 1842 (he observes) you were close on 
 fifteen; I scarcely twelve. In my eyes your 
 age made you my superior. And then, you 
 were so strong, so tender, so amiteux, to use 
 a word from up there a charming word. 
 And so God, Who had His designs for you,
 
 128 Essays from 
 
 whereas I, in spite of my pious childhood, 
 wandered on my way as chance bade me, 
 led you by the hand, attached, ended by 
 keeping you for Himself. He did well 
 truly when He chose you and rejected me!" 
 
 His finding the pair in the wilds of 
 Paris is an adventure, in which, in fact, a 
 goldfinch again takes an important part 
 a goldfinch who is found to understand the 
 Cevenol dialect : 
 
 " The goldfinch (escaped from its cage 
 somewhere, into the dreary court of the 
 Institute) has seen me : is looking at me. 
 If he chose to make his way into my apart- 
 ment, he would be very welcome. I feel a 
 strong impulse to try him with that unique 
 patois word, which, whistled after a peculiar 
 manner, when I was a boy never failed to 
 succeed in the mountains of Orb Bent ! 
 Beni ! Viens ! Viens ! I dare not ! He 
 might take fright and fly away altogether." 
 
 In effect, the Cevenol bird, true to call, 
 introduces Norine,hisrightful owner, whose 
 husband Justin is slowly dying. Towards 
 the end of a hard life, faithful to their
 
 the " Guardian" 129 
 
 mountain ideal, they have not lost their 
 dignity, though in a comparatively sordid 
 medium : 
 
 " As for me, my dear Arribas,! remained 
 in deep agitation, an attentive spectator of 
 the scene; and while Justin and Norine, set 
 both alike in the winepress of sorrow, le 
 pressoir de la douleur, as your good books 
 express it, murmured to each other their 
 broken consoling words, I saw them again, 
 in thought, young, handsome, in the full 
 flower of life, under the cherry-trees, the 
 swarming goldfinches, of blind Barthelemy 
 Jalaquier. Ah me ! It was thus that, five- 
 and-forty years after, in this dark street of 
 Paris, that festive day was finishing, blessed, 
 in the plenitude of nature, by that august 
 old man, celebrated by the alternate song 
 of all the birds of Rocaillet." 
 
 Justin's one remaining hope is to go home 
 to those native mountains, if it may be, 
 with the dead body of his boy, dead " the 
 very morning on which he should have 
 received the tonsure from the hands of 
 Mgr. 1'Archeveque," arid buried now tem- 
 K
 
 130 Essays from 
 
 porarily at the cemetery of Montpar- 
 nasse : 
 
 " ' Theodore calls me. I saw him dis- 
 tinctly to-night. He gave me a sign. 
 After all said, life is heavy, sans le fillot, 
 and but for you it were well to be released 
 from it.' 
 
 " ' I have seen Justin Lebasset die, dear 
 Arribas, and was touched, edified, to the 
 bottomof mysoul. Godgrant,whenmy hour 
 comes, I may find that calm, that force, in 
 the last struggle with life. Not a complaint! 
 not a sigh ! Once only he gave Norine a 
 sorrowful, heartrending look ; then, from 
 lips already cold, breathed that one word, 
 ' Theodore ! ' Marcus Aurelius used to say : 
 ' A man should leave the world as a ripe 
 olive falls from the tree that bore it, and 
 with a kiss for the earth that nourished it.' 
 Well ! the peasant of Rocaillet had the 
 beautiful, noble, simple death of the fruit of 
 the earth, going to the common receptacle 
 of all mortal beings, with no sense that he 
 was torn away. Pardon, I pray, my quota- 
 tion from Marcus Aurelius, who persecuted
 
 the ''Guardian'' 131 
 
 the Christians. I give it with the same 
 respect with which you would quote some 
 holy writer. Ah ! my dear Arribas ! not all 
 the saints have received canonization." 
 
