THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT
 
 <fcition 
 
 THE WRITINGS OF 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 IN PROSE AND POETRY 
 VOLUME IV
 
 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 IV. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 <fe iitof rs'ide press, amfcnt>ge
 
 Copyright, 1871, 1876, 1890, 
 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Copyright, 1899, 
 BY MABEL LOWELL BURNETT. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. 8. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 00 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 POPE ,. . . 1 
 
 MILTON ..,......58 
 
 DANTE ....... 118 
 
 SPENSEK ..*.... . 265 
 
 WOBDSWOKTH . , . 854 
 
 .O60161
 
 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 POPE 
 
 1871 
 
 IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton's 
 nephews, published his Theatrum Poetarum. In 
 his Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt 
 that he reflected the aesthetic principles and liter 
 ary judgments of his now illustrious uncle, who had 
 died in obscurity the year before. 1 The great poet 
 who gave to English blank verse the grandeur and 
 compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems 
 kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shake 
 speare, died with no foretaste, and yet we may 
 believe as confident as ever, of that " immortality 
 of fame " which he tells his friend Diodati he was 
 " meditating with the help of Heaven " in his 
 youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who 
 doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps per 
 sonally knew Jonson, 2 lived to see that false school 
 of writers whom he qualified as " good rhymists, 
 but no poets," at once the idols and the victims of 
 the taste they had corrupted. As he saw, not with- 
 
 1 This was Thomas Warton's opinion. 
 
 2 Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and 
 twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Flet 
 cher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died.
 
 2 POPE 
 
 out scorn, how they found universal hearing, while 
 he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he 
 ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of 
 Eve ? It is not impossible ; but however that may 
 be, he sowed in his nephew's book the dragon's 
 teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of 
 a century and a half, was to end in the expulsion 
 of the usurping dynasty and the restoration of the 
 ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on 
 the grace of God. In the following passage surely 
 the voice is Milton's, though the hand be that of 
 Phillips : " Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, 
 even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are 
 one thing ; true native poetry is another, in which 
 there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, 
 the most learned and judicious in other arts do not 
 perfectly apprehend ; much less is it attainable by 
 any art or study." The man who speaks of ele 
 gancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was 
 not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years 
 before had said that " decorum " (meaning a higher 
 or organic unity) was " the grand masterpiece to 
 observe " in poetry. 1 
 
 It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has 
 remarked) that Joseph Warton bases his classifi 
 cation of poets in the dedication to Young of the first 
 volume of his essay on the Genius and Writings of 
 Pope, published in 1756. That was the earliest pub 
 lic and official declaration of war against the reign 
 ing mode, though private hostilities and reprisals had 
 been going on for some time. Addison's panegyric 
 1 In his Tractate on Education.
 
 POPE 8 
 
 of Milton in the Spectator was a criticism, not the 
 less damaging because indirect, of the superficial 
 poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old bal 
 lads condemned by innuendo the artificial elabora 
 tion of the drawing-room pastoral by contrasting it 
 with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself inca 
 pable of being natural except in prose, he had an in 
 stinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as 
 that of Gray. Thomson's " Winter " (1726) was a 
 direct protest against the literature of Good Society, 
 going as it did to prove that the noblest society 
 was that of one's own mind heightened by the 
 contemplation of outward nature. What Thomson's 
 poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his 
 having modelled his two principal poems on Milton 
 and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in the 
 " Seasons," and in the " Castle of Indolence " reject 
 ing the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came 
 Akenside's " Pleasures of Imagination," whose very 
 title, like a guide-post, points away from the level 
 highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and 
 less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and 
 unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler 
 births, and without it the " Lines written at Tintern 
 Abbey " might never have been. Three years later 
 Collins printed his little volume of Odes, advocat 
 ing in theory and exemplifying in practice the nat 
 ural supremacy of the imagination (though he called 
 it by its older name of fancy) as a test to distin 
 guish poetry from verse-making. The whole Roman 
 tic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistaka 
 bly foreshadowed, lies already in the " Ode on the
 
 4 POPE 
 
 Superstitions of the Highlands." He was the first 
 to bring back into poetry something of the antique 
 fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of being 
 classically elegant without being pedantically cold. 
 A skilled lover of music, 1 he rose from the general 
 sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had 
 been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own 
 words, 
 
 " The force of energy is found, 
 And the sense rises on the wings of sound." 
 
 But beside his own direct services in the reforma 
 tion of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt 
 as the inspirer of Gray, whose " Progress of Poesy," 
 in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies 
 all other English lyrics like an eagle. In spite of 
 the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with 
 the continuous hum of the popular' hurdy-gurdy, 
 it was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that 
 more than anything else called men back to the 
 legitimate standard. 2 Another poet, Dyer, whose 
 
 * Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony, 
 were all musicians. 
 
 2 Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, 
 Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition 
 about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation 
 of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray's tune in 
 his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied mod 
 ulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, 
 his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the 
 suggestion of one of his own finest lines, 
 
 (" The light that never was on land or sea,") 
 was due to Gray's 
 
 " Orient hues unborrowed of the sun." 
 I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray's
 
 POPE 5 
 
 " Fleece " was published in 1753, both in the choice 
 of his subject and his treatment of it gives further 
 proof of the tendency among the younger genera 
 tion to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly 
 enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though 
 there are also traces of a careful study of Milton. 
 Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his 
 renown, the acknowledged monarch of letters, as 
 supreme as Voltaire when the excitement and ex 
 posure of his coronation-ceremonies at Paris has 
 tened his end a generation later. His fame, like 
 Voltaire's, was European, and the style which he 
 had carried to perfection was paramount through 
 out the cultivated world. The new edition of the 
 
 Sonnet on the Death of West, which Wordsworth condemns as of 
 no value, the second 
 
 " And reddening Phosbus lifts his golden fires " 
 is one of Gray's happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects 
 greater than either of them : 
 
 " Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte 
 Cum coeptat natura." 
 
 Lucret., iv. 404, 405. 
 
 Gray's taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of 
 pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, 
 he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only 
 the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved 
 solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was 
 the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the plea 
 sure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses 
 a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of " the pure and power 
 ful minds " who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the 
 discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Wai- 
 pole : ' ' Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost 
 any of our number, but rough and injudicious." Dyer has one fine 
 verse, 
 
 " On the dark level of adversity."
 
 6 POPE 
 
 " Dunciad," with the Fourth Book added, pub 
 lished the year before his death, though the sub 
 stitution of Gibber for Theobald made the poem 
 incoherent, had yet increased his reputation and 
 confirmed the sway of the school whose recognized 
 head he was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lu 
 cidity of its wit, and the resounding, if somewhat 
 uniform, march of its numbers. He had been 
 translated into other languages living and dead. 
 Voltaire had long before pronounced him " the 
 best poet of England, and at present of all the 
 world." 1 It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, 
 and technical skill, of the ease that comes of prac 
 tice, not of the fulness of original power. And 
 yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very plen 
 itude of his power, there was already a widespread 
 discontent, a feeling that what " comes nearest," 
 as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from 
 giving those profounder and incalculable satisfac 
 tions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A 
 movement was gathering strength which prompted 
 
 " The age to quit their clogs 
 By the known rules of ancient liberty." 
 
 Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms 
 of a similar reaction began to show themselves on 
 the Continent, notably in the translation of Milton 
 (1732) and the publication of the Nibelungen Lied 
 (1757) by Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson 
 in France. Was it possible, then, that there was 
 
 1 MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of 
 Pope, vol. iv. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. I do 
 not find it in Voltaire's Correspondence.
 
 POPE 1 
 
 anything better than good sense, elegant diction, 
 and the highest polish of style ? Could there be 
 an intellectual appetite which antithesis failed to 
 satisfy ? If the horse would only have faith enough 
 in his green spectacles, surely the straw would ac 
 quire, not only the flavor, but the nutritious proper 
 ties of fresh grass. The horse was foolish enough 
 to starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising 
 how patiently it will go on, for generation after 
 generation, transmuting dry stubble into verdure 
 in this fashion. 
 
 The school which Boileau founded was critical 
 and not creative. It was limited, not only in its 
 essence, but by the capabilities of the French lan 
 guage and by the natural bent of the French mind, 
 which finds a predominant satisfaction in phrases 
 if elegantly turned, and can make a despotism, po 
 litical or aesthetic, palatable with the pepper of 
 epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did what his 
 armies failed to do. It overran and subjugated 
 Europe. It struck the literature of imagination 
 with palsy, and it is droll enough to see Voltaire, 
 after he had got some knowledge of Shakespeare, 
 continually endeavoring to reassure himself about 
 the poetry of the grand siecle, and all the time 
 asking himself, " Why, in the name of all the gods 
 at once, is this not the real thing ? " He seems to 
 have felt that there was a dreadful mistake some 
 where, when poetry must be called upon to prove 
 itself inspired, above all when it must demonstrate 
 that it is interesting, all appearances to the con 
 trary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to
 
 8 POPE 
 
 Voltaire, is the tenth Muse ; but how if there were 
 difficulty in reading as well as writing? It was 
 something, at any rate, which an increasing number 
 of persons were perverse enough to feel in attempt 
 ing the productions of a pseudo-classicism, the clas 
 sicism of red heels and periwigs. Even poor old 
 Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of muddled 
 notion that artifice was not precisely art, that there 
 were depths in human nature which the most per 
 fectly manufactured line of five feet could not 
 sound, and passionate elations that could not be 
 tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The 
 satisfactions of a conventional taste were very well 
 in their own way, but were they, after all, the high 
 est of which men were capable who had obscurely 
 divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet, 
 Lear, and Othello upon the stage ? Was not 
 poetry, then, something which delivered us from 
 the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely recon 
 ciling us with it ? 
 
 A century earlier the school of the cultists had 
 established a dominion, ephemeral, as it soon ap 
 peared, but absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas, 
 who may, perhaps, as fairly as any, lay claim to its 
 paternity, 1 had been called divine, and similar hon 
 ors had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and 
 Marini, who were in the strictest sense contempo 
 raneous. The infection of mere fashion will hardly 
 
 1 Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman 
 de la Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy ; 
 but in Dn Bartas the research of effect not seldom subjugates the 
 thought as well as the phrase.
 
 POPE 9 
 
 account satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden and so 
 widely extended. It may well be suspected that 
 there was some latent cause, something at work 
 more potent than the fascinating mannerism of 
 any single author in the rapid and almost simul 
 taneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. 
 It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, 
 men whose native tongues had not yet attained the 
 precision and grace only to be acquired by long 
 literary usage, should have learned from a study of 
 the Latin poets to value the form above the sub 
 stance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring prop 
 erty which belongs to them only when they catch 
 life and meaning from profound thought or power 
 ful emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression 
 at the expense of everything else, though its ex 
 cesses were fatal to the innovators who preached 
 and practised it, may not have been without good 
 results in refining language and fitting it for the 
 higher uses to which it was destined. The cultists 
 went down before the implacable good sense of 
 French criticism, but the defect of this criticism 
 was that it ignored imagination altogether, and 
 sent Nature about her business as an impertinent 
 baggage whose household loom competed unlaw 
 fully with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely 
 uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. 
 There is more than a fanciful analogy between the 
 style which Pope brought into vogue and that 
 which for a time bewitched all ears in the latter 
 half of the sixteenth century. As the master had 
 made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low,
 
 10 POPE 
 
 so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was 
 common. This they contrived by the ready expe 
 dient of the periphrasis. They called everything 
 something else. A boot with them was 
 
 " The fining leather that encased the limb " ; 
 
 coffee became 
 
 " The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown " ; 
 
 and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal 
 christening of proper names. Two in every verse, 
 one to balance the other, was the smallest allow 
 ance. Here are four successive verses from " The 
 Vanity of Human Wishes " : 
 
 " The encumbered oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast 
 Through purple billows and & floating host. 
 The bold Bavarian in a luckless hoar 
 Tries the dread summits of Ccesarian power." 
 
 This fashion perished also by its own excess, but 
 the criticism which laid at the door of the master 
 all the faults of his pupils was unjust. It was de 
 fective, moreover, in overlooking how much of what 
 we call natural is an artificial product, above all in 
 forgetting that Pope had one of the prime qualities 
 of a great poet in exactly answering the intellect 
 ual needs of the age in which he lived, and in 
 reflecting its lineaments. He did in some not in 
 adequate sense hold the mirror up to nature. His 
 poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Words 
 worth; it is not in sympathy with the higher 
 moods of the mind ; yet it continues entertaining, 
 iu spite of all changes of mode. It was a mirror in 
 a drawing-room, but it gave back a faithful image
 
 POPE 11 
 
 of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, and 
 intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way 
 as the heroes of Homer in theirs. 
 
 For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini 
 and his sect, circumstances had prepared the way. 
 English literature for half a century after the Res 
 toration showed the marks both of a moral reaction 
 and of an artistic vassalage to France. From the 
 compulsory saintship and cropped hair of the Puri 
 tans men rushed or sneaked, as their temperaments 
 dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality and a 
 wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had brought 
 back with him from exile French manners, French 
 morals, and above all French taste. Misfortune 
 makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the 
 king so ; and this, at a time when court patronage 
 was the main sinew of authorship, was fatal to the 
 higher qualities of literature. That Charles should 
 have preferred the stately decorums of the French 
 school, and should have mistaken its polished man 
 nerism for style, was natural enough. But there 
 was something also in the texture of the average 
 British mind which prepared it for this subjuga 
 tion from the other side of the Channel. No ob 
 server of men can have failed to notice the clumsy 
 respect which the understanding pays to elegance 
 of manner and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward 
 sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an 
 accomplished worldliness. The code of society is 
 stronger with most persons than that of Sinai, and 
 many a man who would not scruple to thrust his 
 fingers in his neighbor's pocket would forego green
 
 12 POPE 
 
 peas rather than use his knife as a shovel. The 
 submission with which the greater number surren 
 der their natural likings for the acquired taste of 
 what for the moment is called the World is a highly 
 curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of 
 originality, is the main safeguard of society and 
 nurse of civility. Any one who has witnessed the 
 torments of an honest citizen in a foreign gallery 
 before some hideous martyrdom which he feels it 
 his duty to admire, though it be hateful to him as 
 nightmare, may well doubt whether the gridiron of 
 the saint were hotter than that of the sinner. It 
 is only a great mind or a strong character that 
 knows how to respect its own provincialism and 
 can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewil 
 dered clown with his " Am I Giles ? or am I not ? " 
 was but a type of the average man who finds him 
 self uniformed, drilled, and keeping step, whether 
 he will or no, with the company into which destiny 
 or chance has drafted him, and which is marching 
 him inexorably away from everything that made 
 him comfortable. 
 
 The insularity of England, while it fostered pride 
 and reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridi 
 cule which haunts^pride like an evil genius. " The 
 English," says Barclay, writing half a century be 
 fore the Restoration, " have for the most part 
 grave minds and withdrawn, as it were, into them 
 selves for counsel ; they wonderfully admire them 
 selves and the manners, genius, and spirit of their 
 own nation. In salutation or in writing they en 
 dure not (unless haply imbued with foreign man
 
 POPE 13 
 
 ners) to descend to those words of imaginary ser 
 vitude which the refinement (blandities) of ages 
 hath invented." 1 Yet their fondness of foreign 
 fashions had long been the butt of native satirists. 
 Every one remembers Portia's merry picture of the 
 English lord : " How oddly he is suited ! I think 
 he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in 
 France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior 
 everywhere." But while she laughs at his bun 
 gling efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in ex 
 ternals, she hints at the persistency of his inward 
 Anglicism : " He hath neither Latin, French, nor 
 Italian." In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon 
 mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust 
 of itself, which it betrays either in an affectation 
 of burly contempt or in a pretence of admiration 
 equally insincere. The young lords who were to 
 make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found 
 in Paris an elegance beside which the homely blunt- 
 ness of native manners seemed rustic and under 
 bred. They frequented a theatre where propriety 
 was absolute upon the stage, though license had its 
 full swing behind the scenes. They brought home 
 with them to England debauched morals and that 
 urbane discipline of manners whicn is so agreeable 
 a substitute for discipline of mind. The word 
 " genteel " came back with them, an outward symp 
 tom of the inward change. In the last generation, 
 the men whose great aim was success in the Other 
 World had wrought a political revolution ; now, 
 those whose ideal was prosperity in This World 
 1 Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France.
 
 14 POPE 
 
 were to have their turn and to accomplish with 
 their lighter weapons as great a change. Before 
 the end of the seventeenth century John Bull was 
 pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way, 
 that he had been vulgar, and especially that his 
 efforts in literature showed marks of native vigor, 
 indeed, but of a vigor clownish and uncouth. He 
 began to be ashamed of the provincialism which 
 had given strength, if also something of limitation, 
 to his character. 
 
 Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing 
 the life out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso 
 of the Duchess of York, expresses the prevailing 
 belief as regarded poetry in the prologue to his 
 " improvement " of the " Maid's Tragedy " of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the play rea 
 sonable, as it was called, and there is a pleasant 
 satire in the fact that it was refused a license be 
 cause there was an immoral king in it. On the 
 throne, to be sure, but on the stage ! Forbid it, 
 decency ! 
 
 " Above our neighbors' our conceptions are, 
 But faultless writing is the effect of care ; 
 Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste, 
 Polished like marble, would like marble last. 
 
 " Were we but less indulgent to our fau'ts, 
 And patience had to cultivate our thoughts, 
 Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage 
 Would honor this than did the Grecian stage. " 
 
 It is a curious comment on these verses in favor 
 of careful writing, that Waller should have failed 
 even to express his own meaning either clearly or
 
 POPE 15 
 
 with propriety. He talks of "cultivating our 
 thoughts," when he means " pruning our style ' r ; 
 he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any 
 rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with per 
 fect equanimity to tell us that a nobler " rage " 
 (that is, madness) than that of Greece would fol 
 low the horticultural devices he recommends. It 
 never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is 
 the substance of what you polish, and not the polish 
 itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough- 
 and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to 
 Congreve on the " Double Dealer." He begins by 
 stating the received theory about the improvement 
 of English literature under the new regime, but 
 the thin ice of sophistry over which Waller had 
 glided smoothly gives way under his greater weight, 
 and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware. 
 
 " Well, then, the promised hour has come at last, 
 The present age in wit obscures the past ; 
 Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, 
 Conquering with force of arm 1 and dint of wit. 
 Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ; 
 And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood ; 
 Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, 
 With rules of husbandry the rankness cured, 
 Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude, 
 And boisterous English wit with art endued ; 
 Our age was cultivated thus at length, 
 But what we gained in skill we lost in strength ; 
 Our builders were with want of genius curst, 
 The second temple was not like the first." 
 
 There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of 
 
 1 Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to 
 correspond with dint, which he used in its old meaning' of a down 
 right blow.
 
 16 POPE 
 
 Waller's verse in the half -scornful emphasis which 
 Dryden lays on " cultivated." Perhaps he was at 
 first led to give greater weight to correctness and 
 to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a conscious 
 ness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and ex 
 travagance. But he afterwards became convinced 
 that the heightening of discourse by passion was a 
 very different thing from the exaggeration which 
 heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like 
 beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by 
 his powerful example, by the charm of his verse 
 which combines vigor and fluency in a measure 
 perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, 
 and above all because it is never long before the 
 sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through 
 the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges 
 over which his thought clambers like an unpruned 
 vine, Dryden, one of the most truly English of 
 English authors, did more than all others com 
 bined to bring about the triumphs of French stand 
 ards in taste and French principles in criticism. 
 But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel 
 happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who 
 would go back if he could to the camp where he 
 naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more 
 French words, I believe, were directly transplanted 
 into our language than in the century and a half 
 since. What was of more consequence, French 
 ideas came with them, shaping the form, and 
 through that modifying the spirit, of our literature. 
 Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the 
 theories of art which had been inherited as tradi-
 
 POPE 17 
 
 tlons of classicism from the preceding generation. 
 He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, 
 gives us a very good notion of the tone which was 
 prevalent there in his time, an English version of 
 the criticism imported from France. He tells us 
 that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who 
 had written a reasonable tragedy. And in spite 
 of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy 
 pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing 
 sound judgment here and there, this was the opin 
 ion of most persons at that day, except, it may be 
 suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison 
 himself. Voltaire says of the English tragedians, 
 and it will be noticed that he is only putting, 
 in another way, the opinion of Dryden, " Their 
 productions, almost all barbarous, without polish, 
 order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in 
 the midst of their night ; ... it seems sometimes 
 that nature is not made in England as it is else 
 where." Eh bien, the inference is that we must 
 try and make it so ! The world must be uniform 
 in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so 
 becoming as the one we have invented in Paris ? 
 It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played 
 master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre 
 Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other 
 kind of nature made a profounder impression on 
 them than quite pleased him. So he turned about 
 presently and called his whilome protege a buffoon. 
 The condition of the English mind at the close 
 of the seventeenth century was such as to make 
 it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which
 
 16 POPE 
 
 Waller's verse in the half -scornful emphasis which 
 Dry den lays on " cultivated." Perhaps he was at 
 first led to give greater weight to correctness and 
 to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a conscious 
 ness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and ex 
 travagance. But he afterwards became convinced 
 that the heightening of discourse by passion was a 
 very different thing from the exaggeration which 
 heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like 
 beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by 
 his powerful example, by the charm of his verse 
 which combines vigor and fluency in a measure 
 perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, 
 and above all because it is never long before the 
 sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through 
 the clouds of rhetoric, and gilds the clipped hedges 
 over which his thought clambers like an unpruned 
 vine, Dryden, one of the most truly English of 
 English authors, did more than all others com 
 bined to bring about the triumphs of French stand 
 ards in taste and French principles in criticism. 
 But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel 
 happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who 
 would go back if he could to the camp where he 
 naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more 
 French words, I believe, were directly transplanted 
 into our language than in the century and a half 
 since. What was of more consequence, French 
 ideas came with them, shaping the form, and 
 through that modifying the spirit, of our literature. 
 Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the 
 theories of art which had been inherited as tradi-
 
 POPE 17 
 
 tions of classicism from the preceding generation. 
 He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, 
 gives us a very good notion of the tone which was 
 prevalent there in his time, an English version of 
 the criticism imported from France. He tells us 
 that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who 
 had written a reasonable tragedy. And in spite 
 of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy 
 pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing 
 sound judgment here and there, this was the opin 
 ion of most persons at that day, except, it may be 
 suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison 
 himself. Voltaire says of the English tragedians, 
 and it will be noticed that he is only putting, 
 in another way, the opinion of Dryden, " Their 
 productions, almost all barbarous, without polish, 
 order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in 
 the midst of their night ; ... it seems sometimes 
 that nature is not made in England as it is else 
 where." Eh bien, the inference is that we must 
 try and make it so ! The world must be uniform 
 in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so 
 becoming as the one we have invented in Paris ? 
 It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played 
 master of ceremonies to introduce the bizarre 
 Shakespeare among his countrymen, that other 
 kind of nature made a profounder impression on 
 them than quite pleased him. So he turned about 
 presently and called his whilome protege a buffoon. 
 The condition of the English mind at the close 
 of the seventeenth century was such as to make 
 it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which
 
 20 POPE 
 
 stronger in perceptive and analytic than in imagi 
 native qualities, loving precision, grace, and finesse, 
 prone to attribute an almost magical power to the 
 scientific regulation whether of politics or reli 
 gion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant 
 arts of society to as great perfection as was pos 
 sible by the a priori method. Its ideal in litera 
 ture was to conjure passion within the magic circle 
 of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of 
 careless ease and gayety of thought with intellect 
 ual exactness of statement. The eternal watchful 
 ness of a wit that never slept had made it distrust- 
 fid of the natural emotions and the unconventional 
 expression of them, and its first question about a 
 sentiment was, Will it be safe? about a phrase, 
 Will it pass with the Academy ? The effect of its 
 example on English literature would appear chiefly 
 in neatness and facility of turn, in point and epi 
 grammatic compactness of phrase, and these in con 
 veying conventional sentiments and emotions, in 
 appealing to good society rather than to human 
 nature.. Its influence would be greatest where its 
 success had been most marked, in what was called 
 moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, 
 and in which satire, with its avenging scourge, took 
 the place of that profounder art whose office it was 
 to purify, not the manners, but the source of them 
 in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake of 
 the whole school of French criticism, it seems to 
 me, lay in its tendency to confound what was com 
 mon with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive def 
 erence to authority at the expense of all free 
 movement of the mind.
 
 POPE 21 
 
 There are certain defects of taste which correct 
 themselves by their own extravagance. Language, 
 I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the charm 
 of some master of it, like Milton, than by any 
 amount of precept. The influence of second-rate 
 writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true style, 
 the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is 
 always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in 
 whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed 
 when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, 
 could write, 
 
 ' ' My passion has no April in her eyes : 
 I cannot spend in mists ; I cannot mizzle ; 
 My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 
 Slight drops." l 
 
 Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines 
 itself to its own rightful province of the proprie 
 ties, but when it attempts to correct those profound 
 instincts out of whose judgments the higher princi 
 ples of aesthetics have been formulated, its success 
 is a disaster. During the era when the French 
 theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline 
 from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, 
 from metaphor, which fuses image and thought in 
 one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from 
 the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the 
 
 1 Elegie on Doctor Wilson, But if Quarles had been led astray 
 by the vices of Donne's manner, he had good company in Herbert 
 and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of 
 simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. In the same 
 poem he says, 
 
 " Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 
 In Abram's bosom, in the sacred down 
 Of soft eternity."
 
 22 POPE 
 
 parochial by-laws of etiquette. The imagination 
 instinctively Platonizes, and it is the essence of 
 poetry that it should be unconventional, that the 
 soul of it should subordinate the outward parts ; 
 while the artificial method proceeds from a princi 
 ple the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the 
 form. 
 
 Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the 
 epilogue to the " Maid's Tragedy " : 
 
 " Nor is 't less strange such mighty wits as those 
 Should use a style in tragedy like prose ; 
 Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage, 
 Should speak their virtue and describe their rage." 
 
 That it should be beneath the dignity of princes 
 to speak in anything but rhyme can only be paral 
 leled by Mr. Puff's law that a heroine can go deco 
 rously mad only in white satin. Waller, I sup 
 pose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be 
 positive, uses " describe " in its Latin sense of lim 
 itation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this 
 go-cart ! Phillips touches the true point when he 
 says, " And the truth is, the use of measure alone, 
 without any rime at all, would give more scope and 
 liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly 
 be observed in rime." 1 But let us test Waller's 
 method by an example or two. His monarch made 
 reasonable, thus discourses : 
 
 " Courage our greatest failings does supply, 
 And makes all good, or handsomely we die. 
 Life is a thing of common use ; by heaven 
 As well to insects as to monarchs given ; 
 But for the crown, 't is a more sacred thing ; 
 
 1 Preface to the Theatrum.
 
 POPE 23 
 
 1 11 dying lose it, or I '11 live a king. 
 
 Come, Diphilus, we must together walk 
 
 And of a matter of importance talk." [Exeunt. 
 
 Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, 
 merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, 
 where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, 
 but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog 
 irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to re 
 mind us of the older tragic style but the exeunt at 
 the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief 
 which it brings us from his majesty's prosing give 
 it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia's reflections 
 upon suicide (or " suppressing our breath," as she 
 calls it), in the same play, will make few readers 
 regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unas 
 sisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet's soliloquy 
 on the same topic : 
 
 " 'T was in compassion of oar woe 
 That nature first made poisons grow, 
 For hopeless wretches such as I 
 Kindly providing means to die : 
 As mothers do their children keep, 
 So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. 
 The indisposed she does invite 
 To go to bed before 'tis night." 
 
 Correctness in this case is but a synonym of mo 
 notony, and words are chosen for the number of 
 their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, 
 instead of being forced upon the poet by the mean 
 ing which occupies the mind. Language becomes 
 useful for its diluting properties, rather than as 
 the medium by means of which the thought or 
 fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a
 
 24 POPE 
 
 connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few 
 verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may 
 feel fully the difference between the rude and the 
 reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of As- 
 patia's. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working 
 the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for 
 the older masters loved a picturesque background 
 and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspa- 
 tia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough : 
 
 " Do it by me, 
 
 Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
 And yon shall find all true but the wild island. 
 Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now, 
 Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind, 
 Wild as that desert ; and let all about me 
 Be teachers of my story. Do my face 
 (If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) 
 Thus, thus. Antiphila ; strive to make me look 
 Like sorrow's monument ; and the trees about me 
 Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks 
 Groan with continual surges ; and behind me 
 Make all a desolation." 
 
 What instinctive felicity of versification ! what sob 
 bing breaks and passionate repetitions are here ! 
 
 We see what the direction of the new tendency 
 was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest 
 criticism that should hold Pope responsible for the 
 narrow compass of the instrument which was his 
 legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more 
 than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune 
 by those who came after him and who had caught 
 his technical skill without his genius. The question 
 properly stated is, How much was it possible to 
 make of the material supplied by the age in which
 
 POPE 25 
 
 he lived ? and how much did he make of it ? Thus 
 far, among the great English poets who preceded 
 him, we have seen actual life represented by Chau 
 cer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by 
 Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as 
 everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of it 
 self, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, 
 was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most 
 fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of 
 intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of 
 phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a strik 
 ing instance how much success and permanence of 
 reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as 
 on native endowment. Butler asks, 
 
 " Then why should those who pick and choose 
 The best of all the best compose, 
 And join it by Mosaic art, 
 In graceful order, part to part, 
 To make the whole in beauty suit, 
 Not merit as complete repute 
 As those who, with less art and pain, 
 Can do it with their native brain ? " 
 
 Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps 
 a man as an artist is this power of finding out what 
 is " the best of all the best." 
 
 I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope 
 with diffidence. I was brought up in the old super 
 stition that he was the greatest poet that ever 
 lived ; and when I came to find that I had instincts 
 of my own, and my mind was brought in contact 
 with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of 
 poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the 
 idols I had been brought up to worship, without
 
 26 POPE 
 
 any regard to their artistic beauty, which character 
 izes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope 
 was called a master of style ? I felt, as Addison 
 says in his Freeholder when answering an argu 
 ment in favor of the Pretender because he could 
 speak English and George I. could not, " that I did 
 not wish to be tyrannized over in the best Eng 
 lish that ever was spoken." The young demand 
 thoughts that find an echo in their real and not 
 their acquired nature, and care very little about the 
 dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to 
 like the conventional, as we do olives. There was 
 a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked 
 him on principle, as old Roger Ascham seems to 
 have felt about Italy when he says, " I was once in 
 Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was 
 only nine days." 
 
 But Pope fills a very important place in the his 
 tory of English poetry, and must be studied by 
 every one who would come to a clear knowledge of 
 it. I have since read over every line that Pope 
 ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, 
 and that more than once. If I have not come to 
 the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I be 
 lieve that I am at least in a condition to allow him 
 every merit that is fairly his. I have said that 
 Pope as a literary man represents precision and 
 grace of expression; but as a poet he represents 
 something more, nothing less, namely, than one 
 of those eternal controversies of taste which will 
 last as long as the imagination and understanding 
 divide men between them. It is not a matter to be
 
 POPE 27 
 
 settled by any amount of argument or demonstra 
 tion. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, 
 Lockists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to 
 be said of the matter. 
 
 Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope 
 justice. A man brought up in sublime mountain 
 solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more 
 vast than they, walking an earth which quivered 
 with the throe of the French Revolution, the child 
 of an era of profound mental and moral movement, 
 it could not be expected that he should be in sym 
 pathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he 
 was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time 
 when the school which Pope founded had degener 
 ated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, 
 and who with their congenial critics united at once 
 to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous 
 innovation of having a soul in it. 
 
 But however it may be with poets, it is very cer 
 tain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad 
 enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature, 
 and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they 
 be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must 
 allow that the man who can produce one perfect 
 work is either a great genius or a very lucky one ; 
 and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of 
 secondary importance which. And Pope has done 
 this in the " Rape of the Lock." For wit, fancy, 
 invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. 
 I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest 
 order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would 
 choose as the companion of his best hours. There
 
 28 POPE 
 
 is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure 
 entertainment it is unmatched. There are two 
 kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said 
 to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must 
 compel its age to understand it ; the second under 
 stands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. 
 Let us find strength and inspiration in the one, 
 amusement and instruction in the other, and be 
 honestly thankful for both. 
 
 The very earliest of Pope's productions give indi 
 cations of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, 
 which afterward so eminently distinguished him. 
 The facility of expression is remarkable, and we 
 find also that perfect balance of metre, which he 
 afterward carried so far as to be wearisome. His 
 pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and 
 their publication immediately brought him into no 
 tice. The following four verses from his first pas 
 toral are quite characteristic in their antithetic 
 balance : 
 
 " You that, too wise for pride, too good for power, 
 Enjoy the glory to be great no more, 
 And carrying with you all the world can boast, 
 To all the world illustriously are lost ! " 
 
 The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that 
 future period of Pope's Correspondence with his 
 Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with dis 
 appointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising 
 delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretend 
 ing not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his 
 life, played together the solemn farce of affecting 
 indifference to the world by which it would have
 
 POPE 29 
 
 agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters 
 addressed to each other, but really intended for that 
 posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise. 
 
 In these pastorals there is an entire want of na 
 ture. For example, in that on the death of Mrs. 
 Tempest : 
 
 " Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze 
 And told in sighs to all the trembling trees ; 
 The trembling trees, in every plain and wood, 
 Her fate remunnur to the silver flood ; 
 The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 
 Swelled with new passion, and o'erflows with tears ; 
 The winds and trees and floods her death deplore, 
 Daphne, our grief ! our glory now no more ! " 
 
 All this is as perfectly professional as the mourn 
 ing of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope material 
 izes and makes too palpably objective that sympa 
 thy which our grief forces upon outward nature. 
 Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lyci- 
 das, puts our feelings in tune, as it were, and hints 
 at his own imagination as the source of this emo 
 tion in inanimate things, 
 
 " But, O the heavy change now thou art gone ! " 
 
 In "Windsor Forest" we find the same thing 
 again : 
 
 "Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, 
 There the last numbers flowed from Cowley's tongue ; 
 O early lost, what tears the river shed 
 When the sad pomp along his banks was led ! 
 His drooping swans on every note expire, 
 And on his willows hung each muse's lyre ! " 
 
 In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit 
 that, 
 
 " Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, 
 And learn of man each other to undo ' ' i
 
 30 POPE 
 
 and in the succeeding verses gives some striking 
 instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate 
 to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordi 
 nary life, which brought verse-making to such a 
 depth of absurdity in the course of the century. 
 
 " With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves 
 Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves ; 
 Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o'ershade, 
 And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade ; 
 He lifts the tube and levels with his eye, 
 Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky : 
 Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, 
 The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death ; 
 Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare, 
 They fall and leave their little lives in air." 
 
 Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler 
 was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of 
 the larks preparing their notes like a country 
 choir ! Yet even here there are admirable lines, 
 
 ' ' Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, " 
 " They fall and leave their little lives in air," 
 
 for example. 
 
 In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criticism," 
 the wit and poet become apparent. It is full of 
 clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, 
 written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur 
 some of those lines which have become proverbial ; 
 such as 
 
 " A little learning is a dangerous thing " ; 
 
 " For fools rush in where angels fear to tread " ; 
 
 " True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 
 What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." 
 
 - For each ill author is as bad a friend."
 
 POPE 81 
 
 In all of these we notice that terseness in which 
 (regard being had to his especial range of thought) 
 Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help 
 being struck also with the singular discretion which 
 the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where 
 to look for another author in whom it appeared so 
 early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind 
 and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, 
 it is still more wonderful. In his boyish corre 
 spondence with poor old Wycherley, one would 
 suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the 
 youth. Pope's understanding was no less vigorous 
 (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy 
 was lightsome and sprightly. 
 
 I come now to what in itself would be enough to 
 have immortalized him as a poet, the " Rape of the 
 Lock," in. which, indeed, he appears more purely 
 as poet than in any other of his productions. Else 
 where he has shown more force, more wit, more 
 reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic 
 combination of elegance and fancy. His genius 
 has here found its true direction, and the very 
 same artificiality, which in his pastorals was un- 
 pleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the gen 
 eral keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet 
 of man, as God made him, dealing with great pas 
 sions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet 
 of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer 
 of those motives which may be called acquired, 
 whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely 
 worldly origin. 
 
 The " Rape of the Lock " was written in Pope's
 
 82 POPE 
 
 twenty - fourth year, and the machinery of the 
 Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth, 
 a circumstance for which we can feel a more 
 unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the 
 "Dispensary." The idea was taken from that 
 entertaining book "The Count de Gabalis," in 
 which Fouque afterward found the hint for his 
 *' Undine " ; but the little sprites as they appear 
 in the poem are purely the creation of Pope's 
 fancy. 
 
 The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic 
 is out of the question in fine society. It is per 
 fectly true that almost every door we pass in the 
 street closes upon its private tragedy, but the mo 
 ment a great passion enters a man he passes at 
 once out of the artificial into the human. So long 
 as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious 
 absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the 
 only way in which the petty actions and sufferings 
 of the fine world can be epically treated, and the 
 contrast continually suggested with subjects of 
 larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes 
 no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the 
 point of the wit. The invocation is admirable : 
 
 " Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel, 
 A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle ? 
 O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored, 
 Could make a gentle belle reject a lord ? " 
 
 The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we 
 are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not 
 a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it 
 in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and
 
 POPE 33 
 
 modes of thought with which it is in comical antip 
 athy, and while it is not degraded, they are shown 
 in their triviality. The "clouded cane," as com 
 pared with the Homeric spear, indicates the differ 
 ence of scale, the lower plane of emotions and pas 
 sions. The opening of the action, too, is equally 
 good : 
 
 "Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray, 
 And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day, 
 Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake, 
 And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake ; 
 Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground, 
 And the pressed watch returned a silver sound." 
 
 The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most 
 fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is 
 Pope's peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing 
 Belinda : 
 
 " Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly, 
 The light militia of the lower sky ; 
 These, though unseen, are ever on the wing, 
 Hang o'er the box and hover round the ring. 
 As now your own our beings were of old, 
 And once enclosed in woman's beauteous mould ; 
 Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled, 
 That all her vanities at once are dead ; 
 Succeeding vanities she still regards, 
 And, though she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards. 
 For when the fair in all their pride expire, 
 To their first elements their souls retire ; 
 The sprites of fiery termagants in flame 
 Mount up and take a salamander's name ; 
 Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away 
 And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea ; 
 The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome, 
 In search of mischief still on earth to roam ; 
 The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair 
 And sport and flutter in the fields of air."
 
 84 POPE 
 
 And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened 
 is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the 
 machinery : 
 
 ** He said : when Shock, who thought she slept too long, 
 Leaped np and waked his mistress with bis tongue ; 
 'T was then, Belinda, if report say true, 
 Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux" 
 
 Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps 
 out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, 
 in describing the toilet-table, he says : 
 
 " Here files of pins extend their shining rows, 
 Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux" 
 
 Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed, 
 
 " Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, 
 And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies, 
 Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast 
 When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last ; 
 Or when rich china- vessels, fallen from high, 
 In glittering dust and painted fragments lie ! " 
 
 And so, when the conflict begins : 
 
 " Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air ; 
 Weighs the men's wits against the ladies 1 hair ; 
 The doubtful beam long nods from side to side ; 
 At length the wits mount np, the hairs subside." 
 
 But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the per 
 fect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Ex 
 cept a touch of grossness, here and there, there is 
 the most pleasing harmony in all the conceptions 
 and images. The punishments which he assigns to 
 the sylphs who neglect their duty are charmingly 
 appropriate and ingenious : 
 
 " Whatever spirit, careless of his charge, 
 His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,
 
 POPE 35 
 
 Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins; 
 Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins, 
 Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, 
 Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye ; 
 Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, 
 While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain ; 
 Or alum styptics with contracting power, 
 Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower ; 
 Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel 
 The giddy motion of the whirling wheel, 
 In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow, 
 And tremble at the sea that froths below ! " 
 
 The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll cli 
 max, is equally good : 
 
 " Methinks already I your tears survey, 
 Already hear the horrid things they say, 
 Already see you a degraded toast, 
 And all your honor in a whisper lost ! 
 How shall I then your helpless fame defend ? 
 'T will then be infamy to seem your friend I 
 And shall this prize, the inestimable prize, 
 Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes, 
 And heightened by the diamond's circling rays, 
 On that rapacious hand forever blaze ? 
 Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow, 
 And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow, 
 Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall, 
 Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all ! " 
 
 So also Belinda's account of the morning omens : 
 
 " 'T was this the morning omens seemed to tell ; 
 Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell ; 
 The tottering china shook without a wind ; 
 Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." 
 
 The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her 
 palace, where 
 
 " The dreaded East is all the wind that blows," 
 
 was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem
 
 36 POPE 
 
 more truly deserves the name of a creation than 
 anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined 
 to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is 
 wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is al 
 lowed to overstep the limitations of the subject. 
 It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of hu 
 man fancy ; whether that fancy be strictly poetical 
 or not is another matter. If we compare it with 
 the " Midsummer-night's Dream," an uncomforta 
 ble doubt is suggested. The perfection of form in 
 the " Rape of the Lock " is to me conclusive evi 
 dence that in it the natural genius of Pope found 
 fuller and freer expression than in any other of his 
 poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant pas 
 sages rather than harmonious wholes. 
 
 It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of 
 human nature, a more profound satire than Pope 
 himself ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly 
 rest upon the " Essay on Man." It has been 
 praised and admired by men of the most opposite 
 beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and 
 free-thinkers have met here on a common ground 
 of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is 
 no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of 
 inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things 
 beyond a question, that Pope was not a great 
 thinker ; and that wherever he found a thought, 
 no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so 
 clearly, and with such smoothness of versification 
 as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes's un 
 wieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore 
 of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its
 
 POPE 37 
 
 selfishness, from this Pope distilled a fragrant 
 oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his phi 
 losophy, lamps like those in the tombs of alche 
 mists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let 
 in upon them. The only positive doctrines in the 
 poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, 
 and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from 
 mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more 
 absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this 
 " Essay on Man." For example, Pope affirms ex-- 
 plicitly that instinct is something better than rea 
 son : 
 
 " See him from Nature rising slow to art, 
 To copy instinct then was reason's part ; 
 Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ; 
 Go, from the creatures thy instructions take ; 
 Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield ; 
 Learn from the birds the physic of the field ; 
 The arts of building from the bee receive ; 
 Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ; 
 Learn of the little nautilus to sail, 
 Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale." 
 
 I say nothing of the quiet way in which the gen 
 eral term " nature " is substituted for God, but 
 how unutterably void of reasonableness is the the 
 ory that Nature would have left her highest prod 
 uct, man, destitute of that instinct with which she 
 had endowed her other creatures ! As if reason 
 were not the most sublimated form of instinct. 
 The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and 
 for which he is commended, was not accuracy of 
 thought so much as of expression. And he can 
 not always even claim this merit, but only that of 
 correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have
 
 38 POPE 
 
 already quoted from the " Rape of the Lock " he 
 talks of casting shrieks to heaven, a performance 
 of some difficulty, except when cast is needed to 
 rhyme with last. 
 
 But the supposition is that in the " Essay on 
 Man " Pope did not himself know what he was 
 writing. He was only the condenser and epigram- 
 inatizer of Bolingbroke, a very fitting St. John 
 for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, we can 
 account for the contradictions by supposing that 
 he threw in some of the commonplace moralities 
 to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that 
 Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope's having 
 been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did 
 not hold. But this is hardly probable when we 
 consider the relations between them. It is giving 
 Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to 
 suppose that he did not understand the principles 
 of his intimate friend. The caution with which he 
 at first concealed the authorship would argue that 
 he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. 
 When it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he 
 gladly accepted Warburton's championship, and 
 assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived 
 to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is 
 familiar to everybody : 
 
 " Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things 
 To low ambition and the pride of kings ; 
 Let us (since life can little more supply 
 Than just to look about us and to die) 
 Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man, 
 A mighty maze, but not without a plan " ; 
 
 To expatiate o'er a mighty maze is rather loose
 
 POPE 39 
 
 writing, but the last verse, as it stood in the orig 
 inal editions, was, 
 
 " A mighty maze of walks without a plan ; " 
 
 and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opinion 
 than the verse he substituted for it. Warburton 
 is careful not to mention this variation in his notes. 
 The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its con 
 fusion of logic as it often is for ease of verse and 
 grace of expression. An instance of both occurs 
 in a passage frequently quoted : 
 
 " Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate ; 
 All but the page prescribed, their present state ; 
 From brutes what men, from men whai; spirits know, 
 Or who would suffer being here below ? 
 The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
 Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 
 Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
 And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 
 O, blindness to the future kindly given 
 That each may fill the circle meant by heaven ! 
 Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall, 
 Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, 
 And now a bubble burst, and now a world ! " 
 
 Now, if " heaven from all creatures hides the book 
 of fate," why should not the lamb " skip and play," 
 if he had the reason of man ? Why, because he 
 would then be able to read the book of fate. But 
 if man himself cannot, why, then, could the lamb 
 with the reason of man ? For, if the lamb had 
 the reason of man, the book of fate would still 
 be hidden, so far as himself was concerned. If 
 the inferences we can draw from appearances are 
 equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the know-
 
 40 POPE 
 
 ing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather 
 might be called so. There is a manifest confu 
 sion between what we know about ourselves and 
 about other people ; the whole point of the pas 
 sage being that we are always mercifully blinded 
 to our own future, however much reason we may 
 possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inele 
 gance in saying, 
 
 "Heaven, 
 
 Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall." 
 
 To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconcil 
 ing his author with Scripture, appends a note re 
 ferring to Matthew x. 29 : " Are not two sparrows 
 sold for one farthing ? and one of them shall not 
 fall to the ground without your Father." It would 
 not have been safe to have referred to the thirty- 
 first verse : " Fear ye not, therefore, ye are of more 
 value than many sparrows." 
 
 To my feeling, one of the most beautiful pas 
 sages in the whole poem is that familiar one : 
 
 " Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind 
 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, 
 His soul proud science never taught to stray 
 Far as the solar walk or milky way : 
 Yet simple Nature to his hope has given 
 Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven ; 
 Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, 
 Some happier island in the watery waste, 
 Where slaves once more their native land behold, 
 No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
 To be contents his natural desire, 
 He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire, 
 But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 
 His faithful dog shall bear him company."
 
 POPE 41 
 
 But this comes in as a corollary to what went just 
 before : 
 
 " Hope springs eternal in the human breast, 
 Mau never is but always to be blest ; 
 The soul, uneasy, and confined from home, 
 Rests and expatiates in a life to come." 
 
 Then follows immediately the passage about the 
 poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented 
 with merely being, and whose soul, therefore, is 
 an exception to the general rule. And what have 
 the " solar walk " (as he calls it) and " milky 
 way " to do with the affair ? Does our hope of 
 heaven depend on our knowledge of astronomy ? 
 Or does he mean that science and faith are neces 
 sarily hostile ? And, after being told that it is 
 the " untutored mind " of the savage which " sees 
 God in clouds and hears him in the wind," we are 
 rather surprised to find that the lesson the poet in 
 tends to teach is that 
 
 " All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul, 
 That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, 
 Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame, 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees." 
 
 t$o that we are no better off than the untutored 
 Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. War- 
 burton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off 
 the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. 
 He would have found it harder to show that the 
 acknowledgment of any divine revelation would 
 not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If 
 Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop
 
 42 POPE 
 
 takes for granted in his commentary, we must 
 deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit, 
 clearness. If he did not, we grant him clear 
 ness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a 
 man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the 
 difficulty would be, that Pope's precision of thought 
 was no match for the fluency of his verse. 
 
 Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking 
 of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter 
 what his department, will rank the highest. I 
 think there are enough indications in these letters 
 of Byron's, however, that they were written rather 
 more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The 
 rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater 
 poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron 
 cites Petrarch as an example ; yet if Petrarch had 
 put nothing more into his sonnets than execution, 
 there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would 
 be his match. But, in point of fact, the depart 
 ment chooses the man and not the man the depart 
 ment, and it has a great deal to do with our esti 
 mate of him. Is the department of Milton no 
 higher than that of Butler ? Byron took especial 
 care not to write in the style he commended. But 
 I think Pope has received quite as much credit in 
 respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely 
 execution is not confined to versification alone. 
 What can be worse than this ? 
 
 " At length Erasmus, that great, injured name^ 
 (The glory of the priesthood and the shame,) 
 Stemmed the wild torrent of a harbarous age, 
 And drove those holy vandals off the stage. ' '
 
 POPE 43 
 
 It would have been hard for Pope to have found a 
 prettier piece of confusion in any of the small 
 authors he laughed at than this image of a great, 
 injured name stemming a torrent and driving van 
 dals off the stage. And in the following verses 
 the image is helplessly confused : 
 
 " Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies, 
 Which no one looks 'in with another's eyes, 
 But, as the flatterer or dependant paint, 
 Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint." 
 
 The use of the word "applies" is perfectly un- 
 English ; and it seems that people who look in this 
 remarkable glass see their pictures and not their 
 reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the 
 sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical, 
 as where he says, in the Dunciad, 
 
 " As, one hy one, at dread Medea's strain, 
 The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain.'" 
 
 And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of 
 the verse without much regard to fitness of im 
 agery ; in the " Essay on Man," for example : 
 
 " Passions, like elements, though born to fight, 
 Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite ; 
 These 't is enough to temper and employ ; 
 But what composes man can man destroy ? 
 Suffice that Keason keep to Nature's road, 
 Subject, compound them, follow her and God. 
 Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train, 
 Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, 
 These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined, 
 Make and maintain the balance of the mind. ' ' 
 
 Here reason is represented as an apothecary com 
 pounding pills of "pleasure's smiling train" and 
 the " family of pain." And in the Moral Essays,
 
 44 POPE 
 
 " Know God and Nature only are the same ; 
 In man the judgment shoots at flying game, 
 A bird of passage, gone as soon as found, 
 Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground. " 
 
 The " judgment shooting at flying game " is an odd 
 image enough ; but I think a bird of passage, now 
 in the moon and now under ground, could be found 
 nowhere out of Goldsmith's Natural History, per 
 haps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt 
 him into saying something without basis in truth, 
 as where he ranks together " Macedonia's madman 
 and the Swede," and says that neither of them 
 " looked forward farther than his nose," a slang 
 phrase which may apply well enough to Charles 
 XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, 
 who showed himself capable of a large political 
 forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a 
 sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, 
 as where he makes " Socrates bleed." 
 
 But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his 
 Satires that Pope deserves the praise which he 
 himself desired : 
 
 " Happily to steer 
 
 Prom grave to gay, from lively to severe, 
 Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, 
 Intent to reason, or polite to please." 
 
 Here Pope must be allowed to have established a 
 style of his own, in which he is without a rival. 
 One can open upon wit and epigram at any page. 
 
 " Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns, 
 
 Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns ; 
 To ease the soul of one oppressive weight, 
 This quite an empire, that embroils a state ;
 
 POPE 45 
 
 The same adust complexion has impelled, 
 Charles to the convent, Philip to the field." 
 
 Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the in 
 variable this set off by the inevitable that, and 
 wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet 
 now and then. In the first couplet, too, the con 
 ditional " frown " would have been more elegant. 
 But taken as detached passages, how admirably the 
 different characters are drawn, so admirably that 
 half the verses have become proverbial. This of 
 Addison will bear reading again : 
 
 " Peace to all such ; but were there one whose fires 
 True genius kindles and fair fame inspires ; 
 Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
 And born to write, converse, and live with ease ; 
 Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, 
 Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne, 
 View Jiim with scornful yet with jealous eyes, 
 And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, 
 Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
 And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer ; 
 Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, 
 Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, 
 Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
 A timorous foe and a suspicious friend ; 
 Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged, 
 And so obliging that he ne'er obliged ; 
 Like Cato give his little Senate laws, 
 And sit attentive to his own applause, 
 While wits and templars every sentence raise, 
 And wonder with a foolish face of praise ; 
 Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? " 
 
 With the exception of the somewhat technical im 
 age in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire 
 of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the
 
 46 POPE 
 
 frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of 
 its kind was ever written. How applicable it was 
 to Addison I shall consider in another place. As 
 an accurate intellectual observer and describer of 
 personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in 
 English verse. 
 
 In his epistle on the characters of women, no one 
 who has ever known a noble woman, nay, I should 
 almost say no one who ever had a mother or sister, 
 will find much to please him. The climax of his 
 praise rather degrades than elevates. 
 
 " 0, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 
 Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, 
 She who can love a sister's charms, or hear 
 Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, 
 She who ne'er answers till a husband cools, 
 Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules, 
 Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, 
 Yet has her humor most when she obeys ; 
 Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will, 
 Disdains all loss of tickets or codille, 
 Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all 
 And mistress of herself, though china fall." 
 
 The last line is very witty and pointed, but con 
 sider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must 
 have had, who praises his heroine for not being 
 jealous of her daughter. Addison, in commending 
 Pope's " Essay on Criticism," says, speaking of us 
 " who live in the latter ages of the world " : " We 
 have little else to do left us but to represent the 
 common sense of mankind, in more strong, more 
 beautiful, or more uncommon lights." I think he 
 has here touched exactly the point of Pope's merit, 
 and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the
 
 POPE 47 
 
 position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of 
 Jeremy Taylor's prose sentences about the Coun 
 tess of Carbery, the lady in Milton's " Comus " : 
 " The religion of this excellent lady was of another 
 constitution : it took root downward in humility, 
 and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial 
 graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in 
 chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweet 
 ness of society. . . . And though she had the great 
 est judgment, and the greatest experience of things 
 and persons I ever yet knew in a person of her 
 youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she 
 knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of 
 herself, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all 
 the room, yet round about her station she had cast 
 a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody 
 but herself." This is poetry, though not in verse. 
 The plays of the elder dramatists are not without 
 examples of weak and vile women, but they are not 
 without noble ones either. Take these verses of 
 Chapman, for example : 
 
 " I jet no man value at a little price 
 A virtuous woman's counsel : her winged spirit 
 Is feathered oftentimes with noble words 
 And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure ; 
 The weaker body, still the stronger soul. 
 O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, 
 Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth 
 Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. 
 She gives him double forces to endure 
 And to enjoy, being one with him, 
 Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense : 
 If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short ; 
 If he lament, she melts herself in tears ; 
 If he be glad, she triumphs ; if he stir,
 
 48 POPE 
 
 She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape, 
 Himself divinely varied without change. 
 All store without her leaves a man but poor, 
 And with her poverty is exceeding store." 
 
 Pope in the characters I have read was drawing his 
 ideal woman, for he says at the end that she shall 
 be his muse. The sentiments are those of a bour 
 geois and of the back parlor, more than of the poet 
 and the muse's bower. A man's mind is known by 
 the company it keeps. 
 
 Now it is very possible that the women of Pope's 
 time were as bad as they could be ; but if God made 
 poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions 
 of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant 
 the influence of the age, but there is a sense in 
 which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven 
 from every other home, will never be an outcast 
 and a wanderer, while there is a poet's nature left, 
 will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It 
 seems to me that Pope had a sense of the neat rather 
 than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more 
 in detecting the blemish than in enjoying the charm. 
 
 However great his merit in expression, I think it 
 impossible that a true poet could have written such 
 a satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than 
 it is witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and 
 Swift himself could not have gone beyond some 
 parts of it. One's mind needs to be sprinkled with 
 some disinfecting fluid after reading it. I do not 
 remember that any other poet ever made poverty a 
 crime. And it is wholly without discrimination. 
 De Foe is set in the pillory forever ; and George
 
 POPE 49 
 
 Wither, the author of that charming poem, " Fair 
 Virtue," classed among the dunces. And was it 
 not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife 
 the finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he 
 said " that to love her was a liberal education " ? 
 
 Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is that 
 of a wit rather than of a poet. It might not be just 
 to compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shake 
 speare ; but contrast the kind of fancy shown in 
 the poem with that of Drayton's Nymphidia, for 
 example. I will give one stanza of it, describing 
 the palace of the Fairy : 
 
 " The walls of spider's kgs were made, 
 Well mortised, and finely laid : 
 (He was the master of his trade 
 It curiously that builded : ) 
 The windows of the eyes of cats, 
 And, for the roof, instead of slats 
 'T is covered with the skins of bats, 
 With moonshine that are gilded." 
 
 In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are rec 
 ognized. 
 
 Personally we know more about Pope than about 
 any of our poets. He kept no secrets about himself. 
 If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always 
 contrived to give her tail a wrench so that we might 
 know she was there. In spite of the savageness 
 of his satires, his natural disposition seems to have 
 been an amiable one, and his character as an author 
 was as purely factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson 
 appears to have suspected his sincerity ; but artifice 
 more than insincerity lay at the basis of his charac 
 ter. I think that there was very little real malice
 
 60 POPE 
 
 in him, and that his " evil was wrought from want 
 of thought." When Dennis was old and poor, he 
 wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his ben 
 efit. Except Addison, he numbered among his 
 friends the most illustrious men of his time. 
 
 The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less 
 interesting than that of any other eminent English 
 poet, except that of Southey, and their letters have 
 the same fault of being labored compositions. 
 Southey's are, on the whole, the more agreeable of 
 the two, for they inspire one (as Pope's certainly 
 do not) with a sincere respect for the character of 
 the writer. Pope's are altogether too full of the 
 proclamation of his own virtues to be pleasant read 
 ing. It is plain that they were mostly addressed 
 to the public, perhaps even to posterity. But let 
 ters, however carefully drilled to be circumspect, 
 are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave in the 
 reader's mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspec 
 tion, of an attempt to look as an eminent literary 
 character should rather than as the man really was. 
 They have the unnatural constraint of a man in 
 full dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring 
 to look his best. We never catch him, if he can 
 help it, at unawares. Among all Pope's corre 
 spondents, Swift shows in the most dignified and, 
 one is tempted to say, the most amiable light. It 
 is creditable to the Dean that the letters which 
 Pope addressed to him are by far the most simple 
 and straightforward of any that he wrote. No 
 sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin 
 without wincing. "I think, on the whole, that a
 
 POPE 51 
 
 revision of judgment would substitute " discomfort 
 ing consciousness of the public " for " insincerity " 
 in judging Pope's character by his letters. He 
 could not shake off the habits of the author, and 
 never, or almost never, in prose, acquired that 
 knack of seeming carelessness that makes Wai- 
 pole's elaborate compositions such agreeable read 
 ing. Pope would seem to have kept a common 
 place book of phrases proper to this or that occa 
 sion ; and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral 
 sentiment, nay, even sometimes a burst of passion 
 ate ardor, from one correspondent to another, with 
 the most cold-blooded impartiality. We're it not 
 for this curious economy of his, no one could read 
 his letters to Lady Wortley Montagu without a 
 conviction that they were written by a lover. In 
 deed, I think nothing short of the spretce injuria 
 formce will account for (though it will not excuse) 
 the savage vindictiveness he felt and .showed to 
 wards her. It may be suspected also that the bit 
 terness of caste added gall to his resentment. His 
 enemy wore that impenetrable armor of superior 
 rank which rendered her indifference to his shafts 
 the more provoking that it was unaffected. Even 
 for us his satire loses its sting when we reflect that 
 it is not in human nature for a woman to have had 
 two such utterly irreconcilable characters as those 
 of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel with 
 the poet. In any view of Pope's conduct in this 
 affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to de 
 grade a woman whom he had once made sacred with 
 his love. Spenser touches the right chord when he 
 says of the Rosalinde who had rejected him,
 
 52 POPE 
 
 " Not, then, to her, that scorned thing so base, 
 But to myself the blame, that lookt so high ; 
 Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant 
 To simple swain, sith her I may not love, 
 Tet that I may her honor paravant 
 And praise her worth, though far my wit above ; 
 Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 
 And long affliction which I have endured." 
 
 In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, 
 pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. He 
 vainly endeavors to show that his personalities had 
 all been written in the interests of literature and 
 morality, and from no selfish motive. But it is 
 hard to believe that Theobald would have been 
 deemed worthy of his disgustful preeminence but 
 for the manifest superiority of his edition of Shake 
 speare, or that Addison would have been so adroitly 
 disfigured unless through wounded self-love. It is 
 easy to conceive the resentful shame which Pope 
 must have felt when Addison so almost contempt 
 uously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer de 
 fence of Cato in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope 
 had done a mean thing to propitiate a man whose 
 critical judgment he dreaded ; and the great man, 
 instead of thanking him, had resented his interfer 
 ence as impertinent. In the whole portrait of At- 
 ticus one cannot help feeling that Pope's satire is 
 not founded on knowledge, but rather on what his 
 own sensitive suspicion divined of the opinions of 
 one whose expressed preferences in poetry implied 
 a condemnation of the very grounds of the satirist's 
 own popularity. We shall not so easily give up 
 the purest and most dignified figure of that some-
 
 POPE 53 
 
 what vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and 
 Spenser as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our 
 literary annals. A man who could command the 
 unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick 
 Steele could not have been a coward or a backbiter. 
 The only justification alleged by Pope was of the 
 flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison regretted the 
 introduction of the sylphs in the second edition of 
 the " Rape of the Lock," saying that the poem was 
 merum sal before. Let any one ask himself how 
 he likes an author's emendations of any poem to 
 which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, 
 and he will hardly think it needful to charge Ad 
 dison with any mean motive for his conservatism 
 in this matter. One or two of Pope's letters are so 
 good as to make us regret that he did not oftener 
 don the dressing-gown and slippers in his corre 
 spondence. One in particular, to Lord Burlington, 
 describing a journey on horseback to Oxford with 
 Lintot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor 
 worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray. 
 
 Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his 
 essay on the genius and writings of Pope, says that 
 the largest part of his works " is of the didac 
 tic, moral, and satiric ; and, consequently, not of 
 the most poetic species of poetry ; whence it is 
 manifest that good sense and judgment were his 
 characteristical excellences rather than fancy and 
 invention." It is plain that in any strict definition 
 there can be only one kind of poetry, and that what 
 Warton really meant to say was that Pope was not 
 a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what
 
 54 POPE 
 
 Johnson says in his "Life of Pope," though he 
 does not name Warton. The dispute on this point 
 went on with occasional lulls for more than a half- 
 century after Warton's death. It was renewed 
 with peculiar acrimony when the Rev. W. L. 
 Bowles diffused and confused Warton's critical 
 opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way in edit 
 ing a new edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles en 
 tirely mistook the functions of an editor, and mal- 
 adroitly entangled his judgment of the poetry with 
 his estimate of the author's character. 1 Thirteen 
 years later, Campbell, in his " Specimens," contro 
 verted Mr. Bowles's estimate of Pope's character 
 and position, both as man and poet. Mr. Bowles 
 replied in a letter to Campbell on what he called 
 " the invariable principles of poetry." This letter 
 was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by Gil- 
 christ in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowles made 
 an angry 'and unmannerly retort, among other 
 things charging Gilchrist with the crime of being 
 a tradesman's son, whereupon the affair became 
 what they call on the frontier a free fight, in which 
 Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder Disraeli, and Byron 
 took part with equal relish, though with various 
 fortune. The last shot, in what had grown into 
 a thirty years' war, between the partisans of what 
 
 1 Bowles's Sonnets, wellnigh f orgotten now, did more than his 
 controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence 
 upon the coming generation was great (greater than we can well 
 account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty 
 copies of them while at Christ's Hospital. Wordsworth's prefaces 
 first made imagination the true test of poetry, in its more mod 
 ern sense. But they drew little notice till later.
 
 POPE 55 
 
 was called the Old School of poetry and those of 
 the New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in 
 losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, 
 and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, con 
 trived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger 
 made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, 
 and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical 
 faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. 
 Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid 
 himself open to dreadful punishment, especially 
 from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of 
 polemic prose. Bowles most happily exemplified 
 in his own pamphlets what was really the turning- 
 point of the whole controversy (though all the 
 combatants more or less lost sight of it or never 
 saw it), namely, that without clearness and terse 
 ness there could be no good writing, whether in 
 prose or verse ; in other words that, while precision 
 of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, yet good 
 writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone 
 saw clearly that here was the true knot of the ques 
 tion, though, as his object was mainly mischief, he 
 was not careful to loosen it. The sincerity of By 
 ron's admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, 
 too hastily doubted. What he admired in him was 
 that patience in careful finish which he felt to be 
 wanting in himself and in most of his contempora 
 ries. Pope's assailants went so far as to make 
 a defect of what, rightly considered, was a distin 
 guished merit, though the amount of it was exag 
 gerated. The weak point in the case was that his 
 nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase,
 
 56 POPE 
 
 leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and 
 that it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often 
 not beyond a single verse. His serious poetry, 
 therefore, at its best, is a succession of loosely 
 strung epigrams, and no poet more often than he 
 makes the second line of the couplet a mere train- 
 bearer to the first. His more ambitious works may 
 be defined as careless thinking carefully versified. 
 Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accord 
 ingly he tells us that " his great, I will not say 
 greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of 
 poetry." l Lessing, with his usual insight, paren 
 thetically qualifies his statement ; for where Pope, 
 as in the " Rape of the Lock," found a subject ex 
 actly level with his genius, he was able to make 
 what, taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem 
 in the language. 
 
 It will hardly be questioned that the man who 
 writes what is still piquant and rememberable, a 
 century and a quarter after his death, was a man of 
 genius. But there are two modes of uttering such 
 things as cleave to the memory of mankind. They 
 may be said or sung. I do not think that Pope's 
 verse anywhere sings, but it should seem that the 
 abiding presence of fancy in his best work forbids 
 his exclusiDn from the rank of poet. The atmos 
 phere in wHiich he habitually dwelt was an essen 
 tially prosaic one, the language habitual to him was 
 that of conversation and society, so that he lacked 
 the help of that fresher dialect which seems like 
 
 1 Briefe die neueste Litteratur betrejfend, 1759, ii. Brief. See 
 also his more elaborate criticism of the Essay on Man (Pope ein 
 Metaphysiker), 1755.
 
 POPE 67 
 
 inspiration in the elder poets. His range of asso 
 ciations was of that narrow kind which is always 
 vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the 
 court. Certainly he has not the force and majesty 
 of Dryden in his better nioods, but he has a grace, 
 a finesse, an art of being pungent, a sensitiveness 
 to impressions, that would incline us to rank him 
 with Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much 
 resembles), as an author with whom the gift of 
 writing was primary, and that of verse secondary. 
 No other poet that I remember ever wrote prose 
 which is so purely prose as his ; and yet, in any im 
 partial criticism, the " Rape of thfe Lock " sets him 
 even as a poet far above many men more largely 
 endowed with poetic feeling and insight than he. 
 
 A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the 
 age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for 
 the influence of Swift. In his own province he still 
 stands unapproachably alone. If to be the great 
 est satirist of individual men, rather than of human 
 nature, if to be the highest expression which the 
 life of the court and the ball-room has ever found 
 in verse, if to have added more phrases to our lan 
 guage than any other but Shakespeare, if to have 
 charmed four generations make a man a great poet, 
 then he is one. He was the chief founder of an 
 artificial style of writing, which in his hands was 
 living and powerful, because he used it to express 
 artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state 
 of society. Measured by any high standard of im 
 agination, he will be found wanting ; tried by any 
 test of wit, he is unrivalled.
 
 MILTON i 
 
 [1872] 
 
 IF the biographies of literary men are to assume 
 the bulk which Mr. Masson is giving to that of 
 Milton, their authors should send a phial of elixir 
 vitce with the first volume, that a purchaser might 
 have some valid assurance of surviving to see the 
 last. Mr. Masson has already occupied thirteen 
 hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton 
 to his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven 
 years stretches between the dates of the first and 
 second instalments of his published labors. As 
 Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, 
 with the " Ode on the Nativity," and as by far the 
 more important part of it lies between the year at 
 which we are arrived and his death at the age of 
 sixty-six, we might seem to have the terms given us 
 by which to make a rough reckoning of how soon 
 
 1 The Life of John Milton : narrated in Connection with the 
 Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By 
 David Masson, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Rhetoric and English 
 Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Vols. i., ii. 1638- 
 1643. London and New York : Macmillan & Co. 1871. 8vo. 
 pp. xii, 608. 
 
 The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Introduction, 
 Notes, and an Essay on Milton's English, by David Masson, M. A., 
 LL. D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the Uni 
 yersity of Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo. Macmillan & Co. 1874.
 
 MILTON 59 
 
 we are likely to see land. But when we recollect 
 the baffling character of the winds and currents we 
 have already encountered, and the eddies that may 
 at any time slip us back to the reformation in Scot 
 land or the settlement of New England ; when we 
 consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped 
 the grand siecle of French literature, with its irre 
 sistible temptations to digression and homily for 
 a man of Mr. Masson's temperament, we may be 
 pardoned if a sigh of doubt and discouragement 
 escape us. We envy the secular leisures of Methu 
 selah, and are thankful that his biography at least 
 (if written in the same longeval proportion) is ir 
 recoverably lost to us. What a subject would that 
 have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spacious 
 predilections ! Even if he himself can count on 
 patriarchal prorogations of existence, let him hang 
 a print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to 
 remind him of the ambushes which Fate lays for 
 the toughest of us. For myself, I have not dared 
 to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his 
 work. Even with the promise of a speedy third 
 volume before me, I feel by no means sure of living 
 to see Mary Powell back in her husband's house ; 
 for it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, with the 
 diabolical art of a practised serial writer, leaves us 
 while he goes into an exhaustive account of the 
 Westminster Assembly and the political and reli 
 gious notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One 
 could not help thinking, after having got Milton 
 fairly through college, that he was never more mis 
 taken in his life than when he wrote,
 
 60 MILTON 
 
 " How soon hath Time, that subtle thief of youth, 
 Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! " 
 
 Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's 
 wheels ? 
 
 It is plain from the Preface to the second volume 
 that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy conscious 
 ness that something is wrong, and that Milton 
 ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of 
 his own biography. He tells us that, " whatever 
 may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the 
 subject from the outside, no one can study the life 
 of Milton as it ought to be studied without being 
 obliged to study extensively and intimately the 
 contemporary history of England, and even inci 
 dentally of Scotland and Ireland too. . . . Thus 
 on the very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of 
 the biography, a history grew on my hands. It was 
 not in human nature to confine the historical in 
 quiries, once they were in progress, within the pre 
 cise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the 
 biography, even had it been possible to determine 
 these limits beforehand ; and so the history as 
 sumed a coordinate importance with me, was pur 
 sued often for its own sake, and became, though 
 always with a sense of organic relation to the bio 
 graphy, continuous in itself." If a " hasty person " 
 be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have 
 his button held by a biographer ere he begin his 
 next sentence, I take to myself the sting of Mr. 
 Masson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a 
 pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a "to be contin 
 ued " do not redeem its promise before the lapse of
 
 MILTON 61 
 
 a quinquennium. I could scarce await the " Auto 
 crat " himself so long. The heroic age of literature 
 is past, and even a duodecimo may often prove too 
 heavy (oloi vvv fiporol) for the descendants of men 
 to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does 
 Mr. Masson mean by " continuous " ? To me it 
 seems rather as if his somewhat rambling history 
 of the seventeenth century were interrupted now 
 and then by an unexpected apparition of Milton, 
 who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does 
 not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in 
 the mean while. The reader, immersed in Scottish 
 politics or the schemes of Archbishop Laud, is a lit 
 tle puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on being 
 reminded that this fair-haired young man is the 
 protagonist of the drama. Pars minima est ipsa 
 puella sui. 
 
