/ 
 
 . ] ; A 
 
 -Couch
 
 By Sir Arthur Quitter-Couch 
 
 On the Art of Writing 
 On the Art of Reading 
 Studies in Literature 
 
 (first series) 
 
 Studies in Literature 
 
 (second series)
 
 Studies in Literature 
 
 By 
 
 Sir Arthur Quiller-Gouch, M.A. 
 
 Fellow of Jesus College 
 
 King Edward VII Professor of English Literature 
 in the University of Cambridge 
 
 First Series 
 
 New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 Cambridge, England: University Press
 
 First Printing, December 1918 
 Second Printing, December 1922 
 
 Made in the United States of America
 
 PREFACE 
 
 '"PHE first of these ' studies, ' The Commerce of Thought, 
 ^ was originally read before an audience at the 
 Royal Institution of London. Coleridge and Matthew 
 Arnold have appeared as Introductions in 'The World's 
 Classics' series, and I thank the Oxford University 
 Press for allowing me to reprint them. Swinburne was 
 written for 'The Edinburgh Review,' and Charles 
 Reade for 'The Times Literary Supplement' on the 
 centenary of Reade's birth. 
 
 I cannot quarrel with any critic who may find the 
 word 'studies' too important for a volume which con- 
 sists, in the main, of familiar discourses: and will only 
 plead that it was chosen to cover not this book alone 
 but a successor of which some part of the contents may 
 better justify the general title. For example, in the lec- 
 ture here printed On the Terms 'Classical' and 'Ro- 
 mantic' I purposely contented myself with discussing 
 some elementary and (as I believe) mistaken notions, 
 reserving some interesting modern theories for later 
 treatment. 
 
 I must here, however, avow my belief that before 
 starting to lay down principles of literature or aesthetic 
 a man should offer some evidence of his capacity to 
 enjoy the better and eschew the worse. The claim, 
 for the moment fashionable, that a general philoso- 
 phy of aesthetic can be constructed by a thinker who, 
 
 iii 
 
 2037805
 
 iv Preface 
 
 in practice, cannot distinguish Virgil from Bavius, or 
 Rodin from William Dent Pitman, seems to me to pre- 
 sume a credulity almost beyond the dreams of illicit 
 therapeutics. By 'poetry, ' in these pages, I mean 
 what has been written by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare 
 and some others. 
 
 ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH 
 
 May 10, 1918.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE COMMERCE OF THOUGHT i 
 
 BALLADS .23 
 
 THE HORATIAN MODEL IN ENGLISH VERSE . . 51 
 
 ON THE TERMS "CLASSICAL" AND "ROMANTIC" . 76 
 
 SOME SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POETS 
 
 I. JOHN DONNE 96 
 
 II. HERBERT AND VAUGHAN . . . .118 
 
 III. TRAHERNE, CRASHAW AND OTHERS . . 146 
 
 THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH . . .168 
 
 THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY . . . .189 
 
 COLERIDGE 212 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . . . 231 
 
 SWINBURNE ........ 246 
 
 CHARLES READE 274 
 
 PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, I . . . 289 
 PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, II . . 306 
 INDEX 321
 
 THE COMMERCE OF THOUGHT 
 
 A MONG the fascinating books that have never been 
 ** written (and they are still the most fascinating of 
 all) I think my favourite is Professor So-and-So's History 
 of Trade-Routes from the Earliest Times, a magnificent 
 treatise, incomplete in three volumes. The title may 
 not allure you ; possibly you suspect it of promising as 
 much dullness as the title of this lecture, and it is even 
 conceivable that you secretly extend your mistrust to 
 professors as a class. Well, concerning us, as men, you 
 may be right: the accusation has been levelled: but I 
 shall try to persuade you that you are mistaken about 
 this book. 
 
 For a few examples Who, hearing that British 
 oysters, from Richborough, were served at Roman 
 dinner-parties under the Empire, does not want to know 
 how that long journey was contrived for them and how 
 they were kept alive on the road? Or take the secret 
 of the famous purple that was used to dye the Emper- 
 or's robe. As Browning asked, "Who fished the murex 
 up?" How did it reach the dyeing-vat? What was 
 the process? Was the trade a monopoly? Again, you 
 remember that navy of Tarshish, which came once in 
 three years bringing Solomon gold and silver, ivory and 
 apes and peacocks. Who would not wish to read one
 
 2 Studies in Literature 
 
 of its bills of lading, to construct a picture of the quays 
 as the vessels freighted or discharged their cargo? As 
 who would not eagerly read a description of that 
 lumberer's camp on Lebanon to which Solomon sent 
 ten thousand men a month by courses: "a month they 
 were in Lebanon and two months at home, and Adoni- 
 ram was over the levy"? The conditions, you see, 
 must have been hard, as the corvee was enormous. What 
 truth, if any, underlies the legend that when Solomon 
 died they embalmed and robed him and stood the corpse 
 high on the unfinished wall that, under their great task- 
 master's eye, the workmen should work and not ' ' slack " 
 (as we say) ? What a clerk-of-the-works ! 
 
 Yet again Where lay the famous tin-islands, the 
 Cassiterides? How were the great ingots of Cornish 
 tin delivered down to the coast and shipped on to Mar- 
 seilles, Carthage, Tyre? We know that they were 
 shaped pannier-wise, and carried by ponies. But 
 where was the island of Ictis, where the ships received 
 them? Our latest theorists will not allow it to have 
 been St. Michael's Mount the nearest of all, and the 
 most obviously correspondent with the historian's 
 description. They tell us hardily it was the Isle of 
 Wight or the Isle of Thanet. Ah, if these professors 
 did not suffer from sea-sickness, how much simpler 
 their hypotheses would be! Image the old Cornish 
 merchant taking whole trains of ponies, laden with 
 valuable ore, along the entire south of England, through 
 dense forests and marauding tribes, to ship his ware at 
 Thanet, when he had half a dozen better ports at his 
 door! Imagine a skipper from Marseilles But the 
 absurdities are endless, and I will not here pursue them. 
 
 For what other hidden port of trade was that Phoe- 
 nician skipper bound who, held in chase off the Land's
 
 The Commerce of Thought 3 
 
 End by a Roman galley and desperate of cheating her, 
 deliberately (tradition tells) drove his ship ashore to 
 save his merchant's secret? Through what phases, be- 
 fore this, had run and shifted the commercial struggle 
 between young Greece and ancient Phoenicia imaged 
 for us in Matthew Arnold's famous simile: 
 
 As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, 
 
 Descried at sunrise an emerging prow 
 Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily, 
 
 The fringes of a southward-facing brow 
 
 Among the ^Egean isles: 
 And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, 
 
 Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, 
 
 Green bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine; 
 And knew the intruders on his ancient home, 
 
 The young light-hearted masters of the waves; 
 
 And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail, 
 
 And day and night held on indignantly 
 O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, 
 Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, 
 
 To where the Atlantic raves 
 Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails 
 
 There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, 
 Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; 
 And on the beach undid his corded bales. 
 
 What commerce followed the cutting of Rome's great 
 military roads? that tremendous one, for instance, 
 hewn along the cliffs close over the rapids that swirl 
 through the Iron Gates of Danube. By what caravan 
 tracks, through what depots, did the great slave traffic 
 wind up out of Africa and reach the mart at Constanti- 
 nople ? WTiat sort of men worked goods down the Rhone
 
 4 Studies in Literature 
 
 valley; and, if by water, by what contrivances? To 
 come a little later, how did the Crusaders handle trans- 
 port and commissariat? Through and along what line 
 of entrepots did Venice, Genoa, Seville ply their immense 
 ventures? Who planted the vineyards of Bordeaux, 
 Madeira, the Rhine-land, and from what stocks? 
 Who, and what sort of man, opened an aloe market 
 in Socotra? Why, and on what instance, and how, 
 did England and Flanders come to supply Europe, 
 the one with wool, the other with fine linen and 
 naperies? 
 
 Now of these and like questions for of course I might 
 multiply them by the hundred I wish, first of all, to 
 impress on you that they are of first importance if you 
 would understand history; by which I mean, if you 
 would take hold, in imagination, of the human motives 
 which make history. Roughly (but, of course, very 
 roughly) you may say of man that his wars and main 
 migrations on this planet are ruled by the two great 
 appetites which rule the strifes and migrations of the 
 lower animals love, and hunger. If under love we 
 include the parental instinct in man to do his best for his 
 mate and children (which includes feeding them, and 
 later includes patrimonies and marriage portions) you 
 get love and hunger combined, and doubled in driving 
 power. Man, unlike the brutes, will also war for 
 religion (I do not forget the Moslem invasion or the 
 Crusades) and emigrate for religion (I do not forget the 
 Pilgrim Fathers) : but, here again, when a man expatri- 
 ates himself for religion the old motives at least "come 
 in. " The immediate cause of his sailing for America 
 is that authority, finding him obnoxious at home, 
 makes the satisfaction of hunger, love and the 
 parental instincts impossible for him save on con-
 
 The Commerce of Thought 5 
 
 dition of renouncing his faith, which he will not do. 
 
 Neither do I forget indeed it will be my business, 
 before I have done, to remind you that hundreds of 
 thousands of men have left home and country for the 
 sake of learning. There lies the origin of the great 
 universities. But here again you will find it hard to 
 separate at all events from the thirteenth century 
 onward the pure ardour of scholarship from the 
 worldly advancement to which it led. Further, while 
 men may migrate for the sake of learning I do not 
 remember to have heard of their making war for it. 
 On this point they content themselves with calling one 
 another names. 
 
 To cut this part of the argument short Of all the 
 men you have known who went out to the Colonies, 
 did not nine out of ten go to make money? Of all 
 the women, did not nine out of ten go to marry, 
 or to "better themselves" by some less ambiguous 
 process? 
 
 We are used to think of Marathon as a great victory 
 won by a small enlightened Greek race over dense 
 hordes of the obscurantist East; of Thermopylae as a 
 pass held by the free mind of man against its would-be 
 enslavers. But Herodotus does not see it so. Herodo- 
 tus handles the whole quarrel as started and balanced 
 on a trade dispute. Which was it first East or West 
 that, coming in the way of trade, broke the rules of the 
 game by stealing away a woman ? Was lo that woman ? 
 Or was Europa? Jason sails to Colchis and carries off 
 Medea, with the gold : Paris sails to Sparta and abducts 
 Helen both ladies consenting. Always at the root 
 of the story, as Herodotus tells it, we find commerce, 
 coast-wise trading, the game of marriage by capture: 
 no silly notions about liberty, nationality, religion or
 
 6 Studies in Literature 
 
 the human intellect. It is open to us, of course, to 
 believe that Troy was besieged for ten years for the sake 
 of a woman, as it is pleasant to read in Homer of Helen 
 watching the battlefield from the tower above the 
 Skaian gates, while the old men of the city marvel at her 
 beauty, saying one to another, "Small blame is it that 
 for such a woman the Trojans and Achaeans should 
 long suffer hardships." But if you ask me, do I believe 
 that the Trojan War happened so, I am constrained to 
 answer that I do not : I suspect there was money in it 
 somewhere. There is a legend I think in Suetonius, 
 who to be sure had a nasty mind that Caesar first 
 invaded Britain for the sake of its pearls; a disease 
 of which our oysters have creditably rid themselves. 
 And even nowadays, when we happen to be fighting 
 far abroad and our statesmen assure us that "we seek 
 no goldfields, " one murmurs the advice of Tennyson's 
 Northern Farmer 
 
 Doant them marry for mutiny, but goa wheer munny is. 
 
 Money? Yes: but let your imagination play on 
 these old trade-routes, and you will not only enhance 
 your hold on the true springs of history; you will 
 wonderfully seize the romance of it. You will see, as 
 this little planet revolves back out of the shadow of 
 night to meet the day, little threads pushing out over 
 its black spaces dotted ships on wide seas, crawling 
 trains of emigrant waggons, pioneers, tribes on the 
 trek, men extinguishing their camp-fires and shoulder- 
 ing their baggage for another day's march or piling it 
 into canoes by untracked river sides, families loading 
 their camels with figs and dates for Smyrna, villagers 
 treading wine-vats, fishermen hauling nets, olive-
 
 The Commerce of Thought 7 
 
 gatherers, packers, waggoners, long trains of African 
 porters, desert caravans with armed outriders, daha- 
 beeyahs pushing up the Nile, busy rice-fields, puffs of 
 smoke where the expresses run across Siberia, Canada, 
 or northward from Capetown, Greenland whalers, 
 Newfoundland codfishers, trappers around Hudson's 
 Bay. . . . 
 
 The main puzzle with these trade-routes is that while 
 seas and rivers and river valleys last for ever, and roads 
 for long, and even a railroad long enough to be called a 
 "permanent way," the traffic along them is often 
 curiously evanescent. Let me give you a couple of 
 instances, one in quite recent times, the other of today, 
 passing under our eyes. 
 
 A man invents a steam-engine. It promptly makes 
 obsolete the stage-coaches, whose pace was the glory 
 of England. Famous hostelries along the Great North 
 Road put up their shutters; weeds begin to choke the 
 canals; a whole nexus of national traffic is torn in shreds, 
 dissipated. A few years pass, and somebody invents 
 the motor-car locomotion by petrol. Forthwith pro- 
 sperity flows back along the old highways. County 
 Councils start re-metalling, tar-spraying; inns revive 
 under new custom: and your rich man is swept past 
 a queer wayside building, without ever a thought that 
 here stood a turnpike gate which Dick Turpin had to 
 leap. 
 
 For a second change, which I have watched for a year 
 or two as it has passed under my own eyes at the foot 
 of my garden at home. As you know, the trade of 
 Europe from the West Coast of America around the 
 Horn is carried by large sailing-vessels (the passage 
 being too long for steamships without coaling stations). 
 One day America starts in earnest to cut the Panama
 
 8 Studies in Literature 
 
 canal. Forthwith the provident British shipowner 
 begins to get quit of these sailing-vessels: noble three- 
 and four-masters, almost all Clyde-built. He sells 
 them to Italian firms. Why to Italian firms ? Because 
 these ships have considerable draught and are built of 
 iron. Their draught unfits them for general coasting 
 trade; they could not begin to navigate the Baltic, for 
 instance. Now Italy has deep-water harbours. But 
 the Genoese firms (I am told) buy these ships for the 
 second reason, that they are of iron : because while the 
 Italian Government lays a crippling duty on ordinary 
 iron, broken-up ship-iron may enter free. So, after a 
 coastwise voyage or two, it pays to rip their plates out, 
 pass them under the rollers and re-issue them for new 
 iron; and thus for a few months these beautiful things 
 that used to wing it home, five months without sighting 
 land, and anchor under my garden, eke out a new brief 
 traffic until the last of them shall be towed to the 
 breakers' yard. Even in such unnoted ways grew, 
 thrived, passed, died, the commercial glories of Venice, 
 Spain, Holland. 
 
 II 
 
 Now I will ask you to consider something more 
 transient, more secret in operation, than ways of trade 
 and barter the ways in which plants disseminate them- 
 selves or are spread and acclimatised. For my pupils in 
 Cambridge, the other day, I drew, as well as I could, in 
 the New Lecture Theatre, the picture of an old Roman 
 colonist in his villa in Britain, let us say in the fourth 
 century and you must remember that these Roman 
 colonists inhabited Britain for a good four hundred 
 years. Let me quote one short passage from that 
 description:
 
 The Commerce of Thought 9 
 
 The owner of the villa (you may conceive) is the grand- 
 son or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first 
 built it, following in the wake of the legionaries. The 
 family has prospered, and our man is now a considerable 
 landowner. He was born in Britain ; his children have been 
 born here; and here he lives a comfortable, well-to-do, out- 
 of-door life, in its essentials I fancy not so very unlike the 
 life of an English country squire today. Instead of chasing 
 hares and foxes he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the 
 sport is good, and he returns with an appetite. He has 
 added a summer parlour to the house, with a northern aspect 
 and no heating flues ; for the old parlour he has enlarged the 
 praefurnium, and through the long winter evenings sits 
 far better warmed than many a master of a modern country 
 house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him 
 from the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have 
 planted violet-beds which will breathe odorously in the 
 spring. He has rebuilt and enlarged the slave quarters and 
 some of the outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around 
 the atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where 
 stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows 
 that there are no gaps or weak spots in his stockade fence 
 wood is always cheap. In a word, he has improved his estate, 
 is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like the old 
 Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something 
 better than he found it. 
 
 Such a family it was part of my picture would get 
 many parcels from the land they still called "home," 
 from the adored City urbe quam dicunt Romam The 
 City; parcels fetched from the near military station on 
 the great road where the imperial writ ran ; parcels for- 
 warded by those trade-routes of which I have spoken; 
 parcels of books scrolls, rather, or tablets; parcels of 
 seeds useful vegetables or pot-herbs, garden flowers, 
 fruit -plants for the orchard, for the colonnade even roses
 
 io Studies in Literature 
 
 with real Italian earth damp about their roots. For the 
 Romans here were great acclimatisers, and upon Italy 
 they could draw as a nursery into which the best fruits, 
 trees, flowers of the world had been gathered after con- 
 quest and domesticated. 
 
 For beasts, it seems probable that they introduced the 
 ass with the mule as a consequence, the goat, certain 
 new breeds of oxen; for birds, the peacock from India or 
 Persia, the pheasant from Colchis, the Numidian guinea- 
 fowl (as we call it), the duck, the goose (defender of the 
 Capitol), possibly the dove and the falcon. But we talk 
 of plants. Britain swarmed with oak and beech, as with 
 most of the trees of Gaul ; but the Roman brought the 
 small-leaved elm, ilex, cypress, laurel, myrtle, oriental 
 plane, walnut ; of fruits (among others) peach, apricot, 
 cherry, probably the filbert; of vegetables, green peas 
 (bless him!), cucumbers, onions, leeks; of flowers, some 
 species of the rose (the China-rose, as we call it, for 
 one), lilies, hyacinths, sweet-williams, lilacs, tulips. 
 
 But these were plants deliberately imported and 
 tended. What of wild-flowers the common blue 
 speedwell, for instance? I am not botanist enough to 
 say if the speedwell was indigenous in Britain : but, as a 
 gardener in a small way, I know how it can travel! 
 If the speedwell will not do, take some other seed that 
 has lodged on his long tramp northward in the boot- 
 sole of a common soldier in Vespasian's legion. The 
 boot reaches Dover, plods on, wears out, is cast by the 
 way, rots in a ditch. From it, next spring, Britain has 
 gained a new flower. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I come now to something more volatile, more fuga- 
 cious yet more secret and subtle and mysterious in
 
 The Commerce of Thought n 
 
 operation even than the vagaries of seeds; I come 
 to the wanderings, alightings, fertilisings of man's 
 thought. 
 
 Will you forgive my starting off with a small personal 
 experience which (since we have just been talking of a 
 very common weed) may here come in not inappropri- 
 ately? I received a message the other day from an 
 acquaintance, a young engineer in Vancouver. He 
 had been constructing a large dam on the edge of a 
 forest, himself the only European, with a gang of 
 Japanese labourers. But the rains proved so torrential, 
 washing down the sides of the dam as fast as they were 
 heaped, and half drowning the diggers, that at length 
 the whole party sought shelter in the woods. There, as 
 he searched about, my young engineer came upon a 
 log-shanty, doorless, abandoned, empty, save for two 
 pathetic objects left on the mud floor the one a burst 
 kettle, the other a "soiled copy" (as the booksellers 
 say) of one of my most unpopular novels. You see, 
 there is no room for vanity in the narrative a burst 
 kettle and this book the only two things not worth 
 taking away ! Yet I who can neither make nor mend 
 kettles own to a thrill of pride to belong to a call- 
 ing that can fling the other thing so far; and nurse a 
 hope that the book did, in its hour, cheer rather than 
 dispirit that unknown dweller in the wilderness. 
 
 But indeed to come to more serious and less dead, 
 though more ancient, authors you never can tell how 
 long this or that of theirs will lie dormant, then sud- 
 denly spring to life. Someone copies down a little poem 
 on reed paper, on the back of a washing bill : the paper 
 goes to wrap a mummy ; long centuries pass ; a tomb is 
 laid bare of the covering sand, and from its dead ribs 
 they unwind a passionate lyric of Sappho:
 
 12 Studies in Literature 
 
 01 ^xev (xxiQtov <rrp<kov, o 
 of Be vawv <pa!a' 1x1 y2v [xeXatvav 
 xdtXXtcrroV eyw Bs XYJV' OT- 
 
 Troops of horse-soldiers, regiments of footmen, 
 Fleets in full sail "What sight on earth so lovely?" 
 Say you : but my heart ah ! above them prizes 
 Thee, my Beloved. 
 
 I believe that this one was actually recovered from a 
 rubbish-heap : but another such is unwrapped from the 
 ribs of a mummy, of a woman thousands of years dead. 
 Was it bound about them because her heart within them 
 perchance had beaten to it? wrapped by her desire 
 by the hands of a lover or just by chance? As 
 Sir Thomas Browne says 
 
 What song the syrens sang, or what name Achilles 
 assumed when he hid himself among women, though puz- 
 zling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time 
 the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of 
 the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might 
 admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of 
 these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a 
 question above antiquarism. 
 
 IV 
 
 But these travels and resuscitations of the written or 
 the printed word, though they may amuse our curiosity, 
 are nothing to marvel at; we can account for them. I 
 am coming to something far more mysterious. 
 
 A friend of mine, a far traveller, once assured me that 
 if you wanted to find yourself in a real "gossip shop" 
 as he put it you should go to the Sahara. That desert,
 
 The Commerce of Thought 13 
 
 he informed me solemnly, "is one great sounding-board. 
 You scarcely dare to whisper a secret there. You can- 
 not kill a man in the Algerian Sahara even so far south 
 as Fort Mirabel but the news of it will be muttered 
 abroad somewhere in the Libyan desert, say at Ain-el- 
 Sheb, almost as soon as a telephone (if there were one, 
 which there is not) could carry it. " 
 
 Well, doubtless my friend overstated it. But how do 
 you account for the folk-stories ? Take any of the fairy- 
 tales you know best. Take Cinderella, or Red Riding 
 Hood or Hop o' my Thumb. How can you explain that 
 these are common not only to widely scattered nations 
 of the race we call Aryan, from Asia to Iceland, but 
 common also to savages in Borneo and Zululand, the 
 South Sea Islander, the American Indian? The mis- 
 sionaries did not bring them, but found them. There 
 are tribal and local variations, but the tale itself cannot 
 be mistaken. Shall we choose Beauty and the Beast? 
 That is not only and plainly, as soon as you start to 
 examine it, the Greek tale of Cupid and Psyche, pre- 
 served in Apuleius; not only a tale told by nurses in 
 Norway and Hungary; not only a tale recognisable in 
 the Rig- Veda: but a tale told by Bornuese and by 
 Algonquin Indians. Shall we choose The Wolf who ate 
 the Six Kids while the Seventh was hidden in the Clock- 
 case? That again is negro as well as European: you 
 may find it among the exploits of Brer Rabbit. Or 
 shall we choose the story of the adventurous youth who 
 lands on a shore commanded by a wizard, is made spell- 
 bound and set to do heavy tasks, is helped by the 
 wizard's pretty daughter and escapes with her aid. 
 That is the story of Jason and Medea : you may find all 
 the first half of it in Shakespeare's The Tempest: but 
 you may also find it (as Andrew Lang sufficiently
 
 14 Studies in Literature 
 
 proved) "in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the 
 Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, as well as in 
 Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European house- 
 hold tales. " 
 
 Well, I shall not give a guess, this evening, at the 
 way in which these immemorial tales were carried and 
 spread. As Emerson said 
 
 Long I followed happy guides, 
 I could never reach their sides; 
 Their step is forth, and, ere the day 
 Breaks up their leaguer, and away . . . 
 But no speed of mine avails 
 To hunt upon their shining trails . . . 
 On eastern hills I see their smokes, 
 Mixed with mist by distant lochs. 
 
 But the camp-fires around which men told these old 
 tales have been broken up for the next day's march, 
 and the embers trodden out, centuries and centuries 
 ago. 
 
 V 
 
 Well, now, let us work back for a few minutes towards 
 this inexplicable thing through something of which, 
 though marvellous, we may catch at an understanding. 
 In the beginning of the eighth century in the remote 
 north of a barbarous tract of England, a monk called 
 Bede founds a school. He is (I suppose) of all men 
 in the world the least as we should put it nowadays 
 self -advertising. He just labours there, in the cloisters 
 of Jarrow, never leaving them, intent only on his page, 
 for the love of scholarship. Between his solitary lamp 
 and the continent of Europe stretches a belt of fens, of 
 fog, of darkness, broad as two-thirds of England;
 
 The Commerce of Thought 15 
 
 beyond that, the Channel. Yet the light reaches across 
 and over. As Portia beautifully says 
 
 How far that little candle throws his beams ! 
 So shines a good deed in a naughty world. 
 
 Men on the continent have heard of Jarrow: eyes are 
 watching; in due time Bede's best pupil, Alcuin of York, 
 gets an invitation to come over to the court of Charle- 
 magne, to be its educational adviser. So Alcuin leaves 
 York, soon to be destroyed with its fine school and 
 library by the Scandinavian raiders (for your true bar- 
 barian, even when he happens to be a pedantic one, 
 always destroys a library. Louvain is his sign-manual) 
 Alcuin leaves York and crosses over to France with 
 his learning. Very well: but how can you explain it, 
 save by supposing a community of men in Europe alert 
 for learning as merchants for gold, kept informed of 
 where the best thing was to be had, and determined to 
 have it? 
 
 Yes, and we are right in supposing this. For when 
 light begins to glimmer, day to break, on the Dark Ages 
 (as we call them, and thereby impute to them, I think, 
 along with their own darkness no little of ours, much 
 as the British seaman abroad has been heard to com- 
 miserate "them poor ignorant foreigners") when day- 
 light begins to flow, wavering, and spreads for us over 
 the Dark Ages, what is the first thing we see? I will 
 tell you what is the first thing / see. It is the Roads. 
 
 VI 
 
 That is why to your mild wonder, maybe I began 
 this lecture by talking of the old trade-routes. I see 
 the Roads glimmer up out of that morning twilight
 
 16 Studies in Literature 
 
 with the many men, like ants, coming and going upon 
 them; meeting, passing, overtaking; knights, mer- 
 chants, carriers ; justiciars with their trains, king's mes- 
 sengers riding post; afoot, friars black, white and 
 grey pardoners, poor scholars, minstrels, beggar-men; 
 packhorses in files; pilgrims, bound for Walsingham, 
 Canterbury, or to Southampton, to ship there for Com- 
 postella, Rome. For the moment let us limit our gaze to 
 this little island. I see the old Roman roads Watling 
 Street, Ermine Street, Icknield Street, Akeman Street, 
 the Fosse Way and the rest hard-metalled, built in 
 fine layers, from the foundation or pavimentum of fine 
 earth hard beaten in, through layers of large stones, 
 small stones (both mixed with mortar), pounded nu- 
 cleus of lime, clay or chalk, brick and tile, up to the 
 paved surface, summum dorsum; one running north 
 through York and branching, as Hadrian had diverted 
 it, to point after point of the Great Wall; another coast- 
 wise towards Cornwall; a third for Chester and on to 
 Anglesey, a fourth, embanked and ditched, through the 
 Cambridgeshire fens : I see the minor network of cross- 
 roads, the waterways with their slow freight. You 
 may remember a certain chapter of Rabelais, concerning 
 a certain Island of Odes in which the highways keep 
 moving, moving of themselves ; and another passage in 
 Pascal in which the rivers are seen as roads themselves 
 travelling with the travellers. ' Well, I see it like that; 
 and the by-roads where outlaws lurked; the eastern 
 fens where a hunted man could hide for years, the lanes 
 leading to sanctuary. Some years ago, in Cornwall, 
 
 1 It is observable how many of the great books of the world the 
 Odyssey, the &neid, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, The Pilgrim's 
 Progress, Gil Bias, Pickwick and The Cloister and the Hearth are books 
 of wayfaring.
 