 It is to the priestly character, in truth, 
 that M. Fabre always comes back for 
 tranquillizing effect ; and if his peasants 
 have something akin to Wordsworth's, his 
 priests may remind one of those solemn 
 ecclesiastical heads familiar in the paintings 
 and etchings of M. Alphonse Legros. The 
 reader travelling in Italy, or Belgium 
 perhaps, has doubtless visited one or more 
 of those spacious sacristies, introduced to 
 which for the inspection of some more 
 than usually recherche work of art, one is 
 presently dominated by their reverend 
 quiet : simple people coming and going 
 there,devout,or at least on devout business, 
 withhalf-pitched voices, notwithout touches 
 of kindly humour, in what seems to express 
 like a picture the most genial side, midway 
 between the altar and the home, of the 
 ecclesiastical life. Just such interiors we 
 seem to visit under the magic of M. Fabre's
 
 132 Essays from the "Guardian." 
 
 well-trained pen. He has a real power of 
 taking one from Paris, or from London, to 
 places and people certainly very different 
 from either, to the satisfaction of those who 
 seek in fiction an escape.
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE "CONTES" OF 
 M. AUGUSTIN FILON. 
 
 JULY i6xH, 1890. 
 
 "CONTES DU CENTENAIRE." PAR AUGUSTIN FILON. 
 PARIS: HACHETTE ET CIE.
 
 THE "CONTES" OF 
 M. AUGUSTIN FILON. 
 
 TALES OF A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE. 
 
 T was a happy thought of M. 
 Filon to put into the mouth of an 
 imaginary centenarian a series of 
 delightfully picturesque studies which aim 
 at the minute presentment of life in France 
 under the old regime, and end for the most 
 part with the Revolution. A genial cen- 
 tenarian, whose years have told happily 
 on him, he appreciates not only those 
 humanities of feeling and habit which were 
 peculiar to the last centuryand passed away 
 with it, but also that permanent humanity 
 which has but undergone a change of 
 surface in the new world of our own, wholly
 
 136 Essays from 
 
 different though it may look. With a 
 sympathetic sense of life as it is always, 
 M. Filon has transplanted the creations of 
 his fancy into an age certainly at a greater 
 distance from ourselves than can be esti- 
 mated by mere lapse of time, and where a 
 fully detailed antiquarian knowledge, used 
 with admirable tact and economy, is indeed 
 serviceable in giving reality of effect to 
 scene and character. In truth, M. Filon's 
 very lively antiquarianism carries with it a 
 genuine air of personal memory. With him, 
 as happens so rarely, an intimate knowledge 
 of historic detail is the secret of life, of the 
 impression of life ; puts his own imagina- 
 tion on the wing ; secures the imaginative 
 co-operation of the reader. A stately age 
 to us, perhaps, in the company of the 
 historic muse, seeming even more stately 
 than it actually was it is pleasant to find 
 it, as we do now and again on these pages, 
 ingra.cQ{u\des/iabi!/e. Withperfectlightness 
 of touch, M. Filon seems to haveacomplete 
 command of all the physiognomic details of 
 old France, of old Paris and its people
 
 the " Guardian^ 137 
 
 how they made a holiday ; how they got at 
 the news ; the fashions. Did the English 
 reader ever hear before of the beautifully 
 dressed doll which came once a month 
 from Paris to Soho to teach an expectant 
 world of fashion how to dress itself? Old 
 Paris ! For young lovers at their windows, 
 for every one fortunate enough to have 
 seen it : " Qu'il est joli ce paysage du 
 Paris nocturne d'il y a cent ans ! " We 
 think we shall best do justice to an un- 
 usually pretty book by taking one of M. 
 Filon's stories (not because we are quite 
 sure it is the cleverest of them) with a view 
 to the more definite illustration of his 
 method, therein. 
 