 If Goethe was right in saying that every man 
 was a citizen of his age as well as of his country, 
 there can be no doubt that in order to understand 
 the motives and conduct of the man we must first 
 make ourselves intimate with the time in which he 
 lived. We have therefore no fault to find with the 
 thoroughness of Mr. Masson's " historical inquiries." 
 The more thorough the better, so far as they were 
 essential to the satisfactory performance of his task. 
 But it is only such contemporary events, opinions, 
 or persons as were really operative on the charac 
 ter of the man we are studying that are of conse 
 quence, and we are to familiarize ourselves with 
 them, not so much for the sake of explaining as of 
 understanding him. The biographer, especially of
 
 62 MILTON 
 
 a literary man, need only mark the main currents 
 of tendency, without being officious to trace out to 
 its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its 
 tiny pitcherful with the rest. Much less should he 
 attempt an analysis of the stream and to classify 
 every component by itself, as if each were ever 
 effectual singly and not in combination. Human 
 motives cannot be thus chemically cross-examined, 
 nor do we arrive at any true knowledge of char 
 acter by such minute subdivision of its ingredients. 
 Nothing is so essential to a biographer as an eye 
 that can distinguish at a glance between real events 
 that are the levers of thought and action, and what 
 Donne calls " unconcerning things, matters of fact," 
 between substantial personages, whose contact 
 or even neighborhood is influential, and the super 
 numeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and af 
 terwards the interstices of a biographical dictionary. 
 
 " Time hath a wallet at his back 
 
 Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion." 
 
 Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sa 
 cred and merciful deposit, and not renew for us the 
 bores of a former generation as if we had not 
 enough of our own. But if he cannot forbear that 
 unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly complain when 
 he insists on taking us along with him in the pro 
 cesses of his investigation, instead of giving us the 
 sifted results in their bearing on the life and char 
 acter of his subject, whether for help or hindrance. 
 We are blinded with the dust of old papers ran 
 sacked by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no 
 relation whatever to his hero. He had been wise
 
 MILTON 63 
 
 if he had kept constantly in view what Milton him 
 self says of those who gathered up personal tradi 
 tions concerning the Apostles : " With less fer 
 vency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John 
 had written than was listened to one that could say 
 * Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, 
 and thus he went habited ; and O, happy this house 
 that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he 
 rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.' 
 . . . Thus while all their thoughts were poured 
 out upon circumstances and the gazing after such 
 men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by 
 this means they lost their time and truanted on the 
 fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was 
 seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so 
 poured out his mind upon circumstances, that his 
 work reminds us of Allston's picture of Elijah in 
 the Wilderness, where a good deal of research at 
 last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded 
 like a conundrum in the landscape where the very 
 ravens could scarce have found him out, except by 
 divine commission. The figure of Milton becomes 
 but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with 
 the scenery through which he may by any possibility 
 be conjectured to have passed. I will cite a single 
 example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Mas- 
 son is reduced in order to hitch Milton on to his own 
 biography. He devotes the first chapter of his Sec 
 ond Book to the meeting of the Long Parliament. 
 " Already," he tells us, " in the earlier part of the 
 day, the Commons had gone through the ceremony 
 of hearing the writ for the Parliament read, and
 
 64 MILTON 
 
 the names of the members that had been returned 
 called over by Thomas Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of 
 the Crown in Chancery. His deputy, Agar, Mil 
 ton s brother-in-law, may have been in attendance 
 on such an occasion. During the preceding month 
 or two, at all events, Agar and his subordinates in 
 the Crown Office had been unusually busy with 
 the issue of the writs and with the other work con 
 nected with the opening of Parliament." (Vol. ii. 
 p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute " at all events " is 
 very amusing. Meanwhile 
 
 " The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." 
 
 Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer 
 for, if to him we owe the modern fashion of writing 
 history picturesquely. At least his method leads 
 to most unhappy results when essayed by men to 
 whom nature has denied a sense of what the pic 
 turesque really is. The historical picturesque does 
 not consist in truth of costume and similar accessa 
 ries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression 
 of the figures, caught when they are unconscious 
 that the artist is sketching them. The moment 
 they are posed for a composition, unless by a man 
 of genius, the life has gone out of them. In the 
 hands of an inferior artist, who fancies that im 
 agination is something to be squeezed out of color- 
 tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jack 
 boots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere property- 
 room of a deserted theatre, as if the light had been 
 scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that 
 vanished with the foot-lights. It is the power of 
 catching the actors in great events at unawares that
 
 MILTON 65 
 
 makes the glimpses given us by contemporaries so 
 vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the 
 great masters of the picturesque, lets us into the 
 secret of his art when he tells us how, in that won 
 derful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw 
 " du premier coup d'ceil vivement porte, tout ce 
 qui leur echappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit." 
 It is the gift of producing this reality that almost 
 makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping 
 through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which 
 we had no right, it is this only that can justify 
 the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has 
 this power of contemporizing himself with bygone 
 times, he cheats us to 
 
 " Play with our fancies and believe we see " ; 
 
 but we find the tableaux vivants of the apprentices 
 who " deal in his command without his power," 
 and who compel us to work very hard indeed with 
 our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker 
 arms to shoot with his mighty bow has filled the 
 air of recent literature with more than enough fruit 
 less twanging. 
 
 Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes 
 intolerably awkward when he strives to make up 
 for the want of St. Simon's premier coup d'ceil by 
 impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo- 
 dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to 
 have traced Milton from the University to a " sub 
 urb sink" of London? Mr. Masson fancies he 
 hears Milton saying to himself, " A suburb sink ! 
 has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk all the
 
 66 MILTON 
 
 way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry 
 where I live, and so have an exact notion of my 
 whereabouts ? There has been plague in the neigh 
 borhood certainly ; and I hope Jane Yates had my 
 doorstep tidy for the visit." Does Milton, answer 
 ing Hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces 
 of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather 
 " choose a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred " ? 
 Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm 
 of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this 
 wise : " What have we here ? Surely nothing less, 
 if we choose so to construe it, than a marriage ad 
 vertisement ! Ho, all ye virgins of England (wid 
 ows need not apply), here is an opportunity such 
 as seldom occurs : a bachelor, unattached ; age, 
 thirty-three years and three or four months ; height 
 [Milton, by the way, would have said hightfi\ mid 
 dle or a little less ; personal appearance unusually 
 handsome, with fair complexion and light auburn 
 hair ; circumstances independent ; tastes intellec 
 tual and decidedly musical; principles Root-and- 
 Branch ! Was there already any young maiden in 
 whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in 
 her way, it would have raised a conscious flutter? 
 If so, did she live near Oxford? " If there is any 
 thing worse than an unimaginative man trying to 
 write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fan 
 cies he is being facetious. He tramples out the 
 last spark of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot 
 of a hippopotamus. 
 
 I am no advocate of what is called the dignity 
 of history, when it means, as it too often does, that
 
 MILTON 67 
 
 dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity. Too 
 well do I recall the sorrows of my youth, when I 
 was shipped in search of knowledge on the long 
 Johnsonian swell of the last century, favorable to 
 anything but the calm digestion of historic truth. 
 I had even then an uneasy suspicion, which has 
 ripened into certainty, that thoughts were never 
 draped in long skirts like babies, if they were 
 strong enough to go alone. But surely there should 
 be such a thing as good taste, above all a sense of 
 self-respect, in the historian himself, that should 
 not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity 
 of his subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto 
 invested the figure of Milton, and our image of 
 him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from 
 the vulgarities of life. No diaries, no private let 
 ters, remain to give the idle curiosity of after-times 
 the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion 
 of his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles 
 were written in the language of Cicero, whose 
 sense of personal dignity was so great that, when 
 called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he 
 always does it with an epical stateliness of phrase, 
 and whose self-respect even in youth was so pro 
 found that it resembles the reverence paid by other 
 men to a far-off and idealized character, that he 
 should be treated in this off-hand familiar fashion 
 by his biographer seems to us a kind of desecration, 
 a violation of good manners no less than of the 
 laws of biographic art. Milton is the last man in 
 the world to be slapped on the back with impunity. 
 Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such
 
 68 MILTON 
 
 presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seven 
 teenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the 
 insupportable foot of the interviewer I 
 
 But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) 
 idiomatic, can do something worse than what has 
 been hitherto quoted. He can be even vulgar. 
 Discussing the motives of Milton's first marriage, 
 he says, " Did he come seeking his 500, and did 
 Mrs. Powell heave a daughter at him ? " We 
 have heard of a woman throwing herself at a 
 man's head, and the image is a somewhat violent 
 one ; but what is this to Mr. Masson's improve 
 ment on it ? It has been sometimes affirmed that 
 the fitness of an image may be tested by trying 
 whether a picture could be made of it or not. Mr. 
 Masson has certainly offered a new and striking 
 subject to the historical school of British art. A 
 little further on, speaking of Mary Powell, he says, 
 " We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her 
 appearance ; but on the usual rule of the elective 
 affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, we will 
 vote her to have been dark-haired." I need say 
 nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but its 
 absurdity is heightened by the fact that Mr. Masson 
 himself had left us in doubt whether the match 
 was one of convenience or inclination. I know 
 not how it may be with other readers, but for my 
 self I feel inclined to resent this hail-fellow-well- 
 met manner with its jaunty " we will vote." In 
 some cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of 
 style may possibly be accounted for as attempts at 
 humor by one who has an imperfect notion of its
 
 MILTON 69 
 
 ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the 
 effect, the pensive element of the compound enters 
 in too large an excess over the hilarious. Whether 
 I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether 
 the cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity of 
 the picturesque and vivid, I shall leave the reader 
 to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript 
 copy of Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his 
 own house the immunity which the memory of Pin 
 dar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title 
 had originally been, " On his Door when the City 
 expected an Assault." Milton has drawn a line 
 through this and substituted " When the Assault 
 was intended to the City." Mr. Masson fancies 
 " a mood of jest or semi-jest in the whole affair " ; 
 but we think rather that Milton's quiet assumption 
 of equality with two such famous poets was as se 
 riously characteristic as Dante's ranking himself 
 sesto tra cotanto senno. Mr. Masson takes advan 
 tage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince 
 Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and 
 finding some of his " Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that 
 had been left lying about inadvertently. ' Oho ! ' 
 the Cavalier Captain might then have said, ' Pindar 
 and Euripides are all very well, by G ! I 've 
 been at college myself ; and when I meet a gen 
 tleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat 
 him ; but neither Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote 
 pamphlets against the Church of England, by 
 G ! It won't do, Mr. Milton ! ' " This, it may be 
 supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and 
 dramatic at the same time. Good taste is shocked
 
 70 MILTON 
 
 with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the 
 Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles L, 
 at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641, 
 fills the vacant English sees, we are told, " It was 
 more than an insult ; it was a sarcasm ! It was as 
 if the King, while giving Alexander Henderson his 
 hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that 
 reverend Presbyter's back ! " Now one can con 
 ceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn 
 League and Covenant, but never his father under 
 any circumstances. He may have been, and I be 
 lieve he was, a bad king, but surely we may take 
 Marvell's word for it, that 
 
 " He nothing common did or mean," 
 
 upon any of the " memorable scenes " of his life. 
 The image is therefore out of all imaginative keep 
 ing, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand 
 historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least 
 a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse 
 than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, 
 who wrote in defence of the Independents against 
 Thomas Edwards, he says, " People wondered who 
 this she-Brownist, Katherine Chidley, was, and did 
 not quite lose their interest in her when they found 
 that she was an oldish woman, and a member of 
 some hole-and-corner congregation in London. In 
 deed, she put her nails into Mr. Edwards with 
 some effect" Why did he not say at once, after 
 the good old fashion, that she " set her ten com 
 mandments in his face " ? In another place he 
 speaks of " Satan standing with his staff around
 
 MILTON 71 
 
 him." Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian 
 at best, naturally grows worse when forced to con 
 descend to every-day matters. He can no more 
 dismount and walk than the man in armor on a 
 Lord Mayor's day. " It [Aldersgate Street] 
 stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile 
 as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by 
 Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with the 
 name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new 
 names of Goswell Street and Goswell Road, com 
 pletes its tendency towards the suburbs and fields 
 about Islington." What a noble work might not 
 the Directory be if composed on this scale ! The 
 imagination even of an alderman might well be 
 lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous 
 thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these 
 passages of civic grandeur ; but he is more surpris 
 ing, on the whole, where he has an image to deal 
 with. Speaking of Milton's " two-handed engine " 
 in Lycidas, he says : " May not Milton, whatever 
 else he meant, have meant a coming English Par 
 liament with its two Houses ? Whatever he meant, 
 his prophecy had come true. As he sat among 
 his books in Aldersgate Street, the two-handed en 
 gine at the door of the English Church was on the 
 swing. Once, twice, thrice, it had swept its arcs 
 to gather energy ; now it was on the backmost 
 poise, and the blow was to descend." One cannot 
 help wishing that Mr. Masson would try his hand 
 on the tenth horn of the beast in Revelation, or on 
 the time and half a time of Daniel. There is some 
 thing so consoling to a prophet in being told that,
 
 72 MILTON 
 
 no matter what he meant, his prophecy had come 
 true, and that he might mean " whatever else " he 
 pleased, so long as he may have meant what we 
 choose to think he did, reasoning backward from 
 the assumed fulfilment ! But perhaps there may 
 be detected in Mr. Masson's " swept its arcs " a 
 little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness to 
 which he allows so generous a latitude. How if 
 the " two-handed engine," after all, were a broom 
 (or besom, to be more dignified), 
 
 " Sweeping vehemently sweeping, 
 No pause admitted, no design avowed," 
 
 like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion 
 the Syracusan saw ? I make the suggestion mod 
 estly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Mas- 
 son's system of exegesis, which reminds one of the 
 casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which 
 a man may be probabiliter obligatus and prdbabili- 
 ter deobligatus at the same time. But perhaps 
 the most remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's fig 
 ures of speech is where we are told that the king 
 might have established a bona fide government 
 " by giving public ascendency to the popular or 
 Parliamentary element in his Council, and indu 
 cing the old leaven in it either to accept the new pol 
 icy, or to withdraw and become inactive" There 
 is something consoling in the thought that yeast 
 should be accessible to moral suasion. It is really 
 too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want 
 of such an appeal to its moral sense as should 
 " induce it to accept the new policy." Of Mr. 
 Masson's unhappy infection with the vivid style
 
 MILTON 73 
 
 an instance or two shall be given in justification of 
 what has been alleged against him in that partic 
 ular. He says of London that " he was committed 
 to the Tower, where for more than two months he 
 lay, with as near a prospect as ever prisoner had 
 of a chop with the executioner's axe on a scaffold 
 on Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidious, but the 
 word " chop " offends my ears with its coarseness, 
 or if that be too strong, has certainly the unplea 
 sant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old 
 Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that "he gart 
 kings ken they had a lith in their necks," is a good 
 example of really vivid phrase, suggesting the axe 
 and the block, and giving one of those dreadful 
 hints to the imagination which are more powerful 
 than any amount of detail, and whose skilful use is 
 the only magic employed by the masters of truly 
 picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will 
 serve also as an example of that tendency to sur 
 plusage which adds to the bulk of Mr. Masson's sen 
 tences at the cost of their effectiveness. If he had 
 said simply " chop on Tower Hill " (if chop there 
 must be), it had been quite enough, for we all know 
 that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are im 
 plied in it. Once more, and I have done with the 
 least agreeable part of my business. Mr. Masson, 
 after telling over again the story of Straff ord with 
 needless length of detail, ends thus : " On Wednes 
 day, the 12th of May, that proud curly head, 
 the casket of that brain of power, rolled on the 
 scaffold of Tower Hill." Why curly ? Surely it 
 is here a ludicrous impertinence. This careful
 
 74 MILTON 
 
 thrusting forward of outward and unmeaning par 
 ticulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a pic 
 ture which genius only has the art to do, is becom 
 ing a weariness in modern descriptive writing. It 
 reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of dress 
 ing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very 
 clothes they wore when they did the deed, or with 
 the real halter round their necks wherewith they 
 expiated it. It is probably very effective with the 
 torpid sensibilities of the class who look upon wax 
 figures as works of art. f True imaginative power 
 works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving 
 to wash away from her hands the damned spot that 
 is all the more there to the mind of the spectator 
 because it is not there at all, is a type of the meth 
 ods it employs and the intensity of their action. 
 
 Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. 
 Masson's faults of manner, which I should not have 
 dwelt on so long had they not greatly marred a 
 real enjoyment in the reading, and were they not 
 the ear-mark of a school which has become unhap 
 pily numerous, I turn to a consideration of his work 
 as a whole. I think he made a mistake in his very 
 plan, or else was guilty of a misnomer in his title. 
 His book is not so much a life of Milton as a col 
 lection of materials out of which a careful reader 
 may sift the main facts of the poet's biography. 
 His passion for minute detail is only to be equalled 
 by his diffuseness on points mainly if not altogether 
 irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Lit 
 erature, occupying one hundred and twenty-eight 
 pages of his first volume, written in the main with
 
 MILTON 75 
 
 good judgment, and giving the average critical 
 opinion upon nearly every writer, great and small, 
 who was in any sense a contemporary of Milton. 
 I have no doubt all this would be serviceable and 
 interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edinburgh 
 University, and they may well be congratulated on 
 having so competent a teacher ; but what it has to 
 do with Milton, unless in the case of such authors 
 as may be shown to have influenced his style or 
 turn of thought, one does not clearly see. Most 
 readers of a life of Milton may be presumed to 
 have some knowledge of the general literary history 
 of the time, or at any rate to have the means of 
 acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style was 
 his own) was very little affected by any of the 
 English poets, with the single exception, in his ear 
 lier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also 
 has something to say about everybody, from Went- 
 worth to the obscurest Brownist fanatic who was 
 so much as heard of in England during Milton's 
 lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's duty 
 should hold, our grandchildren may expect to see 
 " A Life of Thackeray, or who was who in England, 
 France, and Germany during the first Half of the 
 Nineteenth Century." These digressions of Mr. 
 Masson's from what should have been his main 
 topic (he always seems somehow to be " complet 
 ing his tendency towards the suburbs " of his sub 
 ject), give him an uneasy feeling that he must get 
 Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were 
 only to remind the reader that he has a certain 
 connection with the book. He is eager even to
 
 76 MILTON 
 
 discuss a mere hypothesis, though an untenable 
 one, if it will only increase the number of pages de 
 voted specially to Milton, and thus lessen the ap 
 parent disproportion between the historical and 
 the biographical matter. Milton tells us that his 
 morning wont had been " to read good authors, or 
 cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, 
 or memory have his full fraught ; then with useful 
 and generous labors preserving the body's health 
 and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not 
 lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of re 
 ligion and our country's liberty when it shall re 
 quire firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and 
 cover their stations rather than see the ruin of our 
 Protestantism and the enforcement of a slavish 
 life." Mr. Masson snatches at the hint : " This is 
 interesting," he says ; " Milton, it seems, has for 
 some time been practising drill ! The City Artil 
 lery Ground was near. . . . Did Milton among 
 others make a habit of going there of mornings ? 
 Of this more hereafter." When Mr. Masson re 
 turns to the subject he speaks of Milton's " all but 
 positive statement . . . that in the spring of 1642, 
 or a few months before the breaking out of the 
 Civil War, he was in the habit of spending a part 
 of each day in military exercise somewhere not far 
 from his house in Aldersgate Street" What he 
 puts by way of query on page 402 has become 
 downright certainty seventy-nine pages further on. 
 The passage from Milton's tract makes no " state 
 ment " of the kind it pleases Mr. Masson to as 
 sume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that
 
 MILTON 77 
 
 he took regular exercise, because lie believed that 
 moral no less than physical courage demanded a 
 sound body. And what proof does Mr. Masson 
 bring to confirm his theory ? Nothing more nor 
 less than two or three passages in " Paradise Lost," 
 of which I shall quote only so much as is essential 
 to his argument : 
 
 " And now 
 
 Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front 
 Of dreadful length and dazzling 1 arms, in guise 
 Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield, 
 Awaiting what command their mighty chief 
 Had to impose." l 
 
 Mr. Masson assures us that " there are touches in 
 this description (as, for example, the ordering of 
 arms at the moment of halt, and without word of 
 command) too exact and technical to have occurred 
 to a mere civilian. Again, at the same review . . . 
 
 ' He now prepared 
 
 To speak ; whereat their doubled ranks they bend 
 From wing to wing, and half enclose him round 
 With all his peers ; attention held them mute.' 2 
 
 To the present day this is the very process, or one 
 of the processes, when a commander wishes to ad 
 dress his men. They wheel inward and stand at 
 ' attention.' " But his main argument is the phrase 
 "ported spears," in Book Fourth, on which he has 
 an interesting and valuable comment. He argues 
 the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking 
 to prove that Milton must have had some practical 
 experience of military drill. I confess a very grave 
 doubt whether " attention " and " ordered " in the 
 passages cited have any other than their ordinary 
 1 Book I. 562-567. 2 Ibid. 615-618.
 
 78 MILTON 
 
 meaning, and Milton could never have looked on 
 at the pike-exercise without learning what " ported " 
 meant. But, be this as it may, I will venture to 
 assert that there was not a boy in New England, 
 forty years ago, who did not know more of the 
 manual than is implied in Milton's use of these 
 terms. Mr. Masson's object in proving Milton to 
 have been a proficient in these martial exercises 
 is to increase our wonder at his not entering the 
 army. " If there was any man in England of 
 whom one might surely have expected that he 
 would be in arms among the Parliamentarians," 
 he says, "that man was Milton." Milton may 
 have had many an impulse to turn soldier, as all 
 men must in such times, but I do not believe that 
 he ever seriously intended it. Nor is it any matter 
 of reproach that he did not. It is plain, from his 
 works, that he believed himself very early set apart 
 and consecrated for tasks of a very different kind, 
 for services demanding as much self-sacrifice and 
 of more enduring result. I have no manner of 
 doubt that he, like Dante, believed himself divinely 
 inspired with what he had to utter, and, if so, why 
 not also divinely guided in what he should do or 
 leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he 
 loved a weapon far more effective than a sword. 
 
 It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method, 
 that a great deal of space is devoted to what might 
 have befallen his hero and what he might have 
 seen. This leaves a broad margin indeed for the 
 insertion of purely hypothetical incidents. Nay, so 
 desperately addicted is he to what he deems the
 
 MILTON 79 
 
 vivid style of writing, that he even goes out of his 
 way to imagine what might have happened to any 
 body living at the same time with Milton. Having 
 told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his last 
 visit to London, perhaps saw Milton " a fair child 
 of six playing at his father's door," he must needs 
 conjure up an imaginary supper at the Mermaid. 
 " Ah ! what an evening . . . was that ; and how 
 Ben and Shakespeare be-tongued each other, while 
 the others listened and wondered ; and how, when 
 the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard 
 their departing footsteps, and the stars shone down 
 on the old roofs." Certainly, if we may believe 
 the old song, the stars " had nothing else to do," 
 though their chance of shining in the middle of a 
 London November may perhaps be reckoned very 
 doubtful. An author should consider how largely 
 the art of writing consists in knowing what to leave 
 in the inkstand. 
 
 Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal of 
 very valuable matter, whatever one may think of 
 its bearing upon the life of Milton. The chapters 
 devoted to Scottish affairs are particularly interest 
 ing to a student of the Great Rebellion, its causes 
 and concomitants. His analyses of the two armies, 
 of the Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly, 
 are sensible additions to our knowledge. A too 
 painful thoroughness, indeed, is the criticism we 
 should make on his work as a biography. Even 
 as a history, the reader might complain that it 
 confuses by the multiplicity of its details, while it 
 wearies by want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks
 
 80 MILTON 
 
 the skill of an accomplished story-teller. A fact 
 is to him a fact, never mind how unessential, and 
 he misses the breadth of truth in his devotion to 
 accuracy. The very order of his title-page, " The 
 Life of Milton, narrated in Connection with the 
 Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his 
 Time," shows, it should seem, a misconception of 
 the true nature of his subject. Milton's chief im 
 portance, it might be fairly said his only impor 
 tance, is literary. His place is fixed as the most 
 classical of our poets. 
 
 Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, 
 did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the 
 thought of his time or in the history of opinion. 
 In all these lines of his activity circumstances 
 forced upon him the position of a controversialist 
 whose aims and results are by the necessity of the 
 case desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him 
 and Hobbes after him had a far firmer grasp of 
 fundamental principles than he. His studies in 
 these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and 
 his opinions were heated to the temper of the times 
 and shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum, 
 sometimes to his own convenience at the moment, 
 instead of being the slow result of a deliberate 
 judgment enlightened by intellectual and above all 
 historical sympathy with his subject. His interest 
 was rather in the occasion than the matter of the 
 controversy. No aphorisms of political science are 
 to be gleaned from his writings as from those of 
 Burke. His intense personality could never so far 
 dissociate itself from the question at issue as to see
 
 MILTON 81 
 
 it in its larger scope and more universal relations. 
 He was essentially a doctrinaire^ ready to sacrifice 
 everything to what at the moment seemed the ab 
 stract truth, and with no regard to historical ante 
 cedents and consequences, provided those of scho 
 lastic logic were carefully observed. He has no 
 respect for usage or tradition except when they 
 count in his favor, and sees no virtue in that power 
 of the past over the minds and conduct of men 
 which alone insures the continuity of national 
 growth and is the great safeguard of order and 
 progress. The life of a nation was of less impor 
 tance to him than that it should be conformed to 
 certain principles of belief and conduct. Burke 
 coulcl distil political wisdom out of history because 
 he had a profound consciousness of the soul that 
 underlies and outlives events, and of the national 
 character that gives them meaning and coherence. 
 Accordingly his words are still living and opera 
 tive, while Milton's pamphlets are strictly occa 
 sional and no longer interesting except as they 
 illustrate him. In the Latin ones especially there 
 is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public 
 orator. His training, so far as it was thorough, so 
 far, indeed, as it may be called optional, was purely 
 poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made 
 boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly 
 classic honey. 
 
 Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match 
 for some of his antagonists in theological and 
 ecclesiastical learning. But he brought into the 
 contest a white heat of personal conviction that
 
 82 MILTON 
 
 counted for much. His self-consciousness, always 
 active, identified him with the cause he undertook. 
 " I conceived myself to be now not as mine own 
 person, but as a member incorporate into that 
 truth whereof I was persuaded and whereof I had 
 declared myself openly to be the partaker." 1 Ac 
 cordingly it does not so much seem that he is the 
 advocate of Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or 
 the People of England, as that all these are Ae, 
 and that he is speaking for himself. He was not 
 nice in the choice of his missiles, and too often 
 borrows a dirty lump from the dunghill of Luther ; 
 but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy 
 turn to golden arrows ef Phoebus in his trembling 
 hands, singing as they fly and carrying their mes 
 sages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his prose 
 as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the 
 early gods, and there is that in him which tramples 
 all learning under his victorious feet. From the 
 first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated 
 and set apart. He had that sublime persuasion of 
 a divine mission which sometimes lifts his speech 
 from personal to cosmopolitan significance ; his 
 genius unmistakably asserts itself from time to 
 time, calling down fire from heaven to kindle the 
 sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the 
 hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the 
 worship of mankind. Plainly enough here was a 
 man who had received something other than Epis 
 copal ordination. Mysterious and awful powers 
 had laid their unimaginable hands on that fair 
 
 1 Apology for Smectymnuus.
 
 MILTON 83 
 
 head and devoted it to a nobler service. Yet it 
 must be confessed that, with the single exception 
 of the " Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are weari 
 some reading, and going through them is like 
 a long sea- voyage whose monotony is more than 
 compensated for the moment by a stripe of phos 
 phorescence heaping before you in a drift of star- 
 sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks 
 of silver, as if the conscious element were giving 
 out all the moonlight it had garnered in its loyal 
 depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent. 
 Which, being interpreted, means that his prose is 
 of value because it is Milton's, because it some 
 times exhibits -in an inferior degree the qualities oi 
 his verse, and not for its power of thought, of rea 
 soning, or of statement. It is valuable, where it is 
 best, for its inspiring quality, like the fervencies of 
 a Hebrew prophet. The English translation of 
 the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized, not 
 the English mind, but the Puritan temper. Those 
 fierce enthusiasts could more easily find elbow-room 
 for their consciences in an ideal Israel than in a 
 practical England. It was convenient to see Ama- 
 lek or Philistia in the men who met them in the 
 field, and one unintelligible horn or other of the 
 Beast in their theological opponents. The spiritual 
 provincialism of the Jewish race found something 
 congenial in the English mind. Their national 
 egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was es 
 pecially sympathetic with the personal egotism of 
 Milton. It was only as an inspired and irrespon 
 sible person that he could live on decent terms with
 
 84 MILTON 
 
 his own self-confident individuality. There is an 
 intolerant egotism which identifies itself with om 
 nipotence, 1 and whose sublimity is its apology; 
 there is an intolerable egotism which subordinates 
 the sun to the watch in its own fob. Milton's was 
 of the former kind, and accordingly the finest pas 
 sages in his prose and not the least fine in his verse 
 are autobiographic, and this is the more striking 
 that they are often unconsciously so. Those fallen 
 angels in utter ruin and combustion hurled, are 
 also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause; 
 Philistia is the Restoration, and what Samson did, 
 that Milton would have done if he could. 
 
 The " Areopagitica " might seem an exception, 
 but that also is a plea rather than an argument, 
 and his interest in the question is not one of ab 
 stract principle, but of personal relation to himself. 
 He was far more rhetorician than thinker. The 
 sonorous amplitude of his style was better fitted to 
 persuade the feelings than to convince the reason. 
 The only passages from his prose that may be said 
 to have survived are emotional, not argumentative, 
 or they have lived in virtue of their figurative 
 beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's 
 power lay in dilation. Touched by him, the sim 
 plest image, the most obvious thought, 
 
 " Dilated stood 
 Like Teneriffe or Atlas . . . 
 . . . nor wanted in his grasp 
 What seemed both spear and shield." 
 
 1 " For him I was not sent, nor yet to free 
 
 That people, victor once, now vile and base, 
 Deservedly made vassal." (P. E., IV. 131-133.)
 
 MILTON 85 
 
 But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more 
 effective weapon than these fantastic arms of his. 
 He had not the secret of compression that properly 
 belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as Haz- 
 litt said of himself, "nothing but abstract ideas 
 makes any impression." Almost every aphoristic 
 phrase that he has made current is borrowed from 
 some one of the classics, like his famous 
 
 "License they mean when they cry liberty," 
 
 from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far 
 as his true function, that of poet, is concerned. It 
 is his peculiar glory that literature was with him 
 so much an art, an end and not a means. Of his 
 political work he has himself told us, "I should 
 not choose this manner of writing, wherein, know 
 ing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial 
 power of nature to another task), I have the use, 
 as I may account, but of my left hand." 
 
 Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis of 
 these writings, selecting with great judgment the 
 salient passages, which have an air of blank-verse 
 thinly disguised as prose, like some of the cor 
 rupted passages of Shakespeare. We are partic 
 ularly thankful to him for his extracts from the 
 pamphlets written against Milton, especially for 
 such as contain criticisms on his style. It is not 
 a little interesting to see the most stately of poets 
 reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low 
 words. We seem to get a glimpse of the schooling 
 of his " choiceful sense " to that nicety which could 
 not be content till it had made his native tongue
 
 86 MILTON 
 
 " search all her coffers round." One cannot help 
 thinking also that his practice in prose, especially 
 in the long involutions of Latin periods, helped 
 him to give that variety of pause and that majestic 
 harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so 
 unapproachably his own. Landor, who, like Mil 
 ton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught 
 somewhat more than others of the dignity of his 
 gait, but without his length of stride. Words 
 worth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, but 
 with how long an interval ! Bryant has not sel 
 dom attained to its serene equanimity, but never 
 emulates its pomp. Keats has caught something 
 of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its 
 nervous severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that 
 moved with such graceful ease in slippers) becomes 
 stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buc 
 kles on her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thom 
 son grows tumid wherever he assays the grandiosity 
 of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse 
 of the slow processes by which Milton arrived at 
 that classicism which sets him apart from, if not 
 above, all our other poets. 
 
 In gathering up the impressions made upon us 
 by Mr. Masson's work as a whole, we are inclined 
 rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake 
 than for ours. The several parts, though dispro 
 portionate, are valuable, his research has been con 
 scientious, and he has given us better means of 
 understanding Milton's time than we possessed be- 
 f or,e. But how is it about Milton himself ? Here 
 was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of por-
 
 MILTON 87 
 
 trait-painting. There is hardly a more stately fig 
 ure in literary history than Milton's, no life in some 
 of its aspects more tragical, except Dante's. In 
 both these great poets, more than in any others, 
 the character of the men makes part of the singu 
 lar impressiveness of what they wrote and of its 
 vitality with after times. In them the man some 
 how overtops the author. The works of both are 
 full of autobiographical confidences. Like Dante, 
 Milton was forced to become a party by himself. 
 He stands out in marked and solitary individuality, 
 apart from the great movement of the Civil War, 
 apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restora 
 tion, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforget- 
 ting man. Very much alive he certainly was in 
 his day. Has Mr. Masson made him alive to us 
 again? I fear not. At the same time, while we 
 cannot praise either the style or the method of Mr. 
 Masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful for 
 it. It is not so much a book for the ordinary 
 reader of biography as for the student, and will be 
 more likely to find its place on the library-shelf 
 than on the centre-table. It does not in any sense 
 belong to light literature, but demands all the mus 
 cle of the trained and vigorous reader. "Truly, 
 in respect of itself, it is a good life ; but in respect 
 that it is Milton's life it is naught." 
 
 Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates 
 of Milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in 
 some respects to undertake an edition of the poet 
 ical works. His edition, accordingly, has distin 
 guished merits. The introductions to the several
 
 88 MILTON 
 
 poems are excellent and leave scarcely anything to 
 be desired. The general Introduction, on the other 
 hand, contains a great deal that might well have 
 been omitted, and not a little that is positively 
 erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's 
 English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to 
 whom English is in some sort a foreign tongue. 
 It is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined 
 to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any alto 
 gether satisfactory study should surely be the Mil- 
 tonic prose ; nay, should include all the poetry and 
 prose of his own age and of that immediately pre 
 ceding it. The uses to which Mr. Masson has put 
 the concordance to Milton's poems tempt one some 
 times to class him with those whom the poet him 
 self taxed with being " the mousehunts and ferrets 
 of an index." For example, what profits a discus 
 sion of Milton's aTrag Xeyo/Aevo, a matter in which 
 accident is far more influential than choice? 1 
 What sensible addition is made to our stock of 
 knowledge by learning that " the word woman does 
 not occur in any form in Milton's poetry before 
 ' Paradise Lost,' " and that it is " exactly so with 
 the word female " ? Is it any way remarkable that 
 such words as Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Para 
 dise, Sin, Satan, and Serpent should occur " very 
 frequently " in " Paradise Lost " ? Would it not 
 rather have been surprising that they should not ? 
 Such trifles at best come under the head of what 
 
 1 If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty 
 inferences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably print 
 ing eura \eyo/j.eva !
 
 MILTON 89 
 
 old Warner would have called cumber-minds. It 
 is time to protest against this minute style of 
 editing and commenting great poets. Gulliver's 
 microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the Brob- 
 dignagian maids of honor " a mole here and there 
 as broad as a trencher," and we shrink from a cup 
 of the purest Hippocrene after the critic's solar 
 microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical, 
 syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters 
 that sprawl in every drop of it. When a poet has 
 been so much edited as Milton, the temptation of 
 whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is 
 not to be seen becomes great in proportion as he 
 finds how little there is that has not been seen 
 before. 
 
 Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to mod 
 ernize the spelling of Milton, for surely the reading 
 of our classics should be made as little difficult as 
 possible, and he is right also in making an excep 
 tion of such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly 
 be supposed to have chosen for melodic reasons. 
 His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the orig 
 inal editions seems, however, to be the less called- 
 for as he himself appears to admit that the compos 
 itor, not the author, was supreme in these matters, 
 and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to 
 the thousand Milton had no system, but spelt 
 by immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills 
 nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel 
 sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility 
 of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he 
 tells us that the short a sound is the same in man
 
 90 MILTON 
 
 and Darby, the short o sound in God and does, 
 and what he calls the long o sound in broad and 
 wrath. Speaking of the apostrophe, Mr. Masson 
 tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a 
 possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural 
 mark : hero's for heroes, myrtle's for myrtles, Gor- 
 gons and Hydra's, etc." Now, in books printed 
 about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was put 
 in almost at random, and in all the cases cited is 
 a misprint, except in the first, where it serves to in 
 dicate that the pronunciation was not heroes as it 
 had formerly been. 1 In the " possessive singular 
 of nouns already ending in s," Mr. Masson tells us, 
 " Milton's general practice is not to double the s ; 
 thus, Nereus wrinkled look, Glaucus spell. The 
 necessities of metre would naturally constrain to 
 such forms. In a possessive followed by the word 
 sake or the word side, dislike to [of] the double 
 sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. In 
 addition to ''for righteousness 1 sake ' such phrases 
 as ''for thy name sake ' and 'for mercy sake,' are 
 allowed to pass; bedside is normal and riverside 
 nearly so." The necessities of metre need not be 
 taken into account with a poet like Milton, who 
 never was fairly in his element till he got off the 
 soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his 
 
 1 " That you may tell heroes, when you come 
 To banquet with your wife." 
 
 Chapman's Odyssey, VIII. 336, 337. 
 In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find 
 
 " Thy firm uiishak'n vertue ever brings," 
 which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.
 
 MILTON 91 
 
 verse under him like a steed that knows his rider. 
 But does the dislike of the double sibilant account 
 for the dropping of the s in these cases ? Is it not 
 far rather the presence of the s already in the 
 sound satisfying an ear accustomed to the English 
 slovenliness in the pronunciation of double conso 
 nants ? It was this which led to such forms as con 
 science sake and on justice side, and which beguiled 
 Ben Jonson and Dryden into thinking, the one 
 that noise and the other that corps was a plural. 1 
 What does Mr. Masson say to hillside, Bankside, 
 seaside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospel' 
 side (of a church), nights ide, countryside, way 
 side, brookside, and I know not how many more ? 
 Is the first half of these words a possessive ? Or 
 is it not rather a noun impressed into the service 
 as an adjective? How do such words differ from 
 Jiilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman, 
 and the like, where no double s can be made the 
 scapegoat? Certainly Milton would not have 
 avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote 
 
 " And airy tongues that syllable men's names 
 On sands and shores and desert wildernesses, " 
 
 " So in his seed all nations shall be blest," 
 " And seat of Salmanasser whose success," 
 
 1 Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from, 
 j5rummond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for an 
 authority in English, 
 
 "Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest." 
 
 The survival of Horse for horses is another example. So by a 
 reverse process pult and shay have been vulgarly deduced from 
 the supposed plurals pulse and chaise.
 
 92 MILTON 
 
 verses that hiss like Medtisa's head in wrath, and 
 who was, I think, fonder of the sound than any 
 other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds of the 
 kind we always make a distinction wholly indepen 
 dent of the doubled s. Nobody would boggle at 
 mountainside ; no one would dream of saying on 
 the fatherside or motherside. 
 
 Mr. Masson speaks of " the Miltonic forms van- 
 quisht, markt, lookt, etc." Surely he does not mean 
 to imply that these are peculiar to Milton ? Chap 
 man used them before Milton was born, and pressed 
 them farther, as in nak't and saf't for naked and 
 saved. He often prefers the contracted form in 
 his prose also, showing that the full form of the 
 past participle in ed was passing out of fashion, 
 though available in verse. 1 Indeed, I venture to 
 affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling 
 or accent to be found in Milton which is without 
 example in his predecessors or contemporaries. 
 Even highth, which is thought peculiarly Miltonic, 
 is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and still 
 
 1 Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he 
 looked after his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron's 
 Conspiracy, both dated 1608, bat one evidently printed later than 
 the other, for it shows corrections. The more solemn ending in ed 
 was probably kept alive by the reading of the Bible in churches. 
 Though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right 
 hearing of the more metrical passages in the Old Testament, 
 which are finer and more scientific than anything in the language, 
 unless it be some parts of Samson Agonistes. I remember an old 
 gentleman who always used the contracted form of the partici 
 ple in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable 
 in reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the 
 more solemn form. At any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled 
 in prose.
 
 MILTON 93 
 
 often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives 
 an odd reason for Milton's preference of it " as in 
 dicating more correctly the formation of the word 
 by the addition of the suffix th to the adjective 
 high." Is an adjective, then, at the base of growth, 
 earth, birth, truth, and other words of this kind ? 
 Home Tooke made a better guess than this. If 
 Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar 
 meaning is implied in the spelling bearth (Para 
 dise Lost, IX. 624), which he interprets as " collec 
 tive produce," though in the only other instance 
 where it occurs it is neither more nor less than 
 birth, it should seem that Milton had hit upon 
 Home Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn 
 trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the 
 original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. 
 Masson has honestly done, that in all likelihood 
 Milton had nothing to do with it. And yet he 
 cannot refrain. On the word voutsafe he hangs 
 nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Mil 
 ton's ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton "must 
 have had a reason for it," : and finds that reason 
 in " his dislike to [of] the sound ch, or to [of] that 
 sound combined with s. . . . His fine ear taught 
 him not only to seek for musical effects and ca 
 dences at large, but also to be fastidious as to syl- 
 
 1 He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though 
 they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's Faustus 
 two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words " Cursed 
 be he that struck." In a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us 
 that the old editions (there were three) have stroke and strooke in 
 the first instance, and all agree on strucke in the second. No in* 
 f erence can be drawn from such casualties.
 
 94 MILTON 
 
 lables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions 
 of consonants, except when there might be a mu 
 sical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the 
 management of the letter s, the frequency of which 
 in English is one of the faults of the speech, he 
 will be found, I believe, most careful and skilful. 
 More rarely, I think, than in Shakespeare will one 
 word ending in s be found followed immediately 
 in Milton by another word beginning with the same 
 letter ; or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase 
 as MoaVs sows, it will be difficult to find in him, 
 I believe, such a harsher example as earth's sub 
 stance, of which many writers would think nothing. 
 [With the index to back him Mr. Masson could 
 safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even 
 more apparent in his management of the sh sound. 
 He has it often, of course ; but it may be noted 
 that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He 
 writes Basan for Bashan, Sittim for SMttim, 
 Silo for /Shiloh, Asdod for Ashdod. Still more, 
 however, does he seem to have been wary of the 
 compound sound ch as in church. Of his sensitive 
 ness to this sound in excess there is a curious proof 
 in his prose pamphlet entitled ' An Apology against 
 a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' 
 where, having occasion to quote these lines from 
 one of the Satires l of his opponent, Bishop Hall, 
 
 1 The lines are not " from one of the Satires," and Milton made 
 them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to 
 grove. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often 
 harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in 
 the very terms of the preface to Paradise Lost.
 
 MILTON 95 
 
 ' Teach each hollow grove to sound his love, 
 Wearying echo with one changeless word,' 
 
 he adds, ironically, ' And so he well might, and all 
 his auditory besides, with his teach each 1 ' : Gen 
 eralizations are always risky, but when extempo 
 rized from a single hint they are maliciously so. 
 Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be 
 set on edge by Hall's echo of teach each. Did 
 Milton reject the h from Bashan and the rest be 
 cause he disliked the sound of sh, or because he 
 had found it already rejected by the Vulgate and 
 by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into 
 English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words be 
 ginning with sh seven hundred and fifty -four times 
 in his poetry, not to speak of others in which the 
 sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in tion. 
 Hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted 
 on Milton his own 
 
 " Manliest, resolutesf, "breast, 
 As the magnetick hardest iron draws, ' ' 
 
 or his 
 
 " What moves thy inquisition ? 
 Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall, 
 And my promotion thy destruction ? " 
 
 With the playful controversial wit of the day he 
 would have hinted that too much est-est is as fatal 
 to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that danger 
 was often incurred by those who too eagerly 
 shunned it. Nay, he might even have found an 
 echo almost tallying with his own in 
 
 " To hegirt the almighty throne 
 Beseeching or hesieging,"
 
 96 MILTON 
 
 a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he 
 might have twitted him with " a sequent king who 
 seeks." As for the sh sound, a poet could hardly 
 have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote, 
 
 " GnasAing for anguisA and despite and sAame, 
 
 or again, 
 
 " Then bursting forth 
 
 Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round 
 That rest or intermission none I find. 
 Before mine eyes in opposition sits 
 Grim Death, my son." 
 
 And if Milton disliked the cJi sound, he gave his 
 ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these, 
 
 ' ' Straight coucAes close ; then, rising, changes oft 
 His coucAant watch, as one who chose his ground " ; 
 
 still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless 
 chief." i 
 
 The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather 
 than a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exqui 
 site melodies (like the " Sabrina Fair ") among his 
 earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case 
 
 1 Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that Milton 
 may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of slep'st, 
 "for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear boast'st and one 
 stares and gasps at it doaCdst. There is, by the way, a fami 
 liar passage in which the ch sound predominates, not without a 
 touch of sh in a single couplet : 
 
 " Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould 
 
 Breathe such divine encAanting ravisAment ? " 
 So 
 
 " Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss," 
 and perhaps 
 
 " I see his tents 
 Pitched about Sechem " 
 might be added.
 
 MILTON 97 
 
 in an age which produced or trained the authors of 
 our best English glees, as ravishing in their instinc 
 tive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he 
 also showed from the first that larger style which 
 was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard 
 in the " Nativity Ode," in the " Solemn Music," and 
 in '^Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards met 
 rical construction, than anything that had thrilled 
 the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury 
 of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay 
 silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ- 
 pipes of our various language, that have never 
 since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. It 
 was in the larger movements of metre that Milton 
 was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of 
 Spenser's fondness for dilation as respects thoughts 
 and images. In Milton it extends to the language 
 also, and often to the single words of which a pe 
 riod is composed. He loved phrases of towering 
 port, in which every member dilated stands like 
 Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages 
 that stamp him great, the verses do not dance inter 
 weaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with 
 resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is 
 true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scatter 
 ing them that they tell in his orchestra without be 
 ing obvious, but it is in the more scientific region 
 of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer 
 rhyme and yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one 
 might call them), that he is an artist and a master. 
 He even sometimes introduces rhyme with mislead 
 ing intervals between and unobviously in his blank- 
 verse :
 
 98 MILTON 
 
 " There rest, if any rest can harbour there ; 
 And, reassembling our afflicted powers, 
 Consult how we may henceforth most offend 
 Our enemy, our own loss how repair, 
 How overcome this dire calamity, 
 What reinforcement we may gain from hope, 
 If not, what resolution from despair." 1 
 
 There is one almost perfect quatrain, _ 
 
 " Before thy fellows, ambitious to win 
 From me some plume, that thy success may show 
 Destruction to the rest. This pause between 
 (Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know " ; 
 
 and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an as* 
 sonance, 
 
 " If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge 
 Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft 
 In worst extremes and on the perilous edge 
 Of battle when it raged, in all assaults. " 
 
 There can be little doubt that the rhymes in 
 the first passage cited were intentional, and perhaps 
 they were so in the others ; but Milton's ear has 
 tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming couplets, and 
 others in which the assonance almost becomes 
 rhyme, certainly a fault in blank-verse : 
 
 " From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these), 
 From India and the Golden Chersonese " ; 
 
 " That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired 
 What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired " ; 
 
 " And will alike be punished, whether thou 
 Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow " ; 
 
 - I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness 
 af enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the 
 comma after If not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the 
 sense, and certainly to keep not a little farther apart from what, 
 ("teach each"!)
 
 MILTON 99 
 
 "Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy, 
 Save what is in destroying, other joy " ; 
 
 " Shall all be Paradise, far happier place 
 Than this of Eden, and far happier days " ; 
 
 " This my long sufferance and my day of grace 
 They who neglect and scorn shall never taste ' ' ; 
 
 " So far remote with diminution seen, 
 
 First in his East the glorious lamp was seen." 1 
 
 These examples (and others might be adduced) 
 serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy about 
 the larger interests of his measures to be always 
 careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather 
 than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any 
 other English poet, of putting great masses through 
 the most complicated evolutions without clash or 
 confusion, but he was not curious that every foot 
 should be at the same angle. In reading " Para 
 dise Lost " one has a feeling of vastness. You 
 float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sun 
 shine or hung with constellations ; the abysses of 
 space are about you ; you hear the cadenced surges 
 of an unseen ocean ; thunders mutter round the 
 horizon ; and if the scene change, it is with an ele 
 mental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. 
 His imagination seldom condenses, like Shake 
 speare's, in the kindling flash of a single epithet, 
 but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his de 
 scriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle 
 bathing in the blue streams of air, controlling with 
 his eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and 
 rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser 
 
 1 " First in his East," is not soothing to the ear.
 
 100 MILTON 
 
 expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps 
 I should rather say the indefinite, where more is 
 meant than meets the ear, than any other of our 
 poets. He loved epithets (like old and far) that 
 suggest great reaches, whether of space or time. 
 This bias shows itself already in his earlier poems, 
 as where he hears 
 
 ' ' The far off curfew sound 
 Over some widewatered shore," 
 
 or where he fancies the shores * and sounding seas 
 washing Lycidas far away ; but it reaches its cli 
 max in the " Paradise Lost." He produces his 
 effects by dilating our imaginations with an impal 
 pable hint rather than by concentrating them upon 
 too precise particulars. Thus in a famous compar 
 ison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies 
 stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean 
 of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of 
 specifying, the true secret of the ideal treatment 
 in which he is without peer, and, though every 
 where grandiose, he is never turgid. Tasso begins 
 finely with 
 
 " Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne 
 II rauco suon della tartarea tromba ; 
 Treman le spaziose atre caverne, 
 E 1' aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba," 
 
 but soon spoils all by condescending to definite 
 comparisons with thunder and intestinal convul 
 sions of the earth ; in other words, he is unwary 
 enough to give us a standard of measurement, and 
 
 1 There seems to be something wrong in this word shores. Did 
 Milton write shoals ?
 
 MILTON 101 
 
 the moment you furnish Imagination with a yard 
 stick she abdicates in favor of her statistical poor- 
 relation Commonplace. Milton, with this passage 
 in his memory, is too wise to hamper himself with 
 any statement for which he can be brought to book, 
 but wraps himself in a mist of looming indefinite- 
 ness; 
 
 " He called so loud that all the hollow deep 
 Of hell resounded," 
 
 thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from his 
 usual method of prolonged evolution. No caverns, 
 however spacious, will serve his turn, because they 
 have limits. He could practise this self-denial when 
 his artistic sense found it needful, whether for vari 
 ety of verse or for the greater intensity of effect to 
 be gained by abruptness. His more elaborate pas 
 sages have, the multitudinous roll of thunder, dying 
 away to gather a sullen force again from its own 
 reverberations, but he knew that the attention is 
 recalled and arrested by those claps that stop short 
 without echo and leave us listening. There are no 
 such vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading 
 the " Paradise Lost " one has a feeling of spacious 
 ness such as no other poet gives. Milton's respect 
 for himself and for his own mind and its move 
 ments rises wellnigh to veneration. He prepares 
 the way for his thought and spreads on the ground 
 before the sacred feet of his verse tapestries inwoven 
 with figures of mythology and romance. There is 
 no such unfailing dignity as his. Observe at what 
 a reverent distance he begins when he is about to 
 speak of himself, as at the beginning of the Third
 
 102 MILTON 
 
 Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength is 
 especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always 
 to start full-sail ; the wind and tide always serve ; 
 there is never any fluttering of the canvas. In this 
 he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who 
 has to go through with a great deal of yo-heave- 
 ohing before he gets under way. And though, in 
 the didactic parts of "Paradise Lost," the wind 
 dies away sometimes, there is a long swell that will 
 not let us forget it, and ever and anon some emi 
 nent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer peers 
 heaped with stormy memories. And the poem 
 never becomes incoherent ; we feel all through it, 
 as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great control 
 ling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust impli 
 citly. 
 
 Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, 
 it seems to me, for the most part unsatisfactory. 
 He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a 
 history of the genitival form its, which adds noth 
 ing to our previous knowledge on the subject and 
 which has no relation to Milton except for its bear 
 ing on the authorship of some verses attributed to 
 him against the most overwhelming internal evi 
 dence to the contrary. Mr. Masson is altogether 
 too resolute to find traces of what he calls oddly 
 enough " recollectiveness of Latin constructions " 
 in Milton, and scents them sometimes in what 
 would seem to the uninstructed reader very idio 
 matic English. More than once, at least, he has 
 fancied them by misunderstanding the passage in 
 which they seem to occur. Thus, in "Paradise 
 Lost," XI. 520, 521,
 
 MILTON 103 
 
 " Therefore so abject is their punishment, 
 Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own," 
 
 has no analogy with eorum deformantium, for the 
 context shows that it is the punishment which dis 
 figures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds con 
 structions difficult, ellipses strange, and words 
 needing annotation that are common to all poetry, 
 nay, sometimes to all English, that his notes seem 
 not seldom to have been written by a foreigner. 
 On this passage in " Comus," 
 
 " I do not think my sister so to seek 
 Or so unprincipled in virtue's book 
 And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever 
 As that the single want of light and noise 
 (Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) 
 Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts," 
 
 Mr. Masson tells us, that " in very strict construc 
 tion, not being would cling to want as its substan 
 tive ; but the phrase passes for the Latin ablative 
 absolute." So on the words forestalling night, 
 " i. e. anticipating. Forestall is literally to antici 
 pate the market by purchasing goods before they 
 are brought to the stall." In the verse 
 
 " Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good," 
 
 he explains that "while here has the sense of so 
 long as." But Mr. Masson's notes on the language 
 are his weakest. He is careful to tell us, for exam 
 ple, " that there are instances of the use of shine as 
 a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, and other 
 poets." It is but another way of spelling sheen, 
 and if Mr. Masson never heard a shoeblack in the 
 street say, "Shall I give you a shine, sir?" his
 
 104 MILTON 
 
 experience Las been singular. l His notes in gen 
 eral are very good (though too long). Those on 
 the astronomy of Milton are particularly valuable. 
 I think he is sometimes a little too scornful of par 
 allel passages, 2 for if there is one thing more strik 
 ing than another in this poet, it is that his great 
 and original imagination was almost wholly nour 
 ished by books, perhaps I should rather say set in 
 motion by them. It is wonderful how, from the 
 most withered and juiceless hint gathered iu his 
 reading, his grand images rise like an exhalation ; 
 how from the most battered old lamp caught in 
 that huge drag-net with which he swept the waters 
 
 1 But his etymological notes are worse. For example, " recreant, 
 renouncing the faith, from the old French recroire, which again is 
 from the mediaeval Latin recredere, to ' believe hack, ' or aposta 
 tize." This is pure fancy. The word had no such meaning in 
 either language. He derives serenate from sera, and says that 
 parle means treaty, negotiation, though it is the same word as par 
 ley, had the same meanings, and was commonly pronounced like 
 it, as in Marlowe's 
 
 " What, shall we parle with this Christian ? " 
 
 It certainly never meant treaty, though it may have meant negotia 
 tion. When it did it implied the meeting face to face of the prin 
 cipals. On the verses 
 
 " And some flowers and some hays 
 
 For thy hearse to strew the ways," 
 
 he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken " in our sense 
 of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a tomb or 
 framework over a tomb," though the obvious meaning is "to 
 strew the ways for thy hearse." How could one do that for a 
 tomb or the framework over it ? 
 
 2 A passage from Dante (Inferno, XI. 96-105), with its refer 
 ence to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of " Nature 
 taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study of Dante and 
 of his earlier commentators would also have been of great service 
 in the astronomical notes.
 
 MILTON 105 
 
 of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to build 
 his palaces. Whatever he touches swells and tow 
 ers. That wonderful passage in " Comus " of the 
 airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in sug 
 gestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry 
 sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such 
 examples help us to understand the poet. When I 
 find that Sir Thomas Browne had said before Mil 
 ton, that Adam " was the wisest of all men since," 
 I am glad to find this link between the most pro 
 found and the most stately imagination of that age. 
 Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the 
 historical development of our poetry, of its apostol 
 ical succession, so to speak. Every one has noticed 
 Milton's fondness of sonorous proper names, which 
 have not only an acquired imaginative value by as 
 sociation, and so serve to awaken our poetic sensi 
 bilities, but have likewise a merely musical signi 
 ficance. This he probably caught from Marlowe, 
 traces of whom are frequent in him. There is cer 
 tainly something of what afterwards came to be 
 called Miltonic in more than one passage of " Tam- 
 burlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems 
 struggling from the block, as in Michael Angelo's 
 Dawn. 
 
 Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of 
 Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when he 
 ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree 
 with him. He seems to understand that our pros 
 ody is accentual merely, and yet, when he comes to 
 what he calls variations, he talks of the " substitu 
 tion of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee,
 
 106 MILTON 
 
 for the regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the 
 Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the same." This is 
 always misleading. The shift of the accent in 
 what Mr. Masson calls " dissyllabic variations " is 
 common to all pentameter verse, and, in the other 
 case, most of the words cited as trisyllables either 
 were not so in Milton's day, 1 or were so or not at 
 choice of the poet, according to their place in the 
 verse. There is not an elision of Milton's without 
 precedent in the dramatists from whom he learned 
 to write blank-verse. Milton was a greater metrist 
 than any of them, except Marlowe and Shake 
 speare, and he employed the elision (or the slur) 
 oftener than they to give a faint undulation or re 
 tardation to his verse, only because his epic form 
 demanded it more for variety's sake. How Milton 
 would have read them, is another question. He 
 certainly often marked them by an apostrophe in 
 his manuscripts. He doubtless composed accord 
 ing to quantity, so far as that is possible in Eng 
 lish, and as Cowper somewhat extravagantly says, 
 " gives almost as many proofs of it in his ' Paradise 
 Lost ' as there are lines in the poem." 2 But when 
 Mr. Masson tells us that 
 
 " Self -fed and self -consumed : if this fail," 
 
 and 
 
 " Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare," 
 
 are " only nine syllables," and that in 
 
 1 Almost every combination of two vowels might in those days 
 be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision was 
 confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study of the 
 Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely conforms. 
 
 2 Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.
 
 MILTON 107 
 
 " Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream," 
 
 " either the third foot must be read as an anapcest 
 or the word hugest must be pronounced as one syl 
 lable, hug'st" I think Milton would have invoked 
 the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of course Milton 
 read it 
 
 " Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream," 
 
 just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Masson's 
 facsimile) 
 
 " Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills," 
 
 a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur pre 
 cisely as in the Italian poets. 1 " Gest that swim " 
 would be rather a knotty anapcest, an insupporta 
 ble foot indeed ! And why is even hug'st worse 
 than Shakespeare's 
 
 " Young'st follower of thy drum " ? 
 
 In the same way he says of 
 
 " For we have also our evening and our morn," 
 
 that " the metre of this line is irregular," and of 
 the rapidly fine 
 
 " Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried," 
 
 that it is " a line of unusual metre." Why more 
 unusual than 
 
 " As being the contrary to his high will " ? 
 
 What would Mr. Masson say to these three verses 
 from Dekkar ? 
 
 1 So Dante : 
 
 " Ma sapienza e amore e virtute." 
 So Donne : 
 
 " Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."
 
 108 MILTON 
 
 " And knowing so much, I muse thou art so poor " ; 
 
 " I fan away the dust flying in mine eyes " ; 
 
 " Flowing o'er with court news only of you and them." 
 
 All such participles (where no consonant divided 
 the vowels) were normally of one syllable, permis 
 sibly of two. 1 If Mr. Masson had studied the 
 poets who preceded Milton as he has studied him, 
 he would never have said that the verse 
 
 " Not this rock only ; his omnipresence fills," 
 
 was " peculiar as having a distinct syllable of over- 
 measure." He retains Milton's spelling of hunderd 
 without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that 
 e?, , j9, 6, &c., followed by I or r, might be either 
 of two or of three syllables. In Marlowe we find 
 it both ways in two consecutive verses : 
 
 " A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse, 
 Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms." 2 
 
 Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses ending 
 in one or more unaccented syllables, and even ar 
 gues in his Introduction that some of them might 
 be reckoned Alexandrines. He cites some lines of 
 Spenser as confirming his theory, forgetting that 
 rhyme wholly changes the conditions of the case 
 
 1 Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with 
 the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, 
 but seems to have learned something from Abbott's Shakespearian 
 Grammar in the interval between writing his notes and his Intro 
 duction. Walker's Shakespeare's Versification would have been a 
 great help to him in default of original knowledge. 
 
 2 Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from the 
 word sister by its preceding a vowel : 
 
 " Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near! " 
 This would have been impossible before a consonant.
 
 MILTON 109 
 
 by throwing the accent (appreciably even now, but 
 more emphatically in Spenser's day) on the last 
 syllable. 
 
 " A spirit and judgment equal or superior," 
 
 he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consisting 
 of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely Mil 
 ton's ear would never have tolerated a dissyllabic 
 " spirit " in such a position. The word was then 
 more commonly of one syllable, though it might be 
 two, and was accordingly spelt spreet (still surviv 
 ing in sprite), sprit, and even spirt, as Milton him 
 self spells it in one of Mr. Masson's facsimiles. 1 
 Shakespeare, in the verse 
 
 " Hath put a spirit of youth in everything," 
 
 uses the word admirably well in a position where 
 it cannot have a metrical value of more than one 
 syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to the 
 verse in keeping with the sense. Our old metrists 
 were careful of elasticity, a quality which modern 
 verse has lost in proportion as our language has 
 stiffened into uniformity under the benumbing fin 
 gers of pedants. 
 
 This discussion of the value of syllables is not so 
 trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense has 
 been written about imperfect measures in Shake 
 speare, and of the admirable dramatic effect pro 
 duced by filling up the gaps of missing syllables 
 with pauses or prolongations of the voice in read 
 ing. In rapid, abrupt, and passionate dialogue 
 this is possible, but in passages of continuously 
 
 1 So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old French.
 
 110 MILTON 
 
 level speech it is barbarously absurd. I do not be 
 lieve that any of our old dramatists has knowingly 
 left us a single imperfect verse. Seeing in what a 
 haphazard way and in how mutilated a form their 
 plays have mostly reached us, we should attribute 
 such faults (as a geologist would call them) to 
 anything rather than to the deliberate design of 
 the poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best 
 metrists among them, have given us a standard by 
 which to measure what licenses they took in versi 
 fication, the one in his translations, the other in 
 his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are 
 very few, and all of them occur in works printed 
 after his blindness had lessened the chances of su 
 pervision and increased those, of error. There are 
 only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indi 
 gestible as they stand. These are, 
 
 " Burnt after them to the bottomless pit," 
 
 and 
 
 " With them from bliss to the bottomless deep." 
 
 This certainly looks like a case where a word had 
 dropped out or had been stricken out by some 
 proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in 
 a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. 
 Masson notices only the first of these lines, and 
 says that to make it regular by accenting the word 
 bottomless on the second syllable would be " too 
 horrible." ^Certainly not, if Milton so accented it, 
 any more than blasphemous and twenty more which 
 sound oddly to us now. However that may be, 
 Milton could not have intended to close not only a 
 period, but a paragraph also, with an unmusical
 
 MILTON 111 
 
 verse, and in the only other passage where the word 
 occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable : 
 
 " With hideous ruin and combustion down 
 To bottomless perdition, there to dwell." 
 
 As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom, 
 may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to 
 circumstances, I am persuaded that the last pas 
 sage quoted (and all three refer to the same event) 
 gives us the word wanting in the two others, and 
 that Milton wrote, or meant to write, 
 
 " Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit," 
 
 which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of rip 
 ple that Milton liked best. 1 
 
 Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Introduc 
 tion of the way in which the verses of Milton 
 should be read is judicious enough, though some of 
 the examples he gives, of the " comicality " which 
 would ensue from compressing every verse into an 
 exact measure of ten syllables, are based on a sur 
 prising ignorance of the laws which guided our 
 poets just before and during Milton's time in the 
 structure of their verses. Thus he seems to think 
 that a strict scansion would require us in the verses 
 
 "So he with difficulty and labor hard," 
 
 and 
 
 "Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold," 
 
 1 Milton, however, would not have balked at th 1 bottomless any 
 more than Drayton at th 1 rejected or Donne at th 1 sea. Mr. Mas- 
 son does not seem to understand this elision, for he corrects z' <A' 
 midst to {' the midst, and takes pains to mention it in a note. He 
 might better have restored the n in i', where it is no contraction, 
 but merely indicates the pronunciation, as o' for of and on.
 
 112 MILTON 
 
 to pronounce diffikty and purp\ Though Mr. 
 Masson talks of " slurs and elisions," his ear would 
 seem somewhat insensible to their exact nature or 
 office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus where none 
 is intended, and his making purple of one syllable 
 wrecks the whole verse, the real slur in the latter 
 case being on azure or. 1 When he asks whether 
 Milton required " these pronunciations in his verse," 
 no positive answer can be given, but I very much 
 doubt whether he would have thought that some of 
 the lines Mr. Masson cites " remain perfectly good 
 Blank Verse even with the most leisurely natural 
 enunciation of the spare syllable," and I am sure 
 he would have stared if told that " the number of 
 accents " in a pentameter verse was " variable." It 
 may be doubted whether elisions and compressions 
 which would be thought in bad taste or even vul 
 gar now were more abhorrent to the ears of Milton's 
 generation than to a cultivated Italian would be 
 the hearing Dante read as prose. After all, what 
 Mr. Masson says may be reduced to the infallible 
 axiom that poetry should be read as poetry. 
 
 Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main prin 
 ciples, but the examples he quotes make one doubt 
 whether he knows what a verse is. For example, 
 he thinks it would be a " horror," if in the verse 
 
 " That invincible Samson far renowned " 
 
 we should lay the stress on the first syllable of in 
 vincible. It is hard to see why this should be 
 worse than conventicle or remonstrance or succes- 
 
 1 Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened to 
 two syllables.
 
 MILTON 113 
 
 sor or incompatible, (the three latter used by the 
 correct Daniel) or why Mr. Masson should clap an 
 accent on surface merely because it comes at the 
 end of a verse, and deny it to invincible. If one 
 read the verse just cited with those that go with it, 
 he will find that the accent must come on the first 
 syllable of invincible, or else the whole passage be 
 comes chaos. 1 Should we refuse to say obleeged 
 with Pope because the fashion has changed ? From 
 its apparently greater freedom in skilful hands, 
 blank verse gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing 
 and dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup 
 let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in the 
 one that would not be good in the other when han 
 dled by a master like Dryden. Milton, like other 
 great poets, wrote some bad verses, and it is wiser 
 to confess that they are so than to conjure up some 
 unimaginable reason why the reader should accept 
 them as the better for their badness. Such a bad 
 verse is 
 
 " Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shapes of death," 
 
 which might be cited to illustrate Pope's 
 
 " And ten low words oft creep in one dull line." 
 
 Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any par 
 tiality for low words. He rather loved them tall, 
 as the Prussian King loved men to be six feet 
 high in their stockings, and fit to go into the gren- 
 
 1 Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him guilty 
 of a verse like 
 
 " Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep," 
 
 while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions 
 that he loved.
 
 114 MILTON 
 
 adiers. He loved them as much for their music 
 as for their meaning, perhaps more. His style, 
 therefore, when it has to deal with commoner 
 things, is apt to grow a little cumbrous and un 
 wieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl 
 would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge 
 of a hole. Shakespeare would have understood 
 this. Milton would have made him talk like an 
 eagle. His influence is not to be left out of ac 
 count as partially contributing to that decline 
 toward poetic diction which was already beginning 
 ere he died. If it would not be fair to say that 
 he is the most artistic, he may be called in the 
 highest sense the most scientific of our poets. If 
 to Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to, 
 they have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught. 
 Our language has no finer poem than " Samson 
 Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of austere 
 dignity or in the skill with which the poet's per 
 sonal experience is generalized into a classic tra 
 gedy. 
 
 Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would seem 
 to show him, he had in him by nature, or bred 
 jnto him by fate, something of the haughty and 
 defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michael Angelo. 
 In no other English author is the man so large a 
 part of his works. Milton's haughty conception of 
 himself enters into all he says and does. Always 
 the necessity of this one man became that of the 
 whole human race for the moment. There were 
 no walls so sacred but must go to the ground when 
 he wanted elbow-room; and he wanted a great
 
 MILTON 115 
 
 deal. Did Mary Powell, the cavalier's daughter, 
 find the abode of a roundhead schoolmaster incom 
 patible and leave it, forthwith the cry of the uni 
 verse was for an easier dissolution of the marriage 
 covenant. If he is blind, it is with excess of light, 
 it is a divine partiality, an over-shadowing with 
 angels' wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted 
 among the prophets because they, too, had lost 
 their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of more 
 account than his Iliad. After writing in rhyme 
 till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuitable for his 
 epic, and it at once becomes " the invention of a 
 barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame 
 metre." If the structure of his mind be undra- 
 matic, why, then, the English drama is naught, 
 learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest 
 notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on 
 a Greek model with the blinded Samson for its 
 hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme. 
 Plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men 
 whose yesterdays are in no way responsible for 
 their to-morrows. And this makes him perennially 
 interesting even to those who hate his politics, de 
 spise his Socinianism, and find his greatest poem 
 a bore. A new edition of his poems is always 
 welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a 
 fresh side to each new student, and Mr. Masson, 
 in his three handsome volumes, has given us, with 
 much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much 
 more that is a solid and permanent acquisition to 
 our knowledge. 
 
 It results from the almost scornful withdrawal
 
 116 MILTON 
 
 of Milton into the fortress of his absolute person 
 ality that no great poet is so uniformly self-con 
 scious as he. We should say of Shakespeare that 
 he had the power of transforming himself into 
 everything ; of Milton, that he had that of trans 
 forming everything into himself. Dante is indi 
 vidual rather than self-conscious, and he, the cast- 
 iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at the 
 breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of 
 sunshine. But Milton never let himself go for a 
 moment. As other poets are possessed by their 
 theme, so is he seT/^-possessed, his great theme be 
 ing John Milton, and his great duty that of inter 
 preter between him and the world. I say it with 
 all respect, for he was well worthy translation, and 
 it is out of Hebrew that the version is made. Pope 
 says he makes God the Father reason " like a 
 school-divine." The criticism is witty, but inac 
 curate. He makes Deity a mouthpiece for his 
 present theology, and had the poem been written 
 a few years later, the Almighty would have be 
 come more heterodox. Since Dante, no one had 
 stood on these visiting terms with heaven. 
 
 Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reliance, 
 I suspect, which goes far toward making the sub 
 lime, and which, falling by a hair's-breadth short 
 thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puritanism showed 
 both the strength and weakness of its prophetic 
 nurture ; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of 
 England by the very men it had conquered in the 
 field, enough of the former to intrench itself in 
 three or four immortal memories. It has left an
 
 MILTON 117 
 
 abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great 
 monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse 
 of Milton. It is a high inspiration to be the neigh 
 bor of great events ; to have been a partaker in 
 them and to have seen noble purposes by their own 
 self-confidence become the very means of ignoble 
 ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a 
 passion of regret deepening the song which dares 
 not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand loneli 
 ness of Milton in his latter years, while it makes 
 him the most impressive figure in our literary his 
 tory, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a 
 sublime independence of human sympathy like that 
 with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But 
 it is idle to talk of the loneliness of one the habit 
 ual companions of whose mind were the Past and 
 Future. I always seem to see him leaning in his 
 blindness a hand on the shoulder of each, sure 
 that the one will guard the song which the other 
 had inspired.
 
 DANTE 1 
 
 1872 
 
 ON the banks of a little river so shrunken by the 
 suns of summer that it seems fast passing into a 
 tradition, but so swollen by the autumnal rains with 
 Italian suddenness of passion that the massy bridge 
 shudders under the impatient heap of waters be 
 hind it, stands a city which, in its period of bloom 
 not so large as Boston, may well rank next to 
 Athens in the history which teaches come V uom 
 *' eterna. 
 