 The Commerce of Thought 17 
 
 I took an old map and decided to walk by a certain road 
 marked on it. My host averred there was no such road 
 in the parish; his brother, a district councillor, agreed. 
 Well, being obstinate, I followed the old map, and found 
 that road. What is more, after tracking it for a quarter 
 of a mile, stooping under thorns and elders and pushing 
 through brambles, I came in the dusk upon a fire and a 
 tramp cooking his pot over it. It is a question which of 
 us two received the greater shock. 
 
 VII 
 
 Now in the Middle Ages, to keep these roads, and 
 especially their bridges, in repair was one of the first 
 calls on godly piety: nor will you ever begin to under- 
 stand these Middle Ages until you understand their 
 charitable concern for all travellers. Turn to your 
 Litany, and read : 
 
 That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land 
 or by water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons, 
 and young children: and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners 
 and captives. 
 
 Read the evidence collected by Jusserand, and it will 
 leave you with no doubt that the persons thus inter- 
 ceded for are not mixed together casually or carelessly; 
 but that the keeping of the roads in repair was consid- 
 ered as a pious and meritorious work before God, of the 
 same sort as attending the sick or caring for the poor, 
 or comforting the prisoners. A religious order of Pon- 
 tiffs (Pontifices, bridge-makers) built bridges in many 
 countries of Europe. The famous Pont d' Avignon was 
 one; Pont St. Esprit (still in use) was another. A 
 bridge with a chapel on it was one of the most familiar
 
 i8 Studies in Literature 
 
 features of medieval England a chapel and a toll-gate 
 the church being no more averse then than now to 
 "take up a collection." Old London Bridge, with a 
 chapel on it Old London Bridge which for centuries 
 was the marvel of England Old London Bridge which 
 (mind you) remained until the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, until Dr. Johnson's day, the only bridge span- 
 ning the Thames was begun in 1176, finished in 1209, 
 with its twenty arches, by subscription of the charitable. 
 I have no time, this afternoon, to draw you separate 
 portraits of the men and women travelling these roads : 
 but medieval literature (and especially our Chaucer) 
 teems with pictures of them pictures which, if read 
 with imagination, will "depict your chamber walls 
 around" as with a moving frieze. I shall conclude by 
 choosing one familiar figure and for a minute or two 
 presenting him to you, with what he meant : the Wan- 
 dering Scholar. 
 
 VIII 
 
 He is young, and poor, and careless. He tramps it 
 on foot, and, when his pocket is empty, has no shame 
 in begging: and men find a religious reward in doling 
 him a penny : he being bound for one of the great uni- 
 versities, of whose learning the world has heard; for 
 Oxford or Cambridge, or for Paris, or, farther yet, for 
 Bologna, for Salerno. The roads of Europe are full 
 of his like. No one quite knows how it has happened. 
 The schools of Remigius and of William of Champeaux 
 (we will say) have given Paris a certain prestige when 
 a mysterious word, a rumour, spreads along the great 
 routes, of a certain great teacher called Abelard whose 
 voice will persuade a man's soul almost out of his body.
 
 The Commerce of Thought 19 
 
 The fame of it spreads almost as pollen is wafted on the 
 wind: but spreads, and alights, and fertilizes. Forth- 
 with, in all the far corners of Europe, young men are 
 packing their knapsacks, bidding good-bye to their 
 homes, waving back to the family at the gate as they 
 dare the great adventure and fare (say) for Paris, intel- 
 lectual queen of Europe. 
 
 The desire of the moth for the star! The ineffable 
 spell of those great names Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, 
 Bologna, Salamanca ! These young men reach at length 
 the city which has been shining in their imagination. 
 The light fades down its visionary spires to a narrow 
 noisome medieval street in which the new comer is 
 one of a crowd, a turbulent crowd of the wantonest 
 morals. But youth is there, and friendship: to be 
 kept green through the years of later life, when all 
 this young blood is dispersed, and the boys have shaken 
 hands, not to meet again, and nothing remains in com- 
 mon to Dick of York and Hans of Hungary but a 
 memory of the old class-room where they blew on their 
 fingers, and took notes by the light of unglazed windows, 
 and shuffled their numb feet in the straw. 
 
 Let me instance one such scholar William Dunbar, 
 the great fifteenth-century poet of Scotland. He was 
 born about 1460, went to St. Andrews and there gradu- 
 ated Master of Arts in 1479: at once became an Ob- 
 servantine Friar of the Franciscan Order, and started 
 to travel : very likely took ship first from Leith to the 
 Thames, but anyhow crossed to France the little 
 passenger ships of those days carrying a hundred besides 
 their crew. Says the old ballad: 
 
 Men may leve alle gamys, 
 That saylen to seynt Jamys !
 
 20 Studies in Literature 
 
 (that is, to St. James of Compostella) 
 
 Ffor many a man hit gramys (vexes), 
 
 When they begyn to sayle. 
 Ffor when they have take the see, 
 At Sandwyche, or at Wynchylsee, 
 At Brystow, or where that hit bee, 
 
 Theyr hertes begyn to fayle. 
 
 Then follows an extremely moving picture of the 
 crowded sea-sickness on board. We will not dwell on it. 
 Somehow, Dunbar gets to France; roves Picardy; is in 
 Paris in 1491 and mingles with the scholars of the Sor- 
 bonne; returns home by way of London (and be it re- 
 membered that the kingdoms of England and his native 
 Scotland were more often antagonistic than not in those 
 days) ; on his way pauses to muse on London Bridge 
 that Bridge of which I spoke to you a few minutes ago 
 "lusty Brigge of pylers white" he calls it and breaks 
 into this noble praise of our City : 
 
 London, thou art of townes A per se. 
 
 Soveraign of cities, semeliest in sight, 
 Of high renoun, riches and royaltie; 
 
 Of lordis, barons, and many a goodly knyght; 
 
 Of most delectable lusty ladies bright ; 
 Of famous prelatis, in habitis clericall; 
 
 Of merchauntis full of substaunce and of myght: 
 London, thou art the flour of Cities all. 
 
 Above all ryvers thy Ryver hath renowne, 
 
 Whose beryall streamys, pleasaunt and preclare, 
 
 Under thy lusty wallys renneth down, 
 
 Where many a swanne doth swymme with wyngis fair; 
 Where many a barge doth saile, and row with are (oars) ;
 
 The Commerce of Thought 21 
 
 Where many a ship doth rest with toppe-royall. 
 O, towne of townes ! patrone and not compare, 
 London, thou art the floure of Cities all. 
 
 My discourse, like many a better one, shall end with 
 a moral. I have often observed in life, and especially 
 in matters of education you too, doubtless, have ob- 
 served that what folks get cheaply or for nothing they 
 are disposed to undervalue. Indeed I suspect we all 
 like to think ourselves clever, and it helps our sense of 
 being clever to adjust the worth of a thing to the price 
 we have paid for it. Now the medieval scholar I have 
 been trying to depict for you was poor, even bitterly 
 poor, yet bought his learning dear. Listen to Chaucer's 
 account of him when he had attained to be a Clerk of 
 Oxenford, and to enough money to hire a horse: 
 
 As leene was his hors as is a rake, 
 
 And he nas nat right fat, I undertake, 
 
 But looked holwe, and ther-to sobrely; 
 
 Ful thredbare was his overeste courtepy; 
 
 For he hadde geten hym yet no benefice, 
 
 Ne was so worldly for to have office; 
 
 For hym was levere have at his beddes heed 
 
 Twenty bookes clad in blak or reed 
 
 Of Aristotle and his philosophic, 
 
 Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie: 
 
 But al be that he was a philosophre, 
 
 Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre; 
 
 But al that he myghte of his freendes hente 
 
 On bookes and his lernynge he it spente, 
 
 And bisily gan for the soules preye 
 
 Of hem that yaf hym wher-with to scoleye. 
 
 How happy would such a poor scholar deem us, who 
 have printed books cheap and plenty, who have news-
 
 22 Studies in Literature 
 
 papers brought to our door for a groat, who can get in 
 less than an hour and a half to Oxford, to Cambridge, 
 in a very few hours to Paris, to Rome cities of his 
 desire, shining in a land that is very far off! Neverthe- 
 less I tell you, who have listened so kindly to me for an 
 hour, that in the commerce and transmission of thought 
 the true carrier is neither the linotype machine, nor the 
 telegraph at the nearest post office, nor the telephone 
 at your elbow, nor any such invented convenience : but 
 even such a wind as carries the seed, "it may chance of 
 wheat, or of some other grain " : the old, subtle, winding, 
 caressing, omnipresent wind of man's aspiration. For 
 the secret which is also the reward of all learning lies 
 in the passion for the search.
 
 BALLADS 
 
 '"PHE Ballad is, of all forms of poetry, about the most 
 * mysterious and singular: singular in its nature, 
 mysterious not only in this but in its origin and its 
 history. 
 
 We need not, here, today, trouble ourselves overmuch 
 with its origin, which is much the same as Melchizedek's. 
 Yet we may not wholly neglect the question. There 
 are, as you probably know, two conflicting theories 
 about it ; and the supporters of each talk like men ready 
 to shed blood, though for my part I hold that a very 
 little common sense might reconcile them; since each 
 theory contains a modicum of truth,' and each, when 
 pushed to the extreme, becomes frantically absurd. 
 
 On the one hand we have the theory invented 
 or pioneered by Herder, elaborated and oracularly 
 preached by James Grimm that these "folk songs" 
 were made by the "folk" ; that they burst into existence 
 by a kind of natural and spontaneous generation in a 
 tribe or nation, at that stage of culture when it is "for 
 all practical purposes an individual"; that a ballad 
 comes, or came, into being much as the floating matter 
 of a nebula condenses to form a star. 
 
 Now there is much truth in this. A tribe meets to- 
 gether to celebrate some occasion of common interest 
 23
 
 24 Studies in Literature 
 
 a successful hunt, a prosperous foray, the wedding of 
 its chief, the return of the god who brings summer, the 
 end of a religious fast, a harvest home. As Professor 
 Kittredge puts it in his Introduction to the abridgement 
 of Child's great collection of Ballads : 
 
 The object of the meeting is known to all ; the deeds which 
 are to be sung, the dance which is to accompany and illus- 
 trate the singing, are likewise familiar to everyone. There 
 is no such diversity of intellectual interests as characterises 
 even the smallest company of civilised men. There is unity 
 of feeling and a common stock, however slender, of ideas and 
 traditions. The dancing and singing, in which all share, are 
 so closely related as to be practically complementary parts 
 of a single festal act. . . . And this is no fancy picture. 
 It is the soberest kind of science, a mere brief chapter of 
 descriptive anthropology, for which authorities might be 
 cited without number. 
 
 Let me add that all this rests on the early discovery of 
 man that all manual or bodily labour is enormously in- 
 creased in effect, when timed to rhymth. So a regiment 
 marches to a band; so the tramp of a column crossing 
 a light bridge has to be broken lest the timed impact 
 wreck the structure ; so in the Peninsular War a British 
 regiment heaved down a wall apparently immovable, 
 by lining against it and applying bodily pressure in suc- 
 cessive rhythmical waves. So I, who have lived most 
 of my life over a harbour, have seen and heard crews 
 weighing anchor at windlass or capstan, or hauling on 
 ropes, to a sailors' chanty, the solo-man intoning 
 
 We have a good ship and a jolly good crew! 
 
 the chorus taking him up 
 
 And away, away Rio!
 
 Ballads 25 
 
 So also as we saw in one of the lectures last term the 
 children in our streets help out dance with song in such 
 primitive games as "Sally, Sally Waters," "Here come 
 three Dukes a-riding," or 
 
 London Bridge is broken down, 
 Dance over, my Lady Lee! 
 
 The "nebular" theorists have etymology, too, on their 
 side, for what it is worth. Undoubtedly "ballad" 
 comes from the late Latin verb ballare "to dance, " and 
 should mean a song accompanied by dancing. Un- 
 doubtedly some old ballads with their refrains are refer- 
 able to that origin the famous old one of Binnorie, 
 for example, with its chorus: 
 
 There were twa sisters sat in a bour; 
 
 Binnorie, Binnorie! 
 There cam a knight to be their wooer, 
 
 By the bonnie milldams o' Binnorie. 
 
 But this only applies to some ballads, and these a few. 
 The theory, pushed to cover all, exposes its absurdity 
 in Grimm's famous phrase "das Volk dichtet. " 
 
 That let in Schlegel, who at first had nibbled at 
 Grimm's theory; as it lets in all those who maintain 
 (and I think incontrovertibly) that, after all, in the end 
 a ballad must be composed by somebody; and if you 
 think a ballad can be composed by public meeting, just 
 call a public meeting and try! In human experience 
 poetry doesn't get written in that way: it requires an 
 author. Moreover these ballads, as they come down to 
 us, though overlaid by improvements by Tom, Dick 
 and Harry, are things of genius, individual. As for 
 etymology, if balada be the origin of ballad, so is it of the
 
 26 Studies in Literature 
 
 ballet: and so is sonetto the origin alike of a Beethoven's 
 Moonlight Sonata and a Miltonic or Wordsworthian 
 Sonnet. Sonetto means a song accompanied by instru- 
 mental music. It is all very well to say that in Milton's 
 hands "the Thing became a trumpet " ; but he certainly 
 did not attune it to an instrumental obbligato. 
 
 So you get the opposing "artistic" theory; that our 
 ballads were composed by minstrels, gleemen, sc6ps, 
 skalds, bards ; itinerant professional singers who com- 
 posed them and recited them at wakes, fairs and feasts, 
 from town to town, from hall to hall. Bishop Percy, 
 and generations of scholars after him, ascribed the com- 
 position of our ballads to these professional minstrels 
 almost as a matter of course. Nor, to my mind, does 
 Professor Kittredge make a very shrewd point when he 
 says 
 
 Such ballads as have been recovered from oral tradition 
 in recent times (and these . . . comprise the vast majority 
 of our texts) have not, except now and then, been taken 
 down from the recitation or the singing of minstrels, or of 
 any order of men who can be regarded as the descendants or 
 representatives of minstrels. They have almost always 
 been found in the possession of simple folk whose relation 
 to them was in no sense professional. 
 
 Quite so: and the simple answer is that the itiner- 
 ant singer died more than three hundred years ago. 
 Whether of inanition, passing out of vogue, or because 
 the invention of printing killed him, die he did: and 
 he left no professional descendants, because the print- 
 ing-press had destroyed the profession. You can- 
 not collect ballads straight from the lips of men three 
 hundred years in the grave. Whence in the world would 
 anyone expect to recover them, save from descendants
 
 Ballads 27 
 
 of those simple folk for whom they were written and 
 from whom they have been transmitted? 
 
 Nor again does that seem to me a wholly triumphant 
 objection which Dr. Gummere makes in his chapter on 
 Ballads in The Cambridge History of English Literature. 
 Says he: 
 
 Still stronger proof lies in the fact that we have the poetry 
 which the minstrels did make; and it is far removed from 
 balladry. 
 
 This, to start with, is inaccurate. We have not the 
 poetry which the minstrels did make : we have only some 
 of it. But truly you could hardly have a better example 
 of the root-blindness which affects men who treat litera- 
 ture learnedly as a dead thing, without having served 
 an apprenticeship in it as a living art. Anyone who 
 practises writing, quickly learns that appropriateness to 
 subject and audience is a great part of the secret of style ; 
 and the defter, the more accomplished, the more tactful 
 your artist is, the less surely can you argue (say) from 
 his manner in light verse to his manner in a pulpit. 
 Let me give you an example. Here is the opening of a 
 nineteenth century ballad : 
 
 Ben Battle was a soldier bold, 
 
 And used to war's alarms : 
 But a cannon-ball took off his legs, 
 
 So he laid down his arms! 
 
 Now as they bore him off the field, 
 
 Said he, "Let others shoot, 
 For here I leave my second leg, 
 
 And the Forty-second Foot!" 
 
 And here is the opening of a poem of about the same 
 date
 
 28 Studies in Literature 
 
 I saw old Autumn in the misty morn 
 Stand shadowless like Silence, listening 
 To silence, for no lonely bird would sing 
 Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn .... 
 
 Now, supposing the authorship of Faithless Nelly Gray 
 to be uncertain, what is more certain than that a scholar 
 of Dr. Gummere's type would demonstrate the impossi- 
 bility of its having been written by Thomas Hood 
 "because we have Hood's Ode to Autumn, and it is far 
 removed from Faithless Nelly Gray"'? Yet as a fact he 
 would be quite wrong; because Hood wrote them both. 
 
 No: the really important point about ballads has 
 nothing to do with "who wrote them?" even if that 
 could be discovered at this time of day. It matters 
 very little to us, at any rate, if they were written by the 
 people. What gives them their singularity of nature is 
 that, whoever wrote them, wrote them for the people: 
 and to this singularity, this individuality, by a paradox, 
 their curious avoidance of the self-conscious personal 
 touch will be found (I think) in no small degree to con- 
 tribute. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us first, however, establish that the Ballad has a 
 nature of its own among poetic forms; is a thing by 
 itself, or, as Professor Ker puts it, "the Ballad is an Idea, 
 a poetical Form, which can take up any matter and does 
 not leave that matter as it was before. " Professor Ker 
 goes on : 
 
 In spite of Socrates and his logic, we may venture to say, 
 in answer to the question "What is a Ballad?" "A Ballad 
 is The Milldams of Binnorie and Sir Patrick Spens and The
 
 Ballads 29 
 
 Douglas Tragedy and Childe Maurice, and things of that 
 sort. " 
 
 "And things of that sort. " Let me read you a sample 
 or two of the sort of thing. Here are a few stanzas from 
 Tarn Lin: 
 
 Janet has kilted her green kirtle 
 
 A little abune the knee; 
 And she has snooded her yellow hair 
 
 A little abune her bree, 
 And she is on to Miles Cross 
 
 As fast as she can hie. 
 
 About the dead hour o' the night 
 
 She heard the bridles ring; 
 And Janet was as glad at that 
 
 As any earthly thing. 
 
 And first gaed by the black, black steed, 
 
 And syne gaed by the brown ; 
 But fast she gript the milk-white steed 
 
 And pu'd the rider down. 
 
 She's pu'd him frae the milk-white steed, 
 
 An' loot the bridle fa', 
 And up there rase an eldritch cry, 
 "True Tarn Lin he's awa ' ! " 
 
 They shaped him in her arms at last 
 
 A mother-naked man; 
 She cast her mantle over him, 
 
 And sae her love she wan. 
 
 Up then spak' the Queen of Fairies, 
 
 Out o' a bush o' broom, 
 "She that has borrow'd young Tarn Lin 
 
 Has gotten a stately groom. "
 
 30 Studies in Literature 
 
 Out then spak' the Queen o' Fairies, 
 
 And an angry woman was she, 
 "She's ta'en awa' the bonniest knight 
 
 In a' my companie! 
 
 "But what I ken this night, Tarn Lin, 
 
 Gin I had kent yestreen, 
 I wad ta'en out thy heart o' flesh, 
 
 And put in a heart o' stane. 
 
 "And adieu, Tarn Lin! But gin I had kent 
 
 A ladye wad borrow'd thee, 
 I wad ta'en out thy twa grey e'en 
 
 Put in twa e'en o' tree. 
 
 "And had I the wit yestreen, yestreen, 
 
 That I have coft this day, 
 I'd paid my teind seven times to hell 
 
 Ere you had been won away!" 
 
 Here are some verses from a carol-ballad that of The 
 Seven Virgins: 
 
 All under the leaves and the leaves of life 
 
 I met with virgins seven, 
 And one of them was Mary mild, 
 
 Our Lord's mother of Heaven. 
 
 "O what are you seeking, you seven fair maids, 
 
 All under the leaves of life? 
 Come tell, come tell, what seek you 
 
 All under the leaves of life?" 
 
 "We're seeking for no leaves, Thomas, 
 
 But for a friend of thine; 
 We're seeking for sweet Jesus Christ, 
 
 To be our guide and thine. "
 
 Ballads 31 
 
 "Go down, go down, to yonaer town, 
 
 And sit in the gallery, 
 And there you'll see sweet Jesus Christ, 
 
 Nail'd to a big yew-tree." 
 
 Then He laid his head on His right shoulder, 
 Seeing death it struck Him nigh 
 
 "The Holy Ghost be with your soul, 
 I die, Mother dear, I die. " 
 
 O the rose, the gentle rose, 
 And the fennel that grows so green! 
 
 God give us grace in every place 
 To pray for our king and queen. 
 
 Furthermore for our enemies all 
 Our prayers they should be strong: 
 
 Amen, good Lord; your charity 
 Is the ending of my song. 
 
 Or here two stanzas from another old narrative carol- 
 / saw Three Ships; 
 
 O they sail'd in to Bethlehem! 
 
 To Bethlehem, to Bethlehem; 
 Saint Michael was the steresman, 
 
 Saint John sate in the horn. 
 
 And all the bells on earth did ring 
 
 On earth did ring, on earth did ring: 
 "Welcome be thou Heaven's King, 
 
 On Christ's Sunday at morn!" 
 
 Here are three stanzas from a ballad in dialogue- 
 Edward, Edward:
 
 32 Studies in Literature 
 
 "Why 'does your brand sae drop wi' blude, 
 
 Edward, Edward? 
 Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude, 
 
 And why sae sad gang ye, O?" 
 "O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude, 
 
 Mither, mither; 
 
 O I hae kill'd my hawk sae gude, 
 And I had nae mair but he, 0." 
 
 "Your hawk's blude was never sae red, 
 
 Edward, Edward; 
 Your hawk's blude was never sae red, 
 
 My dear son, I tell thee, 0." 
 "01 hae kill'd my red-roan steed, 
 
 Mither, mither; 
 
 O I hae kill'd my red-roan steed, 
 That erst was sae fair and free, O. " 
 
 "Your steed was auld, and ye hae got mair, 
 
 Edward, Edward; 
 Your steed was auld, and ye hae got mair; 
 
 Some other dule ye dree, O. " 
 "O I hae kill'd my father dear, 
 
 Mither, mither; 
 
 O I hae kill'd my father dear, 
 
 Alas, and wae is me, O!" 
 
 And here is one from a ballad with a refrain The Cruel 
 Brother. [But I should say in parenthesis that, of the 
 ballads which survive to us, few carry a refrain: they 
 are far fewer than to justify the stress laid on the re- 
 frain by those who trace all balladry to communal 
 dancing. The vast majority as we have them, tell 
 straightforward stories straightforwardly.]
 
 Ballads 33 
 
 There were three ladies play'd at the ba', 
 
 With a hey ho! and a lily gay/ 
 By came a knight and he woo'd them a' 
 As the primrose spreads so sweetly. 
 
 Sing Annet, and Marret, and fair Maisrie, 
 As the dew hangs i' the wood, gay ladie! 
 
 Here are some verses of a Robin Hood Ballad which 
 tells how Robin, having won the King's pardon on con- 
 dition that he lived at the King's court, homesickened 
 for the green-wood and Barnesdale, and at length 
 obtained leave for a week's furlough there: 
 
 When he came to greene-wood 
 
 In a merry morning, 
 There he heard the notes small 
 
 Of birds merry singing. 
 
 " It is far gone, " said Robin Hood, 
 
 "That I was latest here; 
 Me list a little for to shoot 
 
 At the dunne deer." 
 
 Robin slew a full great hart; 
 
 His horn then gan he blow, 
 That all the outlaws of that forest 
 
 That horn they coulde know, 
 
 And them together gathered 
 
 In a little throw; 
 Seven score of wight young men 
 
 Came ready on a row, 
 
 And faire didden off their hoods, 
 
 And set them on their knee: 
 "Welcome," they said, "our dear master, 
 
 Under this green- wood tree!"
 
 34 Studies in Literature 
 
 Robin dwelt in greene-wood 
 Twenty year and two; 
 
 For all dread of Edward our King, 
 Again would he not go. 
 
 Christ have mercy on his soul, 
 
 That died upon the rood ! 
 For he was a good outlaw, 
 
 And did poor men much good. 
 
 And here finally is the well-known Lyke Wake Dirge, 
 so weird and wonderful: 
 
 This ae nighte, this ae nighte, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 Fire and fleet and candle-lighte, 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 When thou from hence away art past, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last: 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 Sit thee down and put them on: 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 The whinnes sail prick thee to the bare bane; 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 From whinny-muir when thou may'st pass, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last; 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule.
 
 Ballads 35 
 
 From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last; 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 If ever thou gavest meat or drink, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 The fire sail never make thee shrink; 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 The fire will burn thee to the bare bane; 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 This ae nighte, this ae nighte, 
 
 Every nighte and alle, 
 Fire and fleet and candle-lighte, 
 
 And Christe receive thy saule. 
 
 Now I put it to you, Gentlemen, that all these ex- 
 tracts, with all their difference of subject, have a 
 common note at once unmistakable and indefinable; a 
 note which attests them all as poetical and as alike, and 
 yet as somehow different from any other poetry we 
 know : certainly different from the note of any conscious 
 poet known to us. And this peculiar ballad-note per- 
 sists, perseveres, even down to late times and whether 
 the ballad sing high or low. 
 
 It can sing high : 
 
 Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour 
 
 'Tis fifty fathom deep; 
 And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens 
 
 Wi' the Scots lords at his feet. 
 
 (Sir Patrick Spens}
 
 36 Studies in Literature 
 
 Or 
 
 About the dead hour o' the night 
 She heard the bridles ring. 
 
 (Tarn Lin) 
 
 It can sing low : 
 
 Then up bespake the bride's mother 
 She never was known to speak so free 
 
 "Ye'll not forsake my only daughter 
 Though Susie Pye has crossed the sea:" 
 
 (Young Beichan) 
 
 Or 
 
 An' thou sail marry a proud gunner; 
 An' a proud gunner I'm sure he'll be. 
 
 (The Great Silkie} 
 
 It can gallop: 
 
 O there was horsing, horsing in haste 
 And cracking of whips out owre the lee. 
 
 (Archie of Cawfield} 
 
 Or it can be merely flat pedestrianism : 
 
 There was slayne upon the Scottes' side 
 
 For sooth as I you say, 
 Of four and fifty thousand Scottes 
 
 Went but eighteen away. 
 
 (Otterburn) 
 
 But always it is unmistakable, and like no other thing 
 in poetry.
 