 Christopher Marteau was a warden of 
 the corporation of Lut/iiers. He dealt in 
 musical instruments, as his father and 
 grandfather had done before him, at the 
 sign of Saint Cecilia, With his wife, his 
 only child Phlipote, and Claude his 
 apprentice, who was to marry Phlipote, 
 he occupied a good house of his own. Of 
 course the disposition of the young people,
 
 138 Essays from 
 
 bred together from their childhood, does 
 not at first entirely concur with the 
 parental arrangements. But the story tells, 
 reassuringly, how to some extent how 
 sadly they came heartily to do so. M. 
 Marteau was no ordinary shopkeeper. 
 The various distinguished people who had 
 fingered his clavecins, and turned over the 
 folios of music, for half a century past, had 
 left their memories behind them ; M. de 
 Voltaire, for instance, who had caressed 
 the head of Phlipote with an aged, skeleton 
 hand, leaving, apparently, no very agreeable 
 impression on the child, though her father 
 delighted to recall the incident, being him- 
 self a detni-philosophe. He went to church, 
 that is to say, only twice a year, on the 
 Feast of St. Cecilia and on the Sunday when 
 the LutJiiers offered the pain benit. It was 
 his opinion that everything in the State 
 needed reform except the Corporations. 
 The relations of the husband to his affec- 
 tionate, satiric, pleasure-seeking wife, who 
 knew so well all the eighteen theatres 
 which then existed in Paris, are treated
 
 the '* Guardian." 139 
 
 with much quiet humour. On Sundays 
 the four set forth together for a country 
 holiday. At such times Phlipote would 
 walk half-a-dozen paces in advance of her 
 father and mother, side by side with her 
 intended. But they never talked to each 
 other : the hands, the eyes, never met. Of 
 what was Phlipote dreaming ? and what 
 was in the thoughts of Claude ? 
 
 It happened one day that, like sister and 
 brother, the lovers exchanged confidences. 
 "It is not always," observes Phlipote, whom 
 every one excepting Claude on those occa- 
 sions sought with admiring eyes 
 
 " ' It is not always one loves those one is 
 told to love.' 
 
 " ' What, havejtfw, too, a secret, my little 
 Phlipote ? ' 
 
 " ' I too, Claude ! Then what may be 
 yours ? ' 
 
 " ' Listen, Phlipote ! ' he answered. ' We 
 don't wish to be husband and wife, but we 
 can be friends good and faithful friends, 
 helping each other to change the decision 
 of our parents.'
 
 140 Essays from 
 
 " ' Were I but sure you would not betray 
 me ' 
 
 "'Would you like me to confess first? 
 
 The woman I love Ah ! but you will 
 
 laugh at my folly ! ' 
 
 "'No, Claude! I shall not laugh. I 
 know too well what one suffers.' 
 
 " ' Especially when love is hopeless.' 
 
 " ' Hopeless ? ' 
 
 " ' Alas ! I have never spoken to her. 
 Perhaps never shall ! ' 
 
 " ' Well ! as for me, I don't even know the 
 name of him to whom my heart is given ! ' 
 
 " ' Ah ! poor Phlipote ! ' 
 
 " ' Poor Claude ! ' 
 
 " They had approached each other. The 
 young man took the tiny hand of his friend, 
 pressing it in his own. 
 
 "'The woman I adore is Mademoiselle 
 Guimard ! ' 
 
 " ' What ! Guimard of the Opera ? the 
 fiancee of Despreaux ? " 
 
 Claude still held the hands of Phlipote, 
 who was trembling now, and almost on fire 
 at the story of this ambitious love. In
 
 the " Guardian" 141 
 
 return she reveals her own. It was Good 
 Friday. She had come with her mother to 
 the Sainte CJiapelle to hear Mademoiselle 
 Coupain play the organ and witness the 
 extraordinary spectacle of the convulsion- 
 naires, brought thither to be touched by 
 the relic of the True Cross. In the press 
 of the crowd at this exciting scene Phlipote 
 faints, or nearly faints, when a young man 
 comes kindly to their aid. " She is so 
 young ! " he explains to the mother, " she 
 seems so delicate ! " " He looked at me," 
 she tells Claude "he looked at me.through 
 his half-closed eyelids ; and his words were 
 like a caress " : 
 
 "'And have you seen him no more?' 
 asks Claude, full of sympathy. 
 
 " ' Yes ! once again. He pretended to be 
 looking at the window of the Little Dun- 
 kirk, over the way, but with cautious 
 glances towards our house. Only, as he 
 did not know what storey we live on, he 
 failed to discover me behind my curtain, 
 where I was but half visible.' 
 