 Originally only a convenient spot in the valley 
 where the fairs of the neighboring Etruscan city of 
 Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from a huddle 
 of booths to a town, and then to a city, which ab 
 sorbed its ancestral neighbor and became a cradle 
 for the arts, the letters, the science, and the com 
 merce 2 of modern Europe. For her Cimabue 
 
 1 The Shadow of Dante, being an Essay towards studying Him 
 self, his World, and his Pilgrimage. By Maria Francesca Ros- 
 setti. 
 
 " Se Dio te lasci, letter, prender fmtto 
 
 Di tua lezione." 
 Boston : Roberts Brothers. 1872. 8vo, pp. 296. 
 
 2 The Florentines should seem to have invented or re-invented 
 banks, book-keeping by double-entry, and bills of exchange. The 
 last, by endowing Value with the gift of fern-seed and enabling it to 
 walk invisible, turned the flank of the baronial tariff-system and
 
 DANTE 119 
 
 wrought, who infused Byzantine formalism with a 
 suggestion of nature and feeling ; for her the Pi- 
 sani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure 
 with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculp 
 ture ; for her the marvellous boy Ghiberti proved 
 that unity of composition and grace of figure and 
 drapery were never beyond the reach of genius ; 1 
 for her Brunelleschi curved the dome which Michael 
 Angelo hung in air on St. Peter's ; for her Giotto 
 reared the bell-tower graceful as an Horatian ode 
 in marble ; and the great triumvirate of Italian poe 
 try, good sense, and culture called her mother. 
 There is no modern city about which cluster so 
 many elevating associations, none in which the past 
 is so contemporary with us in unchanged buildings 
 and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante 
 is still shown ; children still receive baptism at the 
 font (il mio bel San Giovanni) where he was 
 christened before the acorn dropped that was to 
 grow into a keel for Columbus ; and an inscribed 
 stone marks the spot where he used to sit and watch 
 
 made the roads safe for the great liberalizer, Commerce. This 
 made Money omnipresent, and prepared the way for its present 
 omnipotence. Fortunately it cannot usurp the third attribute of 
 Deity, omniscience. But whatever the consequences, this Flo 
 rentine invention was at first nothing but admirable, securing to 
 brain. its legitimate influence over brawn. The latter has begun 
 its revolt, but whether it will succeed better in its attempt to 
 restore mediaeval methods than the barons in maintaining them 
 remains to be seen. 
 
 1 Ghiberti's designs have been criticised by a too systematic 
 sesthetieism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and painting. 
 But is not the rilievo precisely the bridge by which the one art 
 passes over into the territory of the other ?
 
 120 DANTE 
 
 the slow blocks swing up to complete the master- 
 thought of Arnolfo. In the convent of St. Mark 
 hard by lived and labored Beato Angelico, the 
 saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo, who 
 taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls 
 Savonarola went forth to his triumphs, short-lived 
 almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. The plain 
 little chamber of Michael Angelo seems still to ex 
 pect his return ; his last sketches lie upon the table, 
 his staff leans in the corner, and his slippers wait 
 before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad 
 hills, just without the city walls, one's feet may 
 press the same stairs that Milton climbed to visit 
 Galileo. To an American there is something su 
 premely impressive in this cumulative influence of 
 a past full of inspiration and rebuke, something 
 saddening in this repeated proof that moral supre 
 macy is the only one that leaves monuments and 
 not ruins behind it. Time, who with us obliterates 
 the labor and often the names of yesterday, seems 
 here to have spared almost the prints of the care 
 piante that shunned the sordid paths of worldly 
 honor. 
 
 Around the courtyard of the great Museum of 
 Florence stand statues of her illustrious dead, her 
 poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors, and 
 statesmen ; and as the traveller feels the ennobling 
 lift of such society, and reads the names or recog 
 nizes the features familiar to him as his own thresh 
 old, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace 
 here as Notoriety everywhere else, and that this 
 fifth-rate city should have the privilege thus to
 
 DANTE 121 
 
 commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose 
 claim to preeminence the whole world would con 
 cede. Among them is one figure before which 
 every scholar, every man who has been touched by 
 the tragedy of life, lingers with reverential pity. 
 The haggard cheeks, the lips clamped together in 
 unfaltering resolve, the scars of lifelong battle, and 
 the brow whose stern outline seems the trophy 
 of final victory, this, at least, is a face that needs 
 no name beneath it. This is he who among literary 
 fames finds only two that for growth and immuta 
 bility can parallel his own. The suffrages of high 
 est authority would now place him second in that 
 company where he with proud humility took the 
 sixth place. 1 
 
 Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli 
 Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, probably 
 during the month of May. 2 This is the date given 
 by Boccaccio, who is generally followed, though he 
 makes a blunder in saying, sedendo Urbano quarto 
 nella cattedra di San Pietro, for Urban died in 
 October, 1264. Some, misled by an error in a few 
 of the early manuscript copies of the Divina Corn- 
 media^ would have him born five years earlier, in 
 1260. According to Arrivabene, 3 Sansovino was 
 
 1 Inferno, IV. 102. 
 
 2 The Nouvelle Biographie Ge"nlrale gives May 8 as his birth 
 day. This is a mere assumption, for Boccaccio only says generally 
 May. The indication which Dante himself gives that he was born 
 when the sun was in Gemini would give a range from about the 
 middle of May to about the middle of June, so that the 8th is 
 certainly too early. 
 
 3 Secolo di Dante, Udine edition of 1828, voL iii. Part I. p. 
 578.
 
 122 DANTE 
 
 the first to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the 
 authority of the poet himself, basing his argument 
 on the first verse of the Inferno, 
 
 " Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita " ; 
 
 the average age of man having been declared by 
 the Psalmist to be seventy years, and the period 
 of the poet's supposed vision being unequivocally 
 fixed at 1300. 1 Leonardo Aretino and Manetti 
 add their testimony to that of Boccaccio, and 1265 
 is now universally assumed as the true date. Vol 
 taire, 2 nevertheless, places the poet's birth in 1260, 
 and jauntily forgives Bayle (who, he says, ecrivait 
 a Rotterdam currente calamo pour son libraire) 
 for having been right, declaring that he esteems 
 him neither more nor less for having made a mis 
 take of five years. Oddly enough, Voltaire adopts 
 this alleged blunder of five years on the next page, 
 in saying that Dante died at the age of fifty-six, 
 though he still more oddly omits the undisputed date 
 of his death (1321), which would have shown Bayle 
 to be right. The poet's descent is said to have 
 been derived from a younger son of the great 
 Roman family of the Frangipani, classed by the 
 popular rhyme with the Orsini and Colonna : 
 
 "Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani, 
 Prendono oggi e pagano domain." 
 
 That his ancestors had been long established in 
 Florence is an inference from some expressions of 
 
 1 Arrivabene, however, is wrong. Boccaccio makes precisely 
 the same reckoning in the first note of bis Commentary (Bocc. 
 Comento, etc., Firenze, 1844, vol. i. pp. 32, 33). 
 
 2 Diet. Phil., art " Dante."
 
 DANTE 123 
 
 the poet, and from their dwelling having been situ 
 ated in the more ancient part of the city. The 
 most important fact of the poet's genealogy is, that 
 he was of mixed race, the Alighieri being of Teu 
 tonic origin. Dante was born, as he himself tells 
 us, 1 when the sun was in the constellation Gemini, 
 and it has been absurdly inferred, from a passage 
 in the Inferno? that his horoscope was drawn and 
 a great destiny predicted for him by his teacher, 
 Brunette Latini. The Ottimo Comento tells us 
 that the Twins are the house of Mercury, who in 
 duces in men the faculty of writing, science, and of 
 acquiring knowledge. This is worth mentioning 
 as characteristic of the age and of Dante himself, 
 with whom the influence of the stars took the place 
 of the old notion of destiny. 3 It is supposed, from 
 a passage in Boccaccio's life of Dante, that Ali- 
 ghiero the father was still living when the poet was 
 nine years old. If so, he must have died soon after, 
 for Leonardo Aretino, who wrote with original doc 
 uments before him, tells us that Dante lost his 
 father while yet a child. This circumstance may 
 have been not without influence in muscularizing 
 his nature to that character of self-reliance which 
 shows itself so constantly and sharply during his 
 after-life. His tutor was Brunetto Latini, a very 
 superior man (for that age), says Aretino paren 
 thetically. Like Alexander Gill, he is now remem 
 bered only as the schoolmaster of a great poet, and 
 that he did his duty well may be inferred from 
 Dante's speaking of him gratefully as one who by 
 1 Paradiso, XXII. 2 Canto XV. z Purgatorio, XVI.
 
 124 DANTE 
 
 times "taught him how man eternizes himself." 
 This, and what Villani says of his refining the Tus 
 can idiom (for so we understand laisfarli scorti in 
 bene parlare J ), are to be noted as of probable in 
 fluence on the career of his pupil. Of the order of 
 Dante's studies nothing can be certainly affirmed. 
 His biographers send him to Bologna, Padua, Paris, 
 Naples, and even Oxford. All are doubtful, Paris 
 and Oxford most of all, and the dates utterly unde 
 terminable. Yet all are possible, nay, perhaps 
 probable. Bologna and Padua we should be in 
 clined to place before his exile ; Paris and Oxford, 
 if at all, after it. If no argument in favor of Paris 
 is to be drawn from his Pape Satan 2 and the cor 
 responding paix, paix, Sathan, in the autobiogra 
 phy of Cellini, nor from the very definite allusion 
 to Doctor Sigier, 8 we may yet infer from some pas 
 sages in the Commedia that his wanderings had 
 extended even farther ; 4 for it would not be hard 
 to show that his comparisons and illustrations from 
 outward things are almost invariably drawn from 
 actual eyesight. As to the nature of his studies, 
 there can be no doubt that he went through the 
 trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the 
 quadrimum (arithmetic, music, geometry, and as 
 tronomy) of the then ordinary university course. 
 
 1 Though he himself preferred French, and wrote his Li Tresors 
 in that language for two reasons, " /' unaperche noi siamo in Fran- 
 da, e /' ultra perche la parlatura francesca e piii dilettevole e piu 
 comune che tutti li altri linguaggi." (Proemio, suljine.) 
 
 2 Inferno, Canto VII. 8 Paradiso, Canto X. 
 
 * See especially Inferno, IX. 112 et seq. ; XII. 120 ; XV. 4 et 
 seq. ; XXXII. 25-30.
 
 DANTE 125 
 
 To these he afterward added painting (or at least 
 drawing, disegnava un angelo sopra certe tavo- 
 lette J ), theology, and medicine. He is said to have 
 been the pupil of Cimabue, and was certainly the 
 friend of Giotto, the designs for some of whose 
 frescos at Assisi and elsewhere have been wrongly 
 attributed to him, though we may safely believe in 
 his helpful comment and suggestion. To prove his 
 love of music, the episode of Casella were enough, 
 even without Boccaccio's testimony. The range of 
 Dante's study and acquirement would be encyclo 
 pedic in any age, but at that time it was literally 
 possible to master the omne scibile, and he seems 
 to have accomplished it. How lofty his theory of 
 science was, is plain from this passage in the Con- 
 vito : " He is not to be called a true lover of wis 
 dom (filosofo) who loves it for the sake of gain, as 
 do lawyers, physicians, and almost all churchmen 
 (li religiosfy, who study, not in order to know, but 
 to acquire riches or advancement, and who would 
 not persevere in study should you give them what 
 they desire to gain by it. ... And it may be said 
 that (as true friendship between men consists in 
 each wholly loving the other) the true philosopher 
 loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part 
 of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to 
 herself, and allows no one of his thoughts to wan 
 der to other things." 2 The Convito gives us a 
 glance into Dante's library. We find Aristotle 
 (whom he calls the philosopher, the master) cited 
 
 1 Vit. Nuov., c. xxxv. 
 
 2 Tratt III. cap. xi.
 
 126 DANTE 
 
 seventy-six times ; Cicero, eighteen ; Albertus Mag 
 nus, seven ; Boethius, six ; Plato (at second-hand), 
 four; Aquinas, Avicenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, 
 Lucan, and Ovid, three each ; Virgil, Juvenal, 
 Statius, Seneca, and Horace, twice each ; and Al- 
 gazzali, Alfrogan, Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and 
 Homer (at second-hand), once. Of Greek he 
 seems to have understood little ; of Hebrew and 
 Arabic, perhaps more. But it was not only in the 
 closet and from books that Dante received his edu 
 cation. He acquired, perhaps, the better part of it 
 in the streets of Florence, and later, in those home 
 less wanderings which led him (as he says) wher 
 ever the Italian tongue was spoken. His were the 
 only open eyes of that century, and, as nothing es 
 caped them, so there is nothing that was not pho 
 tographed upon his sensitive brain, to be afterward 
 fixed forever in the Commedia. What Florence was 
 during his youth and manhood, with its Guelphs 
 and Ghibellines, its nobles and trades, its Bianchi 
 and Neri, its kaleidoscopic revolutions, " all parties 
 loving liberty and doing their best to destroy her," 
 as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our province 
 to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as events 
 are when we look back on them across so many 
 ages, only the upheavals of party conflict catching 
 the eye, while the spaces of peace between sink out 
 of the view of history, a whole century seems like 
 a mere wild chaos. Yet during a couple of such 
 centuries the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and 
 Siena got built; Cimabue, Giotto, Arnolfo, the 
 Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti gave the im-
 
 DANTE 127 
 
 pulse to modern art, or brought it in some of its 
 branches to its culminating point; modern litera 
 ture took its rise ; commerce became a science, and 
 the middle class came into being. It was a time 
 of fierce passions and sudden tragedies, of pictur 
 esque transitions and contrasts. It found Dante, 
 shaped him by every experience that life is capa 
 ble of, rank, ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft, 
 hope, exile, hunger, dependence, despair, until 
 he became endowed with a sense of the nothingness 
 of this world's goods possible only to the rich, and 
 a knowledge of man possible only to the poor. The 
 few well-ascertained facts of Dante's life may be 
 briefly stated. In 1274 occurred what we may 
 call his spiritual birth, the awakening in him of 
 the imaginative faculty, and of that profounder 
 and more, intense consciousness which springs from 
 the recognition of beauty through the antithesis of 
 sex. It was in that year that he first saw Beatrice 
 Portinari. In 1289 he was present at the battle of 
 Campaldino, fighting on the side of the Guelphs 
 who there utterly routed the Ghibellines, and 
 where, he says characteristically enough, " I was 
 present, not a boy in arms, and where I felt much 
 fear, but in the end the greatest pleasure, from the 
 various changes of the fight." l In the same year 
 he assisted at the siege and capture of Caprona. 2 
 In 1290 died Beatrice, married to Simoiie dei 
 Bardi, precisely when is uncertain, but before 1287, 
 as appears by a mention of her in her father's will, 
 
 1 Letter of Dante, now lost, cited by Aretino. 
 a Inferno, XXI. 94.
 
 128 DANTE 
 
 bearing date January 15 of that year. Dante's 
 own marriage is assigned to various years, ranging 
 from 1291 to 1294 ; but the earlier date seems the 
 more probable, as he was the father of seven chil 
 dren (the youngest, a daughter, named Beatrice) 
 in 1301. His wife was Gemma dei Donati, and 
 through her Dante, whose family, though noble, 
 was of the lesser nobility, became nearly connected 
 with Corso Donati, the head of a powerful clan of 
 the grandi, or greater nobles. In 1293 occurred 
 what is called the revolution of Gian Delia Bella, 
 in which the priors of the trades took the power 
 into their own hands, and made nobility a disquali 
 fication for office. A noble was defined to be any 
 one who counted a knight among his ancestors, and 
 thus the descendant of Cacciaguida was excluded. 
 
 Delia Bella was exiled in 1295, but the nobles 
 did not regain their power. On the contrary, the 
 citizens, having all their own way, proceeded to 
 quarrel among themselves, and subdivided into the 
 popolani grossi and popolani minuti, or greater 
 and lesser trades, a distinction of gentility some 
 what like that between wholesale and retail trades 
 men. The grandi continuing turbulent, many of 
 the lesser nobility, among them Dante, drew over 
 to the side of the citizens, and between 1297 and 
 1300 there is found inscribed in the book of the 
 physicians and apothecaries, Dante d 1 Aldighiero, 
 degli Aldighieri, poeta Florentine. 1 Professor de 
 Vericour thinks it necessary to apologize for this 
 lapse on the part of the poet, and gravely bids us 
 1 Balbo, Vita di Dante, Firenze, 1853, p. 117.
 
 DANTE 129 
 
 take courage, nor think that Dante was ever an 
 apothecary. 1 In 1300 we find him elected one of 
 the priors of the city. In order to a perfect mis 
 understanding of everything connected with the 
 Florentine politics of this period, one has only to 
 study the various histories. The result is a spec 
 trum on the mind's eye, which looks definite and 
 brilliant, but really hinders all accurate vision, as 
 if from too steady inspection of a Catharine-wheel 
 in full whirl. A few words, however, are necessary, 
 if only to make the confusion palpable. The rival 
 German families of Welfs and Weiblingens had 
 given their names, softened into Guelfi and Ghibel- 
 lini, from which Gabriel Harvey 2 ingeniously, 
 but mistakenly, derives elves and goblins, to two 
 parties in Northern Italy, representing respectively 
 the adherents of the pope and of the emperor, but 
 serving very well as rallying-points in all manner of 
 intercalary and subsidiary quarrels. The nobles, es 
 pecially the greater ones, perhaps from instinct, 
 perhaps in part from hereditary tradition, as being 
 more or less Teutonic by descent, were com 
 monly Ghibellines, or Imperialists ; the bourgeoisie 
 were very commonly Guelphs, or supporters of the 
 pope, partly from natural antipathy to the nobles, 
 and partly, perhaps, because they believed them 
 selves to be espousing the more purely Italian side. 
 Sometimes, however, the party relation of nobles 
 and burghers to each other was reversed, but the 
 names of Guelph and Ghibelline always substan- 
 
 1 Life and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 80. 
 a Notes to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar.
 
 130 DANTE 
 
 tially represented the same things. The family of 
 Dante had been Guelphic, and we have seen him 
 already as a young man serving two campaigns 
 against the other party. . But no immediate ques 
 tion as between pope and emperor seems then to 
 have been pending ; and while there is no evidence 
 that he was ever a mere partisan, the reverse would 
 be the inference from his habits and character. 
 Just before his assumption of the priorate, how 
 ever, a new complication had arisen. A family 
 feud, beginning in the neighboring city of Pistoja, 
 between the Cancellieri Neri and Cancellieri Bian- 
 chi, 1 had extended to Florence, where the Guelphs 
 took the part of the Neri and the Ghibellines of 
 the Bianchi. 2 The city was instantly in a ferment 
 of street brawls, as actors in one of which some of 
 the Medici are incidentally named, the first ap 
 pearance of that family in history. Both parties 
 appealed at different times to the pope, who sent 
 two ambassadors, first a bisnop and then a cardi 
 nal. Both pacificators soon flung out again in a 
 rage, after adding the new element of excommuni 
 cation to the causes of confusion. It was in the 
 midst of these things that Dante became one of 
 the six priors (June, 1300), an office which the 
 Florentines had made bimestrial in its tenure, in 
 order apparently to secure at least six constitutional 
 chances of revolution in the year. He advised 
 
 1 See the story at length in Balbo, Vita di Dante, cap. x. 
 
 2 Thus Foscolo. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that 
 at first the blacks were the extreme Guelphs, and the whites those 
 moderate Guelphs inclined to make terms with the Ghibellines. 
 The matter is obscure, and Balbo contradicts himself about it.
 
 DANTE 131 
 
 that the leaders of both parties should be banished 
 to the frontiers, which was forthwith done ; the os 
 tracism including his relative Corso Donati among 
 the Neri, and his most intimate friend the poet 
 Guido Cavalcanti among the Bianchi. They were 
 all permitted to return before long (though after 
 Dante's term of office was over), and came accord 
 ingly, bringing at least the Scriptural allowance 
 of " seven other " motives of mischief with them. 
 Affairs getting worse (1301), the Neri, with the 
 connivance of the pope (Boniface VIII.), entered 
 into an arrangement with Charles of Valois, who 
 was preparing an expedition to Italy. Dante was 
 meanwhile sent on an embassy to Rome (Septem 
 ber, 1301, according to Arrivabene, 1 but probably 
 earlier) by the Bianchi, who still retained all the 
 offices at Florence. It is the tradition that he said 
 in setting forth : " If I go, who remains ? and if I 
 stay, who goes ? " Whether true or not, the story 
 implies what was certainly true, that the counsel 
 and influence of Dante were of great weight with 
 the more moderate of both parties. On October 
 31, 1301, Charles took possession of Florence in 
 the interest of the Neri. Dante being still at 
 Eome (January 27, 1302), sentence of exile was 
 pronounced against him and others, with a heavy 
 fine to be paid within two months ; if not paid, the 
 entire confiscation of goods, and, whether paid or 
 no, exile ; the charge against him being pecuniary 
 malversation in office. The fine not paid (as it 
 
 1 Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He would seem to have been in 
 Rome during the Jubilee of 1300. See Inferno, XVIII. 28-33.
 
 132 DANTE 
 
 could not be without admitting the justice of the 
 charges, which Dante scorned even to deny), in 
 less than two months (March 10, 1302) a second 
 sentence was registered, by which he with others 
 was condemned to be burned alive if taken within 
 the boundaries of the republic. 1 From this time 
 the life of Dante becomes semi-mythical, and for 
 nearly every date we are reduced to the " as they 
 say" of Herodotus. He became now necessarily 
 identified with his fellow-exiles (fragments of all 
 parties united by common wrongs in a practical, if 
 not theoretic, Ghibellinism), and shared in their 
 attempts to reinstate themselves by force of arms. 
 He was one of their council of twelve, but withdrew 
 from it on account of the unwisdom of their meas 
 ures. Whether he was present at their futile as 
 sault on Florence (July 22, 1304) is doubtful, but 
 probably he was not. From the Ottimo Comento, 
 written at least in part 2 by a contemporary as early 
 as 1333, we learn that Dante soon separated him 
 self from his companions in misfortune with mu 
 tual discontents and recriminations. 3 During the 
 nineteen years of Dante's exile, it would be hard 
 to say where he was not. In certain districts of 
 Northern Italy there is scarce a village that has 
 
 1 That Dante was not of the grandi, or great nobles (what we 
 call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, 
 is plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list 
 and with no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen domini. Bayle, 
 however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been 
 obscure. 
 
 2 See Witte, " Quando e da chi sia composto 1' Ottimo Co- 
 mento," etc. (Leipsic, 1847). 
 
 9 Ott. Com. Farad. XVIL
 
 DANTE ' 133 
 
 not its tradition of him, its sedia, rocca, spelonca, 
 or torre di Dante ; and what between the patri 
 otic complaisance of some biographers overwilling 
 to gratify as many provincial vanities as possible, 
 and the pettishness of others anxious only to snub 
 them, the confusion becomes hopeless. 1 After his 
 banishment we find some definite trace of him first 
 at Arezzo with Uguccione della Faggiuola ; then 
 at Siena ; then at Verona with the Scaligeri. He 
 himself says : " Through almost all parts where 
 this language [Italian] is spoken, a wanderer, well- 
 nigh a beggar, I have gone, showing against my 
 will the wound of fortune. Truly I have been a 
 vessel without sail or rudder, driven to diverse 
 ports, estuaries, and shores by that hot blast, the 
 breath of grievous poverty ; and I have shown my 
 self to the eyes of many who perhaps, through some 
 fame of me, had imagined me in quite other guise, 
 in whose view not only was my person debased, but 
 every work of mine, whether done or yet to do, 
 became of less account." 2 By the election of the 
 Emperor Henry VII. (of Luxemburg, November, 
 
 1 The loose way in which many Italian scholars write history 
 is as amazing as it is perplexing. For example : Count Balho's 
 Life of Dante was published originally at Turin, in 1839. In a 
 note (lib. i. cap. x.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of 
 Dante's banishment should not be 1303, and inclines to think it 
 should be. Meanwhile, it seems never to have occurred to him 
 to employ some one to look at the original decree, still existing 
 in the archives. Stranger still, Le Monnier, reprinting the work 
 at Florence in 1853, within a stone's-throw of the document itself, 
 and with full permission from Ealbo to make corrections, leaves 
 the matter just where it was. 
 
 2 Convito, Tratt. I. cap. iii.
 
 134 DANTE 
 
 1308), and the news of his proposed expedition 
 into Italy, the hopes of Dante were raised to the 
 highest pitch. Henry entered Italy, October, 1310, 
 and received the iron crown of Lombardy at Milan, 
 on the day of Epiphany, 1311. His movements 
 being slow, and his policy undecided, Dante ad 
 dressed him that famous letter, urging him to crush 
 first the "Hydra and Myrrha" Florence, as the 
 root of all the evils of Italy (April 16, 1311). To 
 this year we must probably assign the new decree 
 by which the seigniory of Florence recalled a por 
 tion of the exiles, excepting Dante, however, among 
 others, by name. 1 The undertaking of Henry, af 
 ter an ill-directed dawdling of two years, at last 
 ended in his death at Buonconvento (August 24, 
 1313 ; Carlyle says wrongly September) ; poi 
 soned, it was said, in the sacramental bread, by a 
 Dominican friar, bribed thereto by Florence. 2 The 
 story is doubtful, the more as Dante nowhere al 
 ludes to it, as he certainly would have done had 
 he heard of it. According to Balbo, Dante spent 
 the time from August, 1313, to November, 1314, 
 in Pisa and Lucca, and then took refuge at Ve 
 rona, with Can Grande della Scala (whom Voltaire 
 calls, drolly enough, le grand-can de Verone, as if 
 he had been a Tartar), where he remained till 
 1318. Foscolo with equal positiveness sends him, 
 
 1 Macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited 
 in the preface to the Udine edition of the Codex Bartolinianus 
 as placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such thing, but 
 expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch. Op. 
 ed. Baretti, London, 1772, vol. i. p. 60.) 
 
 2 See Carlyle's Frederic, vol. i. p. 147.
 
 DANTE 135 
 
 immediately after the death of Henry, to Guido da 
 Polenta 1 at Ravenna, and makes him join Can 
 Grande only after the latter became captain of the 
 Ghibelline league in December, 1318. In 1316 
 the government of Florence set forth a new decree 
 allowing the exiles to return on conditions of fine 
 and penance. Dante rejected the offer (by accept 
 ing which his guilt would have been admitted), in 
 a letter still hot, after these five centuries, with in 
 dignant scorn. " Is this then the glorious return 
 of Dante Alighieri to his country after nearly three 
 lustres of suffering and exile ? Did an innocence, 
 patent to all, merit this? this, the perpetual 
 sweat and toil of study? Far from a man, the 
 housemate of philosophy, be so rash and earthen- 
 hearted a humility as to allow himself to be offered 
 up bound like a school-boy or a criminal! Far 
 from a man, the preacher of justice, to pay those 
 who have done him wrong as for a favor ! This is 
 not the way of returning to my country ; but if 
 another can be found that shall not derogate from 
 the fame and honor of Dante, that I will enter on 
 with no lagging steps. For if by none such Flor 
 ence may be entered, by me then never ! Can I 
 not everywhere behold the mirrors of the sun and 
 stars ? speculate on sweetest truths under any sky 
 without first giving myself up inglorious, nay, ig- 
 
 1 A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna till 
 several years later. But Boccaccio also assigns 1313 as the date 
 of Dante's withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may 
 have been one of the other Polentani to whom Guido (surnamed 
 Novello, or the Younger ; his grandfather having borne the same 
 name) succeeded.
 
 136 DANTE 
 
 nominious, to the populace and city of Florence ? 
 Nor shall I want for bread." Dionisi puts the 
 date of this letter in 1315. 1 He is certainly wrong, 
 for the decree is dated December 11, 1316. Fos- 
 colo places it in 1316, Troya early in 1317, and 
 both may be right, as the year began March 25. 
 Whatever the date of Dante's visit to Voltaire's 
 great Khan 2 of Verona, or the length of his stay 
 with him, may have been, it is certain that he was 
 in Ravenna in 1320, and that, on his return thither 
 from an embassy to Venice (concerning which a 
 curious letter, forged probably by Doni, is extant), 
 he died on September 14, 1321 (13th, according 
 to others). He was buried at Eavenna under a 
 monument built by his friend, Guido Novello. 3 
 
 1 Under this date (1315) a fourth condemnatio against Dante is 
 mentioned facta in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Rainerium, 
 D. Zacharii de Urbeveteri, dim et tune vicarium regium civitatis 
 Flarentice, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in 
 1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, 
 to wit : Una possessione cum vinea et cum domibus super ea, com- 
 bustis et non combustis, posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnola. 
 In the domibus combustis we see the blackened traces of Dante's 
 kinsman by marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt 
 the houses of the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city 
 by Charles of Valois. (See De Romanis, notes on Tiraboschi's 
 Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1830, vol. v. p. 119.) 
 
 3 Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by 
 Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the Middle 
 Ages, Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each 
 other, and adds : H n*y a done pas trop a s'ftonner des noms bi- 
 zarres de Mastino et de Cane donnes a ces Delia Scala. (Dante, 
 herttique, revolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.) 
 
 3 If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted by 
 Balbo (Vita, i. lib. ii. cap. xvii.), whom De Yericour copies 
 without question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation
 
 DANTE 137 
 
 Dante is said to have dictated the following in 
 scription for it on his death-bed : 
 
 JVKA MONAJRCHLE SvPEKOS PflLEGETHONTA LACVSQVB 
 LVSTRANDO CECINI VOLVERVNT FATA QVOVSQVE 
 SED QVIA PARS CESSIT MELIORIBVS HOSPITA CASTKIS 
 AVCTOREMQVE SVVM PETIIT FELICIOR ASTRIS 
 
 Hie CLAVDOR DANTES PATRUS EXTORRIS AB ORIS 
 
 QVEM OENVIT PARVI FLORENTIA MATER AMORIS. 
 
 Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a 
 translation : 
 
 The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire, the Pit, 
 In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit ; 
 But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars, 
 And, happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars, 
 Here am I Dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore, 
 Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore. 1 
 
 of the original epitaph replaced by Bernardo Bembo when he built 
 the new tomb, in 1483. Bembo's own inscription implies an al 
 ready existing monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epi- 
 taphial Latin verses are not to be taken too literally, considering 
 the exigencies of that branch of literary ingenuity. The doggerel 
 Latin has been thought by some unworthy of Dante, as Shake 
 speare's doggerel English epitaph has been thought unworthy of 
 him. In both cases the rudeness of the verses seems to us a proof 
 of authenticity. An enlightened posterity with unlimited super 
 latives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, 
 would have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It 
 is certain, at least in Dante's case, that Bembo would never have 
 inserted in the very first words an allusion to the De Monarchia, 
 a book long before condemned as heretical. 
 
 1 We have translated lacusque by "the Pit," as being the near 
 est English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the several 
 circles of his Hell, narrowing, one beneath the other, to the cen 
 tre. As a curious specimen of English we subjoin Professor de 
 Vericour's translation : "I have sang the rights of monarchy ; I 
 have sang, in exploring them, the abode of God, the Phlegethon 
 and the impure lakes, as long as destinies have permitted. But 
 as the part of myself, which was only passing, returns to better 
 fields, and happier, returned to his Maker, I, Dante, exiled from
 
 138 DANTE 
 
 If these be not the words of Dante, what is internal 
 evidence worth ? The indomitably self-reliant man, 
 loyal first of all to his most unpopular convictions 
 (his very host, Guido, being a Guelph), puts his 
 Ghibellinism (Jura monarchic^) in the front. The 
 man whose whole life, like that of selected souls 
 always, had been a warfare, calls heaven another 
 camp, a better one, thank God ! The wanderer 
 of so many years speaks of his soul as a guest, 
 glad to be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharp 
 est reproaches of Florence are always those of an 
 outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his uncon 
 scious bones should lie in alien soil. 
 
 Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a 
 contemporary, thus sketches him : " This man was 
 a great scholar in almost every science, though a 
 layman ; was a most excellent poet, philosopher, 
 and rhetorician ; perfect, as well in composing and 
 versifying as in haranguing ; a most noble speaker. 
 . . . This Dante, on account of his learning, was a 
 little haughty, and shy, and disdainful, and like a 
 philosopher almost ungracious, knew not well how 
 to deal with unlettered folk." Benvenuto da Imola 
 tells us that he was very abstracted, as we may well 
 believe of a man who carried the Commedia in his 
 brain. Boccaccio paints him in this wise : " Our 
 poet was of middle height ; his face was long, his 
 nose aquiline, his jaw large, and the lower lip pro 
 truding somewhat beyond the upper ; a little stoop- 
 
 the regions of fatherland, I am laid here, I, to whom Florence 
 gave birth, a mother who experienced but a feeble love." (The 
 I4fe and Times of Dante, London, 1858, p. 208.)
 
 DANTE 139 
 
 ing in the shoulders ; his eyes rather large than 
 small ; dark of complexion ; his hair and beard 
 thick, crisp, and black; and his countenance al 
 ways sad and thoughtful. His garments were al 
 ways dignified ; the style such as suited ripeness of 
 years ; his gait was grave and gentlemanlike ; and 
 his bearing, whether public or private, wonderfully 
 composed and polished. In meat and drink he was 
 most temperate, nor was ever any more zealous 
 in study or whatever other pursuit. Seldom spake 
 he, save when spoken to, though a most eloquent 
 person. In his youth he delighted especially in 
 music and singing, and was intimate with almost 
 all the singers and musicians of his day. He was 
 much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few, 
 and most assiduous in study as far as he could find 
 time for it. Dante was also of marvellous capacity 
 and the most tenacious memory." Various anec 
 dotes of him are related by Boccaccio, Sacchetti, 
 and others, none of them verisimilar, and some of 
 them at least fifteen centuries old when revamped. 
 Most of them are neither veri nor ben trovati. 
 One clear glimpse we get of him from the Ottimo 
 Comento, the author of which says : l " I, the writer, 
 heard Dante say that never a rhyme had led him to 
 say other than he would, but that many a time and 
 oft (molte e spesse volte) he had made words say 
 for him what they were not wont to express for 
 other poets." That is the only sincere glimpse 
 we get of the living, breathing, word-compelling 
 Dante. 
 
 1 Inferno, X. 85.
 
 140 DANTE 
 
 Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems to 
 have been an utter and disastrous failure. What 
 its inward satisfactions must have been, we, with 
 the Paradiso open before us, can form some faint 
 conception. To him, longing with an intensity 
 which only the word Dantesque will express to 
 realize an ideal upon earth, and continually baffled 
 and misunderstood, the far greater part of his ma 
 ture life must have been labor and sorrow. We 
 can see how essential all that sad experience was to 
 him, can understand why all the fairy stories hide 
 the luck in the ugly black casket ; but to him, then 
 and there, how seemed it ? 
 
 Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee, 
 Beloved most dearly ; this that arrow is 
 Shot from the bow of exile first of all ; 
 And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath 
 The bread of others, and how hard a path 
 To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs ! 1 
 
 Come sa di sale. Who never wet his bread with 
 tears, says Goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly 
 powers ! Our nineteenth century made an idol of 
 the noble lord who broke his heart in verse once 
 every six months, but the fourteenth was lucky 
 enough to produce and not to make an idol of that 
 rarest earthly phenomenon, a man of genius who 
 could hold heartbreak at bay for twenty years, and 
 would not let himself die till he had done his task. 
 At the end of the Vita Nuova, his first work, 
 Dante wrote down that remarkable aspiration that 
 God would take him to himself after he had written 
 
 1 Paradiso, XVII.
 
 DANTE 141 
 
 of Beatrice such things as were never yet written of 
 woman. It was literally fulfilled when the Corn- 
 media was finished twenty-five years later. 
 
 Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when Italy 
 felt instinctively that this was her great man. Boc 
 caccio tells us that in 1329 1 Cardinal Poggetto (du 
 Poiet) caused Dante's treatise De Monarchia to be 
 publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to 
 dig up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna, 
 as having been a heretic ; but so much opposition 
 was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this 
 was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John 
 XXII., whose damnation the poet himself seems to 
 prophesy, 2 and against whose election he had en 
 deavored to persuade the cardinals, in a vehement 
 letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence voted the 
 sum of ten golden florins to be paid by the hands 
 of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to Dante's daughter 
 Beatrice, a nun in the convent of Santa Chiara at 
 Ravenna. In 1396 Florence voted a monument, 
 and begged in vain for the metaphorical ashes of 
 the man of whom she had threatened to make lit 
 eral cinders if she could catch him alive. In 1429 3 
 she begged again, but Ravenna, a dead city, was 
 tenacious of the dead poet. In 1519 Michael An' 
 
 1 He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany 
 which took place in that year. The De Monarchia was afterward 
 condemned by the Council of Trent. 
 
 2 Inferno, XI. 50. 
 
 8 See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedito d 1 artisti (Firenze, 
 1839), vol. i. p. 123.
 
 142 DANTE 
 
 gelo would have built the monument, but Leo X. 
 refused to allow the sacred dust to be removed. 
 Finally, in 1829, five hundred and eight years after 
 the death of Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly 
 built in Santa Croce (by Ricei), ugly beyond even 
 the usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on 
 it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side and 
 Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna, built 
 originally in 1483, by the father of Cardinal 
 Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692, 
 and finally rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal 
 Gonzaga, in 1780, all three of whom commemo 
 rated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a little 
 shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the tomb of 
 a Mohammedan saint, and is now the chief magnet 
 which draws foreigners and their gold to Ravenna. 
 The valet de place says that Dante is not buried 
 under it, but beneath the pavement of the street in 
 front of it, where also, he says, he saw my Lord 
 Byron kneel and weep. Like everything in Ra 
 venna, it is dirty and neglected. 
 
 In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a chair 
 of the Divina Commedia, and Boccaccio was named 
 first professor. He accordingly began his lectures 
 on Sunday, October 3, following, but his comment 
 was broken off abruptly at the 17th verse of the 
 17th canto of the Inferno by the illness which 
 ended in his death, December 21, 1375. Among his 
 successors were Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bo 
 logna was the first to follow the example of Flor 
 ence, Benvenuto da Imola having begun his lectures, 
 according to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375. Chairs
 
 DANTE 143 
 
 were established also at Pisa, Venice, Piacenza, and 
 Milan before the close of the century. The lec 
 tures were delivered in the churches and on feast- 
 days, which shows their popular character. Balbo 
 reckons (but this, though probable, is guess-work) 
 that the MS. copies of the Divina Commedia 
 made during the fourteenth century, and now exist 
 ing in the libraries of Europe, are more numerous 
 than those of all other works, ancient and modern, 
 made during the same period. Between the inven 
 tion of printing and the year 1500 more than 
 twenty editions were published in Italy, the earliest 
 in 1472. During the sixteenth century there were 
 forty editions ; during the seventeenth, a period, 
 for Italy, of sceptical dilettantism, only three ; 
 during the eighteenth, thirty-four; and already, 
 during the first half of the nineteenth, at least 
 eighty. The first translation was into Catalan, in 
 1428. 1 M. St. Kene Taillandier says that the 
 Commedia was condemned by the inquisition in 
 Spain ; but this seems too general a statement, for, 
 according to Foscolo, 2 it was the commentary of 
 Landino and Vellutello, and a few verses in the 
 Inferno and Paradiso, which were condemned. 
 The first French translation was that of Grangier, 
 1596, but the study of Dante struck no root there 
 till the present century. Kivarol, who translated 
 the Inferno in 1783, was the first Frenchman who 
 divined the wonderful force and vitality of the 
 
 1 St. Rene 1 Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, December 
 1, 1856, says into Spanish. 
 
 2 Dante, vol. iv. p. 116.
 
 144 DANTE 
 
 Oommedia. 1 The expressions of Voltaire repre 
 sent very well the average opinion of cultivated 
 persons in respect of Dante in the middle of the 
 eighteenth century. He says : " The Italians call 
 him divine ; but it is a hidden divinity ; few peo 
 ple understand his oracles. He has commentators, 
 which, perhaps, is another reason for his not being 
 understood. His reputation will go on increasing, 
 because scarce anybody reads him." 2 To Father 
 Bettinelli he writes : "I estimate highly the cour 
 age with which you have dared to say that Dante 
 was a madman and his work a monster." But he 
 adds, what shows that Dante had his admirers even 
 in that flippant century : " There are found among 
 us, and in the eighteenth century, people who strive 
 to admire imaginations so stupidly extravagant 
 and barbarous." 3 Elsewhere he says that the 
 Oommedia was " an odd poem, but gleaming with 
 natural beauties, a work in which the author rose 
 in parts above the bad taste of his age and his sub 
 ject, and full of passages written as purely as if 
 they had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso." 4 
 It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination 
 which Dante exercised over a nature so opposite to 
 his own. 
 
 At the beginning of this century Chateaubriand 
 speaks of Dante with vague commendation, evi 
 dently from a very superficial acquaintance, and 
 
 1 Ste. Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, tome xi. p. 169. 
 
 2 Diet. Phil, art. "Dante." 
 
 8 Corresp. gen., CEuvres, tome Ivii. pp. 80, 81. 
 
 4 Essai sur les mceurs, CEuvres, tome xvii. pp. 371, 372.
 
 DANTE 145 
 
 that only with the Inferno, probably from Rivarol's 
 version. 1 Since then there have been four or five 
 French versions in prose or verse, including one by 
 Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not 
 condescend to the conventional elegance which 
 makes the charm of French, and the most virile of 
 poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most 
 feminine of languages. . Yet in the works of Fau- 
 riel, Ozanam, Ampere, and Villemain, France has 
 given a greater impulse to the study of Dante than 
 any other country except Germany. Into Germany 
 the Commedia penetrated later. How utterly 
 Dante was unknown there in the sixteenth century 
 is plain from a passage in the " Vanity of the Arts 
 and Sciences " of Cornelius Agrippa, where he is 
 spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories : 
 " There have been many of these historical pandars, 
 of which some of obscure fame, as JEneas Sylvius, 
 Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus," etc. 2 
 The first German translation was that of Bachen- 
 schwanz (1767-69). Versions by Kannegiesser, 
 Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John of Saxony, 
 followed. Goethe seems never to have given that 
 attention to Dante which his ever-alert intelligence 
 might have been expected to bestow on so impos 
 ing a moral and sesthetic phenomenon. Unless the 
 conclusion of the second part of " Faust " be an in 
 spiration of the Paradiso, we remember no ade 
 quate word from him on this theme. His remarks 
 on one of the German translations are brief, dry, 
 
 1 Ginie. du Christianisme, cap. iv. 
 
 2 Ed. Lond. 1684, p. 199.
 
 146 DANTE 
 
 and without that breadth which comes only of 
 thorough knowledge and sympathy. But German 
 scholarship and constructive criticism, through 
 Witte, Kopisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have 
 been of preeminent service in deepening the un 
 derstanding and facilitating the study of the poet. 
 In England the first recognition of Dante is by 
 Chaucer in the " Hugelin of Pisa " of the " Monkes 
 Tale," l and an imitation of the opening verses of 
 the third canto of the Inferno (" Assembly of 
 Foules "). In 1417 Giovanni da Serravalle, bishop 
 of Fermo, completed a Latin prose translation of 
 the Commedia, a copy of which, as he made it at 
 the request of two English bishops whom he met at 
 the council of Constance, was doubtless sent to 
 England. Later we find Dante now and then 
 mentioned, but evidently from hearsay only, 2 till 
 the time of Spenser, who, like Milton fifty years 
 later, shows that he had read his works closely. 
 Thenceforward for more than a century Dante be 
 came a mere name, used without meaning by liter 
 ary sciolists. Lord Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, 
 and Dr. Drake in his " Literary Hours " 3 could 
 
 1 It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical judgment, 
 that he calls Dante "the great poet of Itaille," while in the 
 " Clerke's Tale " he speaks of Petrarch as a "worthy clerk," as 
 " the laureat poete " (alluding to the somewhat sentimental cere 
 mony at Rome), and says that his 
 
 " Rhetorike sweete 
 Enlumined all Itaille of poetry." 
 
 2 It is probable thatSackville may have read the Inferno, and it 
 is certain that Sir John Harrington had. See the preface to his 
 translation of the Orlando Furioso. 
 
 8 Second edition, 1800.
 
 DANTE 147 
 
 speak of Darwin's " Botanic Garden " as showing 
 the " wild and terrible sublimity of Dante " ! The 
 first complete English translation was by Boyd, 
 of the Inferno in 1785, of the whole poem in 1802. 
 There have been eight other complete translations, 
 beginning with Gary's in 1814, six since 1850, be 
 side several of the Inferno singly. Of these that 
 of Longfellow is the best. It is only within the 
 last twenty years, however, that the study of 
 Dante, in any true sense, became at all general. 
 Even Coleridge seems to have been familiar only 
 with the Inferno. In America Professor Ticknor 
 was the first to devote a special course of illustra 
 tive lectures to Dante ; he was followed by Long 
 fellow, whose lectures, illustrated by admirable 
 translations, are remembered with grateful pleasure 
 by many who were thus led to learn the full signi 
 ficance of the great Christian poet. A translation 
 of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons 
 ranks with the best for spirit, faithfulness, and ele 
 gance. In Denmark and Russia translations of the 
 Inferno have been published, beside separate vol 
 umes of comment and illustration. We have thus 
 sketched the steady growth of Dante's fame and 
 influence to a universality unparalleled except in 
 the case of Shakespeare, perhaps more remarkable 
 if we consider the abstruse and mystical nature of 
 his poetry. It is to be noted as characteristic that 
 the veneration of Dantophilists for their master is 
 that of disciples for their saint. Perhaps no other 
 man could have called forth such an expression as 
 that of Ruskin, that " the central man of all the
 
 148 DANTE 
 
 world, as representing in perfect balance the im 
 aginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at 
 their highest, is Dante." 
 
 The first remark to be made upon the writings 
 of Dante is that they are all (with the possible 
 exception of the treatise De Vulgarl Eloquio) 
 autobiographic, and that all of them, including 
 that, are parts of a mutually related system, of 
 which the central point is the individuality and 
 experience of the poet. In the Vita Nuova he 
 recounts the story of his love for Beatrice Porti- 
 nari, showing how his grief for her loss turned his 
 thoughts first inward upon his own consciousness, 
 and, failing all help there, gradually upward 
 through philosophy to religion, and so from a world 
 of shadows to one of eternal substances. It traces 
 with exquisite unconsciousness the gradual but cer 
 tain steps by which memory and imagination tran 
 substantiated the woman of flesh and blood into 
 a holy ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of 
 sorrow and hope that faith which is the instinctive 
 refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of God 
 which higher natures learn to find in the trial 
 which passeth all understanding, and that perfect 
 womanhood, the dream of youth and the memory 
 of maturity, which beckons toward the forever un 
 attainable. As a contribution to the physiology of 
 genius, no other book is to be compared with the 
 Vita Nuova. It is more important to the under 
 standing of Dante as a poet than any other of his 
 works. It shows him (and that in the midst of 
 affairs demanding practical ability and presence
 
 DANTE 149 
 
 of mind) capable of a depth of contemplative ab 
 straction, equalling that of a Soofi who has passed 
 the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in 
 some sort to see how, from being the slave of his 
 imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture and 
 force of will to that mastery of it which is art. 
 We comprehend the Commedia better when we 
 know that Dante could be an active, clear-headed 
 politician and a mystic at the same time. Various 
 dates have been assigned to the composition of 
 the Vita Nuova. The earliest limit is fixed by 
 the death of Beatrice in 1290 (though some of the 
 poems are of even earlier date), and the book is 
 commonly assumed to have been finished by 1295 ; 
 Foscolo says 1294. But Professor Karl "Witte, 
 a high authority, extends the term as far as 1300. 1 
 The title of the book also, Vita Nuova, has been 
 diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who published 
 an English version of it at Florence in 1846, enti 
 tles it the " Early Life of Dante." Balbo under 
 stands it in the same way. 2 But we are strongly 
 of the opinion that " New Life " is the interpreta 
 tion sustained by the entire significance of the book 
 itself. 
 
 His next work in order of date is the treatise 
 De Monarchia. It has been generally taken for 
 granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics up to 
 the time of his banishment, and that out of resent 
 ment he then became a violent Ghibelline. Not to 
 
 1 Dante Alighieri's lyrische Gedicftfe, Leipzig, 1842, Theil II. 
 pp. 4-9. 
 
 2 Vita, 9. 97.
 
 150 DANTE 
 
 speak of the consideration that there is no author 
 whose life and works present so remarkable a 
 unity and logical sequence as those of Dante, Pro 
 fessor Witte has drawn attention to a fact which 
 alone is enough to demonstrate that the De Mo- 
 narchia was written before 1300. That and the 
 
 Vita Nuova are the only works of Dante in which 
 no allusion whatever is made to his exile. That 
 bitter thought was continually present to him. In 
 the Convito it betrays itself often, and with touch 
 ing unexpectedness. Even in the treatise De 
 
 Vulgari Eloquio, he takes as one of his examples 
 of style : " I have most pity for those, whosoever 
 they are, that languish in exile, and revisit their 
 country only in draams." We have seen that the 
 one decisive act of Dante's priorate was to expel 
 from Florence the chiefs of both parties as the 
 sowers of strife, and he tells us {Paradiso, XVII.) 
 that he had formed a party by himself. The king 
 of Saxony has well defined his political theory as 
 being " an ideal Ghibellinism," l and he has been 
 accused of want of patriotism only by those short 
 sighted persons who cannot see beyond their own 
 parish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of 
 the same kind with Milton's refusing (as Tacitus 
 had done before) to confound license with liberty. 
 The argument of the De Monarchia is briefly this : 
 As the object of the individual man is the highest 
 development of his faculties, so is it also with men 
 united in societies. But the individual can only 
 attain the highest development when all his powers 
 
 1 Comment on Paradiso, VL
 
 DANTE 151 
 
 are in absolute subjection to the intellect, and so 
 ciety only when it subjects its individual caprices 
 to an intelligent head. This is the order of na 
 ture, as in families, and men have followed it in 
 the organization of villages, towns, cities. Again, 
 since God made man in his own image, men and 
 societies most nearly resemble him in proportion 
 as they approach unity. But as in all societies 
 questions must arise, so there is need of a monarch 
 for supreme arbiter. And only a universal mon 
 arch can be impartial enough for this, since kings 
 of limited territories would always be liable to the 
 temptation of private ends. With the internal 
 policy of municipalities, commonwealths, and king 
 doms, the monarch would have nothing to do, only 
 interfering when there was danger of an infraction 
 of the general peace. This is the doctrine of the 
 first book, enforced sometimes eloquently, always 
 logically, and with great fertility of illustration. 
 It is an enlargement of some of the obiter dicta of 
 the Convito. The earnestness with which peace 
 is insisted on as a necessary postulate of civic well- 
 being shows what the experience had been out of 
 which Dante had constructed his theory. It is to 
 be looked on as a purely scholastic demonstration 
 of a speculative thesis, in which the manifold ex 
 ceptions and modifications essential in practical 
 application are necessarily left aside. Dante al 
 most forestalls the famous proposition of Calvin, 
 " that it is possible to conceive a people without a 
 prince, but not a prince without a people," when 
 he says, Non enim gens propter regem, sed e
 
 152 DANTE 
 
 verso rex propter gentem. 1 And in his letter to 
 the princes and peoples of Italy on the coming of 
 Henry VII., he bids them " obey their prince, but 
 so as freemen preserving their own constitutional 
 forms." He says also expressly: Animadverten- 
 dum sane, quod cum dicitur humanum genus potest 
 regi per unum supremum principem, non sic intel- 
 ligendum est ut ab illo uno prodire possint muni- 
 cipia et leges municipales. Habent namque na- 
 tiones, regna, et civitates inter se proprietates quas 
 legibus differ entibus regulari oportet. Schlosser 
 the historian compares Dante's system with that of 
 the United States. 2 It in some respects resembled 
 more the constitution of the Netherlands under the 
 supreme stadtholder, but parallels between ideal 
 and actual institutions are always unsatisfactory. 3 
 
 The second book is very curious. In it Dante 
 endeavors to demonstrate the divine right of the 
 Roman Empire to universal sovereignty. One of 
 his arguments is, that Christ consented to be born 
 under the reign of Augustus ; another, that he as 
 sented to the imperial jurisdiction in allowing him 
 self to be crucified under a decree of one of its 
 courts. The atonement could not have been accom 
 plished unless Christ suffered under sentence of a 
 court having jurisdiction, for otherwise his condem- 
 
 1 Jean de Meung had already said, 
 
 " Ge n'en met hors rois ne pre'las 
 
 Qu'il sunt tui serf au menu pueple." 
 
 (Roman de la Ease (ed. Me*on), v. ii. pp. 78, 79.) 
 * Dante, Studien, etc. , 1855, p. 144. 
 8 Compare also Spinoza, Tractat. polit., cap. vi.
 
 DANTE 153 
 
 nation would have been an injustice and not a pen 
 alty. Moreover, since all mankind was typified in 
 the person of Christ, the court must have been one 
 having jurisdiction over all mankind ; and since 
 he was delivered to Pilate, an officer of Tiberius, 
 it must follow that the jurisdiction of Tiberius was 
 universal. He draws an argument also from the 
 wager of battle to prove that the Roman Empire 
 was divinely permitted, at least, if not instituted. 
 For since it is admitted that God gives the victory, 
 and since the Romans always won it, therefore it 
 was God's will that the Romans should attain uni 
 versal empire. In the third book he endeavors to 
 prove that the emperor holds by divine right, and 
 not by permission of the pope. He assigns suprem 
 acy to the pope in spirituals, and to the emperor 
 in temporals. This was a delicate subject, and 
 though the king of Saxony (a Catholic) says that 
 Dante did not overstep the limits of orthodoxy, it 
 was on account of this part of the book that it was 
 condemned as heretical. 1 
 
 Next follows the treatise De Vulgari Eloquio. 
 Though we have doubts whether we possess this 
 book as Dante wrote it, inclining rather to think 
 that it is a copy in some parts textually exact, in 
 others an abstract, there can be no question either 
 of its great glossological value or that it conveys 
 the opinions of Dante. We put it next in order, 
 though written later than the Convito, only because, 
 
 1 It is instructive to compare Dante's political treatise with 
 those of Aristotle and Spinoza. We thus see more clearly the 
 limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us to 
 a broader view of him as poet.
 
 154 DANTE 
 
 like the De Monarchic it is written in Latin. It 
 is a proof of the national instinct of Dante, and of 
 his confidence in his genius, that he should have 
 chosen to write all his greatest works in what was 
 deemed by scholars a patois, but which he more 
 than any other man made a classic language. Had 
 he intended the De Monarchia for a political pam 
 phlet, he would certainly not have composed it in 
 the dialect of the few. The De Vulgari Eloquio 
 was to have been in four books. Whether it was 
 ever finished or not it is impossible to say; but 
 only two books have come down to us. It treats 
 of poetizing in the vulgar tongue, and of the differ 
 ent dialects of Italy. From the particularity with 
 which it treats of the dialect of Bologna, it has 
 been supposed to have been written in that city, or 
 at least to furnish an argument in favor of Dante's 
 having at some time studied there. In lib. ii. 
 cap. ii., is a remarkable passage in which, defin 
 ing the various subjects of song and what had been 
 treated in the vulgar tongue by different poets, he 
 says that his own theme had been righteousness. 
 
 The Convito is also imperfect. It was to have 
 consisted of fourteen treatises, but, as we have it, 
 contains only four. In the first he justifies the 
 use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the Latin. 
 In the other three he comments on three of his 
 own Canzoni. It will be impossible to give an 
 adequate analysis of this work in the limits allowed 
 us. 1 It is an epitome of the learning of that age, 
 
 1 A very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the 
 Molini edition of Dante, pp. 391-433.
 
 DANTE 155 
 
 philosophical, theological, and scientific. As afford 
 ing illustration of the Commedia, and of Dante's 
 style of thought, it is invaluable. It is reckoned 
 by his countrymen the first piece of Italian prose, 
 and there are parts of it which still stand un 
 matched for eloquence and pathos. The Italians 
 (even such a man as Cantii among the rest) find 
 in it and a few passages of the Commedia the 
 proof that Dante, as a natural philosopher, was 
 wholly in advance of his age, that he had, 
 among other things, anticipated Newton in the 
 theory of gravitation. But this is as idle as the 
 claim that Shakespeare had discovered the circula 
 tion of the blood before Harvey, 1 and one might 
 as well attempt to dethrone Newton because Chau 
 cer speaks of the love which draws the apple to 
 the earth. The truth is, that it was only as a poet 
 that Dante was great and original (glory enough, 
 surely, to have not more than two competitors), 
 and in matters of science, as did all his contempo 
 raries, sought the guiding hand of Aristotle like a 
 child. Dante is assumed by many to have been a 
 Platonist, but this is not true, in the strict sense 
 of the word. Like all men of great imagination, 
 he was an idealist, and so far a Platonist, as Shake 
 speare might be proved to have been by his son 
 nets. But Dante's direct acquaintance with Plato 
 may be reckoned at zero, and we consider it as hav 
 ing strongly influenced his artistic development for 
 the better, that transcendentalist as he was by na 
 ture, so much so as to be in danger of lapsing into 
 1 See Field's Theory of Colon.
 
 156 DANTE 
 
 an Oriental mysticism, his habits of thought should 
 have been made precise and his genius disciplined 
 by a mind so severely logical as that of Aristotle. 
 This does not conflict with what we believe to be 
 equally true, that the Platonizing commentaries on 
 his poem, like that of Landino, are the most satis 
 factory. Beside the prose already mentioned, we 
 have a small collection of Dante's letters, the re 
 covery of the larger number of which we owe to 
 Professor Witte. They are all interesting, some 
 of them especially so, as illustrating the prophetic 
 character with which Dante invested himself. The 
 longest is one addressed to Can Grande della 
 Scala, explaining the intention of the Commedia 
 and the method to be employed in its interpreta 
 tion. The authenticity of this letter has been 
 doubted, but is now generally admitted. 
 
 We shall barely allude to the minor poems, full 
 of grace and depth of mystic sentiment, and which 
 would have given Dante a high place in the his 
 tory of Italian literature, even had he written noth 
 ing else. They are so abstract, however, that with 
 out the extrinsic interest of having been written by 
 the author of the Commedia, they would probably 
 find few readers. All that is certainly known in 
 regard to the Commedia is that it was composed 
 during the nineteen years which intervened be 
 tween Dante's banishment and death. Attempts 
 have been made to fix precisely the dates of the 
 different parts, but without success, and the differ 
 ences of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has con 
 structed an ingenious and forcible argument to
 
 DANTE 157 
 
 show that no part of the poem was published before 
 the author's death. The question depends some 
 what on the meaning we attach to the word " pub 
 lished." In an age of manuscript the wide disper 
 sion of a poem so long even as a single one of the 
 three divisions of the Commedia would be accom 
 plished very slowly. But it is difficult to account 
 for the great fame which Dante enjoyed during 
 the latter years of his life, unless we suppose that 
 parts, at least, of his greatest work had been read 
 or heard by a large number of persons. This 
 need not, however, imply publication ; and Witte, 
 whose opinion is entitled to great consideration, 
 supposes even the Inferno not to have been fin 
 ished before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where 
 certainty would be impossible, it is of little con 
 sequence to reproduce conjectural dates. In the 
 letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante him 
 self has stated the theme of his song. He says that 
 " the literal subject of the whole work is the state of 
 the soul after death simply considered. But if the 
 work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, as 
 by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, 
 he renders himself liable to the reward or punish 
 ment of justice." He tells us that the work is to 
 be interpreted in a literal, allegorical, moral, and 
 anagogical sense, a mode then commonly employed 
 with the Scriptures, 1 and of which he gives the fol 
 lowing example : " To make which mode of treat 
 ment more clear, it may be applied in the following 
 verses : In exitu Israel de ^Egypto, domus Jacob 
 
 1 As by Dante himself in the Convito.
 
 158 DANTE 
 
 de populo barbaro, facto, est Judaea sanctificatio 
 ejus, Israel potestas ejus. 1 For if we look only at 
 the literal sense, it signifies the going out of the 
 children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses ; 
 if at the allegorical, it signifies our redemption 
 through Christ; if at the moral, it signifies the 
 conversion of the soul from the grief and misery 
 of sin to a state of grace ; and if at the anagogical, 
 it signifies the passage of the blessed soul from the 
 bondage of this corruption to the freedom of eternal 
 glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one of the old 
 commentators, puts the matter compactly together 
 for us : 
 
 " Litera gesta refert ; quid credos allegaria ; 
 Moral is quid agas ; quid speres anagogia." 1 
 
 Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy be 
 cause it has a fortunate ending, and gives its title 
 thus : " Here begins the comedy of Dante Alighieri, 
 a Florentine by birth, but not in morals." 2 The 
 poem consists of three parts, Hell, Purgatory, and 
 Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three 
 cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour's life ; 
 for though the Hell contains thirty-four, the first 
 canto is merely introductory. In the form of the 
 verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of 
 the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the three 
 fold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Sym 
 bolic meanings reveal themselves, or make them 
 selves suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture 
 of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem 
 
 1 Psalm cxiv. 1, 2. 
 
 2 He commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase as 
 txul immerittu.
 
 DANTE 159 
 
 would be out of place here, but we must say a few 
 words of Dante's position as respects modern litera 
 ture. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is 
 the first Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might 
 say the only) one whose whole system of thought is 
 colored in every finest fibre by a purely Christian 
 theology. Lapse through sin, mediation, and re 
 demption, these are the subjects of the three parts 
 of the poem : or, otherwise stated, intellectual con 
 viction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (sym 
 bol also of that imperialism whose origin he sang) ; 
 moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, 
 typified in Beatrice ; reconciliation with God, and 
 actual blinding vision of him " The pure in 
 heart shall see God." Here are general truths 
 which any Christian may accept and find comfort 
 in. But the poem comes nearer to us than this. 
 It is the real history of a brother man, of a tempted, 
 purified, and at last triumphant human soul ; it 
 teaches the benign ministry of sorrow, and that the 
 ladder of that faith by which man climbs to the 
 actual fruition of things not seen ex quovis ligno 
 nonfit, but only of the cross manfully borne. The 
 poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis 
 of woman. Indeed, as Mar veil's drop of dew mir 
 rored the whole firmament, so we find in the Corn- 
 media the image of the Middle Ages, and the sen 
 timental gyniolatry of chivalry, which was at best 
 but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an ideal and 
 universal plane. It is the same with Catholicism, 
 with imperialism, with the scholastic philosophy ; 
 and nothing is more wonderful than the power of
 
 160 DANTE 
 
 absorption and assimilation in this man, who could 
 take up into himself the world that then was, and 
 reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth to human 
 nature and to his own individuality, as to reduce 
 all contemporary history to a mere comment on his 
 vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial 
 criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere par 
 tisan, which sees in him a Luther before his time, 
 and would clap the bonnet rouge upon his heavenly 
 muse. 
 
 Like all great artistic minds, Dante was essen 
 tially conservative, and, arriving precisely in that 
 period of transition when Church and Empire were 
 entering upon the modern epoch of thought, he 
 strove to preserve both by presenting the theory of 
 both in a pristine and ideal perfection. The whole 
 nature of Dante was one of intense belief. There 
 is proof upon proof that he believed himself in 
 vested with a divine mission. Like the Hebrew 
 prophets, with whose writings his whole soul was 
 imbued, it was back to the old worship and the God 
 of the fathers that he called his people ; and not 
 Isaiah himself was more destitute of that humor, that 
 sense of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in 
 the composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, learn 
 ing had something of a sacred character ; the line 
 was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the 
 possessor of supernatural powers ; it was with the 
 next generation, with the elegant Petrarch, even 
 more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the 
 purely literary life, and that dilettantism, which is 
 the twin sister of scepticism, began. As a merely
 
 DANTE 161 
 
 literary figure, the position of Dante is remarkable. 
 Not only as respects thought, but as respects aesthet 
 ics also, his great poem stands as a monument on 
 the boundary line between the ancient and modern. 
 He not only marks, but is in himself, the transi 
 tion. Arma mrumque cano, that is the motto of 
 classic song ; the things of this world and great 
 men. Dante says, subjectum est homo, not vir ; 
 my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the 
 old epic and drama was in this world, and its ca 
 tastrophe here ; Dante lays his scene in the human 
 soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He 
 makes himself the protagonist of his own drama. 
 In the Commedia for the first time Christianity 
 wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes its seminal 
 principle. But aesthetically also, as well as mor 
 ally, Dante stands between the old and the new, 
 and reconciles them. The theme of his poem is 
 purely subjective, modern, what is called romantic ; 
 but its treatment . is objective (almost to realism, 
 here and there), and it is limited by a form of 
 classic severity. In the same way he sums up in 
 himself the two schools of modern poetry which had 
 preceded him, and, while essentially lyrical in his 
 subject, is epic in the handling of it. So also he 
 combines the deeper and more abstract religious 
 sentiment of the Teutonic races with the scientific 
 precision and absolute systematism of the Romanic. 
 In one respect Dante stands alone. While we can 
 in some sort account for such representative men 
 as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even Shakespeare) 
 by the intellectual and moral fermentation of the
 
 162 DANTE 
 
 age in which they lived, Dante seems morally iso 
 lated and to have drawn his inspiration almost 
 wholly from his own internal reserves. Of his 
 mastery in style we need say little here. Of his 
 mere language, nothing could be better than the ex 
 pression of Rivarol : " His verse holds itself erect 
 by the mere force of the substantive and verb, with 
 out the help of a single epithet." We will only add 
 a word on what seems to us an extraordinary mis 
 apprehension of Coleridge, who disparages Dante 
 by comparing his Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He 
 seems to have forgotten that the precise measure 
 ments of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely de 
 manded by the nature of his poem. He is describ 
 ing an actual journey, and his exactness makes a 
 part of the verisimilitude. We read the " Paradise 
 Lost " as a poem, the Commedia as a record of 
 fact ; and no one can read Dante without believing 
 his story, for it is plain that he believed it himself. 
 It is false aesthetics to confound the grandiose with 
 the imaginative. Milton's angels are not to be 
 compared with Dante's, at once real and supernat 
 ural ; and the Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, 
 while nothing in all poetry approaches the imagi 
 native grandeur of Dante's vision of God at the 
 conclusion of the Paradiso. In all literary history 
 there is no such figure as Dante, no such homoge- 
 neousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, 
 such sublime irrecognition of the unessential ; and 
 there is no moral more touching than that the 
 contemporary recognition of such a nature, so en 
 dowed and so faithful to its endowment, should be
 
 DANTE 163 
 
 summed up in the sentence of Florence: Igne 
 comburatur sic quod moriatur. 1 
 
 The range of Dante's influence is not less re 
 markable than its intensity. Minds, the antipodes 
 of each other in temper and endowment, alike feel 
 the force of his attraction, the pervasive comfort of 
 his light and warmth. Boccaccio and Lamennais 
 are touched with the same reverential enthusiasm. 
 The imaginative Ruskin is rapt by him, as we have 
 seen, perhaps beyond the limit where critical appre 
 ciation merges in enthusiasm ; and the matter-of- 
 fact Schlosser tells us that " he, who was wont to 
 contemplate earthly life wholly in an earthly light, 
 has made use of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in 
 his solitude to bring a heavenly light into his in 
 ward life." Almost all other poets have their sea 
 sons, but Dante penetrates to the moral core of 
 those who once fairly come within his sphere, and 
 possesses them wholly. His readers turn students, 
 his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes 
 a religion. The homeless exile finds a home in 
 thousands of grateful hearts : E da esilio venne a 
 questa pace. 
 
 1 In order to fix more precisely In the mind the place of Dante 
 in relation to the history of thought, literature, and events, we 
 subjoin a few dates : Dante born, 1265 ; end of Crusades, death of 
 St. Louis, 1270 ; Aquinas died, 1274 ; Bonaventura died, 1274 ; 
 Giotto born, 1276 ; Albertus Magnus died, 1280 ; Sicilian vespers, 
 1282 ; death of Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282 ; death of 
 Beatrice, 1290 ; Roger Bacon died, 1202 ; death of Gimabue, 1302 ; 
 Dante's banishment, 1302 ; Petrarch born, 1304 ; Fra Dolcino 
 burned, 1307 ; Pope Clement V- at Avignon, 1309 ; Templars sap- 
 pressed, 1312 ; Boccaccio born, 1313 ; Dante died, 1321 ; Wycliffe 
 born, 1324 ; Chaucer born, 1328.
 
 164 DANTE 
 
 Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other, may 
 be, and has been, made to the Divina Commedia, 
 especially by critics who have but a superficial ac 
 quaintance with it, or rather with the Inferno, 
 which is as far as most English critics go. Cole 
 ridge himself, who had a way of divining what was 
 in books, may be justly suspected of not going fur 
 ther, though with Gary to help him. Mr. Carlyle, 
 who has said admirable things of Dante the man, 
 was very imperfectly read in Dante the author, or 
 he would never have put Sordello hi hell and the 
 meeting with Beatrice in paradise. In France it 
 was not much better (though Rivarol has said the 
 best thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epi 
 thet x ) before Ozanam, who, if with decided ultra 
 montane leanings, has written excellently well of 
 our poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though 
 not without relentings toward a poet who had put 
 popes heels upward in hell, regards him on the 
 whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It was 
 no better in Italy, if we may trust Foscolo, who 
 affirms that " neither Pelli nor others deservedly 
 more celebrated than he ever read attentively the 
 poem of Dante, perhaps never ran through it from 
 
 1 Rivarol characterized only a single quality of Dante's style, 
 who knew how to spend as well as spare. Even the Inferno, on 
 which he based his remark, might have put him on his guard. 
 Dante understood very well the use of ornament in its fitting 
 place. Est enim exornatio alicujus convenientis additio, he tells us 
 in his De Vulgari Eloquio (lib. ii. cap. i.). His simile of the 
 doves (Inferno, V. 82 et seq.), perhaps the most exquisite in all 
 poetry, quite oversteps Rivarol's narrow limit of " substantive and 
 verb."
 
 DANTE 165 
 
 the first verse to the last." l Accordingly we have 
 heard that the Commedia was a sermon, a political 
 pamphlet, the revengeful satire of a disappointed 
 Ghibelline, nay, worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It 
 is narrow, it is bigoted, it is savage, it is theologi 
 cal, it is mediaeval, it is heretical, it is scholastic, it 
 is obscure, it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of la 
 Crusca, its ideas are not those of an enlightened 
 eighteenth century, it is everything, in short, that a 
 poem should not be; and yet, singularly enough, 
 the circle of its charm has widened in proportion 
 as men have receded from the theories of Church 
 and State which are supposed to be its foundation, 
 and as the modes of thought of its author have be 
 come more alien to those of his readers. In spite 
 of all objections, some of which are well founded, 
 the Commedia remains one of the three or four uni 
 versal books that have ever been written. 
 