 Ballads 37 
 
 III 
 
 Now as we study this peculiar unmistakable note, 
 one or two things become clear to us. 
 
 It becomes clear, in the first place, that whether or 
 not these ballads "wrote themselves" (as Grimm put 
 it) whether or not they were written by the people, as 
 they certainly were for the people it is no accident of 
 chance or of time that withholds from us all knowledge 
 of the authorship. We discern that somehow ano- 
 nymity belongs to their very nature; that anonymity, 
 impersonality, permeates their form and substance. 
 Let me apply a test which I have applied elsewhere. If 
 any known man ever steeped himself in balladry, that 
 man was Sir Walter Scott, and once or twice, in Proud 
 Maisie and Brignall Banks, he came near to distil the 
 essence. If any man, taking the Ballad for his model, 
 has ever sublimated its feeling and language in a poem 
 
 seraphically free 
 From taint of personality, 
 
 that man was Coleridge, and that poem The Ancient 
 Mariner. If any writer today alive can be called a 
 ballad- writer of genius, it is the author of Danny Deever 
 and East and West. But suppose a bundle of most 
 carefully selected ballads by Scott, Coleridge, Kipling, 
 bound up in a volume with such things as Clerk Saun- 
 ders, Cospatrick, Robin Hood and the Monk, you feel 
 (do you not?) you know they would intrude almost, 
 though not quite, as obviously as would a ballad of 
 Rossetti's or one from Morris's Defence of Guinevere. 
 
 Now we must never forget that the old ballads have 
 come down to us orally, after centuries of transmis- 
 sion through the memories of simple people who never
 
 38 Studies in Literature 
 
 thought of them as "literature"; that in fact, barring 
 the broadsides, they never were "literature" or written 
 speech at all, until Bishop Percy in 1765 started apolo- 
 getically to make them literature. And so I have some- 
 times fancied that the impress of their authorship may 
 merely have worn away as the impress on a shilling 
 wears away after years of transference from pocket to 
 pocket. There is something in this; and there is more 
 in it when we remind ourselves that a ballad written on 
 one memorable event will often have been recast and 
 refurbished to commemorate another. Let me illustrate 
 this from the fortunes of a beautiful one, The Queen's 
 Marie. You all know it : 
 
 When she cam to the Netherbow port, 
 
 She la ugh 'd loud laughters three; 
 But when she cam to the gallows foot 
 
 The tears blinded her e'e. 
 
 "Yestreen the Queen had four Maries, 
 
 The night she'll hae but three; 
 There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton, 
 
 And Marie Carmichael, and me. 
 
 "O little did my mother ken, 
 
 The day she cradled me, 
 The lands I was to travel in, 
 
 Or the dog's death I wad d'ee!" 
 
 Now Professor Child collected and printed some 
 twenty-eight variants and fragments of this ballad 
 which is a somewhat late one, if its story can be traced 
 no farther back than 1563 Then, or about then, Mary 
 Queen of Scots had four Maries among her gentle- 
 women Mary Seaton, Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming
 
 Ballads 39 
 
 and Mary Livingstone : and Knox, in his History of the 
 Reformation, relates a tragic scandal, involving the 
 queen's apothecary and "a Frenchwoman that served 
 in the Queen's bedchamber." This is substantially 
 the story told in the ballad; which, however, in most 
 versions makes the king himself ("the highest Stewart 
 of a'") to be the male sinner. But why Mary Car- 
 michael and Mary Hamilton in place of Mary Fleming 
 and Mary Livingstone? Well, we must travel to 
 Russia for it. There, after the marriage of one of the 
 ministers of Peter the Great's father with a Hamilton, 
 that Scottish family ranked with the Russian aris- 
 tocracy. The Czar Peter was punctilious that all his 
 Empress Catharine's maids-of-honour should be re- 
 markable for good looks ; a niece of the minister's wife, a 
 Mary Hamilton, was appointed for her extreme beauty. 
 There followed an amour with one Orloff, an aide-de- 
 camp to the Czar: a murdered babe was found, the guilt 
 traced to Mary. Orloff was arrested but subsequently 
 reprieved or pardoned. Mary Hamilton suffered ex- 
 ecution, on March 14, 1719. 
 
 Here, then, we have a story almost precisely similar 
 to that of the ballad ; with a real Mary Hamilton, who 
 does not occur historically in the scandal of 1563. Her 
 date is 1719: and yet no one with the smallest sense of 
 poetry can put the ballad so late, or anywhere within a 
 hundred years of 1719. Obviously the old ballad was 
 re-adapted to fit a new scandal in high life. But, mark 
 yet again, the stanza about the four Maries is merely 
 incidental and has nothing to do with the scandal : and 
 as that kind of scandal has been common enough in 
 courts from very early times, there is no reason why the 
 ballad should not reach back to very early times, have 
 been adapted to the business of 1563 and re-adapted to
 
 40 Studies in Literature 
 
 the business of 1719. Speculation, to be sure! But 
 that is where you always are with ballads. 
 
 Yet no ! Our simile of the shilling worn in passing 
 from pocket to pocket, will not do. For it is not only 
 that the more a ballad suffers wear and change the more 
 it remains the same thing : it is that the more it wears, 
 the more it takes that paradoxically sharp impress, the 
 impress of impersonality. 
 
 IV 
 
 The next point to be noted of the Ballad is its extra- 
 ordinary rapidity of movement. Rapidity of movement 
 has been preached of the epic by Horace, and by Mat- 
 thew Arnold specially commended in Homer. But, for 
 rapidity, these innominate lays beat anything in Homer. 
 I remember studying, once on a time, a treatise on 
 American cocktails and coming on the following rider 
 to a recipe for a mixed liquor entitled Angler's Punch 
 "N. B. This punch can also be put up in bottles, so 
 that the Angler may lose no time." 
 
 Now the true Ballad is put up (doubtless upon ex- 
 perience) so that the audience loses no time : 
 
 The king sits in Dunfermline town 
 Drinking the blude-red wine; 
 
 and forthwith he asks 
 
 "O whare will I get a skeely skipper 
 To sail this new ship o' mine?" 
 
 And "What," Professor Ker very pertinently asks, 
 "What would the story of Sir Patrick Spens be worth if it 
 was told in any other way with a description of the
 
 Ballads 41 
 
 scenery about Dunfermline, the domestic establishment 
 of the King of Norway, and the manners of the court?" 
 This rapidity of movement is constant, and (if it be 
 not begging the question to term it so) "professional." 
 There are tricks, cliches, always at hand to carry us from 
 one incident to another: 
 
 They hadna sail'd a league, a league 
 A league but barely three . . . 
 
 when something new is ready to happen. The little 
 foot-page, after he has duly louted on his knee and 
 received the fatal message, always runs with it and has 
 to cross a river : 
 
 And whan he came to the broken briggs 
 He bent his bow and swam . . . 
 
 actually bending his bow (I suppose) and laying his 
 arms across it while he kicked his legs, swimming : and 
 so on. Almost always you will find the intervals hurried 
 over in this way, and it would seem that the audience 
 (easy with conventions as simple folk are) took these 
 formulae for granted as the right and proper bridges 
 over dull gaps of narrative. 
 
 Now let me draw four lines for you: the first two 
 across the map, the second two in historical time. 
 
 Across the map of England and Scotland I draw my 
 first and northerly line from the Firth of Forth to the 
 Clyde; my second and southerly from Newcastle-on- 
 Tyne to St. Bee's Head. Between these two lines lie 
 almost all the places most celebrated in ballad poetry. 
 They crowd thicker and thicker as on either side they
 
 42 Studies in Literature 
 
 near the ancient Border of the two kingdoms: but I 
 draw no line here, being cautious; because, as you 
 know, the men of whose deeds the ballads were written 
 deeds ranging from pitched battle to the reiving of 
 cattle and brides drew no line at all, either in morals 
 or geographically: even mathematically, none known to 
 Euclid. Their line had breadth. At the thinnest it 
 was a strip; and they called this strip "The Debatable 
 Land." 
 
 Now of course all the many ballads of Border fights 
 and forays from Otterburn and Chevy Chase to such 
 things as Kinmont Willie, Hobbie Noble, Jamie Telfer in 
 the Fair Dodhead come from this region. But these 
 are not the very best ; and the curious fact is that all the 
 very best ballads, which have little or nothing to do 
 with forays and cattle-lifting, also come from this region, 
 and specially among the upper waters of Tweed and 
 Teviot. A fact is a fact, and a guess is a guess, and I 
 can bring no evidence for what is nevertheless my sincere 
 belief that once on a time there lived just hereabouts 
 a man of genius who gave these songs their immortal 
 impress and taught it to others (also he may have taught 
 the children of the Border the use of the Bow). 
 
 Now these, the songs, remain to eternity, 
 Those, only those, the bountiful choristers, 
 Gone those are gone, those unremembered 
 Sleep and are silent in earth for ever. 
 
 As Ecclesiasticus has it : 
 
 Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that 
 begat us. ... Leaders of the people by their counsels, and 
 by their knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and 
 eloquent in their instructions: such as found out musical
 
 Ballads 43 
 
 tunes, and recited verses in writing. . . . All these were 
 honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their 
 times. There be of them that have left a name behind 
 them, that their praises might be reported. And some 
 there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as 
 though they had never been ; and are become as though they 
 had never been born ; and their children after them. 
 
 Or as Lucian put it : 
 
 Mortal are the things of mortals : we abide as they decay. 
 If you doubt this proposition, put it just the other way. 
 
 I have told you my guess. But this much is no 
 guess. Folk-poetry being a large word, we do our 
 scientific sense of it some help by fixing the best of 
 this form of our literature upon a certain folk inhabit- 
 ing a certain limited region, which we find to lie between 
 the Forth and the Tyne. 
 
 VI 
 
 I draw my other two lines, which are chronological, 
 at the years 1350 and 1550. Almost all the evidence 
 shows that the Ballad with the impress we know upon 
 it, rose, flourished, declined, within that period. The 
 author of Piers Plowman mentions "rimes of Robin 
 Hood and Randolph, earl of Chester" as known to the 
 common men of his day: Wynkyn de Worde printed 
 the Lytell Geste of Robyn Hood, as we have it, about a 
 hundred and forty years later : but when, yet a century 
 later, we come to the Elizabethan dramatists, we find 
 them holding the Ballad in open derision. Nor could 
 the Last Minstrel of that age (if we suppose any such 
 person) have pleaded with Scott's that
 
 44 Studies in Literature 
 
 The bigots of an iron time 
 
 Had called his harmless art a crime . . . 
 
 the truth being rather that he had delighted the com- 
 pany long enough. A new poetry had come into vogue 
 with Wyatt and Surrey, Grimald, Lodge, Lyly and the 
 rest, and as an artistic poem the Ballad had passed 
 into the shade. It had been, as we know, impersonal 
 curiously impersonal in utterance: its business had 
 been to tell a plain tale. The lyrical cry seldom breaks 
 from it. When it does, at its most poignant, it breaks 
 forth thus, as Leesome Brand buries the wife he has 
 killed unwittingly : 
 
 There is a feast in your father's house, 
 
 The broom blooms bonnie and sae it is fair 
 
 It becomes you and me to be very douce, 
 And we'll never gang down to the broom nae mair. 
 
 He's houkit a grave, long, large and wide, 
 The broom blooms bonnie and sae it is fair 
 
 He's buried his auld son doun by her side, 
 And we'll never gang down to the broom nae mair. 
 
 It was nae wonder his heart was sair 
 
 The broom blooms bonnie and sae it is fair 
 
 When he shool'd the mools on her yellow hair, 
 And we'll never gang down to the broom nae mair. 
 
 And this is exquisitely poignant : but it is not personal, 
 as any stanza of Wyatt's is personal: for instance 
 
 And wilt thou leave me thus, 
 That hath loved thee so long 
 In wealth and woe among:
 
 Ballads 45 
 
 And is thy heart so strong 
 As for to leave me thus ? 
 Say nay ! say nay ! 
 
 The ballad-metre had been simple, almost to jog-trot 
 (you remember Dr. Johnson's parody). The Ballad 
 had never philosophised its emotion. But now listen 
 to this: 
 
 To love and to be wise, 
 
 To rage with good advice, 
 Now thus, now than, so goes the game, 
 
 Uncertain is the dice: 
 There is no man, I say, that can 
 
 Both love and to be wise. 
 
 Keeping that stanza in mind, let us take an old ballad 
 which has happened to attract in its time (i) the Eliza- 
 bethan improver and (2) the eighteenth century embel- 
 lisher, and see what a mess they both make of it, with 
 the best intentions. It begins, much in the fashion of 
 the Nut Brown Maid, with a set dialogue a dialogue 
 between a lover and a pilgrim who is returning from the 
 shrine of St. Mary at Walsingham : and it starts in the 
 true ballad-style. (I may mention that it is quoted in 
 Fletcher's play The Knight of the Burning Pestle.') 
 
 "As ye came from the holy land 
 
 Of Walsingham, 
 Met you not with my true love 
 
 By the way as you came?" 
 
 "How shall I know your true love, 
 
 That have met many a one 
 As I came from the holy land, 
 
 That have come, that have gone?" 

 
 46 Studies in Literature 
 
 "She is neither white nor brown, 
 
 But as the heavens fair; 
 There is none hath her form divine, 
 
 In the earth or the air." 
 
 "Such a one did I meet, Good Sir, 
 
 Such an angelique face: 
 Who like a nymph, like a queen did appear 
 
 In her gait, in her grace." 
 
 "She hath left me here alone, 
 
 All alone, as unknown, 
 Who sometime did me lead with herself 
 
 And me loved, as her own." 
 
 "What's the cause that she leaves you alone 
 
 And a new way doth take, 
 That sometime did love you as her own 
 
 And her joy did you make?" 
 
 "I have loved her all my youth, 
 
 But now am old, as you see, 
 Love loves not the falling fruit, 
 
 Nor the withered tree." 
 
 So there you have, with its pretty anapaests, a little 
 ballad-poem, fairly ended and closed. Now comes in 
 the improving Elizabethan with a sophisticated moral : 
 
 Know that Love is a careless child, 
 
 And forgets promise past : 
 He is blind, he is deaf when he list, 
 
 And in faith never fast. 
 
 His desire is a dureless content 
 
 And a trustless joy; 
 He is won with a world of despair 
 
 And is lost with a toy.
 
 Ballads 47 
 
 But true love is a durable fire 
 
 In the mind ever burning, 
 Never sick, never old, never dead, 
 
 From itself never turning. 
 
 You see how far we are getting from the simplicity of 
 the first stanzas? But worse, far worse, is to come. 
 Bishop Percy found this version in his folio: but a 
 "corrected" copy was forwarded to him by his friend 
 Mr. Shenstone. Now Shenstone was by no means a 
 negligible poet, in the eighteenth century manner : but 
 tripping anapaests were too vulgar for him and thus 
 he emended : 
 
 "As ye came from the holy land 
 
 Of blessed Walsingham, 
 O met you not with my true love 
 
 As by the way ye came?" 
 
 "How shall I know your true love 
 
 That have met many a one, 
 As I came from the holy land 
 
 That have both come and gone?" . . . 
 
 and so on, with a deadening fist on each stanza, until 
 we come to this superlative ending : 
 
 But true love is a lasting fire, 
 
 Which viewless vestals tend, 
 That burns for ever in the soule, 
 
 And knowes not change nor end. 
 
 "Viewless Vestals"! 
 
 VII 
 
 Now let me say, before concluding, that greatly as I 
 adore these old ballads I do so not idolatrously. They 
 are genuine poetry, peculiar poetry, sincere poetry; but
 
 48 Studies in Literature 
 
 they will not compare with the high music of Spenser's 
 Epithalamion or of Milton's Lycidas or of Keats' Night- 
 ingale. In truth any comparison of the ballads with 
 these would be unfair as any comparison between 
 children and grown folk. They appealed in their day 
 to something young in the national mind. They have 
 all the winning grace of innocence : but they cannot scale 
 the great poetical heights any more than mere innocence 
 can scale the great spiritual heights. Tears and fasting 
 and bread eaten in sorrow go to that achievement: and 
 who has not known and tried them and been tried by 
 them 
 
 He knows you not, ye heavenly powers ! 
 
 I but contend today that to complain of the fifteenth 
 century as unpoetical, turning your ear aside from this 
 outpouring of spring numbers to listen to the bagpipe 
 drone of a Lydgate or a Hoccleve, is to sin like a 
 handbook. 
 
 VIII 
 
 I end with a ballad The Old Cloak which, as we 
 are, with all our shortcomings, a humorous nation, de- 
 served a long line of children, but in fact had few or 
 none. I cannot think why. It runs in antiphon like 
 the Nut Brown Maid, and is a supposed dialogue between 
 a good man and his wife : 
 
 This winter's weather it waxeth cold, 
 
 And frost it freezeth on every hill, 
 And Boreas blows his blast so bold 
 
 That all our cattle are like to spill. 
 Bell, my wife, she loves no strife; 
 
 She said unto me quietlye, 
 "Rise up, and save cow Crumbock's life! 
 
 Man, put thine old cloak about thee!"
 
 Ballads 49 
 
 He. O Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte? 
 
 Thou kens my cloak is very thin: 
 It is so bare and over worn, 
 
 A cricke thereon cannot renn. 
 Then I'll no longer borrow nor lend; 
 
 For once I'll new apparell'd be; 
 To-morrow I'll to town and spend; 
 
 For I'll have a new cloak about me. 
 
 She. Cow Crumbock is a very good cow: 
 
 She has been always true to the pail; 
 She has help'd us to butter and cheese, I trow, 
 
 And other things she will not fail. 
 I would be loth to see her pine. 
 
 Good husband, counsel take of me: 
 It is not for us to go so fine 
 
 Man, take thine old cloak about thee! 
 
 He. My cloak it was a very good cloak, 
 
 It hath been always true to the wear; 
 But now it is not worth a groat: 
 
 I have had it four and forty year'. 
 Sometime it was of cloth in grain: 
 
 'Tis now but a sigh clout, as you may see: 
 It will neither hold out wind nor rain; 
 
 And I'll have a new cloak about me. 
 
 She. It is four and forty years ago 
 
 Since the one of us the other did ken; 
 And we have had, betwixt us two, 
 
 Of children either nine or ten: 
 We have brought them up to women and men : 
 
 In the fear of God I trow they be: 
 And why wilt thou thyself misken? 
 
 Man, take thine old cloak about thee!
 
 50 Studies in Literature 
 
 He. Bell my wife, why dost thou flyte? 
 
 Now is now, and then was then: 
 Seek now all the world throughout, 
 
 Thou kens not clowns from gentlemen: 
 They are clad in black, green, yellow and blue, 
 
 So far above their own degree. 
 Once in my life I'll take a view; 
 
 For I'll have a new cloak about me. 
 
 She. King Stephen was a worthy peer; 
 
 His breeches cost him but a crown; 
 He held them sixpence all too dear, 
 
 Therefore he called the tailor "lown." 
 He was a king and wore the crown, 
 
 And thou'se but of a low degree: 
 It's pride that puts this country down: 
 
 Man, take thy old cloak about thee! 
 
 He. Bell my wife, she loves not strife, 
 
 Yet she will lead me, if she can: 
 And to maintain an easy life 
 
 I oft must yield, though I'm good-man. 
 It's not for a man with a woman to threap, 
 
 Unless he first give o'er the plea: 
 As we began, so will we keep, 
 
 And I'll take my old cloak about me.
 
 THE HORATIAN MODEL IN 
 ENGLISH VERSE 
 
 BEFORE discussing as I am engaged to do this 
 morning the Horatian model in English verse, 
 give me leave, Gentlemen, to delimit the ground. 
 
 I am not going to discuss the many attempts to trans- 
 late Horace to turn him straight into English verse 
 with their various degrees of ill-success. They are so 
 many, so various, as to raise one's moral estimate of 
 Man improbus homo, indomitable still against all 
 experience and the advice of his friends "still clutching 
 the inviolable shade!" The talents of the late Mr. 
 Gladstone were multifarious and large indeed in their 
 ambit ; yet we may agree that the Odes of Horace were 
 not haunts meet for him : 
 
 Piscium et summS, genus haesit ulmo . . . 
 as he translated 
 
 The elm-tree top to fishy kind 
 Gave harbour . . . 
 
 Or we might paraphrase in words addressed to another 
 Father William : 
 
 51
 
 52 Studies in Literature 
 
 And yet you incessantly stand on your head: 
 Do you think, at your age, it is right? 
 
 My own judgment would place Conington first among 
 competitors, with Sir Theodore Martin second (surpass- 
 ing him in occasional brilliance but falling some way 
 behind on the long run), De Vere third. But these pre- 
 ferences are idle; since, in the ordinary sense, Horace 
 defies translation. 
 
 Secondly I shall ask your leave, this morning, to 
 plant our Deus Terminus yet nearer on this side of the 
 Satires and Epistles. I do not deny that this fences off 
 a deal of the genuine Horace, or pretend that we can 
 either summarise or appreciate the total Horace if we 
 leave the Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica out of account. 
 But I shall take little more than a glance at them 
 because his magic secret does not hide anywhere in 
 these, and as a fact their style, in all its essentials, has 
 been caught and transferred into modern literature 
 certainly into French and English by a number of 
 writers. I am not talking of satire as we commonly 
 understand it today. When we think of satire we 
 think of Juvenal and of Swift, of Pope, of Churchill, 
 who derive from Juvenal not from Horace, save but 
 occasionally and then at a remove. Satire has come to 
 connote something of savagery, of castigation : and I am 
 glad to be quit of it this morning because (to be frank) 
 it is a form of art that appeals to me very faintly, especi- 
 ally in warm weather and this not merely because bad 
 temper is troublesome, but for the reason that anger 
 valuable, indeed, now and then is a passion of which it 
 behoves all men to be economical. To be indignant is 
 better than to be cynical: to rage is manlier than to 
 sneer. Yet to be constitutionally an angry man to
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 53 
 
 commence satirist and set up in business as a profession- 
 ally angry man has always seemed to me, humanly 
 speaking (and therefore artistically), more than a trifle 
 absurd. Few will deny Juvenal's force: yet after all 
 as we open a volume entitled Sixteen Satires of Juvenal, 
 what are we promised but this "Go to! I, Decimus 
 Junius Juvenalis, propose to lose my temper on sixteen 
 several occasions"? In fact, when we have been 
 scolded through eleven or so of these efforts, even such 
 a genius as his is left laboriously flogging a dead horse; 
 reduced to vituperating some obscure Egyptians for an 
 alleged indulgence in cannibalism. Say, now, that you 
 pick up tomorrow's newspaper and read that a mission- 
 ary has been eaten in the Friendly Islands. You will 
 pay his exit the tribute of a sigh : but the distance, and 
 anthropology, will soften the blow. You will not fly 
 into a passion. At the most you will write to The Times 
 calling for a punitive visit by one of His Majesty's ships. 
 More likely you will reckon your debt of humanity 
 discharged by ingeminating, after Sir Isaac Newton, 
 "O Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest what thou 
 hast devoured!" 
 
 II 
 
 But the Satires of Horace were not satires in this 
 sense at all: no more satires than this week's Punch 
 is the London Charivari. Satura literally translated, 
 is a "hotch potch": in letters it becomes (as we should 
 say) a "miscellany," a familiar discourse upon this, 
 that and the other. With a man of Horace's tempera- 
 ment such sermones could not miss to be urbane, 
 gossipy, sententious a little, wise a great deal, smooth 
 in address, pointed in wit ; and I dare to say that these
 
 54 Studies in Literature 
 
 qualities have been achieved by his English and French 
 descendants. To prove that the trick can be done even 
 in a straight translation, let me quote you an example 
 from Conington's version of Epistle 2, Book n. 
 Luculli miles, etc. : 
 
 A soldier of Lucullus's, they say, 
 
 Worn out at night by marching all the day, 
 
 Lay down to sleep, and, while at ease he snored, 
 
 Lost to a farthing all his little hoard. 
 
 This woke the wolf in him ; 'tis strange how keen 
 
 The teeth will grow with but the tongue between; 
 
 Mad with the foe and with himself, off-hand 
 
 He stormed a treasure-city, wall'd and manned, 
 
 Destroys the garrison, becomes renowned, 
 
 Gets decorations and two hundred pound. 
 
 Soon after this the general had in view 
 
 To take some fortress where, I never knew; 
 
 He singles out our friend, and makes a speech 
 
 That e'en might drive a coward to the breach: 
 
 "Go, my fine fellow! go where valour calls! 
 
 There's fame and money too inside those walls." 
 
 "I'm not your man," returned the rustic wit: 
 
 "He makes a hero who has lost his kit." 
 
 At Rome I had my schooling, and was taught 
 Achilles' wrath, and all the woes it brought; 
 At classic Athens, where I went erelong, 
 I learnt to draw the line 'twixt right and wrong, 
 And search for truth, if so she might be seen 
 In academic groves of blissful green; 
 But soon the stress of civil strife removed 
 My adolescence from the scenes it loved, 
 And ranged me with a force that could not stand 
 Before the might of Caesar's conquering hand. 
 Then when Philippi turned me all adrift 
 A poor plucked fledgling, for myself to shift,
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 55 
 
 Bereft of property, impaired of purse, 
 Sheer penury drove me into scribbling verse: 
 But now, when times are altered, having got 
 Enough, thank Heaven, at least to boil my pot, 
 I were the veriest madman if I chose 
 To write a poem rather than to doze. 
 
 Now I would repeat here an observation of New- 
 man's which I have quoted before to you, that to invent 
 a style is in itself a triumph of genius ' ' It is like cross- 
 ing a country before roads are made between place and 
 place" and the author who does this deserves to be a 
 classic both because of what he does and because he can 
 do it. But this originality being granted in the Horace 
 of the Satires and Epistles, I do think that our English 
 translator has caught the trick of the Latin, or very 
 nearly. But he derives it, of course, through countless 
 English imitators of Horace who repeat the model at 
 short intervals, mile after mile, for two centuries and 
 more. Here, for example is Bishop Hall (1574-1656) : 
 
 Late travelling along in London way, 
 
 We met as seem'd by his disguised array 
 
 A lusty courtier, whose curled head 
 
 With abron locks was fairly furnished. 
 
 I him saluted in our la vis wise ; 
 
 He answers my untimely courtesies. 
 
 His bonnet vail'd, or ever he could think, 
 
 The unruly wind blows off his periwinke. 
 
 He 'lights, and runs, and quickly hath him sped 
 
 To overtake his overrunning head. 
 
 Here is the note in Cleveland (1613-1658) : 
 
 Lord ! what a goodly thing is want of shirts !
 
 56 Studies in Literature 
 
 Here in Oldham (1653-1683) : 
 
 Some think themselves exalted to the Sky 
 If they light in some noble Family: 
 Diet, an Horse, and thirty Pounds a Year, 
 Besides th' Advantage of his Lordship's ear. 
 
 Here it is in Dry den : 
 
 Shimei, whose youth did early promise bring 
 Of zeal to God and hatred to his King, 
 Did wisely from expensive sins refrain, 
 And never broke the Sabbath, but for gain. 
 