 " ' You should have shown yourself.'
 
 142 Essays from 
 
 " ' Oh, Claude ! ' she cried, with a delicious 
 gesture of timidity, of shame. 
 
 "So they prattled fora long time; he 
 talking of the great Guimard, she of her 
 unknown lover, scarce listening to, but 
 completely understanding each other. 
 
 " ' Holloa ! ' cries the loud voice of Chris- 
 topher Marteau. ' What are you doing out 
 there ? ' 
 
 "The young people arose. Phlipote 
 linked her arm gaily in that of Claude. 
 ' How contented I feel ! ' she says ; ' how 
 good it is to have a friend to have you 
 whom I used to detest, because I thought 
 you were in love with me. Now, when I 
 know you can't bear me, I shall be nicely 
 in love with you.' The soft warmth of her 
 arm seemed to pass through Claude, and 
 gave him strange sensations. He resumed 
 naively, ' Yes ! and how odd it is after all 
 that I am not in love with you. You are 
 so pretty ! ' Phlipote raised her finger 
 coquettishly, ' No compliments, monsieur. 
 Since we are not to marry each other, it is 
 forbidden to pay court to me ! ' '
 
 the " Guardian" 143 
 
 From that day a close intimacy estab- 
 lished itself between the formerly affianced 
 pair, now become accomplices in defeating 
 the good intentions of their elders. In 
 long conversations, they talked in turn, or 
 both together, of their respective loves. 
 Phlipote allows Claude entrance to her 
 chamber, full of admiration for its graceful 
 arrangements, its virgin cleanliness. He 
 inspects slowly all the familiar objects 
 daily touched by her, her books, her girlish 
 ornaments. One day she cried with an air 
 of mischief, " If she were here in my place, 
 what would you do ? " and no sooner were 
 the words uttered than his arms were round 
 her neck. " 'Tis but to teach you what I 
 would do were she here." They were a 
 little troubled by this adventure. 
 
 And the next day was a memorable one. 
 By the kind contrivance of Phlipote her- 
 self, Claude gains the much-desired access 
 to the object of his affections, but to his 
 immense disillusion. If he could but speak 
 to her, he fancies he should find the courage, 
 the skill, to bend her. Breathless, Phlipote
 
 144 Essays from 
 
 comes in secret with the good news. The 
 great actress desires some one to tune her 
 clavecin : 
 
 " ' Papa would have gone ; but I begged 
 him so earnestly to take me to the Theatre 
 Frangais that he could not refuse ; and it 
 is yourself will go this evening to tune the 
 clavecin of your beloved.' 
 
 " ' Phlipote, you've a better heart than I ! 
 This morning I saw a gentleman, who re- 
 sembled point by point your description of 
 the unknown at the Sainte CJiapelle, prowl- 
 ing about our shop.' 
 
 " ' And you didn't tell me ! ' 
 
 " Claude hung his head. 
 
 " ' But why not ? ' the young girl asks 
 imperiously. ' Why not ? ' 
 
 " ' In truth I could hardly say, hardly 
 understand, myself. Do you forgive me, 
 Phlipote ? ' 
 
 " ' I suppose I must. So make yourself as 
 smart as you can, to please your goddess.' " 
 
 Next day she hears the story of Claude's 
 grievous disappointment on seeing the 
 great actress at home plain, five-and-
 
 the " Guardian'" 1 145 
 
 forty, ill-tempered. He had tuned the 
 clavecin and taken flight. 
 
 And now for Phlipote's idol ! It was 
 agreed that Whitsunday should be spent 
 at Versailles. On that day the royal apart- 
 ments were open to the public, and at the 
 hour of High Mass the crowd flowed back 
 towards the vestibule of the chapel to wit- 
 ness what was called the procession of the 
 Cordons Blens. The " Blue Ribbons " were 
 the knights of the Order Du Saint-Esprit 
 in their robes of ceremony, who came to 
 range themselves in the choir according to 
 the date of their creation. The press was 
 so great that the parents were separated 
 from the young people. Claude, however, 
 at the side of Phlipote, realized the ideal of 
 a faithful and jealous guardian. The Jialle- 
 bardes of the Suisses rang on the marble 
 pavement of the gallery. Royalty, now 
 unconsciously presenting its ceremonies for 
 the last time, advanced through a cloud of 
 splendour ; but before the Queen appeared 
 it was necessary that all the knights of the 
 order down to the youngest should pass by, 
 L
 