 We may admit, with proper limitations, the mod 
 ern distinction between the Artist and the Moralist. 
 With the one Form is all in all, with the other 
 Tendency. The aim of the one is to delight, of the 
 other to convince. The one is master of his pur 
 pose, the other mastered by it. The whole range 
 of perception and thought is valuable to the one 
 as it will minister to imagination, to the other only 
 as it is available for argument. With the moralist 
 use is beauty, good only as it serves an ulterior 
 purpose ; with the artist beauty is use, good in and 
 for itself. In the fine arts the vehicle makes part 
 of the thought, coalesces with it. The living con- 
 
 1 Discvrso std testo, ec., XVIII.
 
 166 DANTE 
 
 ception shapes itself a body in marble, color, or 
 modulated sound, and henceforth the two are insep 
 arable. The results of the moralist pass into the 
 intellectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters lit 
 tle by what mode of conveyance. But where, as 
 in Dante, the religious sentiment and the imagina 
 tion are both organic, something interfused with 
 the whole being of the man, so that they work in 
 kindly sympathy, the moral will insensibly suffuse 
 itself with beauty as a cloud with light. Then that 
 fine sense of remote analogies, awake to the asso 
 nance between facts seemingly remote and unre 
 lated, between the outward and inward worlds, 
 though convinced that the things of this life are 
 shadows, will be persuaded also that they are not 
 fantastic merely, but imply a substance somewhere, 
 and will love to set forth the beauty of the visible 
 image because it suggests the ineffably higher 
 charm of the unseen original. Dante's ideal of 
 life, the enlightening and strengthening of that na 
 tive instinct of the soul which leads it to strive 
 backward toward its divine source, may sublimate 
 the senses till each becomes a window for the light 
 of truth and the splendor of God to shine through. 
 In him as in Calderon the perpetual presence of 
 imagination not only glorifies the philosophy of life 
 and the science of theology, but idealizes both in 
 symbols of material beauty. Though Dante's con 
 ception of the highest end of man was that he 
 should climb through every phase of human experi 
 ence to that transcendental and supersensual region 
 where the true, the good, and the beautiful blend
 
 DANTE 167 
 
 in the white light of God, yet the prism of his im 
 agination forever resolved the ray into color again, 
 and he loved to show it also where, entangled and 
 obstructed in matter, it became beautiful once more 
 to the eye of sense. Speculation, he tells us, is the 
 use, without any mixture, of our noblest part (the 
 reason). And this part cannot in this life have its 
 perfect use, which is to behold God (who is the 
 highest object of the intellect), except inasmuch 
 as the intellect considers and beholds him in his 
 effects. 1 Underlying Dante the metaphysician, 
 statesman, and theologian, was always Dante the 
 poet, 2 irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through 
 in a picturesque phrase, or touching things unex 
 pectedly with that ideal light which softens and 
 subdues like distance in the landscape. The stern 
 outline of his system wavers and melts away before 
 the eye of the reader in a mirage of imagination 
 that lifts from beyond the sphere of vision and 
 hangs in serener air images of infinite suggestion 
 projected from worlds not realized, but substantial 
 to faith, hope, and aspiration. Beyond the horizon 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. xxii. 
 
 2 It is remarkable that when Dante, in 1297, as a preliminary 
 condition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild of physi 
 cians and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the title poeta. 
 The arms of the Alighieri (curiously suitable to him who sovra gli 
 altri come aquila vola) were a wing of gold in a field of azure. 
 His vivid sense of beauty even hovers sometimes like a corposant 
 over the somewhat stiff lines of his Latin prose. For example, in 
 his letter to the kings and princes of Italy on the coming of Henry 
 VII. : " A new day brightens, revealing the dawn which already 
 scatters the shades of long calamity ; already the breezes of 
 morning gather ; the lips of heaven are reddening ! "
 
 168 DANTE 
 
 of speculation floats, in the passionless splendor of 
 the empyrean, the city of our God, the Rome 
 whereof Christ is a Roman, 1 the citadel of refuge, 
 even in this life, for souls purified by sorrow and 
 self-denial, transhumanized 2 to the divine abstrac 
 tion of pure contemplation. " And it is called Em 
 pyrean," he says in his letter to Can Grande, 
 " which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire 
 or ardor, not because there is in it a material fire 
 or burning, but a spiritual one, which is blessed 
 love or charity." But this splendor he bodies forth, 
 if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly and most 
 often in types of winning grace. 
 
 Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn of 
 mind. A Platonist by nature, an Aristotelian by 
 training, his feet keep closely to the narrow path of 
 dialectics, because he believed it the safest, while 
 his eyes are fixed on the stars and his brain is busy 
 with things not demonstrable, save by that grace 
 of God which passeth all understanding, nor capa 
 ble of being told unless by far-off hints and adum 
 brations. Though he himself has directly explained 
 the scope, the method, and the larger meaning of his 
 greatest work, 3 though he has indirectly pointed out 
 the way to its interpretation in the Convito, and 
 though everything he wrote is but an explanatory 
 comment on his own character and opinions, un 
 mistakably clear and precise, yet both man and 
 poem continue not only to be misunderstood popu- 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XXXII. 100. 
 
 8 Paradise, I. 70. 
 
 8 In a letter to Can Grande (XI. of the Epistdae).
 
 DANTE 169 
 
 larly, but also by such as should know better. 1 
 That those who confined their studies to the Corn- 
 media should have interpreted it variously is not 
 wonderful, for out of the first or literal meaning 
 others open, one out of another, each of wider cir 
 cuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own hea 
 vens, giving and receiving light. 2 Indeed, Dante 
 himself is partly to blame for this. " The form or 
 mode of treatment," he says, " is poetic, fictive, de 
 scriptive, digressive, transumptive, and withal de 
 finitive, divisive, probative, improbative, and posi 
 tive of examples." Here are conundrums enough, 
 to be sure ! To Italians at home, for whom the 
 great arenas of political and religious speculation 
 were closed, the temptation to find a subtler mean 
 ing than the real one was irresistible. Italians in 
 exile, on the other hand, made Dante the stalking- 
 horse from behind which they could take a long 
 shot at Church and State, or at obscurer foes. 3 In 
 finitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct of 
 intense sympathy which draws these latter toward 
 
 1 Witte, Wegele, and Ruth in German, and Ozanam in French, 
 have rendered ignorance of Dante inexcusable among men of cul 
 ture. 
 
 2 Inferno, VII. 75. "Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti, "is 
 more than concise : it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first thought 
 often lies coiled up and hidden under a second ; the words -which 
 state the conclusion involve the premises and develop the sub 
 ject." (p. 3.) 
 
 8 A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be se 
 lected from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nannucci's 
 excellent tract, Intorno alle voci usate da Dante, Corfu, 1840. Even 
 Foscolo could not always refrain. Dante should have taught them 
 to shun such vulgarities. See Inferno, XXX. 131-148.
 
 170 DANTE 
 
 their great forerunner, exul immeritus like them 
 selves. 1 But they have too often wrung a mean 
 ing from Dante which is injurious to the man and 
 out of keeping with the ideas of his age. The aim 
 in expounding a great poem should be, not to dis 
 cover an endless variety of meanings often contra 
 dictory, but whatever it has of great and perennial 
 significance ; for such it must have, or it would 
 long ago have ceased to be living and operative, 
 would long ago have taken refuge in the Char 
 treuse of great libraries, dumb thenceforth to all 
 mankind. We do not mean to say that this minute 
 exegesis is useless or unpraiseworthy, but only that 
 it should be subsidiary to the larger way. It serves 
 to bring out more clearly what is very wonderful 
 in Dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory 
 throughout the work, so that its intimate coherence 
 does not exist in spite of the reconditeness and 
 complexity of allusion, but is woven out of them. 
 The poem has many senses, he tells us, and there 
 can be no doubt of it ; but it has also, and this 
 alone will account for its fascination, a living soul 
 
 1 " My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee too 
 much I have lost thee, and, perhaps, . . . ah, may God avert the 
 omen ! ~ But more proud than sorrowful for an evil endured for 
 thee alone, I continue to consecrate my vigils to thee alone. . . . 
 An exile full of anguish, perchance, availed to sublime the more 
 in thy Alighieri that lofty soul which was a beautiful gift of thy 
 smiling sky ; and an exile equally wearisome and undeserved now 
 avails, perhaps, to sharpen my small genius so that it may pene 
 trate into what he left written for thy instruction and for his 
 glory." (Rossetti, Disamina, ec., p. 405.) Rossetti is himself a 
 proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by misfortune. His 
 Comment (unhappily incomplete) is one of the most valuable and 
 suggestive.
 
 DANTE 171 
 
 behind them all and informing all, an intense sin 
 gleness of purpose, a core of doctrine simple, hu 
 man, and wholesome, though it be also, to use his 
 own phrase, the bread of angels. 
 
 Nor is this unity characteristic only of the Di- 
 vina Commedia. All the works of Dante, with 
 the possible exception of the De Vulgari Eloquio 
 (which is unfinished), are component parts of a 
 Whole Duty of Man mutually completing and in 
 terpreting one another. They are also, as truly as 
 Wordsworth's " Prelude," a history of the growth 
 of a poet's mind. Like the English poet he valued 
 himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt after 
 Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. Sempre 
 il magnanimo si magnified in suo cuore ; e cosi 
 lo pusillanimo per contrario sempre si tiene meno 
 che non e. 1 As in the prose of Milton, whose strik 
 ing likeness to Dante in certain prominent fea 
 tures of character has been remarked by Foscolo, 
 there are in Dante's minor works continual allu 
 sions to himself of great value as material for his 
 biographer. Those who read attentively will dis 
 cover that the tenderness he shows toward Fran- 
 cesca and her lover did not spring from any friend 
 ship for her family, but was a constant quality of 
 his nature, and that what is called his revengeful 
 ferocity is truly the implacable resentment of a 
 lofty mind and a lover of good against evil, whether 
 showing itself in private or public life; perhaps 
 
 1 The great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart, 
 and in like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he 
 is. (Convito, Tr. I. c. 11.)
 
 172 DANTE 
 
 hating the former manifestation of it the most be 
 cause he believed it to be the root of the latter, 
 a faith which those who have watched the course 
 of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be in 
 clined to share. His gentleness is all the more 
 striking by contrast, like that silken compensation 
 which blooms out of the thorny stem of the cactus. 
 His moroseness, 1 his party spirit, and his personal 
 vindictiveness are all predicated upon the Inferno, 
 and upon a misapprehension or careless reading 
 even of that. Dante's zeal was not of that senti 
 mental kind, quickly kindled and as soon quenched, 
 that hovers on the surface of shallow minds, 
 
 " Even as the flame of unctuous things is wont] 
 To move upon the outer surface only " ; 2 
 
 it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling the 
 whole character of the man through and through, 
 like the minarets of his own city of Dis. 3 He was, 
 as seems distinctive in some degree of the Latin 
 ized races, an unflinching a priori logician, not un 
 willing to " syllogize invidious verities," 4 wherever 
 they might lead him, like Sigier, whom he has put 
 in paradise, though more than suspected of hetero 
 doxy. But at the same time, as we shall see, he 
 
 1 Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor has 
 any one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid than he 
 in the Convito. She is "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes," 
 and he dwells on the delights of her love with a rapture which 
 kindles and purifies. So far from making her an inquisitor, he 
 says expressly that she " should be gladsome and not sullen in all 
 her works." (Convito, Tr. I. c. 8.) "Not harsh and crabbed as 
 dull fools suppose " I 
 
 2 Inferno, XIX. 28, 29. * Inferno, VIII. 70-75. 
 * Paradiso, X. 138.
 
 DANTE 173 
 
 had something of the practical good sense of that 
 Teutonic stock whence he drew a part of his blood, 
 which prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield 
 without breaking to the inevitable, but incalculable 
 pressure of human nature and the stiffer logic of 
 events. His theory of Church and State was not 
 merely a fantastic one, but intended for the use 
 and benefit of men as they were ; and he allowed 
 accordingly for aberrations, to which even the law 
 of gravitation is forced to give place ; how much 
 more, then, any scheme whose very starting-point 
 is the freedom of the will ! 
 
 We are thankful for a commentator at last who 
 passes dry-shod over the turbide onde of inappre- 
 ciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside the 
 thick atmosphere which has gathered about the 
 character of Dante both as man and poet, opens 
 for us his City of Doom with the divining-rod of 
 reverential study. Miss Kossetti comes commended 
 to our interest, not only as one of a family which 
 seems to hold genius by the tenure of gavelkind, 
 but as having a special claim by inheritance to a 
 love and understanding of Dante. She writes Eng 
 lish with a purity that has in it something of fem 
 inine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. 
 Her lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace 
 through the metaphysical and other intricacies of 
 her subject. She brings to her work the refined 
 enthusiasm of a cultivated woman and the penetra 
 tion of sympathy. She has chosen the better way 
 (in which Germany took the lead) of interpreting 
 Dante out of himself, the pure spring from which,
 
 174 DANTE 
 
 and from which alone, he drew his inspiration, and 
 not from muddy Fra Alberico or Abbate Giovac- 
 chino, from stupid visions of Saint Paul or voyages 
 of Saint Brandan. She has written by far the 
 best comment that has appeared in English, and 
 we should say the best that has been done in Eng 
 land, were it not for her father's Comento anali- 
 tico, for excepting which her filial piety will thank 
 us. Students of Dante in the original will be 
 grateful to her for many suggestive hints, and 
 those who read him in English will find in her 
 volume a travelling map in which the principal 
 points and their connections are clearly set down. 
 In what we shall say of Dante we shall endeavor 
 only to supplement her interpretation with such 
 side-lights as may have been furnished us by 
 twenty years of assiduous study. Dante's thought 
 is multiform, and, like certain street signs, once 
 common, presents a different image according to 
 the point of view. Let us consider briefly what 
 was the plan of the Divina Commedia and Dante's 
 aim in writing it, which, if not to justify, was at 
 least to illustrate, for warning and example, the 
 ways of God to man. The higher intention of the 
 poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwis 
 dom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and conse 
 quently in the life to come, which is but the contin 
 uation and fulfilment of this. The scene accordingly 
 is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly deni 
 zens now as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the 
 human soul in its journey upwards from error 
 through repentance to atonement with God. To
 
 DANTE 175 
 
 make it apprehensible by those whom it was meant 
 to teach, nay, from its very nature as a poem, and 
 not a treatise of abstract morality, it must set 
 forth everything by means of sensible types and 
 images. 
 
 " To speak thus is adapted to your mind, 
 
 Since only through the sense it apprehendeth 
 What then it worthy makes of intellect. 
 On this account the Scripture condescends 
 Unto your faculties, and feet and hands 
 To God attributes, and means something else." x 
 
 "Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of its 
 branches need not be told that Dante's age was 
 one that demanded very palpable and even revolt 
 ing types. As in the old legend, a drop of scald 
 ing sweat from the damned soul must shrivel the 
 very skin of those for whom he wrote, to make 
 them wince if not to turn them away from evil- 
 doing. To consider his hell a place of physical 
 torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine. Its 
 mouth yawns not only under Florence, but before 
 the feet of every man everywhere who goeth about 
 to do evil. His hell is a condition of the soul, and 
 he could not find images loathsome enough to ex 
 press the moral deformity which is wrought by sin 
 on its victims, or his own abhorrence of it. Its 
 inmates meet you in the street every day. 
 
 " Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 
 In one self place ; for where we are is hell, 
 And where hell is there we must ever be." 2 
 
 1 Paradise, IV. 40-45 (Longfellow's version). 
 
 2 Marlowe's Faustus. " Which way I fly is hell ; myself am 
 hell." (Paradise Lost, IV. 75.) In the same way, ogni dove f 
 eielo e Paradiso. (Paradiso, ILL. 88, 89.)
 
 176 DANTE 
 
 It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the ap 
 pearance of good, and out of a crooked hag makes 
 a bewitching siren. The reason enlightened by 
 the grace of God sees it as it truly is, full of stench 
 and corruption. 1 It is this office of reason which 
 Dante undertakes to perform, by divine commis 
 sion, hi the Inferno. There can be no doubt that 
 he looked upon himself as invested with the pro 
 phetic function, and the Hebrew forerunners, in 
 whose society his soul sought consolation and sus- 
 tainment, certainly set him no example of observ 
 ing the conventions of good society in dealing with 
 the enemies of God. Indeed, his notions of good 
 society were not altogether those of this world in 
 any generation. He would have defined it as mean 
 ing " the peers " of Philosophy, " souls free from 
 wretched and vile delights and from vulgar habits, 
 endowed with genius and memory." 2 Dante him 
 self had precisely this endowment, and in a very 
 surprising degree. His genius enabled him to see 
 and to show what he saw to others ; his memory 
 neither forgot nor forgave. Very hateful to his 
 fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the 
 modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary 
 error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders 
 of Atavism or those of Society, personified for pur 
 poses of excuse, but escaping into impersonality 
 again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that 
 sense of personal responsibility which is the root 
 of self-respect and the safeguard of character. 
 Dante indeed saw clearly enough that the Divine 
 1 Purgatorio, XIX. 7-33. 2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 16.
 
 DANTE 177 
 
 justice did at length overtake Society in the ruin 
 of states caused by the corruption of private, and 
 thence of civic, morals ; but a personality so in 
 tense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy 
 and generalized penalty as this. "It is Thou," 
 he says sternly, " who hast done this thing, and 
 Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, 
 damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. 
 This is not my judgment, but that of universal 
 Nature * from before the beginning of the world." 2 
 Accordingly the highest reason, typified in his 
 guide Virgil, rebukes him for bringing compas 
 sion to the judgments of God, 3 and again em 
 braces him and calls the mother that bore him 
 blessed, when he bids Filippo Argenti begone 
 among the other dogs. 4 This latter case shocks 
 our modern feelings the more rudely for the simple 
 pathos with which Dante makes Argenti answer 
 when asked who he was, " Thou seest I am one 
 
 1 La natura universale, doe Iddio. (Convito, Tr. III. c. 4.) 
 
 2 Inferno, III. 7, 8. 
 
 3 Inferno, XX. 30. Mr. W. M. Rossetti strangely enough ren 
 ders this verse "Who hath a passion for God's judgeship." 
 Compassion porta, is the reading of the best texts, and Witte 
 adopts it. Buti's comment is " doe porta pena e dolore di colui 
 che giustamente e condannato da Dio che e sempre giusto." There 
 is an analogous passage in The Revelation of the Apostle Paul, 
 printed in the Proceedings of the American Oriental Societj (vol. 
 viii. pp. 213, 214) : " And the angel answered and said, ' Where 
 fore dost thou weep ? Why ! art tliou more merciful than God ? ' 
 And I said, ' God forbid, my lord ; for God is good and long- 
 suffering unto the sons of men, and he leaves every one of them 
 to his own will, and he walks as he pleases.' " This is precisely 
 Dante's view. 
 
 * Inferno, VIH. 40.
 
 178 DANTE 
 
 that weeps." It is also the one that makes most 
 strongly for the theory of Dante's personal vindic- 
 tiveness, 1 and it may count for what it is worth. 
 We are not greatly concerned to defend him on 
 that score, for he believed in the righteous use of 
 anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. 
 He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the politi 
 cal wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day 
 merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the 
 duty of an upright and thoroughly trained citizen 
 to speak out severely and unmistakably. He be 
 lieved firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of 
 the universe, a conception whereof had been vouch 
 safed him, and that whatever and whoever hindered 
 or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered 
 not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards ; 
 because obedience to God's law, and not making 
 things generally comfortable, was the highest duty 
 of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity. 
 It has been commonly assumed that Dante was a 
 man soured by undeserved misfortune, that he took 
 up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with 
 his fallen fortunes, and that his theory of life and 
 of man's relations to it was altogether reshaped for 
 him by the bitter musings of his exile. This would 
 
 1 " I following her (Moral Philosophy) in the work as well as 
 the passion, so far as I could, abominated and disparaged the 
 errors of men, not to the infamy and shame of the erring, hut of 
 the errors." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 1.) " Wherefore in my judg 
 ment as he who defames a worthy man ought to he avoided by 
 people and not listened to, so a vile man descended of worthy 
 ancestors ought to be hunted out by all." (Convito, Tr. IV. 
 e.29.)
 
 DANTE 179 
 
 be singular, to say the least, in a man who tells us 
 that he "felt himself indeed four-square against 
 the strokes of chance," and whose convictions were 
 so intimate that they were not merely intellectual 
 conclusions, but parts of his moral being. Fortu 
 nately we are called on to believe nothing of the 
 kind. Dante himself has supplied us with hints 
 and dates which enable us to watch the germina 
 tion and trace the growth of his double theory of 
 government, applicable to man as he is a citizen of 
 this world, and as he hopes to become hereafter a 
 freeman of the celestial city. It would be of little 
 consequence to show in which of two equally self 
 ish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled him 
 self six hundred years ago, but it is worth some 
 thing to know that a man of Ambitious temper and 
 violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of fac 
 tions, could rise to a level of principle so far above 
 them all. Dante's opinions have life in them still, 
 because they were drawn from living sources of re 
 flection and experience, because they were reasoned 
 out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, 
 and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance 
 at the doubtful political sky of the hour. 
 
 Swiftly the politic goes : is it dark ? he borrows a lantern ; 
 Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars. 
 
 It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology of 
 Dante's thought. When his ancestor Cacciaguida 
 prophesies to him the life which is to be his after 
 1300, 1 he says, speaking of his exile: 
 
 1 Paradise, XVII. 61-69.
 
 180 DANTE 
 
 11 And that which most shall -weigh upon thy shoulders 
 Will be the bad and foolish company 
 With which into this valley thou shalt fall ; 
 
 Of their bestiality their own proceedings 
 
 Shall furnish proof ; so 't will be well for thee 
 
 A party to have made thee by thyself." 
 
 Here both context and grammatical construction 
 (infallible guides in a writer so scrupulous and 
 exact) imply irresistibly that Dante had become a 
 party by himself before his exile. The measure 
 adopted by the Priors of Florence while he was 
 one of them (with his assent and probably by his 
 counsel), of sending to the frontier the leading 
 men of both factions, confirms this implication. 
 Among the persons thus removed from the oppor 
 tunity of doing mischief was his dearest friend 
 Guido Cavalcanti, to whom he had not long before 
 addressed the Vita JVuova. 1 Dante evidently 
 looked back with satisfaction on his conduct at 
 this time, and thought it both honest and patriotic, 
 as it certainly was disinterested. "We whose 
 country is the world, as the ocean to the fish," he 
 tells us, " though we drank of the Arno in infancy, 
 and love Florence so much that, because we loved 
 her, we suffer exile unjustly, support the shoulders 
 
 1 It is worth mentioning that the sufferers in his Inferno are in 
 like manner pretty exactly divided between the two parties. 
 This is answer enough to the charge of partiality. He even puts 
 persons there for whom he felt affection (as Brunetto Latini) and 
 respect (as Farinata degli Uberti and Frederick II.). Till the 
 French looked up their MSS., it was taken for granted that the 
 beccajo di Parigi (Purgatario, XX. 52) was a drop of Dante's gall. 
 *Ce fu Huez Capez c' on apelle bouchier." Hugues Capet, p. 1.
 
 DANTE 181 
 
 of our judgment rather upon reason than the 
 senses." 1 And again, speaking of old age, he 
 says : " And the noble soul at this age blesses also 
 the times past, and well may bless them, because, 
 revolving them in memory, she recalls her right 
 eous conduct, without which she could not enter 
 the port to which she draws nigh, with so much 
 riches and so great gain." This language is not 
 that of a man who regrets some former action as 
 mistaken, still less of one who repented it for any 
 disastrous consequences to himself. So, in justi 
 fying a man for speaking of himself, he alleges 
 two examples, that of Boethius, who did so to 
 " clear himself of the perpetual infamy of his ex 
 ile " ; and that of Augustine, " for, by the process 
 of his life, which was from bad to good, from good 
 to better, and from better to best, he gave us ex 
 ample and teaching." 2 After middle life, at least, 
 Dante had that wisdom " whose use brings with it 
 marvellous beauties, that is, contentment with every 
 condition of time, and contempt of those things 
 which others make their masters." 3 If Dante, 
 moreover, wrote his treatise De Monarchia before 
 1302, and we think Witte's inference, 4 from its 
 style and from the fact that he nowhere alludes to 
 his banishment in it, conclusive on this point, then 
 he was already a Ghibelline in the same larger and 
 
 1 De Vulgari Eloquio, lib. i. cap. vi. Cf . Inferno, XV. 61-64. 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. I. c. 2. 
 
 8 Convito, Tr. III. c. 13. 
 
 4 Opp. Min., ed. Fraticelli, vol. ii. pp. 281 and 283. Witte 
 is inclined to put it even earlier than 1300, and we believe he is 
 right.
 
 182 DANTE 
 
 unpartisan sense which ever after distinguished 
 him from his Italian contemporaries. 
 
 " Let, let the Ghibellines ply their handicraft 
 
 Beneath some other standard ; for this ever 
 111 follows he who it and justice parts," 
 
 he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Roman 
 eagle. 1 His Ghibellinism, though undoubtedly the 
 result of what he had seen of Italian misgovern- 
 ment, embraced in its theoretical application the 
 civilized world. His political system was one 
 which his reason adopted, not for any temporary 
 expediency, but because it conduced to justice, 
 peace, and civilization, the three conditions on 
 which alone freedom was possible in any sense 
 which made it worth having. Dante was intensely 
 Italian, nay, intensely Florentine, but on all great 
 questions he was, by the logical structure of his 
 mind and its philosophic impartiality, incapable of 
 intellectual provincialism. 2 If the circle of his 
 affections, as with persistent natures commonly, 
 was narrow, his thought swept a broad horizon 
 from that tower of absolute self which he had 
 reared for its speculation. Even upon the princi 
 ples of poetry, mechanical and other, 3 he had re 
 flected more profoundly than most of those who 
 criticise his work, and it was not by chance that he 
 discovered the secret of that magical word too few, 
 which not only distinguishes his verse from all 
 
 1 Paradiso, VI. 103-105. 
 
 2 Some Florentines have amusingly enough doubted the genu 
 ineness of the De Vulgari Eloquio, because Dante therein denies 
 the preeminence of the Tuscan dialect. 
 
 8 See particularly the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio.
 
 DANTE 183 
 
 other, but so strikingly from his own prose. He 
 never took the bit of art 1 between his teeth where 
 only poetry, and not doctrine, was concerned. 
 
 If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was 
 practical, a guide for the conduct of life, it was, on 
 the other, a much more transcendent thing, whose 
 body was wisdom, her soul love, and her efficient 
 cause truth. It is a practice of wisdom from the 
 mere love of it, for so we must interpret his amo 
 roso uso di sapienza, when we remember how 
 he has said before 2 that " the love of wisdom for 
 its delight or profit is not true love of wisdom." 
 And this love must embrace knowledge in all its 
 branches, for Dante is content with nothing less 
 than a pancratic training, and has a scorn of dilet 
 tanti, specialists, and quacks. "Wherefore none 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XXXIII. 141. " That thing one calls beautiful 
 whose parts answer to each other, because pleasure results from 
 their harmony." (Convito, Tr. I. c. 5.) Carlyle says that "he 
 knew too, partly, that his work was great, the greatest a man 
 could do." He knew it fully. Telling us how Giotto's fame as a 
 painter had eclipsed that of Cimabue, he takes an example from 
 poetry also, and selecting two Italian poets, one the most 
 famous of his predecessors, the other of his contemporaries, 
 calmly sets himself above them both (Purgatorio, XI. 97-99), and 
 gives the reason for his supremacy (Purgatorio, XXIV. 49-62). 
 It is to be remembered that Amore in the latter passage does not 
 mean love in the ordinary sense, but in that transcendental one 
 set forth in the Convito, that state of the soul which opens it 
 for the descent of God's spirit, to make it over into his own image. 
 ' ' Therefore it is manifest that in this love the Divine virtue de 
 scends into men in the guise of an angel, . . . and it is to be 
 noted that the descending of the virtue of one thing into another 
 is nothing else than reducing it to its own likeness." (Convito, 
 Tr. III. c. 14.) 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. III. c. 12 ; ib. c. 11.
 
 184 DANTE 
 
 ought to be called a true philosopher who for any 
 delight loves any part of knowledge, as there are 
 many who delight in composing Canzoni, and de 
 light to be studious in them, and who delight to be 
 studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and 
 abandon the other sciences which are all members 
 of wisdom." l " Many love better to be held mas 
 ters than to be so." With him wisdom is the 
 generalization from many several knowledges of 
 small account by themselves ; it results therefore 
 from breadth of culture, and would be impossible 
 without it. Philosophy is a noble lady (donna gen- 
 til 2 '), partaking of the divine essence by a kind of 
 eternal marriage, while with other intelligences she 
 is united in a less measure " as a mistress of whom 
 no lover takes complete joy." 3 The eyes of this 
 lady are her demonstrations, and her smile is her 
 persuasion. " The eyes of wisdom are her demon 
 strations by which truth is beheld most certainly ; 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. in. c. 11. 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. III. Canzone, w. 19-22. This lady corresponds 
 to Lucia (Inferno, II. 97), the prevenient Grace, the light of God 
 which shows the right path and guides the feet in it. With Dante 
 God is always the sun, " which leadeth others right hy every road." 
 (Inferno, L 18.) " The spiritual and intelligible Sun, which is 
 God." (Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.) His light " enlighteneth every 
 man that cometh into the world," but his dwelling is in the hea 
 vens. He who wilfully deprives himself of this light is spiritually 
 dead in sin. So when in Mars he beholds the glorified spirits of 
 the martyrs he exclaims, " Helios, who so arrayest them ! " 
 (Paradiso, XIV. 96.) Blanc (Vocabolario, sub voce) rejects this 
 interpretation. But Dante, entering the abode of the Blessed, 
 invokes the " good Apollo," and shortly after calls him divina 
 virtu. We shall have more to say of this hereafter. 
 
 * Convito, Tr. III. c. 12.
 
 DANTE 185 
 
 and her smile is her persuasions in which the in 
 terior light of wisdom is shown under a certain 
 veil, and in these two is felt that highest pleasure 
 of beatitude which is the greatest good in para 
 dise." l " It is to be known that the beholding this 
 lady was so largely ordained for us, not merely to 
 look upon the face which she shows us, but that 
 we may desire to attain the things which she keeps 
 concealed. And as through her much thereof is 
 seen by reason, so by her we believe that every 
 miracle may have its reason in a higher intellect, 
 and consequently may be. Whence our good faith 
 has its origin, whence comes the hope of those 
 unseen things which we desire, and through that 
 the operation of charity, by the which three virtues 
 we rise to philosophize in that celestial Athens 
 where the Stoics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans 
 through the art of eternal truth accordingly concur 
 in one will." 2 
 
 As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy we 
 will cite a passage from the Convito, all the more 
 to our purpose as it will illustrate his own method 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. III. c. 15. Recalling how the eyes of Beatrice 
 lift her servant through the heavenly spheres, and that smile of 
 hers so often dwelt on with rapture, we see how Dante was in the 
 habit of commenting and illustrating his own works. We must 
 remember always that with him the allegorical exposition is the 
 true one (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 1), the allegory being a truth which 
 is hidden under a beautiful falsehood (Convito, Tr. II. c. 1), and 
 that Dante thought his poems without this exposition "under 
 some shade of obscurity, so that to many their beauty was more 
 grateful than their goodness" (Convito, Tr. I. c. 1), "because 
 the goodness is in the meaning, and the beauty in the ornament of 
 the words" (Convito, Tr. II. c. 12). 
 
 Convito, Tr. III. c. 14.
 
 186 DANTE 
 
 of allegorizing. "Verily the use of our mind is 
 double, that is, practical and speculative, the one 
 agd the other most delightful, although that of con 
 templation be the more so. That of the practi 
 cal is for us to act virtuously, that is, honorably, 
 with prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. 
 [These are the four stars seen by Dante, Purgato- 
 rio, I. 22, 27.] That of the speculative is not to 
 act for ourselves, but to consider the works of God 
 and nature. . . . Verily of these uses one is more 
 full of beatitude than the other, as it is the specu 
 lative, which without any admixture is the use of 
 our noblest part. . . . And this part in this life 
 cannot have its use perfectly, which is to see God, 
 except inasmuch as the intellect considers him and 
 beholds him through his effects. And that we 
 should seek this beatitude as the highest, and not 
 the other, the Gospel of Mark teaches us if we will 
 look well. Mark says that Mary Magdalene, Mary 
 the mother of James, and Mary Salome went to 
 find the Saviour at the tomb and found him not, 
 but found a youth clad in white who said to them, 
 4 Ye seek the Saviour, and I say unto you that he 
 is not here ; and yet fear ye not, but go and say 
 unto his disciples and Peter that he will go before 
 them into Galilee, and there ye shall see him even 
 as he told you.' By these three women may be un 
 derstood the three sects of the active life, that is, 
 the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics, 
 who go to the tomb, that is, to the present life, 
 which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and seek 
 the Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him not,
 
 DANTE 187 
 
 but they find a youth in white raiment, who, ac 
 cording to the testimony of Matthew and the rest, 
 was an angel of God. This angel is that nobleness 
 of ours which conies from God, as hath been said, 
 which speaks in our reason and says to each of 
 these sects, that is, to whoever goes s'eeking beati 
 tude in this life, that it is not here, but go and say 
 to the disciples and to Peter, that is, to those who 
 go seeking it and those who are gone astray (like 
 Peter who had denied), that it will go before them 
 into Galilee, that is, into speculation. Galilee is 
 as much as to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a 
 body full of corporeal light more than any other, 
 and so contemplation is fuller of spiritual light 
 than anything else here below. And he says, * it 
 will go before,' and does not say, ' it will be with 
 you,' to give us to understand that God always goes 
 before our contemplation, nor can we ever over 
 take here Him who is our supreme beatitude. And 
 it is said, ' There ye shall see him as he told you,' 
 that is, here ye shall have of his sweetness, that is, 
 felicity, as is promised you here, that is, as it is or 
 dained that ye can have. And thus it appears that 
 we find our beatitude, this felicity of which we are 
 speaking, first imperfect in the active life, that is, 
 in the operations of the moral virtues, and after 
 wards wellnigh perfect in the operation of the in 
 tellectual ones, the which two operations are speedy 
 and most direct ways to lead to the supreme beati 
 tude, the which cannot be had here, as appears by 
 what has been said." 1 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22.
 
 188 DANTE 
 
 At first sight there may seem to be some want of 
 agreement in what Dante says here of the soul's 
 incapacity of the vision of God in this life with the 
 triumphant conclusion of his own poem. But here 
 as elsewhere Dante must be completed and ex 
 plained by himself. " We must know that every 
 thing most greatly desires its own perfection, and 
 in that its every desire is appeased, and by that 
 everything is desired. [That is, the one is drawn 
 toward, the other draws.] And this is that desire 
 which makes every delight maimed, for no delight 
 is so great in this life that it can take away from 
 the soul this thirst so that desire remain not in the 
 thought." l " And since it is most natural to wish 
 to be in God, the human soul naturally wills it 
 with all longing. And since its being depends on 
 God and is preserved thereby, it naturally desires 
 and wills to be united with God in order to fortify 
 its being. And since in the goodnesses of human 
 nature is shown some reason for those of the Divine, 
 it follows that the human soul unites itself in a 
 spiritual way with those so much the more strongly 
 and quickly as they appear more perfect, and this 
 appearance happens according as the knowledge of 
 the soul is clear or impeded. And this union is 
 what we call Love, whereby may be known what is 
 within the soul, seeing those it outwardly loves. 
 . . . And the human soul which is ennobled with 
 the ultimate potency, that is, reason, participates 
 in the Divine nature after the manner of an eternal 
 Intelligence, because the soul is so ennobled and 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. III. c. 6.
 
 DANTE 189 
 
 denuded of matter in that sovran potency that the 
 Divine light shines in it as in an angel." 1 This 
 union with God may therefore take place before 
 the warfare of life is over, but is only possible for 
 souls perfettamente naturati, perfectly endowed by 
 nature. 2 This depends on the virtue of the gener 
 ating soul and the concordant influence of the 
 planets. " And if it happen that through the pu 
 rity of the recipient soul, the intellectual virtue be 
 well abstracted and absolved from every corporeal 
 shadow, the Divine bounty is multiplied in it as in 
 a thing sufficient to receive the same." 3 "And 
 there are some who believe that if all the aforesaid 
 virtues [powers] should unite for the production 
 of a soul in their best disposition, so much of the 
 Deity would descend into it that it would be al 
 most another incarnate God." 4 Did Dante believe 
 himself to be one of these ? He certainly gives us 
 reason to think so. He was born under fortunate 
 stars, as he twice tells us, 5 and he puts the middle 
 of his own life at the thirty-fifth year, which is the 
 period he assigns for it in the diviner sort of men. 6 
 The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. III. c. 2. By potenzia and potenza Dante means 
 the faculty of receiving influences or impressions. (Paradiso, 
 XIII. 61 ; XXIX. 34.) Reason is the " sovran potency" because 
 it makes us capable of God. 
 
 2 " O thou well-born, unto whom Grace concedes 
 To see the thrones of the Eternal triumph, 
 Or ever yet the warfare be abandoned." 
 
 (Paradiso, V. 115-118.) 
 3 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 21. - * Convito, Tr. IV. c. 21. 
 
 5 Inferno, XV. 55, 56; Paradiso, XXII. 112-117. 
 
 6 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 23 (cf. Inferno, I. 1).
 
 190 DANTE 
 
 growth may, we think, be reckoned with some ap 
 proach to exactness from data supplied by himself. 
 In the poems of the Vita Nuova, Beatrice, until 
 her death, was to him simply a poetical ideal, a 
 type of abstract beauty, chosen according to the 
 fashion of the day after the manner of the Proven- 
 93! poets, but in a less carnal sense than theirs. 
 " And by the fourth nature of animals, that is, the 
 sensitive, man has another love whereby he loves 
 according to sensible appearance, even as a beast. 
 . . . And by the fifth and final nature, that is, the 
 truly human, or, to speak better, angelic, that is, 
 rational, man has a love for truth and virtue. . . . 
 Wherefore, since this nature is called mind, I said 
 that love discoursed in my mind to make it under 
 stood that this love was that which is born in the 
 noblest of natures, that is, [the love] of truth and 
 virtue, and to shut out every false opinion by which 
 it might be suspected that my love was for the de 
 light of sense." 1 This is a very weighty affirma 
 tion, made, as it is, so deliberately by a man of 
 Dante's veracity, who would and did speak truth 
 at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and for 
 ever all the idle tales of Dante's amours, of la 
 Montanina, Gentucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and the 
 rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts la 
 onde la stoltezza dipartille. 2 We think Miss Eos 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IIL c. 3 ; Paradiso, XVIIL 108-130. 
 
 2 See an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter by 
 Witte, who so highly deserves the gratitude of all students of 
 Dante, in Dante AlighierTs Lyrische Gedichte, Theil II. pp. 48- 
 57- It was kindly old Boccaccio, who, without thinking any harm, 
 first set this nonsense a-going. His Life of Dante is mainly
 
 DANTE 191 
 
 setti a little hasty in allowing that in the years 
 which immediately followed Beatrice's death Dante 
 gave himself up " more or less to sensual gratifica 
 tion and earthly aim." The earthly aim we in a 
 certain sense admit ; the sensual gratification we 
 reject as utterly inconsistent, not only with Dante's 
 principles, but with his character and indefatigable 
 industry. Miss Rossetti illustrates her position by 
 a subtle remark on " the lulling spell of an intel 
 lectual and sensitive delight in good running par 
 allel with a voluntary and actual indulgence in 
 evil." The dead Beatrice beckoned him toward 
 the life of contemplation, and it was precisely dur 
 ing this period that he attempted to find happiness 
 
 a rhetorical exercise. After making Dante's marriage an excuse 
 for revamping all the old slanders against matrimony, he adds 
 gravely, " Certainly I do not affirm these things to have happened 
 to Dante, for I do not know it, though it be true that (whether 
 things like these or others were the cause of it), once parted froifl 
 her, he would never come where she was nor suffer her to come 
 where he was, for all that she was the mother of several children 
 by him." That he did not come to her is not wonderful, for he 
 would have been burned alive if he had. Dante could not send 
 for her because he was a homeless wanderer. She remained in 
 Florence with her children because she had powerful relations and 
 perhaps property there. It is plain, also, that what Boccaccio 
 says of Dante's lussuria had no better foundation. It gave him a 
 chance to turn a period. He gives no particulars, and his general 
 statement is simply incredible. Lionardo Bruni and Vellutello 
 long ago pointed out the trifling and fictitious character of this 
 Life. Those familiar with Dante's allegorical diction will not 
 lay much stress on the literal meaning of pargoletta in Purgatorio, 
 XXXI. 59. Gentucca, of course, was a real person, one of those 
 who had shown hospitality to the exile. Dante remembers them 
 all somewhere, for gratitude (which is quite as rare as genius) 
 was one of the virtues of his unforgetting nature. Boccaccio's 
 Comment is later and far more valuable than the Life.
 
 192 DANTE 
 
 in the life of action. " Verily it is to be known 
 that we may in this life have two felicities, follow 
 ing two ways, good and best, which lead us thither. 
 The one is the active, the other the contemplative 
 life, the which (though by the active we may at 
 tain, as has been said, unto good felicity) leads us 
 to the best felicity and blessedness." 1 " The life 
 of my heart, that is, of my inward self, was wont 
 to be a sweet thought which went many times to 
 the feet of God, that is to say, in thought I contem 
 plated the kingdom of the Blessed. And I tell 
 the final cause why I mounted thither in thought 
 when I say, * Where it [the sweet thought] beheld 
 a lady in glory,' that I might make it understood 
 that I was and am certain, by her gracious revela 
 tion, that she was in heaven, [not on earth, as I 
 had vainly imagined,] whither I went in thought, 
 so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt." 2 
 This passage exactly answers to another in Purgar 
 torio, XXX. 109-138: 
 
 " Not only by the work of those great wheels 
 That destine every seed unto some end, 
 According as the stars are in conjunction, 
 But by the largess of celestial graces, 
 
 Such had this man become in his New Life 
 Potentially, that every righteous habit 
 Would have made admirable proof in him ; 
 
 Some time did I sustain him -with my look (volto) ; 
 Revealing unto him my youthful eyes, 
 I led him with me turned in the right way. 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 17 ; Purgatorio, XXVII. 100-10& 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. IL c. 8.
 
 DANTE 193 
 
 As soon as ever of my second age 
 
 I was upon the threshold and changed life, 
 Himself from me he took and gave to others. 
 
 When from the flesh to spirit I ascended, 
 
 And beauty and virtue were in me increased, 
 I was to him less dear and less delightful ; 
 
 And into ways untrue he turned his steps, 
 Pursuing the false images of good, 
 That never any promises fulfil 1 
 
 Nor prayer for inspiration me availed, 2 
 
 Sy means of which in dreams and otherwise 
 I called him back, so little did he heed them. 
 
 So low he fell, that all appliances 
 
 For his salvation were already short, 
 
 Save showing him the people of perdition." 
 
 Now Dante himself, we think, gives us the clue, 
 by following which we may reconcile the contra 
 diction, what Miss Rossetti calls " the astounding 
 discrepancy," between the Lady of the Vita Nuova 
 who made him unfaithful to Beatrice, and the same 
 Lady in the Convito, who in attributes is identical 
 with Beatrice herself. We must remember that 
 the prose part of the Convito, which is a comment 
 on the Canzoni, was written after the Canzoni 
 themselves. How long after we cannot say with 
 certainty, but it was plainly composed at intervals, 
 a part of it probably after Dante had entered upon 
 old age (which began, as he tells us, with the forty- 
 fifth year), consequently after 1310. Dante had 
 
 1 That is, wholly fulfil, rendono intera. 
 
 2 We should prefer here, 
 
 " Nor inspirations won by prayer availed," 
 
 as better expressing Ne V impetrare spirazion. Mr Longfellow's 
 translation is so admirable for its exactness as well as its beauty 
 that it may be thankful for the minutest criticism, such only be 
 ing possible.
 
 194 DANTE 
 
 then written a considerable part of the Divina 
 Commedia, in which Beatrice was to go through 
 her final and most ethereal transformation in his 
 mind and memory. We say in his memory, for 
 such idealizations have a very subtle retrospective 
 action, and the new condition of feeling or thought 
 is uneasy till it has half unconsciously brought into 
 harmony whatever is inconsistent with it in the 
 past. The inward life unwillingly admits any 
 break in its continuity, and nothing is more com 
 mon than to hear a man, in venting an opinion 
 taken up a week ago, say with perfect sincerity, 
 "I have always thought so and so." Whatever 
 belief occupies the whole mind soon produces the 
 impression on us of having long had possession of 
 it, and one mode of consciousness blends so insensi 
 bly with another that it is impossible to mark by 
 an exact line where one begins and the other ends. 
 Dante in his exposition of the Canzoni must have 
 been subject to this subtlest and most deceitful of 
 influences. He would try to reconcile so far as he 
 conscientiously could his present with his past. 
 This he could do by means of the allegorical inter 
 pretation. "For it would be a great shame to 
 him," he says in the Vita Nuova, " who should 
 poetize something under the vesture of some figure 
 or rhetorical color, and afterwards, when asked, 
 could not strip his words of that vesture in such 
 wise that they should have a true meaning." Now 
 in the literal exposition of the Canzone beginning, 
 ** Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movcte," 1 he 
 1 Which he cites in the Paradise, VUL 37.
 
 DANTE 
 
 tells us that the grandezza of the Donna Gentil 
 was " temporal greatness " (one certainly of the 
 felicities attainable by way of the vita attiva), and 
 immediately after gives us a hint by which we may 
 comprehend why a proud 1 man might covet it. 
 " How much wisdom and how great a persistence 
 in virtue (abito virtuoso) are hidden for want of 
 this lustre ! " 2 When Dante reaches the Terres 
 trial Paradise 3 which is the highest felicity of this 
 world, and therefore the consummation of the Ac 
 tive Life, he is welcomed by a Lady who is its 
 symbol, 
 
 " Who went along 
 Singing and culling floweret after floweret," 
 
 and warming herself in the rays of Love, or " ac 
 tual speculation," that is, " where love makes its 
 peace felt." 4 That she was the symbol of this is 
 evident from the previous dream of Dante, 5 in 
 which he sees Leah, the universally accepted type 
 of it, 
 
 " Walking in a meadow, 
 
 Gathering flowers ; and singing she was saying, 
 ' Know whosoever may my name demand 
 
 That I am Leah, and go moving round 
 
 My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,' " 
 
 that is to say, of good works. She, having " washed 
 him thoroughly from sin," 6 
 
 1 Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which (as 
 appears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition, in Pur 
 gatorio, XIII. 136, 137. 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 11. 8 Purgatorio, XXVIII. 
 
 4 Purgatorio, XXVIII. 40-44 ; Convito, Tr. III. c. 13. 
 
 5 Purgatorio, XXVII. 94-105. 
 
 6 Psalm li. 2. " And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's]
 
 196 DANTE 
 
 "All dripping brought 
 Into the dance of the four beautiful," 1 
 
 who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, 
 Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides 
 of the Practical Life, which he had seen when he 
 came out of the Hell where he had beheld the re 
 sults of sin, and arrived at the foot of the Mount 
 of Purification. That these were the special vir 
 tues of practical goodness Dante had already told 
 us in a passage before quoted from the Convito. 2 
 That this was Dante's meaning is confirmed by 
 what Beatrice says to him, 3 
 
 " Short while shalt thou be here a forester (silvano) 
 And thou shalt be with me f orevermore 
 A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman " ; 
 
 for by a " forest " he always means the world of life 
 and action. 4 At the time when Dante was writing 
 the Canzoni on which the Convito was a comment, 
 he believed science to be the " ultimate perfection 
 itself, and not the way to it," 5 but before the Con 
 vito was composed he had become aware of a higher 
 and purer light, an inward light, in that Beatrice, 
 already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the 
 mind, " who lives in heaven with the angels, and on 
 earth with my soul." 6 
 
 beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous 
 appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the 
 which appetite removes us from the natural as well as other 
 vices." (Convito, Tr. HI. c. 15.) 
 
 1 Ptirgatorio, XXXI. 103, 104. 2 Tr. IV. c. 22. 
 
 8 Purgatorio, XXXII. 100-102. 
 
 4 Such is the sdva oscura (Inferno, I. 2), such the selva erronea 
 di questa vita (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24). 
 
 6 Convito, Tr. I. c. 13. 6 Convito, Tr. II. c. 2.
 
 DANTE 197 
 
 So spiritually does Dante always present Bea 
 trice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the 
 Vita Nuova, that many, like Biscione and Rossetti, 
 have doubted her real existence. But surely we 
 must consent to believe that she who speaks of 
 
 " The fair limbs wherein 
 I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth," 
 
 was once a creature of flesh and blood, 
 
 " A creature not too bright and good 
 For human nature's daily food." 
 
 When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Con 
 stance, filled her room up with something fairer 
 than the reality had ever been. There is no ideal- 
 izer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a 
 regret of fancy as much as of real feeling. She 
 early began to undergo that change into something 
 rich and strange in the sea 1 of his mind which so 
 completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not 
 impossible, we think, to follow the process of trans 
 formation. During the period of the Convito Can- 
 zoni, when he had so given himself to study that 
 to his weakened eyes " the stars were shadowed 
 with a white blur," 2 this star of his imagination 
 was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his 
 love had never been of the senses (which is bes 
 tial 3 ), so his sorrow was all the more ready to be 
 irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her to 
 be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in 
 him the nobler impulses of his nature, 
 
 1 Mar di tutto il senno, he calls Virgil (Inferno, VIII. 7). Those 
 familiar with his own works will think the phrase singularly ap 
 plicable to himself. 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. III. c. 9. 8 Convito, Tr. HI. c. 3.
 
 198 DANTE 
 
 (" Such had this man become in his New Life 
 Potentially,") 
 
 and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of 
 the highest good. With that turn for double mean 
 ing and abstraction which was so strong in him, 
 her very name helped him to allegorize her into 
 one who makes blessed (beat), and thence the step 
 was a short one to personify in her that Theosophy 
 which enables man to see God and to be mystically 
 united with him even in the flesh. Already, in the 
 Vita Nuova, 1 she appears to him as afterwards in 
 the Terrestrial Paradise, clad in that color of flame 
 which belongs to the seraphim who contemplate 
 God in himself, simply, and not in his relation to 
 the Son or the Holy Spirit. 2 When misfortune 
 came upon him, when his schemes of worldly activ 
 ity failed, and science was helpless to console, as it 
 had never been able wholly to satisfy, she already 
 rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth, re 
 proaching him with his desertion of purely spirit 
 ual aims. It is, perhaps, in allusion to this that he 
 fixes the date of her death with such minute pre 
 cision on the 9th June, 1290, most probably his 
 own twenty-fifth birthday, on which he passed the 
 boundary of adolescence. 3 
 
 That there should seem to be a discrepancy be 
 tween the Lady of the Vita JVuova and her of the 
 
 1 Vita Nuova, XL. 2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 6. 
 
 8 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 24. The date of Dante's birth is uncer 
 tain, but the period he assigns for it (Paradise, XXII. 112-117) 
 extends from the middle of May to the middle of June. If we 
 understand Buti's astrological comment, the day should fall in 
 June rather than May.
 
 DANTE 199 
 
 Convito, Dante himself was already aware when 
 writing the former and commenting it. Explain 
 ing the sonnet beginning Gentil pensier, he says, 
 " In this sonnet I make two parts of myself ac 
 cording as my thoughts were divided in two. The 
 one part I call heart, that is, the appetite, the 
 other soul, that is, reason. ... It is true that 
 in the preceding sonnet I take side with the heart 
 against the eyes [which were weeping for the lost 
 Beatrice], and that appears contrary to what I 
 say in the present one ; and therefore I say that 
 in that sonnet also I mean by my heart the appe 
 tite, because my desire to remember me of my 
 most gentle Lady was still greater than to behold 
 this one, albeit I had already some appetite for 
 her, but slight as should seem: whence it ap 
 pears that the one saying is not contrary to the 
 other." l When, therefore, Dante speaks of the 
 love of this Lady as the " adversary of Reason" 
 he uses the word in its highest sense, not as under 
 standing (Intellectus), but as synonymous with 
 soul. Already, when the latter part of the Vita 
 JWuova, nay, perhaps the whole of the explanatory 
 portion of it, was written, the plan of the Corn- 
 media was complete, a poem the higher aim of 
 which was to keep the soul alive both in this world 
 and for the next. As Dante tells us, the contra 
 diction in his mind was, though he did not become 
 aware of it till afterwards, more apparent than real. 
 
 1 Vita Nuova, XXXIX. Compare for a different view, The 
 New Life of Dante, an Essay with Translations, by C. E. Norton 
 pp. 92 et seq.
 
 200 DANTE 
 
 He sought consolation in study, and, failing to find 
 it in Learning (saewza), lie was led to seek it in 
 Wisdom (sapienza), which is the love of God and 
 the knowledge of him. 1 He had sought happiness 
 through the understanding ; he was to find it 
 through intuition. The lady Philosophy (accord 
 ing as she is moral or intellectual) includes both. 
 Her gradual transfiguration is exemplified in pas 
 sages already quoted. The active life leads indi 
 rectly by a knowledge of its failures and sins (In- 
 , or directly by a righteous employment of it 
 
 1 There is a passage in the Convito (Tr. III. c. 15) in which 
 Dante seems clearly to make the distinction asserted above, " And 
 therefore the desire of man is limited in this life to that knowledge 
 (scienzia) -which may here be had, and passes not save by error 
 that point which is beyond our natural understanding. And so is 
 limited and measured in the angelic nature the amount of that 
 wisdom which the nature of each is capable of receiving. 1 ' Man 
 is, according to Dante, superior to the angels in this, that he is 
 capable both of reason and contemplation, while they are confined 
 to the latter. That Beatrice's reproaches refer to no human par- 
 goletta, the context shows, where Dante asks, 
 
 " But wherefore so beyond my power of sight 
 Soars your desirable discourse, that aye 
 The more I strive, so much the more I lose it ? 
 ' That thou mayst recognize,' she said, ' the school 
 
 Which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far 
 Its doctrine follows after my discourse, 
 And mayst behold your path from the divine 
 Distant as far as separated is 
 From earth the heaven that highest hastens on.' " 
 Purgatorio, XXXHI. 82-90. 
 
 The pargoletta in its ordinary sense was necessary to the literal 
 and human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with that 
 non-natural interpretation which, according to Dante's repeated 
 statement, lays open the true and divine meaning.
 
 DANTE 201 
 
 (Purgatorio'), to the same end. The use of the 
 sciences is to induce in us the ultimate perfection, 
 that of speculating upon truth; the use of the 
 highest of them, theology, the contemplation of 
 God. 1 To this they all lead up. In one of those 
 curious chapters of the Convito, 2 where he points 
 out the analogy between the sciences and the hea 
 vens, Dante tells us that he compares moral philoso 
 phy with the crystalline heaven or Primum Mo 
 bile, because it communicates life and gives motion 
 to all the others below it. But what gives motion 
 to the crystalline heaven (moral philosophy) itself ? 
 " The most fervent appetite which it has in each of 
 its parts to be conjoined with each part of that 
 most divine quiet heaven " (Theology). 3 Theol 
 ogy, the divine science, corresponds with the Em 
 pyrean, " because of its peace, the which, through 
 the most excellent certainty of its subject, which is 
 God, suffers no strife of opinions or sophistic argu 
 ments." * No one of the heavens is at rest but 
 this, and in none of the inferior sciences can we 
 find repose, though he likens physics to the heaven 
 of the fixed stars, in whole name is a suggestion of 
 the certitude to be arrived at in things demonstrable. 
 Dante had this comparison in mind, it may be in 
 ferred, when he said, 
 
 1 " So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But 
 ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of 
 God dwell in you." (Romans viii. 8, 9.) 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. II. c. 14, 15. 
 
 8 Convito, Tr. II. e. 4. Compare Paradiso, I. 76, 77. 
 * " Vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called." 
 (1 Tim. vi. 20.)
 
 202 DANTE 
 
 " Well I perceive that never sated is 
 
 Our intellect unless the Truth illume it 
 Beyond which nothing true 1 expands itself. 
 It rests therein as wild beast in his lair, 
 
 When it attains it ; and it can attain it ; 
 If not, then each desire would frustrate he. 
 Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot, 
 
 Doubt at the foot of truth ; and this is nature, 
 Which to the top from height to height impels us." 2 
 
 The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves itself 
 into an essential, easily apprehensible, if mystical, 
 unity. Dante at first gave himself to the study of 
 the sciences (after he had lost the simple, unques 
 tioning faith of youth) as the means of arriving at 
 certainty. From the root of every truth to which 
 he attained sprang this sucker (rampollo) of doubt, 
 drawing out of it the very sap of its life. In this 
 way was Philosophy truly an adversary of his soul, 
 and the reason of his remorse for fruitless studies 
 which drew him away from the one that alone was 
 and could be fruitful is obvious enough. But by 
 and by out of the very doubt came the sweetness 3 
 of a higher and truer insight. He became aware 
 that there were "things* in heaven and earth un 
 dreamt of in your philosophy," as another doubter 
 said, who had just finished his studies, but could 
 not find his way out of the scepticism they engen 
 dered as Dante did. 
 
 " Insane is he who hopeth that our reason 
 Can traverse the illimitable way, 
 Which the one Substance in three Persons follows ! 
 
 1 That is, no partial truth. 2 Paradiso, IV. 124-132. 
 
 " Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong 
 came forth sweetness." (Judges xiv. 14.)
 
 DANTE 203 
 
 Mortals, remain contented at the Quia ; 
 
 For if ye had been able to see all, 
 
 No need there were [had been] for Mary to give birth. 
 And ye have seen desiring without fruit 
 
 Those whose desire would have been quieted, 
 
 Which evermore is given them for a grief. 
 I speak of Aristotle and of Plato 
 
 And others many." 1 
 
 Whether at the time when the poems of the Vita 
 JVuova were written the Lady who withdrew him 
 for a while from Beatrice was (which we doubt) 
 a person of flesh and blood or not, she was no 
 
 1 Purgatorio, III. 34-44. The allusions in this passage are all 
 to sayings of Saint Paul, of whom Dante was plainly a loving 
 reader. " Remain contented at the Quia," that is, be satisfied 
 with knowing that things are, without inquiring too nicely how or 
 why. " Being justified by faith we have peace with God ' ' (Rom. 
 v. 1). Infinita via: "O the depth of the riches both of the 
 wisdom and knowledge of God ! How unsearchable are his judg 
 ments, and his ways past finding out ! " (Rom. xi. 33.) Aristotle 
 and Plato : " For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven 
 dguinst all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the 
 truth in unrighteousness. . . . For the invisible things of him from 
 the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by 
 the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so 
 that they are without excuse. Because that when they knew God, 
 they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became 
 vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened " 
 (Rom. i. 18-21). He refers to the Greeks. The Epistle to the 
 Romans, by the way, would naturally be Dante's favorite. Aa 
 Saint Paul made the Law, so he would make Science, "our 
 schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified 
 by faith " (Gal. iii. 24). He puts Aristotle and Plato in his In 
 ferno, because they did not " adore God duly " (Inferno, IV. 38), 
 that is, they " held the truth in unrighteousness.'' Yet he calls 
 Aristotle " the master and guide of human reason " ( Convito, Tr. 
 IV. c. 6), and Plato "a most excellent man" (Convito, Tr. II. 
 c. 5). Plato and Aristotle, like all Dante's figures, are types. We 
 must disengage our thought from the individual, and fix it on the 
 genus.
 
 204 DANTE 
 
 longer so when the prose narrative was composed. 
 Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings 
 will hardly question that by putting her at a win 
 dow, which is a place to look out of , he intended 
 to imply that she personified Speculation, a word 
 which he uses with a wide range of meaning, some 
 times as looking for, sometimes as seeing (like 
 Shakespeare's 
 
 " There is no speculation in those eyes "), 
 
 sometimes as intuition, or the beholding all things 
 in God, who is the cause of all. This is so obvious, 
 and the image in this sense so familiar, that we are 
 surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked. 
 It is plain that, even when the Vita Nuova was 
 written, the Lady was already Philosophy, but 
 philosophy applied to a lower range of thought, not 
 yet ascended from flesh to spirit. The Lady who 
 seduced him was the science which looks for truth 
 in second causes, or even in effects, instead of seek 
 ing it, where alone it can be found, in the First 
 Cause ; she was the Philosophy which looks for 
 happiness in the visible world (of shadows), and 
 not in the spiritual (and therefore substantial) 
 world. The guerdon of his search was doubt. 
 But Dante, as we have seen, made his very doubts 
 help him upward toward certainty ; each became a 
 round in the ladder by which he climbed to clearer 
 and clearer vision till the end. 1 Philosophy had 
 
 1 It is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same thing 
 when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries him down by 
 clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the same way upwards 
 again a riveder le stelle. Satan is the symbol of materialism, fixed 
 at the point
 
 DANTE 205 
 
 made him forget Beatrice ; it was Philosophy who 
 was to bring him back to her again, washed clean 
 in that very stream of forgetfulness that had made 
 an impassable barrier between them. 1 Dante had 
 known how to find in her the gift of Achilles's 
 lance, 
 
 " Which used to be the cause 
 First of a sad and then a gracious boon." 2 
 
 There is another possible, and even probable, the 
 ory which would reconcile the Beatrice of the Pur- 
 gatorio with her of the Vita JVuova. Suppose 
 that even in the latter she signified Theology, or at 
 least some influence that turned his thoughts to 
 God ? Pietro di Dante, commenting the pargoletta 
 passage in the Purgatorio, says expressly that the 
 poet had at one time given himself to the study of 
 theology and deserted it for poesy and other mun 
 dane sciences. This must refer to a period begin- 
 
 " To which things heavy draw from every side " ; 
 as God is Light and Warmth, so is he "cold obstruction"; the 
 very effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his wings be 
 gets the chilly blast that freezes him more immovably in his place 
 of doom. The danger of all science save the highest (theology) 
 was that it led to materialism. There appears to have been a 
 great deal of it in Florence in the time of Dante. Its followers 
 called themselves Epicureans, and burn in living tombs (Inferno, 
 X.). Dante held them in special horror. " Of all bestialities that 
 is the most foolish and vile and hurtful which believes there is no 
 other life after this." " And I so believe, so affirm, and so am 
 certain that we pass to another better life after this" (Convito, 
 Tr. II. c. 9). It is a fine divination of Carlyle from the Non han 
 speranza di morte that " one day it had risen sternly benign in the 
 scathed heart of Dante that he, wretched, never resting, worn as 
 he was, would [should] full surely rfie." 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XXXI. 103. 2 Inferno, XXXI. 5, 6.
 
 206 DANTE 
 
 ning before 1290. Again, there is an early tra 
 dition that Dante in his youth had been a novice 
 in a Franciscan convent, but never took the vows. 
 Buti affirms this expressly in his comment on In 
 ferno, XVI. 106-123. It is perhaps slightly con 
 firmed by what Dante says in the Convito, 1 that 
 "one can not only turn to Religion by making 
 himself like in habit and life to St. Benedict, St. 
 Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, but like 
 wise one may turn to good and true religion in a 
 state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us 
 but of the heart." If he had ever thought of tak 
 ing monastic vows, his marriage would have cut 
 short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed 
 the real Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed, 
 might not this be the time when his thoughts took 
 that direction ? If so, the impulse came indirectly, 
 at least, from her. 
 
 We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari was a 
 real creature, 
 
 " Col sangue suo e con le sue ginnture " ; 
 
 but how real she was, and whether as real to the 
 poet's memory as to his imagination, may fairly be 
 questioned. She shifts, as the controlling emotion 
 or the poetic fitness of the moment dictates, from a 
 woman loved and lost to a gracious exhalation of 
 all that is fairest in womanhood or most divine in 
 the soul of man, and ere the eye has defined the 
 new image it has become the old one again, or an 
 other mingled of both. 
 
 i Tr. IV. c. 2&
 
 DANTE 207 
 
 " Nor one nor other seemed now what he was ; 
 E'en as proceedeth on before the flame 
 
 Upward along the paper a brown color, 
 
 Which is not black as yet, and the white dies." 1 
 
 As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice (her 
 demonstrations), so she in his own, 
 
 " Now with the one, now with the other nature ; 
 Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled 
 When I beheld the thing itself stand still 
 And in its image it transformed itself." 2 
 
 At the very moment when she had undergone her 
 most sublimated allegorical evaporation, his in 
 stinct as poet, which never failed him, realized her 
 into woman again in those scenes of almost un- 
 approached pathos which make the climax of his 
 Purgatorio. The verses tremble with feeling and 
 shine with tears. 3 Beatrice recalls her own beauty 
 
 1 Inferno, XXV. 64-67. 2 Purgatorio, XXXI. 123-126. 
 
 3 Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platonizing side, and who was 
 probably the first English poet since Chaucer that had read the 
 Commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these passages in the 
 Faerie Queene (B. VI. c. 10). He has turned it into a com 
 pliment, and a very beautiful one, to a living mistress. It is in 
 structive to compare the effect of his purely sensuous verses with 
 that of Dante's, which have such a wonderful reach behind them. 
 They are singularly pleasing, but they do not stay by us as those 
 of his model had done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called 
 him, a ' ' sage and serious poet " ; he would be the last to take 
 offence if we draw from him a moral not without its use now that 
 Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will make 
 him as good rs Urania. Better far the naked nastiness ; the 
 more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor old god of 
 gardens ! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting 
 as an ideal of art. In the last century, they set him up in Ger 
 many and in France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light 
 of which came too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long 
 endurable.
 
 208 DANTE 
 
 with a pride as natural as that of Fair Annie in 
 the old ballad, and compares herself as advanta 
 geously with the " brown, brown bride " who had 
 supplanted her. If this be a ghost, we do not need 
 be told that she is a woman still. 1 We must re 
 member, however, that Beatrice had to be real that 
 she might be interesting, to be beautiful that her 
 goodness might be persuasive, nay, to be beautiful 
 at any rate, because beauty has also something in 
 
 1 This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim hu 
 mor for Dante. We have never been able to find it, unless it be 
 in that passage (Inferno, XV. 119) where Brunetto Latini lingers 
 under the burning shower to recommend his Tesoro to his former 
 pupil. There is a comical touch of nature in an author's solici 
 tude for his little work, not, as in Fielding's case, after its, but 
 his own damnation. We are not sure, but we fancy we catch the 
 momentary flicker of a smile across those serious eyes of Dante's. 
 There is something like humor in the opening verses of the XVI. 
 Paradiso, where Dante tells us how even in heaven he could not 
 help glorying in being gently born, he who had devoted a Can 
 zone and a book of the Convito to proving that nobility consisted 
 wholly in virtue. But there is, after all, something touchingly 
 natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly robbed of his property, 
 and with it of the independence so dear to him, seeing 
 " Needy nothings trimmed in jollity, 
 And captive Good attending Captain 111," 
 
 would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could 
 neither buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the Con 
 vito which shows how bitterly he resented his undeserved poverty. 
 He tells us that buried treasure commonly revealed itself to the 
 bad rather than the good. " Verily I saw the place on the flanks 
 of a mountain in Tuscany called Falterona, where the basest pea 
 sant of the whole countryside digging found there more than a 
 bushel of pieces of the finest silver, which perhaps had awaited 
 him more than a thousand years." (Tr. IV. c. 11.) One can see 
 the grimness of his face as he looked and thought, "how salt a 
 savor hath the bread of others ! "
 
 DANTE 209 
 
 it of divine. Dante has told, in a passage already 
 quoted, that he would rather his readers should 
 find his doctrine sweet than his verses, but he had 
 his relentings from this Stoicism. 
 
 " Canzone, I believe those will be rare 
 Who of thine inner sense can master all, 
 Such toil it costs thy native tongue to learn ; 
 Wherefore, if ever it perchance befall 
 That thou in presence of such men shouldst fare 
 As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern, 
 I pray thee then thy grief to comfort turn, 
 Saying to them, ' O thou my new delight, 
 Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.' " 1 
 
 We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been 
 as purely imaginary as the Dulcinea of Don Qui 
 xote, useful only as motives, but a real Beatrice is 
 as essential to the human sympathies of the Divina 
 Commedia as her glorified Idea to its allegorical 
 teaching, and this Dante understood perfectly well. 2 
 Take her out of the poem, and the heart of it goes 
 with her ; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of 
 its soul. She is the menstruum in which letter 
 and spirit dissolve and mingle into unity. Those 
 who doubt her existence must find Dante's graceful 
 sonnet 3 to Guido Cavalcanti as provoking as San- 
 cho's story of his having seen Dulcinea winnowing 
 wheat was to his master, " so alien is it from all 
 
 1 L' Envoi of Canzone XIV. of the Canzoniere, I. of the Convito. 
 Dante cites the first verse of this Canzone, Paradiso, VIII. 37. 
 
 2 How Dante himself could allegorize even historical person 
 ages may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito (Tr. IV. c. 
 28), where, commenting on a passage of Lucan, he treats Marcia 
 and Cato as mere figures of speech. 
 
 3 II. of the Canzoniere. See Fraticelli's preface.
 
 210 DANTE 
 
 that which eminent persons, who are constituted 
 and preserved for other exercises and entertain 
 ments, do and ought to do." l But we should al 
 ways remember in reading Dante that with him the 
 allegorical interpretation is the true one (verace 
 sposizione), and that he represents himself (and 
 that at a time when he was known to the world 
 only by his minor poems) as having made right 
 eousness (rettitudine, in other words, moral philos 
 ophy) the subject of his verse. 2 Love with him 
 seems first to have meant the love of truth and the 
 search after it (speculazione), and afterwards the 
 contemplation of it in its infinite source (specula- 
 zione in its higher and mystical sense.) This is 
 the divine love " which where it shines darkens and 
 wellnigh extinguishes all other loves." 3 Wisdom 
 
 1 Don Quixote, P. II. c. viii. 
 
 a De Vulgari Eloquio, 1. ii. c. 2. He says the same of Giraud 
 de Borneil, many of whose poems are moral and even devotional. 
 See, particularly, "Al honor Dieu torn en mon chan" (Ray- 
 nouard, Lex. Earn. I. 388), " Ben es dregz pos en aital port " (Ib. 
 393), " Jois sia comensamens" (Ib. 395), and "Be veg e conosc e 
 say " (Ib. 398). Another of his poems (" Ar ai grant joy," Ray- 
 nouard, Choix, 'III. 304), may possibly be a mystical profession of 
 love for the Blessed Virgin, for whom, as Dante tells us, Beatrice 
 had a special devotion. 
 
 3 Convito, Tr. III. c. 14. In the same chapter is perhaps an 
 explanation of the two rather difficult verses which follow that 
 in which the verace speglio is spoken of (Paradiso, XXVI. 107, 
 108). 
 
 " Che f a di se pareglie 1' altre cose 
 
 E nulls face lui di se pareglio." 
 
 Buti's comment is, " that is, makes of itself a receptacle to other 
 things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen in it." 
 Dante says (ubi supra), " The descending of the virtue of one 
 thing into another is a reducing that other into a likeness of itself.
 
 DANTE 211 
 
 is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to con 
 template God the true mirror (v&race speglio^ spec- 
 ulum), wherein all things are seen as they truly 
 are. Nay, she herself "is the brightness of the 
 eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty 
 of God." ! 
 
 . . . Whence we see that the sun sending his ray down hither- 
 ward reduces things to a likeness with his light in so far as they 
 are able by their disposition to receive light from his power. So 
 I say that God reduces this love to a likeness with himself as 
 much as it is possible for it to be like him." In Provencal pareilh 
 means like, and Dante may have formed his word from it. But 
 the four earliest printed texts read : 
 
 " Che fa di se pareglio all' altre cose." 
 
 Accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should be 
 corrected thus : 
 
 " E null a face a lui di se pareglio." 
 
 We would form pareglio from parere (a something in which things 
 appear), as.miraglio from mirare (a something in which they are 
 seen). God contains all things in himself, but nothing can wholly 
 contain him. The blessed behold all things in him as if reflected, 
 but not one of the things so reflected is capable of his image in 
 its completeness. This interpretation is confirmed by Paradise, 
 XIX. 49-51. 
 
 " E quinci appar ch? ogni minor natura 
 E corto recettacolo a quel bene 
 
 Che non ha fine, e se con se misura." 
 