 Here in Pope (of Dr. Bentley) : 
 
 Before them march'd that awful Aristarch: 
 Plough'd was his front with many a deep remark. 
 His hat, which never vail'd to human pride, 
 Walker with reverence took, and laid aside. 
 
 Still mark it in Goldsmith : 
 
 In arguing, too, the Parson own'd his skill, 
 
 For e'en though vanquish'd, he could argue still; 
 
 While words of learned length and thund'ring sound 
 
 Amazed the gazing rustics all around, 
 
 And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew 
 
 That one small head could carry all he knew . . . 
 
 in Cowper: 
 
 O barb'rous! wouldst thou with a Gothic hand 
 
 Pull down the schools? What! all the schools i' th' land? 
 
 Or throw them up to liv'ry nags and grooms, 
 
 Or turn them into shops and auction rooms? . . . 
 
 even in Crabbe :
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 57 
 
 We had a sprightly nymph. In every town 
 Are some such sprights, who wander up and down. 
 She had her useful arts, and could contrive 
 In time's despite, to stay at twenty-five; 
 "Here will I rest: move on, thou lying year,; 
 This is my age, and I will rest me here. " 
 
 III 
 
 But the truly magical secret of Horace lies nowhere 
 in his Satires and Epistles. It lies in his Odes. There 
 haunts that witchery of style which, the moment you 
 lose grasp of it, is dissipated into thin air and eludes your 
 concentrated pursuit so that, like any booby school- 
 boy, you have your hands for certain over the butterfly, 
 and, opening them ever so cautiously, find it gone. 
 You know the man's story (he has told much of it in 
 the lines of which I have read Conington's paraphrase) 
 born of parentage humble enough, but with gentle 
 instincts; a University man, of Athens and (as Mr. 
 Verdant Green said) proud of the title a brief spell of 
 military campaigning, which he did not pretend to 
 enjoy, and enjoyed all the less because his was the losing 
 side then Rome again with a brief experience of what 
 in Rome corresponded to Grub Street then a post in 
 the Quaestor's office put it at a Treasury Clerkship 
 then Maecenas, patronage, success, with a small Sabine 
 farm to which he could retreat whenever his foot-sole 
 tired of pavement a small country house, frugal but 
 with good wine in the cellar, and silver, well-rubbed, on 
 the table: 
 
 A bin of wine, a spice of wit, 
 A home with lawns enclosing it, 
 A living river by the door, 
 A nightingale in the sycamore,
 
 58 Studies in Literature 
 
 or their equivalents. Horace enjoyed these rural com- 
 forts the better that they were tinged with a delicate 
 nostalgia for the Town. He would have said with 
 Laurence Oliphant 
 
 Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly. 
 
 You know the man too. If you know him well, he is 
 not a mere "man-about-town" but so commonsensical 
 at that as to seem a kind of glorified "man-in-the- 
 street," with a touch of Browning's poet, in How it 
 strikes a Contemporary: 
 
 I only knew one poet in my life . . . 
 He took such cognizance of men and things . . . 
 Yet stared at nobody, you stared at him, 
 And found, less to your pleasure than surprise, 
 He seemed to know you and expect as much . . . 
 
 an Epicurean, yet a patriot with firm views about 
 patriotism ; a middle-aged man who had "lived " (as we 
 say) and made no secret about it, yet by luck or good 
 management had so nursed his pleasures as to keep 
 a steady supply for the advance of age, calling in 
 humour and earned wisdom to amuse when appetite 
 failed. 
 
 You know, too, what kind of poetry the man wrote, 
 and have had his characteristics labelled for you a score 
 of times its clarity, its nicety, its felicity of phrase, its 
 instinct for the appropriate, its delicate blend of the 
 scholar and the gentleman. I suppose one must add 
 "its faultless taste " since the one trick of Horace which 
 offends me has somehow passed for permissible from 
 his day to ours and apparently still delights the audi-
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 59 
 
 ences of the late Sir William Schwenck Gilbert I mean 
 the trick of gibing at a woman because she is growing 
 old and losing her beauty ("Little Butter-cup," 
 "There will be too much of me in the coming by-and- 
 by" and the like), a form of merriment which I shall 
 continue to regard as inhumane until Death reconciles 
 me with the majority and may be (but I wonder) with 
 enlightenment. 
 
 Critics there are, I find, who deny the title of "poet/ ' or 
 at any rate of ' ' great poet, ' ' to Horace, because they miss 
 in him certain qualities moral earnestness, aicouBatoTYji;, 
 splendour of diction, intensity of imagination, and 
 other abstract virtues, with all of which, though neces- 
 sary to their notion of a poet, Horace rather deliberately 
 had nothing to do. I point to one or two of the odes, 
 say the grand Cleopatra towards the end of Book I, or 
 the yet more celebrated Regulus in Book in, and 
 observe that if our critics' notion of poetry do not 
 include these, why then it had better be enlarged to 
 make room for them: and further that I do not care 
 one obol (as neither would he yet he knew exegi 
 monumentuni) what is meant by "great poet" or even 
 "poet" in the abstract, when here you have a man 
 whose verses have such a diuturnity of charm that, as 
 has been said, "Men so wide apart in temperament 
 and spirit as Newman and Gibbon, Bossuet and Vol- 
 taire, Pope and Wordsworth, Thackeray and Glad- 
 stone, Rabelais and Charles Lamb, seem all to have 
 felt in Horace a like attraction and to have made of him 
 an intimate friend. " And I solemnly subscribe to the 
 sentence that follows. "The magnetic attraction to 
 which such names as these collectively testify is a 
 phenomenon of sufficient rarity to invite some attempt 
 to explain it. "
 
 6o Studies in Literature 
 
 IV 
 
 Whatever the secret be, our English poets have been 
 chasing it these four hundred years. Start, if you will, 
 with Sir Thomas Wyatt's Vixi puellis: 
 
 They flee from me that some time did me seek, 
 With naked foot stalking within my chamber . . . 
 
 Take Campion's Integer Vitae: 
 
 The man of life upright, 
 
 Whose guiltless heart is free 
 From all dishonest deeds, 
 
 Or thought of vanity .... 
 
 Take Wotton in a like strain : 
 
 How happy is he born and taught 
 That serveth not another's will; 
 Whose armour is his honest thought, 
 And simple truth his utmost skill. 
 
 Or, varying the strain, take Peele's Farewell to Arms: 
 
 His golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd . . . 
 His helmet now shall make a hive for bees. 
 
 Or Ben Jonson's 
 
 Still to be neat, still to be drest, 
 As you were going to a feast. 
 
 Take Herrick's 
 
 Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. 
 
 Or Randolph's Ode to Master Anthony Stafford, to hasten 
 him into the country.
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 61 
 
 Or to leave quoting by fragments let me read 
 this one lyric of Campion's, in two stanzas: 
 
 Now winter nights enlarge 
 
 The number of their hours, 
 And clouds their storms discharge 
 
 Upon the airy towers. 
 Let now the chimneys blaze 
 
 And cups o'erflow with wine; 
 Let well-tuned words amaze 
 
 With harmony divine. 
 Now yellow waxen lights 
 
 Shall wait on honey love, 
 While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights 
 
 Sleep's leaden spells remove. 
 
 This time doth well dispense 
 
 With lovers' long discourse; 
 Much speech hath some defence, 
 
 Though beauty no remorse. 
 All do not all things well; 
 
 Some measures comely tread, 
 Some knotted riddles tell, 
 
 Some poems smoothly read. 
 The summer hath his joys, 
 
 And winter his delights; 
 Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, 
 
 They shorten tedious nights. 
 
 The second stanza loses grip for a while; but the whole 
 is right Horace. 
 
 But let us come to more learned imitation learned, 
 that is to say in the matter of technique. It has been 
 pointed out first I believe by our present Poet Laure-
 
 62 Studies in Literature 
 
 ate that Milton in his sonnets was deliberately 
 adapting the sonnet-form to the Horatian ode; and the 
 suggestion had only to be made, to convince. 
 
 Lawrence, of vertuous Father vertuous Son, 
 
 Now that the Fields are dank, and ways are mire, 
 Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire 
 
 Help waste a sullen day; what may be won 
 
 From the hard season gaining? Time will run 
 On smoother till Favonius re-inspire 
 The frozen earth ; and clothe in fresh attire 
 
 The Lily and Rose, that neither sow'd nor spun. 
 
 What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, 
 Of Attick taste, with Wine, whence we may rise 
 
 To hear the Lute well toucht, or artful voice 
 Warble immortal Notes and Tuscan Ayre? 
 He who of those delights can judge, and spare 
 To interpose them oft, is not unwise. 
 
 Consider that, or the sonnet to Cromwell, or that to 
 Cyriack Skinner: 
 
 To day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench 
 In mirth, that after no repenting draws; 
 Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause, 
 
 And what the Swede intend, and what the French. 
 
 To measure life, learn thou betimes, and know 
 Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; 
 For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains. 
 
 And disapproves that care, thou wise in show, 
 That with superfluous burden loads the day, 
 And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains. 
 
 I shall discuss the technique later: but who can read 
 that without exclaiming Aut Flaccus aut nullus? Now I 
 proceed to point out that just when Milton was endeav- 
 ouring to break up the old Petrarchan sonnet, and
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 63 
 
 refit it to the Horatian ode, he was Cromwell's Latin 
 Secretary and, for comrade in the Secretaryship, he had 
 another poet, Andrew Marvell, who was at the same 
 time working upon the Horatian model though in a 
 different way: and I have sometimes wondered what 
 Cromwell would have said had he happened in and 
 caught his two secretaries at it, one at either end of the 
 table. Now Andrew Marvell's Garden and Coy Mis- 
 tress are Horatian enough, as are his later satires written 
 under Charles II. But his Horatian Ode upon Crom- 
 well's Return from Ireland has been praised as the most 
 Horatian thing not written by Horace. Therefore I 
 pause upon it, and will quote its two best-known 
 stanzas, those upon Charles I at his execution: 
 
 He nothing common did, or mean, 
 Upon that memorable scene, 
 
 But with his keener eye 
 
 The axe's edge did try; 
 
 Nor called the gods with vulgar spite 
 To vindicate his helpless right; 
 
 But bowed his comely head 
 
 Down, as upon a bed. 
 
 What falls short, here, of Horace's 
 
 scilicet invidens 
 privata deduci superbo 
 non humilis mulier triumpho, 
 
 or of the conclusion of the great Regulus ode, where 
 the noble Roman, simply obedient to his honour, parts 
 the anguished crowd that would have stayed him at any 
 price, and goes back to certain death by torture, cheer- 
 ful as though bound on a week-end release from busi- 
 ness?
 
 64 Studies in Literature 
 
 Tendens Venafranos in agros 
 Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. 
 
 I should consent and no two words about it with the 
 general opinion that this "falling close" is one of the 
 noblest on which ever poem concluded, were it not that 
 a critic whose judgment as a rule I respect Dr. Tyrrell 
 of Dublin 1 has twice at least and recently derided it 
 for sheer bathos. I hardly know where to begin with 
 such a pronouncement. Yet if Dr. Tyrrell be somehow 
 mixing up Venafrum or Tarentum with some reminisc- 
 ences of cheap week-end tickets, I would remind him 
 that Venafrum was a home of Samnite warriors (who 
 were among the best), while the verse itself reminds him 
 of Tarentum 's origin; and the noble associations of both 
 may not improbably have crossed Horace's mind as it 
 usually crosses his reader's. A great deal depends in 
 poetry on the dignity thus associated with a name : the 
 'busman's call "Penny all the way Shepherd's Bush 
 to Marble Arch!" would (as Dr. Tyrrell will allow) be 
 enhanced in allurement if beneath that Arch sat Jove, 
 father of gods and men, if that bush sheltered pastoral 
 Apollo with the flock of Admetus. But take the verse 
 alone, in its own beauty. Is it possible that Dr. Tyrrell 's 
 ear has missed to hear the lovely tolling vowels of ' ' Vena- 
 franos in agros " or missed the note the even more lovely 
 cadences of vowels on which it chimes a close "Aut 
 Lacedaemonium Tarentum " ? 
 
 Gentlemen, listen to this though you listen to no- 
 thing else this morning. You would write strongly and 
 melodiously, so that out of the strong should come forth 
 sweetness. Well, as the strength of style rests on the 
 verb verbum, the word; as your noun is but a name 
 
 1 Now valde deflendus.
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 65 
 
 and your adjective but an adjunct to a name, while 
 along your verb runs the nerve of life; so, if you would 
 write melodiously, through your vowels must the melody 
 run. What are the consonants, all of them ? Why, as 
 their name implies, they are assistant sounds, naught 
 by themselves. Some of them are mute, and known as 
 "mutes." With others you can make queer abortive 
 noises. But take any phrase, of verse or prose, re- 
 nowned for beauty : 
 
 O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem . . . 
 Tuba mirum spargens sonum . . . 
 In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . . 
 
 Open the temple gates unto my love, 
 
 Open them wide that she may enter in ! . . . 
 
 Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. . . . 
 
 Where the bright Seraphim in burning row 
 Their loud-uplifted Angel trumpets blow. . . . 
 
 Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name : worship 
 the Lord in the beauty of holiness. 
 
 The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of 
 glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters. . . . 
 
 I say that after allowing all you can for the beautiful 
 assistance of consonants you must recognise that the 
 vowels carry the main music. 
 
 It amazes me therefore to find Stevenson himself 
 a melodious writer in an Essay On Some Technical 
 Elements of Style playing about with these secondary 
 letters P, V, H, and the rest, while almost totally 
 neglecting the great vowels, and that though he had
 
 66 Studies in Literature 
 
 this very Regulus ode in his thoughts at the time, for he 
 quotes it with special approval. Yet what is approval 
 worth when he talks of "these thundering verses"? 
 What ? ' ' thundering ' ' ? 
 
 Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum. 
 
 No: I will swear, not thundering; or if thundering, but 
 as a storm rolling away southward beyond distant hills 
 and muted into calm. 
 Now in Marvell's stanza 
 
 Nor called the gods with vulgar spite 
 To vindicate his helpless right; 
 
 But bowed his comely head 
 
 Down, as upon a bed . . . 
 
 with its shrill, spitting, "spite" the sharp i and s con- 
 centrating on the labial p lowered at once and dupli- 
 cated as by echo in the thinner i and softer sibilant v 
 (spite to vind) followed by the quiet 
 
 But bowed his comely head 
 Down . . . 
 
 (mark the full 0's) 
 
 Down, as upon a bed . . . 
 
 in Marvell's stanza we do in sense and sound get 
 the Horatian falling close almost perfectly suggested. 
 Yes : but not quite perfectly, I think. For why ? Be- 
 cause the ear is all the while attending for the rhyme 
 "head," "bed." That is the nuisance with rhyme: 
 it can hardly help suggesting the epigram, the clinch, 
 the verse "brought off" with a little note of triumph. 
 In rhyme you cannot quite "cease upon the midnight
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 67 
 
 with no pain." Your ear expects the correspondent, 
 and "you are not quite happy until you get it." Bear- 
 ing this in mind, will you turn to a sonnet of Milton, 
 whose sonnets (as everyone knows) are peculiarly con- 
 structed? Bearing this in mind, and that Milton was 
 labouring to make the English sonnet a vehicle for the 
 Horatian ode, you see, in a flash, two things : 
 
 (1) You see why Milton rejected the Shakespearean 
 form, with its three quatrains and rhymed distich com- 
 ing at the end as a clou of the whole : e.g. 
 
 If this be error and upon me proved, 
 I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 
 
 For this epigrammatic clou, of all things, Milton wished 
 to avoid. 
 
 (2) You see why Milton, wisely preferring the Petrar- 
 chan form, yet made the curious innovation of running 
 octave and sestet together into a continuous strain. He 
 wanted to rid it of all clinches, to ease the ear of ex- 
 pectancy, to let the rhymes come unobtrusively as if 
 they just happened. That is why he cut, so to speak, 
 through the cross-trench and let the verse run, on the 
 Horatian model, like a brook. 
 
 VI 
 
 Just here, Gentlemen, I find myself on the verge of 
 preaching heresy, and shall break off for a minute or so 
 to hazard some other reasons why our poets, though 
 pursuing it by the pack, have never captured the whole 
 of Horace's secret. You will find the Restoration men 
 Etherege, Dorset, Sedley and others in full chase. 
 But all these men missed as did Prior and his followers 
 in the next age the serious side of Horace; or, more
 
 68 Studies in Literature 
 
 likely perhaps, it did not interest them. Yet it is just 
 his real concern in high affairs of state that gives Horace 
 his Roman gravitas, a sense of which weights our under- 
 standing of the man even while he is telling of his ban- 
 quets or his lights-of-love. 
 
 The merchant, to secure his treasure, 
 Conveys it in a borrowed name: 
 
 Euphelia serves to grace my measure, 
 But Chloe is my real flame. 
 
 This trifling is all very well: but, to arrive at Horace, 
 you must ballast your light boat with such things as 
 
 Delicta majorum immeritus lues. . . . 
 Or, 
 
 Divis orte bonis, op time Romulae 
 Gustos gentis .... 
 
 You may demur: but I shall be ready, at some future 
 occasion, to defend my firm belief that of all our poets 
 the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have 
 become our English Horace, was William Cowper. He 
 had the wit, with the underlying moral seriousness. 
 You will find almost everywhere in his poetry hints of 
 the Horatian touch. Moreover he had originality along 
 with the Horatian sense of the appropriate. But dark- 
 ness came down on him and he was lost. I am sure, at 
 any rate, that if any one of you wish to rival Horace, 
 he must not be afraid of serious politics, of saying as 
 his conviction moves him : 
 
 Asquith, a name to resound for ages ! . . . 
 Or, 
 
 Asquith, thou most unhappy man of men! . . .
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 69 
 
 Or, when the assault was (or was not) intended upon 
 the province of Ulster, 
 
 Carson, our chief of men, who thro' a cloud 
 Not of war only, but detractions rude. . . . 
 
 Or, 
 
 Carson, bound Jephthah to thy Covenant . . . . 
 
 To employ a classical phrase, I will not presume to 
 dictate. 
 
 VII 
 
 Time presses, and we need not pursue this part of 
 our enquiry to its end, because the moral of it that 
 the style is the man himself may be easily applied. 
 Praed has Horatian touches, but he again is light, some- 
 times light to flimsiness levitas cum levitate. Landor 
 has all the classical sense of form, and his best I dare 
 almost aver to be as good as Horace : 
 
 Tanagra ! think not I forget 
 Thy beautifully storied streets! 
 
 But he is heir rather to the Greek anthologists than to 
 Augustan Rome. In our own day Mr. Austin Dobson 
 has chiselled out exquisite lyrics in the Horatian mode : 
 but one feels that the poet's gaze all the while is retro- 
 spective, wistful of the past, a trifle distrait about cur- 
 rent affairs; that its quiz is of a period, of a bygone age; 
 that it follows the fair Gunnings along the Mall : 
 
 The ladies of St. James's 
 Go swinging to the play 
 
 in sedan chairs; whereas it is a part again of Horace's 
 secret to be for all time, just because he belonged to his
 
 70 Studies in Literature 
 
 age and curiously interested in it, perceiving it to be 
 full of meaning and worth any man's interest caught, 
 fixed, the flying hour. 
 
 I revert, then, to what is more important. We can 
 compass the Horatian manner; we can compass the 
 Horatian phrase. The Horatian phrase is everywhere 
 in our best literature even in the Book of Common 
 Prayer. See how it leaps out in the Te Deum, "When 
 thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death." That is 
 right Horace. But what of his metrical secret ? If you 
 examine Horace's work what he did (which I shall ever 
 preach to you as the first business of criticism) one 
 thing, quite ludicrously missed by a good half of his 
 translators and imitators, leaps forthwith to the eye. 
 He chose the most tantalisingly difficult foreign metres 
 and with consummate skill tamed them to the Latin tongue. 
 Once grasp this once grasp that the secret of the odes 
 cannot at any rate be dissociated from their metrical 
 cunning once perceive that in an Alcaic, major Sap- 
 phic, fourth Asclepiad, fifth Archilochian, Horace is 
 weaving his graceful way through measures intricate 
 as any minuet, gavotte, saraband and you will start 
 by laughing out of court all easy renderings (say) in 
 flat-footed octosyllables such as Gladstone's 
 
 What if our ancient love awoke 
 And bound us with its golden yoke? 
 If auburn Chloe I resign, 
 And Lydia once again be mine. 
 
 [They stopped the coach and all got out 
 And in the street they walked about : 
 But when the rain began to rain 
 In haste they all got in again.]
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 71 
 
 In the common anapaestic measure I know of but one 
 happy experiment, and that is Thackeray's gay little 
 rendering of Persicos odi: 
 
 But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy, 
 
 I prithee get ready at three; 
 Have it smoking, and tender and juicy, 
 
 And what better meat can there be? 
 
 But now listen to this, by Sir Theodore Martin : 
 
 I myself, wooed by one that was truly a jewel, 
 In thraldom was held, which I cheerfully bore 
 By that vulgar thing Myrtale, tho' she was cruel 
 But I reckon Sir Theodore Martin was more. 
 
 [The last line is conjectural.] 
 
 Shall we turn to such pretty measures as Tennyson 
 employed in The Daisy and the Invitation to F. D. 
 Maurice (noting by the way their delicate metrical 
 differences, especially in the last line of the stanza : the 
 one 
 
 Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine, 
 the other 
 
 Making the little one leap for joy) ? 
 For a sample : 
 
 You'll have no scandal while you dine, 
 But honest talk and wholesome wine, 
 
 And only hear the magpie gossip 
 Garrulous under a roof of pine. 
 
 That is better: and good, too, is our present laureate's 
 Invitation to the Country :
 
 72 Studies in Literature 
 
 And country life I praise, 
 And lead, because I find 
 The philosophic mind 
 
 Can take no middle ways; 
 
 She will not leave her love 
 To mix with men, her art 
 
 Is all to strive above 
 The crowd, or stand apart. 
 
 VIII 
 
 But it is time to return on my steps and state, very 
 briefly, my heresy; a heresy (you will say) killed long 
 ago in Elizabethan times, when Spenser and Gabriel 
 Harvey, Sidney, Campion and Daniel disputed the 
 question of rhyme v. no-rhyme, and the honours happily 
 rested with the rhymers. Yes, most happily ; and yet 
 that the narrow gauge system on our railways has killed 
 the broad gauge does not prove to every mind that the 
 narrow gauge is the better. And moreover rhyme did 
 not kill no-rhyme. On the contrary, were this demand 
 suddenly and dreadfully sprung upon you, "Of rhyme 
 and no-rhyme in English Poetry you must today sur- 
 render one or the other which shall it be?" you 
 would find it a desperate choice. Could you abandon 
 Paradise Lost with Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear all the great 
 Elizabethan drama? 
 
 Well, as everybody knows, Daniel had the better in 
 the dialectic, and, we have to own, the better cause. At 
 all events we have plenty of reason to congratulate our- 
 selves that Campion's arguments were not convincing. 
 But as a poet Campion none the less was a better man 
 than Daniel and as it were casually, by an experiment, 
 just by "taking and doing the thing," as we say, he had
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 73 
 
 really proved this much of his case that, though we 
 cannot afford to lose rhyme, there is plenty of room for 
 the unrhymed lyric too. Listen to this : 
 
 Rose cheek'd Laura, come; 
 
 Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's 
 Silent music, either other 
 
 Sweetly gracing. 
 
 Lovely forms do flow 
 
 From concent divinely framed : 
 Heaven is music, and thy beauty's 
 
 Birth is heavenly. 
 
 These dull notes we sing 
 
 Discords need for helps to grace them; 
 Only beauty purely loving 
 
 Knows no discord; 
 
 But still moves delight, 
 
 Like clear springs renew'd by flowing, 
 Ever perfect, ever in them- 
 
 -selves eternal. 
 
 Campion never pretended that classical metres could be 
 exactly transferred to our English use : nay he expressly 
 denied it and was at pains to lay down lines on which 
 they can be adapted. In this he was undoubtedly right. 
 Attempts have been made e.g. to write pure Sapphics in 
 English, the most successful being one by Doctor Watts 
 who (though some of you may remember him as the 
 author of "Let dogs delight To bark and bite") was a 
 considerable poet, and wrote excellent Sapphics on the 
 unpromising subject (by which I mean, unpromising 
 for Sapphics) of the Day of Judgment :
 
 74 Studies in Literature 
 
 When the fierce North-wind with his airy forces 
 Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury; 
 And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes 
 Rushing amain down. 
 
 Such shall the noise be, and the wild disorder 
 (If things eternal may be like these earthly), 
 Such the dire terror when the great Archangel 
 
 Shakes the creation; 
 
 Tears the strong pillars of the vault of Heaven, 
 Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes, 
 Sees the graves open, and the bones arising, 
 
 Flames all about them. 
 
 He ends: 
 
 may I sit there when He comes triumphant, 
 Dooming the nations ! then ascend to glory, 
 While our Hosannas all along the passage 
 
 Shout the Redeemer. 
 
 This, in the polite language of its own generation, is 
 monstrous fine: but I once spent time and pains on 
 studying the English Sapphic and convinced myself 
 that our language cannot be constrained to it naturally 
 or without a necessary loss beyond all likely gain. 
 Nevertheless I sometimes wonder that Milton no 
 lover of rhyme, as his preface to Paradise Lost tells you 
 having gone some way to efface the impression of 
 rhyme in his Horatian sonnets, did not experiment 
 farther and try working on the Horatian model without 
 it. 
 
 That is my heresy. If any one in this room feels 
 that he has at all the Horatian genius (I use the word in
 
 Horatian Model in English Verse 75 
 
 its Latin sense, not its modern) I would commend to 
 him the experiment of rendering it in delicate metres 
 divorced from rhyme, being convinced that Horace's 
 secret, though it may never be captured in that way, 
 will be captured in no other. Then if he ask, ' ' But have 
 you any one concrete example to encourage me?" I 
 answer, "Yes, one: and it is Collins's Ode to Evening. 
 There, if anywhere in English poetry, if he seek, he 
 will find the secret of Horace's "falling close": 
 
 Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake 
 Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile, 
 
 Or upland fallows grey 
 
 Reflect its last cool gleam. 
 
 Or if chill blustering winds, or driving rain, 
 Prevent my willing feet, be mine the hut 
 
 That from the mountain's side 
 
 Views wilds and swelling floods, 
 
 And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires, 
 And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all 
 
 Thy dewy fingers draw 
 
 The gradual dusky veil. 
 
 You will not accept the suggestion, but I commend it 
 to your thoughts ; and so, for today, conclude.
 
 ON THE TERMS "CLASSICAL 
 AND "ROMANTIC" 
 
 1 PROPOSE to say a few words upon two terms 
 "Classical" and "Romantic" with which your 
 handbooks to English Literature have doubtless by 
 this time made you familiar, though you will not find 
 them frequently mentioned in the masterpieces of which 
 those handbooks are supposed to treat. 
 