 146 Essays from 
 
 slow, solemn, majestic. They wore, besides 
 their ribbons of blue moire, the silver dove 
 on the shoulder, and the long mantle of 
 sombre blue velvet lined with yellow satin. 
 Phlipote watched mechanically the double 
 file of haughty figures passing before them : 
 then, on a sudden, with a feeble cry, falls 
 fainting into the arms of Claude. 
 
 Recovered after a while, under shelter of 
 the great staircase, she wept as those weep 
 whose heart is broken by a great blow. 
 Claude, without a word, sustained, soothed 
 her. A sentiment of gratitude mingled 
 itself with her distress. " How good he 
 is ! " she thought. 
 
 " It was a pity," says her mother a little 
 later "a pity you did not see the Cordons 
 Bleus. Fancy ! You will laugh at me ! 
 But in one of the handsomest of the Che- 
 valiers I felt sure I recognized the stranger 
 who helped us at the Sainte Cliapelle, and 
 was so gallant with you." 
 
 Phlipote did not laugh. " You are de- 
 ceived, mother ! " she said in a faint voice. 
 " Pardi ! " cries the father. " 'Tis what I
 
 the " Guardian" 147 
 
 always say. Your stranger was some 
 young fellow from a shop." 
 
 Two months later the young people 
 receive the nuptial benediction, and con- 
 tinue the musical business when the elders 
 retire to the country. At first a passionate 
 lover, Claude was afterwards a good and 
 devoted husband. Phlipote never again 
 opened her lips regarding the vague love 
 which for a moment had flowered in her 
 heart : only sometimes, a cloud of reverie 
 veiled her eyes, which seemed to seek 
 sadly, beyond the circle of her slow, calm 
 life, a brilliant but chimeric image visible 
 for her alone. 
 
 And once again she saw him. It was in 
 the terrible year 1794. She knew the hour 
 at which the tumbril with those condemned 
 to die passed the windows ; and at the first 
 signal would close them and draw the cur- 
 tain. But on this day some invincible fas- 
 cination nailed her to her place. There 
 were ten faces ; but she had eyes for one 
 alone. She had not forgotten, could not 
 mistake, him that pale head, so proud
 
 148 Essays from the ' ' Guardian" ' 
 
 and fine, but now thin with suffering ; the 
 beautiful mobile eyes, now encircled with 
 the signs of sorrow and watching. The 
 convict's shirt, open in large, broad folds, 
 left bare the neck, delicate as a woman's, 
 and made for that youthful face an aureole, 
 of innocence, of martyrdom. His looks 
 met hers. Did he recognize her ? She 
 could not have said. She remained there, 
 paralyzed with emotion, till the moment 
 when the vision disappeared. 
 
 Then she flung herself into her chamber, 
 fell on her knees, lost herself in prayer. 
 There was a distant roll of drums. The 
 man to whom she had given her maiden 
 soul was gone. 
 
 " Cursed be their anger.for it was cruel ! " 
 says the reader. But Monsieur Filon's 
 stories sometimes end as merrily as they 
 begin ; and always he is all delicacy a 
 delicacy which keeps his large yet minute 
 antiquarian knowledge of that vanished 
 time ever in service to a direct interest in 
 humanity as it is permanently, alike before 
 and after '93. His book is certainly one 
 well worth possessing.
 
 IX. 
 
 MR. GOSSE'S POEMS. 
 
 OCTOBER 2gTH, 1890.
 
 MR. GOSSE'S POEMS. 
 
 " On Viol and Flute." By Edmund 
 Gosse. 
 