 1 Wisdom of Solomon, vii. 26, quoted by Dante (Conirito, Tr. 
 III. c. 15). There are other passages in the Wisdom of Solomon 
 besides that just cited which we may well believe Dante to have 
 had in his mind when writing the Canzone, beginning, 
 
 " Amor che nella mente mi ragiona," 
 
 and the commentary upon it, and some to which his experience of 
 life must have given an intenser meaning. The writer of that 
 book also personifies Wisdom as the mistress of his soul: "I 
 loved her and sought her out from my youth, I desired to make 
 her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty." He says of
 
 212 DANTE 
 
 There are two beautiful passages in the Convito, 
 which we shall quote, both because they have, as 
 we believe, a close application to Dante's own ex 
 perience, and because they are good specimens of 
 
 Wisdom that she -was "present when thou (God) madest the 
 world," and Dante in the same way identifies her with the divine 
 Logos, citing as authority the " beginning of the Gospel of John." 
 He tells us, "I perceived that I could not otherwise obtain her 
 except God gave her me," and Dante came at last to the same 
 conclusion. Again, " For the very true beginning of her is the 
 desire of discipline ; and the care of discipline is love. And love 
 is the keeping of her laws ; and the giving heed unto her laws is 
 the assurance of incorruption." But who can doubt that he read 
 with a bitter exultation, and applied to himself passages like 
 these which follow ? " When the righteous fled from his brother's 
 wrath, she guided him in right paths, showed him the kingdom of 
 God, and gave him knowledge of holy things. She defended him 
 from his enemies and kept him safe from those that lay in wait, 
 . . . that he might know that godliness is stronger than all. . . . 
 She forsook him not, but delivered him from sin ; she went down 
 with him into the pit, and left him not in bonds till she brought him 
 the sceptre of the kingdom, . . . and gave him perpetual glory." 
 It was, perhaps, from this book that Dante got the hint of making 
 his punishments and penances typical of the sins that earned 
 them. " Wherefore, whereas men lived dissolutely and unright 
 eously, thou hast tormented them with their own abominations." 
 Dante was intimate with the Scriptures. They do even a scholar 
 no harm. M. Victor Le Clerc, in his Histoire Litteraire de la 
 France au quatorzieme siecle (torn. ii. p. 72), thinks it " not impos 
 sible " that a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, para 
 phrased by Dante, may have been suggested to him by Rutebeuf 
 or Tristan, rather than by the prophet himself ! Dante would 
 hardly have found himself so much at home in the company of 
 jongleurs as in that of prophets. Yet he was familiar with 
 French and Provencal poetry. Beside the evidence of the Vulgari 
 Eloquio, there are frequent and broad traces in the Commedia of 
 the Roman de la Rose, slighter ones of the Chevalier de la Cha- 
 rette, Guillaume d' Orange, and a direct imitation of Bernard de 
 Ventadour.
 
 DANTE 213 
 
 his style as a writer of prose. In the manly sim 
 plicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and in 
 the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far be 
 yond that of any of his contemporaries as his verse ; 
 nay, more, has hardly been matched by any Italian 
 from that day to this. Illustrating the position 
 that "the highest desire of everything and the 
 first given us by nature is to return to its first 
 cause," he says : " And since God is the beginning 
 of our souls and the maker of them like unto him 
 self, according as was written, ' Let us make man 
 in our image and likeness,' this soul most greatly 
 desires to return to him. And as a pilgrim who 
 goes by a way he has never travelled, who believes 
 every house he sees afar off to be his inn, and not 
 finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and 
 so from house to house till he come to the inn, so 
 our soul forthwith on entering upon the new and 
 never-travelled road of this life directs its eyes to 
 the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes 
 whatever thing it sees that seems to have in it any 
 good to be that. And because its first knowledge 
 is imperfect by reason of not being experienced 
 nor indoctrinated, small goods seem to it great. 
 Wherefore we see children desire most greatly an 
 apple, and then proceeding further on desire a 
 bird, and then further yet desire fine raiment, and 
 then a horse, and then a woman, and then riches 
 not great, and then greater and greater. And this 
 befalls because in none of these things it finds that 
 which it goes seeking, and thinks to find it further 
 on. By which it may be seen that one desirable
 
 214 DANTE 
 
 stands before another in the eyes of our soul in 
 a fashion as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at 
 first covers the whole of them, and is as it were 
 the apex of the highest desirable, which is God, 
 as it were the base of all ; so that the further we 
 go from the apex toward the base the desirables 
 appear greater ; and this is the reason why human 
 desires become wider one after the other. Verily 
 this way is lost through error as the roads of earth 
 are ; for as from one city to another there is of 
 necessity one best and straightest way, and one 
 that always leads farther from it, that is, the one 
 which goes elsewhere, and many others, some less 
 roundabout and some less direct, so in human life 
 are divers roads whereof one is the truest and an 
 other the most deceitful, and certain ones less de 
 ceitful, and certain less true. And as we see that 
 that which goes most directly to the city fulfils 
 desire and gives repose after weariness, and that 
 which goes the other way never fulfils it and never 
 can give repose, so it falls out in our life. The 
 good traveller arrives at the goal and repose, the 
 erroneous never arrives thither, but with much 
 weariness of mind, always with greedy eyes looks 
 before him." 1 If we may apply Dante's own 
 method of exposition to this passage, we find him 
 telling us that he first sought felicity in knowledge, 
 
 " That apple sweet which through so many branches 
 The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of," 2 
 
 then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we fol- 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 12. 
 
 2 Purgatorio, XXVU. 115, 116.
 
 DANTE 215 
 
 low, 1 then in being esteemed of men (" to be 
 clothed in purple, ... to sit next to Darius, . . . 
 and be called Darius his cousin "), then in power, 2 
 then in the riches of the Holy Spirit in larger and 
 larger measure. 3 He, too, had found that there 
 was but one straight road, whether to the Terres 
 trial Paradise or the Celestial City, and may come 
 to question by and by whether they be not parallel 
 one with the other, or even parts of the same road, 
 by which only repose is to be reached at last. 
 Then, when in old age " the noble soul returns to 
 God as to that port whence she set forth on the sea 
 of this life, . . . just as to him who comes from a 
 long journey, before he enters into the gate of his 
 city, the citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so 
 the citizens of the eternal life go to meet her, and 
 do so because of her good deeds and contempla 
 tions, who, having already betaken herself to God, 
 
 1 That Dante loved fame we need not be told. He several 
 times confesses it, especially in the De Vulgari Eloquio, I. 17. 
 4 ' How glorious she [the Vulgar Tongue] makes her intimates [/o- 
 miliares, those of her household], we ourselves have known, who 
 in the sweetness of this glory put our exile behind our backs." 
 
 2 Dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image of 
 rule. See especially Purgatorio, VI. 99, and Convito, Tr. IV. 
 c. 9. 
 
 3 " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the know 
 ledge of God ! ' ' Dante quotes this in speaking of the influence of 
 the stars, which, interpreting it presently "by the theological 
 way," he compares to that of the Holy Spirit. "And thy coun 
 sel who hath known, except thou give wisdom and send thy Holy 
 Spirit from above?" (Wisdom of Solomon, ix. 17.) The last 
 words of the Convito are, " her [Philosophy] whose proper dwell 
 ing is in the depths of the Divine mind." The ordinary reading 
 is ragione (reason), but it seems to us an obvious blunder for ma- 
 gione (mansion, dwelling).
 
 216 DANTE 
 
 seems to see those whom she believes to be nigh 
 unto God." l This also was to be the experience 
 of Dante, for who can doubt that the Paradiso 
 was something very unlike a poetical exercise to him 
 who appeals to the visions even of sleep as proof of 
 the soul's immortality ? 
 
 When did his soul catch a glimpse of that cer 
 tainty in which " the mind that museth upon many 
 things " can find assured rest ? We have already 
 said that we believe Dante's political opinions to 
 have taken their final shape and the De Monarchia 
 to have been written before 1300. 2 That the revi 
 sion of the Vita Nuova was completed in that year 
 seems probable from the last sonnet but one, which 
 is addressed to pilgrims on their way to the Santa 
 Veronica at Rome. 3 In this sonnet he still laments 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 28. 
 
 2 He refers to a change in his own opinions (lib. ii. 1), where 
 he says, " When I knew the nations to have murmured against 
 the preeminence of the Roman people, and saw the people imag 
 ining Tain things as I myself was wont." He was a Guelph by in 
 heritance, he became a Ghibelline by conviction. 
 
 8 It should seem from Dante's words ( " at the time when much 
 people went to see the blessed image," and " ye seem to come 
 from a far-off people ") that this was some extraordinary occa 
 sion, and what so likely as the jubilee of 1300 ? (Compare Para 
 diso, XXXI. 103-108.) Dante's comparisons are so constantly 
 drawn from actual eyesight, that his allusion (Inferno, XIII. 28- 
 33) to a device of Boniface VIII. for passing the crowds quietly 
 across the bridge of Saint Angelo, renders it not unlikely that he 
 was in Rome at that time, and perhaps conceived his poem there 
 as Giovanni Villani his chronicle. That Rome would deeply stir 
 his mind and heart is beyond question. " And certes I am of a 
 firm opinion that the stones that stand in her walls are worthy of 
 reverence, and the soil where she sits worthy beyond what is 
 preached and admitted of men." (Convito, Tr. IV. c. 5.)
 
 DANTE 217 
 
 Beatrice as dead ; he would make the pilgrims 
 share his grief. It is the very folly of despairing 
 sorrow, that calls on the first comer, stranger 
 though he be, for a sympathy which none can fully 
 give, and he least of all. But in the next sonnet, 
 the last in the book, there is a surprising change of 
 tone. The transfiguration of Beatrice has begun, 
 and we see completing itself that natural gradation 
 of grief which will erelong bring the mourner to 
 call on the departed saint to console him for her 
 own loss. The sonnet is remarkable in more senses 
 than one, first for its psychological truth, and then 
 still more for the light it throws on Dante's inward 
 history as poet and thinker. Hitherto he had cele 
 brated beauty and goodness in the creature ; hence 
 forth he was to celebrate them in the Creator whose 
 praise they were. 1 We give an extempore transla 
 tion of this sonnet, in which the meaning is pre 
 served so far as is possible where the grace is left 
 out. We remember with some compunction as we 
 do it, that Dante has said, " know every one that 
 
 1 Beatrice, loda di Dio vera, Inferno, II. 103. "Surely vain are 
 all men by nature who are ignorant of God, and could not out of 
 the g-ood things that are seen know him that is, neither by con 
 sidering the works did they acknowledge the work-master. . . . 
 For, being conversant in his works, they search diligently and be 
 lieve their sight, because the things are beautiful that are seen. 
 Howbeit, neither are they to be pardoned." (Wisdom of Solomon, 
 xiii. 1, 7, 8.) Non adorar debitamente Dio. " For the invisible 
 things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, be 
 ing understood by the things that are made, even his eternal 
 power and godhead; so that they are without excuse." It was 
 these ' ' invisible things ' ' whereof Dante was beginning to get a 
 glimpse.
 
 218 DANTE 
 
 nothing harmonized by a musical band can be 
 transmuted from its own speech to another without 
 breaking all its sweetness and harmony," l and 
 Cervantes was of the same mind : 2 
 
 " Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre 
 Passeth the sigh 8 that leaves my heart below ; 
 A new intelligence doth love bestow 
 On it with tears that ever draws it higher ; 
 When it wins thither where is its desire, 
 A Lady it beholds who honor so 
 And light receives, that, through her splendid glow, 
 The pilgrim spirit * sees her as in fire ; 
 It sees her such, that, telling me again 
 I understand it not, it speaks so low 
 Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell ; 
 Its speech is of that noble One I know, 
 For ' Beatrice ' I often hear full plain, 
 So that, dear ladies, I conceive it well. ' ' 
 
 No one can read this in its connection with what 
 goes before and what follows without feeling that 
 a new conception of Beatrice had dawned upon the 
 mind of Dante, dim as yet, or purposely made to 
 seem so, and yet the authentic forerunner of the 
 fulness of her rising as the light of his day and the 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. I. c. 7. 
 
 2 " And here we would have forgiven Mr. Captain if he had not 
 betrayed him (traido, traduttore, traditore) to Spain and made 
 him a Castilian, for he took away much of his native worth, and 
 so will all those do who shall undertake to turn a poem into an 
 other tongue ; for with all the care they take and ability they 
 show, they will never reach the height of its original conception," 
 says the Curate, speaking of a translation of Ariosto. (Don 
 Quixote, P. I. c. 6.) 
 
 8 In his own comment Dante says, " I tell whither goes my 
 thought, calling it by the name of one of its effects." 
 
 * Spirito means in Italian both breath (spirto ed acqua fessi, 
 Purgatorio, XXX. 98) and spirit.
 
 DANTE 219 
 
 guide of his feet, the divine wisdom whose glory 
 pales all meaner stars. The conception of a poem 
 in which Dante's creed in politics and morals should 
 be picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of 
 the high place which Beatrice should take in it, 
 had begun vaguely to shape itself in his thought. 
 As he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined itself 
 clearly. " Soon after this sonnet there appeared 
 to me a marvellous vision 1 wherein I saw things 
 which made me propose not to say more of that 
 blessed one until I could treat of her more wor 
 thily. And to arrive at that I study all I can, as 
 she verily knows. So that, if it be the pleasure of 
 Him through whom all things live, that my life 
 hold out yet a few years, I hope to say that of her 
 which was never yet said of any (woman). And 
 then may it please Him who is the Lord of Cour 
 tesy that my soul may go to see the glory of her 
 Lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice who gloriously 
 beholds the face of Him qui est per omnia scecula 
 benedictus." It was the method of presentation 
 that became clear to Dante at this time, the plan 
 of the great poem for whose completion the expe 
 rience of earth and the inspiration of heaven were 
 to combine, and which was to make him lean for 
 many years. 2 The doctrinal scope of it was already 
 determined. Man, he tells us, is the only creature 
 who partakes at once of the corruptible and incor- 
 
 1 By visione Dante means something seen waking by the inner 
 eye. He believed also that dreams were sometimes divinely in 
 spired, and argues from such the immortality of the souL ( Con 
 vito, Tr. II. c. 9. ) 
 
 2 Paradiso, XXV. 1-3.
 
 220 DANTE 
 
 mptible nature ; " and since every nature is or 
 dained to some ultimate end, it follows that the end 
 of man is double. And as among all beings he 
 alone partakes of the corruptible and incorrupti 
 ble, so alone among all beings he is ordained to a 
 double end, whereof the one is his end as corrupti 
 ble, the other as incorruptible. That unspeakable 
 Providence therefore foreordered two ends to be 
 pursued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life, 
 which consists in the operation of our own virtue, 
 and is figured by the Terrestrial Paradise, and the 
 beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a frui 
 tion of the divine countenance, whereto our own 
 virtue cannot ascend unless aided by divine light, 
 which is understood by the Celestial Paradise." 
 The one we attain by practice of the moral and 
 intellectual virtues as they are taught by philoso 
 phers, the other by spiritual teachings transcending 
 human reason, anil the practice of the theological 
 virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. For one, 
 Reason suffices (" which was wholly made known 
 to us by philosophers "), for the other we need the 
 light of supernatural truth revealed by the Holy 
 Spirit and " needful for us." Men led astray by 
 cupidity turn their backs on both, and in their bes 
 tiality need bit and rein to keep them in the way. 
 " Wherefore to man was a double guidance needful 
 according to the double end," the Supreme Pontiff 
 in spiritual, the Emperor in temporal things. 1 
 
 1 De Monarchic, lib. iii. ult. See the whole passage in Miss 
 Rossetti, p. 39. It is noticeable that Dante says that the Pope is 
 to lead (by example), the Emperor to direct (by the enforcing of
 
 DANTE 221 
 
 But how to put this theory of his into a poetic 
 form which might charm while it was teaching? 
 He would typify Reason in Virgil (who would 
 serve also as a symbol of political wisdom as hav 
 ing celebrated the founding of the Empire), and 
 the grace of God in that Beatrice whom he had 
 already supernaturalized into something which pass- 
 eth all understanding. In choosing Virgil he was 
 sure of that interest and sympathy which his in 
 stinct led him to seek in the predisposition of his 
 readers, for the popular imagination of the Middle 
 Ages had busied itself particularly with the Man- 
 tuan poet. The Church had given him a quasi- 
 orthodoxy by interpreting his jam redit et virgo as 
 a prophecy of the birth of Christ. At Naples he 
 had become a kind of patron saint, and his bones 
 were exhibited as relics. Dante himself may have 
 heard at Mantua the hymn sung on the anniversary 
 of St. Paul, in which the apostle to the Gentiles is 
 represented as weeping at the tomb of the greatest 
 of poets. Above all, Virgil had described the de 
 scent of ^Eneas to the under-world. Dante's choice 
 of a guide was therefore, in a certain degree, made 
 for him. But the mere Reason l of man without 
 
 justice). The duty, we are to observe, was a double but not a di 
 vided one. To exemplify this unity was indeed one object of the 
 Commedia. 
 
 1 " What Reason seeth here 
 
 Myself [Virgil] can tell thee ; beyond that await 
 
 For Beatrice, since 'tis a work of Faith." 
 
 (Purgatorio, XVIII. 46-48 .) 
 
 Beatrice here evidently impersonates Theology. It would be in 
 teresting to know what was the precise date of Dante's theological 
 studies. The earlier commentators all make him go to Paris, the
 
 222 DANTE 
 
 the illumination of divine Grace cannot be trusted, 
 and accordingly the intervention of Beatrice was 
 needed, of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably 
 well expresses it, " already transfigured, potent not 
 only now to charm and soothe, potent to rule ; to 
 the Intellect a light, to the Affections a compass 
 and a balance, a sceptre over the Will." 
 
 The wood obscure in which Dante finds himself 
 is the world. 1 The three beasts who dispute his 
 way are the sins that most easily beset us, Pride, 
 the Lusts of the Flesh, and Greed. We are sur 
 prised that Miss Rossetti should so localize and 
 confine Dante's meaning as to explain them by 
 Florence, France, and Rome. Had he written in 
 so narrow a sense as this, it would indeed be hard 
 to account for the persistent power of his poem. 
 
 great fountain of such learning, after his banishment. Boccaccio 
 indeed says that he did not return to Italy till 1311. Wegele 
 (Dante's Leben und Werke, p. 85) puts the date of his journey be 
 tween 1292 and 1297. Ozanam, with a pathos comically touching 
 to the academic soul, laments that poverty compelled hkn to leave 
 the university without the degree he had so justly earned. He 
 consoles himself with.tne thought that " there remained to him 
 an incontestable erudition and the love of serious studies." (Dante 
 et la philosophic catholique, p. 112.) It is sad that we cannot write 
 Dantes Alighierius, S. T. D. ! Dante seems to imply that he be 
 gan to devote himself to Philosophy and Theology shortly after 
 Beatrice's death. (Convito, Tr. II. c. 13.) He compares himself 
 to one who, "seeking silver, should, without meaning it, find 
 gold, which an occult cause presents to him, not perhaps without 
 the divine command." Here again apparently is an allusion to 
 his having found Wisdom while he sought Learning. He had 
 thought to find God in the beauty of his works, he learned to seek 
 all things in God. 
 
 1 In a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses, no 
 doubt with a recollection of Aristotle's S\TJ.
 
 DANTE 223 
 
 But it was no political pamphlet that Dante was 
 writing. Subjectum est Homo, and it only takes 
 the form of a diary by Dante Alighieri because of 
 the intense realism of his imagination, a realism as 
 striking in the Paradiso as the Inferno, though 
 it takes a different shape. Everything, the most 
 supersensual, presented itself to his mind, not as 
 abstract idea, but as visible type. As men could 
 once embody a quality of good in a saint and see 
 it, as they even now in moments of heightened 
 fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their country 
 and speak of England, France, or America, as if 
 they were real beings, so did Dante habitually. 1 
 He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as the hypo 
 chondriac sees his black dog, and, as in that, their 
 form and color were but the outward form of an in 
 ward and spiritual condition. Whatever subsidiary^ 
 interpretations the poem is capable of, its great 
 and primary value is as the Autobiography of a 
 human soul, of yours and mine^ it may be, as well 
 as Dante's. In that lie its profound meaning and 
 its permanent force. That an txile, a proud man 
 forced to be dependent, should have found some 
 consolation in brooding over the justice of God, 
 weighed in such different scales from those of man, 
 in contrasting the outward prosperity of the sinner 
 with the awful spiritual ruin within, is not wonder 
 ful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes finding 
 the wrath of God sweeter s than his mercy. But it 
 
 1 As we have seen, even a sigh becomes He. This makes one of 
 the difficulties of translating his minor poems. The modern mind 
 is incapable of this subtlety.
 
 224 DANTE 
 
 is wonderful that out of the very wreck of his own 
 life he should have built this three-arched bridge, 
 still firm against the wash and wear of ages, 
 stretching from the Pit to the Empyrean, by which 
 men may pass from a doubt of God's providence to 
 a certainty of his long-suffering and loving-kind 
 ness. 
 
 " The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms 
 That it receives whatever turns to it." 1 
 
 A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of 
 them. 2 It cannot be too often repeated that Dante's 
 Other World is not in its first conception a place 
 of departed spirits. It is the Spiritual World, 
 whereof we become denizens by birth and citizens 
 by adoption. It is true that for artistic purposes 
 he makes it conform so far as possible with vulgar 
 preconceptions, but he himself has told us again 
 and again what his real meaning was. Virgil tells 
 Dante, 
 
 " Thou shalt behold the people dolorous 
 Who have foregone the good of intellect." 8 
 
 The " good of the intellect," Dante tells us after 
 Aristotle, is Truth. 4 He says that Virgil has led 
 him " through the deep night of the truly dead" 6 
 Who are they ? Dante had in mind the saying of 
 the Apostle, "to be carnally minded is death." 
 He says : " In man to live is to use reason. Then 
 if living is the being of man, to depart from that 
 use is to depart from being, and so to be dead. 
 
 1 Purgatario, III. 122, 123. 
 
 2 Purgatario, V. 107. 
 
 8 Inferno, III. 17, 18 (hanno perduto = thrown away). 
 
 * Convito, Tr. II. c. 14. 
 
 6 Purgatorio, XXTTT. 121, 122.
 
 DANTE 225 
 
 And doth not he depart from the use of reason 
 who doth not reason out the object of his life ? '' 
 " I say that so vile a person is dead, seeming to be 
 alive. For we must know that the wicked man may 
 be called truly dead." " He is dead who follows 
 not the teacher. And of such a one some might say, 
 how is he dead and yet goes about ? I answer that 
 the man is dead and the beast remains." 1 Ac 
 cordingly he has put living persons in the Inferno, 
 like Frate Alberigo and Branca d' Oria, of whom 
 he says with bitter sarcasm that he still " eats and 
 drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his 
 highest ideal of the true ends of life. 2 There is a 
 passage in the first canto of the Inferno 3 which 
 has been variously interpreted : 
 
 " The ancient spirits disconsolate 
 Who cry out each one for the second death" 
 
 Miss Eossetti cites it as an example of what she 
 felicitously calls " an ambiguity, not hazy, but pris 
 matic, and therefore not really perplexing." She 
 gives us accordingly our choice of two interpreta 
 tions : " ' Each cries out on account of the second 
 death which he is suffering,' and ' Each cries out 
 for death to come a second time and ease him of 
 his sufferings.' " 4 Buti says : " Here one doubts 
 what the author meant by the second death, and as 
 for me I think he meant the last damnation, which 
 
 1 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 7. 
 
 2 Inferno, XXXIII. 118, et seq. 
 8 Inferno, I. 116, 117. 
 
 * Mr. Longfellow's for, like the Italian per, gives us the same 
 privilege of election. We " freeze for cold," we "hunger for 
 food."
 
 226 DANTE 
 
 shall be at the day of judgment, because they 
 would wish through envy that it had already come, 
 that they might have more companions, since the 
 first death is the first damnation, when the soul 
 parted from the body is condemned to the pains of 
 hell for its sins. The second is when, resuscitated 
 at the judgment day, they shall be finally con 
 demned, soul and body together. ... It may 
 otherwise be understood as annihilation." Imola 
 says, " Each would wi^h to die again, if he could, 
 to put an end to his pain. Do not hold with some 
 who think that Dante calls the second death the 
 day of judgment," and then quotes a passage from 
 St. Augustine which favors that view. Pietro di 
 Dante gives us four interpretations among which 
 to choose, the first being that, " allegorically, de 
 praved and vicious men are in a certain sense dead 
 in reputation, and this is the first death ; the sec 
 ond is that of the body." This we believe to be 
 the true meaning. Dante himself, in a letter to 
 the " most rascally (scelestissimis) dwellers in 
 Florence," gives us the key : " but you, transgres 
 sors of the laws of God and man, whom the dire 
 ful maw of cupidity hath enticed not unwilling to 
 every crime, does not the terror of the second death 
 torment you ? " Their first death was in their sins, 
 the second is what they may expect from the just 
 vengeance of the Emperor Henry VII. The world 
 Dante leads us through is that of his own thought, 
 and it need not surprise us therefore if we meet in 
 it purely imaginary beings like Tristrem l and Ke- 
 1 Inferno, V. 67.
 
 DANTE 227 
 
 noard of the club. 1 His personality is so strongly 
 marked that it is nothing more than natural that 
 his poem should be interpreted as if only he and 
 his opinions, prejudices, or passions were concerned. 
 He would not have been the great poet he was if 
 he had not felt intensely and humanly, but he 
 could never have won the cosmopolitan place he 
 holds had he not known how to generalize his spe 
 cial experience into something mediatorial for all of 
 us. Pietro di Dante in his comment on the thirty- 
 first canto of the Purgatorio says that " unless you 
 understand him and his figures allegorically, you 
 will be deceived by the bark," and adds that our 
 author made his pilgrimage as the representative 
 of the rest (in persona ceterorurn)? To give his 
 vision reality, he has adapted it to the vulgar my 
 thology, but to understand it as the author meant, 
 it must be taken in the larger sense. To confine 
 
 1 Paradiso, XVIII. 46. Renoard is one of the heroes (a rudely 
 humorous one) in La Bataille d'Alischans, an episode of the 
 measureless Guillaume d' Orange. It was from the graves of those 
 supposed to have been killed in this battle that Dante draws a 
 comparison, Inferno, IX. Boccaccio's comment on this passage 
 might have been read to advantage by the French editors of Ali- 
 schans. 
 
 2 We cite this comment under its received name, though it is 
 uncertain if Pietro was the author of it. Indeed, we strongly 
 doubt it. It is at least one of the earliest, for it appears, by the 
 comment on Paradiso, XXVI., that the greater part of it was 
 written before 1341. It is remarkable for the strictness with 
 which it holds to the spiritual interpretation of the poem, and de 
 serves much more to be called Ottimo, than the comment which 
 goes by that name. Its publication is due to the zeal and liberal 
 ity of the late Lord Vernon, to whom students of Dante are also 
 indebted for the parallel-text reprint of the four earliest editions 
 of the Commedia.
 
 228 DANTE 
 
 it to Florence or to Italy is to banish it from the 
 sympathies of mankind. It was not from the cam 
 panile of the Badia that Dante got his views of life 
 and man. 
 
 The relation of Dante to literature is monumen 
 tal, and marks the era at which the modern begins. 
 He is not only the first great poet, but the first 
 great prose writer who used a language not yet sub 
 dued to literature, who used it moreover for scien 
 tific and metaphysical discussion, thus giving an 
 incalculable impulse to the culture of his country 
 men by making the laity free of what had hitherto 
 been the exclusive guild of clerks. 1 Whatever 
 poetry had preceded him, whether in the Romance 
 or Teutonic tongues, is interesting mainly for its 
 simplicity without forethought, or, as in the Nibe- 
 lungen, for a kind of savage grandeur that rouses 
 the sympathy of whatever of the natural man is 
 dormant in us. But it shows no trace of the crea 
 tive faculty either in unity of purpose or style, the 
 proper characteristics of literature. If it have the 
 charm of wanting artifice, it has not the higher 
 charm of art. We are in the realm of chaos and 
 chance, nebular, with phosphorescent gleams here 
 and there, star-stuff, but uncondensed in stars. 
 
 1 See Wegele, ubi supra, p. 174, et seq. The best analysis of 
 Dante's opinions we have ever met with is Eniil Ruth's Studien 
 iiber Dante Alighieri, Tubingen, 1853. Unhappily it wants an 
 index, and accordingly loses a great part of its usefulness for those 
 not already familiar with the subject. Nor are its references suf 
 ficiently exact. We always respect Dr. Ruth's opinions, if we do 
 not wholly accept them, for they are all the results of original and 
 assiduous study.
 
 DANTE 229 
 
 The Nibelungen is not without far-reaching hints 
 and forebodings of something finer than we find in 
 it, but they are a glamour from the vague darkness 
 which encircles it, like the whisper of the sea upon 
 an unknown shore at night, powerful only over the 
 more vulgar side of the imagination, and leaving 
 no thought, scarce even any image (at least of 
 beauty) behind them. Such poems are the amours, 
 not the lasting friendships and possessions of the 
 mind. They thrill and cannot satisfy. 
 
 But Dante is not merely the founder of modern 
 literature. He would have been that if he had 
 never written anything more than his Canzoni, 
 which for elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor 
 of sentiment were something altogether new. They 
 are of a higher mood than any other poems of the 
 same style in their own language, or indeed in any 
 other. In beauty of phrase and subtlety of analogy 
 they remind one of some of the Greek tragic cho 
 ruses. We are constantly moved in them by a 
 nobleness of tone, whose absence in many admired 
 lyrics of the kind is poorly supplied by conceits. 
 So perfect is Dante's mastery of his material, that 
 in compositions, as he himself has shown, so arti 
 ficial, 1 the form seems rather organic than mechan- 
 
 1 See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio. The only 
 other Italian poet who reminds us of Dante in sustained dignity 
 is Guido Guinicelli. Dante esteemed him highly, calls him max- 
 imus in the De Vulgari Eloquio, and " the father of me and of my 
 betters," in the XXVI. Purgatorio. See some excellent specimens 
 of him in Mr. D. G. Rossetti's remarkable volume of translations 
 from the early Italian poets. Mr. Rossetti would do a real and 
 lasting service to literature by employing his singular gift in put 
 ting Dante's minor poems into English.
 
 230 DANTE 
 
 ical, which cannot be said of the best of the Pro- 
 venc. al poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's 
 sonnets also have a grace and tenderness which 
 have been seldom matched. His lyrical excellence 
 would have got him into the Collections, and he 
 woidd have made here and there an enthusiast as 
 Donne does in English, but his great claim to re 
 membrance is not merely Italian. It is that he 
 was the first Christian poet, in any proper sense of 
 the word, the first who so subdued dogma to the 
 uses of plastic imagination as to make something 
 that is still poetry of the highest order after it has 
 suffered the disenchantment inevitable in the most 
 perfect translation. Verses of the kind usually 
 called sacred (reminding one of the adjective's 
 double meaning) had been written before his time 
 in the vulgar tongue, such verses as remain invio 
 lably sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked 
 at with distant reverence by the pious, and with 
 far other feelings by the profane reader. There 
 were cycles of poems in which the physical conflict 
 between Christianity and Paganism l furnished the 
 subject, but in which the theological views of the 
 authors, whether doctrinal or historical, could hardly 
 be reconciled with any system of religion ancient 
 or modern. There were Church legends of saints 
 and martyrs versified, fit certainly to make any 
 other form of martyrdom seem amiable to those 
 who heard them, and to suggest palliative thoughts 
 about Diocletian. Finally, there were the romances 
 
 1 The old French poems confound all unbelievers together as 
 pagans and worshippers of idols.
 
 DANTE 231 
 
 of Arthur and his knights, which later, by means 
 of allegory, contrived to be both entertaining and 
 edifying ; every one who listened to them paying 
 the minstrel his money, and having his choice 
 whether he would take them as song or sermon. 
 In the heroes of some of these certain Christian 
 virtues were typified, and around a few of them, as 
 the Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered 
 piety and withdrawal. Wolfram von Eschenbach, 
 indeed, has divided his Parzival into three books, 
 of Simplicity, Doubt, and Healing, which has led 
 Gervinus to trace a not altogether fanciful analogy 
 between that poem and the Dimna Commedia. 
 The doughty old poet, who says of himself, 
 
 " Of song I have some slight control, 
 But deem her of a feeble soul 
 That doth not love my naked sword 
 Above my sweetest lyric word," 
 
 tells us that his subject is the choice between good 
 and evil ; 
 
 " Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride 
 And sets himself on Evil's side, 
 Chooses the Black, and sure it is 
 His path leads down to the abyss ; 
 But he who doth his nature feed 
 With steadfastness and loyal deed 
 Lies open to the heavenly light 
 And takes his portion with the White." 
 
 But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows 
 good feeling rather than settled conviction. Above 
 all it is wandering (as he himself confesses), and 
 altogether wants any controlling purpose. But to 
 whatever extent Christianity had insinuated itself
 
 232 DANTE 
 
 into and colored European literature, it was mainly 
 as mythology. The Christian idea had never yet 
 incorporated itself. It was to make its avatar in 
 Dante. To understand fully what he accomplished 
 we must form some conception c f what is meant by 
 the Christian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, 
 let us contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears 
 in poetry ; for we are not dealing with a question 
 of theology so much as with one of aesthetics. 
 
 Greek art at its highest point is doubtless the 
 most perfect that we know. But its circle of mo 
 tives was essentially limited ; and the Greek drama 
 in its passion, its pathos, and its humor is prima 
 rily Greek, and secondarily human. Its tragedy 
 chooses its actors from certain heroic families, and 
 finds its springs of pity and terror in physical suf 
 fering and worldly misfortune. Its best examples, 
 like the Antigone, illustrate a single duty, or, like 
 the Hippolytus, a single passion, on which, as on 
 a pivot, the chief character, statuesquely simple in 
 its details, revolves as pieces of sculpture are some 
 times made to do, displaying its different sides in 
 one invariable light. The general impression left 
 on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer one than 
 any drawn from single examples) is that the duty 
 is one which is owed to custom, that the passion 
 leads to a breach of some convention settled by 
 common consent, 1 and accordingly it is an outraged 
 
 1 Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but the 
 difference is that with him society is something divinely ordaiiied. 
 He follows Aristotle pretty closely, but on his own theory crime 
 and sin are identical
 
 DANTE 233 
 
 society whose figure looms in the background, 
 rather than an offended God. At most it was one 
 god of many, and meanwhile another might be 
 friendly. In the Greek epic, the gods are parti 
 sans, they hold caucuses, they lobby and log-roll 
 for their candidates. The tacit admission of a re 
 vealed code of morals wrought a great change. 
 The complexity and range of passion is vastly in 
 creased when the offence is at once both crime and 
 sin, a wrong done against order and against con 
 science at the same time. The relation of the 
 Greek tragedy to the higher powers is chiefly an 
 tagonistic, struggle against an implacable destiny, 
 sublime struggle, and of heroes, but sure of defeat 
 at last. And that defeat is final. Grand figures 
 are those it exhibits to us, in some respects un 
 equalled, and in their severe simplicity they com 
 pare with modern poetry as sculpture with paint 
 ing^ Considered merely as works of art, these 
 products of the Greek imagination satisfy our 
 highest conception of form. They suggest inevi 
 tably a feeling of perfect completeness, isolation, 
 and independence, of something rounded and fin 
 ished in itself. The secret of those old shapers 
 died with them ; their wand is broken, their book 
 sunk deeper than ever plummet sounded. The 
 type of their work is the Greek temple, which 
 leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection 
 of design, in harmony and subordination of parts, 
 and in entireness of impression. But in this aes 
 thetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly and 
 complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there 
 with it.
 
 234 DANTE 
 
 Now the Christian idea has to do with the hu 
 man soul, which Christianity may be almost said 
 to have invented. While all Paganism represents 
 a few preeminent families, the founders of dynas 
 ties or ancestors of races, as of kin with the gods, 
 Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity, 
 makes monarch and slave the children of one God. 
 Its heroes struggle not against, but upward and 
 onward toward, the higher powers who are always 
 on their side. Its highest conception of beauty 
 is not aesthetic, but moral. With it prosperity 
 and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds 
 enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pa 
 gan and even Hebrew literature saw the highest 
 blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty, 
 humbleness of station, where the former world 
 recognized only implacable foes. While it utterly 
 abolished all boundary lines of race or country 
 and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the 
 individual man whoever and wherever he may 
 be. Above all, an entirely new conception of the 
 Infinite and of man's relation to it came in with 
 Christianity. That, and not the finite, is always the 
 background, consciously or not. It changed the 
 scene of the last act of every drama to the next 
 world. Endless aspiration of all the faculties be 
 came thus the ideal of Christian life, and to express 
 it more or less perfectly the ideal of essentially 
 Christian art. It was this which the Middle Ages 
 instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral, no 
 accidental growth, but the visible symbol of an in 
 ward faith, which soars forever upward, and
 
 DANTE 235 
 
 yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly 
 turned to stone. 
 
 It is not without significance that Goethe, who, 
 like Dante, also absorbed and represented the ten 
 dency and spirit of his age, should, during his youth 
 and while Europe was alive with the moral and in 
 tellectual longing which preluded the French Revo 
 lution, have loved the Gothic architecture. It is 
 no less significant that in the period of reaction 
 toward more positive thought which followed, he 
 should have preferred the Greek. His greatest 
 poem, conceived during the former era, is Gothic. 
 Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary 
 tradition, began to write the Divina Commedia in 
 Latin, and had elaborated several cantos of it in 
 that dead and intractable material. But that poetic 
 instinct, which is never the instinct of an individ 
 ual, but of his age, could not so be satisfied, and 
 leaving the classic structure he had begun to stand 
 as a monument of failure, he completed his work 
 in Italian. Instead of endeavoring to manufacture 
 a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial, 
 he let the poem make itself out of him. The epic 
 which he wished to write in the universal language 
 of scholars, and which might have had its ten lines 
 in the history of literature, would sing itself in pro 
 vincial Tuscan, and turns out to be written in the 
 universal dialect of mankind. Thus all great poets 
 have been in a certain sense provincial, Homer, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Burns, Scott in the 
 " Heart of Midlothian " and " Bride of Lammer- 
 moor," because the office of the poet is always
 
 236 DANTE 
 
 vicarious, because nothing that has not been living 
 experience can become living expression, because 
 the collective thought, the faith, the desire of a na 
 tion or a race, is the cumulative result of many ages, 
 is something organic, and is wiser and stronger 
 than any single person, and will make a great states 
 man or a great poet out of any man who can en 
 tirely surrender himself to it. 
 
 As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of the 
 Christian idea, so is it also of Dante's poem. And 
 as that in its artistic unity is but the completed 
 thought of a single architect, which yet could never 
 have been realized except out of the faith and by the 
 contributions of an entire people, whose beliefs and 
 superstitions, whose imagination and fancy, find 
 expression in its statues and its carvings, its calm 
 saints and martyrs now at rest forever in the seclu 
 sion of their canopied niches, and its wanton gro 
 tesques thrusting themselves forth from every pin 
 nacle and gargoyle, so in Dante's poem, while it is 
 as personal and peculiar as if it were his private 
 journal and autobiography, we can yet read the 
 diary and the autobiography of the thirteenth cen 
 tury and of the Italian people. Complete and har 
 monious in design as his work is, it is yet no Pagan 
 temple enshrining a type of the human made divine 
 by triumph of corporeal beauty ; it is not a private 
 chapel housing a single saint and dedicate to one 
 chosen bloom of Christian piety or devotion ; it is 
 truly a cathedral, over whose high altar hangs the 
 emblem of suffering, of the Divine made human to 
 teach the beauty of adversity, the eternal presence
 
 DANTE 237 
 
 of the spiritual, not overhanging and threatening, 
 but informing and sustaining the material. In this 
 cathedral of Dante's there are side-chapels as is fit, 
 with altars to all Christian virtues and perfections ; 
 but the great impression of its leading thought is 
 that of aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three 
 divisions of the poem we may trace something more 
 than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica. 
 There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the purga 
 torial middle space, and last the holy of holies 
 dedicated to the eternal presence of the media 
 torial God. 
 
 But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim to 
 the title of the first Christian poem is not merely its 
 doctrinal truth or its Christian mythology, but the 
 fact that the scene of it is laid, not in this world, 
 but in the soul of man ; that it is the allegory 
 of a human life, and therefore universal in its sig 
 nificance and its application. The genius of Dante 
 has given to it such a self-subsistent reality, that 
 one almost gets to feel as if the chief value of con 
 temporary Italian history had been to furnish it 
 with explanatory foot-notes, and the age in which it 
 was written assumes towards it the place of a satel 
 lite. For Italy, Dante is the thirteenth century. 
 
 Most men make the voyage of life as if they car 
 ried sealed orders which they were not to open till 
 they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante had 
 made up his mind as to the true purpose and mean 
 ing of our existence in this world shortly after he 
 had passed his twenty-fifth year. He had already 
 conceived the system about which as a connecting
 
 238 DANTE 
 
 thread the whole experience of his life, the whole 
 result of his studies, was to cluster in imperishable 
 crystals. The corner-stone of his system was the 
 Freedom of the Will (in other words, the right of 
 private judgment with the condition of accounta 
 bility), which Beatrice calls the " noble virtue." 1 
 As to every man is offered his choice between good 
 and evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature 
 originally evil a habit of virtue may be engrafted, 2 
 no man is excused. " All hope abandon ye who 
 enter in," for they have thrown away reason which 
 is the good of the intellect, " and it seems to me no 
 less a marvel to bring back to reason him in whom 
 it is wholly spent than to bring back to life him 
 who has been four days in the tomb." 3 As a guide 
 of the will in civil affairs the Emperor ; in spirit 
 ual, the Pope. 4 Dante is not one of those reform 
 ers who would assume the office of God to " make all 
 things new." He knew the power of tradition and 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XVIII. 73. He defines it in the De Monarchia 
 (lib. i. 14). Among other things he calls it " the first begin 
 ning of our liberty." Paradiso, V. 19, 20, he calls it " the great 
 est gift that in his largess God creating made." " Dico quod judi- 
 cium medium est apprehensionis et appetitus." (De Monarchia, ubi 
 supra.) 
 
 " Right and wrong, 
 Between whose endless jar justice resides." 
 
 (Troilus and Cressida.) 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 22. 
 
 8 Convilo, Tr. IV. c. 7. " Qui descenderit ad inferos, non ascen- 
 det." (Job vii. 9.) 
 
 4 But it may be inferred that he put the interests of mankind 
 above both. " For citizens," he says, " exist not for the sake of 
 consuls, nor the people for the sake of the king, but, on the con 
 trary, consuls for the sake of citizens, and the king for the sake of 
 the people."
 
 DANTE 239 
 
 habit, and wished to utilize it for his purpose. He 
 found the Empire and the Papacy already existing, 
 but both needing reformation that they might serve 
 the ends of their original institution. Bad leader 
 ship was to blame ; men fit to gird on the sword had 
 been turned into priests, and good preachers spoiled 
 to make bad kings. 1 The spiritual had usurped to 
 itself the prerogatives of the temporal power. 
 
 " Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was 
 
 Two suns to have which one road and the other, 
 Of God and of the world, made manifest. 
 One has the other quenched, and to the crosier 
 The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it, 
 
 Because, being joined one feareth not the other." 2 
 Both powers held their authority directly from God, 
 " not so, however, that the Roman Prince is not in 
 some things subject to the Roman Pontiff, since 
 that human felicity [to be attained only by peace, 
 justice, and good government, possible only under 
 a single ruler] is in some sort ordained to the end 
 of immortal felicity. Let Caesar use that reverence 
 toward Peter which a first-born son ought to use 
 toward a father ; that, shone upon by the light of 
 paternal grace, he may more powerfully illumine 
 the orb of earth over which he is set by him alone 
 who is the ruler of all things spiritual and tempo 
 ral." 3 As to the fatal gift of Constantine, Dante 
 demonstrates that an Emperor could not alienate 
 what he held only in trust ; but if he made the 
 gift, the Pope should hold it as a feudatory of the 
 
 1 Paradiso, VIII. 145, 146. a Purgatorio, XVI. 106-112. 
 
 8 De Monarchia, ult.
 
 240 DANTE 
 
 Empire, for the benefit, however, of Christ's poor. 1 
 Dante is always careful to distinguish between the 
 Papacy and the Pope. He prophesies for Boniface 
 VIII. a place in hell, 2 but acknowledges him as the 
 Vicar of Christ, goes so far even as to denounce 
 the outrage of Guillaume de Nogaret at Anagni as 
 done to the Saviour himself. 3 But in the Spiritual 
 World Dante acknowledges no such supremacy, 
 and, when he would have fallen on his knees before 
 Adrian V., is rebuked by him in a quotation from 
 the Apocalypse : 
 
 " Err not, fellow-servant am I 
 With thee and with the others to one power." * 
 
 So impartial was this man whose great work is 
 so often represented as a kind of bag in which he 
 secreted the gall of personal prejudice, so truly 
 Catholic is he, that both parties find their arsenal 
 in him. The Romanist proves his soundness in 
 doctrine, the anti-Romanist claims him as the first 
 Protestant ; the Mazzinist and the Imperialist can 
 alike quote him for their purpose. Dante's ardent 
 conviction would not let him see that both Church 
 
 1 De Monarchia, lib. iii. 10. " Poterat tamen Imperator in pa- 
 trocinium EcclesiaB patrimonium et alia deputare immoto semper 
 snperiori dominio cujus unitas divisionem non patitur. Poterat et 
 Vicarius Dei recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed tanquara fruc- 
 tuum pro Ecclesia proque Christi pauperibus dispensator." He 
 tells us that St. Dominic did not ask for the tithes which belong 
 to the poor of God. (Paradise, XTI. 93, 94.) " Let them return 
 whence they came," he says (De Monarchia, lib. ii. 12) ; "they 
 came well, let them return ill, for they were well given and ill 
 held." 
 
 2 Inferno, XIX. 53 ; Paradise, XXX. 145-148. 
 
 Purgatorio, XX. 86-92. * Purgatorio, XIX. 134, 135.
 
 DANTE 241 
 
 and Empire were on the wane. If an ugly suspi 
 cion of this would force itself upon him, perhaps 
 he only clung to both the more tenaciously ; but 
 he was no blind theorist. He would reform the 
 Church through the Church, and is less anxious for 
 Italian independence than for Italian good govern 
 ment under an Emperor from Germany rather than 
 from Utopia. 
 
 The Papacy was a necessary part of Dante's sys 
 tem, as a supplement to the Empire, which we 
 strongly incline to believe was always foremost in 
 his mind. In a passage already quoted, he says 
 that "the soil where Rome sits is worthy beyond 
 what men preach and admit," that is, as the birth 
 place of the Empire. Both in the Convito and the 
 De Monarchia he affirms that the course of Roman 
 history was providentially guided from the first. 
 Rome was founded in the same year that brought 
 into the world David, ancestor of the Redeemer 
 after the flesh. St. Augustine said that "God 
 showed in the most opulent and illustrious Empire 
 of the Romans how much the civil virtues might 
 avail even without true religion, that it might be 
 understood how, this added, men became citizens 
 of another city whose king is truth, whose law 
 charity, and whose measure eternity." Dante goes 
 further than this. He makes the Romans as well 
 as the Jews a chosen people, the one as founders 
 of civil society, the other as depositaries of the true 
 faith. 1 One side of Dante's mind was so practical 
 
 1 This results from the whole course of his argument in the sec 
 ond book of De Monarchia, and in the VI. Paradise he calls the
 
 242 DANTE 
 
 and positive, and his pride in the Romans so in 
 tense, 1 that he sometimes seems to regard their 
 mission as the higher of the two. Without peace, 
 which only good government could give, mankind 
 could not arrive at the highest virtue, whether of 
 the active or contemplative life. " And since what 
 is true of the part is true of the whole, and it hap 
 pens in the particular man that by sitting quietly 
 he is perfected in prudence and wisdom, it is clear 
 that the human race in the quiet or tranquillity of 
 peace is most freely and easily disposed for its 
 proper work which is almost divine, as it is writ 
 ten, ' Thou hast made him a little lower than the 
 angels.' 2 Whence it is manifest that universal 
 peace is the best of those things which are ordained 
 for our beatitude. Hence it is that not riches, not 
 pleasures, not honors, not length of life, not health, 
 not strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shep 
 herds from on high, but peace." 3 It was Dante's 
 experience of the confusion of Italy, where 
 
 Roman eagle "the bird of God" and "the scutcheon of God." 
 We must remember that with Dante God is always the " Emperor 
 of Heaven," the barons of whose court are the Apostles. (Para- 
 diso, XXIV. 115 ; Ib., XXV. 17.) 
 
 1 Dante seems to imply (though his name be German) that he 
 was of Roman descent. He makes the original inhabitants of 
 Florence (Inferno, XV. 77, 78) of Roman seed ; and Cacciaguida, 
 when asked by him about his ancestry, makes no more definite 
 answer than that their dwelling was in the most ancient part of 
 the city. (Paradiso, XVI. 40.) 
 
 2 Man was created, according to Dante ( Convito, Tr. II. c. 6), 
 to supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a sense superior 
 to the angels, inasmuch as he has reason, which they do not need. 
 
 8 De Monarchia, lib. i. 5.
 
 DANTE 243 
 
 " One doth gnaw the other 
 Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in," i 
 
 that suggested the thought of a universal umpire, 
 for that, after all, was to be the chief function of 
 his Emperor. He was too wise to insist on a uni 
 formity of political institutions a priori? for he 
 seems to have divined that the surest stay of order, 
 as of practical 'wisdom, is habit, which is a growth, 
 and cannot be made off-hand. He believed with 
 Aristotle that vigorous minds were intended by na 
 ture to rule, 3 and that certain races, like certain 
 men, are born to leadership. 4 He calls democra 
 cies, oligarchies, and petty princedoms (tyrannides) 
 " oblique policies which drive the human race to 
 slavery, as is patent in all of them to one who rea 
 sons." 5 He has nothing but pity for mankind 
 when it has become a many-headed beast, " despis 
 ing the higher intellect irrefragable in reason, the 
 lower which hath the face of experience." 6 He 
 had no faith in a turbulent equality asserting the 
 divine right of I'm as good as you. He thought 
 it fatal to all discipline : " The confounding of 
 persons hath ever been the beginning of sickness 
 in the state." 7 It is the same thought which Shake 
 speare puts in the mouth of Ulysses : 
 
 " Degree being vizarded, 
 
 The tmworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. 
 
 . . When degree is shaked, 
 
 1 Purgatorio, VI. 83, 84. 2 De Monarchia, lib. i. 16. 
 
 8 De Monarchia, lib. i. 5. 4 De Monarchia, lib. ii. 7. 
 
 5 De Monarchia, lib. i. 14. 6 De Monarchia, lib. i. 18. 
 
 7 Faradiso, XVI. 67, 68.
 
 244 DANTE 
 
 Which is the ladder to all high designs, 
 Then enterprise is sick." 1 
 
 Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that he 
 had a high sense of the worth of freedom, whether 
 in thought or government. He represents, indeed, 
 the very object of his journey through the triple 
 realm of shades as a search after liberty. 2 But it 
 must not be that scramble after undefined and in 
 definable rights which ends always in despotism, 
 equally degrading whether crowned with a red cap 
 or an imperial diadem. His theory of liberty has 
 for its corner-stone the Freedom of the Will, and 
 the will is free only when the judgment wholly con 
 trols the appetite. 3 On such a base even a demo 
 cracy may rest secure, and on such alone. 
 
 Rome was always the central point of Dante's 
 speculation. A shadow of her old sovereignty was 
 still left her in the primacy of the Church, to 
 which unity of faith was essential. He accordingly 
 has no sympathy with heretics of whatever kind. 
 He puts the ex-troubadour Bishop of Marseilles, 
 chief instigator of the horrors of Provence, in para 
 dise. 4 The Church is infallible in spiritual mat 
 ters, but this is an affair of outward discipline 
 merely, and means the Church as a form of polity. 
 Unity was Dante's leading doctrine, and there 
 fore he puts Mahomet among the schismatics, not 
 because he divided the Church, but the faith. 5 
 
 1 Troilus and Cressida, Act I. s. 3. The whole speech is very 
 remarkable both in thought and phrase. 
 
 2 Purgatorio, L 71. * De Monarchia. lib. i. . 14. 
 * Paradise, IX. 
 
 6 Irtferno, XXVIII. ; Purgatorio, XXXTT.
 
 DANTE 245 
 
 Dante's Church was of this world, but he surely 
 believed in another and spiritual one. It has been 
 questioned whether he was orthodox or not. There 
 can be no doubt of it so far as outward assent and 
 conformity are concerned, which he would practise 
 himself and enforce upon others as the first pos 
 tulate of order, the prerequisite for all happiness 
 in this life. In regard to the Visible Church he 
 was a reformer, but no revolutionist; it is sheer 
 ignorance to speak of him as if there were anything 
 new or exceptional in his denunciation of the cor 
 ruptions of the clergy. They were the common 
 places of the age, nor were they confined to lay 
 men. 1 To the absolute authority of the Church 
 Dante admitted some exceptions. He denies that 
 the supreme Pontiff has the unlimited power of 
 binding and loosing claimed for him. " Otherwise 
 he might absolve me impenitent, which God him 
 self could not do." 2 
 
 " By malison of theirs is not so lost 
 Eternal Love that it cannot return. " 8 
 
 Nor does the sacredness of the office extend to him 
 who chances to hold it. Philip the Fair himself 
 could hardly treat Boniface VIII. worse than he. 
 With wonderful audacity, he declares the Papal 
 throne vacant by the mouth of Saint Peter himself. 4 
 Even if his theory of a dual government were not 
 
 1 See the poems of Walter Mapes (who vraa Archdeacon of Ox 
 ford) ; the Bible Guiot, and the Bible au seignor de Berze, Barba 
 zan and Me'on, II. 
 
 2 De Monarchia, lib. iii. 8. 
 1 Purgatorio, III. 133, 134. 
 * Paradiso, XXVII. 22.
 
 246 DANTE 
 
 in question, Dante must have been very cautious 
 in meddling with the Church. It was not an age 
 that stood much upon ceremony. He himself tells 
 us he had seen men burned alive, and the author 
 of the Ottimo Comento says : " I the writer saw 
 followers of his [Fra Dolcino] burned at Padua to 
 the number of twenty-two together." l Clearly, 
 in such a time as this, one must not make " the 
 veil of the mysterious verse " too thin. 2 
 
 In the affairs of this life Dante was, as we 
 have said, supremely practical, and he makes pru 
 dence the chief of the cardinal virtues. 3 He has 
 made up his mind to take things as they come, and 
 to do at Rome as the Romans do. 
 
 " Ah, savage company ! but in the Church 
 With saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons ! " * 
 
 In the world of thought it was otherwise, and here 
 Dante's doctrine, if not precisely esoteric, was cer 
 tainly not that of his day, and must be gathered 
 from hints rather than direct statements. The 
 general notion of God was still (perhaps is largely 
 even now) of a provincial, one might almost say a 
 denominational, Deity. The popular poets always 
 represent Macon, Apolin, Tervagant, and the rest 
 as quasi-deities unable to resist the superior strength 
 of the Christian God. The Paynim answers the 
 arguments of his would-be converters with the 
 taunt that he would never worship a divinity who 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XXVII. 18 ; Ottimo, Inferno, XXVIII. 55. 
 
 2 Inferno, IX. 63 ; Purgatorio, VIII. 20. 
 8 Purgatorio, XXIX. 131, 132. 
 
 * Inferno, XXTT. 13, 14.
 
 DANTE 247 
 
 could not save himself from being done ignomini- 
 ously to death. Dante evidently was not satisfied 
 with the narrow conception which limits the inter 
 est of the Deity to the affairs of Jews and Chris 
 tians. That saying of Saint Paul, " Whom, there 
 fore, ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto 
 you," had perhaps influenced him, but his belief 
 in the divine mission of the Roman people prob 
 ably was conclusive. " The Roman Empire had 
 the help of miracles in perfecting itself," he says, 
 and then enumerates some of them. The first is 
 that " under Numa Pompilius, the second king of 
 the Romans, when he was sacrificing according to 
 the rite of the Gentiles, a shield fell from heaven 
 into the city chosen of God." 1 In the Convito 
 we find " Virgil speaking in the person of God," 
 and ^Eacus " wisely having recourse to God," the 
 god being Jupiter. 2 Ephialtes is punished in hell 
 for rebellion against " the Supreme Jove," 3 and, 
 that there may be no misunderstanding, Dante 
 elsewhere invokes the 
 
 "Jove Supreme, 
 Who upon earth for us wast crucified." * 
 
 It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident de 
 sign, constantly alternates examples drawn from 
 Christian and Pagan tradition or mythology. 5 He 
 
 1 De Monarchia, lib. ii. 4. 
 
 2 Convito, Tr.IV.c. 4; Ib., c. 27; ^Eneid, I. 178, 179; Ovid'a 
 Met., VII. 
 
 8 Inferno, XXXI. 92. 
 
 * Purgatorio, VI. 118, 119. Pulci, not understanding, has paro 
 died this. (Morgante, Canto II. st. 1.) 
 
 6 See, for example, Purgatorio, XX. 100-117.
 
 248 DANTE 
 
 had conceived a unity in the human race, all of 
 whose branches had worshipped the same God un 
 der divers names and aspects, and had arrived at 
 the same truth by different roads. We cannot un 
 derstand a passage in the twenty-sixth Paradiso, 
 where Dante inquires of Adam concerning the 
 names of God, except as a hint that the Chosen 
 People had done in this thing even as the Gentiles 
 did. 1 It is true that he puts all Pagans in Limbo, 
 "where without hope they live in longing," and 
 that he makes baptism essential to salvation. 2 But 
 it is noticeable that his Limbo is the Elysium of 
 Virgil, and that he particularizes Adam, Noah, 
 Moses, Abraham, David, and others as prisoners 
 there with the rest till the descent of Christ into 
 hell. 3 But were they altogether without hope? 
 and did baptism mean an immersion of the body 
 or a purification of the soul? The state of the 
 heathen after death had evidently been to Dante 
 one of those doubts that spring up at the foot 
 of every truth. In the De Monarchia he says : 
 " There are some judgments of God to which, 
 though human reason cannot attain by its own 
 
 1 We believe that Dante, though he did not understand Greek, 
 knew something of Hebrew. He would have been likely to study 
 it as the sacred language, and opportunities of profiting by the 
 help of learned Jews could not have been wanting to him in his 
 wanderings. In the above-cited passage some of the. best texts 
 read I s' appellava, and others Un s' appellava. God was called I 
 (the Je in Jehovah) or One, and afterwards El, the strong, 
 an epithet given to many gods. Whichever reading we adopt, 
 the meaning and the inference from it are the same. 
 
 2 Inferno, IV. 
 
 8 Dante's " Limbo," of course, is the older " Limbus Patrum."
 
 DANTE 249 
 
 strength, yet is it lifted to them by the help of 
 faith and of those things which are said to us in 
 Holy Writ, as to this, that no one, however per 
 fect in the moral and intellectual virtues both as a 
 habit [of the mind] and in practice, can be saved 
 without faith, it being granted that he shall never 
 have heard anything concerning Christ; for the 
 unaided reason of man cannot look upon this as 
 just ; nevertheless, with the help of faith, it can." 
 But faith, it should seem, was long in lifting Dante 
 to this height ; for in the nineteenth canto of the 
 Paradiso, which must have been written many 
 years after the passage just cited, the doubt recurs 
 again, and we are told that it was "a cavern," 
 concerning which he had " made frequent question 
 ing." The answer is given here : 
 
 " Truly to him who with me subtilizes, 
 
 'If so the Scripture were not over you, 
 
 For doubting there were marvellous occasion." 
 
 But what Scripture ? Dante seems cautious, tells 
 us that the eternal judgments are above our com 
 prehension, postpones the answer, and when it 
 comes, puts an orthodox prophylactic before it : 
 
 " Unto this kingdom never 
 Ascended one who had not faith in Christ, 
 Before or since he to the tree was nailed. 
 But look thou, many crying are, ' Christ, Christ ! ' 
 Who at the judgment shall be far less near 
 To him than some shall be who knew not Christ." 
 
 There is, then, some hope for the man born on the 
 bank of Indus who has never heard of Christ? 
 Dante is still cautious, but answers the question in- 
 
 1 De Monarchia, lib ii. 8.
 
 250 DANTE 
 
 directly in the next canto by putting the Trojan 
 Ripheus among the blessed : 
 
 " Who would believe, down in the errant world, 
 That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round 
 Could be the fifth one of these holy lights ? 
 Now knoweth he enough of what the world 
 Has not the power to see of grace divine, 
 Although his sight may not discern the bottom." 
 
 Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the 
 Church legend of Trajan brought back to life by 
 the prayers of Gregory the Great that he might be 
 converted ; and after an interval of fifty lines tells 
 us how Ripheus was saved : 
 
 " The other one, through grace, that from so deep 
 A fountain wells that never hath the eye 
 Of any creature reached its primal wave, 
 
 Set all his love below on righteousness ; 
 
 Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose 
 His eye to our redemption yet to be, 
 
 Whence he believed therein, and suffered not 
 
 From that day forth the stench of Paganism, 
 And he reproved therefor the folk perverse. 
 
 Those Maidens three, whom at the right-hand wheel 1 
 Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism 
 More than a thousand years before baptizing." 
 
 If the reader recall a passage already quoted from 
 the Convito, 2 he will perhaps think with us that 
 the gate of Dante's Limbo is left ajar even for the 
 ancient philosophers to slip out. The divine judg 
 ments are still inscrutable, and the ways of God 
 
 1 Faith, Hope, and Charity. (Purgatorio, XXIX. 121.) Mr. 
 Longfellow has translated the last verse literally. The meaning 
 
 IB, 
 
 " More than a thousand years ere baptism was." 
 
 2 In which the celestial Athens is mentioned.
 
 DANTE 251 
 
 past finding out, but faith would seem to have led 
 Dante at last to a more merciful solution of his 
 doubt than he had reached when he wrote the De 
 Monarchia. It is always humanizing to see how 
 the most rigid creed is made to bend before the 
 kindlier instincts of the heart. The stern Dante 
 thinks none beyond hope save those who are dead 
 in sin, and have made evil their good. But we are 
 by no means sure that he is not right in insisting 
 rather on the implacable severity of the law than 
 on the possible relenting of the judge. Exact jus 
 tice is commonly more merciful in the long run 
 than pity, for it tends to foster in men those 
 stronger qualities which make them good citizens, 
 an object second only with the Roman-minded 
 Dante to that of making them spiritually regener 
 ate, nay, perhaps even more important as a neces 
 sary preliminary to it. The inscription over the 
 gate of hell tells us that the terms on which we re 
 ceive the trust of life were fixed by the Divine 
 Power (which can what it wills), and are therefore 
 unchangeable ; by the Highest Wisdom, and there 
 fore for our truest good ; by the Primal Love, and 
 therefore the kindest. These are the three attri 
 butes of that justice which moved the maker of 
 them. Dante is no harsher than experience, which 
 always exacts the uttermost farthing ; no more in 
 exorable than conscience, which never forgives nor 
 forgets. No teaching is truer or more continually 
 needful than that the stains of the soul are in 
 effaceable, and that though their growth may be 
 arrested, their nature is to spread insidiously till
 
 252 DANTE 
 
 they have brought all to their own color. Evil is 
 a far more cunning and persevering propagandist 
 than Good, for it has no inward strength, and is 
 driven to seek countenance and sympathy. It must 
 have company, for it cannot bear to be alone in 
 the dark, while 
 
 " Virtue can see to do what Virtue would 
 By her own radiant light." 
 
 There is one other point which we will dwell on 
 for a moment as bearing on the question of Dante's 
 orthodoxy. His nature was one in which, as in 
 Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was 
 continually streamed over by the northern lights of 
 mysticism, through which the familiar stars shine 
 with a softened and more spiritual lustre. Nothing 
 is more interesting than the way in which the two 
 qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into 
 each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes 
 with unexpected glows of fancy, sometimes giving 
 an almost geometrical precision to his most mysti 
 cal visions. In his letter to Can Grande he says : 
 " It behooves not those to whom it is given to know 
 what is best in us to follow the footprints of the 
 herd ; much rather are they bound to oppose its 
 wanderings. For the vigorous in intellect and rea 
 son, endowed with a certain divine liberty, are con 
 strained by no customs. Nor is it wonderful, since 
 they are not governed by the laws, but much more 
 govern the laws themselves." It is not impossible 
 that Dante, whose love of knowledge was all-em 
 bracing, may have got some hint of the doctrine of 
 the Oriental Sufis. With them the first and lowest
 
 DANTE 253 
 
 of the steps that lead upward to perfection is the 
 Law, a strict observance of which is all that is ex 
 pected of the ordinary man whose mind is not open 
 to the conception of a higher virtue and holiness. 
 But the Sufi puts himself under the guidance of 
 some holy man [Virgil in the Inferno], whose 
 teaching he receives implicitly, and so arrives at 
 the second step, which is the Path \Purg atorio~\ 
 by which he reaches a point where he is freed from 
 all outward ceremonials and observances, and has 
 risen from an outward to a spiritual worship. The 
 third step is Knowledge \Paradiso~\, endowed by 
 which with supernatural insight, he becomes like 
 the angels about the throne, and has but one far 
 ther step to take before he reaches the goal and 
 becomes one with God. The analogies of this sys 
 tem with Dante's are obvious and striking. They 
 become still more so when Virgil takes leave of 
 him at the entrance of the Terrestrial Paradise 
 with the words : 
 
 " Expect no more a word or sign from me ; 
 
 Free and upright and sound is thy free-will, 
 And error were it not to do its bidding ; 
 Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre," 1 
 
 that is, " I make thee king and bishop over thy 
 self ; the inward light is to be thy law in things 
 both temporal and spiritual." The originality of 
 Dante consists in his not allowing any divorce be 
 tween the intellect and the soul in its highest sense, 
 in his making reason and intuition work together 
 to the same end of spiritual perfection. The un- 
 l Purgatorio, XXVII. 139-142.
 
 254 DANTE 
 
 satisfactoriness of science leads Faust to seek re 
 pose in worldly pleasure ; it led Dante to find it in 
 faith, of whose efficacy the shortcoming of all logi 
 cal substitutes for it was the most convincing argu 
 ment. That we cannot know, is to him a proof 
 that there is some higher plane on which we can 
 believe and see. Dante had discovered the incal 
 culable worth of a single idea as compared with 
 the largest heap of facts ever gathered. To a man 
 more interested in the soul of things than in the 
 body of them, the little finger of Plato is thicker 
 than the loins of Aristotle. 
 
 We cannot but think that there is something 
 like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the ad 
 vance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of 
 science, and not in that of morals. No doubt the 
 laws of morals existed from the beginning, but so 
 also did those of science, and it is by the applica 
 tion, not the mere recognition, of both that the 
 race is benefited. No one questions how much 
 science has done for our physical comfort and con 
 venience, and with the mass of men these perhaps 
 must of necessity precede the quickening of their 
 moral instincts ; but such material gains are illu 
 sory, unless they go hand in hand with a corre 
 sponding ethical advance. The man who gives 
 his life for a principle has done more for his kind 
 than he who discovers a new metal or names a new 
 gas, for the great motors of the race are moral, not 
 intellectual, and their force lies ready to the use of 
 the poorest and weakest of us all. We accept a 
 truth of science so soon as it is demonstrated, are
 
 DANTE 255 
 
 perfectly willing to take it on authority, can appro 
 priate whatever use there may be in it without the 
 least understanding of its processes, as men send 
 messages by the electric telegraph, but every truth 
 of morals must be redemonstrated in the experience 
 of the individual man before he is capable of util 
 izing it as a constituent of character or a guide in 
 action. A man does not receive the statements 
 that "two and two make four," and that "the pure 
 in heart shall see God," on the same terms. The 
 one can be proved to him with four grains of corn ; 
 he can never arrive at a belief in the other till he 
 realize it in the intimate persuasion of his whole 
 being. This is typified in the mystery of the in 
 carnation. The divine reason must forever mani 
 fest itself anew in the lives of men, and that as 
 individuals. This atonement with God, this iden 
 tification of the man with the truth, 1 so that right 
 action shall not result from the lower reason of 
 utility, but from the higher of a will so purified of 
 self as to sympathize by instinct with the eternal 
 laws, a is not something that can be done once for 
 all, that can become historic and traditional, a dead 
 flower pressed between the leaves of the family 
 Bible, but must be renewed in every generation, 
 and in the soul of every man, that it may be valid. 
 
 1 'I conceived myself to be now," says Milton, "not as mine 
 own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof 
 I was persuaded." 
 
 2 " But now was turning my desire and will, 
 
 Even as a wheel that equally is moved, 
 The Love that moves the sun and other stars." 
 (Paradise, XXXIII., closing verses of the Divina Commedia.)
 
 256 DANTE 
 
 Certain sects show their recognition of this in what 
 are called revivals, a gross and carnal attempt to 
 apply truth, as it were, mechanically, and to accom 
 plish by the etherization of excitement and the 
 magnetism of crowds what is possible only in the 
 solitary exaltations of the soul. This is the high 
 moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to a 
 Christian basilica ; and as in that so there is here 
 also, painted or carven, every image of beauty and 
 holiness the artist's mind could conceive for the 
 adornment of the holy place. We may linger to 
 enjoy these if we will, but if we follow the central 
 thought that runs like the nave from entrance to 
 choir, it leads us to an image of the divine made 
 human, to teach us how the human might also 
 make itself divine. Dante beholds at last an image 
 of that Power, Love, and Wisdom, one in essence, 
 but trine in manifestation, to answer the needs of 
 our triple nature and satisfy the senses, the heart, 
 and the mind. 
 
 " Within the deep and luminous subsistence 
 
 Of the High Light appeared to me three circles, 
 Of threefold color and of one dimension, 
 And hy the second seemed the first reflected 
 As Iris is by Iris, and the third 
 Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed. 
 
 Within itself, of its own very color, 
 
 Seemed to me painted with our effigy, 
 Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein. 11 
 
 He had reached the high altar where the miracle 
 of transubstantiation is wrought, itself also a type 
 of the great conversion that may be accomplished
 
 DANTE 257 
 
 in our own nature (the lower thing assuming the 
 qualities of the higher), not by any process of rea 
 son, but by the very fire of the divine love. 
 
 " Then there smote my mind 
 A flash of lightning wherein came its wish." 1 
 
 Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was the 
 first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out 
 of himself, but, rightly looked at, it implies a won 
 derful self-reliance and originality in his genius. 
 His is the first keel that ever ventured into the 
 silent sea of human consciousness to find a new 
 world of poetry. 
 
 '* L' acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse-" 2 
 
 He discovered that not only the story of some he 
 roic person, but that of any man might be epical ; 
 that the way to heaven was not outside the world, 
 but through it. Living at a time when the end of 
 the world was still looked for as imminent, 3 he be 
 lieved that the second coming of the Lord was to take 
 place on no more conspicuous stage than the soul of 
 
 1 Dante seems to allude directly to this article of the Cath 
 olic faith when he says, on entering the Celestial Paradise, " to 
 signify transhumanizing by words could not be done," and ques 
 tions whether he was there in the renewed spirit only or in the 
 flesh also : 
 
 " If I was merely what of me thou newly 
 
 Createdst, Love, who governest the heavens, 
 Thou knowest, who didst lift me with thy light ! " 
 
 (Paradiso, I. 73-75.) 
 
 2 Paradiso, II. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast : 
 
 " Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante 
 
 Tritasolo." 
 8 Convito, Tr. II. c. 15.
 