 They are adjectives, epithets, assigning to this and 
 that work of art either this or that of two qualities 
 which (I shall not be wrong in saying) these handbooks 
 suggest to you as opposed to one another, if not mu- 
 tually exclusive. Further, I shall not be much amiss, 
 perhaps, in suggesting that you have no very sharply 
 defined idea of how exactly, or exactly why, or exactly 
 how far, these qualities "classical" and "romantic" 
 stand opposed one to another, or of how far exactly 
 they exclude one another. You can say of this paper 
 that it is white, of the print typed upon it that it is black: 
 your sense accurately distinguishes and you can indicate 
 with finger or pencil precisely where black impinges on 
 white. 
 
 But we cannot draw any such line between "clas- 
 sical" and "romantic" work; since, to begin with, the 
 difference between them is notional and vague (even if 
 76
 
 "Classical" and " Romantic" 77 
 
 we admit a true difference, which at this point I do not) . 
 You have probably not defined the difference, even to 
 yourselves. You have (I dare to assert) a positive 
 opinion that Pope is "classical" and Blake "romantic, " 
 as you have (I dare to suggest) a notion that it means 
 something like the difference between St. Paul's Cathe- 
 dral and Westminster Abbey. We may get to some- 
 thing a little more definite than that before we have 
 done, this morning. But for the moment maybe I do 
 few of you a grave injustice in assuming that you are 
 more confident of "knowing what you mean" by the 
 epithets "classical" and "romantic" than of your ability 
 to determinate their difference in words: and that if 
 suddenly presented with some line or passage of litera- 
 ture, admittedly beautiful, and halted with the demand 
 "Is this classical? or is it romantic?" you might con- 
 ceivably find yourself yet more diffident. Say, for 
 example, you were thus held up to stand and deliver 
 yourself upon Hamlet's dying speech to Horatio: 
 
 If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain 
 To tell my story . . . 
 
 or upon this from Lycidas: 
 
 Together both, ere the high lawns appeared 
 Under the opening eyelids of the Moon, 
 We drove a-field . . . 
 
 or upon the last words of Beatrice Cenci : 
 
 Give yourself no unnecessary pain, 
 
 My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie 
 
 My girdle for me, and bind up this hair
 
 78 Studies in Literature 
 
 In any simple knot; ay, that does well. 
 
 And yours I see is coming down. How often 
 
 Have we done this for one another; now 
 
 We shall not do it any more. My Lord, 
 
 We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well .... 
 
 I say that I may do you no grave injustice in supposing 
 that, confronted with those famous passages and having 
 it suddenly demanded of you, "Is this classical? or 
 romantic ? Under which king, Besonian ? speak, or die ! " 
 you would hesitate, might be inclined to temporise, 
 might even save your life by admitting that, all things 
 considered, there was a little bit of both about them. 
 Well, that is a useful admission ! It concedes that the 
 two epithets describe things which may be contraries, 
 but are at any rate not contradictories, are not mutually 
 exclusive, may meet in the same work, may blend in a 
 line or phrase even, and so as to be hard to distinguish. 
 
 II 
 
 But let us go a little further. These epithets 
 "romantic" and "classical" vague and indeterminate 
 as we have found their frontiers to be, are still epithets, 
 adjectives by which we qualify real things. We say, 
 for example, of The Faerie Queene, that it is "romantic," 
 of Samson Agonistes that it is "classical" and, The 
 Faerie Queene and Samson Agonistes being things, good 
 nouns concrete and substantive, poems actually printed 
 in ink upon paper, we can bring our epithets to the test. 
 They are not epithets like "blue" or "wine-dark" (of 
 the sea), like "acid" (of the taste of lemon), like "deaf- 
 ening" (of the explosion of a shell), like "penetrating" 
 (of the effect of a bullet) . They are not epithets of sense, 
 but of concept. They belong to the realm of opinion.
 
 "Classical" and "Romantic" 79 
 
 If you say of a bullet that it is penetrating, you appeal 
 to the evidence of sense, and the description cannot be 
 denied. If you say of the German behaviour in Belgium 
 that it has been beastly, you appeal to opinion: and a 
 German will say it has been humane, not godlike. 
 
 Still your epithet "romantic" or "classical" is, 
 however indeterminate, referable to a real thing, and 
 can be corrected by it. 
 
 But when we go a step further yet, and convert our 
 epithets of opinion "classical," "romantic" into ab- 
 stract nouns "classicism," "romanticism" I would 
 point out to you with all the solemnity at my com- 
 mand that we are at once hopelessly lost : lost, because 
 we have advanced a vague concept to the pretence 
 of being a thing; hopelessly lost, because we have re- 
 moved our concept out of range of the thing; which 
 is not only what matters, but the one and single test 
 of our secondary notions. "The play's the thing." 
 Hamlet, Lycidas or The Cenci is the thing. Shakespeare, 
 Milton, Shelley did not write "classicism" or "roman- 
 ticism." They wrote Hamlet, Lycidas, The Cenci. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Gentlemen, I would I could persuade you to remem- 
 ber that you are English, and to go always for the thing, 
 casting out of your vocabulary all such words as 
 "tendencies," "influences," "revivals," "revolts." 
 "Tendencies" did not write The Canterbury Tales; 
 Geoffrey Chaucer wrote them. "Influences" did not 
 make The Faerie Queene; Edmund Spenser made it : as 
 a man called Ben Jonson wrote The Alchemist, a man 
 called Sheridan wrote The Rivals, a man called Meredith 
 wrote The Egoist.
 
 8o Studies in Literature 
 
 Now it is the weakness of Germans in criticism that, 
 not having a literature of their own to rank with the 
 great, but being endowed as a race with an unusual tal- 
 ent for philosophising, they habitually think and talk of 
 a literary masterpiece which is a work of art achieved 
 in the way of practice as though it were a product, 
 or at any rate a by-product, of philosophy, producible 
 by the methods of philosophy. And the reason, I be- 
 lieve, why the Germans have never had, nor are likely 
 to have, a literature comparable with the best does not 
 lie in the uncouthness of their language. Our English 
 tongue was uncouth enough until, in their varied ways 
 Chaucer and Wyat and Spenser; the early translators 
 and Tindale; Sidney, Hooker; Milton, Waller and 
 Dryden; Browne and Clarendon and Berkeley; Pope, 
 Addison, Swift, Gibbon, Johnson (to go no further) 
 practised and polished it. But these men, and specially, 
 of course, the earlier ones, saw the difficulty of their task 
 as a condition of overcoming it. You can scarcely 
 open a preface of the old translators, or of an early 
 collection of Songs and Sonnets, but your eye falls on 
 some passage of pathetic apology for our unmusical and 
 barbarous tongue, in which nevertheless the poor fellow 
 affirms that he has done his best 
 
 To find out what you cannot do, 
 And then to go and do it. . . . 
 
 That was the way of the men who made English Litera- 
 ture exquisite. 
 
 Now the Germans would seem never, or rarely, to 
 have felt that humility of mind before the great master- 
 pieces, that prostration in worship, that questioning 
 and almost hopeless self-distrust, out of which, by
 
 " Classical" and "Romantic" 81 
 
 some divine desire of emulation yet persistent in him, 
 the artist is raised to win the crown. Yes, I do assure 
 you, Gentlemen, that George Herbert's loveliest lyric, 
 though it speak of holier things, may be applied in par- 
 able, and scarcely with exaggeration, to the attitude of 
 the true artist before his art. Let me remind you of 
 it: 
 
 Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, 
 
 Guilty of dust and sin. 
 But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack 
 
 From my first entrance in, 
 Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning 
 
 If I lack'd anything. 
 
 "A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here": 
 
 Love said, "You shall be he. " 
 "I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, 
 
 I cannot look on thee. " 
 Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, 
 
 "Who made the eyes but I?" 
 
 "Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame 
 
 Go where it doth deserve. " 
 "And know you not, " says Love, "Who bore the blame? " 
 
 "My dear, then I will serve." 
 "You must sit down, " says Love, "and taste my meat. " 
 
 So I did sit and eat. 
 
 IV 
 
 Apparently (I say) the Germans feel no such humility 
 of soul before other peoples' great literature: and by 
 consequence it may seem a strange thing to assert of 
 them they don't take pains enough; they don't take
 
 82 Studies in Literature 
 
 the trouble because they don't see it. They are at ease 
 in other peoples' Sions: but they cannot build one, and 
 moreover it is not Sion. Literature being literature, 
 and philosophy philosophy, you can never understand 
 or account for literature still less can you produce 
 literature by considering it in terms of philosophy; 
 that is, by being wise about it in a category to which it 
 does not happen to belong. 
 
 So when a German, cultivating his own bent, bemuses 
 himself with a theory that Wordsworth (we will say) 
 wrote naturalism, or that naturalism wrote Wordsworth, 
 it matters which even less than it matters to us what 
 the German thinks he means. For we know that what 
 Wordsworth wrote was Tintern Abbey, while what 
 naturalism wrote was nothing at all: for it never 
 existed but as a concept in somebody's mind, an 
 abstract notion. God made man in His image. Ger- 
 mans make generalisations in theirs. That is all, and 
 that is just the difference. 
 
 To men who really practise writing as an Art to 
 every true man of letters in France, in England, in 
 Russia, in Belgium to an Anatole France, to a Ros- 
 tand, to a Rolland, to a Thomas Hardy, to a Maxim 
 Gorky, to a Maurice Maeterlinck, these abstract 
 notions are about as useful as the wind in the next 
 street; and the more you practise good actual writing 
 the more composedly you will ignore them. 
 
 But they do confuse and nullify criticism all over 
 Europe, even among men of strong mind who happen 
 to be critics only, and have never undergone the disci- 
 pline of creative writing. For example yesterday I 
 took down a volume by that man of really powerful 
 mind, Dr. George Brandes. I opened it quite at ran- 
 dom, and read:
 
 "Classical" and "Romantic" 83 
 
 The strongest tendency even of works like Byron's Don 
 Juan and Shelley's Cenci . . . 
 
 Do you know any works "like" these, by the way? 
 
 The strongest tendency even of works like Byron's Don 
 Juan and Shelley's Genci is in reality Naturalism. In other 
 words Naturalism is so powerful in England that it per- 
 meates Coleridge's Romantic supernaturalism, Words- 
 worth's Anglican orthodoxy, Shelley's atheistic spiritualism, 
 Byron's revolutionary liberalism . . . 
 
 -ism, -ism, -ism! "Omm-jective and summ-jective ! " 
 I open at another page, again at haphazard: 
 
 Keats's poetry is the most fragrant flower of English 
 Naturalism. Before he appeared, this Naturalism had had 
 a long period of continuous growth. Its active principle 
 had been evolved by Wordsworth . . . Coleridge provided 
 it with the support of a philosophy of nature which had a 
 strong resemblance to Schelling's. In Scott it assumes the 
 highly successful form of a study of men, manners and 
 scenery, inspired by patriotism, by interest in history, and 
 by a wonderful appreciation of the significance of race. 
 
 At this point I began to yearn for five minutes of Jane 
 Austen, and wondered idly what sort of figure she could 
 be made to cut in this galley. But, being too listless to 
 search, I turned back to the Introduction and read : 
 
 It is my intention to trace in the poetry of England of 
 the first decades of this century the course of the strong, 
 deep, pregnant current in the intellectual life of the 
 country, which, sweeping away the classic forms and con- 
 ventions, produces a Naturalism dominating the whole of 
 literature, which from Naturalism leads to Radicalism, from 
 revolt against traditional convention in literature to vig-
 
 84 Studies in Literature 
 
 orous rebellion against religious and political reaction. . . . 
 Though the connection between these authors and schools is 
 not self-evident, but only discernible to the understanding 
 critical eye, yet the period has its unity, and the picture 
 it presents, though a many-coloured restless one, is a coher- 
 ent composition, the work of the great artist, history. 
 
 Is not that fine ? Everything ending in ' ' ion ' ' permeat- 
 ing everything that ends in "ance" or "ity" or "ism, " 
 fighting it out like queer aquatic monsters in a tank, all 
 subdued finally to a coherent com-pos-it-ion by a wave 
 of the pen in the hand of that great personi-fi-cat-ion 
 history! Gentlemen, tell yourselves that these foolish 
 abstractions never did any of these foolish things. 
 "The great artist, history ! ' ' Call up your courage and 
 say with Betsey Prig that you "don't believe there is no 
 sich person. " Cure yourselves, if you would be either 
 artists or critics, of this trick of personifying inanities. 
 "My brethren," said a clergyman addicted to this 
 foible, "as we feast and revel, catering for the inner 
 man, Septuagesima creeps up to our elbow, and pluck- 
 ing us by the sleeve whispers, ' Lent is near ! " ' Beware, 
 I beg you, of such personifying of what isn't there, 
 whether it be of "the great artist, history," or of that 
 minatory virgin, Septuagesima. 
 
 But you will find (thanks to the servility of English 
 professors) this German trick of philosophising art and 
 fobbing off abstractions for things at its most rampant, 
 at its most dangerous, in your literary handbooks, which, 
 for convenience' sake, obliterate all that is vital to the 
 work you ought to be studying, to chatter about 
 ' 'schools, " " influences, " " revivals, " " revolts, " " tend- 
 encies, " "reactions. " 
 
 Come: shall we make such a Handbook of English
 
 "Classical" and " Romantic" 85 
 
 Literature together? It can be done, and completed in 
 five minutes or so : as thus 
 
 A Short History of English Literature 
 
 Roman occupation of Britain. 450 years. Reason why 
 no results. 
 
 Extirpation of colonists by sturdy Anglo-Saxon race. 
 Beowulf. "Book of our origins " : "our Genesis " : "not one 
 word about England in the poem. " No school of Beowulf. 
 Surprise at this. 
 
 Story of Csedmon, a cowherd. No school of Caedmon. 
 Surprise at this. 
 
 Rise of Anglo-Saxon Prose under Alfred. Orosius. 
 Boethius. Collapse of Anglo-Saxon Prose. Surprise at 
 this. Conjectural explanation. 
 
 Norman Conquest. Consequent explicable invasion of 
 Norman-French influence. Layamon's Brut. Wace. 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sturdy persistence of Anglo- 
 Saxon. Significance of Piers Plowman. 
 
 Tendencies producing Chaucer's debt to Italian influ- 
 ences, to French influences, to other influences. Chaucer's 
 inflexions, Chaucer's word-endings. Influence of Chaucer. 
 Scottish Chaucerians; English school of Chaucer. Decline 
 of Chaucerian tradition. General tendency (shared by us) 
 to look everywhere but in the right place. Lydgate and 
 Hoccleve writing bad poetry, but improving Middle English 
 endings. "Transition period" (which means we haven't 
 much to say just hereabout). 
 
 Italianate Revival: French Pleiad: Influence producing 
 Wyat and Surrey : School of Wyat and Surrey. The Renais- 
 sance, The New Learning: Columbus discovers America. 
 Surprises at this. Sir Thomas More at home in Chelsea. 
 Simultaneous rise of the Drama. Evolution of the Miracle 
 Play. The Miracle Play superseded by the Morality. 
 Evolution of the Drama. Evolution of Blank Verse. 
 Shakespeare his Comedies his Tragedies his Historical
 
 86 Studies in Literature 
 
 plays his indebtedness to his times his many-sidedness 
 his Will his second-best bed his romanticism. Classic- 
 ism of Ben Jonson. Reaction (metaphysical) led by 
 Donne. The mystical school. The Platonical school. 
 Milton's indebtedness to the Copernican system. Tend- 
 ency of Waller, Dryden, Pope. Decline of metaphysical 
 school. Rise of the classical school. Tyranny of the 
 Pamphlet, rise of the Essay, rise of the Novel. Tendency 
 to write like Gray, or Collins: tendency to admire Dr. 
 Johnson: tendency not to admire Dr. Johnson so much 
 tendency to make up on the swings what you have lost on 
 the roundabouts: tendency to be Cowper or Crabbe: all 
 these tendencies culminating in Romantic revolt. Natural- 
 ism (alias Wordsworth), mysticism (alias Coleridge), deism 
 (alias Shelley), the revolutionary spirit (alias Byron), and 
 sensuous naturalism (alias Keats). Exhaustion of tenden- 
 cies. Reform Act of 1832 its devastating influence on 
 English Literature, and especially on its study in Cam- 
 bridge. Albeit we have heard it rumoured that in a later 
 generation Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, 
 Morris and others made a spirited attempt to revive the 
 interplay of those tendencies and reactions which we 
 have been considering, at this point we down the curtain 
 and count the takings. 
 
 Now this method of considering literature as the pro- 
 duct not of successive men of genius and talent, but of 
 abstract "influences" and "tendencies" divisible in 
 periods and capable of being studied in compartments, 
 has various vices, mostly consequent upon its being 
 untrue. 
 
 For one, it gets you into a habit of regarding literature 
 as a compost of blocks or slabs laid down in segments 
 with dabs of editorial cement to fill up the chinks : and
 
 " Classical*' and " Romantic" 87 
 
 concurrently (this is the mischief) you lose your sense of 
 it as an organic living thing with delicate, often infini- 
 tesimal, roots, thrown out this way and that way and 
 every way, feeding it all the while by suction from the 
 brain and blood of living men : and so (last and worst) 
 you arrive at losing faith, which is the substance of 
 things hoped for. I do not believe in youth that is 
 content to abide in the past: for I am very sure it pre- 
 pares for itself a desert prospect against the day when it 
 shall have children of its own. 
 
 For another vice, this method constantly throws the 
 story for you into a false perspective; a perspective 
 which belies now the order of time and anon the degrees 
 of right importance. Doubtless there are, have been, 
 always will be, fashions in writing as in most of man's 
 activities ; but in the minds and feelings of men litera- 
 ture being ever personal they so overlap, so interlace, 
 so blend, dispart, reunite their forces, that if, copying 
 the method of science and the manner of Euclid, you 
 superimpose the compartment ABC upon the compart- 
 ment DEF, you are bound to be misled, logically and 
 even chronologically. 
 
 For an example, take these lines, upon a certain 
 translator : 
 
 That servile path thou nobly dost decline 
 Of tracing word by word, and line by line. 
 Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, 
 Not the effects of poetry, but pains; 
 
 Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords 
 No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words. 
 A new and nobler way thou dost pursue, 
 To make translations and translators too. 
 They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame, 
 True to his sense, but truer to his fame.
 
 88 Studies in Literature 
 
 "Classicism, " I hear you say. "Age of Pope: finished 
 couplet, balanced antithesis the whole armoury of 
 tricks. " Sirs, they were written by Sir John Denham, 
 who was born in 1615, more than seventy years before 
 Pope, and died almost twenty years before Pope was 
 born or thought of. 
 
 VI 
 
 But come What do you understand by the words 
 "classical" and "classicism"? I gather from the 
 essays you bring me that they mean something you 
 certainly dislike (being children of your age, as we all 
 are or alas ! have been ), and that you incline to lay your 
 grievance at the door of Alexander Pope. You dislike 
 it so much that when we read Gray or Collins together 
 and I pause say at these lines To Evening: 
 
 O nymph reserved, while now the bright-hair'd sun 
 Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, 
 
 With brede ethereal wove, 
 
 O'erhang his wavy bed . . . 
 
 there ensues some such dialogue as this: 
 
 The Tutor pauses on the verse and muses, half to himself, 
 
 "Lovely! and lovelier every time." 
 "Yes, isn't it?" the Pupil agrees ardently. 
 ' ' And classical ? ' ' 
 The Pupil hesitates. "Well no I shouldn't say that. 
 
 It seems to me that there's a feeling for Nature about 
 
 it. " Pause. 
 Tutor (encouragingly). "Yes. I seem to have observed 
 
 that. "
 
 " Classical" and "Romantic" 89 
 
 Pupil (brightly). "It seems to me just to illustrate what 
 Mr. So-and-So said the other day, that long before we 
 come to the Romantic Revival under Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge and yes, Scott of course " 
 
 Tutor. "Yes. Yes." 
 
 Pupil. "There were bound to be stirrings 'gropings, ' 
 as he put it. Of course I know that Collins calls 
 Evening a 'nymph. ' " 
 
 Tutor. "Let us look on the bright side of things. Brown- 
 ing one of your romantics by the way would have 
 called her a 'numph. ' " 
 
 Pupil. "And then again he speaks of the 'bright-hair'd 
 sun' and dolefully I suppose that's classical: some- 
 thing out of Homer, no doubt. But," with reviving 
 courage "But anyhow, Sir, you'll admit it's different 
 from Pope?" 
 
 Tutor. "With all my heart. " 
 
 Pupil's brow clears. He has established the point. 
 
 VII 
 
 You, who have to listen, term in and term out, to all 
 this talk about ' ' classicism ' ' and ' ' classicality ' ' do you 
 seriously suppose that Pope was a classical writer? 
 
 I am not going to define the term "classical " for you, 
 just at this moment. I prefer to oppose thing to thing. 
 You will perhaps allow that Homer, at any rate, was 
 a classical writer. As between him and Pope, Homer 
 has I am, perhaps, not extravagant in supposing the 
 first call on that title. 
 
 Well, when Homer, having to tell how Odysseus, 
 shipwrecked and far-spent with swimming, wins to 
 shore and drags himself, naked, to hide in the bushes 
 just as Nausicaa the king's daughter of the country 
 drives down to the beach with her maidens, to wash
 
 9O Studies in Literature 
 
 the court linen in a stream close by, he tells the business 
 thus: 
 
 Then they took the clothes from the waggon, and carry- 
 ing them to the dark water, trod them in pits briskly, in 
 rivalry. Then, after they had washed and cleansed away 
 all the stains, they spread everything out in order on the 
 foreshore, even where the sea, beating on the coast, had 
 washed the pebbles clean. Then, having bathed and 
 anointed themselves with olive oil, they ate their mid-day 
 meal on the river bank, waiting till the clothes should dry 
 in the sun's rays. And anon, having finished their meal, the 
 maidens and the Princess, they fell to playing at ball, casting 
 away their veils, and among them white-armed Nausicaa 
 sang the song which led the game. 
 
 Could anything be simpler, more direct, more classical ? 
 (We are approaching a definition.) But now turn to 
 Pope's version or rather, to Brome's, which Pope ad- 
 mired so much that he incorporated it in his rendering 
 of the Odyssey: 
 
 Then emulous the royal robes they lave, 
 And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave 
 (The vestures cleansed o'erspread the shelly sand, 
 Their snowy lustre whitens all the strand) ; 
 Then with a short repast relieve their toil, 
 And o'er their limbs diffuse ambrosial oil; 
 And while the robes imbibe the solar ray, 
 O'er the green mead the sporting virgins play 
 (Their shining veils unbound). Along the skies, 
 Toss'd and retoss'd, the ball incessant flies. 
 They sport, they feast; Nausicaa lifts her voice, 
 And, warbling sweet, makes earth and heaven rejoice. 
 
 Can you not see at once that if Homer's narrative be 
 classical, Pope (or Brome) has induced something upon
 
 "Classical" and "Romantic" 91 
 
 it which changes its nature? something extraneous, 
 ornamental, fantastic 
 
 And while the robes imbibe the solar ray 
 
 something more alien from true classical than almost 
 anything you can find in the wildest romanticist as 
 you will call him ? 
 
 VIII 
 
 When you apply the word "classical" or the word 
 "classicism" to such tawdry overlay as I have quoted, 
 are you not are your professional instructors not 
 committing the first of literary offences, that of per- 
 verting the sense of words? Do you not do not 
 your professional instructors by this use of the word 
 ' ' classical ' ' mean in fact ' ' conventional ' ' a word which 
 contradicts almost every notion that can be even 
 remotely associated with the classics? Your professors 
 and compilers of little handbooks may not go about 
 like Theophile Gautier, wearing crimson waistcoats : but 
 beneath whatever waistcosts they wear they carry 
 a stupidity which was never Gautier's, in his most 
 intoxicated moments. 
 
 Pope sealed a fashion. It was an artificial manner 
 of writing, as far removed from the practice of the men 
 we call classical authors as any manner of writing could 
 well be. Sophocles or Virgil or Dante would have 
 shuddered at it. Still he set up a fashion under which 
 it became unpoetical that is, was esteemed unpoetical 
 to call the moon the moon without adding "sole 
 regent of the night, " or to talk of drying clothes: to be 
 garments worthy of poetry they had to "imbibe the 
 solar ray."
 
 92 Studies in Literature 
 
 But are we sure that our poets, having repudiated 
 Pope, are not practising very similar fooleries in our 
 own year of grace? The inventions of one age are 
 always in process of becoming the conventions, the 
 tyrants, of the next. Listen to this, from Francis 
 Thompson's Essay on Shelley; and mark you, it is 
 written of our own day: 
 
 There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian 
 cohorts of poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every 
 aspirant to the poetical purple, and without whose prescrip- 
 tive aid none dares aspire to the poetical purple; against 
 these it is time some banner should be raised. 
 
 And he goes on : 
 
 It is at any rate curious to note that the literary revolu- 
 tion against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing, 
 like political revolutions, in a despotism of its own making. 
 
 If our teachers persist in labelling Pope and his imi- 
 tators as "classical, " let us cheerfully claim the bulk of 
 Greek and Roman literature as "romantic" and have 
 done with it. Why not? Do you postulate, for 
 romantic writing, glamour and magic, adventures on 
 ' ' perilous seas in faery lands forlorn ' ' ? Very well ; then 
 I exhibit this same Odyssey to you, with its isle of Circe, 
 
 where that ^Eaean isle forgets the main, 
 
 its garden-court of Phaeacia, its wonderlands of the Cy- 
 clops, the Sirens, the Lotus-eaters, its scene, a moment 
 ago related, of the princess playing at ball with her 
 maidens on the strand; or I exhibit the marvellous tale
 
 "Classical" and "Romantic" 93 
 
 of Cupid and Psyche, parent of a hundred fairy-tales dis- 
 persed throughout the world (Beauty and the Beast for 
 one). 
 
 Or is it passion you demand of romance? I exhibit 
 the passionate verses of Sappho, preserved for us by 
 Longinus, beginning 
 
 oq 6e<riaiv 
 
 or a speech of Phaedra, or Catullus's lyric of Acme 
 and Septimius. 
 
 Is it pathos ? utter pathos ? I exhibit to you Priam 
 on his knees, kissing the hand that has murdered his 
 son; Helen on the wall; Andromache bidding farewell 
 to her husband at the gate, her boy kicking and crowing 
 on her arm at sight of his father's nodding plume; and 
 again that last glimpse Virgil gives of her, in slavery, 
 returning from vows paid to the dead of her that was 
 "Hectoris Andromache. " 
 
 Is it any sense of predestinate doom fulfilled? I 
 refer you to the last stand of the Sicilian expedition in 
 Thucydides. Or is it a general sense of the woe, the tears, 
 the frailty, the transience inherent in all human things? 
 A dozen passages from Virgil might be quoted. 
 
 I think, if you will look into "classicism" and 
 "romanticism" for yourselves, with your own open 
 eyes, you will find though the whole pother about 
 their difference amounts to nothing that need trouble 
 a healthy man it amounts to this: some men have 
 naturally a sense of form stronger than their sense of 
 colour: some men have a sense of colour stronger than 
 their sense of form. 
 