 ,ERHAPS no age of literature, 
 certainly no age of literature in 
 England, has been so rich as ours 
 in excellent secondary poetry ; and it is 
 with our poetry (in a measure) as with our 
 architecture, constrained by the nature of 
 the case to be imitative. Our generation, 
 quite reasonably, is not very proud of its 
 architectural creations ; confesses that it 
 knows too much knows, but cannot do. 
 And yet we could name certain modern 
 churches in London, for instance, to which 
 posterity may well look back puzzled. 
 Could these exquisitely pondered buildings 
 have been indeed works of the nineteenth
 
 152 Essays from 
 
 century ? Were they not the subtlest 
 creations of the age in which Gothic art 
 was spontaneous ? In truth, we have had 
 instances of workmen, who, through long, 
 large, devoted study of the handiwork of 
 the past, have done the thing better, with 
 a more fully enlightened consciousness, 
 with full intelligence of what those early 
 workmen only guessed at. And some- 
 thing like this is true of some of our best 
 secondary poetry. It is the least that is 
 true the least that can fairly be said in 
 praise of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund 
 Gossc. 
 
 Of course there can be no exact parallel 
 between arts so different as architecture 
 and poetic composition. But certainly in 
 the poetry of our day also, though it has 
 been in some instances powerfully initiative 
 and original, there is great scholarship, a 
 large comparative acquaintance with the 
 poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a 
 very subtle intelligence of their charm. 
 Of that fine scholarship in this matter there 
 is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is
 
 the " Guardian" 153 
 
 manifested especially in the even finish of 
 his varied work, in the equality of his level 
 a high level in species of composition 
 so varied as the three specimens which 
 follow. 
 
 Far away, in late spring, " by the sea in 
 the south," the swallows are still lingering 
 around " white Algiers." In Mr. Gosse's 
 " Return of the Swallows," the northern 
 birds lark and thrush have long been 
 calling to them : 
 
 " And something awoke in the slumbering heart 
 
 Of the alien birds in their African air, 
 And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart, 
 
 And met in the broad white dreamy square, 
 And the sad slave woman, who lifted up 
 From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup, 
 
 Said to herself, with a weary sigh, 
 
 ' To-morrow the swallows will northward fly ! ' ' 
 
 Compare the following stanzas, from a 
 kind of palinode, " 1870-1871," years of 
 the Franco-German war and the Parisian 
 Commune : 
 
 " The men who sang that pain was sweet 
 
 Shuddered to see the mask of death 
 Storm by with myriad thundering feet ;
 
 154 Essays from 
 
 The sudden truth caught up our breath, 
 Our throats like pulses beat. 
 
 " The songs of pale emaciate hours, 
 The fungus-growth of years of peace, 
 
 Withered before us like mown flowers ; 
 We found no pleasure more in these 
 When bullets fell in showers. 
 
 " For men whose robes are dashed with blood, 
 What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs, 
 
 Stained with the torturing interlude 
 
 That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers, 
 In old days harsh and rude ? 
 
 " For men whose lips are blanched and white, 
 With aching wounds and torturing thirst, 
 
 What charm in canvas shot with light, 
 And pale with faces cleft and curst, 
 Past life and life's delight ? " 
 
 And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive 
 power, his aptitude for still-life and land- 
 scape, is unmistakably vivid and sound. 
 Take, for an instance, this description of 
 high-northern summer: 
 
 "The ice-white mountains clustered all around us, 
 But artic summer blossomed at our feet ; 
 
 The perfume of the creeping sallows found us, 
 The cranberry-flowers were sweet.
 
 the "Guardian" 155 
 
 " Below us through the valley crept a river, 
 Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay ; 
 
 Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour 
 The mountain snows away. 
 
 " There is no night-time in the northern summer, 
 But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep, 
 
 And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer, 
 Red sunrise, smites the deep. 
 
 " But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser 
 Across the peaks against the golden sky, 
 
 And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser, 
 And raised their tender cry, 
 
 "And wandered downward to the Lap-men's 
 dwelling, 
 
 We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent, 
 And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling, 
 
 Our homeward steps we bent." 
 