 258 DANTE 
 
 man ; that his kingdom would be established in the 
 surrendered will. A poem, the precious distillation 
 of such a character and such a life as his through 
 all those sorrowing but undespondent years, must 
 have a meaning in it which few men have meaning 
 enough in themselves wholly to penetrate. That its 
 allegorical form belongs to a past fashion, with 
 which the modern mind has little sympathy, we 
 should no more think of denying than of whitewash 
 ing a fresco of Giotto. But we may take it as we 
 may nature, which is also full of double meanings, 
 either as picture or as parable, either for the sim 
 ple delight of its beauty or as a shadow of the 
 spiritual world. We may take it as we may his 
 tory, either for its picturesqueness or its moral, 
 either for the variety of its figures, or as a witness 
 to that perpetual presence of God in his creation of 
 which Dante was so profoundly sensible. He had 
 seen and suffered much, but it is only to the man 
 who is himself of value that experience is valuable. 
 He had not looked on man and nature as most of 
 us do, with less interest than into the columns of 
 our daily newspaper. He saw in them the latest 
 authentic news of the God who made them, for he 
 carried everywhere that vision washed clear with 
 tears which detects the meaning under the mask, 
 and, beneath the casual and transitory, the eternal 
 keeping its sleepless watch. The secret of Dante's 
 power is not far to seek. Whoever can express 
 himself with the full force of unconscious sincerity 
 will be found to have uttered something ideal and 
 universal. Dante intended a didactic poem, but
 
 DANTE 259 
 
 the most picturesque of poets could not escape his 
 genius, and his sermon sings and glows and charms 
 in a manner that surprises more at the fiftieth 
 reading than the first, such variety of freshness is 
 in imagination. 
 
 There are no doubt in the Divina Comm edict, (re 
 garded merely as poetry) sandy spaces enough both 
 of physics and metaphysics, but with every deduc 
 tion Dante remains the first of descriptive as well 
 as moral poets. His verse is as various as the feel 
 ing it conveys ; now it has the terseness and edge 
 of steel, and now palpitates with iridescent softness 
 like the breast of a dove. In vividness he is with 
 out a rival. He drags back by its tangled locks 
 the unwilling head of some petty traitor of an Ital 
 ian provincial town, lets the fire glare on the sullen 
 face for a moment, and it sears itself into the mem 
 ory forever. He shows us an angel glowing with that 
 love of God which makes him a star even amid the 
 glory of heaven, and the holy shape keeps lifelong 
 watch in our fantasy, constant as a sentinel. He 
 has the skill of conveying impressions indirectly. 
 In the gloom of hell his bodily presence is revealed 
 by his stirring something, on the mount of expia 
 tion by casting a shadow. Would he have us feel 
 the brightness of an angel ? He makes him whiten 
 afar through the smoke like a dawn, 1 or, walk 
 ing straight toward the setting sun, he finds his 
 eyes suddenly unable to withstand a greater splen 
 dor against which his hand is unavailing to shield 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XVI. 142. Here is Milton's " Far off his coming 
 shone."
 
 260 DANTE 
 
 him. Even its reflected light, then, is brighter 
 than the direct ray of the sun. 1 And how much 
 more keenly do we feel the parched lips of Master 
 Adam for those rivulets of the Casentino which 
 run down into the Arno, " making their channels 
 cool and soft " ! His comparisons are as fresh, as 
 simple, and as directly from nature as those of 
 Homer. 2 Sometimes they show a more subtle 
 observation, as where he compares the stooping of 
 Antaeus over him to the leaning tower of Cari- 
 senda, to which the clouds, flying in an opposite di 
 rection to its inclination, give away their motion. 3 
 His suggestions of individuality, too, from attitude 
 or speech, as in Fariuata, Sordello, or Pia, 4 give 
 in a hint what is worth acres of so-called character- 
 painting. In straightforward pathos, the single and 
 sufficient thrust of phrase, he has no competitor. 
 He is too sternly touched to be effusive and tearful : 
 
 " Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai." 6 
 
 His is always the true coin of speech, 
 
 1 Purgatorio, XV. 7, et seq. 
 
 2 See, for example, Inferno, XVII. 127-132 ; Ib. XXIV. 7-12 ; 
 Purgatorio, 11.124-129; Ib., III. 79-84; Ib., XXVII. 76-81; 
 Paradiso, XIX. 91-93 ; Ib. XXI. 34-39 ; Ib. XXIII. 1-9. 
 
 8 Inferno, XXXI. 136-138. 
 
 " And those thin clonds above, in flakes and bars, 
 That give away their motion to the stars." 
 
 (Coleridge, Dejection, an Ode.) 
 
 See also the comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around 
 him in Paradise to " a pearl on a white forehead." (Paradise, 
 IH. 14.) 
 
 * Inferno, X. 35-41 ; Pnrgatorio, VI. 61-66 ; Ib., X. 133. 
 5 For example, Cavalcanti's Come dicesti egli ebbe ? (Inferno, X. 
 67, 68.) Anselmuccio's Tu guardi si, padre, che hoi ? ( Inferno, 
 
 xxxin. 51.)
 
 DANTE 261 
 
 " SI lucida e si tonda 
 Che nel suo conio mil la ci s' inforsa," 
 
 and never the highly ornamented promise to pay, 
 token of insolvency. 
 
 No doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities 
 that a poet must be judged, for it is by these, if by 
 anything, that he is to maintain his place in litera 
 ture. And he must be judged by them absolutely, 
 with reference, that is, to the highest standard, 
 and not relatively to the fashions and opportunities 
 of the age in which he lived. Yet these considera 
 tions must fairly enter into our decision of another 
 side of the question, and one that has much to do 
 with the true quality of the man, with his charac 
 ter as distinguished from his talent, and therefore 
 with how much he will influence men as well as 
 delight them. We may reckon up pretty exactly a 
 man's advantages and defects as an artist ; these he 
 has in common with others, and they are to be mea 
 sured by a recognized standard ; but there is some 
 thing in his genius that is incalculable. It would 
 be hard to define the causes of the difference of im 
 pression made upon us respectively by two such 
 men as ^Eschylus and Euripides, but we feel pro 
 foundly that the latter, though in some respects a 
 better dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight. 
 2Eschylus stirs something in us far deeper than the 
 sources of mere pleasurable excitement. The man 
 behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself, 
 and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and 
 most sacred in us, though we cannot always explain 
 it, is none the less real and lasting. Some men
 
 262 DANTE 
 
 always seem to remain outside their work ; others 
 make their individuality felt in every part of it ; 
 their very life vibrates in every verse, and we do 
 not wonder that it has " made them lean for many 
 years." The virtue that has gone out of them 
 abides in what they do. The book such a man 
 makes is indeed, as Milton called it, " the precious 
 lifeblood of a master spirit." Theirs is a true im 
 mortality, for it is their soul, and not their talent, 
 that survives in their work. Dante's concise forth- 
 rightness of phrase, which to that of most other 
 poets is as a stab * to a blow with a cudgel, the 
 vigor of his thought, the beauty of his images, the 
 refinement of his conception of spiritual things, 
 are marvellous if we compare him with his age 
 and its best achievement. But it is for his power 
 of inspiring and sustaining, it is because they find 
 in him a spur to noble aims, a secure refuge in 
 that defeat which the present always seems, that 
 they prize Dante who know and love him best. He 
 is not merely a great poet, but an influence, part of 
 the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him 
 she learns that, " married to the truth, she is a mis 
 tress, but otherwise a slave shut out of all lib 
 erty." 2 
 
 All great poets have their message to deliver us, 
 from something higher than they. We venture on 
 no unworthy comparison between him who reveals 
 
 1 To the " bestiality " of certain arguments Dante says, " one 
 would wish to reply, not with words, but with a knife. " ( Con- 
 Vito, Tr. IV. c. 14.) 
 
 2 Convito, Tr. IV. c. 2.
 
 DANTE 263 
 
 to us the beauty of this world's love and the gran 
 deur of this world's passion and him who shows 
 that love of God is the fruit whereof all other loves 
 are but the beautiful and fleeting blossom, that the 
 passions are yet sublimer objects of contemplation, 
 when, subdued by the will, they become patience 
 in suffering and perseverance in the upward path. 
 But we cannot help thinking that if Shakespeare 
 be the most comprehensive intellect, so Dante is 
 the highest spiritual nature that has expressed it 
 self in rhythmical form. Had he merely made us 
 feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows, and vexa 
 tions of earth appear when looked down on from 
 the heights of our own character and the seclusion 
 of our own genius, or from the region where we 
 commune with God, he had done much : 
 
 " I with my sight returned through one and all 
 
 The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe 
 Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance." * 
 
 But he has done far more ; he has shown us the 
 way by which that country far beyond the stars 
 may be reached, may become the habitual dwelling- 
 place and fortress of our nature, instead of being 
 the object of its vague aspiration in moments of 
 indolence. At the Round Table of King Arthur 
 there was left always one seat empty for him who 
 should accomplish the adventure of the Holy GraiL 
 It was called the perilous seat because of the dan 
 gers he must encounter who would win it. In the 
 company of the epic poets there was a place left 
 for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a 
 i Paradiso, XXII. 132-135; Ib., XXVII. 110.
 
 264 DANTE 
 
 triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly vic 
 torious, who should make us partakers of that cup 
 of sorrow in which all are communicants with 
 Christ. He who should do this would indeed 
 achieve the perilous seat, for he must combine 
 poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the 
 one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity, 
 and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of 
 it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when 
 Virgil rejoined the company of great singers, 
 
 " All honor to the loftiest of poets I "
 
 SPENSER 
 1875 
 
 CHAUCER had been in his grave one hundred 
 and fifty years ere England had secreted choice 
 material enough for the making of another great 
 poet. The nature of men living together in socie 
 ties, as of the individual man, seems to have its pe 
 riodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the 
 ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful 
 boundary line of shore between them is in one gen 
 eration a hard sandy actuality strewn only with 
 such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss 
 here and there, and in the next is whelmed with 
 those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding 
 foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a 
 moment catches and holds the sunshine. 
 
 From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 
 the indefatigable Ritson in his Bibliographia Po- 
 etica has made us a catalogue of some six hundred 
 English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. 
 Ninety-nine in a hundred of them are mere names, 
 most of them no more than shadows of names, some 
 of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them 
 that their works have perished because they were 
 written in an obsolete dialect ; for it is the poem 
 that keeps the language alive, and not the language
 
 266 SPENSER 
 
 that buoys up the poem. The revival of letters, as 
 it is called, was at first the revival of ancient let 
 ters, which, while it made men pedants, could do 
 very little towards making them poets, much less 
 towards making them original writers. There 
 was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity, inven 
 tion, and careless faith in the present which make 
 many of the productions of the Norman Trouveres 
 delightful reading even now. The whole of Eu 
 rope during the fifteenth century produced no 
 book which has continued readable, or has become 
 in any sense of the word a classic. I do not mean 
 that that century has left us no illustrious names, 
 that it was not enriched with some august intel 
 lects who kept alive the apostolic succession of 
 thought and speculation, who passed along the still 
 unextinguished torch of intelligence, the lampada 
 vitce, to those who came after them. But a clas 
 sic is properly a book which maintains itself by 
 virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and 
 style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between 
 the thought that gives life and the form that con 
 sents to every mood of grace and dignity, which 
 can be simple without being vulgar, elevated with 
 out being distant, and which is something neither 
 ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of 
 growing old. It is not his Latin which makes 
 Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Beranger's French 
 prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language 
 however thorny, no dragon-coil of centuries, will 
 keep men away from these true apples of the Hes- 
 perides if once they have caught sight or scent of
 
 SPENSER 267 
 
 them. If poems die, it is because there was never 
 true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality 
 which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no 
 sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but 
 which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping 
 faculty the imagination. Take Aristotle's ethics, 
 the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, 
 the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small poli 
 tics of a provincial city of the Middle Ages, mix in 
 at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, 
 and tell me what chance there is to make an im 
 mortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. Can 
 these dry bones live ? Yes, Dante can create such 
 a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred 
 and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in 
 these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth cen 
 tury since his death. Accordingly I am apt to be 
 lieve that the complaints one sometimes hears of 
 the neglect of our older literature are the regrets 
 of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does 
 not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut- 
 trees are, nor could any amount of lecturing per 
 suade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut. 
 
 On the whole, the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth 
 century has more meat in it than the English, but 
 this is to say very little. Where it is meant to be 
 serious and lofty it falls into the same vices of un 
 reality and allegory which were the fashion of the 
 day, and which there are some patriots so fearfully 
 and wonderfully made as to relish. Stripped of 
 the archaisms (that turn every y to a meaningless 
 s, spell which quhillc, shake schaik, bugle bowgill t
 
 268 SPENSER 
 
 powder puldir, and will not let us simply whistle 
 till we have puckered our mouths to quhissill') in 
 which the Scottish antiquaries love to keep it dis 
 guised, as if it were nearer to poetry the further 
 it got from all human recognition and sympathy, 
 stripped of these, there is little to distinguish it 
 from the contemporary verse-mongering south of 
 the Tweed. Their compositions are generally as 
 stiff and artificial as a trellis, in striking contrast 
 with the popular ballad-poetry of Scotland (some 
 of which possibly falls within this period, though 
 most of it is later), which clambers, lawlessly if you 
 will, but at least freely and simply, twining the 
 bare stem of old tradition with graceful sentiment 
 and lively natural sympathies. I find a few sweet 
 and flowing verses in Dunbar's " Merle and Night 
 ingale," indeed one whole stanza that has always 
 seemed exquisite to me. It is this : 
 
 " Ne'er sweeter noise was heard by living man 
 Than made this merry, gentle nightingale. 
 Her sound went with the river as it ran 
 Out through the fresh and flourished lusty vale ; 
 O merle, quoth she, O fool, leave off thy tale, 
 For in thy song good teaching there is none, 
 For both are lost, the time and the travail 
 Of every love but upon God alone." 
 
 But except this lucky poem, I find little else in the 
 serious verses of Dunbar that does not seem to me 
 tedious and pedantic. I dare say a few more lines 
 might be found scattered here and there, but I 
 hold it a sheer waste of time to hunt after these 
 thin needles of wit buried in unwieldy haystacks 
 of verse. If that be genius, the less we have of it
 
 SPENSER 269 
 
 the better. His "Dance of the Seven Deadly 
 Sins," over which the excellent Lord Hailes went 
 into raptures, is wanting in everything but coarse 
 ness ; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a 
 galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be 
 well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such 
 wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What 
 he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity ; 
 his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, 
 failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for 
 it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. 
 Mr. Sibbald, in his " Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," 
 has admiringly preserved more than enough of it, 
 and seems to find a sort of national savor therein, 
 such as delights his countrymen in a haggis, or the 
 German in his sauer-kraut. The uninitiated for 
 eigner puts his handkerchief to his nose, wonders, 
 and gets out of the way as soon as he civilly can. 
 Barbour's " Brus," if not precisely a poem, has 
 passages whose simple tenderness raises them to 
 that level. That on Freedom is familiar. 1 But its 
 highest merit is the natural and unstrained tone of 
 manly courage in it, the easy and familiar way in 
 which Barbour always takes chivalrous conduct as 
 a matter of course, as if heroism were the least you 
 could ask of any man. I modernize a few verses 
 to show what I mean. When the King of England 
 turns to fly from the battle of Bannockburn (and 
 
 1 Though always misapplied in quotation, as if he had used the 
 word in that generalized meaning which is common now, but 
 which could not without an impossible anachronism have been 
 present to his mind. He meant merely freedom from prison.
 
 270 SPENSER 
 
 Barbour with his usual generosity tells us he has 
 heard that Sir Aymer de Valence led him away 
 by the bridle-rein against his will), Sir Giles 
 d'Argente 
 
 " Saw the king thus and his menie 
 Shape them to flee so speedily, 
 He came right to the king in hy [hastily] 
 And said, ' Sir, since that is so 
 That ye thus gate your gate will go, 
 Have ye- good-day, for back will I : 
 Yet never fled I certainly, 
 And I choose here to bide and die 
 Than to live shamefully and fly.' " 
 
 The " Brus " is in many ways the best rhymed 
 chronicle ever written. It is national in a high 
 and generous way, but I confess I have little faith 
 in that quality in literature which is commonly 
 called nationality, a kind of praise seldom given 
 where there is anything better to be said. Liter 
 ature that loses its meaning, or the best part of it, 
 when it gets beyond sight of the parish steeple, is 
 not what I understand by literature. To tell you 
 when you cannot fully taste a book that it is be 
 cause it is so thoroughly national, is to condemn 
 the book. To say it of a poem is even worse, for 
 it is to say that what should be true of the whole 
 compass of human nature is true only to some 
 north-and-by-east-half-east point of it. I can un 
 derstand the nationality of Firdusi when, looking 
 sadly back to the former glories of his country, he 
 tells us that " the nightingale still sings old Per 
 sian " ; 1 can understand the nationality of Burns 
 when he turns his plough aside to spare the rough
 
 SPENSER 271 
 
 burr thistle, and hopes he may write a song or two 
 for dear auld Scotia's sake. That sort of national 
 ity belongs to a country of which we are all citi 
 zens, that country of the heart which has no 
 boundaries laid down on the map. All great poe 
 try must smack of the soil, for it must be rooted in 
 it, must suck life and substance from it, but it must 
 do so with the aspiring instinct of the pine that 
 climbs forever toward diviner air, and not in the 
 grovelling fashion of the potato. Any verse that 
 makes you and me foreigners is not only not great 
 poetry, but no poetry at all. Dunbar's works were 
 disinterred and edited some thirty years ago by 
 Mr. Laing, and whoso is national enough to like 
 thistles may browse there to his heart's content. 
 I am inclined for other pasture, having long ago 
 satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading 
 that every generation is sure of its own share of 
 bores without borrowing from the past. 
 
 A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose trans 
 lation of the ^Eneid is linguistically valuable, and 
 whose introductions to the seventh and twelfth books 
 the one describing winter and the other May 
 have been safely praised, they are so hard to read. 
 There is certainly some poetic feeling in them, and 
 the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as 
 is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke 
 of oxen, who lays over one furrow of verse, and 
 then turns about to lay the next as cleverly along 
 side it as he can. But it is a wrong done to good 
 taste to hold up this item kind of description any 
 longer as deserving any other credit than that of
 
 272 SPENSER 
 
 a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a 
 post-mortem inventory of nature, where imagina 
 tion is not merely not called for, but would be out 
 of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book is as 
 much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like 
 true word-painting. The poet with a real eye in 
 his head does not give us everything, but only the 
 best of everything. He selects, he combines, or 
 else gives what is characteristic only ; while the 
 false style of which I have been speaking seems to 
 be as glad to get a pack of impertinences on its 
 shoulders as Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress 
 was to be rid of his. One strong verse that can 
 hold itself upright (as the French critic Kivarol 
 said of Dante) with the bare help of the substan 
 tive and verb, is worth acres of this dead cord- wood 
 piled stick on stick, a boundless continuity of dry- 
 ness. I would rather have written that half-stanza 
 of Longfellow's, in the " Wreck of the Hesperus," 
 of the " billow that swept her crew like icicles from 
 her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enu 
 meration of meteorological phenomena put together. 
 A real landscape is never tiresome ; it never pre 
 sents itself to us as a disjointed succession of iso 
 lated particulars ; we take it in with one sweep of 
 the eye, its light, its shadow, its melting grada 
 tions of distance : we do not say it is this, it is that, 
 and the other ; and we may be sure that if a descrip 
 tion in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mis 
 take somewhere. All the pictorial adjectives in 
 the dictionary will not bring it a hair's-breadth 
 nearer to truth and nature. The fact is that what
 
 SPENSER 273 
 
 we see is in the rnind to a greater degree than we 
 are commonly aware. As Coleridge says, 
 
 " O lady, we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone doth Nature live ! ' ' 
 
 I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for 
 a diatribe on the subject of descriptive poetry, be 
 cause I find that this old ghost is not laid yet, but 
 comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a 
 true enjoyment of poetry, and the medicine by 
 which vampires were cured was to unbury them, 
 drive a stake through them, and get them under 
 ground again with all despatch. The first duty of 
 the Muse is to be delightful, and it is an injury 
 done to all of us when we are put in the wrong by 
 a kind of statutory affirmation on the part of the 
 critics of something to which our judgment will not 
 consent, and from which our taste revolts. A col 
 lection of poets is commonly made up, nine parts 
 in ten, of this perfunctory verse-making, and I 
 never look at one without regretting that we have 
 lost that excellent Latin phrase, Corpus poetarum. 
 In fancy I always read it on the backs of the vol 
 umes, a body of poets, indeed, with scarce one 
 soul to a hundred of them. 
 
 One genuine English poet illustrated the early 
 years of the sixteenth century, John Skelton. 
 lie had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality. 
 Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate 
 in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was 
 truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is a 
 freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that 
 gives it a singular attraction. A breath of cheer-
 
 274 SPENSER 
 
 fulness runs along the slender stream of his verse, 
 under which it seems to ripple and crinkle, catch 
 ing and casting back the sunshine like a stream 
 blown on by clear western winds. 
 
 But Skelton was an exceptional blossom of au 
 tumn. A long and dreary winter follows. Surrey, 
 who brought back with him from Italy the blank- 
 verse not long before introduced by Trissino, is to 
 some extent another exception. He had the sen 
 timent of nature and unhackneyed feeling, but he 
 has no mastery of verse, nor any elegance of dic 
 tion. We have Gascoigne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pe 
 dantic, artificial, systematic as a country cemetery, 
 and, worst of all, the whole time desperately in 
 love. Every verse is as flat, thin, and regular as a 
 lath, and their poems are nothing more than bun 
 dles of such tied trimly together. They are said to 
 have refined our language. Let us devoutly hope 
 they did, for it would be pleasant to be grateful to 
 them for something. But I fear it was not so, for 
 only genius can do that ; and Sternhold and Hop 
 kins are inspired men in comparison with them. 
 For Sternhold was at least the author of two noble 
 stanzas : 
 
 " The Lord descended from above 
 And bowed the heavens high, 
 And underneath his feet he cast 
 The darkness of the sky ; 
 
 " On cherubs and on chernbims 
 
 Full royally he rode, 
 And on the wings of all the winds 
 Came flying all abroad." 
 
 But Gascoigne and the rest did nothing more than
 
 SPENSER 275 
 
 put the worst school of Italian love poetry into an 
 awkward English dress. The Italian proverb says, 
 " Inglese italianizzato, Diavolo incarnato," that an 
 Englishman Italianized is the very devil incarnate, 
 and one feels the truth of it here. The very titles 
 of their poems set one yawning, and their wit is the 
 cause of the dulness that is in other men. " The 
 lover, deceived by his love, repenteth him of the 
 true love he bare her." As thus : 
 
 " Where I sought heaven there found I hap ; 
 
 From danger unto death, 
 Much like the mouse that treads the trap 
 
 In hope to find her food, 
 And bites the bread that stops her breath, 
 So in like case I stood." 
 
 "The lover, accusing his love for her unfaithful 
 ness, proposeth to live in liberty." He says : 
 
 '.' But I am like the beaten fowl 
 That from the net escaped, 
 And thou art like the ravening owl 
 That all the night hath waked." 
 
 And yet at the very time these men were writing 
 there were simple ballad-writers who could have 
 set them an example of simplicity, force, and 
 grandeur. Compare the futile efforts of these poet 
 asters to kindle themselves by a painted flame, 
 and to be pathetic over the lay figure of a mistress, 
 with the wild vigor and almost fierce sincerity of 
 the " Twa Corbies " : - 
 
 " As I was walking all alone 
 I heard twa corbies making a moan. 
 The one unto the other did say, 
 Where shall we gang dine to-day ? 
 In beyond that old turf dyke
 
 276 SPENSER 
 
 I wot there lies a new-slain knight ; 
 
 And naebody kens that he lies there 
 
 I] ut his hawk and his honnd and his lady fair. 
 
 His honnd is to the hunting gone, 
 
 His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home, 
 
 His lady has ta'en another mate, 
 
 So we may make ou> dinner sweet. 
 
 O'er his white bones as they lie hare 
 
 The wind shall blow forevermair." 
 
 There was a lesson in rhetoric for our worthy 
 friends, could they have understood it. But they 
 were as much afraid of an attack of nature as of 
 the plague. 
 
 Such was the poetical inheritance of style and 
 diction into which Spenser was born, and which he 
 did more than any one else to redeem from the 
 leaden gripe of vulgar and pedantic conceit. Sir 
 Philip Sidney, born the year after him, with a 
 keener critical instinct, and a taste earlier emanci 
 pated than his own, would have been, had he lived 
 longer, perhaps even more directly influential in 
 educating the taste and refining the vocabulary of 
 his contemporaries and immediate successors. The 
 better of his pastoral poems in the " Arcadia " are, 
 in my judgment, more simple, natural, and, above 
 all, more pathetic than those of Spenser, who some 
 times strains the shepherd's pipe with a blast that 
 would better suit the trumpet. Sidney had the 
 good sense to feel that it was unsophisticated senti 
 ment rather than rusticity of phrase that befitted 
 such themes. 1 He recognized the distinction be 
 tween simplicity and vulgarity, which Wordsworth 
 
 1 In his Defence of Poesy he condemns the archaisms and pro 
 vincialisms of the Shepherd's Calendar.
 
 SPENSER 277 
 
 was so long in finding out, and seems to have 
 divined the fact that there is but one kind of Eng 
 lish that is always appropriate and never obsolete, 
 namely, the very best. 1 With the single exception 
 of Thomas Campion, his experiments in adapting 
 classical metres to English verse are more success 
 ful than those of his contemporaries. Some of his 
 elegiacs are not ungrateful to the ear, and it can 
 hardly be doubted that Coleridge borrowed from 
 his eclogue of Strephon and Klaius the pleasing 
 movement of his own Catullian Hendecasyllabics. 
 Spenser, perhaps out of deference to Sidney, also 
 tried his hand at English hexameters, the introduc 
 tion of which was claimed by his friend Gabriel 
 Harvey, who thereby conceived that he had assured 
 to himself an immortality of grateful remembrance. 
 But the result was a series of jolts and jars, prov 
 ing that the language had run off the track. He 
 seems to have been half conscious of it himself, 
 and there is a gleam of mischief in what he writes 
 to Harvey : " I like your late English hexameter 
 so exceedingly well that I also enure my pen some 
 time in that kind, which I find indeed, as I have 
 often heard you defend in word, neither so hard 
 nor so harsh but that it will easily yield itself to 
 our mother-tongue. For the only or chiefest hard 
 ness, which seemeth, is in the accent, which some- 
 
 1 " There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a 
 language of pure, intelligible English, which was spoken in Chau 
 cer's time, and is spoken in ours; equally understood then and 
 now ; and of which the Bible is the written and permanent stand 
 ard, as it has undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it." 
 (Southey's Life and Correspondence, iii. 193, 194.)
 
 278 SPENSER 
 
 time gapeth, and, as it were, yawneth ill-favoredly, 
 coming short of that it should, and sometime ex 
 ceeding the measure of the number, as in Carpen 
 ter ; the middle syllable being used short in speech, 
 when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a 
 lame gosling that draweth one leg after her ; and 
 Heaven being used short as one syllable, when it is 
 in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a 
 lame dog that holds up one leg." l It is almost in 
 conceivable that Spenser's hexameters should have 
 been written by the man who was so soon to teach 
 his native language how to soar and sing, and to 
 give a fuller sail to English verse. 
 
 One of the most striking facts in our literary 
 history is the preeminence at once so frankly and 
 unanimously conceded to Spenser by his contempo 
 raries. At first, it is true, he had not many rivals. 
 Before the " Faery Queen " two long poems were 
 printed and popular, the "Mirror for Magis 
 trates " and Warner's " Albion's England," and 
 not long after it came the " Polyolbion " of Dray- 
 ton and the " Civil Wars " of Daniel. This was 
 the period of the saurians in English poetry, inter 
 minable poems, book after book and canto after 
 canto, like far-stretching vertebrce, that at first 
 
 1 Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the 
 English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's 
 hexameters in prose, "that drunken, staggering kind of verse, 
 which is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford 
 and Beechfield, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire 
 in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight 
 aloft on his tiptoes." It was a happy thought to satirize (in this 
 inverted way) prose written in the form of verse, for the last 
 twelve words make a hexameter.
 
 SPENSER 279 
 
 sight would seem to have rendered earth unfit for 
 the habitation of man. They most of them sleep 
 well now, as once they made their readers sleep, 
 and their huge remains lie embedded in the deep 
 morasses of Chalmers and Anderson. We wonder 
 at the length of face and general atrabilious look 
 that mark the portraits of the men of that genera 
 tion, but it is no marvel when even their relaxations 
 were such downright hard work. Fathers when 
 their day on earth was up must have folded down 
 the leaf and left the task to be finished by their 
 sons, a dreary inheritance. Yet both Drayton 
 and Daniel are fine poets, though both of them in 
 their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their 
 genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of 
 them could make poetry coalesce with gazetteering 
 or chronicle-making. It was like trying to put a 
 declaration of love into the forms of a declaration 
 in trover. The " Polyolbion " is nothing less than 
 a versified gazetteer of England and Wales, for 
 tunately Scotland was not yet annexed, or the poem 
 would have been even longer, and already it is the 
 plesiosaurus of verse. Mountains, rivers, and even 
 marshes are personified, to narrate historical epi 
 sodes, or to give us geographical lectures. There 
 are two fine verses in the seventh book, where, 
 speaking of the cutting down some noble woods, he 
 says, 
 
 " Their trunks like aged folk now bare and naked stand, 1 
 As for revenge to heaven each held a withered hand " ; 
 
 and there is a passage about the sea in the twen- 
 
 1 Probably suggested by a verse of Spenser cited infra.
 
 280 SPENSER 
 
 tieth book that comes near being fine ; but the far 
 greater part is mere joiner-work. Consider the 
 life of man, that we flee away as a shadow, that 
 our days are as a post, and then think whether we 
 can afford to honor such a draft upon our time as 
 is implied in these thirty books all in alexandrines ! 
 Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations 
 on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, 
 gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. Yet 
 Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable 
 lightsomeness of fancy, as his " Nymphidia " proves. 
 His poem " To the Cambrio-Britons on their Harp " 
 is full of vigor ; it runs, it leaps, clashing its verses 
 like swords upon bucklers, and moves the pulse to 
 a charge. 
 
 Daniel was in all respects a man of finer mould. 
 He did indeed refine our tongue, and deserved the 
 praise his contemporaries concur in giving him of 
 being " well-languaged." 1 Writing two hundred 
 and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a glos 
 sary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and 
 not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have 
 become obsolete. This certainly indicates both re 
 markable taste and equally remarkable judgment. 
 There is a conscious dignity in his thought and 
 
 1 Edmund Bolton in his Hypercritica says, " The works of Sam 
 Daniel contained somewhat a flat, but yet withal a very pure and 
 copious English, and words as warrantable as any man's, and Jitter 
 perhaps for prose than measure." I have italicized his second 
 thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves 
 in the mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, vol. ii.) 
 Wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to 
 the Countess of Cumberland.
 
 SPENSER 281 
 
 sentiment such as we rarely meet. His best poems 
 always remind me of a table-land, where, because 
 all is so level, we are apt to forget on how lofty a 
 plane we are standing. I think his " Musophilus " 
 the best poem of its kind in the language. The 
 reflections are natural, the expression condensed, 
 the thought weighty, and the language worthy of 
 it. But he also wasted himself on an historical 
 poem, in which the characters were incapable of 
 that remoteness from ordinary associations which 
 is essential to the ideal. Not that we can escape 
 into the ideal by merely emigrating into the past 
 or the unfamiliar. As in the German legend the 
 little black Kobold of prose that haunts us in 
 the present will seat himself on the first load of 
 furniture when we undertake our flitting, if the 
 magician be not there to exorcise him. No man 
 can jump off his own shadow, nor, for that matter, 
 off his own age, and it is very likely that Daniel 
 had only the thinking and languaging parts of a 
 poet's outfit, without the higher creative gift which 
 alone can endow his conceptions with enduring life 
 and with an interest which transcends the parish 
 limits of his generation. In the prologue to his 
 " Masque at Court " he has unconsciously defined 
 his own poetry : 
 
 " Wherein no wild, no rude, no antic sport, 
 But tender passions, motions soft and grave, 
 The still spectator must expect to have." 
 
 And indeed his verse does not snatch you away 
 from ordinary associations and hurry you along 
 with it as is the wont of the higher kinds of poetry,
 
 282 SPENSER 
 
 but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching 
 the peaceful current and lulled by its somewhat 
 monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blun 
 deringly misprinted in all the collections, is that 
 addressed to the Countess of Cumberland. It is an 
 amplification of Horace's Integer Vitce, and when 
 we compare it with the original we miss the point, 
 the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of 
 the original. It is very fine English, but it is the 
 English of diplomacy somehow, and is never down 
 right this or that, but always has the honor to be 
 so or so, with sentiments of the highest consider 
 ation. Yet the praise of well-languaged, since it 
 implies that good writing then as now demanded 
 choice and forethought, is not without interest for 
 those who would classify the elements of a style 
 that will wear and hold its colors well. His dic 
 tion, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of 
 muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give proof 
 of training and endurance. His " Defence of 
 Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than 
 verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds 
 one of Burke, and is more light-armed and mod 
 ern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For 
 us Occidentals he has a kindly prophetic word : 
 
 " And who in time knows whither we may vent 
 
 The treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores 
 
 The gain of our best glory may be sent 
 
 To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 
 
 What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
 
 May come refined with accents that are ours ? " 
 
 During the period when Spenser was getting his 
 artistic training, a great change was going on in
 
 SPENSER 283 
 
 our mother-tongue, and the language of literature 
 was disengaging itself more and more from that of 
 ordinary talk. The poets of Italy, Spain, and 
 France began to rain influence and to modify and 
 refine not only style but vocabulary. Men were 
 discovering new worlds in more senses than one, and 
 the visionary finger of expectation still pointed for 
 ward. There was, as we learn from contemporary 
 pamphlets, very much the same demand for a na 
 tional literature that we have heard in America. 
 This demand was nobly answered in the next gen 
 eration. But no man contributed so much to the 
 transformation of style and language as Spenser ; 
 for not only did he deliberately endeavor at re 
 form, but by the charm of his diction, the novel 
 harmonies of his verse, his ideal method of treat 
 ment, and the splendor of his fancy, he made the 
 new manner popular and fruitful. We can trace 
 in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste 
 through experiment and failure to that assured 
 self-confidence which indicates that he had at 
 length found out the true bent of his genius, 
 that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it 
 might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed pos 
 session of his own individuality. Before his tune 
 the boundary between poetry and prose had not 
 been clearly defined. His great merit lies not 
 only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified 
 common things and gilded them with a ray of en 
 thusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view 
 which he first revealed to his countrymen. He at 
 first sought for that remoteness, which is implied in
 
 284 SPENSER 
 
 an escape from the realism of daily life, in the pas 
 toral, a kind of writing which, oddly enough, 
 from its original intention as a protest in favor of 
 naturalness, and of human as opposed to heroic 
 sentiments, had degenerated into the most artificial 
 of abstractions. But he was soon convinced of his 
 error, and was not long in choosing between an un 
 reality which pretended to be real and those ever 
 lasting realities of the mind which seem unreal 
 only because they lie beyond the horizon of the 
 every-day world, and become visible only when the 
 mirage cf fantasy lifts them up and hangs them in 
 an ideal atmosphere. As in the old fairy-tales, the 
 task which the age imposes on its poet is to weave 
 its straw into a golden tissue ; and when every 
 device has failed, in comes the witch Imagination, 
 and with a touch the miracle is achieved, simple as 
 miracles always are after they are wrought. 
 
 Spenser, like Chaucer a Londoner, was born in 
 1553. 1 Nothing is known of his parents, except 
 that the name of his mother was Elizabeth; but 
 he was of gentle birth, as he more than once in 
 forms us, with the natural satisfaction of a poor 
 man of genius at a time when the business talent 
 of the middle class was opening to it the door of 
 prosperous preferment. In 1569 he was entered 
 
 1 Mr. Hales, in the excellent memoir of the poet prefixed to 
 the Globe edition of his works, puts his birth a year earlier, on 
 the strength of a line in the sixtieth sonnet. But it is not estab 
 lished that this sonnet was written in 1593, and even if it were, 
 a sonnet is not upon oath, and the poet would prefer the round 
 number forty, which suited the measure of his verse, to thirty- 
 nine or forty-one, which might have been truer to the measure of 
 his days.
 
 SPENSER 285 
 
 as a sizar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and in 
 due course took his bachelor's degree in 1573, and 
 his master's in 1576. He is supposed, on insuffi 
 cient grounds, as it appears to me, to have met 
 with some disgust or disappointment during his 
 residence at the University. 1 Between 1576 and 
 1578 Spenser seems to have been with some of his 
 kinsfolk " in the North." It was during this in 
 terval that he conceived his fruitless passion for 
 the Rosalinde, whose jilting him for another shep 
 herd, whom he calls Menalcas, is somewhat per 
 functorily bemoaned in his pastorals. 2 Before the 
 
 1 This has been inferred from a passage in one of Gabriel Har- 
 yey's letters to him. But it would seem more natural, from the 
 many allusions in Harvey's pamphlets against Nash, that it was 
 his own wrongs which he had in mind, and his self-absorption 
 would take it for granted that Spenser sympathized with him in 
 all his grudges. Harvey is a remarkable instance of the refining 
 influence of 'classical studies. Amid the pedantic farrago of his 
 cram-sufficiency (to borrow one of his own words) we come sud 
 denly upon passages whose gravity of sentiment, stateliness of 
 movement, and purity of diction remind us of Landor. These 
 lucid intervals in his overweening vanity explain and justify the 
 friendship of Spenser. Yet the reiteration of emphasis with 
 which he insists on all the world's knowing that Nash had called 
 him an ass, probably gave Shakespeare the hint for one of the 
 most comic touches in the character of Dogberry. 
 
 2 The late Major C. G. Halpine, in a very interesting essay, 
 makes it extremely probable that Rosalinde is the anagram of 
 Rose Daniel, sister of the poet, and married to John Florio. He 
 leaves little doubt, also, that the name of Spenser's wife (hitherto 
 unknown) was Elizabeth Nagle. (See Atlantic Mottihly, vol. ii. 
 674, November, 1858.) Mr. Halpine informed me that he found 
 the substance of his essay among the papers of his father, the 
 late Rev. N. J. Halpine, of Dublin. The latter published in the 
 series of the Shakespeare Society a sprightly little tract entitled 
 Oberon, which, if not quite convincing, is well worth reading for 
 its ingenuity and research.
 
 286 SPENSER 
 
 publication of his " Shepherd's Calendar " in 1579, 
 he had made the acquaintance of Sir Philip Sidney, 
 and was domiciled with him for a time at Penshurst, 
 whether as guest or literary dependant is uncertain. 
 In October, 1579, he is in the household of the 
 Earl of Leicester. In July, 1580, he accompanied 
 Lord Grey de Wilton to Ireland as Secretary, and 
 in that country he spent the rest of his life, with 
 occasional flying visits to England to publish poems 
 or in search of preferment. His residence in that 
 country has been compared to that of Ovid in Pon- 
 tus. And, no doubt, there were certain outward 
 points of likeness. The Irishry by whom he was 
 surrounded were to the full as savage, as hostile, 
 and as tenacious of their ancestral habitudes as 
 the Scythians 1 who made Tomi a prison, and the 
 descendants of the earlier English settlers had de 
 generated as much as the Mix-Hellenes who dis 
 gusted the Latin poet. Spenser himself looked 
 on his life in Ireland as a banishment. In his 
 " Colin Clout 's come Home again " he tells us 
 that Sir Walter Raleigh, who visited him in 1589, 
 and heard what was then finished of the " Faery 
 Queen," 
 
 " 'Gan to cast great liking to my lore 
 And great disliking to my luckless lot, 
 That banisht had myself, like wight f orlore, 
 Into that waste, where I was quite forgot. 
 The which to leave thenceforth he counselled me, 
 Unmeet for man in whom was aught regardful, 
 And wend with him his Cynthia to see, 
 Whose grace was great and bounty most rewardful." 
 
 1 In his prose tract on Ireland, Spenser, perhaps with some 
 memory of Ovid in his mind, derives the Irish mainly from the 
 Scythians.
 
 SPENSER 287 
 
 Bat Spenser was already living at Kilcolman Cas 
 tle (which, with 3,028 acres of land from the for 
 feited estates of the Earl of Desmond, was con 
 firmed to him by grant two years later), amid 
 scenery at once placid and noble, whose varied 
 charm he felt profoundly. He could not complain, 
 with Ovid, 
 
 " Non liber hie ullus, non qui mihi commodet aurem," 
 
 for he was within reach of a cultivated society, 
 which gave him the stimulus of hearty admiration 
 both as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortu 
 nate in a seclusion that prompted study and deep 
 ened meditation, while it enabled him to converse 
 with his genius disengaged from those worldly in 
 fluences which would have disenchanted it of its 
 mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it inglo- 
 riously away. Surely this sequestered nest was 
 more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal 
 visions of the " Faery Queen " and to giving his 
 " soul a loose " than 
 
 " The smoke, the wealth, and noise of Rome, 
 
 And all the busy pageantry 
 That wise men scorn and fools adore." 
 
 Yet he longed for London, if not with the home 
 sickness of Bussy-Rabutin in exile from the Paris 
 ian sun, yet enough to make him joyfully accom 
 pany Raleigh thither in the early winter of 1589, 
 carrying with him the first three books of the great 
 poem begun ten years before. Horace's nonum 
 prematur in annum had been more than complied 
 with, and the success was answerable to the well"
 
 288 SPENSER 
 
 seasoned material and conscientious faithfulness of 
 the work. But Spenser did not stay long in Lon 
 don to enjoy his fame. Seen close at hand, with 
 its jealousies, intrigues, and selfish basenesses, the 
 court had lost the enchantment lent by the distance 
 of Kilcolman. A nature so prone to ideal contem 
 plation as Spenser's would be profoundly shocked 
 by seeing too closely the ignoble springs of contem 
 poraneous policy, and learning by what paltry 
 personal motives the noble opportunities of the 
 world are at any given moment endangered. It is 
 a sad discovery that history is so mainly made by 
 ignoble men. 
 
 "Vide questo globo 
 
 Tal ch'ei sorrise del suo vil sernbiante." 
 
 In his " Colin Clout," written just after his return 
 to Ireland, he speaks of the court in a tone of con 
 temptuous bitterness, in which, as it seems to me, 
 there is more of the sorrow of disillusion than of 
 the gall of personal disappointment. He speaks, 
 so he tells us, 
 
 " To warn young shepherds' wandering wit 
 Which, through report of that life's painted bliss, 
 Abandon quiet home to seek for it 
 And leave their lambs to loss misled amiss ; 
 For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life 
 For shepherd fit to live in that same place, 
 Where each one seeks with malice and with strife 
 To thrust down other into foul disgrace 
 Himself to raise ; and he doth soonest rise 
 That best can handle his deceitful wit 
 In subtle shifts . . . 
 
 To which him needs a guileful hollow heart 
 Masked with fair dissembling courtesy, 
 A filed tongue f urnisht with terms of art,
 
 SPENSER 289 
 
 No art of school, but courtiers' schoolery. 
 
 For arts of school have there small countenance, 
 
 Counted but toys to busy idle brains, 
 
 And there professors find small maintenance, 
 
 But to be instruments of others' gains, 
 
 Nor is there place for any gentle wit 
 
 Unless to please it can itself apply. 
 
 Even such is all their vaunted vanity, 
 
 Naught else but smoke that passeth soon away. 
 
 So they themselves for praise of fools do sell, 
 And all their wealth for painting on a wall. 
 
 Whiles single Truth and simple Honesty 
 Do wander up and down despised of alL" x 
 
 And again in his "Mother Hubberd's Tale," 
 in the most pithy and masculine verses he ever 
 wrote : 
 
 " Most miserable man, whom wicked Fate 
 Hath brought to Court to sue for Had-I-wist 
 That few have found and many one hath mist! 
 Full little knowest thou that hast not tried 
 What hell it is in suing long to bide ; 
 To lose good days that might be better spent, 
 To waste long nights in pensive discontent, 
 To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow, 
 To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow, 
 To have thy prince's grace yet want her Peers', 
 To have thy asking yet wait many years, 
 To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares, 
 To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs, 
 To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
 To spend, to give, to want, to be undone. 
 
 Whoever leaves sweet home, where mean estate 
 In safe assurance, without strife or hate, 
 
 1 Compare Shakespeare's LXVI. Sonnet.
 
 290 SPEXSER 
 
 Finds all things needful for contentment meek, 
 And will to court for shadows vain to seek, 
 
 That curse God send unto mine enemy ! "' 1 
 
 When Spenser had once got safely back to the 
 secure retreat and serene companionship of his 
 great poem, with what profound and pathetic exul 
 tation must he have recalled the verses of Dante I 
 
 " Chi dietro a jura, e chi ad aforismi 
 Sen giva, e chi seguendo sacerdozio, 
 E chi regnar per f orza o per sofismi. 
 E chi rubare. e chi civil negozio, 
 Chi nei diletti della came involto 
 S' affaticava, e chi si dava all' ozio, 
 Qnando da tiitte queste cose sciolto, 
 Con Beatrice m' era suso in cielo 
 Cotanto gloriosamente accolto." * 
 
 "What Spenser says of the indifference of the 
 court to learning and literature is the more remark 
 able because he himself was by no means an un 
 successful suitor. Queen Elizabeth bestowed on 
 him a pension of fifty pounds, and shortly after he 
 received the grant of lands already mentioned. It 
 is said, indeed, that Lord Burleigh in some way 
 
 1 This poem, published in 1591, was, Spenser tells us in his 
 dedication, "long sithens composed in the raw conceit of my 
 youth." But he had evidently retouched it. The verses quoted 
 show a firmer hand than is generally seen in it, and we are safe in 
 assuming that they were added after his visit to England. Dr. 
 Johnson epigrammatized Spenser's indictment into 
 
 ' There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, 
 Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail," 
 
 but I think it loses in pathos more than it gains in point 
 
 2 Paradiso, XL 4-12. Spenser was familiar with the Divina 
 Commedia, though I do not remember that his commentators have 
 pointed out his chief obligations to it.
 
 SPENSER 291 
 
 hindered the advancement of the poet, who more 
 than once directly alludes to him either in reproach 
 or remonstrance. In " The Ruins of Time," after 
 speaking of the death of Walsingham, 
 
 " Since whose decease learning lies unregarded, 
 And men of annes do wander unrewarded," 
 
 he gives the following reason for their neglect : 
 
 " For he that now wields all things at his will. 
 Scorns th' one and th' other in his deeper skill. 
 O grief of griefs ! O gall of all good hearts, 
 To see that virtue should despised be 
 Of him that first was raised for virtuous parts, 
 And now, broad-spreading like an aged tree, 
 Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be : 
 O let the man of whom the Muse is scorned 
 Nor live nor dead be of the Muse adorned ! " 
 
 And in the introduction to the fourth book of the 
 " Faery Queen," he says again : 
 
 " The rugged forehead that with grave foresight 
 Wields kingdoms' causes and affairs of state, 
 My looser rhymes, I wot, doth sharply wite 
 For praising Love, as I have done of late, 
 
 By which frail youth is oft to folly led 
 
 Through false allurement of that pleasing bait, 
 
 That better were in virtues discipled 
 
 Than with vain poems' weeds to have their fancies fed, 
 
 " Such ones ill judge of love that cannot love 
 Nor in their frozen hearts feel kindly flame ; 
 Forthy they ought not thing unknown reprove, 
 Ne natural affection faultless blame 
 For fault of few that have abused the same : 
 For it of honor and all virtue is 
 The root, and brings forth glorious flowers of fame 
 That crown true lovers with immortal bliss, 
 The meed of them that love and do not live amiss."
 
 292 SPENSER 
 
 If Lord Burleigh could not relish such a dish of 
 nightingales' tongues as the "Faery Queen," he 
 is very much more to be pitied than Spenser. The 
 sensitive purity of the poet might indeed well be 
 wounded when a poem in which he proposed to 
 himself "to discourse at large " of "the ethick part 
 of Moral Philosophy " 1 could be so misinterpreted. 
 But Spenser speaks in the same strain and without 
 any other than a general application in his " Tears 
 of the Muses," and his friend Sidney undertakes 
 the defence of poesy because it was undervalued. 
 But undervalued by whom ? By the only persons 
 about whom he knew or cared anything, those 
 whom we should now call Society and who were 
 then called the Court. The inference I would draw 
 is that, among the causes which contributed to the 
 marvellous efflorescence of genius in the last quar 
 ter of the sixteenth century, the influence of direct 
 patronage from above is to be reckoned at almost 
 nothing. 2 Then, as when the same phenomenon 
 
 1 His own words as reported by Lodowick Bryskett. (Todd's 
 Spenser, I. Ix. ) The whole passage is Tery interesting as giving 
 us the only glimpse we get of the living Spenser in actual contact 
 with his fellow-men. It shows him to us, as we could wish to see 
 him, surrounded with loving respect, companionable and helpful. 
 Bryskett tells us that he was " perfect in the Greek tongue," and 
 " also very well read in philosophy both moral and natural." He 
 encouraged Bryskett in the study of Greek, and offered to help 
 him in it. Comparing the last verse of the above citation of the 
 Faery Queen with other passages in Spenser, I cannot help think 
 ing that he wrote, " do not love amiss." 
 
 " And know, sweet prince, when you shall come to know, 
 
 That 't is not in the power of kings to raise 
 
 A spirit for verse that is not born thereto ; 
 
 Nor are they born in every prince's days." 
 
 Daniel's Dedic. Trag. of Philotas.
 
 SPENSER 293 
 
 has Happened elsewhere, there must have been a 
 sympathetic public. Literature, properly so called, 
 draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's 
 common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered 
 leaf-mould of countless generations (ofy irep <f>vX\u>v 
 yeveT/), and not from any top-dressing capriciously 
 scattered over the surface at some master's bid 
 ding. 1 England had long been growing more truly 
 insular in language and political ideas when the 
 Reformation came to precipitate her national con 
 sciousness by secluding her more completely from 
 the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Eng 
 lishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating 
 foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom 
 they were proud or not as the case might be, but 
 there was no England as a separate entity from 
 the sovereign who embodied it for the time being. 2 
 But now an English people began to be dimly 
 aware of itself. Their having got a religion to 
 themselves must have intensified them much as 
 the having a god of their own did the Jews. The 
 
 1 Louis XIV. is commonly supposed in some miraculous way to 
 have created French literature. He may more truly be said to 
 have petrified it so far as his influence went. The French re 
 naissance in the preceding century was produced by causes similar 
 in essentials to those which brought about that in England not 
 long after. The grand siecle grew by natural processes of devel 
 opment out of that which had preceded it, and which, to the 
 impartial foreigner at least, has more flavor, and more French 
 flavor too, than the Gallo-Roman usurper that pushed it from its 
 stool. The best modern French poetry has been forced to temper 
 its verses in the colder natural springs of the ante-classic period. 
 
 2 In the Elizabethan drama, the words "England" and 
 "France" are constantly used to signify the kings of those 
 countries.
 
 294 SPENSER 
 
 exhilaration of relief after the long tension of anx 
 iety, when the Spanish Armada was overwhelmed 
 like the hosts of Pharaoh, while it confirmed their 
 assurance of a provincial deity, must also have 
 been like sunshine to bring into flower all that 
 there was of imaginative or sentimental in the 
 English nature, already just in the first flush of its 
 spring. 
 
 ( " The yonge sonne 
 Had in the Bull half of his course yronne.") 
 
 And just at this moment of blossoming every breeze 
 was dusty with the golden pollen of Greece, Rome, 
 and Italy. If Keats could say, when he first 
 opened Chapman's Homer, 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken ; 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacific, and all his men 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise," 
 
 if Keats could say this, whose mind had been un 
 consciously fed with the results of this culture, 
 results that permeated all thought, all literature, 
 and all talk, fancy what must have been the 
 awakening shock and impulse communicated to 
 men's brains by the revelation of this new world of 
 thought and fancy, an unveiling gradual yet sud 
 den, like that of a great organ, which discovered 
 to them what a wondrous instrument was in the 
 soul of man with its epic and lyric stops, its deep 
 thunders of tragedy and its passionate vox Jiumana ! 
 It might almost seem as if Shakespeare had typified 
 all this in Miranda, when she cries out at first sight 
 of the king and his courtiers,
 
 SPENSER ' 295 
 
 " O, wonder ! 
 
 How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
 How beauteous mankind is ! O, brave new world 
 That hath such people in 't I " 
 
 The civil wars of the Roses had been a barren 
 period in English literature, because they had been 
 merely dynastic squabbles, in which no great prin 
 ciples were involved which could shake all minds 
 with controversy and heat them to intense convic 
 tion. A conflict of opposing ambitions wears out 
 the moral no less than the material forces of a 
 people, but the ferment of hostile ideas and convic 
 tions may realize resources of character which 
 before were only potential, may transform a merely 
 gregarious multitude into a nation proud in its 
 strength, sensible of the dignity and duty which 
 strength involves, and groping after a common 
 ideal. Some such transformation had been wrought 
 or was going on in England. For the first time a 
 distinct image of her was disengaging itself from 
 the tangled blur of tradition and association in the 
 minds of her children, and it was now only that her 
 great poet could speak exultingly to an audience 
 that would understand him with a passionate sym 
 pathy, of 
 
 " This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 This precious stone set in a silver sea, 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 
 This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, 
 England, bound in with the triumphant sea ! " 
 
 Such a period can hardly recur again, but some 
 thing like it, something pointing back to similar 
 producing causes, is observable in the revival of
 
 296 SPENSER 
 
 English imaginative literature at the close of the 
 last and in the early years of the present century. 
 Again, after long fermentation, there was a .war of 
 principles, again the national consciousness was 
 heightened and stung by a danger to the national 
 existence, and again there was a crop of great poets 
 and heroic men. 
 
 Spenser once more visited England, bringing 
 with him three more books of the " Faery Queen," 
 in 1595. He is supposed to have remained there 
 during the two following years. 1 In 1594 he had 
 been married to the lady celebrated in his some 
 what artificial amoretti. By her he had four chil 
 dren. He was now at the height of his felicity ; 
 by universal acclaim the first poet of his age, and 
 the one obstacle to his material advancement (if 
 obstacle it was) had been put out of the way by 
 the death of Lord Burleigh, August, 1598. In the 
 next month he was recommended in a letter from 
 Queen Elizabeth for the shrievalty of the county 
 of Cork. But alas for Polycrates ! In October 
 the wild kerns and gallowglasses rose in no mood 
 for sparing the house of Pindarus. They sacked 
 and burned his castle, from which he with his wife 
 and children barely escaped. 2 He sought shelter 
 
 1 I say supposed, for the names of his two sons, Sylvanus and 
 Peregrine, indicate that they were born in Ireland, and that Spen 
 ser continued to regard it as a wilderness and his abode there as 
 exile. The two other children are added on the authority of a 
 pedigree drawn up by Sir W. Betham and cited in Mr. Hales's 
 Life of Spenser prefixed to the Globe edition. 
 
 2 Ben Jonson told Drummond that one child perished in the 
 flames. But he was speaking after an interval of twenty-one
 
 SPENSER 297 
 
 in London, and died there on the 16th January, 
 1599, at a tavern in King Street, Westminster. 
 He was buried in the neighboring Abbey next to 
 Chaucer, at the cost of the Earl of Essex, poets 
 bearing his pall and casting verses into his grave,, 
 He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his 
 life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main 
 the lives of the great poets must have commonly 
 been. If they feel more passionately the pang of 
 the moment, so also the compensations are incalcu 
 lable, and not the least of them this very capacity 
 of passionate emotion. The real good fortune is to 
 be measured, not by more or less of outward pros- 
 years, and, of course, from hearsay. Spenser's misery was exag 
 gerated by succeeding poets, who used him to point a moral, and 
 from the shelter of his tomb launched many a shaft of sarcasm at 
 an unappreciative public. Phineas Fletcher in his Purple Island 
 (a poem which reminds us of the Faery Queen by the supreme 
 tediousness of its allegory, but in nothing else) set the example in 
 the best verse he ever wrote : 
 
 " Poorly, poor man, he lived ; poorly, poor man, he died." 
 Gradually this poetical tradition established itself firmly as au 
 thentic history. Spenser could never have been poor, except by 
 comparison. The whole story of his later days has a strong savor 
 of legend. He must have had ample warning of Tyrone's rebel 
 lion, and would probably have sent away his wife and children to 
 Cork, if he did not go thither himself. I am inclined to think 
 that he did, carrying his papers with him, and among them the 
 two cantos of Mutability, first published in 1611. These, it is 
 most likely, were the only ones he ever completed, for, with all 
 his abundance, he was evidently a laborious finisher. When we 
 remember that ten years were given to the elaboration of the first 
 three books, and that five more elapsed before the next three were 
 ready, we shall waste no vain regrets on the six concluding books 
 supposed to have been lost by the carelessness of an imaginary 
 servant on their way from Ireland.
 
 298 SPENSER 
 
 perity, but by the opportunity given for the devel 
 opment and free play of the genius. It should be 
 remembered that the power of expression which 
 exaggerates their griefs is also no inconsiderable 
 consolation for them. We should measure what 
 Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the 
 bitterness of the unavailing tears he shed for Rosa- 
 linde. A careful analysis of these leaves no per 
 ceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to 
 believe that the passion itself was not much more 
 real than the pastoral accessories of pipe and crook. 
 I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more 
 than one profound passion in his life, and that 
 luckily was for his " Faery Queen." He was for 
 tunate in the friendship of the best men and women 
 of his tune, in the seclusion which made him free 
 of the still better society of the past, in the loving 
 recognition of his countrymen. All that we know 
 of him is amiable and of good report. He was 
 faithful to the friendships of his youth, pure in his 
 loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal 
 with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, 
 but the sweetener and ennobler of the street and 
 the fireside. 
 
 There are two ways of measuring a poet, either 
 by an absolute aesthetic standard, or relatively to 
 his position in the literary history of his country 
 and the conditions of his generation. Both should 
 be borne in mind as coefficients in a perfectly fair 
 judgment. If his positive merit is to be settled ir 
 revocably by the former, yet an intelligent criticism 
 will find its advantage not only in considering what
 
 SPENSER 299 
 
 he was, but what, under the given circumstances, 
 it was possible for him to be. 
 
 The fact that the great poem of Spenser was in 
 spired by the Orlando of Ariosto, and written in 
 avowed emulation of it, and that the poet almost 
 always needs to have his fancy set agoing by the 
 hint of some predecessor, must not lead us to over 
 look his manifest claim to originality. It is not 
 what a poet takes, but what he makes out of what 
 he has taken, that shows what native force is in 
 him. Above all, did his mind dwell complacently 
 in those forms and fashions which in their very 
 birth are already obsolescent, or was it instinctively 
 drawn to those qualities which are permanent in 
 language and whatever is wrought in it? There 
 is much in Spenser that is contemporary and eva 
 nescent ; hut the substance of him is durable, and 
 his work was the deliberate result of intelligent 
 
 O 
 
 purpose and ample culture. The publication of 
 his "Shepherd's Calendar" in 1579 (though the 
 poem itself be of little interest) is one of the epochs 
 in our literature. Spenser had at least the origi 
 nality to see clearly and to feel keenly that it was 
 essential to bring poetry back again to some kind 
 of understanding with nature. His immediate pre 
 decessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind 
 of bird of paradise, born to float somewhere be 
 tween heaven and earth, with no very well defined 
 relation to either. It is true that the nearest ap 
 proach they were able to make to this airy ideal 
 was a shuttlecock, winged with a bright plume or 
 so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and
 
 300 SPENSER 
 
 feathers, which they bandied back and forth from 
 one stanza to another, with the useful ambition of 
 keeping it up as long as they could. To my mind 
 the old comedy of " Gammer Gurton's Needle " 
 is worth the whole of them. It may be coarse, 
 earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at 
 least a man among men, and not a humbug among 
 humbugs. 
 
 The form of Spenser's " Shepherd's Calendar," 
 it is true, is artificial, absurdly so if you look at it 
 merely from the outside, not, perhaps, the wisest 
 way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a 
 volume of the " Congressional Globe," but the 
 spirit of it is fresh and original. We have at last 
 got over the superstition that shepherds and shep 
 herdesses are any wiser or simpler than other peo 
 ple. We know that wisdom can be won only by 
 wide commerce with men and books, and that sim 
 plicity, whether of manners or style, is the crowning 
 result of the highest culture. But the pastorals of 
 Spenser were very different things, different both in 
 the moving spirit and the resultant form from the 
 later ones of Browne or the " Piscatory Eclogues " 
 of Phinehas Fletcher. And why ? Browne and 
 Fletcher wrote because Spenser had written, but 
 Spenser wrote from a strong inward impulse an 
 instinct it might be called to escape at all risks 
 into the fresh air from that horrible atmosphere into 
 which rhymer after rhymer had been pumping car 
 bonic-acid gas with the full force of his lungs, and 
 in which all sincerity was on the edge of suffocation. 
 His longing for something truer and better was as
 
 SPENSER 301 
 
 honest as that which led Tacitus so long before to 
 idealize the Germans, and Eousseau so long after 
 to make an angel of the savage. 
 
 Spenser himself supremely overlooks the whole 
 chasm between himself and Chaucer, as Dante be 
 tween himself and Virgil. He called Chaucer mas 
 ter, as Milton was afterwards to call him. And, 
 even while he chose the most artificial of all forms, 
 his aim that of getting back to nature and life 
 was conscious, I have no doubt, to himself, and 
 must be obvious to whoever reads with anything 
 but the ends of his fingers. It is true that Sannaz- 
 zaro had brought the pastoral into fashion again, 
 and that two of Spenser's are little more than 
 translations from Marot ; but for manner he in 
 stinctively turned back to Chaucer, the first and 
 then only great English poet. He has given com 
 mon instead of classic names to his personages, 
 for characters they can hardly be called. Above 
 all, he has gone to the provincial dialects for words 
 wherewith to enlarge and freshen his poetical vo 
 cabulary. 1 I look upon the " Shepherd's Calen- 
 
 1 Sir Philip Sidney did not approve of this. ' ' That same fram 
 ing 1 of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since 
 neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in 
 Italian did affect it." (Defence of Poesy.) Ben Jonson, on the 
 other hand, said that Guarini ' ' kept not decorum in making 
 shepherds speak as well as himself could." (Conversations with 
 Drummond.) I think Sidney was right, for the poets' Arcadia 
 is a purely ideal world, and should be treated accordingly. But 
 whoever looks into the glossary appended to the Calendar by 
 E. K., will be satisfied that Spenser's object was to find unhack 
 neyed and poetical words rather than such as should seem more on 
 a level with the speakers. See also the Epistle Dedicatory. I 
 cannot help thinking that . K. was Spenser himself, with occa-
 
 802 SPENSER 
 
 dar " as being no less a conscious and deliberate at 
 tempt at reform than Thomson's " Seasons " were 
 in the topics, and Wordsworth's " Lyrical Ballads " 
 in the language of poetry. But the great merit 
 of these pastorals was not so much in their mat 
 ter as their manner. They show a sense of style 
 in its larger meaning hitherto displayed by no 
 English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought 
 back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as 
 it is contained in decorum. But here was a new 
 language, a choice and arrangement of words, a 
 variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most 
 grateful to the ears of men. If not passion, there 
 was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the 
 somewhat stately movement of Spenser's mind 
 would allow him to come. Sidney had tried many 
 experiments in versification, which are curious and 
 interesting, especially his attempts to naturalize the 
 sliding rhymes of Sannazzaro in English. But 
 there is everywhere the uncertainty of a 'prentice 
 hand. Spenser shows himself already a master, at 
 least in verse, and we can trace the studies of Mil 
 ton, a yet greater master, in the " Shepherd's Cal 
 endar " as well as in the " Faery Queen." We 
 have seen that Spenser, under the misleading in 
 fluence of Sidney 1 and Harvey, triect his hand at 
 English hexameters. But his great glory is that 
 he taught his own language to sing and move to 
 measures harmonious and noble. Chaucer had 
 
 sional interjections of Harvey. Who else could have written such 
 English as many passages in this Epistle ? 
 
 1 It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has 
 come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of 
 Sidney's are pleasing.
 
 SPENSER 303 
 
 done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show 
 elsewhere, 1 but Spenser was to prove 
 
 " That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired 
 For verse, and that sweet music to the ear 
 Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this." 
 
 The " Shepherd's Calendar " contains perhaps the 
 most picturesquely imaginative verse which Spen 
 ser has written. It is in the eclogue for February, 
 where he tells us of the 
 
 "Faded oak 
 
 Whose body is sere, whose branches broke, 
 Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire." 
 
 It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would 
 have liked in secret, that Dr. Johnson would have 
 proved to be untranslatable into reasonable prose, 
 and which the imagination welcomes at once with 
 out caring whether it be exactly conformable to 
 barbara or celarent. Another pretty verse in the 
 same eclogue, 
 
 " But gently took that ungeutly came," 
 
 pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was 
 his own. But in general it is not so much the sen 
 timents and images that are new as the modula 
 tion of the verses in which they float. The cold 
 obstruction of two centuries thaws, and the stream 
 of speech once more let loose, seeks out its old 
 windings, or overflows musically in unpractised 
 channels. The service which Spenser did to our 
 literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is in 
 calculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous 
 dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong 
 1 See Literary Essays, iii. 338 seqq.
 
 804 SPENSER 
 
 the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the 
 transition from the cast-iron stiffness of " Ferrex 
 and Porrex " to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher 
 and Shakespeare. It was he that 
 
 . " Taught the dumb on high to sing, 
 
 And heavy ignorance aloft to fly : 
 That added feathers to the learned's wing 1 , 
 And gave to grace a double majesty." 
 
 I do not mean that in the " Shepherd's Calen 
 dar " he had already achieved that transmutation 
 of language and metre by which he was afterwards 
 to endow English verse with the most varied and 
 majestic of stanzas, in which the droning old 
 alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a feel 
 ing of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, 
 like M. Jourdain, that he had been talking prose 
 all his life, but already he gave clear indications 
 of the tendency and premonitions of the power 
 which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfec 
 tion. A harmony and alacrity of language like 
 this were unexampled in English verse : 
 
 " Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook 
 
 Do bathe your breast, 
 Forsake your watery bowers and hither look 
 
 At my request. . . . 
 
 And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell, 
 Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, 
 
 Help me to blaze 
 
 Her worthy praise, 
 Which in her sex doth all excel. " 
 
 Here we have the natural gait of the measure, some 
 what formal and slow, as befits an invocation , and 
 now mark how the same feet shall be made to 
 quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune :
 
 SPENSER 305 
 
 " Bring here the pink and purple columbine, 
 
 With gilliflowers ; 
 Bring coronations and sops in wine, 
 
 Worne of paramours ; 
 
 Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies, 
 And cowslips and king-cups and loved lilies ; 
 
 The pretty paunce 
 
 And the chevisance 
 Shall match with the fair flowerdelice." l 
 
 The argument prefixed by E. K. to the tenth 
 Eclogue has a special interest for us as showing 
 how high a conception Spenser had of poetry and 
 the poet's office. By Cuddy he evidently means 
 himself, though choosing out of modesty another 
 
 1 Of course ditties and lilies must be read with a slight accen 
 tuation of the last syllable (permissible then), in order to chime 
 with delice. In the first line I have put here instead of hether, 
 which (like other words where th comes between two vowels) was 
 then very often a monosyllable, in order to throw the accent back 
 more strongly on bring, where it belongs. Spenser's innovation 
 lies in making his verses by ear instead of on the finger-tips, and 
 in valuing the stave more than any of the single verses that 
 compose it. This is the secret of his easy superiority to all others 
 in the stanza which he composed, and which bears his name. Mil 
 ton (who got more of his schooling in these matters from Spenser 
 than anywhere else) gave this principle a greater range, and ap 
 plied it with more various mastery. I have little doubt that the 
 tune of the last stanza cited above was clinging in Shakespeare's 
 ear when he wrote those exquisite verses in Midsummer Night's 
 Dream (" I know a bank "), where our grave pentameter is in 
 like manner surprised into a lyrical movement. See also the 
 pretty song in the eclogue for August. Ben Jonson, too, evi 
 dently caught some cadences from Spenser for his lyrics. I need 
 hardly say that in those eclogues (May, for example) where Spen 
 ser thought he was imitating what wiseacres used to call the rid 
 ing-rhyme of Chaucer, he fails most lamentably. He had evidently 
 learned to scan his master's verses better when he wrote hig Mother 
 Hubberd's Tale.
 
 806 SPENSER 
 
 name instead of the familiar Colin. " In Cuddy 
 is set forth the perfect pattern of a Poet, which, 
 finding no maintenance of his state and studies, 
 complaineth of the contempt of Poetry and the 
 causes thereof, specially having been in all ages, 
 and even amongst the most barbarous, always of 
 singular account and honor, and being indeed so 
 worthy and commendable an art, or rather no art, 
 but a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to be 
 gotten by labor and learning, but adorned with 
 both, and poured into the wit by a certain Enthou- 
 siasmos and celestial inspiration, as the author 
 hereof elsewhere at large discourseth in his book 
 called THE ENGLISH POET, which book being 
 lately come into my hands, I mind also by God's 
 grace, upon further advisement, to publish." E. K., 
 whoever he was, never carried out his intention, 
 and the book is no doubt lost ; a loss to be borne 
 with less equanimity than that of Cicero's treatise 
 De Gloria, once possessed by Petrarch. The pas 
 sage I have italicized is most likely an extract, and 
 reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton. 
 Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, "he [Ben 
 Jonson] hath by heart some verses of Spenser's 
 4 Calendar,' about wine, between Coline and Per- 
 cye " (Cuddie and Piers). 1 These verses are in 
 this eclogue, and are worth quoting both as having 
 the approval of dear old Ben, the best critic of the 
 day, and because they are a good sample of Spen 
 ser's earlier verse : 
 
 1 Drummond. it will be remarked, speaking from memory, takes 
 Cuddy to be Colin. In Milton's Lycidas there are reminiscences
 
 SPENSER 307 
 
 " Thou kenst not, Percie, how the rhyme should rage ; 
 O, if my temples were distained with wine, 
 And girt in garlands of wild ivy-twine, 
 How I could rear the Muse on stately stage 
 
 And teach her tread aloft in buskin fine 
 With quaint Bellona in her equipage ! " 
 
 In this eclogue he gives hints of that spacious 
 style which was to distinguish him, and which, like 
 his own Fame, 
 
 " With golden wings aloft doth fly 
 Above the reach of ruinous decay, 
 And with brave plumes doth beat the azure sky, 
 Admired of base-born men from far away." * 
 
 He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and 
 foreboding the " Faery Queen " : 
 
 of this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are tihe 
 more evident, but I think that Spenser's 
 
 " Cuddle, the praise is better than the price," 
 suggested Milton's 
 
 " But not the praise, 
 
 Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears." 
 Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare 
 
 " But, ah, Maecenas is yclad in clay, 
 And great Augustus long ago is dead, 
 And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead," 
 with 
 
 " King Pandion, he is dead ; 
 
 All thy friends are lapt in lead." 
 
 It is odd that Shakespeare, in his " fapt in lead," is more SpeUv 
 serian than Spenser himself, from whom he caught this ' ' hunting 
 of the letter." 
 
 1 Ruins of Time. It is perhaps not considering too nicely 
 to remark how often this image of wings recurred to Spenser's 
 mind. A certain aerial latitude was essential to the large circlings 
 of his style.
 
 308 SPENSER 
 
 " Lift thyself up out of the lowly dust 
 
 To 'doubted knights whose woundless armor rusts 
 And helms unbruise'd waxen daily brown : 
 There may thy Muse display her fluttering wing, 
 And stretch herself at large from East to West." 
 
 Verses like these, especially the last (which Dry den 
 would have liked), were such as English ears 
 had not yet heard, and curiously prophetic of the 
 maturer man. The language and verse of Spen 
 ser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there 
 is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help 
 being poetical. 
 