 In proportion as they indulge their proclivities or
 
 94 Studies in Literature 
 
 neglect to discipline them, one man will be a classical, 
 the other a romantic, writer. At their utmost, one will 
 be a dull formalist, the other a frantic dauber. I truly 
 believe there is not much more to be said. 
 
 I conclude by reciting to you two compositions by 
 opposing which you may summarise for yourselves all 
 that I have been saying today. 
 
 The first is a Table of Contents of a volume by 
 Doctor George Brandes (Main Currents in Nineteenth 
 Century Literature, vol. iv). 
 
 Common Characteristics of the Period 
 
 National Characteristics 
 
 The Political Background 
 
 The Beginnings of Naturalism 
 
 Strength and Sincerity of the Love of Nature 
 
 Rural Life and its Poetry 
 
 Naturalistic Romanticism 
 
 The Lake School's Conception of Liberty 
 
 The Lake School's Oriental Romanticism 
 
 Historical Naturalism 
 
 All-embracing Sensuousness 
 
 The Poetry of Irish Opposition and Revolt 
 
 Erotic Lyric Poetry 
 
 The British Spirit of Freedom 
 
 Republican Humanism 
 
 Radical Naturalism 
 
 Byron: the Passionate Personality 
 
 Byron: the Passionate Personality (continued) 
 
 Byron: his Self-absorption 
 
 Byron: the Revolutionary Spirit 
 
 Comic and Tragic Realism 
 
 Culmination of Naturalism 
 
 Byron's Death 
 
 Conclusion
 
 "Classical" and "Romantic" 95 
 
 What shall I oppose to this ? Something quite simple, 
 something you all know by heart, yet something so 
 lovely that it never can be hackneyed. 
 
 Ah what avails the sceptered race, 
 
 Ah what the form divine ! 
 When every virtue, every grace! 
 
 Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
 Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
 
 May weep, but never see, 
 A night of memories and of sighs 
 
 I consecrate to thee. 
 
 Is that classical? It is as classical as anything in 
 Catullus. Is that romantic? Yes, I think it is also 
 romantic. 
 
 But what matters either? It is the pure loveliness 
 of it that alone should concern you. 
 
 All things considered, I advise that it may help our 
 minds to earn an honest living if we dismiss the terms 
 "classical" and "romantic" out of our vocabulary for 
 a while.
 
 SOME SEVENTEENTH 
 CENTURY POETS 
 
 I. JOHN DONNE 
 
 I 
 
 WHEN Izaak Walton first published that gem of 
 biography, his Life of Dr. John Donne now one 
 in a casket of five of his carving it was to introduce a 
 volume of his adored master's Sermons: and he prefaced 
 it with a modest account of how he had first but col- 
 lected materials for Sir Henry Wotton, betwixt whom 
 and Donne "there was so mutual a knowledge, and such 
 friendship contracted in their youth, as nothing but 
 death could force a separation," But Wotton died, 
 with the projected Life unwritten. 
 
 When I heard that sad news [Walton continues], and 
 heard also that these Sermons were to be printed, and want 
 the Author's life, which I thought to be very remarkable: 
 indignation or grief (indeed I know not which) transported 
 me so far, that I reviewed my forsaken collections. . . . And 
 if I shall now be demanded, as once Pompey's poor bond- 
 man was: (the grateful wretch had been left alone on the 
 sea-shore, with the forsaken dead body of his once glorious 
 lord and master ; and was then gathering the scattered pieces 
 of an old broken boat, to make a funeral pile to burn it, 
 96
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 97 
 
 which was the custom of the Romans) "Who art thou 
 that alone hast the honour to bury the body of Pompey the 
 Great?" so, who am I that do thus officiously set the 
 Author's memory on fire ? I hope the question will prove to 
 have in it more of wonder than disdain. . . . 
 
 And if the Author's glorious spirit, which now is in 
 heaven, can have the leisure to look down and see me, the 
 poorest, the meanest of all his friends, in the midst of his 
 officious duty, confident I am that he will not disdain this 
 well-meant sacrifice to his memory: for, whilst his con- 
 versation made me and many others happy below, I know 
 his humility and gentleness were then eminent; and, I have 
 heard divines say, those virtues which were but sparks upon 
 earth, become great and glorious flames in heaven. 
 
 Now of encomiums upon the dead, as of entries in 
 hotel visitors' books, you may have (with me) found 
 it observable that qualifications tend to disappear. But 
 the poetical elegies upon Dr. Donne do by their mass 
 (they fill twenty-five pages in Dr. Grierson's great 
 edition) as by their writers' eminence in various stations 
 of life (Bishop King, Browne of Tavistock, Edward 
 Hyde possibly the great Earl of Clarendon Walton 
 himself, Thomas Carew the poet and courtier, Lucius 
 Gary, Endymion Porter, Sidney Godolphin, are among 
 the signatory authors) convey that the men of his time 
 who themselves counted accounted him a very great 
 man indeed. 
 
 And truly he was a great man ; yes, and is one of the 
 greatest figures in English literature, albeit perhaps the 
 worst understood : one of the tribe of strong generative 
 giants in which whether we like them or not, and 
 whether or not we know why we have to reckon (for 
 examples) Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson ; 
 giants whose stature we recognise albeit we cannot
 
 98 Studies in Literature 
 
 measure it by their writings, which sometimes dis- 
 appoint and not seldom fatigue us ; giants of whom we 
 still feel, after reading Sejanus or Absalom and Achito- 
 phel, or Rasselas, that their worth is somehow known 
 although their height be not taken. 
 
 Donne, I dare to say, if we range him up with that 
 tall three, stands an easy compeer. What is more, his 
 work does not disappoint if we know where to look 
 for it. He wrote some of the most magnificent and 
 astounding pages in our literature, if we know where to 
 look for them. We may not call them, though unparal- 
 leled, absolutely beautiful: there is nothing absolute 
 in Donne but his greatness and his manhood. He is 
 Demiourgos a swart smith at the forge, beating out 
 things worthy of the heavenly city: and he cares not 
 what costly stuff he casts into the furnace so that he 
 hammer out a paving-stone, or it may be a primrose 
 for it : and, for the sake of a primrose great fiery masses 
 will hurtle up out of Etna. Also one has to peer through 
 the smoke to discern what the artificer, too intent to 
 help you, has there on the anvil. It may be just a prim- 
 rose or it may be a whole length of celestial wall. He, 
 absorbed, sees only on the anvil a part of his vision. 
 
 II 
 
 But first let me tell a little of this extraordinary man : 
 not enough to absolve you of the duty and delight of 
 reading about him in Walton: just enough to preface 
 the remarks I shall offer upon his work this morning, 
 and thereafter upon the work of his followers. 
 
 John Donne was born in London, in the parish of 
 St. Olave, Bread Street, in the year 1573. His father, 
 a prosperous ironmonger of the city of London, and
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 99 
 
 well descended, died when the boy was about three years 
 old, leaving a widow and six children. The mother was 
 a devout and uncompromising Roman Catholic; which 
 explains why the boy John, after tuition at home, went 
 up at twelve (with a younger brother, Henry, aged 
 eleven) and was entered at Hart Hall, now Hertford 
 College, in Oxford: for certain alleged proselytising 
 activities of the Jesuits had hurried the government 
 into making an order that all students admitted to 
 Oxford must take the Oath of Supremacy, the crucial 
 test of loyalty to the Crown and to the Reformed 
 Church of England; an oath not enforced, however, 
 upon boys under sixteen. So John and Henry dodged 
 it by going up at twelve and eleven. In those days 
 there were no Rhodes scholars: and I should imagine 
 that, under this rule which apparently did not apply 
 to Cambridge, Cambridge would have had consistently 
 the better of things in athletics had there been any. 
 But there were not. 
 
 Walton says that at fourteen or thereabouts he was 
 "transplanted" which seems a good term from 
 Oxford to Cambridge, "that he might receive nourish- 
 ment from both soils." I regret to tell you that no 
 evidence for this, save Walton's, is discoverable, unless 
 it be internal evidence. Walton says that at Oxford 
 they avowed the age to have brought forth another 
 Pico Mirandola: that at Cambridge he was a most 
 laborious student, often changing his studies but 
 endeavouring to take no degree. Plus qa change, plus 
 c'est la meme chose. 
 
 It is probable that, after leaving Oxford, he travelled 
 for a while. At any rate we find him, at seventeen or 
 so, admitted to Lincoln's Inn and living in London. His 
 mother, anxious for his faith, surrounded him there with
 
 ioo Studies in Literature 
 
 tutors who (according to Walton) under cover of the 
 mathematics and other liberal sciences were advised to 
 instil into him particular principles of the Romish 
 Church. Donne, being of a detached mind detached, 
 but extraordinarily eager set himself to read both 
 sides of the question with all his might. The end was 
 that he became a passionate, yet tolerant, Church of 
 England man. Meantime his brother Henry the 
 same that had entered with him at Hart Hall had 
 fallen under suspicion of disloyal commerce with the 
 Jesuit fathers, and was thrown into the Clink for 
 harbouring Harrington, a seminary priest, tracked to his 
 chambers in Thavies' Inn and there arrested. Harring- 
 ton was hurried to trial and hanged at Tyburn. Henry 
 Donne contracted gaol fever and died, after a few 
 weeks' imprisonment. 
 
 It may have been in prudence, being under suspicion, 
 that in 1596, John cleared from London and joined in 
 the Earl of Essex's famous expedition to Cadiz. Quite 
 as likely it was to avoid the scandal of more worldly 
 transgressions: for his poems (and Ben Jonson tells us 
 that he wrote all his best pieces of verse before twenty- 
 five) tell us autobiographically of wild living and licen- 
 tious wooing: 
 
 Th' expense of Spirit in a waste of shame . . . 
 
 and of shamelessness, we may add. They exhibit him 
 as a genuine heir of the Renaissance, insatiable alike in 
 carnal and intellectual curiosity: mad to possess, and, 
 having possessed, violent in reaction, crueller even than 
 Horace to his castaways, then even more cruelly, cynic- 
 ally, cold in analysing the ashes of disgust:
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 101 
 
 Th ' expense of Spirit in a waste of shame 
 Is lust in action; and, till action, lust 
 Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, 
 Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; 
 Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight; 
 Past reason hunted ; and, no sooner had, 
 Past reason hated; as a s wallow' d bait 
 On purpose laid to make the taker mad: 
 Mad in pursuit, and in possession so; 
 Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; 
 A bliss in proof: and, proved, a very woe; 
 Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. . . . 
 
 Setting forth with Essex, the youth, already famous 
 for gifts and learning, writes an Elegie of farewell to a 
 lady with whom he had had an intrigue. This is the 
 sort of thing: 
 
 Was't not enough, that thou didst hazard us 
 
 To paths in love so dark, so dangerous : 
 
 And those so ambush'd round with household spies, 
 
 And over all, thy husbands to wring eyes . . . 
 
 and about the same time he was writing The Curse on 
 his mistress and the man who succeeds him, which (as 
 Andrew Lang said justly) "far outdoes the Epodes of 
 Horace in cold ferocity. " Or this: 
 
 Love, any devile else but you, 
 
 Would for a given soule give something too. 
 
 Or this: 
 
 If thou beest borne to strange sights, 
 
 Things invisible to see, 
 Ride ten thousand daies and nights, 
 
 Till age snow white haires on thee,
 
 102 Studies in Literature 
 
 Thou, when thou retorn'st, wilt tell mee 
 All strange wonders that befell thee, 
 
 And sweare 
 
 No where 
 Lives a woman true, and faire. 
 
 If thou findst one, let mee know, 
 Such a Pilgrimage were sweet; 
 Yet doe not, I would not goe, 
 
 Though at next doore wee might meet. 
 Though shee were true, when you met her, 
 And last, till you write your letter, 
 Yet shee 
 Will bee 
 False, ere I come, to two, or three. 
 
 Now in two more short extracts watch the fierce con- 
 tempt withering down into worse cynicism : 
 
 Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day, 
 To morrow, when thou leav'st, what wilt thou say? 
 Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow? 
 
 And say that now 
 
 We are not just those persons, which we were? 
 Or, that oathes made in reverentiall feare 
 Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear? . . . 
 Vaine lunatique, against these scapes I could 
 Dispute, and conquer, if I would, 
 
 Which I abstaine to doe, 
 For by to morrow, I may thinke so too. 
 Last: 
 
 Thus I reclaim'd my buzzard love, to flye 
 And what, and when, and how and where I chuse; 
 Now negligent of sport I lye, 
 And now as other Falc'ners use, 
 I spring a mistress, sweare, write, sigh and weepe: 
 And the game kill'd, or lost, goe talke, and sleepe . . , 
 
 and there is worse far worse than that.
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 103 
 
 Donne shared the triumph of the Cadiz exploit with 
 a number of young gentlemen who had sailed with 
 Essex as volunteers. Its impudent success so enraged 
 the king of Spain that he started preparing a second 
 Armada. To forestall this, Elizabeth fitted out a grand 
 fleet under Essex, Howard and Ralegh; and Donne 
 sailed with it. A storm (described by him in a dull 
 poem, praised by a modern critic as "most vivid" in 
 pictures of nature and the sea; actually as full of both, 
 or of either, as this room) drove the ships it was real 
 enough for that back to Plymouth. They weighed 
 again, but in so damaged a condition that, after a 
 coasting raid, the larger foray was abandoned for a 
 dash on the Azores to intercept the Spanish plate-ships 
 returning from America. This enterprise (known as 
 the "Islands Expedition") fell to pieces through bicker- 
 ings between Essex and Ralegh, and the fleet trailed a 
 broken wing home in the autumn of 1597. Walton tells 
 us that, just after this, Donne visited Italy and Spain 
 (presumably on minor errands of diplomacy) and that 
 he designed to visit the Holy Land. "But at his being 
 in the furthest parts of Italy, the disappointment of 
 company, or of a safe convoy, or the uncertainty of 
 returns of money into those remote parts, denied him 
 that happiness : which he did often occasionally mention 
 with a deploration. " It is pretty certain he had 
 wasted his patrimony in these wanderings. 
 
 We pursue with Walton : 
 
 Not long after his return into England, that exemplary 
 pattern of gravity and wisdom, the Lord Elsemore [Elles- 
 mere], then Keeper of the Great Seal, the Lord Chancellor of 
 England, taking notice of his learning, languages, and other 
 abilities, and much affecting his person and behaviour, took
 
 104 Studies in Literature 
 
 him to be his Chief Secretary; supposing and intending it to 
 be an introduction to some more weighty employment in the 
 State. 
 
 But here fate interposed. The Chancellor's wife had a 
 niece, Anna, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant 
 of the Tower, and kept her as frequent visitor and 
 attendant. This young lady of sixteen and the hand- 
 some young secretary were thrown much together, read 
 be Dks together 
 
 Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse. 
 
 The pair fell in love, secretly plighted troth, and were 
 clandestinely married (1601). The father's wrath, 
 when he discovered it, was fierce, even "frenetical. " 
 He not only procured the young husband's dismissal 
 from the Chancellor's service, but had him committed 
 to prison with two friends, Samuel and Christopher 
 Brooke (both poets by the way, and Samuel destined 
 to become Master of Trinity), who had abetted the love 
 affair. Almost as quickly as in a comedy the choleric 
 father relented, procured the bridegroom's enlargement, 
 gave the young couple his blessing (with none of his 
 money, however, to back it) and, not to do forgiveness 
 by halves, begged the Chancellor to reconsider his 
 dismissal of so commendable a young secretary. To 
 which that exemplary pattern of gravity and wisdom 
 replied "that though he was unfeignedly sorry for what 
 he had done, yet it was inconsistent with his place and 
 credit, to discharge and re-admit servants at the request 
 of passionate petitioners. "
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 105 
 
 III 
 
 Thus Donne found himself cast on the world, with 
 the obligation to provide for a wife he had dangerously 
 won and passionately adored. After vicissitudes (and 
 much fending for a fast-growing family), he found 
 employ with Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, Suffolk, one 
 of the wealthiest men in England; whose only child, 
 a daughter, had died at the age of sixteen. The rich 
 poor parents applied to Donne to write her epitaph. 
 Donne not only did so, but followed it up with that 
 strangest of poems, The Progresse of the Soule. It was 
 the first of his writings to see print. His earlier licen- 
 tious poems he would gladly have suppressed, had it 
 been possible. They were never published during his 
 lifetime: but copies in MS. for his reputation was 
 already the talk of the town had blown everywhere, in 
 court and throughout London. 
 
 He would gladly have suppressed them because his 
 religious convictions were steadily deepening or rather 
 lifting him to a mystical exaltation but more because 
 the wandering bark of his love had found a polestar in 
 his most adored wife. True and ten times true as are 
 Burns's words of dissipated passion : 
 
 I waive the quantum o' the sin, 
 
 The hazard of concealing; 
 But, och! it hardens a' within, 
 
 And petrifies the feeling ! . . . 
 
 Donne was one of the few who, out of that curse hold 
 fire enough to revive the flame 
 
 I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion 
 and burn up past sins on the altar of a single devotion.
 
 106 Studies in Literature 
 
 It was in Drury's employ, on an embassy to France, 
 that Donne, in Paris, was visited by the apparition 
 reported by Walton and always worthy to be men- 
 tioned because in this man it undoubtedly deepened 
 the mysticism so important to the rest of our story: 
 the vision of his wife passing twice by him "with her 
 hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her 
 arms: . . . and am as sure," said he, telling it to 
 Drury, "that at her second appearing she stopped, and 
 looked me in the face, and vanished. " Sir Robert was 
 so far shaken by Donne's earnestness that 
 
 he immediately sent a servant [home] to Drury House, with 
 a charge to hasten back, and bring him word, whether Mrs. 
 Donne were alive: and, if alive, in what condition she was as 
 to her health. The twelfth day the messenger returned with 
 this account That he found and left Mrs. Donne very sad, 
 and sick in her bed; and that, after a long and dangerous 
 labour, she had been delivered of a dead child. And, upon 
 examination, the abortion proved to be the same day, and 
 about the very hour, that Mr. Donne affirmed he saw her 
 pass by him in his chamber. 
 
 Donne returned to England, where Drury housed him 
 with his rapidly increasing family. He became adviser 
 to the Earl of Somerset ; but yet lacked preferment pro- 
 portionate to his merits, when in 1615, at the persuasion 
 of King James himself, he took Holy Orders. Then 
 preferment came, as it not seldom comes, to a man past 
 enjoying it. Donne, at any rate, had but a short while 
 to share the gratification with his wife. She died in 
 1617 and was buried in St. Clement Danes. Here is a 
 part of the epitaph :
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 107 
 
 Annae. 
 
 Quod hoc saxum fari jussit 
 
 Ipse prae dolore infans 
 Maritus (miserrimum dictu) alim 
 
 Charae charus 
 
 Cineribus cineres spondet suos 
 Novo matrimonio (annual Deus) 
 hoc loco sociandos 
 Joannes Donne 
 
 In 1621 King James made him Dean of St. Paul's. 
 He was now forty-eight, the most famous preacher in 
 London, and the most solitary, melancholy man. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is where you shall seek for the great Donne, 
 the real Donne: not in his verse, into which posterity 
 is constantly betrayed, but in his Sermons, which 
 contain (as I hold) the most magnificent prose ever 
 uttered from an English pulpit, if not the most magni- 
 ficent prose ever spoken in our tongue. I read you a 
 passage this day fortnight: and I hope some day to 
 speak to you of Donne and Andrewes, Hall, Fuller, 
 Jeremy Taylor and others of the Great Age of the 
 Pulpit. Let me today stammer out to you, for evi- 
 dence, two short passages; and ask you to imagine his 
 wonderful voice (by all men's consent, wonderful) 
 ringing them forth under the roof of St. Paul's the old 
 St. Paul's. 
 
 (i) First, for a specimen of his lighter controversial 
 style, which I may call his skirmishing style. And here, 
 by the way, if there be any present of the Catholic
 
 io8 Studies in Literature 
 
 Church of Rome, let him not take offence at that which 
 I present merely as a specimen. Donne's was an age of 
 controversy: and if we pretend amiably there was no 
 such thing, we emasculate our understanding of his time 
 and of the men who lived in it. And moreover I truly 
 believe the passage will not bruise any man's ears; and 
 yet moreover I engage me, when dealing with 
 writers of "the old profession" amply to redeem the 
 balance. 
 
 Well, then, Donne is speaking of supplications ad- 
 dressed to saints. He quotes Justin Martyr's saying 
 that it is a strange thing men should "pray to Escu- 
 lapius or to Apollo for health" when they may as 
 easily pray to the masters who taught them all they 
 know of physic; and he goes on: 
 
 Why should I pray to St. George for victory, when I may 
 go to the Lord of Hosts, Almighty God Himself; or consult 
 with a Serjeant, or corporal, when I may go to the general? 
 Or to another saint for peace, when I may go to the Prince 
 of Peace Christ Jesus ? Why should I pray to Saint Nicho- 
 las for a fair passage at sea, when He that rebuked the storm 
 is nearer me than St. Nicholas? Why should I pray to St. 
 Antony for my hogs, when he that gave the devil leave to 
 drown the Gergesens whole herd of hoggs, did not do that 
 by St. Antony's leave, nor by putting a caveat or prae-non- 
 obstante in his monopoly of preserving hogs? I know not 
 where to find St. Petronilla when I have an ague, nor St. 
 Apollonia when I have the tooth-ache, nor St. Liberius when 
 I have the stone. I know not whether they can hear me in 
 heaven, or no. Our adversaries will not say that all saints 
 in heaven hear all that is said on earth. I know not whether 
 they be in heaven or no : our adversaries will not say that 
 the Pope may not err in a matter of fact, and so may canon- 
 ise a traitor for a saint. I know not whether those saints 
 were ever upon earth or no : our adversaries will not say that
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 109 
 
 all their legends were really, historically true, but that 
 many of them were holy, but yet symbolical inventions. 
 . . . I know my Redeemer liveth, and I know where he is; 
 and no man knows where he is not. 
 
 (2) For a more solemn passage I choose this famous 
 one on Jezebel : 
 
 The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that 
 oak, to tell me how high or how large that was ; it tells me not 
 what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt 
 when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speech- 
 less, too: it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon 
 the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince 
 whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if 
 the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown 
 the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man 
 sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, 
 who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pro- 
 nounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], 
 and this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran ? So was the 
 death of Jezabel (Jezabel was a Queen) expressed. They 
 shall not say This is Jezabel; not only not wonder that it is, 
 nor pity that it should be: but they shall not say, they shall 
 not know, This is Jezabel. 
 
 Thus in his Sermons, if you seek, you will find the 
 Donne I maintain to be the greater Donne, master of 
 well-knit argument, riding tumultuous emotion as with 
 a bridle, thundering out fugue upon fugue of prose 
 modulated with almost impeccable ear. Why do critics 
 then go on judging him first and almost solely as a poet ? 
 And why do I, following them to do evil, speak of him 
 today chiefly as a poet?
 
 no Studies in Literature 
 
 He had no architectonic gift in poetry: in poetry 
 the skill that articulated, knit, compacted his Sermons 
 and marched his arguments as warriors in battalion, 
 completely forsook him. Through lack of it The Pro- 
 gresse of the Soule which might have been a triumph, is a 
 wobbling fiasco. Of the art that constructs a Divina 
 Commedia, an Othello, a Samson Agonistes, or even a 
 Beggar's Opera, he had no inkling whatever. It was 
 not that he strove for it and missed; it was that he 
 either knew not or cared not a farthing about it. 
 
 He had (they say) a most peccable ear in verse. 
 Critics so great as Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Coleridge, all 
 agree on this point: so I suppose they must be right. 
 They agree also in calling him difficult, crabbed, etc. 
 Being so great men, therefore, let them be right. 
 
 I can only say that after trial, especially in reading 
 him aloud to myself, I find him by nine-tenths less 
 inharmonious, halting, crabbed, or difficult than these 
 great critics take for granted that he is. Of course, if 
 you choose a line of his and read it clumsily, if you accent 
 
 Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears 
 as if you were ordering 
 
 Bacon and eggs and a half-pint of beer 
 
 you make little of it as a ten-syllable iambic ; as if you 
 choose to scan with your thumb instead of the organ 
 God gave you : 
 
 Blasted, with sighs, and sur-rounde"d with tears, 
 you will make less. But if you read 
 
 Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears, 
 Hither I come to seek the spring,
 
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets in 
 
 letting the voice linger on "sur-round, " the line becomes 
 exquisite. 
 
 But come, let us take a poem of his and test this 
 alleged harshness : 
 
 Little think'st thou, poore flower, 
 
 Whom I have watch 'd sixe or seaven da yes, 
 
 And seene thy birth, and scene what every houre 
 
 Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise, 
 
 And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough, 
 
 Little think'st thou 
 
 That it will freeze anon, and that I shall 
 To morrow finde thee falne, or not at all. 
 
 Little think'st thou poore heart 
 
 That labour'st yet to nestle thee, 
 And think'st by hovering here to get a part 
 In a forbidden or forbidding tree, 
 And hop'st her stiffenesse by long siege to bow: 
 
 Little think'st thou, 
 
 That thou to morrow, ere that Sunne doth wake, 
 Must with this Sunne, and mee a journey take. 
 
 But thou which lov'st to bee 
 
 Subtile to plague thy selfe, wilt say, 
 Alas, if you must goe, what's that to mee? 
 Here lyes my businesse, and here I will stay : 
 You goe to friends, whose love and meanes present 
 
 Various content 
 
 To your eyes, eares, and tongue, and every part. 
 If then your body goe, what need you a heart? 
 
 Well then, stay here; but know, 
 
 When thou hast stay'd and done thy most; 
 
 A naked thinking heart, that makes no show, 
 
 Is to a woman, but a kinde of Ghost; 
 
 How shall shee know my heart; or having none, 
 Know thee for one?
 
 ii2 Studies in Literature 
 
 Practise may make her know some other part, 
 But take my word, she doth not know a Heart. 
 
 Meet mee at London, then, 
 
 Twenty dayes hence, and thou shalt see 
 
 Mee fresher, and more fat, by being with men, 
 
 Then if I had staid still with her and thee. 
 
 For Gods sake, if you can, be you so too : 
 I would give you 
 
 There, to another friend, whom wee shall finde 
 
 As glad to have my body, as my minde. 
 
 None the less I grant you that Donne's ear for the 
 beat of verse is so wayward, its process often so recon- 
 dite, that the most of his poetry is a struggle rather 
 than a success: and I have already admitted that he 
 could not plan a poem. 
 
 Why then does everyone insist on judging as a poet, 
 and a faulty one, this man who had a superlatively fine 
 ear for the rhythm of prose and could construct in 
 prose? And why am I following the multitude? 
 
 The first and most obvious answer is that nobody 
 reads sermons in these days, and few even trouble to 
 attend them. For reasons which we will examine on 
 another occasion, the once glorious art of preaching has 
 perished out of our midst. The tradition is there laid 
 up in Donne's Sermons: "laid up, not lost!" 
 
 But the main reason is that his verse did smash up 
 an effete tradition of verse. It smashed up Petrarch- 
 in-English, and it was high time. It did so influence 
 English verse for at least half a century, that (as some- 
 one has said) like a glove of civet it scents every gar- 
 ment you take out of the wardrobe. 
 