 "Sunshine before Sunrise!" There's a 
 novelty in that, for poetic use at least, so 
 far as we know, though we remember one 
 fine paragraph about it in"SartorResartus." 
 The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however, 
 had never seen what he describes : not so 
 Mr.Gosse,whoseacquaintance with northern 
 lands and northern literature is special. 
 We have indeed picked out those stanzas
 
 156 Essays from 
 
 from a quiet personal record of certain 
 amorous hours of early youth in that quaint 
 arctic land, Mr. Gosse's description of which, 
 like his pretty poem on Liibeck, made one 
 think that what the accomplished group of 
 poets to which he belongs requires is, above 
 all, novelty of motive, of subject. 
 
 He takes, indeed, the old themes, and 
 manages them better than their old masters, 
 with more delicate cadences, more delicate 
 transitions of though t,throiighlongdwelling 
 on earlier practice. He seems to possess 
 complete command of the technique of 
 poetry every form of what may be called 
 skill of Jiand in it ; and what marks in him 
 the final achievement of poetic scholarship 
 is the perfect balance his work presents of 
 so many and varied effects, as regards both 
 matter and form. The memories of a large 
 range of poetic reading are blent into one 
 methodical music so perfectly that at times 
 the notes seem almost simple. Sounding 
 almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, 
 he has, perhaps as a matter of course, some 
 of the faults also, the " spasmodic " and
 
 the " Guardian" 157 
 
 other lapses, which from age to age, in 
 successive changes of taste, have been the 
 " defects " of excellent good " qualities." 
 He is certainly not the 
 
 " Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing," 
 
 as he says of the white-throat on the tulip- 
 tree, 
 
 " Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song." 
 
 In effect, a large compass of beautiful 
 thought and expression, from poetry old 
 and new, have become to him matter 
 malleable anew for a further and finer 
 reach of literary art. And with the perfect 
 grace of an intaglio, he shows, as in truth 
 the minute intaglio may do, the faculty of 
 structure, the logic of poetry. " The New 
 Endymion " is a good instance of such 
 sustained power. Poetic scholar ! If we 
 must reserve the sacred name of " poet " to 
 a very small number, that humbler but 
 perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably 
 to Mr. Gosse. His work is like exquisite 
 modern Latin verse, into the academic 
 shape of which, discreet and coy, comes a
 
 158 Essays from 
 
 sincere, deeply felt consciousness of modern 
 life, of the modern world as it is. His 
 poetry, according with the best intellectual 
 instincts of our critical age,is as pointed out 
 recently by a clever writer in the " Nine- 
 teenth Century," itself a kind of exquisite, 
 finally revised criticism. 
 
 Not that he fails in originality ; only, the 
 graces, inborn certainly, but so carefully 
 educated, strike one more. The sense of 
 his originality comes to one as but an after- 
 thought ; and certainly one sign of his 
 vocation is that he has made no conscious 
 effort to be original. In his beautiful 
 opening poem of the " White-throat," 
 giving his book its key-note, he seems, in- 
 deed, to accept that position, reasons on 
 and justifies it. Yet there is a clear note 
 of originality (so it seems to us) in the 
 peculiar charm of his strictly personal 
 compositions ; and, generally, in such 
 touches as he gives us of the soul, the life, 
 of the nineteenth century. Far greater, 
 we think, than the charm of poems strictly 
 classic in interest, such as the " Praise of
 
 the " Guardian'' 159 
 
 Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the 
 charm of those pieces in which, so to 
 speak, he transforms, by a kind of colour- 
 change, classic forms and associations into 
 those say! of Thames-side pieces which, 
 though in manner or subject promising a 
 classic entertainment, almost unaware 
 bring you home. No ! after all, it is not 
 imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, 
 but the present world about us, though 
 mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for 
 the land, the age, of Sappho, of Theo- 
 critus : 
 
 " There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here, 
 But can your heart forget the Christmas rose, 
 The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear ? " 
 
 Quite congruously with the placid, 
 erudite, quality of his culture, although, 
 like other poets, he sings much of youth, 
 he is often most successful in the forecast, 
 the expression, of the humours, the con- 
 siderations, that in truth are more proper 
 to old age : 
 
 " When age comes by and lays his frosty hands 
 So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware
 
 1 60 Essays from 
 
 Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear, 
 I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands. 
 When time has bound these limbs of mine with 
 
 bands, 
 
 And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair, 
 May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair 
 Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands. 
 