 It was this instantly felt if not easily definable 
 charm that forthwith won for Spenser his never- 
 disputed rank as the chief English poet of that 
 age, and gave him a popularity which, during his 
 life and in the following generation, was, in its 
 select quality, without a competitor. It may be 
 thought that I lay too much stress on this single 
 attribute of diction. But apart from its impor 
 tance in his case as showing their way to the poets 
 who were just then learning the accidence of their 
 art, and leaving them a material to work in already 
 mellowed to their hands, it should be remembered 
 that it is subtle perfection of phrase and that 
 happy coalescence of music and meaning, where 
 each reinforces the other, that define a man as poet 
 and make all ears converts and partisans. Spenser 
 was an epicure in language. He loved " seld-seen 
 costly " words perhaps too well, and did not always 
 distinguish between mere strangeness and that nov 
 elty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some
 
 SPENSER 309 
 
 charm of seeming association. He had not the con 
 centrated power which can sometimes pack infinite 
 riches in the little room of a single epithet, for his 
 genius is rather for dilation than compression. 1 
 But he was, with the exception of Milton and pos 
 sibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His 
 familiarity with ancient and modern literature was 
 easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in 
 his art, he caught the grand manner and high-bred 
 ways of the society he frequented. But even to 
 the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusti 
 city of phrase that was habitual with the genera 
 tion that preceded him. In the fifth book of the 
 " Faery Queen," where he is describing the passion 
 of Britomart at the supposed infidelity of Arthe- 
 gall, he descends to a Teniers-like realism, 2 he 
 
 1 Perhaps his most striking single epithet is the ' ' sea-shoulder 
 ing whales," B. II. 12, xxiii. His ear seems to delight in prolon 
 gations. For example, he makes such words as glorious, gratious, 
 joyeous, havior, chapelet dactyls, and that, not at the end of 
 verses, where it would not have been unusual, but in the first 
 half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it 
 were) in the uniformity of his verse by a practice exactly the op 
 posite of this. He also shuns a hiatus which does not seem to 
 have been generally displeasing to Spenser's ear, though perhaps 
 in the compound epithet bees-alluring he intentionally avoids it by 
 the plural form. 
 
 2 " Like as a wayward child, whose sounder sleep 
 
 Is broken with some fearful dream's affright, 
 With froward will doth set himself to weep 
 Ne can be stilled for all his nurse's might, 
 But kicks and squalls and shrieks for fell despight, 
 Now scratching her and her loose locks misusing, 
 Now seeking darkness and now seeking light, 
 Then craving suck, and then the suck refusing." 
 He would doubtless have justified himself by the familiar
 
 310 SPENSER 
 
 whose verses generally remind us of the dancing 
 Hours of Guido, where we catch but a glimpse of 
 the real earth and that far away beneath. But 
 his habitual style is that of gracious loftiness and 
 refined luxury. 
 
 He first shows his mature hand in the " Muiopot- 
 mos," the most airily fanciful of his poems, a mar 
 vel for delicate conception and treatment, whose 
 breezy verse seems to float between a blue sky and 
 golden earth in imperishable sunshine. No other 
 English poet has found the variety and compass 
 which enlivened the octave stanza under his sensi 
 tive touch. It can hardly be doubted that in Cla 
 rion the butterfly he has symbolized himself, and 
 surely never was the poetic temperament so pictur 
 esquely exemplified : 
 
 " Over the fields, in his frank lustiness, 
 And all the champaign o'er, he soared light, 
 And all the country wide he did possess, 
 Feeding npon their pleasures bounteously, 
 That none gainsaid and none did him envy. 
 
 " The woods, the rivers, and the meadows green, 
 With his air-cutting wings he measured wide, 
 Nor did he leave the mountains bare unseen, 
 Nor the rank grassy fens' delights untried ; 
 But none of these, however sweet they been, 
 Mote please his fancy, or him cause to abide ; 
 His choicef ul sense with every change doth flit ; 
 No common things may please a wavering wit. 
 
 example of Homer's comparing Ajax to a donkey in the eleventh 
 book of the Iliad. So also in the Epithalamion it grates our nerves 
 to hear, 
 
 " Pour not by cups, but by the bellyful, 
 
 Pour out to all that wull." 
 
 Such examples serve to show how strong a dose of Spenser's au- 
 rum potabile the language needed.
 
 SPENSER 311 
 
 " To the gay gardens his unstaid desire 
 
 Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights ; 
 There lavish Nature, iii her hest attire, 
 Pours forth sweet odors and alluring sights, 
 And Art, with her contending doth aspire, 
 To excel the natural with made delights ; 
 And all that fair or pleasant may be found, 
 In riotous excess doth there abound. 
 
 " There he arriving, round about doth flie, 
 From bed to bed, from one to the other border, 
 And takes survey with curious busy eye, 
 Of every flower and herb there set in order, 
 Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly, 
 Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder, 
 Ne with his feet their silken leaves displace, 
 But pastures on the pleasures of each place. 
 
 " And evermore with most variety 
 And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet) 
 He casts his glutton sense to satisfy, 
 Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet, 
 Or of the dew which yet on them doth lie, 
 Now in the same bathing his tender feet ; 
 And then he percheth on some branch thereby 
 To weather him and his moist wings to dry. 
 
 " And then again he turneth to his play, 
 To spoil [plunder] the pleasures of that paradise ; 
 The wholesome sage, the lavender still gray, 
 Rank-smelling rue, and cummin good for eyes, 
 The roses reigning in the pride of May, 
 Sharp hyssop good for green wounds' remedies, 
 Fair marigolds, and bees-alluring thyme, 
 Sweet marjoram and daisies decking prime, 
 
 " Cool violets, and orpine growing still, 
 Embathed balm, and cheerful galingale, 
 Fresh costmary and breathf ul camomill, 
 Dull poppy and drink-quickening setuale, 
 Vein-healing vervain and head-purging dill,
 
 312 SPENSER 
 
 Sound savory, and basil hearty-hale, 
 Fat coleworts and comforting perseline, 
 Cold lettuce, and refreshing rosemarine. 1 
 
 " And whatso else of virtue good or ill, 
 Grew in this garden, fetched from far away, 
 Of every one he takes and tastes at will, 
 And on their pleasures greedily doth prey ; 
 Then, when he hath both played and fed his fill, 
 In the warm sun he doth himself embay, 
 And there him rests in riotous suffisance 
 Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance. 
 
 " What more felicity can fall to creature 
 Than to enjoy delight with liberty, 
 And to be lord of all the works of nature ? 
 To reign in the air from earth to highest sky, 
 To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, 
 To take whatever thing doth please the eye ? 
 Who rests not pleased with such happiness, 
 Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness." 
 
 The " Muiopotmos " pleases us all the more that 
 it vibrates in us a string of classical association by 
 adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne. 
 "Talking the other day with a friend (the late 
 Mr. Keats) about Dante, he observed that when 
 ever so great a poet told us anything in addition or 
 continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to 
 be regarded as classical authority. For instance, 
 said he, when he tells us of that characteristic 
 death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the in- 
 
 1 I could not bring myself to root out this odorous herb-garden, 
 though it make my extract too long. It is a pretty reminiscence 
 of his master Chaucer, but is also very characteristic of Spenser 
 himself. He could not help planting a flower or two among his 
 serviceable plants, and after all this abundance he is not satisfied, 
 but begins the next stanza with "And whatso else."
 
 SPENSER 313 
 
 formation as authentic, and be glad that we have 
 more news of Ulysses than we looked for." l We 
 can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad 
 to admit this exquisitely fantastic illumination into 
 his margin. 
 
 No German analyzer of aesthetics has given us so 
 convincing a definition of the artistic nature as 
 these radiant verses. " To reign in the air " was 
 certainly Spenser's function. And yet the com 
 mentators, who seem never willing to let their poet 
 be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not been 
 so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, 
 try to make out from his "Mother Hubberd's 
 Tale " that he might have been a very sensible 
 matter-of-fact man if he would. For my own part, 
 I am quite willing to confess that I like him none 
 the worse for being tmpractical, and that my read 
 ing has convinced me that being too poetical is the 
 rarest fault of poets. Practical men are not so 
 scarce, one would think, and I am not sure that 
 the tree was a gainer when the hamadryad flitted 
 and left it nothing but ship-timber. Such men as 
 Spenser are not sent into the world to be part of 
 its motive power. The blind old engine would not 
 know the difference though we got up its steam 
 with attar of roses, nor make one revolution more 
 to the minute for it. What practical man ever left 
 such an heirloom to his countrymen as the " Faery 
 Queen " ? 
 
 Undoubtedly Spenser wished to be useful and in 
 the highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and 
 1 Leigh Hunt's Indicator, XVII.
 
 314 SPENSER 
 
 Milton calls him " our sage and serious poet, whom 
 I dare be known to think a better teacher than 
 Scotus or Aquinas." And good Dr. Henry More 
 was of the same mind. I fear he makes his vices 
 so beautiful now and then that we should not be 
 very much afraid of them if we chanced to meet 
 them; for he could not escape from his genius, 
 which, if it led him as philosopher to the abstract 
 contemplation of the beautiful, left him as poet open 
 to every impression of sensuous delight. When he 
 wrote the " Shepherd's Calendar " he was certainly 
 a Puritan, and probably so by conviction rather 
 than from any social influences or thought of per 
 sonal interests. There is a verse, it is true, in the 
 second of the two detached cantos of " Mutability," 
 
 " Like that ungracious crew -which feigns demurest grace, " 
 
 which is supposed to glance at the straiter religion 
 ists, and from which it has been inferred that he 
 drew away from them as he grew older. It is very 
 likely that years and widened experience of men 
 may have produced in him their natural result of 
 tolerant wisdom which revolts at the hasty destruc- 
 tiveness of inconsiderate zeal. But with the more 
 generous side of Puritanism I think he sympa 
 thized to the last. His rebukes of clerical world- 
 liness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one 
 as any is in " Mother Hubberd's Tale," published 
 in 1591. 1 There is an iconoclastic relish in his 
 
 1 Ben Jonson told Drummond " that in that paper Sir W. 
 Raleigh had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant 
 Beast the Puritans were understood." But this is certainly wrong 
 There were very different shades of Puritanism, according to in-
 
 SPENSER 315 
 
 account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of 
 Bliss that makes us think he would not have re 
 gretted the plundered abbeys as perhaps Shake 
 speare did when he speaks of the winter woods 
 as " bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds 
 sang " : 
 
 " But all those pleasant bowers and palace brave 
 Guyon broke down with rigor pitiless, 
 Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save 
 Them from the tempest of his wrathfulness, 
 But that their bliss he turned to balef ulness ; 
 Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface, 
 Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress, 
 Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase, 
 And of the fairest late now made the foulest place." 
 
 But whatever may have been Spenser's religious 
 opinions (which do not nearly concern us here), 
 the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic mys 
 ticism, a supramundane sphere where it could 
 shape universal forms out of the primal elements 
 of things, instead of being forced to put up with 
 their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling ma 
 terial of mortal clay. He who, when his singing 
 robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to 
 the real world than under some subterfuge of pas 
 toral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this un 
 trammelled ether : 
 
 dividual temperament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a 
 mellowness of which Endicott and Standish were incapable. The 
 gradual change of Milton's opinions was similar to that which I 
 suppose in Spenser. The passage in Mother Hubberd may have 
 been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he says much 
 the same thing in his View of the State of Ireland), but it is gen 
 eral in its terms.
 
 816 SPENSER 
 
 " Lifting himself out of the lowly dust 
 On golden plumes up to the purest sky." 
 
 Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such 
 continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so 
 decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm 
 which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehe 
 mence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, es 
 pecially the latter. There is an exulting spurn of 
 earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. 
 I shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of 
 those intimately coherent and transcendentally log 
 ical poems that " moveth altogether if it move at 
 all," the breaking off a fragment from which would 
 maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals. 
 Whatever there is of sentiment and passion is for 
 the most part purely disembodied and without sex, 
 like that of angels, a kind of poetry which has 
 of late gone out of fashion, whether to our gain or 
 not may be questioned. Perhaps one may venture 
 to hint that the animal instincts are those that 
 stand in least need of stimulation. Spenser's no 
 tions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those 
 of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, 
 as not to disqualify him for achieving the quest of 
 the Holy Grail, and accordingly it is not uninstruc- 
 tive to remember that he had drunk, among others, 
 at French sources not yet deboshed with absinthe. 1 
 
 1 Two of his eclogues, as I have said, are from Marot, and his 
 earliest known verses are translations from Bellay, a poet who 
 was charming whenever he had the courage to play truant from 
 a had school. We must not suppose that an analysis of the liter 
 ature of the demi-monde will give us all the elements of the French 
 character. It has been both grave and profound ; nay, it has even
 
 SPENSER 317 
 
 Yet, with a purity like that of thrice-bolted snow, 
 he had none of its coldness. He is, of all our poets, 
 the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton 
 probably meant it when he said that poetry should 
 be " simple, sensuous, and passionate." A poet is 
 innocently sensuous when his mind permeates and 
 illumines his senses ; when they, on the other hand, 
 muddy the mind, he becomes sensual. Every one 
 of Spenser's senses was as exquisitely alive to the 
 impressions of material, as every organ of his soul 
 was to those of spiritual beauty. Accordingly, if 
 he painted the weeds of sensuality at all, he could 
 not help making them " of glorious feature." It 
 was this, it may be suspected, rather than his 
 44 praising love," that made Lord Burleigh shake 
 his " rugged forehead." Spenser's gamut, indeed, 
 is a wide one, ranging from a purely corporeal de 
 light in "precious odors fetched from far away" 
 upward to such refinement as 
 
 " Upon her eyelids many graces sate 
 Under the shadow of her even brows," 
 
 where the eye shares its pleasure with the mind. 
 He is court-painter in ordinary to each of the senses 
 in turn, and idealizes these frail favorites of his 
 majesty King Lusty Juventus, till they half believe 
 themselves the innocent shepherdesses into which 
 he travesties them. 1 
 
 contrived to be wise and lively at the same time, a combination so 
 incomprehensible by the Teutonic races that they have labelled it 
 levity. It puts them out as Nature did Fuseli. 
 
 1 Taste must be partially excepted. It is remarkable how little 
 eating and drinking there is in the Faery Queen. The only time 
 he fairly sets a table is in the house of Malbecco, where it is
 
 318 SPENSER 
 
 In Ms great poem he had two objects in view : 
 first, the ephemeral one of pleasing the court, and 
 then that of recommending himself to the perma 
 nent approval of his own and following ages as a 
 poet, and especially as a moral poet. To meet the 
 first demand, he lays the scene of his poem in con 
 temporary England, and brings in all the leading 
 personages of the day under the thin disguise of 
 his knights and their squires and lady-loves. He 
 says this expressly in the prologue to the second 
 book : 
 
 " Of Faery Land yet if he more inquire, 
 By certain signs, here set in sundry place, 
 He may it find ; . . . 
 And thou, O fairest princess under sky, 
 In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face 
 And thine own realms in land of Faery." 
 
 Many of his personages we can still identify, and 
 all of them were once as easily recognizable as 
 those of Mademoiselle de Scudery. This, no doubt, 
 added greatly to the immediate piquancy of the 
 allusions. The interest they would excite may be 
 inferred from the fact that King James, in 1596, 
 wished to have the author prosecuted and punished 
 
 necessary to the conduct of the story. Yet taste is not wholly 
 
 forgotten : 
 
 " In her left hand a cup of gold she held, 
 And with her right the riper fruit did reach, 
 Whose sappy liquor, that with fulness sweld, 
 Into her cup she scruzed with dainty breach 
 Of her fine fingers without foul impeach, 
 That so fair wine-press made the wine more sweet." 
 (B. II. c. xii. 56.) 
 
 Taste can hardly complain of unhandsome treatment !
 
 SPENSER 319 
 
 for his indecent handling of his mother, Mary 
 Queen of Scots, under the name of Duessa. 1 To 
 suit the wider application of his plan's other and 
 more important half, Spenser made all his charac 
 ters double their parts, and appear in his allegory 
 as the impersonations of abstract moral qualities. 
 When the cardinal and theological virtues tell 
 Dante, 
 
 " Noi siam qui ninfe e in ciel sianio stelle," 
 
 the sweetness of the verse enables the fancy, by a 
 slight gulp, to swallow without solution the prob 
 lem of being in two places at the same time. But 
 there is something fairly ludicrous in such a dual 
 ity as that of Prince Arthur and the Earl of 
 Leicester, Arthegall and Lord Grey, and Belphcebe 
 and Elizabeth. 
 
 " In this same interlude it doth befall 
 That I, one Snout by name, present a wall." 
 
 The reality seems to heighten the improbability, 
 already hard enough to manage. But Spenser 
 had fortunately almost as little sense of humor as 
 
 1 Had the poet lived longer, he might perhaps have verified his 
 friend Raleigh's saying, that " whosoever in writing modern his 
 tory shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out 
 his teeth." The passage is one of the very few disgusting ones in 
 the Faery Queen. Spenser was copying Ariosto ; but the Ital 
 ian poet, with the discreeter taste of his race, keeps to generali 
 ties. Spenser goes into particulars which can only be called nasty. 
 He did this, no doubt, to pleasure his mistress, Mary's rival ; and 
 this gives us a measure of the brutal coarseness of contemporary 
 manners. It becomes only the more marvellous that the fine 
 flower of his genius could have transmuted the juices of such a 
 soil into the purity and sweetness which are its own peculiar prop 
 erties.
 
 320 SPENSER 
 
 Wordsworth, 1 or he could never have carried his 
 poem on with enthusiastic good faith so far as he 
 did. It is evident that to him the Land of Faery 
 was an unreal world of picture and illusion, 
 
 " The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil," 
 
 in which he could shut himself up from the actual, 
 with its shortcomings and failures. 
 
 " The ways through which my weary steps I guide 
 
 In this delightful land of Faery 
 Are so exceeding spacious and wide, 
 And sprinkled with such sweet variety 
 Of all that pleasant is to ear and eye, 
 That I, nigh ravisht with rare thoughts' delight, 
 
 My tedious travail do forget thereby, 
 And, when I 'gin to feel decay of might, 
 It strength to me supplies, and cheers my dulled spright." 
 
 Spenser seems here to confess a little weariness ; 
 but the alacrity of his mind is so great that, even 
 where his invention fails a little, we do not share 
 his feeling nor suspect it, charmed as we are by 
 the variety and sweep of his measure, the beauty 
 or vigor of his similes, the musical felicity of his 
 diction, and the mellow versatility of his pictures. 
 In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he 
 was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison. 
 That, when the personal allusions have lost their 
 meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the 
 
 1 There is a gleam of humor in one of the couplets of Mother 
 Hubberd's Tale, where the Fox, persuading the Ape that they 
 should disguise themselves as discharged soldiers in order to beg 
 the more successfully, says, 
 
 " Be you the soldier, for you likest are 
 For manly semblance and small skill in war."
 
 SPENSER 321 
 
 book should continue to be read with delight, is 
 proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life 
 and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it 
 must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every 
 fault of which that kind of writing is capable. 
 The characters are vague, and, even were they not, 
 they drop out of the story so often and remain out 
 of it so long, that we have forgotten who they are 
 when we meet them again ; the episodes hinder the 
 advance of the action instead of relieving it with 
 variety of incident or novelty of situation ; the plot, 
 if plot it may be called, 
 
 " That shape has none 
 Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb," 
 
 recalls drearily our ancient enemy, the Metrical 
 Romance ; while the fighting, which in those old 
 poems was tediously sincere, is between shadow 
 and shadow, where we know that neither can harm 
 the other, though we are tempted to wish he might. 
 Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and says 
 that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do 
 not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which 
 after all is the fatal question ? The truth is that 
 it is too often forced upon us against our will, as 
 people were formerly driven to church till they be 
 gan to look on a day of rest as a penal institution, 
 and to transfer to the Scriptures that suspicion of 
 defective inspiration which was awakened in them 
 by the preaching. The true type of the allegory is 
 the Odyssey, which we read without suspicion as 
 pure poem, and then find a new pleasure in divin 
 ing its double meaning, as if we somehow got a
 
 322 SPENSER 
 
 better bargain of our author than he meant to give 
 us. But this complex feeling must not be so exact 
 ing as to prevent our lapsing into the old Arabian 
 Nights simplicity of interest again. The moral of 
 a poem should be suggested, as when in some medi- 
 seval church we cast down our eyes to muse over a 
 fresco of Giotto, and are reminded of the transito- 
 riness of life by the mortuary tablets under our feet. 
 The vast superiority of Bunyan over Spenser lies 
 in the fact that we help make his allegory out of 
 our own experience. Instead of striving to embody 
 abstract passions and temptations, he has given us 
 his own in all their pathetic simplicity. He is the 
 Ulysses of his own prose-epic. This is the secret 
 of his power and his charm, that, while the repre 
 sentation of what may happen to all men comes 
 home to none of us in particular, the story of 
 any one man's real experience finds its startling 
 parallel in that of every one of us. The very 
 homeliness of Bunyan's names and the everyday- 
 ness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and 
 we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with 
 his allegorical beings as we might be with Adam 
 or Socrates in a dream. Indeed, he has prepared 
 us for such incongruities by telling us at setting 
 out that the story was of a dream. The long 
 nights of Bedford jail had so intensified his imagi 
 nation, and made the figures with which it peopled 
 his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his 
 mind become things, as clear to the memory as if 
 we had seen them. *But Spenser's are too often 
 mere names, with no bodies to back them, entered
 
 SPENSER 323 
 
 on the Muses' muster-roll by the specious trick of 
 personification. There is, likewise, in Bunyan, a 
 childlike simplicity and taking-for-granted which 
 win our confidence. His Giant Despair, 1 for ex 
 ample, is by no means the Ossianic figure into 
 which artists who mistake the vague for the sub 
 lime have misconceived it. He is the ogre of the 
 fairy-tales, with his malicious wife ; and he comes 
 forth to us from those regions of early faith and 
 wonder as something beforehand accepted by the 
 imagination. These figures of Bunyan's are al 
 ready familiar inmates of the mind, and, if there 
 be any sublimity in him, it is the daring frankness 
 of his verisimilitude. Spenser's giants are those 
 of the later romances, except that grand figure 
 with the balances in the second Canto of Book V., 
 the most original of all his conceptions, yet no real 
 giant, but a pure eidolon of the mind. As Bunyan 
 rises not seldom to a natural poetry, so Spenser 
 sinks now and then, through the fault of his topics, 
 to unmistakable prose. Take his description of the 
 House of Alma, 2 for instance : 
 
 " The master cook was cald Concoction, 
 
 A careful man, and full of comely guise ; 
 The kitchen-clerk, that hight Digestion, 
 Did order all the achates in seemly wise." 
 
 And so on through all the organs of the body. 
 The author of Ecclesiastes understood these mat 
 ters better in that last pathetic chapter of his, blun- 
 
 1 Bunyan probably took the hint of the Giant's suicidal offer 
 of " knife, halter, or poison," from Spenser's " swords, ropes, 
 poison," in Faery Queen, B. I. c. ix. 1. 
 
 2 Book IL c. 9.
 
 324 SPENSER 
 
 deringly translated as it apparently is. This, I 
 admit, is the worst failure of Spenser in this kind ; 
 though, even here, when he gets on to the organs 
 of the mind, the enchantments of his fancy and 
 style come to the rescue and put us in good-humor 
 again, hard as it is to conceive of armed knights 
 entering the chamber of the mind, and talking with 
 such visionary damsels as Ambition and Shame- 
 fastness. Nay, even in the most prosy parts, un 
 less my partiality deceive me, there is an infantile 
 confidence in the magical powers of Prosopopreia 
 which half beguiles us, as of children who play that 
 everything is something else, and are quite satis 
 fied with the transformation. 
 
 The problem for Spenser was a double one : how 
 to commend poetry at all to a generation which 
 thought it effeminate trifling, 1 and how he, Master 
 Edmund Spenser, of imagination all compact, could 
 dbmmend his poetry to Master John Bull, the most 
 practical of mankind in his habitual mood, but at 
 .that moment in a passion of religious anxiety about 
 his soul. Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile 
 dulci was not only an irrefragable axiom because a 
 Latin poet had said it, but it exactly met the case 
 in point. He would convince the scorners that 
 poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master 
 Bull his new way of making fine words butter pars 
 nips, in a rhymed moral primer. Allegory, as then 
 practised, was imagination adapted for beginners, 
 in words of one syllable and illustrated with cuts, 
 
 1 See Sidney's Defence, and Pnttenham's Art of English Poesy, 
 Book I. c. 8.
 
 SPENSER 325 
 
 and would thus serve both his ethical and pictorial 
 purpose. Such a primer, or a first instalment of it, 
 he proceeded to put forth ; but he so bordered it 
 with bright-colored fancies, he so often filled whole 
 pages and crowded the text hard in others with the 
 gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani mis 
 sal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the 
 ecstasy of its adornment. Worse than all, does not 
 his brush linger more lovingly along the rosy con 
 tours of his sirens than on the modest wimples of 
 the Wise Virgins ? " The general end of the book," 
 he tells us in his Dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 " is to fashion a gentleman of noble person in virtu 
 ous and gentle discipline." But a little further on 
 he evidently has a qualm, as he thinks how gener 
 ously he had interpreted his promise of cuts : " To 
 some I know this method will seem displeasant, 
 which had rather have good discipline delivered 
 plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large, 1 as 
 they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegor 
 ical devices." Lord Burleigh was of this way of 
 thinking, undoubtedly, but how could poor Clarion 
 help it ? Has he not said, 
 
 ' ' And whatso else of virtue good or ill, 
 
 Grew in this garden, fetcht from far away, 
 Of every one he takes and tastes at will, 
 
 And on their pleasures greedily doth prey " ? 
 
 One sometimes feels in reading him as if he were 
 the pure sense of the beautiful incarnated to the 
 one end that he might interpret it to our duller per- 
 
 1 We can fancy how he would have done this by Jeremy Taylor, 
 who was a kind of Spenser in a cassock.
 
 326 SPENSER 
 
 ceptions. So exquisite was his sensibility, 1 that 
 with him sensation and intellection seem identical, 
 and we " can almost say his body thought." This 
 subtle interfusion of sense with spirit it is that 
 gives his poetry a crystalline purity without lack of 
 warmth. He is full of feeling, and yet of such a 
 kind that we can neither say it is mere intellectual 
 perception of what is fair and good, nor yet asso 
 ciate it with that throbbing fervor which leads us 
 to call sensibility by the physical name of heart. 
 
 Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of 
 Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We 
 may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for per 
 haps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason 
 that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his 
 ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it 
 was the only wear. The true use of him is as a 
 gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes 
 us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, 
 long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long 
 as to cloy them. He makes one think always of 
 Venice ; for not only is his style Venetian, 2 but as 
 
 1 Of this he himself gives a striking hint, where speaking in his 
 own person he suddenly breaks in on his narrative with the pas 
 sionate cry, 
 
 " Ah, dearest God, me grant I dead be not defouled." 
 
 (Faery Queen, B. I. c. x. 43.) 
 
 a Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example ? 
 ' ' Arachne figured how Jove did abuse 
 Europa like a bull, and on his back 
 Her through the sea did bear : . . . 
 She seemed still back unto the land to look, 
 And her playfellows' aid to call, and fear 
 The dashing of th waves, that up she took
 
 SPENSER 327 
 
 the gallery there is housed in the shell of an aban 
 doned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. 
 And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola 
 from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to 
 Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, 
 the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical 
 impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from 
 picture to picture. 
 
 " If all the pens that ever poet held 
 Had fed the feeling of their master's thoughts, 
 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts 
 Their minds and muses on admired themes, 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
 If these had made one poem's period, 
 And all combined in beauty's worthiness ; 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best, 
 Which into words no virtue can digest." l 
 
 Spenser at his best, has come as near to expressing 
 this unattainable something as any other poet. He 
 is so purely poet that with him the meaning does 
 not so often modulate the music of the verse as the 
 music makes great part of the meaning and leads 
 
 Her dainty feet, and garments gathered near. . . . 
 Before the bull she pictured winged Lore, 
 With his young brother Sport, . . . 
 And many nymphs about them flocking round, 
 And many Tritons which their horns did sound. " 
 
 (Muiopotmos, 281-296.) 
 
 Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the Common 
 wealth and Government of Venice (1599) with this beautiful verse, 
 " Fail- Venice, flower of the last world's delight." 
 
 Perhaps we should read " lost " ? 
 
 1 Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part I. Act V. 2.
 
 328 SPENSER 
 
 the thought along its pleasant paths. No poet is 
 so splendidly superfluous as he ; none knows so 
 well that in poetry enough is not only not so good 
 as a feast, but is a beggarly parsimony. He spends 
 himself in a careless abundance only to be justified 
 by incomes of immortal youth. 
 
 " Pensier cannto ne molto ne poco 
 Si pub quivi albergare in alcun cuore ; 
 Non entra quivi disagio ne inopia, 
 Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia." 1 
 
 This delicious abundance and overrunning lux 
 ury of Spenser appear in the very structure of his 
 verse. He found the ottava rima too monoto 
 nously iterative ; so, by changing the order of his 
 rhymes, he shifted the couplet from the end of the 
 stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes 
 with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at 
 will as a brace or a bridge ; he found it not roomy 
 enough, so first ran it over into another line, and 
 then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in 
 which the melody of one stanza seems forever long 
 ing and feeling forward after that which is to fol 
 low. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more 
 than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave fol 
 lows wave with equable gainings and recessions, 
 the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled 
 with and carried forward by the next. In all this 
 there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous 
 monotony ; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a 
 
 1 " Grayheaded Thought, nor much nor little, may 
 Take up its lodging here in any heart ; 
 Unease nor Lack can enter at this door ; 
 But here dwells full-horned Plenty evermore." 
 
 (Or/. Fur., c. ri. 73.)
 
 SPENSER 329 
 
 great composer. By the variety of his pauses 
 now at the close of the first or second foot, now of 
 the third, and again of the fourth he gives spirit 
 and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly 
 is to become languorous. He knew how to make it 
 rapid and passionate at need, as in such verses as, 
 
 " But he, my lion, and my noble lord, 
 How does he find in cruel heart to hate 
 Her that him. loved and ever most adored 
 As the God of my life ? Why hath he me abhorred ? " l 
 
 or this, 
 
 " Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily ! " 2 
 
 Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its 
 "constraint led him into many absurdities." Of 
 these he instances three, of which I shall notice 
 only one, since the two others (which suppose him 
 at a loss for words and rhymes) will hardly seem 
 valid to any one who knows the poet. It is that it 
 " obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, 
 however unimportant, with trifling and tedious cir 
 cumlocutions, namely, Faery Queen, II. ii. 44 : 
 
 ' Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face 
 
 Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world, 
 Sith last I left that honorable place, 
 In which her royal presence is enrolled.' 
 
 That is, it is three months since I left her palace." 3 
 
 1 Faery Queen, I. c. iii. 7. Leigh Hunt, one of the most sympa 
 thetic of critics, has remarked the passionate change from the 
 third to the first person in the last two verses. 
 
 2 Faery Queen, II. c. viii. 3. 
 
 8 Observations on Faery Queen, vol. i. pp. 158, 159. Mr. Hughes 
 also objects to Spenser's measure, that it is " closed always by a 
 full-stop, in the same place, by which every stanza is made as it
 
 830 SPENSER 
 
 But Dr. Warton should have remembered (what 
 he too often forgets in his own verses) that, in spite 
 of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and 
 that verse only loses its advantage over the latter 
 by invading its province. 1 Verse itself is an ab 
 surdity except as an expression of some higher 
 movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift 
 other minds to the same ideal level. It is the co 
 thurnus which gives language an heroic stature. I 
 have said that one leading characteristic of Spen 
 ser's style was its spaciousness, that he habitually 
 dilates rather than compresses. But his way of 
 measuring time was perfectly natural in an age 
 when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as 
 now. He is the last of the poets, who went (with 
 out affectation) by the great clock of the firma 
 ment. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the 
 same timepiece, is full of these roundabout ways of 
 telling us the hour. It had nothing to do with 
 Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to 
 
 were a distinct paragraph." (Todd's Spenser, II. xli. ) But he 
 could hardly have read the poem attentively, for there are numer 
 ous instances to the contrary. Spenser was a consummate master 
 of versification, and not only did Marlowe and Shakespeare learn 
 of him, but I have little doubt that, but for the Faery Queen, we 
 should never have had the varied majesty of Milton's blank 
 Terse. 
 
 1 As where Dr. Warton himself says : 
 " How nearly had my spirit past, 
 
 Till stopt by Metcalf 's skilful hand, 
 To death's dark regions wide and waste 
 
 And the black river's mournful strand, 
 Or to," etc., 
 
 to the end of the next stanza. That is, I had died but for Dr. 
 Metcalf 's boluses.
 
 SPENSER 331 
 
 lose these stately revolutions of the superne ruote. 
 Time itself becomes more noble when so measured ; 
 we never knew before of how precious a commodity 
 we had the wasting. Who would prefer the plain 
 time of day to this ? 
 
 " Now when Aldebaran was mounted high 
 Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair ' ' ; 
 
 or this? 
 
 " By this the northern wagoner had set 
 
 His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star 
 
 That was in ocean's waves yet never wet, 
 But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far 
 
 To all that in the wide deep wandering are " ; 
 
 or this? 
 
 " At last the golden oriental gate 
 
 Of greatest heaven gan to open fair, 
 And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to bis mate, 
 Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair 
 And'hurls his glistening beams through dewy air." 
 
 The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour 
 more or less as of no account, is in keeping with 
 that sense of endless leisures which it is one chief 
 merit of the poem to suggest. But Spenser's dila 
 tation extends to thoughts as well as to phrases 
 and images. He does not love the concise. Yet 
 his dilatation is not mere distension, but the expan 
 sion of natural growth in the rich soil of his own 
 mind, wherein the merest stick of a verse puts forth 
 leaves and blossoms. Here is one of his, suggested 
 by Homer : l 
 
 1 Iliad, XVII. 55 seqq. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery 
 Queen, B. I. c. vii. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off 
 with an alexandrine has Homer's icvoial iramoiwv avt^w ex-
 
 832 SPENSER 
 
 " Upon the top of all his lofty crest 
 A bunch of hairs discolored diversly, 
 With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest, 
 Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity ; 
 Like to an almond-tree ymounted high 
 On top of green Selinus all alone 
 With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, 
 Whose tender locks do tremble every one 
 
 At every little breath that under heaven is blown." 
 
 And this is the way he reproduces five pregnant 
 rerses of Dante : 
 
 " Seggendo in pinrna 
 In fama non si vien, ne sotto coltre, 
 Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma, 
 Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia 
 Qual fnmo in aere ed in acqua la scliiuma." 1 
 
 " Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she, 
 Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss, 
 Does waste his days in dark obscurity 
 And in oblivion ever buried is ; 
 Where ease abounds it 'a eath to do amiss : 
 But who his limbs with labors and his mind 
 Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss. 
 
 panded ! Chapman unfortunately has slurred this passage in his 
 version, and Pope tittivated it more than usual in his. I have no 
 other translation at hand. Marlowe was so taken by this passage 
 in Spenser that he put it bodily into his Tamburlaine. 
 i Inferno, XXIV. 46-52. 
 
 " For sitting upon down, 
 Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame, 
 Withonten which whoso his life consumes 
 Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth 
 As smoke in air or in the water foam." 
 
 (Longfellow.) 
 
 It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that 
 none of the commentators on Spenser notice his most important 
 obligations to the great Tuscan.
 
 SPENSER 333 
 
 Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind, 
 Who seeks with painful toil shall Honor soonest find. 
 
 " In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell, 
 
 And will be found with peril and with pain, 
 
 Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell 
 
 Unto her happy mansion attain ; 
 
 Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain, 
 
 And wakeful watches ever to abide ; 
 
 But easy is the way and passage plain 
 
 To pleasure's palace ; it may soon be spied, 
 And day and night her doors to all stand open wide." 1 
 
 Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow- 
 room. His thoughts are never pithily expressed, 
 -but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as if 
 under the open sky, that seems to me very noble. 
 For example, 
 
 " The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought 
 And is with child of glorious-great intent 
 Can never rest until it forth have brought 
 The eternal brood of glory excellent." 2 
 
 One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. 
 And here is a passage which Milton had read and 
 remembered : 
 
 " And is there care in Heaven ? and is there love 
 In heavenly spirits to these creatures base, 
 That may compassion of their evils move ? 
 There is : else much more wretched were the case 
 Of men than beasts : but 0, the exceeding grace 
 Of highest God, that loves his creatures so, 
 And all his works with mercy doth embrace, 
 That blessed angels he sends to and fro, 
 
 To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe I 
 
 ' ' How oft do they their silver bowers leave, 
 To come to succor us that succor want 1 
 
 1 Faery Queen, B. II. c. iii. 40, 41. 
 
 2 Ibid., I. c. v. J.
 
 334 SPENSER 
 
 How oft do they with golden pinions cleaye 
 The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant, 
 Against foul fiends to aid us militant ! 
 They for us fight, they watch and duly ward, 
 And their bright squadrons round about us plant ; 
 And all for love and nothing for reward ; 
 O, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ? " l 
 
 His natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp 
 and abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lin 
 gers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the 
 translucent cup of a lily. So entirely are beauty 
 and delight in it the native element of Spenser, 
 that, whenever in the " Faery Queen " you come 
 suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of un 
 pleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's 
 teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of straw 
 berries and cream. He is the most fluent of our 
 poets. Sensation passing through emotion into 
 revery is a prime quality of his manner. And to 
 read him puts one in the condition of revery, a 
 state of mind in which our thoughts and feelings 
 float motionless, as one sees fish do in a gentle 
 stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to 
 keep themselves from going down with the current, 
 while their bodies yield indolently to all its sooth 
 ing curves. He chooses his language for its rich 
 canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. 
 To characterize his style in a single word, I should 
 call it costly. None but the daintiest and nicest 
 phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one 
 to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration, 
 and such sweet lapses of verse, that never any word 
 
 1 Faery Queen, II. c. viii. 1, 2.
 
 SPENSER 335 
 
 seems more eminent than the rest, nor detains the 
 feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to 
 the end before you have time to stop and muse 
 over the wealth that has been lavished on you. 
 But he has characterized and exemplified his own 
 style better than any description could do : 
 
 " For round about the walls yclothed were 
 
 With goodly arras of great majesty, 
 
 Woven with gold and silk so close and near 
 
 That the rich metal lurked privily 
 
 As f aining to be hid from envious eye ; 
 
 Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares 
 
 It showed itself and shone unwillingly 
 
 Like to a discolored snake whose hidden snares 
 Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back 
 declares." 1 
 
 And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as 
 a sample : 
 
 " And, more to lull him in his slumber soft, 
 A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down 
 And ever drizzling rain upon the loft, 
 Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun 
 Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon. 
 No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries, 
 As still are wont to annoy the walled town, 
 Might there be heard : but careless quiet lies 
 
 Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies." 2 
 
 In the world into which Spenser carries us there 
 is neither time nor space, or rather it is outside of 
 and independent of them both, and so is purely 
 ideal, or, more truly, imaginary ; yet it is full of 
 form, color, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if 
 not real, yet apprehensible by the senses. There 
 are no men and women in it, yet it throngs with 
 
 1 Faery Queen, III. o. xi. 28. 2 Ibid., I. c. L 41.
 
 336 SPENSER 
 
 airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of 
 men and women, and hint at some kind of fore 
 gone reality. Now this place, somewhere between 
 mind and matter, between soul and sense, between 
 the actual and the possible, is precisely the region 
 which Spenser assigns (if I have rightly divined 
 him) to the poetic susceptibility of impression, 
 
 " To reign in the air from the earth to highest sky." 
 
 Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul 
 and spirit of it, dormant till they are magnetized 
 by some powerful emotion. Then whatever is im 
 perishable in us recognizes for an instant and 
 claims kindred with something outside and distinct 
 from it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it, 
 that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which im 
 poverishes all other companionship. This exalta 
 tion with which love sometimes subtilizes the nerves 
 of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the 
 thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, 
 the joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in 
 it, would appear to have been the normal condition 
 of Spenser. While the senses of most men live in 
 the cellar, his " were laid in a large upper chamber 
 which opened toward the sunrising." 
 
 ' ' His birth was of the -womb of morning dew, 
 And his conception of the joyous prime." 
 
 The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, 
 more than one of them ?) have a way, I admit, of 
 getting within our inmost consciousness and in 
 a manner betraying us to ourselves. There is in 
 Spenser a remoteness very different from this, but
 
 SPENSER 337 
 
 it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, per 
 haps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we 
 are glad to get away from ourselves and those im 
 portunate trifles which we gravely call the realities 
 of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind 
 everything 
 
 " Suffers a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 
 
 He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to 
 an ideal distance where no mortal, I had almost 
 said human, fleck is visible. Instead of the ordi 
 nary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epi- 
 thalamion fit for a conscious goddess, and the 
 " savage soil " 1 of Ireland becomes a turf of Ar- 
 cady under her feet, where the merchants' daugh 
 ters of the town are no more at home than the 
 angels and the fair shapes of pagan mythology 
 whom they meet there. He seems to have had a 
 common-sense side to him, and could look at things 
 (if we may judge by his tract on Irish affairs) in 
 a practical and even hard way; but the moment 
 he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the condition 
 which his teacher Plato imposes on poets, and had 
 not a particle of prosaic understanding left. His 
 fancy, habitually moving about in worlds not real 
 ized, unrealizes everything at a touch. The critics 
 blame him because in his Prothalamion the sub- 
 
 1 This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of Or- 
 mond and in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to 
 the Faery Queen. These sonnets are of a much stronger build 
 than the Amoretti, and some of them (especially that to Sir John 
 Norris) recall the firm tread of Milton's, though differing in struc 
 ture.
 
 338 SPENSER 
 
 jects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave 
 it at Temple Gardens as noble damsels ; but to 
 those who are grown familiar with his imaginary 
 world such a transformation seems as natural as in 
 the old legend of the Knight of the Swan. 
 
 " Come now ye damsels, daughters of Delight, 
 
 Help quickly her to dight : 
 But first come ye, fair Hours, which were begot 
 In Jove's sweet paradise of Day and Night, . . . 
 And ye three handmaids of the Cyprian Queen, 
 The which do still adorn her beauty's pride, 
 Help to adorn my beautif ulest bride. 
 
 Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal, 
 
 And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine, 
 
 And let the Graces dance unto the rest, 
 
 For they can do it best. 
 The whiles the maidens do their carols sing, 
 To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring." 
 
 The whole Epithalamion is very noble, with an 
 organ-like roll and majesty of numbers, while it is 
 instinct with the same joyousness which must have 
 been the familiar mood of Spenser. It is no su 
 perficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound 
 delight in the beauty of the universe and in that 
 delicately surfaced nature of his which was its mir 
 ror and counterpart. Sadness was alien to him, 
 and at funerals he was, to be sure, a decorous 
 mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a 
 temperament ; but his condolences are graduated 
 to the unimpassioned scale of social requirement. 
 Even for Sir Philip Sidney his sighs are regulated 
 by the official standard. It was in an unreal world 
 that his affections found their true object and vent, 
 and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never
 
 SPENSER 339 
 
 known that he puts into the mouth of a husband 
 whom he has evaporated into a shepherd the two 
 most naturally pathetic verses he ever penned : 
 
 " I hate the day because it lendeth light 
 To see all things, but not my love to see." 1 
 
 In the Epithalamion there is an epithet which has 
 been much admired for its felicitous tenderness : 
 
 " Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, 
 Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes 
 And blesseth her with his two happy hands. " 
 
 But the purely impersonal passion of the artist 
 had already guided him to this lucky phrase. It 
 is addressed by Holiness a dame surely as far 
 abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can 
 readily conceive of to Una, who, like the vision 
 ary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of 
 womanhood except that of being alive, as Juliet 
 and Beatrice are. 
 
 ' ' happy earth, 
 Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread ! " 2 
 
 Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot 
 would be as soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its 
 mates already fallen, can we conceive of her 
 treading anything so sordid ? No ; it is only on 
 some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks 
 securely, herself a dream. And it is only when 
 Spenser has escaped thither, only when this gla 
 mour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is grown 
 almost as purely a creature of the imagination as 
 the other ideal images with which he converses, 
 
 1 Daphnaida, 407, 408. 
 
 2 Faery Queen, I. c. x. 9.
 
 340 SPENSER 
 
 that his feeling becomes as nearly passionate as 
 nearly human, I was on the point of saying as 
 with him is possible. I am so far from blaming 
 this idealizing property of his mind, that I find it 
 admirable in him. It is his quality, not his defect. 
 Without some touch of it life would be unendur 
 able prose. If I have called the world to which he 
 transports us a world of unreality, I have wronged 
 him. It is only a world of unrealism. It is from 
 pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and 
 inch-long politics that he emancipates us, and makes 
 us free of that to-morrow, always coming and never 
 come, where ideas shall reign supreme. 1 But I am 
 keeping my readers from the sweetest idealization 
 that love ever wrought : 
 
 " Unto this place whenas the elfin knight 
 Approached, him seemed that the merry sound 
 Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, 
 And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, 
 That through the woods their echo did rebound ; 
 He nigher drew to wit what it mote be. 
 There he a troop of ladies dancing found 
 Full merrily and making gladf ul glee ; 
 And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see. 
 
 " He durst not enter into the open green 
 For dread of them unwares to be descried, 
 For breaking of their dance, if he were seen ; 
 But in the covert of the wood did bide 
 Beholding all, yet of them unespied ; 
 There he did see that pleased so much his sight 
 
 1 Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not much more imaginary 
 than that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He 
 who is familiar with mediaeval epics will be extremely cautious in 
 drawing inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He 
 evidently archaizes like the rest.
 
 SPENSER 341 
 
 That even he himself his eyes envied, 
 A hundred naked maidens lily-white, 
 All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight. 
 
 ' ' All they without were ranged in a ring, 
 And danced round ; but in the midst of them 
 Three other ladies did both dance and sing, 
 The while the rest them round about did hem, 
 And like a garland did in compass stem. 
 And in the midst of these same three was placed 
 Another damsel, as a precious gem 
 Amidst a ring most richly well enchased, 
 That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. 
 
 ' Look how the crown which Ariadne wove 
 Upon her ivory forehead that same day, 
 That Theseus her unto his bridal bore, 
 (When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray, 
 With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay) 
 Being now placed in the firmament, 
 Through the bright heaven doth her beams display, 
 And is .unto the stars an ornament, 
 Which round about her move in order excellent ; 
 
 " Such was the beauty of this goodly band, 
 Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell, 
 But she that in the midst of them did stand, 
 Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel, 
 Crowned with a rosy garland that right well 
 Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew 
 About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell, 
 And fragrant odors they upon her threw ; 
 
 But most of all those three did her with gifts endue. 
 
 ' ' Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight, 
 Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt 
 Upon this hill and dance there, day and night ; 
 Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant 
 And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt 
 Is borrowed of them ; but that fair one 
 That in the midst was placed paravant,
 
 342 SPENSER 
 
 Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone, 
 That made him pipe so merrily, as never none. 
 
 "She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass 
 Which piped there unto that merry rout ; 
 That jolly shepherd that there piped was 
 Poor Colin Clout ; (who knows not Colin Clout ?) 
 He piped apace while they him danced about ; 
 Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace, 
 Unto thy love that made thee low to lout ; 
 Thy love is present there with thee in place, 
 Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace. ' ' 1 
 
 Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples 
 and sparkles with simple delight as this ? It is a 
 sky of Italian April full of sunshine and the hid 
 den ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more 
 that it reminds us of that passage in his friend 
 Sidney's Arcadia, where the shepherd-boy pipes 
 "as if he would never be old." If we compare it 
 with the mystical scene in Dante, 2 of which it is a 
 reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit of real 
 life ; but taken by itself it floats as unconcerned 
 in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset 
 cloud. The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to 
 come from as far away as Thessaly when Apollo 
 was keeping sheep there. Sorrow, the great ideal- 
 izer, had had the portrait of Beatrice on her easel 
 for years, and every touch of her pencil transfig 
 ured the woman more and more into the glorified 
 saint. But Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of 
 flesh and blood, who would sit down at meat with 
 the poet on the very day when he had thus beati- 
 
 1 Faery Queen, VI. c. x. 10-16. 
 
 2 Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX.
 
 SPENSER 343 
 
 fied her. As Dante was drawn upward from heaven 
 to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser 
 lifted away from the actual by those of that ideal 
 Beauty whereof his mind had conceived the linea 
 ments in its solitary musings over Plato, but of 
 whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses 
 had already premonished him. The intrusion of 
 the real world upon this supersensual mood of his 
 wrought an instant disenchantment : 
 
 ' ' Much wondered Calidore at this strange sight 
 Whose like before his eye had never seen, 
 And, standing long astonished in sprite 
 And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween,- 
 Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen, 
 Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show 
 With which his eyes might have deluded been, 
 Therefore resolving what it was to know, 
 
 Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go. 
 
 " But sboii as he appeared to their view 
 They vanished all away out of his sight 
 And clean were gone, which way he never knew, 
 All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite 
 Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite." 
 
 Ben Jonson said that " he had consumed a 
 whole night looking to his great toe, about which 
 he had seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Car 
 thaginians, fight in his imagination " ; and Cole 
 ridge has told us how his "eyes made pictures 
 when they were shut." This is not uncommon, but 
 I fancy that Spenser was more habitually possessed 
 by his imagination than is usual even with poets. 
 His visions must have accompanied him " in glory 
 and in joy" along the common thoroughfares of 
 life and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more
 
 344 SPENSER 
 
 real than the men and women he met there. His 
 " most fine spirit of sense " would have tended to 
 keep him in this exalted mood. I must give an 
 example of the sensuousness of which I have 
 spoken : 
 
 ' ' And in the midst of all a fountain stood 
 Of richest substance that on earth might be, 
 So pure and shiny that the crystal flood 
 Through every channel running one might see ; 
 Most goodly it with curious imagery 
 Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys, 
 Of which some seemed with lively jollity 
 To fly about, playing their wanton toys, 
 Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys. 
 
 " And over all, of purest gold was spread 
 
 A trail of ivy in his native hue ; 
 
 For the rich metal was so colored 
 
 That he who did not well avised it view 
 
 Would surely deem it to be ivy true ; 
 
 Low his lascivious arms adown did creep 
 
 That themselves dipping in the silver dew 
 
 Their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep, 
 Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep. 
 
 ' ' Infinite streams continually did well 
 Out of this fountain, sweet and fair to see, 
 The which into an ample laver fell, 
 And shortly grew to so great quantity 
 That like a little lake it seemed to be 
 Whose depth exceeded not three cubits' height, 
 That through the waves one might the bottom see 
 All paved beneath with jasper shining bright, 
 That seemed the fountain in that sea did sail upright. 
 
 " And all the margent round about was set 
 With shady laurel-trees, thence to defend 
 The sunny beams which on the billows bet, 
 And those which therein bathed mote offend.
 
 SPENSER 345 
 
 As Guyon happened by the same to wend 
 Two naked Damsels he therein espied, 
 Which therein bathing seemed to contend 
 And wrestle wantonly, ne cared to hide 
 Their dainty parts from view of any which them eyed 
 
 " Sometimes the one would lift the other quite 
 Above the waters, and then down again 
 Her plunge, as overmastered by might, 
 Where both awhile would covered remain, 
 And each the other from to rise restrain ; 
 The whiles their snowy limbs, as through a veil, 
 So through the crystal waves appeared plain : 
 Then suddenly both would themselves unhele, 
 And the amorous sweet spoils to greedy eyes reveal. 
 
 " As that fair star, the messenger of morn, 
 His dewy face out of the sea doth rear ; 
 Or as the Cyprian goddess, newly born 
 Of the ocean's fruitful froth, did first appear ; 
 Such seemed they, and so their yellow hear 
 Crystalline humor dropped down apace. 
 Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him near, 
 And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace ; 
 His stubborn breast gan secret pleasance to embrace- 
 
 " The wanton Maidens him espying, stood 
 Gazing awhile at his unwonted guise ; 
 Then the one herself low ducked in the flood, 
 Abashed that her a stranger did avise ; 
 But the other rather higher did arise, 
 And her two lily paps aloft displayed, 
 And all that might his melting heart entice 
 To her delights, she unto him bewrayed ; 
 The rest, hid underneath, him more desirous made. 
 
 " With that the other likewise up arose, 
 And her fair locks, which formerly were bonnd 
 Up in one knot, she low adown did loose, 
 Which flowing long and thick her clothed around 
 And the ivory in golden mantle gowned :
 
 346 SPENSER 
 
 So that fair spectacle from him was reft, 
 Yet that which reft it no less fair was found ; 
 So hid in locks and waves from lookers' theft, 
 Naught but her lovely face she for his looking left. 
 
 "Withal she laughed, and she blushed withal, 
 That blushing to her laughter gave more grace, 
 And laughter to her blushing, as did fall. 
 
 Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound, 
 Of all that mote delight a dainty ear, 
 Such as at once might not on living ground, 
 Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere : 
 Right hard it was for wight which did it hear 
 To read what manner music that mote be ; 
 For all that pleasing is to living ear 
 Was there consorted in one harmony ; 
 Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree* 
 
 " The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade, 
 Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet ; 
 The angelical soft trembling voices made 
 To the instruments divine respondence mete ; 
 The silver-sounding instruments did meet 
 With the base murmur of the water's fall ; 
 The water's fall with difference discreet, 
 Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; 
 
 The gentle warbling wind low answered to all." 
 
 Spenser, in one of his letters to Harvey, had 
 said, " Why, a God's name, may not we, as else the 
 Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language ? " 
 This is in the tone of Bellay, as is also a great deal 
 of what is said in the epistle prefixed to the " Shep 
 herd's Calendar." He would have been wiser had 
 he followed more closely Bellay's advice about the 
 introduction of novel words: "Fear not, then, to 
 innovate somewhat, particularly in a long poem, 
 with modesty, however, with analogy, and judg-
 
 SPENSER 847 
 
 ment of ear ; and trouble not thyself as to who 
 may think it good or bad, hoping that posterity 
 will approve it, she who gives faith to doubtful, 
 light to obscure, novelty to antique, usage to unac 
 customed, and sweetness to harsh and rude things." 
 Spenser's innovations were by no means always 
 happy, as not always according with the genius of 
 the language, and they have therefore not pre 
 vailed. He forms English words out of French or 
 Italian ones, sometimes, I think, on a misapprehen 
 sion of their true meaning ; nay, he sometimes 
 makes new ones by unlawfully grafting a scion of 
 Romance on a Teutonic root. His theory, caught 
 from Bellay, of rescuing good archaisms from un 
 warranted oblivion, was excellent ; not so his prac 
 tice of being archaic for the mere sake of escaping 
 from the common and familiar. A permissible 
 archaism is a word or phrase that has been sup 
 planted by something less apt, but has not become 
 unintelligible ; and Spenser's often needed a glos 
 sary, even in his own day. 1 But he never endangers 
 his finest passages by any experiments of this kind. 
 There his language is living, if ever any, and of 
 one substance with the splendor of his fancy. Like 
 all masters of speech, he is fond of toying with and 
 teasing it a little ; and it may readily be granted 
 that he sometimes "hunted the letter," as it was 
 called, out of all cry. But even where his allitera- 
 
 1 I find a goodly number of Yankeeisms in him, such as idee 
 (not as a rhyme) ; but the oddest is his twice spelling dew deow, 
 which is just as one would spell it who wished to phonetize its 
 sound in rural New England.
 
 848 SPENSER 
 
 tion is tempted to an excess, its prolonged echoes 
 caress the ear like the fading and gathering rever 
 berations of an Alpine horn, and one can find in 
 his heart to forgive even such a debauch of initial 
 assonances as 
 
 " Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, 
 More swift than swallow shears the liquid sky." 
 
 Generally, he scatters them at adroit intervals, re 
 minding us of the arrangement of voices in an an 
 cient catch, where one voice takes up the phrase 
 another has dropped, and thus seems to give the 
 web of harmony a firmer and more continuous tex 
 ture. 
 
 Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, 
 mirrors that differ very widely in the truth and 
 beauty of the images they reflect; but Spenser's is 
 a magic glass in which we see few shadows cast 
 back from actual life, but visionary shapes conjured 
 up by the wizard's art from some confusedly re 
 membered past or some impossible future ; it is 
 like one of those still pools of mediaeval legend 
 which covers some sunken city of the antique 
 world ; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem to 
 have been gathered. As we float upon it, we see 
 that it pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds 
 that drift over it, the trees that grow about its 
 margin, but in the midst of these shadowy echoes 
 of actuality we catch faint tones of bells that seem 
 blown to us from beyond the horizon of time, and 
 looking down into the clear depths, catch glimpses 
 of towers and far-shining knights and peerless 
 dames that waver and are gone. Is it a world that
 
 SPENSER 349 
 
 ever was, or shall be, or can be, or but a delusion ? 
 Spenser's world, real to him, is real enough for us 
 to take a holiday in, and we may well be content 
 with it when the earth we dwell on is so often too 
 real to allow of such vacations. It is the same kind 
 of world that Petrarca's Laura has walked in for 
 five centuries with all ears listening for the music 
 of her footfall. 
 
 The land of Spenser is the land of Dream, but 
 it is also the land of Rest. To read him is like 
 dreaming awake, without even the trouble of doing 
 it yourself, but letting it be done for you by the 
 finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how to 
 color his dreams like life and make them move be 
 fore you in music. They seem singing to you as 
 the sirens to Guyon, and we linger like him : 
 
 " O, thou fair son of gentle Faery 
 That art in mighty arms most magnified 
 Above all knights that ever battle tried, 
 O, turn thy rudder hitherward awhile, 
 Here may thy storm-beat vessel safely ride, 
 This is the port of rest from troublous toil, 
 The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil. 1 
 
 " With that the rolling sea, resounding swift 
 In his big bass, them fitly answered, 
 
 1 This song recalls that in Dante's Purgatorio (XIX. 19-24), in 
 which the Italian tongue puts forth all its siren allurements. 
 Browne's beautiful verses (" Turn, hither turn your winged 
 pines") were suggested by these of Spenser. It might almost 
 seem as if Spenser had here, in his usual way, expanded the sweet 
 old verses : 
 
 " Merry sungen the monks binnen Ely 
 When Knut king rew thereby ; 
 ' Roweth knightes near the lond, 
 That I may hear these monkes song.' "
 
 350 SPENSER 
 
 And on the rock the waves, breaking aloft, 
 A solemn mean unto them measured, 
 The whiles sweet Zephyros loud whisteled 
 His treble, a strange kind of harmony 
 Which Guyon's senses softly tickeled 
 That he the boatman bade row easily 
 And let him hear some part of their rare melody." 
 
 Despite Spenser's instinctive tendency to idealize, 
 and his habit of distilling out of the actual an 
 ethereal essence in which very little of the possible 
 seems left, yet his mind, as is generally true of 
 great poets, was founded on a solid basis of good- 
 sense. I do not know where to look for a more co 
 gent and at the same time picturesque confutation 
 of Socialism than in the Second Canto of the Fifth 
 Book. If I apprehend rightly his words and 
 images, there is not only subtle but profound think 
 ing here. The French Revolution is prefigured in 
 the well-meaning but too theoretic giant, and Rous 
 seau's fallacies exposed two centuries in advance. 
 Spenser was a conscious Englishman to his inmost 
 fibre, and did not lack the sound judgment in poli 
 tics which belongs to his race. He was the more 
 English for living in Ireland, and there is some 
 thing that moves us deeply in the exile's passionate 
 cry: 
 
 " Dear Country ! O how dearly dear 
 Ought thy remembrance and perpetual band 
 Be to thy foster-child that from thy hand 
 Did common breath and nouriture receive ! 
 How brutish is it not to understand 
 How much to her we owe that all us gave, 
 That gave unto us all whatever good we have ! " 
 
 His race shows itself also where he tells us that
 
 SPENSER B51 
 
 " chiefly skill to ride seems a science 
 Proper to gentle blood," 
 
 which reminds one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's 
 saying that the finest sight God looked down on 
 was a fine man on a fine horse. 
 
 Wordsworth, in the supplement to his preface, 
 tells us that the " Faery Queen " " faded before " 
 Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas. But Words 
 worth held a brief for himself in this case, and is 
 no exception to the proverb about men who are 
 their own attorneys. His statement is wholly un 
 founded. Both poems, no doubt, so far as popular 
 ity is concerned, yielded to the graver interests of 
 the Civil War. But there is an appreciation much 
 weightier than any that is implied in mere popu 
 larity, and the vitality of a poem is to be measured 
 by the kind as well as the amount of influence it 
 exerts. Spenser has coached more poets and more 
 eminent ones than any other writer of English 
 verse. I need say nothing of Milton, nor of pro 
 fessed disciples like Browne, the two Fletchers, 
 and More. Cowley tells us that he became " irre 
 coverably a poet " by reading the " Faery Queen " 
 when a boy. Dryden, whose case is particularly 
 in point because he confesses having been seduced 
 by Du Bartas, tells us that Spenser had been his 
 master in English. He regrets, indeed, comically 
 enough, that Spenser could not have read the rules 
 of Bossu, but adds that " no man was ever born 
 with a greater genius or more knowledge to support 
 it." Pope says, " There is something in Spenser 
 that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it
 
 852 SPENSER 
 
 did in one's youth. I read the Faery Queen when 
 I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight ; and 
 I think it gave me as much when I read it over 
 about a year or two ago." Thomson wrote the 
 most delightful of his poems in the measure of 
 Spenser ; Collins, Gray, and Akenside show traces 
 of him ; and in our own day his influence reappears 
 in Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Lan- 
 dor is, I believe, the only poet who ever found him 
 tedious. Spenser's mere manner has not had so 
 many imitators as Milton's, but no other of our 
 poets has given an impulse, and in the right direc 
 tion also, to so many and so diverse minds ; above 
 all, no other has given to so many young souls a 
 consciousness of their wings and a delight in the 
 use of them. He is a standing protest against the 
 tyranny of Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a 
 noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the 
 dull uses to which it may be put. 
 
 Three of Spenser's own verses best characterize 
 the feeling his poetry gives us : 
 
 "Among wide waves set like a little nest," 
 " Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies," 
 " The world's sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil." 
 
 We are wont to apologize for the grossness of our 
 favorite authors sometimes by saying that their age 
 was to blame and not they ; and the excuse is a 
 good one, for often it is the frank word that shocks 
 us while we tolerate the thing. Spenser needs no 
 such extenuations. No man can read the " Faery
 
 SPENSER 353 
 
 Queen " and be anything but the better for it. 
 Through that rude age, when Maids of Honor 
 drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet could say a 
 gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely ab 
 stracted and high, the Don Quixote of poets. 
 Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever 
 can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in 
 one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to 
 let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, 
 let him read in the " Faery Queen." There is the 
 land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow 
 of spirit can enter.
 
 WORDSWORTH 
 
 1875 
 
 A GENERATION has now passed away since 
 Wordsworth was laid with the family in the church 
 yard at Grasmere. 1 Perhaps it is hardly yet time 
 to take a perfectly impartial measure of his value 
 as a poet. To do this is especially hard for those 
 who are old enough to remember the last shot 
 which the foe was sullenly firing in that long war 
 of critics which began when he published his man 
 ifesto as Pretender, and which came to a pause 
 rather than to an end when they flung up their 
 caps with the rest at his final coronation. Some 
 thing of the intensity of the odium theologicum (if 
 indeed the cestheticum be not in these days the 
 more bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. 
 The Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had 
 the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the exclu- 
 siveness and partiality to which sects are liable. 
 The verses of the master had for them the virtue of 
 religious canticles stimulant of zeal and not amen- 
 
 1 "I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard at 
 Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Wordsworth) 
 to Crabb Robinson, with a simple, one might almost say canine 
 pathos, thirteen years after his master's death. Wordsworth 
 was always considerate and kind with his servants, Robinson tells 
 us.
 
 WORDSWORTH 355 
 
 able to the ordinary tests of cold-blooded criticism. 
 Like the hymns of the Huguenots and Covenant 
 ers, they were songs of battle no less than of wor 
 ship, and the combined ardors of conviction and 
 conflict lent them a fire that was not naturally their 
 own. As we read them now, that virtue of the 
 moment is gone out of them, and whatever of Dr. 
 Wattsiness there is gives us a slight shock of dis 
 enchantment. It is something like the difference 
 between the Marseillaise sung by armed propa 
 gandists on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in 
 the tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in 
 the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy of 
 Therese. It was natural in the early days of 
 Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on those 
 profounder qualities to appreciate which settled in 
 some sort the measure of a man's right to judge of 
 poetry at all. But now we must admit the short 
 comings, the failures, the defects, as no less essen 
 tial elements in forming a sound judgment as to 
 whether the seer and artist were so united in him 
 as to justify the claim first put in by himself and 
 afterwards maintained by his sect to a place beside 
 the few great poets who exalt men's minds, and 
 give a right direction and safe outlet to their pas 
 sions through the imagination, while insensibly 
 helping them toward balance of character and se 
 renity of judgment by stimulating their sense of 
 proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of means 
 to ends. In none of our poets has the constant 
 propulsion of an unbending will, and the concen 
 tration of exclusive, if I must not say somewhat
 
 856 WORDSWORTH 
 
 narrow, sympathies done so much to make the ori 
 ginal endowment of nature effective, and in none 
 accordingly does the biography throw so much light 
 on the works, or enter so largely into their composi 
 tion as an element whether of power or of weakness. 
 Wordsworth never saw, and I think never wished 
 to see, beyond the limits of his own consciousness 
 and experience. He early conceived himself to be, 
 and through life was confirmed by circumstances 
 in the faith that he was, a " dedicated spirit," * a 
 state of mind likely to further an intense but at 
 the same time one-sided development of the intel 
 lectual powers. The solitude in which the greater 
 part of his mature life was passed, while it doubt 
 less ministered to the passionate intensity of his 
 musings upon man and nature, was, it may be sus 
 pected, harmful to him as an artist, by depriving 
 him of any standard of proportion outside himself 
 by which to test the comparative value of his 
 thoughts, and by rendering him more and more 
 incapable of that urbanity of mind which could be 
 gained only by commerce with men more nearly 
 on his own level, and which gives tone without 
 lessening individuality. Wordsworth never quite 
 saw the distinction between the eccentric and the 
 original. For what we call originality seems not 
 
 1 In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise 
 seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from 
 some village festival where he had danced all night : 
 " My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit." (B. IV.)
 
 WORDSWORTH 357 
 
 so much anything peculiar, much less anything 
 odd, but that quality in a man which touches hu 
 man nature at most points of its circumference, 
 which reinvigorates the consciousness of our own 
 powers by recalling and confirming our own un 
 valued sensations and perceptions, gives classic 
 shape to our own amorphous imaginings, and ade 
 quate utterance to our own stammering conceptions 
 or emotions. The poet's office is to be a Voice, 
 not of one crying in the wilderness to a knot of 
 already magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the 
 throng of men, and lifting their common aspira 
 tions and sympathies (so first clearly revealed to 
 themselves) on the wings of his song to a purer 
 ether and a wider reach of view. We cannot, if 
 we would, read the poetry of Wordsworth as mere 
 poetry ; . at every other page we find ourselves en 
 tangled in a problem of aesthetics. The world-old 
 question of matter and form, of whether nectar is 
 of precisely the same flavor when served to us from 
 a Grecian chalice or from any jug of ruder pot 
 tery, comes up for decision anew. The Teutonic 
 nature has always shown a sturdy preference of 
 the solid bone with a marrow of nutritious moral 
 to any shadow of the same on the flowing mirror 
 of sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget 
 the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang, 
 vien ben da lui. 
 
 William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth 
 in Cumberland, on the 7th of April, 1770, the 
 second of five children. His father was John
 
 858 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir 
 James Lowther, afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale. 
 His mother was Anne Cookson, the daughter of a 
 mercer in Penrith. His paternal ancestors had 
 been settled iminemorially at Penistone in York 
 shire, whence his grandfather had emigrated to 
 Westmoreland. His mother, a woman of piety and 
 wisdom, died in March, 1778, being then in her 
 thirty-second year. His father, who never entirely 
 cast off the depression occasioned by her death, 
 survived her but five years, dying in December, 
 1783, when William was not quite fourteen years 
 old. 
 
 The poet's early childhood was passed partly at 
 Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grand 
 father at Penrith. His first teacher appears to 
 have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstoue's 
 Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her 
 pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not en 
 deavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a 
 process by which children are apt to be converted 
 from natural logicians into impertinent sophists. 
 Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, 
 who afterwards became his wife. 
 
 In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by Ed 
 win Sandys, Archbishop of York, 1 in the year 1585, 
 at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small 
 market-town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third 
 of a mile northwest of the lake. Here Wordsworth 
 
 1 Father of George Sandys, Treasurer of the Virginia Com 
 pany, translator, while in Virginia, of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and 
 author of a book of travels in the East dear to Dr. Johnson.
 
 WORDSWORTH 359 
 
 passed nine years, among a people of simple habits 
 and scenery of a sweet and pastoral dignity. His 
 earliest intimacies were with the mountains, lakes, 
 and streams of his native district, and the associa 
 tions with which his mind was stored during its most 
 impressible period were noble and pure. The boys 
 were boarded among the dames of the village, thus 
 enjoying a freedom from scholastic restraints, which 
 could be nothing but beneficial in a place where the 
 temptations were only to sports that hardened the 
 body while they fostered a love of nature in the 
 spirit and habits of observation in the mind. Words 
 worth's ordinary amusements here were hunting 
 and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks around 
 the lake and among the hills, with an occasional 
 scamper on horseback. 1 His life as a school-boy 
 was favorable also to his poetic development, in 
 being identified with that of the people among 
 whom he lived. Among men of simple habits, and 
 where there are small diversities of condition, the 
 feelings and passions are displayed with less re 
 straint, and the young poet grew acquainted with 
 that primal human basis of character where the 
 Muse finds firm foothold, and to which he ever 
 afterward cleared his way through all the overlying 
 drift of conventionalism. The dalesmen were a 
 primitive and hardy race who kept alive the tradi 
 tions and often the habits of a more picturesque 
 time. A common level of interests and of social 
 standing fostered unconventional ways of thought 
 and speech, and friendly human sympathies. Soli- 
 1 Prelude, Book II.
 
 860 WORDSWORTH 
 
 tude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on 
 its own resources, and individuality of character. 
 Where everybody knew everybody, and everybody's 
 father had known everybody's father, the interest 
 of man in man was not likely to become a matter 
 of cold hearsay and distant report. When death 
 knocked at any door in the hamlet, there was an 
 echo from every fireside, and a wedding dropt its 
 white flowers at every threshold. There was not a 
 grave in the churchyard but had its story ; not a 
 crag or glen or aged tree untouched with some ideal 
 hue of legend. It was here that Wordsworth 
 learned that homely humanity which gives such 
 depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, society, 
 culture, nothing could obliterate the deep trace of 
 that early training which enables him to speak di 
 rectly to the primitive instincts of man. He was 
 apprenticed early to the difficult art of being him 
 self. 
 
 At school he wrote some task-verses on subjects 
 imposed by the master, and also some voluntaries 
 of his own, equally undistinguished by any peculiar 
 merit. But he seems to have made up his mind as 
 early as in his fourteenth year to become a poet. 1 
 "It is recorded," says his biographer vaguely, 
 " that the poet's father set him very early to learn 
 portions of the best English poets by heart, so that 
 at an early age he could repeat large portions of 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser." 2 
 
 1 " I to the muses have been bound, 
 
 These fourteen years, by strong indentures." 
 
 Idiot Boy (1798). 
 8 I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the
 
 WORDSWORTH 361 
 
 The great event of Wordsworth's school-days 
 was the death of his father, who left what may be 
 called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly of 
 claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the pay 
 ment of which, though their justice was acknow 
 ledged, that nobleman contrived in some unex 
 plained way to elude so long as he lived. In 
 October, 1787, he left school for St. John's Col 
 lege, Cambridge. He was already, we are told, a 
 fair Latin scholar, and had made some progress in 
 mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his 
 reading were Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Gulliver's 
 Travels, and the Tale of a Tub ; but at school he 
 had also become familiar with the works of some 
 English poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of 
 whose poems he had learned many by heart. What 
 is more to the purpose, he had become, without 
 knowing it, a lover of Nature in all her moods, and 
 the same mental necessities of a solitary life which 
 compel men to an interest in the transitory phe 
 nomena of scenery had made him also studious of 
 the movements of his own mind, and the mutual 
 interaction and dependence of the external and in 
 ternal universe. 
 