 Gentlemen, never mind when someone smashes up a 
 convention to make a new thing. That way trust it
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 113 
 
 lies life: and literature may make almost any sacrifice 
 to renew itself alive. What was it this man had to 
 invent or to rediscover, that he broke up so much? 
 
 VI 
 
 Most of you know Johnson's Life of Cowley, and the 
 hay that great man made of the "metaphysical" poets, 
 tossing them on his horns. Why "metaphysical" I 
 don't know. Johnson had compiled a Dictionary, and 
 therefore had no excuse for not knowing that "meta- 
 physical" was no accurate term for the thing he took so 
 much joy in deriding. He probably meant something 
 like "fiddlesticks"; something contemptuous. He 
 makes admirable play with a number of things that do 
 not matter. But he never gets near what does matter. 
 
 What is Mysticism ? 
 
 It is something, at any rate, which Johnson had 
 small care or capacity to understand. 
 
 It is also something which even Shakespeare did not 
 understand, though he unconsciously relied on it. You 
 may choose your grandest passage from Shakespeare: 
 choose Prospero's cloud-capped towers and gorgeous 
 palaces; or choose Cleopatra's wail upon dead Antony: 
 
 O! wither'd is the garland of the war, 
 The soldier's pole is fall'n; young boys and girls 
 Are level now with men; the odds is gone, 
 And there is nothing left remarkable 
 Beneath the visiting moon. 
 
 Then set beside it a line or two of Blake : 
 
 When the stars threw down their spears, 
 And water'd heaven with their tears . . . 
 or
 
 ii4 Studies in Literature 
 
 A Robin Redbreast in a cage '. 
 Puts all heaven in a rage . . . 
 
 or Wordsworth's Ode to Duty: 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
 And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and 
 strong . . . 
 
 and you will perceive that there are more things in 
 heaven and earth than find their way into great Shake- 
 speare's philosophy ; and in particular a something which 
 Plato had known, which Shakespeare did not know, 
 which therefore had to be rediscovered by poets, wise 
 men and children. 
 
 That something was Mysticism. And Mysticism is 
 well, Mysticism, Gentlemen, is something we will 
 discuss in our next lecture; in which I shall also try to 
 explain why Donne, who helped to rediscover it, was 
 an imperfect mystic, as also to trace it in certain of his 
 followers Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne. 
 
 For the present be it enough to say that he was an 
 imperfect poet, and mainly for two reasons: (i) he 
 had no constant vision of beauty, (2) he had too 
 busy an intellect, which ever tempted him (as Touch- 
 stone would say) to be breaking his shins on his own 
 wit: or as an American friend used to put it, he 
 suffered "from a rush of brains to the head. " In lines 
 and short passages he could be exquisite. Witness 
 this: 
 
 I long to talke with some old lovers ghost, 
 
 Who dyed before the god of Love was borne . . . 
 
 or this, from his Anatomic of the World:
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 115 
 
 Her pure, and eloquent blood 
 Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought, 
 That one might almost say, her body thought. 
 
 But more than half his time we see the man sweating 
 and straining at his forge and bellows. Obviously half 
 the time he himself cannot see what he is working at, 
 hammering at "that is as it may turn out," and then, 
 suddenly, out of the smoke, shine verses like this, from 
 The Extasie: 
 
 As 'twixt two equall Armies, Fate 
 
 Suspends uncertaine victorie, 
 Our soules, (which to advance their state, 
 
 Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee. 
 
 And whil'st our soules negotiate there, 
 
 Wee like sepulchrall statues lay; 
 All day, the same our postures were, 
 
 And wee said nothing, all the day. 
 
 VII 
 
 In his last years, as disease, over-study and fasting 
 broke up his body, his mind played more and more 
 constantly upon death and its physical horrors, the 
 charnel-house and the worm : yes, though he, always 
 eloquent against the grave, had written this most holy 
 sonnet defying it: 
 
 Death be not proud, though some have called thee 
 Mighty and dreadfull ; for, thou art not soe, 
 For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, 
 Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill mee. 
 From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, 
 Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow, 
 And soonest our best men with thee doe goe, 
 Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
 
 n6 Studies in Literature 
 
 Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men 
 And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, 
 And poppie or charmes can make us sleepe as well, 
 And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then? 
 One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, 
 And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. 
 
 This man lived his last days and slept for years with 
 a full-length portrait of himself (for which he stood on 
 an urn, naked, clad in a winding-sheet) laid alongside his 
 bed, "where it continued and became his hourly object 
 till his death. " You may see the horrible silly picture 
 in many editions of the Life. It is kept among the 
 archives of St. Paul's. Reflex action, say I, of carnality 
 in exitu. A very "gloomy Dean" of St. Paul's at any 
 rate! First and last, Donne \/as always that man in 
 Plato who, drawing near the city ditch and spying the 
 rotten corpses of some malefactors that had been flung 
 there, stood still between abhorrence and a filthy at- 
 traction; until at length, overcome, he ran to the spot 
 opening his eyes wide with his fingers and crying, 
 "Take your fill, you wretches, since you must have it 
 so." 
 
 But a great man, indubitably a very great man: all 
 the taller for standing in the mire of corruption and 
 reaching up to grasp celestial doors. A great man: a 
 very penitent man ! He died on the 3 1 st day of March, 
 1631, and was buried in St. Paul's. Let a simple 
 admirer, a holy and humble man of heart let Izaak 
 Walton say the last word on him, whom many 
 apparently greater admired: 
 
 He was by nature highly passionate, but more apt to 
 reluct at the excesses of it. A great lover of the offices of
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 117 
 
 humanity, and of so merciful a spirit, that he never beheld 
 the miseries of mankind without pity and relief. 
 
 He was earnest and unwearied in the search of knowledge, 
 with which his vigorous soul is now satisfied, and employed 
 in a continual praise of that God that first breathed it into 
 his active body : that body, which once was a Temple of the 
 Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christ- 
 ian dust: 
 
 But I shall see it re-animated.
 
 II. HERBERT AND VAUGHN 
 
 I SHALL begin today, Gentlemen, by collecting from 
 my previous lectures sundry scattered tenets which, 
 if you remember them at all, you probably remember 
 disconnectedly as things dropped disconnectedly, casu- 
 ally, on occasion : and I shall try (if you will allow the 
 simile) to piece these scraps of glass together into a 
 small window through which you may not only, as I 
 hope, have a glimpse into the true meaning of ' ' Mysti- 
 cism" which was the question on which we parted, a 
 fortnight ago but even perhaps, into the last meaning 
 of poetry. Oh yes ! a most presumptuous hope most 
 presumptuously uttered. But we have to do our best 
 in our little time: and my experience has been that 
 while many things continue to lurk in a glass darkly, 
 certain clear visions have come, and the clearest of these 
 not seldom through the eyes of a friend. If that word, 
 again, be presumptuous, you must forgive me. 
 
 First, then, I have preached to you over and over 
 from this desk, and not seldom explicitly, that the 
 function of all true art, and in particular of poetry 
 (with which we are concerned) is to harmonise the soul 
 of man with the immense Universe surrounding him, 
 in which he divines a procession which is orderly, an 
 order which is harmonious, a procession, an order, 
 a harmony which obey, as law, a Will infinitely above 
 
 118
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 119 
 
 him, infinitesimally careful of him the many million- 
 millionth part of a speck of dust, yet sentient. 
 
 Great thinkers (as you know) have all recognised 
 this order. Indeed they must, for it conditions all 
 their thinking. If the Universe were a chaos, which 
 is anarchy if the sun rose unpunctually and lay down 
 when it felt inclined, if no moon commanded the tides, 
 if the stars were peevish, running to and fro like spoilt 
 children any connected thought would be impossible 
 and we no better but worse than blind men jostled 
 about by a crowd. But as a fact we know that what- 
 ever it be, watching over Israel, it slumbers not nor 
 sleeps. Begin where you will. Begin, if you choose, 
 with the rebuke to Job : 
 
 Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose 
 the bands of Orion ? 
 
 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst 
 thou guide Arcturus with his sons? 
 
 Or with Ecclesiasticus : 
 
 The beauty of heaven, the glory of the stars, an ornament 
 giving light in the highest places of the Lord. 
 
 At the commandment of the Holy One they will stand in 
 their order, and never faint in their watches. 
 
 Come down to Wordsworth's Ode to Duty: 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh 
 and strong. 
 
 Or to Meredith's Lucifer in Starlight: 
 
 On a starr'd night Prince Lucifer uprose. 
 Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
 
 120 Studies in Literature 
 
 Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen'd. 
 Where sinners hugg'd their spectre of repose. 
 Poor prey in his hot fit of pride were those, 
 
 And now upon his western wing he lean'd, 
 
 Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careen'd, 
 Now the black planet shadow'd Arctic snows. 
 Soaring through wider zones that prick'd his scars 
 
 With memory of the old revolt from Awe, 
 He reach'd a middle height, and at the stars, 
 Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank. 
 Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank, 
 
 The army of unalterable law. 
 
 The poets, as you know, and philosophers (of whom 
 Plato is chief of course) with poetry in their souls, 
 attempt by many parables to convey their sense of 
 this grand, harmonious, universal orchestral movement. 
 You recall the supposed music of the spheres, inaudible 
 to mortals : 
 
 Sit, Jessica, Look . . . 
 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st" 
 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. 
 
 You remember in Plato the story of Er the Pamphylian, 
 whose relatives after ten days sought his dead body on 
 the battle-field, and found it without taint of corruption : 
 and how on the twelfth day, being laid on the pyre, he 
 came back to life and told them where he had wandered 
 in the other world, and what seen: but chiefly of the 
 great spindle on the knees of Necessity, reaching up to 
 heaven and turning in eight whorls of graduated speed 
 "and on the rim of each sits a Siren, who revolves 
 with it, hymning a single note; the eight notes together 
 forming one harmony. " Plato learned of Pythagoras,
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 121 
 
 Dante of Plato, Chaucer of Dante, Milton of Plato 
 again. Hearken to Milton : 
 
 Then listen I 
 
 To the celestial Sirens' harmony 
 That sit upon the nine infolded spheres 
 And sing to those that hold the vital shears, 
 And turn the adamantine spindle round 
 On which the fate of gods and men is wound. 
 Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, 
 To lull the daughters of Necessity, 
 And keep unsteady Nature to her law, 
 And the low world in measured motion draw 
 After the heavenly tune. 
 
 A commentator on this passage has informed the 
 world in a footnote that "Modern astronomy has 
 exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow con- 
 centric spheres." (By "singular," by the way, he 
 probably meant "curious" the notion was never 
 "singular," it was held by thousands.) But true, 
 true! Not profoundly, perhaps, but how obviously 
 true! Orpheus and Odysseus and Dante did not de- 
 scend into Hell, really. There are no such places as 
 Utopia or the Slough of Despond or the Delectable 
 Mountains or Laputa or the Woods of Westermain or 
 Hy Brazil really. And the cow never jumped over 
 the moon, really. But, poor thing, she might try I if 
 she weren't suffering from the footnote and mouth 
 disease. In short, there are such things as parables, 
 and the greatest of teachers have not disdained them. 
 
 This parable presents a truth, and one of the two 
 most important truths in the world: the Universe is 
 not a Chaos but a Harmony.
 
 122 Studies in Literature 
 
 II 
 
 Now the other and only equally important truth in 
 the world is that this macrocosm of the Universe, with 
 its harmony, cannot be apprehended at all except as it 
 is focussed upon the eye, intellect and soul of Man, 
 the microcosm. All systems of philosophy from the 
 earliest analysed in "Ritter and Preller" down to James 
 and Bergson inevitably work out to this, that the 
 universal harmony is meaningless and nothing to man 
 save in so far as he can apprehend it, and that he can 
 apprehend it only by reference to some corresponding 
 harmony in himself. He is, let us repeat the admission 
 You are, I am but the million-millionth atom of 
 a speck. None the less that atom, being sentient, is 
 reflective: being reflective, draws and contracts the 
 whole into its tiny ring. Impercipient, what were we 
 but dead things? 
 
 Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees, 
 
 Percipient solely by the grace of percipience, we are 
 inheritors of it all, and kings. To quote one of the 
 poets, Traherne, with whom I am to deal : 
 
 But little did the infant dream 
 That all the treasures of the world were by: 
 
 And that himself was so the cream 
 And crown of all which round about did lie. 
 Yet thus it was : the Gem, 
 
 The Diadem, 
 The ring enclosing all 
 That stand upon this earthly ball,
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 123 
 
 The Heavenly eye, 
 Much wider than the sky, 
 Wherein they all included were, 
 
 The glorious Soul, that was the King 
 Made to possess them, did appear 
 
 A small and little thing! 
 
 Here another, Henry Vaughan : 
 
 I saw Eternity, the other night, 
 
 Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, 
 
 All calm, as it was bright; 
 And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, 
 
 Driv'n by the spheres, 
 Like a vast shadow mov'd. 
 
 In that shadow he sees men of all sorts and conditions 
 the lover, the "darksome statesman," the "fearful 
 miser, " the "downright epicure" pursuing their parti- 
 cular cheats of shadow : 
 
 Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, 
 And sing and weep, soar'd up into the Ring ; 
 
 But most would use no wing. 
 "0 fools!" said I "thus to prefer dark night 
 
 Before true light ! 
 To live in grots and caves, and hate the day 
 
 Because it shews the way, 
 The way which from this dead and dark abode 
 
 Leads up to God, 
 A way where you might tread the Sun, and be 
 
 More bright than he!" 
 But as I did their madnes so discusse, 
 
 One whisper'd thus, 
 "This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide 
 
 But for his Bride. "
 
 124 Studies in Literature 
 
 III 
 
 So we have two rings the immense orchestral ring 
 of the Universe wheeling above and around us, and 
 the tiny percipient ring which is the pupil of your 
 eye or mine threaded to a brain infinitesimal and yet 
 infinitely capable. But there is one thing more to be 
 said and a thing of first importance concerning this 
 little soul of man. It instinctively aspires, yearns to 
 know the greater harmony, if only to render it a more 
 perfect obedience : and it aspires, yearns, through a sense 
 of likeness, of oneness, of sonship. Man is, after all, 
 a part of the Universe and just as surely as the Pleiades 
 or Arcturus. Moreover he feels in himself a harmony 
 correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest. 
 His heart pumps his blood to a rhythm ; like the plants 
 by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his 
 kind, enjoys and adorns his day, dies, and returns to 
 earth; and by seasons regulates his life, as summer 
 and winter, seedtime and harvest sweep their circle 
 over him, rhythmical and recurrent, to find him and his 
 house standing, his garden a little better planted, his 
 task a trifle advanced to completion. And then? 
 why then, of course, he is gone: another has his place, 
 and digs his patch. But while his day lasts, the brain 
 just behind his sweating brow is the percipient centre 
 upon which the whole cosmic circle focusses itself as the 
 sun through a burning-glass : and he is not shrivelled up 
 by it. On the contrary, he feels that it is all for him. 
 As Traherne writes: 
 
 The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people 
 were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as 
 much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. 
 The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 125 
 
 stars, and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator 
 and enjoyer of it. 
 
 And again, magnificently: 
 
 You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself 
 floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, 
 and crowned with the stars. 
 
 Yes, and moreover man nurses a native impulse to 
 merge himself in the greater harmony and be one with 
 it; a spirit in his heart (as the Scripture puts it) "of 
 adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father. " Open your 
 Browning and read Johannes Agricola: 
 
 There's heaven above, and night by night 
 
 I look right through its gorgeous roof; 
 No suns and moons though e'er so bright 
 
 Avail to stop me; splendour-proof 
 
 I keep the broods of stars aloof, 
 For I intend to get to God, 
 
 For 'tis to God I speed so fast, 
 For in God's breast, my own abode 
 
 Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed, 
 
 I lay my spirit down at last. 
 I lie where I have always lain, 
 
 God smiles as he has always smiled; 
 Ere suns and moons could wax and wane, 
 
 Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled 
 
 The heavens, God thought on me his child. 
 
 IV 
 
 "All very well," you may urge: "but how is it done? " 
 Well it is not done by the way of philosophy. The 
 quarrel between philosophy and poetry is notorious 
 and inveterate: the patronage of poetry by philosophy
 
 126 Studies in Literature 
 
 as stupid as it is solemnly recognisable. For philosophy 
 attempts to comprehend God's purposes into some 
 system or another: a way which, if effectual, at once 
 enables man to teach God his business, or at least to 
 nag him about it, playing Egeria to his Numa. ' ' God, ' ' 
 says Heine, "created man in his image and man made 
 haste to return the compliment. " The philosophers are 
 always returning the compliment, stoking the chimneys 
 of Sion red-hot to run out the Almighty's purposes 
 into moulds of this or that system. But if by a stretch 
 of fancy we can conceive Hegel or Comte or Bergson 
 or any of these constructives as knowing all about it, 
 why then Hegel or Comte or Bergson is theoretically 
 as good as God and then, the Lord stiffen, for us all, 
 the last barrier between theory and practice ! 
 
 The poet is more modest. He aspires, not to com- 
 prehend but to apprehend: to pierce, by flashes, to some 
 point or other of the great wheeling circle. I have put 
 it thus in an earlier lecture There are certain men, 
 granted to dwell among us, of more delicate mental 
 texture than their fellows; men (often in the rough- 
 and-tumble unhappy therefore), whose minds have, as 
 it were, exquisite filaments to intercept, apprehend and 
 conduct stray messages between the outer mystery of 
 the Universe and the inner mystery of the individual 
 soul; even as telegraphy has learnt to snatch stray 
 messages wandering over waste waters of ocean. And 
 these men are poets. 
 
 V 
 
 Still you may ask, "How is this apprehending done? 
 What is the process?" 
 
 Why, Gentlemen, last term, in a course of lectures 
 "On the Art of Reading" a course which I hope to
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 127 
 
 take up again after Christmas and to continue I 
 insisted almost to weariness on the trinity in Man: 
 What does, What knows, What is, I insisted almost to 
 weariness that through What is lies the way to spiritual 
 understanding; that, all spirit attracting all spirit as 
 surely as all matter attracts all matter, it is only by 
 becoming like them, by being like them, that we ap- 
 prehend a spiritual truth in Dante, Shakespeare or 
 Tolstoy; as in that way and no other they brought the 
 angel down. Paley's Evidences? a folly of perversion ! 
 Any child has surer evidence within him ; as any child, 
 taking up Hamlet, feels that it was written for him, and 
 in no condescension either he is the Prince of Denmark. 
 The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. A lost province? 
 Maybe: but we know today, Gentlemen, how a lost 
 province will remember its parent state, how hard a 
 road the parent will travel to recover that which was lost. 
 You may not agree with me that here lies the deepest 
 secret of poetry: but I present it to you as a historical 
 fact that here lies the central tenet of the Mystics. Man 
 and the Universe and God are in nature One: Unity 
 (if we can find it) runs through all diversities and 
 harmonises them. Therefore to know anything of 
 God Himself we must be, to that extent, like God: 
 therefore, too, the best part of revenge upon an enemy 
 (think of it, in these days) is not to be like him. 
 
 VI 
 
 But still you ask, "What is the process?" Surely 
 that lies implicit in what has been said. Man has in 
 him I will not say a "subliminal self" but a soul 
 listening within for a message; so fain to hear that 
 sometimes it must arise and tip-toe to the threshold :
 
 128 Studies in Literature 
 
 News from a foreign country came 
 As if my treasure and my wealth lay there; 
 
 So much it did my heart inflame, 
 'Twas wont to call my Soul into mine ear; 
 
 Which thither went to meet 
 
 The approaching sweet, 
 
 And on the threshold stood 
 
 To entertain the unknown Good. 
 It hover'd there 
 
 As if 'twould leave mine ear, 
 
 And was so eager to embrace 
 
 The joyful tidings as they came, 
 'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place 
 To entertain that same. 
 
 But the news comes from without, in its own good 
 time and often in guise totally surprising, like the 
 Messiah : 
 
 They all were looking for a king 
 
 To slay their foes and lift them high: 
 
 Thou cam'st, a little baby thing, 
 That made a woman cry. 
 
 You must (says the mystic) await the hour and trust 
 the invitation, neither of which you may command. 
 The poets (say they) do not read the Word by vigorous 
 striving and learning, as your philosophers do : neither, 
 like the priests of Baal, do they cut themselves and yell. 
 Nor do they wrestle with God like Jacob; but wait, 
 prepare themselves with Mary, and say, "Be it unto me 
 according to thy word." They wait, in what one of 
 them called "a wise passiveness " : 
 
 The eye it cannot choose but see; 
 
 We cannot bid the ear be still; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
 
 Against or with our will.
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 129 
 
 Not less I deem that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress; 
 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness. 
 
 Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 
 Of things for ever speaking, 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 
 But we must still be seeking? 
 
 And again this same Wordsworth, in his Tintern Abbey, 
 tells of "that serene and blessed mood" wherein 
 
 the breath of this corporeal frame 
 And even the motion of our human blood, 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body, and become a living soul: 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things. 
 
 Let this, then, be said today about the mystical poets. 
 Their way is not to strive and cry: it is enough for 
 them to wait, receptacles of the divine passing breath. 
 If you command, "Strike and sing us a song of Sion, " 
 they answer, "How can we sing the songs of Sion in 
 a strange land?" but the harp abandoned and hung 
 on a willow by the waters of Babylon may catch at 
 evening (say they) and hum a wind whispering from 
 Israel. The poet merely by waiting and trusting arrives 
 per saltum at truths to which the philosopher, pack- 
 laden and varicose upon the military road of logic, can 
 never reach. 
 
 There yet remain two things to be said about mystic- 
 ism; and perhaps a third, at the end. 
 
 The first is that as a historical fact all mystics, how-
 
 130 Studies in Literature 
 
 ever diverse their outlook or inlook, have been curiously 
 gracious and yet more curiously happy men. They 
 have found, if not contentment itself, the way of 
 contentment and an anchorage for the soul. They 
 possess it in patience. They are the pure in heart and 
 blessed because they see, or believe they see, God. 
 
 The second is that, possessed with a sense of unity 
 in all things, likeness in all things, every mystic has 
 a propensity to deal in symbols, to catch at illustrations 
 which to him seem natural enough, but to us far-fetched, 
 "conceited," not in pari materia. You have, all the 
 while, to lay account with this in dealing with these 
 seventeenth century men, as I shall show. 
 
 VII 
 
 Now to return to Donne on whom we discoursed last 
 week. He is obviously an imperfect mystic, being too 
 restlessly intellectual, having little or none of Words- 
 worth's "wise passiveness." He strives, he cries: and 
 his wit is such that he will fetch an illustration from 
 anywhere. I suppose his poem The Flea to be about 
 the most merely disgusting in our language. He will 
 ruin an exquisite poem (for us) by comparing two lovers' 
 souls with a pair of compasses : 
 
 If they be two, they are two so 
 
 As stiffe twin compasses are two, 
 Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show 
 
 To move, but doth, if the' other doe. 
 And though it in the center sit, 
 
 Yet when the other far doth rome, 
 It leanes, and hearkens after it, 
 
 And growes erect, as that comes home. 
 
 Pass that: but what shall we say to this?
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 131 
 
 As the sweet sweat of Roses in a Still, 
 
 As that which from chaf 'd muskats pores doth trill, 
 
 As the Almighty Balme of th' early East, 
 
 Such are the sweat drops of my Mistris breast. 
 
 VIII 
 
 George Herbert of the family of the great Earls of 
 Pembroke, though of a cadet branch was born the 
 3rd of April, 1593, in the castle of Montgomery; the 
 fifth of seven sons of Sir Richard Herbert and his 
 wife Magdalen, and younger brother of Edward, Lord 
 Herbert of Cherbury. Sir Richard, whom George re- 
 membered as a black-avised, well-knit, capable man, 
 brave and somewhat stern, died in the boy's fourth year 
 and sleeps under an alabaster tomb in Montgomery 
 church. The widow thereafter consecrated her life to 
 her children. She did "often bless God, that they were 
 neither defective in their shapes, or in their reason ; and 
 very often reprove them that they did not praise God 
 for so great a blessing. ' ' On her death George lamented 
 her in one of the most exquisite elegies ever written 
 in Latin by an Englishman : 
 
 Tota renident aede decus et suavitas 
 Animo renidentes prius. 
 
 With comeliness and kindness shone the whole 
 House, for they first were radiant in her soul. 
 
 The close friend and adviser of her widowhood (pray 
 note) was Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, and Donne 
 eulogised her in a poem The Autumnal, and preached her 
 funeral sermon. Donne was also a constant friend of
 
 132 Studies in Literature 
 
 George Herbert, and sent him a gift, a seal, from his 
 death-bed. 
 
 This is not the place to speak of the eldest boy, 
 Herbert of Cherbury, philosopher, duellist, diplomatist, 
 poet and most remarkable fop of his age. All the 
 Herberts have had "blood"; from Charlemagne, to 
 whom they seriously trace back their descent, to Sid- 
 ney Herbert, War Minister and friend of Florence Night- 
 ingale to carry it no farther. 
 
 But we speak of George. At twelve he was sent to 
 Westminster School, where (says Walton) "the beauties 
 of his pretty behaviour and wit shined, and became so 
 eminent and lovely . . . that he seemed to be marked 
 out for piety, and to become the care of Heaven, and of 
 a particular good angel to guard and guide him. ' ' From 
 Westminster he proceeded to Trinity here, where he 
 stuck to his books and was in due time elected a Fellow, 
 becoming Public Orator to the University in 1619. 
 
 As yet he had no intention to devote himself to the 
 priesthood, though it seems that his mother desired it. 
 On the contrary, King James's frequent visits to the 
 University set the young Orator dreaming of Court 
 preferment. With his high birth, his acknowledged 
 talents, his engaging presence and manners always 
 singularly attractive, there was nothing extravagant in 
 the ambition, and we hear that he made himself master 
 of Italian, Spanish and French with a view to qualifying 
 himself for a Secretaryship of State. But the two great 
 men on whose favour he counted died just then, and 
 King James soon after. "Nature," said a not too 
 friendly critic, "intended him for a knight-errant, but 
 disappointed ambition made him a saint." Well, let 
 us be thankful for saints, however they come. 
 
 With or without a sore heart Herbert withdrew from
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 133 
 
 Cambridge and spent some years in retirement, the end 
 of which was a resolve to take Holy Orders. As he 
 puts it, in penitence : 
 
 Whereas my birth and spirit rather took 
 
 The way that takes the town: 
 Thou didst betray me to a lingering book, 
 
 And wrapt me in a gown. 
 
 In 1630 he accepted the living of Bemerton in Wilt- 
 shire, and was ordained priest. Meantime he had 
 married Jane Danvers, the daughter of a Wiltshire 
 squire according to Walton, after a three days' 
 courtship and 
 
 The third day after he was made Rector of Bemerton, and 
 had changed his sword and silk clothes into a canonical coat, 
 he returned so habited . . . and immediately after he had 
 seen and saluted his wife, he said to her "You are now a 
 Minister's wife, and must now so far forget your father's 
 house, as not to claim a precedence of any of your parish- 
 ioners: for you are to know, that a Priest's wife can claim 
 no precedence or place, but that which she purchases by 
 her obliging humility." . . . And she was so meek a wife, as 
 to assure him, "it was no vexing news to her, and that he 
 should see her observe it with a cheerful willingness." 
 