 " As silent rivers into silent lakes, 
 
 Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks, 
 
 Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came, 
 So may my life, and calmly burn away, 
 As ceases in a lamp at break of day 
 
 The flagrant remnant of memorial flame." 
 
 Euthanasia! Yet Mr. Gosse,with all his 
 accomplishment, is still a young man. His 
 youthful confidence in the perpetuity of 
 poetry, of the poetical interests in life, 
 creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be, 
 is, we think, a token, though certainly an 
 unconscious token, of the spontaneous 
 originality of his muse. For a writer of 
 his peculiar philosophic tenets, at all 
 events, the world itself, in truth, must seem 
 irretrievably old or even decadent. 
 
 Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem 
 with Mr. Gosse to be also returning to the
 
 the " Guardian' 161 
 
 thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its 
 youth in Greece, in Italy : 
 
 " Nor seems it strange indeed 
 
 To hold the happy creed 
 That all fair things that bloom and die 
 Have conscious life as well as I. 
 
 " Then let me joy to be 
 
 Alive with bird and tree, 
 And have no haughtier aim than this, 
 To be a partner in their bliss." 
 
 Convinced, eloquent, again andagain the 
 notes of Epicurean philosophy fall almost 
 unconsciously from his lips. With poetry 
 at hand, he appears to feel no misgivings. 
 A large faith he might seem to have in 
 what is called " natural optimism," the 
 beauty and benignity of nature, if let alone, 
 in her mechanical round of changes with 
 man and beast and flower. Her method, 
 however,certainly involves forgetfulness for 
 the individual ; and to this, to the prospect 
 of oblivion, poetry, too, may help to brace 
 us, if, unlike so genial and cheerful a poet 
 as Mr. Gosse, we need bracing thereto : 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Essays from 
 
 " Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go 
 
 Between me and the sunset, footing slow; 
 My spirit, as an uninvited guest, 
 Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim, 
 May stir their hearts and mine with common flame, 
 
 Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul ? 
 I know not, care not, for I deem no shame 
 To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same, 
 Myself, as these, one atom in the whole." 
 
 That is from one of those half-Greek, half- 
 English idylls, reminding one of Frederick 
 Walker's " Ploughman," of Mason's "Even- 
 ing Hymn," in which Mr. Gosse is at his 
 best. A favourite motive, he has treated 
 it even more melodiously in " Lying in the 
 Grass : " 
 
 " I do not hunger for a well-stored mind, 
 I only wish to live my life, and find 
 My heart in unison with all mankind. 
 
 " My life is like the single dewy star 
 
 That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar, 
 
 A microcosm where all things living are. 
 
 " And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death 
 Should come behind and take away my breath, 
 I should not rise as one who sorroweth ; 
 
 " For I should pass, but all the world would be 
 
 Full of desire and young delight and glee, 
 
 And why should men be sad through loss of me ?
 
 the " Guardian" 163 
 
 " The light is flying; in the silver-blue 
 
 The young moon shines from her bright window 
 
 through : 
 The mowers are all gone, and I go too." 
 
 A vein of thought as modern as it is old ! 
 More not less depressing, certainly, to 
 our over-meditative, susceptible, nervous, 
 modern age, than to that antiquity which 
 was indeed the genial youth of the world, 
 but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, 
 it is the sum of what Mr. Gosse has to tell 
 us of the experience of life. Or is it, after 
 all, to quote him once more, that beyond 
 those ever-recurring pagan misgivings, 
 those pale pagan consolations, our genera- 
 tion feels yet cannot adequately express 
 
 " The passion and the stress 
 Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be 
 Enshrined in any melody she knows " ?
 
 PRINTED BY THE THURSTON PRINT 
 EXCHANGE STREET, PORTLAND, MAINE, U. S. A.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES 
 
 COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below. 
 
 May 17
 
 UCLA-College L(brar 
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PR 
 511 
 P27e 
 1897 
 
 A 001 147204