 Doubtless his early orphanage was not without 
 its effect in confirming a character naturally impa 
 tient of control, and his mind, left to itself, clothed 
 itself with an indigenous growth, which grew fairly 
 and freely, unstinted by the shadow of exotic plan- 
 influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Goldsmith 
 was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and the Even 
 ing Walk. I speak of them as originally printed.
 
 362 WORDSWORTH 
 
 tations. It has become a truism, that remarkable 
 persons have remarkable mothers ; but perhaps 
 this is chiefly true of such as have made them 
 selves distinguished by their industry, and by the 
 assiduous cultivation of faculties in themselves of 
 only an average quality. It is rather to be noted 
 how little is known of the parentage of men of the 
 first magnitude, how often they seem in some sort 
 foundlings, and how early an apparently adverse 
 destiny begins the culture of those who are to en 
 counter and master great intellectual or spiritual 
 experiences. 
 
 Of his disposition as a child little is known, but 
 that little is characteristic. He himself tells us 
 that he was " stiff, moody, and of violent temper." 
 His mother said of him that he was the only one 
 of her children about whom she felt any anxiety, 
 for she was sure that he would be remarkable for 
 good or evil. Once, in resentment at some fancied 
 injury, he resolved to kill himself, but his heart 
 failed him. I suspect that few boys of passionate 
 temperament have escaped these momentary sug 
 gestions of despairing helplessness. " On another 
 occasion," he says, "while I was at my grand 
 father's house at Penrith, along with my eldest 
 brother Richard, we were whipping tops together 
 in the long drawing-room, on which the carpet was 
 only laid down on particular occasions. The walls 
 were hung round with family pictures, and I said 
 to my brother, ' Dare you strike your whip through 
 that old lady's petticoat?' He replied, 'No, I 
 won't.' ' Then,' said I, ' here goes,' and I struck
 
 WORDSWORTH 363 
 
 my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which, 
 no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was prop 
 erly punished. But, possibly from some want of 
 judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become 
 perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, 
 and rather proud of it than otherwise." This last 
 anecdote is as happily typical as a bit of Greek 
 mythology which always prefigured the lives of 
 heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so 
 do we find him afterward striking his defiant lash 
 through the hooped petticoat of the artificial style 
 of poetry, and proudly unsubdued by the punish 
 ment of the Reviewers. 
 
 Of his college life the chief record is to be found 
 in "The Prelude." He did not distinguish himself 
 as a scholar, and if his life had any irjcidents, they 
 were of that interior kind which rarely appear in 
 biography, though they may be of controlling influ 
 ence upon the life. He speaks of reading Chaucer, 
 Spenser, and Milton while at Cambridge, 1 but no 
 reflection from them is visible in his earliest pub 
 lished poems. The greater part of his vacations 
 was spent in his native Lake-country, where his only 
 sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his rambles. 
 She was a woman of large natural endowments, 
 
 1 Prelude, Book III. He studied Italian also at Cambridge ; 
 his teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the poet 
 Gray. It may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that his first 
 systematic study of English poetry, was due to the copy of Ander 
 son's British Poets, left with him by his sailor brother John on 
 setting out for his last voyage in 1805. It was the daughter of 
 this Isola, Emma, who was afterwards adopted by Charles and 
 Mary Lamb.
 
 864 WORDSWORTH 
 
 chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do 
 with the formation and tendency of the poet's 
 mind. It was she who called forth the shyer sen 
 sibilities of his nature, and taught an originally 
 harsh and austere imagination to surround itself 
 with fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself 
 with a sun-spray of ferns. She was his first Pub 
 lic, and belonged to that class of prophetically 
 appreciative temperaments whose apparent office 
 it is to cheer the early solitude of original minds 
 with messages from the future. Through the 
 greater part of his life she continued to be a kind 
 of poetical conscience to him. 
 
 Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent 
 in a foot journey upon the Continent (1790). In 
 January, 1791, he took his degree of B. A., and 
 left Cambridge. During the summer of this year 
 he visited Wales, and, after declining to enter 
 upon holy orders under the plea that he was not of 
 age for ordination, went over to France in Novem 
 ber, and remained during the winter at Orleans. 
 Here he became intimate with the republican Gen 
 eral Beaupuis, with whose hopes and aspirations he 
 ardently sympathized. In the spring of 1792 he 
 was at Blois, and returned thence to Orleans, which 
 he finally quitted in October for Paris. He re 
 mained here as long as he could with safety, and at 
 the close of the year went back to England, thus, 
 perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after over 
 took his friends the Brissotins. 
 
 As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be 
 called a fortunate one, not less so in the training
 
 WORDSWORTH 365 
 
 and expansion of his faculties was this period of 
 his stay in France. Born and reared in a country 
 where the homely and familiar nestles confidingly 
 amid the most savage and sublime forms of na 
 ture, he had experienced whatever impulses the 
 creative faculty can receive from mountain and 
 cloud and the voices of winds and waters, but he 
 had known man only as an actor in fireside his 
 tories and tragedies, for which the hamlet supplied 
 an ample stage. In France he first felt the au 
 thentic beat of a nation's heart ; he was a spectator 
 at one of those dramas where the terrible footfall 
 of the Eumenides is heard nearer and nearer in 
 the pauses of the action ; and he saw man such as 
 he can only be when he is vibrated by the orgasm 
 of a national emotion. He sympathized with the 
 hopes of France and of mankind deeply, as was 
 fitting in a young man and a poet ; and if his faith 
 in the gregarious advancement of men was after 
 ward shaken, he only held the more firmly by his 
 belief in the individual, and his reverence for the 
 human as something quite apart from the popular 
 and above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely 
 blamed, as if he had been recreant to the liberal 
 instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable that 
 a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind 
 which always compensated itself for its artistic 
 radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward exter 
 nal respectability, should recoil from whatever was 
 convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above 
 all in religion. He reads the poems of Words 
 worth without understanding, who does not find in
 
 366 WORDSWORTH 
 
 them the noblest incentives to faith in man and 
 the grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon 
 that personal dignity and virtue, the capacity for 
 whose attainment alone makes universal liberty 
 possible and assures its permanence. He was to 
 make men better by opening to them the sources 
 of an inalterable well-being; to make them free, 
 in a sense higher than political, by showing them 
 that these sources are within them, and that no 
 contrivance of man can permanently emancipate 
 narrow natures and depraved minds. His politics 
 were always those of a poet, circling in the larger 
 orbit of causes and principles, careless of the tran 
 sitory oscillation of events. 
 
 The change in his point of view (if change there 
 was) certainly was complete soon after his return 
 from France, and was perhaps due in part to the 
 influence of Burke. 
 
 " While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth, 
 Against all systems built on abstract rights, 
 Keen ridicule ; the majesty proclaims 
 Of institutes and laws hallowed by time ; 
 Declares the vital power of social ties 
 Endeared by custom ; and with high disdain, 
 Exploding upstart theory, insists 
 Upon the allegiance to which men are born. 
 . . . Could a youth, and one 
 
 In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved 
 Under the weight of classic eloquence, 
 Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired ? " 1 
 
 1 Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a 
 still earlier date. " Wordsworth went in powder, and with cocked 
 hat under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's rout." 
 (Southey to Miss Barker, May, 1806.)
 
 WORDSWORTH 367 
 
 He had seen the French for a dozen years 
 eagerly busy in tearing up whatever had roots in 
 the past, replacing the venerable trunks of tra 
 dition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then 
 striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had 
 broken, and to reproduce artificially that sense of 
 permanence and continuity which is the main safe 
 guard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. 
 He became a Tory through intellectual conviction, 
 retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism 
 of temperament and instinct. As in Carlyle, so in 
 him something of the peasant survived to the last. 
 Hay don tells us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont 
 said to him and Wilkie, " Wordsworth may per 
 haps walk in ; if he do, I caution you both against 
 his terrific democratic notions " ; and it must have 
 been many years later that Wordsworth himself 
 told Crabb Robinson, " I have no respect whatever 
 for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist 
 in me." In 1802, during his tour in Scotland, he 
 travelled on Sundays as on the other days of the 
 week. 1 He afterwards became a theoretical church 
 goer. " Wordsworth defended earnestly the Church 
 establishment. He even said he would shed his 
 blood for it. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh 
 raised against him on account of his having con 
 fessed that he knew not when he had been in a 
 church in his own country. * All our ministers are 
 so vile,' said he. The mischief of allowing the 
 
 1 This was probably one reason for the long suppression of Miss 
 Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently prepared for pub 
 lication as early as 1805.
 
 368 WORDSWORTH 
 
 clergy to depend on the caprice of the multitude 
 he thought more than outweighed all the evils of 
 an establishment." l 
 
 In December, 1792, Wordsworth had returned 
 to England, and in the following year published 
 " Descriptive Sketches " and the " Evening Walk." 
 He did this, as he says in one of his letters, to show 
 that, although he had gained no honors at the Uni 
 versity, he could do something. They met with no 
 great success, and he afterward corrected them so 
 much as to destroy all their interest as juvenile pro 
 ductions, without communicating to them any of 
 the merits of maturity. In commenting, sixty years 
 afterward, on a couplet in one of these poems, 
 
 " And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines 
 Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines," 
 
 he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, 
 but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this 
 first struck me. . . . The moment was important 
 in my poetical history ; for I date from it my con 
 sciousness of the infinite variety of natural appear 
 ances which had been unnoticed by the poets of 
 any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with 
 them, and I made a resolution to supply in some 
 degree the deficiency." 
 
 It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was play 
 ing him a trick here, misled by that instinct (it 
 may almost be called) of consistency which leads 
 men first to desire that their lives should have been 
 without break or seam, and then to believe that 
 they have been such. The more distant ranges of 
 1 Crabb Robinson, i. 250, Am. ed.
 
 WORDSWORTH 369 
 
 perspective are apt to run together in retrospection. 
 How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been 
 acquainted with the poets of all ages and coun 
 tries, he who to his dying day could not endure 
 to read Goethe and knew nothing of Calderon ? It 
 seems to me rather that the earliest influence trace 
 able in him is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cow- 
 per, and it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its 
 having already begun that his first volume of " De 
 scriptive Sketches " (1793) was put forth by John 
 son, who was Cowper's publisher. By and by the 
 powerful impress of Burns is seen both in the 
 topics of his verse and the form of his expression. 
 But whatever the ultimate effect of these poets 
 upon his style, certain it is that his juvenile poems 
 were clothed in the conventional habit of the eigh 
 teenth century. " The first verses from which he 
 remembered to have received great pleasure were 
 Miss Carter's ' Poem on Spring,' a poem in the six- 
 line stanza which he was particularly fond of and 
 had composed much in, for example, ' Ruth.' r 
 This is noteworthy, for Wordsworth's lyric range, 
 especially so far as tune is concerned, was always 
 narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, 
 and some of his lighter effusions, as he would have 
 called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in grace 
 of movement. We cannot expect in a modern poet 
 the thrush-like improvisation, the bewitchingly im 
 pulsive cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan 
 drama and whose last warble died with Herrick ; 
 but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have shown 
 that the simple pathos of their music was not irre*
 
 370 WORDSWORTH 
 
 coverable, even if the artless poignancy of their 
 phrase be gone beyond recall. We feel this lack 
 in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare 
 such verses as 
 
 " Like an army defeated 
 The snow hath retreated 
 And now doth fare ill 
 On the top of the bare hill," 
 
 with Goethe's exquisite Ueber alien Gipfeln ist 
 Huh, in which the lines (as if shaken down by a 
 momentary breeze of emotion) drop lingeringly 
 one after another like blossoms upon turf. 
 
 The " Evening Walk " and " Descriptive 
 Sketches " show plainly the prevailing influence 
 of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the 
 mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the 
 temperance of tone and judgment in selection which 
 have made the " Traveller " and the " Deserted 
 Village," perhaps, the most truly classical poems in 
 the language. They bear here and there, however, 
 the unmistakable stamp of the maturer Words 
 worth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in the 
 intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of 
 this realism, from which Wordsworth never wholly 
 freed himself, the following verses may suffice as a 
 specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois- 
 hunter killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes 
 back to the bereaved wife and son : 
 
 " Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze, 
 Passing his father's bones in future days, 
 Start at the reliques of that very thigh 
 On which so oft he prattled when a boy."
 
 WORDSWORTH 371 
 
 In these poems there is plenty of that " poetic dic 
 tion " against which Wordsworth was to lead the 
 revolt nine years later. 
 
 " To wet the peak's impracticable sides 
 He opens of his feet the sanguine tides, 
 Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes 
 Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies." 
 
 Both of these passages have disappeared from the 
 revised edition, as well as some curious outbursts 
 of that motiveless despair which Byron made fash 
 ionable not long after. Nor are there wanting 
 touches of fleshliness which strike us oddly as com 
 ing from Wordsworth. 1 
 
 " Farewell ! those forms that in thy noontide shade 
 Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, 
 Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire 
 To throw the ' sultry ray ' of young Desire ; 
 Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go 
 Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow ; 
 Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed, 
 And rising by the moon of passion swayed." 
 
 The political tone is also mildened in the revision, 
 as where he changes " despot courts " into " tyr 
 anny." One of the alterations is interesting. In 
 the " Evening Walk " he had originally written 
 
 ' ' And bids her soldier come her wars to share 
 Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar." 
 
 An erratum at the end directs us to correct the 
 second verse, thus : 
 
 1 Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to pru 
 dery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at Dr. 
 Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats's Ode to a Grecian 
 Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he saw the group 
 of Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The'dev-ils ! "
 
 372 WORDSWORTH 
 
 "Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar." 1 
 
 Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for mak 
 ing the owl a bodeful bird. He had himself done 
 so in the "Evening Walk," and corrects his epi 
 thets to suit his later judgment, putting " gladsome " 
 for " boding," and replacing 
 
 " The tremulous sob of the complaining owl" 
 
 fcy 
 
 " The sportive outcry of the mocking owl." 
 
 Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much 
 changed in the revision as to make the dates ap 
 pended to them a misleading anachronism. But 
 there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which 
 already gives us a glimpse of that passion with 
 which he was the first to irradiate descriptive po 
 etry, and which sets him on a level with Turner. 
 
 " 'T is storm ; and hid in mist from hour to hour 
 All day the floods a deepening murmur pour ; 
 The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight ; 
 Dark is the region as with coming night ; 
 But what a sudden burst of overpowering light ! 
 Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, 
 Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form ; 
 Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine 
 The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline ; 
 Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, 
 At once to pillars turned that flame with gold ; 
 Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun 
 The West that burns like one dilated sun, 
 Where in a mighty crucible expire 
 The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire." 
 
 1 The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The 
 original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately 
 Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor 
 C. E. Norton.
 
 WORDSWORTH 373 
 
 Wordsworth has made only one change in these 
 verses, and that for the worse, by substitut 
 ing "glorious" (which was already implied in 
 " glances " and " fireclad ") for " wheeling." In 
 later life he would have found it hard to forgive 
 the man who should have made cliffs recline over 
 a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most 
 prophetic in these poems is their want of continuity, 
 and the purple patches of true poetry on a texture 
 of unmistakable prose ; perhaps we might add the 
 incongruous clothing of prose thoughts in the cere 
 monial robes of poesy. 
 
 During the same year (1793) he wrote, but did 
 not publish, a political tract, in which he avowed 
 himself opposed to monarchy and to the hereditary 
 principle, and desirous of a republic, if it could be 
 had without a revolution. He probably continued 
 to be all his life in favor of that ideal republic 
 "which never was on land or sea," but fortunately 
 he gave up politics that he might devote himself to 
 his own nobler calling, to which politics are subor 
 dinate, and for which he found freedom enough in 
 England as it was. 1 Dr. Wordsworth admits that 
 
 1 Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, 
 BO far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Cole 
 ridge and Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced 
 them shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance 
 with Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to 
 them longer. There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle 
 (without date, but apparently written in the spring of 1798) which 
 would imply that Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of 
 social heresy. " Wordsworth has been caballed against so long 
 and so loudly that he has found it impossible to prevail on the 
 tenant of the Allf oxden estate to let him the house after their first
 
 374 WORDSWORTH 
 
 his uncle's opinions were democratical so late as 
 1802. I suspect that they remained so in an eso 
 teric way to the end of his days. He had himself 
 suffered by the arbitrary selfishness of a great land 
 holder, and he was born and bred in a part of Eng 
 land where there is a greater social equality than 
 elsewhere. The look and manner of the Cumber 
 land people especially are such as recall very viv 
 idly to a New Englander the associations of fifty 
 years ago, ere the change from New England to 
 New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile, Want, 
 which makes no distinctions of Monarchist or Re 
 publican, was pressing upon him. The debt due to 
 his father's estate had not been paid, and Words 
 worth was one of those rare idealists who esteem it 
 the first duty of a friend of humanity to live for, 
 and not on, his neighbor. He at first proposed es 
 tablishing a periodical journal to be called " The 
 Philanthropist," but luckily went no further with 
 it, for the receipts from an organ of opinion which 
 professed republicanism, and at the same time dis 
 countenanced the plans of all existing or defunct 
 republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. 
 There being no appearance of any demand, present 
 or prospective, for philanthropists, he tried to get 
 
 agreement is expired.' ' Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's 
 insulation of character and habitual want of sympathy with any 
 thing but the moods of his own mind that rendered him incapable 
 of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have regarded 
 even his sister Dorothy (whom he certainly loved as much as it 
 was possible for him to love anything but his own poems) as a 
 kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a mountain 
 might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.
 
 WORDSWORTH 375 
 
 employment as correspondent of a newspaper. 
 Here also it was impossible that lie should succeed ; 
 he was too great to be merged in the editorial We, 
 and had too well defined a private opinion on all 
 subjects to be able to express that average of public 
 opinion which constitutes able editorials. But so it 
 is that to the prophet in the wilderness the birds 
 of ill omen are already on the wing with food from 
 heaven ; and while Wordsworth's relatives were 
 getting impatient at what they considered his waste 
 of time, while one thought he had gifts enough to 
 make a good parson, and another lamented the rare 
 attorney that was lost in him, 1 the prescient muse 
 guided the hand of Eaisley Calvert while he wrote 
 
 1 Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, " that, after 
 he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt as to 
 what his future employment should be. He did not feel himself 
 good enough for the Church ; he felt that his mind was not prop 
 erly disciplined for that holy office, and that the struggle between 
 his conscience and his impulses would have made life a torture. 
 He also shrank from the Law, although Southey often told him 
 that he was well fitted for the higher parts of the profession. He 
 had studied military history with great interest, and the strategy 
 of war ; and he always fancied that he had talents for command ; 
 and he at one time thought of a military life, but then he was 
 without connections, and he felt, if he were ordered to the West 
 Indies, his talents would not save him from the yellow-fever, and 
 he gave that up." (Memoirs, ii. 466.) It is curious to fancy 
 Wordsworth a soldier. Certain points of likeness between him 
 and Wellington have often struck me. They resemble each 
 other in practical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in 
 a kind of precise uprightness which made their personal character 
 somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Wellington 
 was piety in Wordsworth, and the entire absence of imagination 
 (the great point of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as much as 
 anything to make Wellington a great commander.
 
 876 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the poet's name in his will for a legacy of 900. 
 By the death of Calvert, in 1795, this timely help 
 came to Wordsworth at the turning-point of his 
 life, and made it honest for him to write poems 
 that will never die, instead of theatrical critiques 
 as ephemeral as play-bills, or leaders that led only 
 to oblivion. 
 
 In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his sis 
 ter took up their abode at Racedown Lodge, near 
 Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly two years 
 were passed, chiefly in the study of poetry, and 
 Wordsworth to some extent recovered from the 
 fierce disappointment of his political dreams, and 
 regained that equable tenor of mind which alone 
 is consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here 
 Coleridge, who had contrived to see something 
 more in the " Descriptive Sketches " than the pub 
 lic had discovered there, first made his acquaint 
 ance. The sympathy and appreciation of an in 
 tellect like Coleridge's supplied him with that 
 external motive to activity which is the chief use 
 of popularity, and justified to him his opinion of 
 his own powers. It was now that the tragedy of 
 " The Borderers " was for the most part written, 
 and that plan of the " Lyrical Ballads " suggested 
 which gave Wordsworth a clue to lead him out of 
 the metaphysical labyrinth in which he was entan 
 gled. It was agreed between the two young friends, 
 that Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, 
 and, by a good fortune uncommon to such con 
 spiracies, Nature had already consented to the ar 
 rangement. In July, 1797, the two Wordsworths
 
 WORDSWORTH 377 
 
 removed to Allfoxden in Somersetshire, that they 
 might be near Coleridge, who in the mean while 
 had married and settled himself at Nether-Stowey. 
 In November " The Borderers " was finished, and 
 Wordsworth went up to London with his sister to 
 offer it for the. stage. The good Genius of the 
 poet again interposing, the play was decisively re 
 jected, and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, 
 himself the hero of that first tragi-comedy so com 
 mon to young authors. 
 
 The play has fine passages, but is as unreal 
 as " Jane Eyre." It shares with many of Words 
 worth's narrative poems the defect of being written 
 to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the 
 overbearing thesis is continually thrusting the poe 
 try to the wall. Applied to the drama, such pre 
 destination makes all the personages puppets and 
 disenables them for being characters. Wordsworth 
 seems to have felt this when he published " The 
 Borderers " in 1842, and says in a note that it was 
 " at first written . . . without any view to its ex 
 hibition upon the stage." But he was mistaken. 
 The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle 
 show that he was long in giving up the hope of 
 getting it accepted by some theatrical manager. 
 
 He now applied himself to the preparation of 
 the first volume of the " Lyrical Ballads " for the 
 press, and it was published toward the close of 
 1798. The book, which contained also " The An 
 cient Mariner " of Coleridge, attracted little notice, 
 and that in great part contemptuous. When Mr. 
 Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his copy-
 
 378 WORDSWORTH 
 
 rights to Mr. Longman, that of the " Lyrical Bal 
 lads " was reckoned at zero, and it was at last 
 given up to the authors. A few persons were not 
 wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks 
 of a new day in that light which the critical fire- 
 brigade thought to extinguish with a few contemp 
 tuous spurts of cold water. 1 
 
 Lord Byron describes himself as waking one 
 morning and finding himself famous, and it is quite 
 an ordinary fact that a blaze may be made with a 
 little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands 
 who would have thought the sunrise tedious. If we 
 may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have 
 said that he awoke and found himself in-famous, 
 for the publication of the " Lyrical Ballads " un 
 doubtedly raised him to the distinction of being 
 the least popular poet in England. Parnassus has 
 two peaks ; the one where improvising poets clus 
 ter ; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits 
 alone, a peak veiled sometimes from the whole 
 morning of a generation by earth-born mists and 
 
 1 Cottle says, " The sale was so slow and the severity of most of 
 the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed to be 
 certain." But the notices in the Monthly and Critical reviews 
 (then the most influential) were fair, and indeed favorable, espe 
 cially to Wordsworth's share in the volume. The Monthly says, 
 " So much genius and originality are discovered in this publication 
 that we wish to see another from the same hand." The Critical, 
 after saying that "in the whole range of English poetry we 
 scarcely recollect anything superior to a passage in Lines written 
 near Tintern Abbey" sums up thus : " Yet every piece discovers 
 genius ; and ill as the author has frequently employed his talents, 
 they certainly rank him with the best of living poets." Such 
 treatment surely cannot be called discouraging.
 
 WORDSWORTH 379 
 
 smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more con 
 sciously at sunset, and after nightfall to crown it 
 self with imperishable stars. Wordsworth had 
 that self-trust which in the man of genius is sub 
 lime, and in the man of talent insufferable. It 
 mattered not to him though all the reviewers had 
 been in a chorus of laughter or a conspiracy of 
 silence behind him. He went quietly over to Ger 
 many to write more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin 
 a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time 
 when there were only two men in the world (him 
 self and Coleridge) who were aware that he had 
 one in anywise differing from those, mechanically 
 uniform, which are stuck drearily, side by side, in 
 the great pin-paper of society. 
 
 In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with 
 Klopstock, and after dinner they had a conver 
 sation, of which Wordsworth took notes. The re 
 spectable old poet, who was passing the evening 
 of his days by the chimney-corner, Darby and Joan 
 like, with his respectable Muse, seems to have been 
 rather bewildered by the apparition of a living 
 genius. The record is of value now chiefly for the 
 insight it gives us into Wordsworth's mind. Among 
 other things he said, " that it was the province of 
 a great poet to raise people up to his own level, 
 not to descend to theirs," memorable words, the 
 more memorable that a literary life of sixty years 
 was in keeping with them. 
 
 It would be instructive to know what were 
 Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Goslar. 
 Pe Quincey's statement is mere conjecture. It
 
 380 WORDSWORTH 
 
 may be guessed fairly enough that he would seek 
 an entrance to the German language by the easy 
 path of the ballad, a course likely to confirm him 
 in his theories as to the language of poetry. The 
 Spinozism with which he has been not unjustly 
 charged was certainly not due to any German in 
 fluence, for it appears unmistakably in the " Lines 
 composed at Tintern Abbey " in July, 1798. It 
 is more likely to have been derived from his talks 
 with Coleridge in 1797. 1 When Emerson visited 
 him in 1833, he spoke with loathing of " Wilhelm 
 Meister," a part of which he had read in Carlyle's 
 translation apparently. There was some affecta 
 tion in this, it should seem, for he had read Smol 
 lett. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that 
 the help of Germany in the development of his 
 genius may be reckoned as very small, though 
 there is certainly a marked resemblance both in 
 form and sentiment between some of his earlier 
 lyrics and those of Goethe. His poem of the 
 " Thorn," though vastly more imaginative, may 
 have been suggested by Burger's Pfarrers Tochter 
 von Taubenhain. The little grave drei Spannen 
 lang, in its conscientious measurement, certainly 
 recalls a famous couplet in the English poem. 
 
 After spending the winter at Goslar, Words 
 worth and his sister returned to England in the 
 
 1 A very improbable story of Coleridge's in the Biographia 
 Literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a suspicion 
 of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their constant 
 references to a certain "Spy Nosey." The story at least seems 
 to show how they pronounced the name, which was exactly in ac 
 cordance with the usage of the last generation in New England.
 
 WORDSWORTH 381 
 
 spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in West- 
 moreland. In 1800, the first edition of the " Lyri 
 cal Ballads " being exhausted, it was republished 
 with the addition of another volume, Mr. Long 
 man paying <100 for the copyright of two editions. 
 The book passed to a second edition in 1802, and 
 to a third in 1805. 1 Wordsworth sent a copy of it, 
 with a manly letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly rec 
 ommending to his attention the poems " Michael " 
 and " The Brothers," as displaying the strength 
 and permanence among a simple and rural popula 
 tion of those domestic affections which were cer 
 tain to decay gradually under the influence of 
 manufactories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote 
 a civil acknowledgment, saying that his favorites 
 among the poems were " Harry Gill,"* " We are 
 Seven," "The Mad Mother," and "The Idiot," 
 but that he was prepossessed against the use of 
 blank-verse for simple subjects. Any political sig 
 nificance in the poems he was apparently unable to 
 see. To this second edition Wordsworth prefixed 
 an argumentative Preface, in which he nailed to 
 the door of the cathedral of English song the criti 
 cal theses which he was to maintain against all 
 comers in his poetry and his life. It was a new 
 thing for an author to undertake to show the good- 
 
 1 Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since done) 
 a hearing in America sooner than in England. James Humphreys, 
 a Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a sufficient list of 
 subscribers to reprint the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. 
 The second English edition, however, having been published be 
 fore he had wholly completed his reprinting, was substantially 
 followed in the first American, which was published in 1802.
 
 382 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ness of his verses by the logic and learning of his 
 prose ; but Wordsworth carried to the reform of 
 poetry all that fervor and faith which had lost 
 their political object, and it is another proof of the 
 sincerity and greatness of his mind, and of that 
 heroic simplicity which is their concomitant, that 
 he could do so calmly what was sure to seem ludi 
 crous to the greater number of his readers. Fifty 
 years have since demonstrated that the true judg 
 ment of one man outweighs any counterpoise of 
 false judgment, and that the faith of mankind is 
 guided to a man only by a well-founded faith in 
 himself. To this Defensio Wordsworth afterward 
 added a supplement, and the two form a treatise 
 of permanent value for philosophic statement and 
 decorous English. Their only ill effect has been, 
 that they have encouraged many otherwise deserv 
 ing young men to set a Sibylline value on their 
 verses in proportion as they were unsalable. The 
 strength of an argument for self-reliance drawn 
 from the example of a great man depends wholly 
 on the greatness of him who uses it ; such argu 
 ments being like coats of mail, which, though they 
 serve the strong against arrow-flights and lance- 
 thrusts, may only suffocate the weak or sink him 
 the sooner in the waters of oblivion. 
 
 An advertisement prefixed to the " Lyrical Bal 
 lads," as originally published in one volume, warned 
 the reader that " they were written chiefly with a 
 view to ascertain how far the language of conver 
 sation in the middle and lower classes of society 
 is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure."
 
 WORDSWORTH 383 
 
 In his preface to the second edition, in two vol 
 umes, Wordsworth already found himself forced to 
 shift his ground a little (perhaps in deference to 
 the wider view and finer sense of Coleridge), and 
 now says of the former volume that " it was pub 
 lished as an experiment which, I hoped, might be 
 of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to met 
 rical arrangement, a selection of the real language 
 of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of 
 pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be im 
 parted which a poet may rationally endeavor to 
 impart." 1 Here is evidence of a retreat towards a 
 safer position, though Wordsworth seems to have 
 remained unconvinced at heart, and for many years 
 longer clung obstinately to the passages of bald 
 prose into which his original theory had betrayed 
 him. In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still 
 further change, and an assiduous study of the qual 
 ities of his own mind and of his own poetic method 
 (the two subjects in which alone he was ever a 
 thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry 
 was in no sense that appeal to the understanding 
 which is implied by the words " rationally endeavor 
 to impart." In the preface of that year he says, 
 " The observations prefixed to that portion of these 
 volumes which was published many years ago under 
 the title of ' Lyrical Ballads ' have so little of spe 
 cial application to the greater part of the present 
 enlarged and diversified collection, that they could 
 
 1 Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is now 
 printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edition of 
 1815.
 
 384 WORDSWORTH 
 
 not with propriety stand as an introduction to it." 
 It is a pity that he could not have become an ear 
 lier convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that 
 " prose was words in their best order, and poetry 
 the best words in the best order." But idealization 
 was something that Wordsworth was obliged to 
 learn painfully. It did not come to him naturally, 
 as to Spenser and Shelley, and to Coleridge in his 
 higher moods. Moreover, it was in the too fre 
 quent choice of subjects incapable of being ideal 
 ized without a manifest jar between theme and 
 treatment that Wordsworth's great mistake lay. 
 For example, in " The Blind Highland Boy " he 
 had originally the following stanzas : 
 
 " Strong is the current, but be mild, 
 Ye waves, and spare the helpless child ! 
 If ye in anger fret or chafe, 
 A bee-hive would be ship as safe 
 As that in which he sails. 
 
 " But say, what was it ? Thought of fear! 
 Well may ye tremble when ye hear ! 
 A household tub like one of those 
 Which women use to wash their clothes, 
 This carried the blind boy." 
 
 In endeavoring to get rid of the downright vul 
 garity of phrase in the last stanza, Wordsworth in 
 vents an impossible tortoise-shell, and thus robs his 
 story of the reality which alone gave it a living in 
 terest. Any extemporized raft would have floated 
 the boy down to immortality. But Wordsworth 
 never quite learned the distinction between Fact, 
 which suffocates the Muse, and Truth, which is the 
 very breath of her nostrils. Study and self -culture
 
 WORDSWORTH 385 
 
 did much for him, but they never quite satisfied 
 him that he was capable of making a mistake. He 
 yielded silently to friendly remonstrance on cer 
 tain points, and gave up, for example, the ludi 
 crous exactness of 
 
 " I 've measured it from side to side, 
 'T is three feet long and two feet wide." 
 
 But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to 
 his dying day he could never quite shake off that 
 habit of over-minute detail which renders the nar 
 ratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and some 
 times so distasteful. 1 "Simon Lee," after his 
 latest revision, still contains verses like these : 
 
 "And he is lean and he is sick ; 
 His body, dwindled and awry, 
 Bests upon ankles swollen and thick ; 
 His legs are thin and dry ; 
 
 Few months of life he has in store, 
 As he to you will tell, 
 For still, the more he works, the more 
 Do his weak ankles swell," 
 
 which are not only prose, but bad prose, and more 
 over guilty of the same fault for which Words 
 worth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on 
 the ballad-style, that their " matter is contemp 
 tible." The sonorousness of conviction with which 
 
 1 " On my alluding to the line, 
 
 ' Three feet long and two feet wide,' 
 
 and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company, he 
 said, 'They ought to be liked.'" (Crabb Robinson, 9th May, 
 1815.) His ordinary answer to criticisms was that he considered 
 the power to appreciate the passage criticised as a test of the crit 
 ic's capacity to judge of poetry at all.
 
 386 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Wordsworth sometimes gives utterance to common 
 places of thought and trivialities of sentiment has 
 a ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the 
 faithful in unguarded moments. We are reminded 
 of a passage in u The Excursion " : 
 
 "Lost! I heard 
 
 From yon huge breast of rock a solemn bleat, 
 Sent forth as if it were the mountain'' s voice." 
 
 In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with 
 Lamb began, and was thenceforward never inter 
 rupted. He continued to live at Grasmere, con 
 scientiously diligent in the composition of poems, 
 secure of finding the materials of glory within and 
 around him ; for his genius taught him that inspi 
 ration is no product of a foreign shore, and that 
 no adventurer ever found it, though he wandered 
 as long as Ulysses. Meanwhile the appreciation 
 of the best minds and the gratitude of the purest 
 hearts gradually centred more and more towards 
 him. In 1802 he made a short visit to France, in 
 company with Miss Wordsworth, and soon after 
 his return to England was married to Mary Hutch- 
 inson, on the 4th of October of the same year. Of 
 the good fortune of this marriage no other proof is 
 needed than the purity and serenity of his poems, 
 and its record is to be sought nowhere else. 
 
 On the 18th of June, 1803, his first child, John, 
 was born, and on the 14th of August of the same 
 year he set out with his sister on a foot journey 
 into Scotland. Coleridge was their companion 
 during a part of this excursion, of which Miss 
 Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scotland he
 
 WORDSWORTH 387 
 
 made the acquaintance of Scott, who recited to him 
 a part of the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," then in 
 manuscript. The travellers returned to Grasmere 
 on the 25th of September. It was during this 
 year that Wordsworth's intimacy with the excel 
 lent Sir George Beaumont began. Sir George 
 was an amateur painter of considerable merit, and 
 his friendship was undoubtedly of service to Words 
 worth in making him familiar with the laws of a 
 sister art and thus contributing to enlarge the sym 
 pathies of his criticism, the tendency of which was 
 toward too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beau 
 mont, dying in 1827, did not forego his regard for 
 the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in 
 mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of <100, to 
 defray the charges of a yearly journey. 
 
 In March, 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost 
 his life by the shipwreck of the Abergavenny East- 
 Indiaman, of which he was captain. He was a 
 man of great purity and integrity, and sacrificed 
 himself to his sense of duty by refusing to leave 
 the ship till it was impossible to save him. Words 
 worth was deeply attached to him, and felt such 
 grief at his death as only solitary natures like his 
 are capable of, though mitigated by a sense of the 
 heroism which was the cause of it. The need of 
 mental activity as affording an outlet to intense 
 emotion may account for the great productiveness of 
 this and the following year. He now completed 
 "The Prelude," wrote "The Wagoner," and in 
 creased the number of his smaller poems enough to 
 fill two volumes, which were published in 1807.
 
 888 WORDSWORTH 
 
 This collection, which contained some of the 
 most beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among 
 others the incomparable Odes to Duty and on Im 
 mortality, did not reach a second edition till 1815. 
 The reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets 
 pillaged while they scoffed, particularly Byron, 
 among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth showed 
 as incongruously as a sacred vestment on the back 
 of some buccaneering plunderer of an abbey. 1 
 There was a general combination to put him down, 
 but on the other hand there was a powerful party 
 in his favor, consisting of William Wordsworth. 
 He not only continued in good heart himself, but, 
 reversing the order usual on such occasions, kept 
 up the spirits of his friends. 2 Meanwhile the 
 
 1 Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of these 
 volumes, not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is reported 
 as saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the Edinburgh Re 
 view's attack on Hours of Idleness. " The young man will do 
 something if he goes on," he said. 
 
 2 The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory of 
 his uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused drea 
 riness are only matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's History of 
 the Protectorate House of Cromwell. It is a misfortune that his 
 materials were not put into the hands of Professor Reed, whose 
 notes to the American edition are among the most valuable parts 
 of it, as they certainly are the clearest. The book contains, how 
 ever, some valuable letters of Wordsworth ; and those relating 
 to this part of his life should be read by every student of his 
 works, for the light they throw upon the principles which gov 
 erned him in the composition of his poems. In a letter to Lady 
 Beaumont (May 21, 1807) he says, " Trouble not yourself upon 
 their present reception ; of what moment is that compared with 
 what I trust is their destiny ! to console the afflicted, to add 
 sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier ; to teach the 
 young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel,
 
 WORDSWORTH 389 
 
 higher order of minds among his contemporaries 
 had descried and acknowledged him. They see 
 their peer over the mist and lower summits be 
 tween. 
 
 " When Plinlimmon hath a cap, 
 Snowdon wots well of that." 
 
 Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a 
 house of Sir George Beaumont's, at Coleorton in 
 Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere having be 
 come too small for his increased family. On his 
 return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the house 
 at Allan Bank, where he lived three years. Dur 
 ing this period he appears to have written very 
 little poetry, for which his biographer assigns as a 
 primary reason the smokiness of the Allan Bank 
 chimneys. This will hardly account for the failure 
 of the summer crop, especially as Wordsworth com 
 posed chiefly in the open air. It did not prevent 
 him from writing a pamphlet upon the Convention 
 of Cintra, which was published too late to attract 
 
 and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous ; 
 this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long 
 after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our 
 graves. . . . To conclude, my ears are stone-dead to this idle 
 buzz [of hostile criticism], and my flesh as insensible as iron to 
 these petty stings ; and, after what I have said, I am sure yours 
 will be the same. I doubt not that you will share with me an in 
 vincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little 
 poems) will cooperate with the benign tendencies in human nature 
 and society wherever found ; and that they will in their degree be 
 efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." Here is 
 an odd reversal of the ordinary relation between an unpopular 
 poet and his little public of admirers ; it is he who keeps up their 
 spirits, and supplies them with faith from his own inexhaustible 
 cistern.
 
 390 WORDSWORTH 
 
 much attention, though Lamb says that its effect 
 upon him was like that which one of Milton's 
 tracts might have had upon a contemporary. 1 It 
 was at Allan Bank that Coleridge dictated "The 
 Friend," and Wordsworth contributed to it two 
 essays, one in answer to a letter of Mathetes 2 
 (Professor Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, 
 republished in the Notes to "The Excursion." 
 Here also he wrote his " Description of the Scen 
 ery of the Lakes." Perhaps a truer explanation 
 of the comparative silence of Wordsworth's Muse 
 during these years is to be found in the intense in 
 terest which he took in current events, whose va 
 riety, picturesqueness, and historical significance 
 were enough to absorb all the energies of his imag 
 ination. 
 
 In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed to 
 the Parsonage at Grasmere. Here he remained 
 two years, and here he had his second intimate ex 
 perience of sorrow in the loss of two of his children, 
 Catharine and Thomas, one of whom died 4th June, 
 and the other 1st December, 1812. 3 Early in 1813 
 
 1 " Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any general 
 effect, because the sentences are long and involved ; and his 
 friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered them 
 more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation." (Southey 
 to Scott, 30th July, 1809.) The tract is, as Southey hints, heavy. 
 
 2 The first essay in the third volume of the second edition. 
 8 Wordsworth's children were, 
 
 John, born 18th June, 1803, a clergyman. 
 Dorothy, born 16th August, 1804 ; died 9th July, 1847. 
 Thomas, born 16th June, 1806 ; died 1st December, 1812. 
 Catharine, born 6th September, 1808 ; died 4th June, 1812. 
 William, born 12th May, 1810; succeeded his father as Stamp. 
 Distributor.
 
 WORDSWORTH 391 
 
 be bought Rydal Mount, and, having removed 
 thither, changed his abode no more during the rest 
 of his life. In March of this year he was appointed 
 Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmore 
 land, an office whose receipts rendered him inde 
 pendent, and whose business he was able to do 
 by deputy, thus leaving him ample leisure for no 
 bler duties. De Quincey speaks of this appoint 
 ment as an instance of the remarkable good luck 
 which waited upon Wordsworth through his whole 
 life. In our view it is only another iDustration of 
 that scripture which describes the righteous as 
 never forsaken. Good luck is the willing hand 
 maid of upright, energetic character, and conscien 
 tious observance of duty. Wordsworth owed his 
 nomination to the friendly exertions of the Ear] of 
 Lonsdale, who desired to atone as far as might 
 be for the injustice of the first Earl, and who re 
 spected the honesty of the man more than he ap 
 preciated the originality of the poet. 1 The Collec- 
 torship at Whitehaven (a more lucrative office) 
 was afterwards offered to Wordsworth, and de 
 clined. He had enough for independence, and 
 wished nothing more. Still later, on the death of 
 the Stamp-Distributor for Cumberland, a part of 
 that district was annexed to Westmoreland, and 
 
 1 Good luck (in the sense of Chance) seems properly to be the 
 occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither deserved nor 
 knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly turns to ill luck. 
 Moore's Bermudan appointment is an instance of it. Wordsworth 
 had a sound common-sense and practical conscientiousness, which 
 enabled him to fill his office as well as Dr. Franklin could have 
 done. A fitter man could not have been found in Westmoreland.
 
 392 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Wordsworth's income was raised to something more 
 than .1,000 a year. 
 
 In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, 
 visiting Yarrow in company with the Ettrick 
 Shepherd. During this year " The Excursion " 
 was published, in an edition of five hundred copies, 
 which supplied the demand for six years. Another 
 edition of the same number of copies was published 
 in 1827, and not exhausted till 1834. In 1815 
 " The White Doe of Rylstone " appeared, and in 
 1816 " A Letter to a Friend of Burns," in which 
 Wordsworth gives his opinion upon the limits to 
 be observed by the biographers of literary men. 
 It contains many valuable suggestions, but allows 
 hardly scope enough for personal details, to which 
 he was constitutionally indifferent. 1 Nearly the 
 same date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation 
 of the first three books of the 2Eneid, a specimen of 
 which was printed in the Cambridge " Philological 
 Museum " (1832). In 1819 " Peter Bell," written 
 twenty years before, was published, and, perhaps 
 in consequence of the ridicule of the reviewers, 
 found a more rapid sale than any of his previous 
 volumes. " The Wagoner," printed in the same 
 year, was less successful. His next publication was 
 the volume of Sonnets on the river Duddon, with 
 some miscellaneous poems, 1820. A tour on the 
 Continent in 1820 furnished the subjects for an 
 other collection, published in 1822. This was fol 
 lowed in the same year by the volume of " Eccle- 
 
 1 "I am not one who much or oft delight 
 In personal talk."
 
 WORDSWORTH 393 
 
 siastical Sketches." His subsequent publications 
 were " Yarrow Kevisited," 1835, and the tragedy 
 of " The Borderers," 1842. 
 
 During all these years his fame was increasing 
 slowly but steadily, and his age gathered to itself 
 the reverence and the troops of friends which his 
 poems and the nobly simple life reflected in them 
 deserved. Public honors followed private appreci 
 ation. In 1838 the University of Dublin conferred 
 upon him the degree of D. C. L. In 1839 Oxford 
 did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in 
 his seventieth year) at the University was enthu 
 siastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp- 
 Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of 
 putting him upon the civil list for a pension of 
 .300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, with 
 the express understanding that it was a tribute of 
 respect, involving no duties except such as might 
 be self-imposed. His only official production was 
 an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as 
 Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. His 
 life was prolonged yet seven years, almost, it should 
 seem, that he might receive that honor which he 
 had truly conquered for himself by the unflinching 
 bravery of a literary life of half a century, unpar 
 alleled for the scorn with which its labors were re 
 ceived, and the victorious acknowledgment which 
 at last crowned them. Surviving nearly all his 
 contemporaries, he had, if ever any man had, a 
 foretaste of immortality, enjoying in a sort his own 
 posthumous renown, for the hardy slowness of its 
 growth gave a safe pledge of its durability. He
 
 394 WORDSWORTH 
 
 died on the 23d of April, 1850, the anniversary of 
 the death of Shakespeare. 
 
 We have thus briefly sketched the life of Words 
 worth, a life uneventful even for a man of let 
 ters ; a life like that of an oak, of quiet self -devel 
 opment, throwing out stronger roots toward the 
 side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and 
 of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature 
 of the soil in which it grows. The life and growth 
 of his mind, and the influences which shaped it, are 
 to be looked for, even more than is the case with 
 most poets, in his works, for he deliberately re 
 corded them there. 
 
 Of his personal characteristics little is related. 
 He was somewhat above the middle height, but, 
 according to De Quincey, of indifferent figure, the 
 shoulders being narrow and drooping. His finest 
 feature was the eye, which was gray and full of 
 spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says : " I never beheld 
 eyes that looked so inspired, so supernatural. They 
 were like fires, half burning, half smouldering, 
 with a sort of acrid fixture of regard. One might 
 imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes." 
 Southey tells us that he had no sense of smell, and 
 Haydon that he had none of form. The best like 
 ness of him, in De Quincey's judgment, is the por 
 trait of Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes on 
 Paradise Lost. He was active in his habits, com 
 posing in the open air, and generally dictating his 
 poems. His daily life was regular, simple, and 
 frugal ; his manners were dignified and kindly ; 
 and in his letters and recorded conversations it is
 
 WORDSWORTH 395 
 
 remarkable how little that was personal entered 
 into his judgment of contemporaries. 
 
 The true rank of Wordsworth among poets is, 
 perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, so 
 hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of judgment 
 uninflamed by the tumult of partisanship which 
 besets the doors. 
 
 Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a great 
 poet, at a time when the artificial school of poetry 
 was enthroned with all the authority of long suc 
 cession and undisputed legitimacy, it was almost 
 inevitable that Wordsworth, who, both by nature 
 and judgment was a rebel against the existing 
 order, should become a partisan. Unfortunately, 
 he became not only the partisan of a system, but of 
 William Wordsworth as its representative. Right 
 in general principle, he thus necessarily became 
 wrong in particulars. Justly convinced that great 
 ness only achieves its ends by implicitly obeying 
 its own instincts, he perhaps reduced the following 
 his instincts too much to a system, mistook his own 
 resentments for the promptings of his natural 
 genius, and, compelling principle to the measure of 
 his own temperament or even of the controversial 
 exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the 
 error of making naturalness itself artificial. If a 
 poet resolve to be original, it will end commonly in 
 his being merely peculiar. 
 
 Wordsworth himself departed more and more in 
 practice, as he grew older, from the theories which 
 he had laid down in his prefaces ; l but those theo- 
 
 1 How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
 
 896 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ries undoubtedly had a great effect in retarding the 
 growth of his fame. He had carefully constructed 
 a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems 
 were to be studied, and the public insisted on look 
 ing through them at his mature works, and were 
 consequently unable to see fairly what required a 
 different focus. He forced his readers to come to 
 his poetry with a certain amount of conscious pre 
 paration, and thus gave them beforehand the im 
 pression of something like mechanical artifice, and 
 deprived them of the contented repose of implicit 
 faith. To the child a watch seems to be a living 
 creature ; but Wordsworth would not let his readers 
 be children, and did injustice to himself by giving 
 them an uneasy doubt whether creations which 
 
 influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had 
 protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate 
 of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving 
 Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achieve 
 ment of some later copyist of Pope : 
 
 " While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast." 
 
 And in The Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goatherd we find a 
 thermometer or barometer called 
 
 ' ' The well- wrought scale 
 Whose sentient tube instructs to time 
 A purpose to a fickle clime." 
 
 Still worse in the Eclipse of the Sun, 1821 : 
 ' ' High on her speculative tower 
 Stood Science, waiting for the hour 
 When Sol was destined to endure 
 
 That darkening." 
 Bo in The Excursion, 
 
 " The cold March wind raised in her tender throat 
 Viewless obstructions."
 
 WORDSWORTH 397 
 
 really throbbed with the very heart's-blood of ge 
 nius, and were alive with nature's life of life, were 
 not contrivances of wheels and springs. A natural 
 ness which we are told to expect has lost the crown 
 ing grace of nature. The men who walked in Cor 
 nelius Agrippa's visionary gardens had probably 
 no more pleasurable emotion than that of a shallow 
 wonder, or an equally shallow self-satisfaction in 
 thinking they had hit upon the secret of the thauma- 
 turgy ; but to a tree that has grown as God willed 
 we come without a theory and with no botanical 
 predilections, enjoying it simply and thankfully ; 
 or the Imagination recreates for us its past sum 
 mers and winters, the birds that have nested and 
 sung in it, the sheep that have clustered in its 
 shade, the winds that have visited it, the cloud- 
 bergs that have drifted over it, and the snows that 
 have ermined it in winter. The Imagination is a 
 faculty that flouts at foreordination, and "Words 
 worth seemed to do all he could to cheat his read 
 ers of her company by laying out paths with a 
 peremptory Do not step off the gravel! at the 
 opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for every 
 conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to tell each 
 when and where it must be caught. 
 
 But if these things stood in the way of immedi 
 ate appreciation, he had another theory which inter 
 feres more seriously with the total and permanent 
 effect of his poems. He was theoretically de 
 termined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to 
 be a great philosophic poet, and to this end he 
 must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question
 
 398 WORDSWORTH 
 
 whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be 
 doubted whether the history of a single man's mind 
 is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the 
 requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be 
 more than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be 
 ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and 
 section. It is rather something which is more ener 
 getic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our 
 hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its simple 
 Open sesame ! while they would stand firm against 
 the reading of the whole body of philosophy. In 
 point of fact, the one element of greatness which 
 *' The Excursion " possesses indisputably is heavi 
 ness. It is only the episodes that are universally 
 read, and the effect of these is diluted by the con 
 necting and accompanying lectures on metaphy 
 sics. Wordsworth had his epic mould to fill, and, 
 like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus, was 
 forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal 
 lest it should run short. Separated from the rest, 
 the episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and 
 without example in the language. 
 
 Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong 
 minds, was a good critic of the substance of poetry, 
 but somewhat niggardly in the allowance he made 
 for those subsidiary qualities which make it the 
 charmer of leisure and the employment of minds 
 without definite object. It may be doubted, in 
 deed, whether he set much store by any contempo 
 rary writing but his own, and whether he did not 
 look upon poetry too exclusively as an exercise 
 rather of the intellect than as a nepenthe of the
 
 WORDSWORTH 399 
 
 imagination. 1 He says of himself, speaking of his 
 youth : 
 
 "In fine, 
 
 I was a better judge of thoughts than words, 
 Misled in estimating words, not only 
 By common inexperience of youth, 
 But by the trade in classic niceties, 
 The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 
 From languages that want the living voice 
 To carry meaning to the natural heart ; 
 To tell us what is passion, what is truth, 
 What reason, what simplicity and sense." a 
 
 Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, this 
 was always true of him, and his thought seems 
 often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its 
 weight. No reader of adequate insight can help 
 regretting that he did not earlier give himself to 
 " the trade of classic niceties." It was precisely 
 this which gives to the blank-verse of Landor the 
 severe dignity and reserved force which alone 
 among later poets recall the tune of Milton, and 
 to which Wordsworth never attained. Indeed, 
 Wordsworth's blank-verse (though the passion be 
 profounder) is always essentially that of Cowper. 
 They were alike also in their love of outward na 
 ture and of simple things. The main difference 
 between them is one of scenery rather than of sen 
 timent, between the life-long familiar of the moun 
 tains and the dweller on the plain. 
 
 It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the 
 very highest powers of the poetic mind were asso- 
 
 1 According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to be 
 " not worth five shillings." 
 
 2 Prelude, Book VI.
 
 400 WORDSWORTH 
 
 ciated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and 
 commonplace. It is in the understanding (always 
 prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagi 
 nation are imbedded. 1 He wrote too much to 
 write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes- 
 army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand, 
 that march safely down to posterity. He set tasks 
 to his divine faculty, which is much the same as 
 trying to make Jove's eagle do the service of a 
 clucking hen. Throughout " The Prelude " and 
 "The Excursion" he seems striving to bind the 
 wizard Imagination with the sand-ropes of dry dis 
 quisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell- 
 word which would make the particles cohere. There 
 is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes 
 progress wearisome. Yet with what splendors as 
 of mountain-sunsets are we rewarded ! what golden 
 rounds of verse do we not see stretching heaven 
 ward with angels ascending and descending ! what 
 haunting harmonies hover around us deep and 
 eternal like the undying barytone of the sea! and 
 if we are compelled to fare through sands and 
 desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear airy 
 shapes that syllable our names with a startling 
 
 1 This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss Mar- 
 tineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of Wordsworth's 
 conversation : " Sometimes he is annoying from the pertinacity 
 with which he dwells on trifles ; at other times he flows on in the 
 utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression of inspiration." 
 Robinson tells us that he read Resolution and Independence to a 
 lady who was affected by it even to tears, and then said, " I have 
 not heard anything for years that so much delighted me ; but, 
 after all, it is not poetry."
 
 WORDS WOR TH 401 
 
 personal appeal to our highest consciousness and 
 our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain 
 in any other poet ! Landor, in a letter to Miss 
 Holford, says admirably of him, " Common minds 
 alone can be ignorant what breadth of philos 
 ophy, what energy and intensity of thought, what 
 insight into the heart, and what observation of 
 nature are requisite for the production of such 
 poetry." 
 
 Take from "Wordsworth all which an honest crit 
 icism cannot but allow, and what is left will show 
 how truly great he was. He had no humor, no 
 dramatic power, and his temperament was of that 
 dry and juiceless quality, that in all his published 
 correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only 
 essays. If we consider carefully where he was 
 most successful, we shall find that it was not so 
 much in description of natural scenery, or deline 
 ation of character, as in vivid expression of the 
 effect produced by external objects and events 
 upon his own mind, and of the shape and hue (per 
 haps momentary) which they in turn took from his 
 mood or temperament. His finest passages are 
 always monologues. He had a fondness for par 
 ticulars, and there are parts of his poems which 
 remind us of local histories in the undue relative 
 importance given to trivial matters. He was the 
 historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of par- 
 ticularization (for it is as truly a power as general 
 ization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to 
 single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to 
 poems developing a single thought or sentiment^
 
 402 WORDSWORTH 
 
 It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. 
 That sequestered nook forced upon him the limits 
 which his fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) 
 was never self-denying enough to impose on itself. 
 It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and it 
 was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of what 
 was permanent in literature) liked him best. Its 
 narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end to 
 end, turn into a virtue his too common fault of giv 
 ing undue prominence to every passing emotion. 
 He excels in monologue, and the law of the sonnet 
 tempers monologue with mercy. In " The Excur 
 sion " we are driven to the subterfuge of a French 
 verdict of extenuating circumstances. His mind 
 had not that reach and elemental movement of 
 Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to 
 itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from 
 every quarter ; some deep with silks and spicery, 
 some brooding over the silent thunders of their bat 
 tailous armaments, but all swept forward in their 
 destined track, over the long billows of his verse, 
 every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath 
 of their common epic impulse. It was an organ 
 that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable 
 equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim deli 
 cacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth in 
 great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it 
 for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Words 
 worth sometimes put the trumpet to his lips, yet 
 he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appro 
 priate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is 
 not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that
 
 WORDSWORTH 403 
 
 which Apollo breathed through, tending the flocks 
 of Admetus, that which Pan endowed with every 
 melody of the visible universe, the same in which 
 the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and 
 gifted with her dual nature, so that ever and 
 anon, amid the notes of human joy or sorrow, there 
 comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, 
 thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten 
 divinity. 
 
 Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while it 
 no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by making 
 him insensible both to the comical incongruity into 
 which he was often led by his earlier theory con 
 cerning the language of poetry and to the not un 
 natural ridicule called forth by it, seems to have 
 been indicative of a certain dulness of perception 
 in other directions. 1 We cannot help feeling that 
 
 1 Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency 
 than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of 
 Kirconnel, a poem hardly to be matched in any language for 
 swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shud*- 
 dering compression is masterly. 
 
 " Curst be the heart that thought the thought, 
 And curst the hand that fired the shot, 
 When in my arms burd Helen dropt, 
 That died to succor me ! 
 
 O, think ye not my heart was sair 
 
 When my love dropt down and spake na mair ? " 
 
 Compare this with, 
 
 " Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts 
 That through his brain are travelling^ 
 And, starting up, to Bruce's heart 
 He launched a deadly javelin :
 
 404 WORDSWORTH 
 
 the material of his nature was essentially prose, 
 which, in his inspired moments, he had the power 
 of transmuting, but which, whenever the inspira 
 tion failed or was factitious, remained obstinately 
 leaden. The normal condition of many poets would 
 seem to approach that temperature to which Words- 
 Fair Ellen saw it when it came, 
 And, stepping forth to meet the same, 
 Did with her body cover 
 The Youth, her chosen lover. 
 
 And Bruce (as soon as he had slain 
 The Gordon) sailed away to Spain, 
 And fought with rage incessant 
 Against the Moorish Crescent." 
 
 These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk "penning a 
 stanza when he should engross. " It will be noticed that Words 
 worth here also departs from his earlier theory of the language of 
 poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less modern and 
 familiar. Had he written, 
 
 " And Gordon never gave a hint, 
 But, having somewhat picked his flint, 
 Let fly the fatal bullet 
 That killed that lovely pullet," 
 
 it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. 
 He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient Mari 
 ner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads : " The poem of 
 my friend has indeed great defects ; first, that the principal per 
 son has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, 
 or as a human being who, having been long under the control of 
 supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake 
 of something supernatural ; secondly, that he does not act, but is 
 continually acted upon ; thirdly, that the events, having no neces 
 sary connection, do not produce each other ; and lastly, that the 
 imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated. " Here is an in 
 dictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's 
 clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange charm of 
 Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this very emancipa 
 tion from the laws of cause and effect.
 
 WORDSWORTH 405 
 
 worth's mind could be raised only by the white 
 heat of profoundly inward passion. And in pro 
 portion to the intensity needful to make his nature 
 thoroughly aglow is the very high quality of his 
 best verses. They seem rather the productions of 
 nature than of man, and have the lastingness of 
 such, delighting our age with the same startle of 
 newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it 
 his thought ? It has the shifting inward lustre of 
 diamond. Is it his feeling ? It is as delicate as the 
 impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have 
 caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the 
 most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, 
 the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of 
 being. But this intensity of mood which insures 
 high quality is by its very nature incapable of pro 
 longation, and "Wordsworth, in endeavoring it, 
 falls more below himself, and is, more even than 
 many poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a 
 poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having 
 the feeling sometimes that the poem is there for 
 the sake of these passages, rather than that these 
 are the natural jets and elations of a mind ener 
 gized by the rapidity of its own motion. In other 
 words, the happy couplet or gracious image seems 
 not to spring from the inspiration of the poem con 
 ceived as a whole, but rather to have dropped of 
 itself into the mind of the poet in one of his ram 
 bles, who then, in a less rapt mood, has patiently 
 built up around it a setting of verse too often un 
 graceful in form and of a material whose cheapness 
 may cast a doubt on the priceless quality of the
 
 406 WORDSWORTH 
 
 gem it encumbers. 1 During the most happily pro 
 ductive period of his life, Wordsworth was impa 
 tient of what may be called the mechanical portion 
 of his art. His wife and sister seem from the first 
 to have been his scribes. In later years, he had 
 learned and often insisted on the truth that poetry 
 was an art no less than a gift, and corrected his 
 poems in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. 
 But he certainly had more of the vision than of the 
 faculty divine, and was always a little numb on the 
 side of form and proportion. Perhaps his best 
 poem in these respects is the " Laodamia," and it 
 is not uninstructive to learn from his own lips that 
 " it cost him more trouble than almost anything of 
 equal length he had ever written." His longer 
 poems (miscalled epical) have no more intimate 
 bond of union than their more or less immediate 
 relation to his own personality. Of character 
 other than his own he had but a faint conception, 
 and all the personages of " The Excursion " that 
 are not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of 
 himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated nature 
 was incapable of projecting itself into the conscious 
 ness of other men and seeing the springs of action 
 at their source in the recesses of individual charac 
 ter. The best parts of these longer poems are 
 bursts of impassioned soliloquy, and his fingers were 
 
 1 " A hundred times when, roving high and low, 
 I have been harassed with the toil of verse, 
 Much pains and little progress, and at once 
 Some lovely Image in the song rose up, . 
 Fall-formed, like Venus rising from the sea." 
 
 Prelude, Book IV.
 
 WORDSWORTH 407 
 
 always clumsy at the callida junctura. The stream 
 of narration is sluggish, if varied by times with 
 pleasing reflections (viridesque placido cequore 
 sylvas) ; we are forced to do our own rowing, and 
 only when the current is hemmed in by some nar 
 row gorge of the poet's personal consciousness do 
 we feel ourselves snatched along on the smooth but 
 impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. The 
 fact that what is precious in Wordsworth's poetry 
 was (more truly even than with some greater poets 
 than he) a gift rather than an achievement should 
 always be borne in mind in taking the measure of 
 his power. I know not whether to call it height or 
 depth, this peculiarity of his, but it certainly en 
 dows those parts of his work which we should dis 
 tinguish as Wordsworthian with an unexpectedness 
 and impressiveness of originality such as we feel 
 in the presence of Nature herself. He seems to 
 have been half conscious of this, and recited his 
 own poems to all comers with an enthusiasm of 
 wondering admiration that would have been pro 
 foundly comic 1 but for its simple sincerity and 
 for the fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire, 
 of Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William 
 Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced quite 
 another. We recognize two voices in him, as 
 Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah and 
 
 1 Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile, 
 and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) says, 
 " These quotations [from his own works] he read in a way that 
 much impressed me ; it seemed almost as if he were awed by the 
 greatness of his own power, the gifts with which he had been endowed."" 
 (The italics are mine.)
 
 408 WORDSWORTH 
 
 his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from dic 
 tating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle, employs 
 his pen in jotting down some anecdotes of his mas 
 ter, how he one day went out and saw an old woman, 
 and the next day did not, and so came home and 
 dictated some verses on this ominous phenomenon, 
 and how another day he saw a cow. These mar 
 ginal annotations have been carelessly taken up 
 into the text, have been religiously held by the 
 pious to be orthodox scripture, and by dexterous 
 exegesis have been made to yield deeply oracular 
 meanings. Presently the real prophet takes up the 
 word again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the 
 Voice of a higher and invisible power. Words 
 worth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, 
 the absolute abstraction from time and place, the 
 immunity from decay, that belong to the grand 
 simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more his 
 own than ours and every man's, the word of the 
 inalterable Mind. This gift of his was naturally 
 very much a matter of temperament, and accord 
 ingly by far the greater part of his finer product 
 belongs to the period of his prime, ere Time had 
 set his lumpish foot on the pedal that deadens the 
 nerves of animal sensibility. 1 He did not grow as 
 those poets do in whom the artistic sense is predom- 
 
 1 His best poetry was written when he was under the immedi 
 ate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for 
 it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of 
 " those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after 
 year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream." 
 (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C., vol. i. pp. 
 5-6.) " Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the con-
 
 WORDSWORTH 409 
 
 inant. One of the most delightful fancies of the 
 Genevese humorist, Toepffer, is the poet Albert, 
 who, having had his portrait drawn by a highly 
 idealizing hand, does his best afterwards to look 
 like it. Many of Wordsworth's later poems seem 
 like rather unsuccessful efforts to resemble his for 
 mer self. They would never, as Sir John Harring 
 ton says of poetry, " keep a child from play and an 
 old man from the chimney-corner." l 
 
 Chief Justice Marshall once blandly interrupted 
 a junior counsel who was arguing certain obvi 
 ous points of law at needless length, by saying, 
 " Brother Jones, there are some things which a 
 Supreme Court of the United States sitting in 
 equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth 
 has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious 
 points till the reader feels as if his own intelligence 
 were somewhat underrated. He is over-conscien 
 tious in giving us full measure, and once profoundly 
 absorbed in the sound of his own voice, he knows 
 not when to stop. If he feel himself flagging, he 
 has a droll way of keeping the floor, as it were, by 
 asking himself a series of questions sometimes not 
 
 eluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees : 
 1 The singing masons building roofs of gold.' 
 
 This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. 
 Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in har 
 mony with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's 
 Autobiography.) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, 
 " My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to dis 
 ease." One cannot help thinking that his training in these nice 
 ties was begun by Coleridge. 
 
 1 In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso,
 
 410 WORDSWORTH 
 
 needing, and often incapable of answer. There are 
 three stanzas of such near the close of the First 
 Part of " Peter Bell," where Peter first catches a 
 glimpse of the dead body in the water, all happily 
 incongruous, and ending with one which reaches 
 the height of comicality : 
 
 " Is it a fiend that to a stake 
 Of fire his desperate self is tethering ? 
 Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell, 
 In solitary ward or cell, 
 Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? '' 
 
 The same want of humor which made him insensi 
 ble to incongruity may perhaps account also for the 
 singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so 
 often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little 
 farther on in " Peter Bell " we find : 
 
 " Now like a tempest-shattered bark 
 That overwhelmed and prostrate lies, 
 And in a moment to the verge 
 Is lifted of a foaming surge 
 Full suddenly the Ass doth rise ! " 
 
 And one cannot help thinking that the similes of 
 the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, noble 
 as they are in themselves, are somewhat too lofty 
 for the service to which they are put. 1 
 
 The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too 
 slow and his mood too meditative for narrative 
 poetry. He values his own thoughts and reflections 
 too much to sacrifice the least of them to the inter 
 ests of his story. Moreover, it is never action that 
 interests him, but the subtle motives that lead to or 
 hinder it. " The Wagoner " involuntarily suggests 
 1 In Resolution and Independence,
 
 WORDSWORTH 411 
 
 a comparison with " Tarn O'Shanter " infinitely to 
 its own disadvantage. " Peter Bell," full though 
 it be of profound touches and subtle analysis, is 
 lumbering and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced 
 to confess that he did not like it. "The White 
 Doe," the most Wordsworthian of them all in the 
 best meaning of the epithet, is also only the more 
 truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What 
 charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever is 
 the 
 
 " Happy tone 
 
 Of meditation slipping in between 
 The beauty coming and the beauty gone." 
 
 A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their 
 words to the tune of our own feelings and fancies, 
 in the charm of their manner, indefinable as the 
 sympathetic grace of woman, are everything to us 
 without our being able to say that they are much 
 in themselves. They rather narcotize than fortify. 
 Wordsworth must subject our mood to his own be 
 fore he admits us to his intimacy ; but, once admit 
 ted, it is for life, and we find ourselves in his debt, 
 not for what he has been to us in our hours of 
 relaxation, but for what he has done for us as a 
 reinforcement of faltering purpose and personal 
 independence of character. His system of a Na 
 ture-cure, first professed by Dr. Jean Jacques and 
 continued by Cowper, certainly breaks down as a 
 whole. The Solitary of " The Excursion," who has 
 not been cured of his scepticism by living among 
 the medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see, 
 equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and
 
 412 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this 
 would be so, and accordingly never saw his way. 
 clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, 
 whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome, 
 inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and 
 uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the 
 Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in con 
 stitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what 
 Milton would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue 
 at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The an 
 cients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual me 
 grims had become fashionable, perhaps made more 
 out of life by taking a frank delight in its action 
 and passion and by grappling with the facts of this 
 world, rather than muddling themselves over the 
 insoluble problems of another. If they had not 
 discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, 
 they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his 
 destiny, and would have seen something ludicrous, 
 it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown 
 man running to hide his head in the apron of the 
 Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his 
 finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence. 
 
 But when, as I have said, our impartiality has 
 made all those qualifications and deductions against 
 which even the greatest poet may not plead his 
 privilege, what is left to Wordsworth is enough 
 to justify his fame. Even where his genius is 
 wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable lightning of 
 imagination struggles through, flashing out unex 
 pected vistas, and illuminating the humdrum path 
 way of our daily thought with a radiance of mo-
 
 WORDS WORTH 413 
 
 mentary consciousness that seems like a revelation. 
 If it be the most delightful function of the poet to 
 set our lives to music, yet perhaps he will be even 
 more sure of our maturer gratitude if he do his 
 part also as moralist and philosopher to purify and 
 enlighten ; if he define and encourage our vacilla 
 ting perceptions of duty ; if he piece together our 
 fragmentary apprehensions of our own life and that 
 larger life whose unconscious instruments we are, 
 making of the jumbled bits of our dissected map of 
 experience a coherent chart. In the great poets 
 there is an exquisite sensibility both of soul and 
 sense that sympathizes like gossamer sea-moss with 
 every movement of the element in which it floats, 
 but which is rooted on the solid rock of our com 
 mon sympathies. Wordsworth shows less of this 
 finer feminine fibre of organization than one or two 
 of his contemporaries, notably than Coleridge or 
 Shelley; but he was a masculine thinker, and in 
 his more characteristic poems there is always a 
 kernel of firm conclusion from far-reaching princi 
 ples that stimulates thought and challenges medi 
 tation. Groping in the dark passages of life, we 
 come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall 
 that gives us our bearings and enables us to find 
 an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that he 
 lacks that serene impartiality of mind which results 
 from breadth of culture ; nay, he seems narrow, in 
 sular, almost provincial. He reminds us of those 
 saints of Dante who gather brightness by revolving 
 on their own axis. But through this very limitation 
 of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the im
 
 414 WORDSWORTH 
 
 pressiveness which results from eagerness of per 
 sonal conviction. If we read Wordsworth through, 
 as I have just done, we find ourselves changing 
 our mind about him at every other page, so uneven 
 is he. If we read our favorite poems or passages 
 only, he will seem uniformly great. And even 
 as regards " The Excursion " we should remember 
 how few long poems will bear consecutive reading. 
 For my part I know of but one, the Odyssey. 
 
 None of our great poets can be called popular in 
 any exact sense of the word, for the highest poetry 
 deals with thoughts and emotions which inhabit, 
 like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that 
 shore between our abiding divine and our fluctua 
 ting human nature, rooted in the one, but living in 
 the other, seldom laid bare, and otherwise visible 
 only at exceptional moments of entire calm and 
 clearness. Of no other poet except Shakespeare 
 have so many phrases become household words as 
 of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more 
 epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth be 
 longs the nobler praise of having defined for us, 
 and given us for a daily possession, those faint and 
 vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose 
 gentle ministry with our baser nature the hurry 
 and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be 
 conscious. He has won for himself a secure im 
 mortality by a depth of intuition which makes only 
 the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed 
 capable, of his companionship, and by a homely 
 sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the 
 humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude
 
 WORDSWORTH 415 
 
 for the habitual purity and abstinence of his style, 
 and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to 
 take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves 
 to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It 
 needs not to bid 
 
 " Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh 
 To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lie 
 A little nearer Spenser " ; 
 
 for there is no fear of crowding in that little soci 
 ety with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in the 
 succession of the great English Poets.
 
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