 And this good wife was as good as her word Walton 
 adds, the love of her parishioners "followed her in all 
 places, as inseparably as shadows follow substances in 
 sunshine." 
 
 If ever two lives illustrated the beauty of holiness 
 they were those lived by George and Jane Herbert at 
 Bemerton; dull lives, intent mainly on parish work, or 
 repairing church or chapel or rectory, over the mantel 
 of the chimney of which he graved for his successor:
 
 134 Studies in Literature 
 
 If thou chance for to find 
 A new house to thy mind, 
 And built without thy cost; 
 
 Be good to the poor, 
 
 As God gives thee store, 
 And then my labour's not lost. 
 
 It was a homely, homekeeping life, diversified only by 
 trips into Salisbury the Rector with a fiddle under 
 his arm to hear and join in music, of which he was 
 passionately fond. But when the bell rang in the 
 parsonage chapel, as it did twice daily, the labourers 
 in the fields let their oxen rest and bowed over a prayer. 
 Let me read one short passage from Walton: for it 
 ends on one of my favourite quotations, which you 
 may recognise : 
 
 In another walk to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a 
 poorer horse, that was fallen under his load: they were both 
 in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert 
 perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor 
 man to unload, and after to load, his horse. The poor man 
 blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and was 
 so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to 
 refresh both himself and his horse; and told him, "That if 
 he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast." Thus 
 he left the poor man: and at his coming to his musical 
 friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George 
 Herbert, which used to be so trim and clean, came into that 
 company so soiled and discomposed: but he told them the 
 occasion. And when one of the company told him "He 
 had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment," his 
 answer was, "That the thought of what he had done would 
 prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it 
 would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience, 
 whensoever he should pass by that place: for if I be bound
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 135 
 
 to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am 
 bound, so far as it is in my power, to practice what I pray 
 for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every 
 day, yet let me tell you, I would not willingly pass one day 
 of my life without comforting a sad soul, or shewing mercy ; 
 and I praise God for this occasion. And now let's tune our 
 instruments." 
 
 A life as you read of it in Walton so delicately 
 holy, so fragrant of the Wiltshire water meadows along 
 which the biographer himself wandered with his rod, 
 fishing for trout and "studying to be quiet," that it 
 seemed made to tick on and on like a well-oiled clock! 
 But Herbert had brought the seeds of consumption in 
 him from the fens of Cambridge. He knew it, and, 
 in Dr. Grosart's words, "he not merely walked down 
 the 'valley of the shadow of death' knowing no 
 'fear' and so making no 'haste' but sang." A little 
 before the end he withdrew from Bemerton to lodge 
 with his friend Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding in 
 Huntingdon, that famous religious house of retirement. 
 There he died, and was buried on the 3rd day of March, 
 1633. Upon a most touching, most eloquent descrip- 
 tion of the end, and, after it, upon a pause, "Thus he 
 lived, and thus he died, like a Saint, unspotted of the 
 world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility," Walton 
 (sad to say) concludes with a bad misquotation of 
 Shirley's : 
 
 Only the actions of the just 
 
 Smell sweet and blossom in their dust. 
 
 Had he remembered even a little bit better, he might 
 have quoted the same thought from a poem of Herbert's 
 own, and nowadays his most famous. I mean the one 
 beginning
 
 136 Studies in Literature 
 
 Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright! 
 The bridal of the earth and sky. 
 
 But the close, being marred by conceits, is far inferior 
 to Shirley's, 
 
 Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 
 Like season 'd timber, never gives; 
 
 But though the whole world turn to coal, 
 Then chiefly lives. . . . 
 
 which offends, even after we have reminded ourselves 
 that "coal," in Herbert's day, meant charcoal. But 
 that is always the trouble with Herbert. The example 
 of Donne had infected him, who possessed scarcely a 
 tithe of Donne's wit ; so that he is always saving beauti- 
 ful things and always spoiling (for us) his best lyrics. 
 Very few are flawless. Now and then he can make a 
 conceit lovely, as when of man's heavenly comfort he 
 writes 
 
 Not that he may not here 
 
 Taste of the cheer, 
 
 But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head, 
 So must he sip and think 
 
 Of better drink 
 He may attain to, after he is dead. 
 
 And even a pun (you know) may be made lovely by 
 emotion. Witness this little one in Hood's Song of 
 the Shirt: 
 
 Work work work, . . . 
 While underneath the eaves 
 
 The brooding swallows cling 
 As if to show me their sunny backs 
 
 And twit me with the spring.
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 137 
 
 But when, of man's declension from childish innocence, 
 Herbert says 
 
 The growth of flesh is but a blister 
 
 we must demur. 
 
 It is the trouble with Herbert, among many beauties 
 to find any unflawed by this fault. I know three or 
 four only. Let me read you two : 
 
 Discipline 
 
 Throw away Thy rod, 
 Throw away Thy wrath; 
 
 my God, 
 
 Take the gentle path! 
 
 For my heart's desire 
 Unto Thine is bent: 
 
 1 aspire 
 
 To a full consent. 
 
 Not a word or look 
 I affect to own, 
 But by book, 
 And Thy Book alone. 
 
 Though I fail, I weep; 
 Though I halt in pace, 
 
 Yet I creep 
 To the throne of grace. 
 
 Then let wrath remove; 
 Love will do the deed; 
 
 For with love 
 Stony hearts will bleed. 
 
 Love is swift cf foot; 
 Love's a man of war, 
 
 And can shoot, 
 And can hit from far. 
 
 Who can 'scape his bow? 
 That which wrought on Thee, 
 
 Brought Thee low, 
 Needs must work on me. 
 
 Throw away Thy rod; 
 Though man frailties hath, 
 
 Thou art God: 
 Throw away Thy wrath ! 
 
 Love 
 
 Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, 
 
 Guilty of dust and sin. 
 But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack 
 
 From my first entrance in, 
 Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning 
 
 If I lack'd anything.
 
 138 Studies in Literature 
 
 "A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here": 
 
 Love said, "You shall be he." 
 "I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, 
 
 I cannot look on Thee." 
 Love took my hand and smiling did reply, 
 
 "Who made the eyes but I?" 
 
 "Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame 
 
 Go where it doth deserve." 
 "And know you not," says Love, "Who bore the blame? " 
 
 "My dear, then I will serve." 
 "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat." 
 
 So I did sit and eat. 
 
 It seems almost desecrating to draw your attention down 
 to the mere technique of so lovely, so apparently abso- 
 lute a thing. Yet I think you will admire it none the 
 less for noting the masterly use of monosyllables and 
 the exquisite sense of pause, hesitancy and finally 
 command, produced by it : 
 
 Love said, "You shall be he." 
 
 "And know you not," says Love, "Who bore the blame?" 
 
 "My dear, then I will serve." 
 "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat." 
 
 So I did sit and eat. 
 
 Monosyllables throughout. 
 IX 
 
 The Herberts were a high family. But in Wales 
 dwelt another hardly less noble, the Vaughans : and the 
 two had preserved an ancient inveterate feud. Of the 
 Vaughans in 1622 was born the poet Henry, in Breck- 
 nockshire at Llansaintffraed on the bank of the Usk.
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 139 
 
 He was a twin child. We know little of his parents, 
 though that old gossip Aubrey, who happened to be 
 a relative, informs us with a relative's outspokenness 
 that the father was "a coxcomb and no honester than 
 he should be He cozened me out of 505. once." 
 
 The twin brothers Henry and Thomas received their 
 schooling from a clergyman hard by ; and in due course 
 both went up to Jesus College, Oxford ; then, as today, 
 the resort of young Welshmen. Thomas took his 
 degree, and entered Holy Orders; became rector of 
 his native parish, but was ejected by the Parliamentary 
 Commissioners; returned to Oxford; studied alchemy 
 and wrote of it under the name Eugenius Philalethes; 
 wrote some English and Latin verse too; and died in 
 1666. Henry left the university without taking a 
 degree; studied law in London; got entangled in 
 politics, on the royalist side: lost his money and hopes 
 of a career at the bar; fell back upon medicine and 
 retired to Brecknockshire, where among his native hills 
 and beside his beloved Usk he won such present fame 
 and awards as attend a benevolent medical practitioner 
 in the country ; and in the intervals of his practice trans- 
 lated some devotional prose works and left the poems 
 we possess. He died in 1695 at the age of seventy- 
 three a fairly long life; but, as you see, quite a short 
 story. 
 
 The first and most obvious remark upon Vaughan is 
 that his genius was largely imitative; the next and 
 almost as obvious, that it was curiously original. 
 
 For the imitation, his debt to Herbert is often patent, 
 sometimes flagrant ; and indeed here and there amounts 
 to downright literary pilfering. For a couple of ex- 
 amples in Herbert's poem The Agonie occurs this 
 conceit the beauty of which lifts it into a thought :
 
 140 Studies in Literature 
 
 Love is that liquor sweet and most divine 
 Which my God feels as blood, but I, as wine. 
 
 Turn to Vaughan's poem The Passion and read 
 
 Most blessed Vine! 
 
 Whose juice so good 
 
 I feel as Wine, 
 But thy faire branches felt as blood. 
 
 The art of pilfering and spoiling could scarcely be better 
 illustrated. The verse, as verse, is poorer: and the 
 obtruded personification of the Vine robs Herbert's 
 fancy of half his delicacy, converting a subtle metaphor 
 into a flat simile. Take a second example. Herbert 
 in his Providence writes 
 
 Rain, do not hurt my flowers; but gently spend 
 Your hony-drops. 
 
 Vaughan in his Rainbow again conveys and spoils: 
 
 When thou dost shine darkness looks white and fair, 
 Forms turn to Musick, clouds to smiles and air: 
 Rain gently spends his honey-drops. . . . 
 
 But the sum of these direct borrowings by no means 
 exhausts does not begin to exhaust Vaughan's debt 
 to Herbert; as anyone may convince himself by half- 
 an-hour's study of their poems side by side. (We must 
 always remember however that plagiarism, in days when 
 poets rarely printed their poems, but circulated them in 
 MS. among friends was by no means the crime a later 
 age has made it. It did the robbed one no commercial 
 injury.) The influence of Herbert pervades and is felt 
 everywhere. In the invention of "conceits,' too,
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 141 
 
 Vaughan the more certainly stamps himself the imitator 
 the more audaciously he goes (as we should say) one 
 better than his master. Herbert can be quaint: but 
 Herbert must resign and lay down his arms before such 
 a stanza as this describing daybreak: 
 
 But, as in nature, when the day 
 
 Breaks, night adjourns, 
 Stars shut up shop, mists pack away, 
 
 And the moon mourns. 
 
 Stars "shut up shop"! Et sunt commercia coeli with a 
 vengeance ! 
 
 So much for the debit side; now for the credit. At 
 first sight it seems a paradox to claim that a poet so 
 imitative is actually more original and certainly of 
 deeper insight as well as of ampler, more celestial range 
 than the man he copied. And yet it is so, as I think 
 almost anyone will confess after reading Vaughan 's 
 Eternity or The Timber: 
 
 Sure thou didst flourish once! and many springs, 
 Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, 
 
 Pass'd o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings, 
 Which now are dead, lodged in thy living bowers. 
 
 And still a new succession sings and flies; 
 
 Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot 
 Towards the old and still enduring skies, 
 
 While the low violet thrives at their root. 
 
 But thou beneath the sad and heavy line 
 
 Of death, doth waste all senseless, cold, and dark; 
 
 Where not so much as dreams of light may shine, 
 Nor any thought of greenness, leaf, or bark.
 
 142 Studies in Literature 
 
 And yet as if some deep hate and dissent, 
 
 Bred in thy growth betwixt high winds and thee, 
 
 Were still alive thou dost great storms resent 
 Before they come, and know'st how near they be. 
 
 Else all at rest thou liest, and the fierce breath 
 Of tempests can no more disturb thy ease; 
 
 But this thy strange resentment after death 
 
 Means only those who broke in life thy peace. 
 
 Or this poem on Friends Departed, of which I will read 
 some verses : 
 
 They are all gone into the world of light! 
 
 And I alone sit ling'ring here; 
 Their very memory is fair and bright, 
 And my sad thoughts doth clear. 
 
 It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, 
 
 Like stars upon some gloomy grove, 
 Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest 
 After the sun's remove. 
 
 I see them walking in an air of glory, 
 
 Whose light doth trample on my days: 
 My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, 
 Mere glimmering and decays. 
 
 O holy Hope! and high Humility, 
 
 High as the heavens above! 
 
 These are your walks, and you have show'd them me, 
 To kindle my cold love. 
 
 Dear, beauteous Death ! the jewel of the Just, 
 
 Shining nowhere, but in the dark; 
 
 What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust, 
 
 Could man outlook that mark !
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 143 
 
 He that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know, 
 
 At first sight, if the bird be flown; 
 But what fair well or grove he sings in now, 
 That is to him unknown. 
 
 And yet as Angels in some brighter dreams 
 
 Call to the soul, when man doth sleep: 
 So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, 
 And into glory peep. 
 
 If a star were confined into a tomb, 
 
 Her captive flames must needs burn there; 
 But when the hand that lock'd her up gives room, 
 She'll shine through all the sphere. 
 
 O Father of eternal life, and all 
 Created glories under Thee! 
 Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall 
 Into true liberty. 
 
 Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill 
 
 My perspective still as they pass: 
 Or else remove me hence unto that hill, 
 Where I shall need no glass. 
 
 The paradox is not so strange as it appears. Some 
 most original men Vaughan among them want start- 
 ing. They have the soluble genius within them, but 
 it will not crystallise of itself; it must have a shape, 
 a mould. And such men take the mould supplied by 
 their age: it may not be the best for them, but it is 
 what comes to hand. That Vaughan 's "conceits" are 
 often abominably bad where Herbert's were good, does 
 not prove him the lesser genius. Rather, the argument 
 may lie the other way that he executed them badly 
 because he was naturally superior to such devices,
 
 144 Studies in Literature 
 
 whereas they fitted Herbert's cleverer talent like a 
 glove. To prove how simple and direct Vaughan could 
 be when he chose I will conclude this sketch of him 
 with a short and well-known poem quite free of conceits. 
 It is called Peace : 
 
 My soul, there is a country 
 
 Far beyond the stars, 
 Where stands a winged sentry 
 
 All skilful in the wars: 
 There, above noise and danger, 
 
 Sweet Peace sits crown'd with smiles, 
 And One born in a manger 
 
 Commands the beauteous files. 
 He is thy gracious Friend, 
 
 And my soul, awake! 
 Did in pure love descend 
 
 To die here for thy sake. 
 If thou canst get but thither, 
 
 There grows the flower of Peace, 
 The Rose that cannot wither, 
 
 Thy fortress, and thy ease. 
 Leave then thy foolish ranges; 
 
 For none can thee secure 
 But One who never changes 
 
 Thy God, thy life, thy cure. 
 
 I propose in my next lecture, Gentlemen, to start by 
 examining one most important poem of Vaughan's, 
 which will lead us on to deal expeditiously with Tra- 
 herne, Quarles, the two Fletchers, Crashaw, and maybe 
 one or two other poets on this line of spiritual ancestry. 
 
 Yet one last word, which I had almost forgotten. 
 Can you not see that, while we have mystics among us, 
 death for our literature is impossible? No school- 
 master, even, can kill an instinct which lifts the heads
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 145 
 
 of all nobler young spirits to look past his herding, 
 for they scent the high water-brooks. So mysticism too, 
 in its turn, witnesses and guarantees that until the soul 
 of man be dust, literature shall be alive.
 
 III. TRAHERNE, CRASHAW AND OTHERS 
 
 I 
 
 EVERYONE knows Wordsworth's ode Intimations 
 of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child- 
 hood: and the stanza 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
 The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar: 
 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God, who is our home: 
 Heaven lies about us in our infancy. . . . 
 
 I need rehearse no more. And almost everyone knows 
 or, to speak accurately, has been told (which is a 
 somewhat different thing) that Wordsworth borrowed 
 his thought from Vaughan's famous poem The Retreat: 
 
 Happy those early days, when I 
 Shined in my Angel-infancy ! 
 Before I understood this place 
 Appointed for my second race, 
 Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
 But a white celestial thought : 
 When yet I had not walk'd above 
 A mile or two from my first Love . . . 
 146
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 147 
 
 When on some gilded cloud, or flow'r 
 My "gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 Some shadows of Eternity. 
 
 Now very likely, indeed, Wordsworth took it from 
 Vaughan: but quite as easily he might have taken it 
 from any one of a score of the seventeenth century 
 writers with whom we are dealing. With them man's 
 fall from grace was a preoccupation. How does the 
 greatest of them begin his greatest poem ? 
 
 Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the World, and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
 Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, 
 Sing, Heavenly Muse! 
 
 Please understand that I do no more here than assert 
 a historical fact, expressing no opinion outside the 
 province of this Chair as by Statute restricted; that I 
 have not the authority, nor the leisure, nor (anyway) 
 the inclination to re-start the Pelagian heresy in Cam- 
 bridge. I simply affirm, without comment, that these 
 theological poets and preachers of the seventeenth 
 century happy though they were in having no Dar- 
 winian hypothesis of man's descent to answer were 
 intrigued almost, you may say, one and all by man's 
 lapse from a state of innocence. You may pursue their 
 curiosity about this down (say) to Dr. South, who was 
 born in 1633 and died a Canon of Christchurch at 
 eighty-three so that, if actual experience or obser- 
 vation could attest man's depravity, he had, as men 
 go, plenty of both. Take up a sermon of his, Human 
 Perfection : or Adam in Paradise, and read
 
 148 Studies in Literature 
 
 The image of God in man [he writes] is that universal 
 rectitude of all the faculties of the soul, by which they stand 
 apt and disposed to their respective duties and operations. 
 
 And first for its noblest faculty, the understanding: it was 
 then [i.e., in Paradise] sublime, clear and inspiring, and, as it 
 were, the soul's upper region, lofty and serene, free from the 
 vapours and disturbances of the inferior affections. It was 
 the leading controlling faculty; all the passions wore the 
 colours of reason; it did not so much persuade as command; 
 it was not counsel but dictator ... It did not so properly 
 apprehend as irradiate the object ; not so much find, as make 
 things intelligible. It did arbitrate upon the several reports 
 of sense and all varieties of imagination: not like a drowsy 
 judge, only hearing, but also directing their verdict. In 
 sum, it was vegete, quick and lively; open as the day, 
 untainted as the morning, full of the innocence and sprightli- 
 ness of youth; it gave the soul a bright and full view into 
 all things. 
 
 South then divides this Understanding into Under- 
 standing Speculative, which gives the mind its general 
 notions and rules, and the Practical Understanding, 
 "that storehouse of the soul in which are treasured up 
 the rules of action and the seeds of morality. Of the 
 first, the Speculative Understanding with its notions, 
 he goes on: 
 
 Now it was Adam's happiness in the State of Innocence to 
 have these clear and unsullied. He came into the world a 
 philosopher. He could see consequences yet dormant in 
 their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of 
 their causes; his understanding could almost pierce into 
 future contingents; his conjectures improving even to pro- 
 phecy, or to certainties of prediction: till his fall it was 
 ignorant of nothing but of sin; or at least it rested in the 
 notion without the smart of the experiment. Could any 
 difficulty have been propounded, the solution would have
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 149 
 
 been as early as the proposal. . . . Like a better Archi- 
 medes, the issue of all his enquiries was an eupiqxa. An 
 eupt]xa, the offspring of his brain without the sweat of his 
 brow. ... An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, 
 and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise. 
 
 Now if you ask me, Gentlemen, what I think of that, 
 as prose, I answer that I find it not half as good as it 
 looks. If you ask me what I think of its doctrine, I 
 answer that I don't believe a word of it : that the learned 
 Dr. South is dispensing positive information on a sub- 
 ject of which he is as ignorant as anyone else. Adam's 
 "understanding could almost pierce into future con- 
 tingents. ' ' Why ' ' almost ' ' ? Why, because there was, 
 as King George III said of the dumpling, the apple to be 
 accounted for. So when, of the practical understanding, 
 South goes on to instance such maxims as ' ' That God is 
 to be worshipped, " "That parents are to be honoured, " 
 "That a man's word is to be kept, " I ask concerning the 
 middle proposition, what Adam could possibly know 
 about parents, or at that time even about children, 
 having neither? As when South assures us, of Love, 
 that "this affection, in the state of innocence, was 
 happily pitched upon its right object," I cannot forgo 
 the reflection that, after all, there was but one lady in 
 the garden. Forgive me that I speak brusquely. In 
 my belief the first three chapters of Genesis contain 
 nothing to justify South; and in my belief no handling 
 can well be too rough-and-ready for one who expands 
 himself so pretentiously upon ground where an angel 
 might be diffident. 
 
 But this is opinion : and I have quoted South's sermon, 
 not for what it is worth as opinion, but for what it is 
 worth as evidence of a historical fact that the minds
 
 150 Studies in Literature 
 
 of the seventeenth century played more persistently 
 than do ours with the picture of a state of innocence and 
 the way of man's fall from it, and, by consequence, 
 with the notion which Wordsworth afterwards elabo- 
 rated the notion of an ante-natal realm of bliss out of 
 which the child descends (as the children you may 
 remember in Maeterlinck's Oiseau Bleu, the little ones 
 waiting to be born), to lose his ineffable aura as this 
 world entraps him, encloses him in the shades of its 
 prison-house. 
 
 Let us turn to a more delicate mind than South's, and 
 consult the Platonist John Earle. These seventeenth 
 century men, as you know, were much given to penning 
 Characters more or less in imitation of the Characters 
 of Theophrastus. It was a literary craze in its day; 
 and not seldom, to my thinking, they achieved things 
 far more philosophical, as well as far more poetical, 
 than any in Theophrastus's range. Here is what John 
 Earle, in his Microcosmographie, writes of "A Child": 
 
 A Child 
 
 He is nature's fresh picture newly drawn in oil; which 
 time, and much handling, dims and defaces. His soul is 
 yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the 
 world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. 
 He is purely happy because he knows no evil, nor hath made 
 means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He arrives 
 not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures evils to come 
 by foreseeing them. He kisses and loves all, and, when the 
 smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater. . . . 
 
 We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest : 
 and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems 
 and mockings of men's business. His father hath writ 
 him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 151 
 
 his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what 
 innocence he has outlived. The elder he grows he is a stair 
 lower from God; and like his first father much worse in his 
 breeches. 
 
 He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; 
 the one imitates his pureness, and the other falls into his 
 simplicity. Could he put off his body with his little coat, 
 he had got Eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but 
 one heaven for another. 
 
 II 
 
 But for faith in this notion which Earle treated so 
 playfully, and for burning fervour in that faith we must 
 go to a lowly follower of Herbert and Vaughan, to an 
 exceedingly humble man of heart Thomas Traherne. 
 
 Who was Traherne? Well, we know him now to 
 have been a poor Welsh parson, born in 1636 or there- 
 abouts, somewhere on the Welsh border (likeliest at 
 Hereford), the son of a shoemaker; that somehow in 
 1652 he managed to enter at Brasenose College, Oxford, 
 was made Bachelor of Arts in 1656, Master of Arts in 
 1661, Bachelor of Divinity in 1669; that he took Orders 
 and became vicar of Credenhill, in Herefordshire, about 
 1661; where, he tells us, "being seated among silent 
 trees, and meads and hills " he made a resolve to cling to 
 this childish felicity. Yes, " I chose rather to live upon 
 ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and 
 feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my 
 time clearly to myself"; that after nine years or so he 
 was removed to London to be chaplain to Sir Orlando 
 Bridgman, Lord Keeper of the Seals, and that he died 
 in Bridgman's house at Teddington in October, 1674, 
 aged but thirty-eight. 
 
 For two hundred and fifty years his writings were
 
 152 Studies in Literature 
 
 lost, and his name was not even the shade of a name. 
 When, in 1896 or 1897, a Mr. Brooks picked up two 
 innominate volumes in MS. for a few pence at a street 
 bookstall, and submitted them to Dr. Grosart, that 
 veteran at once and excusably pronounced them to be 
 the work of Vaughan and set about including them in 
 a new edition of Vaughan which, just before his death, 
 he was endeavouring to find means to publish. On his 
 death, his library being dispersed, the volumes again 
 started wandering. It were a fascinating story had I 
 the time to tell it how they came into the hands of 
 the late Mr. Bertram Dobell, most lovable of booksellers 
 (which is saying a great deal), how Mr. Dobell hit on a 
 clue, followed it, and discovered the true author, and 
 how later a third MS. not bearing Traherne's name, was 
 found in the British Museum. I will only recount my 
 own very small part in the affair. Seventeen years ago, 
 when preparing the Oxford Book of English Verse I was 
 sent by the late Professor York Powell, without com- 
 ment, a bookseller's catalogue with a poem on its back 
 page. It was the poem beginning ' ' News from a foreign 
 country came, " part of which I read to you a fortnight 
 ago. I made enquiries, and Mr. Dobell very kindly 
 copied out some other poems for me none of which, 
 however, seemed to me quite so good as News, which 
 duly went into the Oxford Book and with them some 
 prose passages from the second MS. volume entitled Cen- 
 turies of Meditations. I wrote back that the prose 
 seemed to me even finer stuff than the poems, and 
 urged him to publish it. The poems appeared that is, 
 first saw print in 1903, Centuries of Meditations in 1908, 
 and I cannot forbear telling you what pleasure it was to 
 open the volume, to find my own name on the editor's 
 page of dedication, and to reflect (a little wistfully if
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 153 
 
 not whimsically) that maybe this author, forgotten for 
 two hundred and fifty years might, after another two 
 hundred and fifty, rescue from complete oblivion the 
 name of another who had admired him. 
 
 Well, let that be we all have our little vanities. 
 But of Traherne himself the first and last word is that 
 he carries into a sustained ecstasy this adoration of the 
 wisdom of childhood Regnum Scientiae ut regnum coeli 
 non nisi sub persona infantis intratur: and it is truly mar- 
 vellous how the man can harp so long and elaborately 
 on one string. I have said that his verse, in my opinion, 
 ranks lower than his prose : but here is a specimen : 
 
 How like an Angel came I down ! 
 How bright are all things here! 
 When first among His works I did appear 
 O how their Glory me did crown! 
 The world resembled his Eternity 
 
 In which my soul did walk; 
 And everything that I did see 
 Did with me talk. 
 
 The streets were paved with golden stones, 
 
 The boys and girls were mine, 
 O how did all their lovely faces shine! 
 The sons of men were holy ones, 
 
 In joy and beauty they appear'd to me: 
 
 And every thing which here I found, 
 (While like an angel I did see) 
 Adorn'd the ground. 
 
 Proprieties [properties] themselves were mine, 
 
 And hedges ornaments; 
 Walls, boxes, coffers, and their rich contents 
 
 Did not divide my joys, but all combine.
 
 154 Studies in Literature 
 
 Clothes, ribbons, jewels, laces, I esteem'd 
 
 My joys by others worn: 
 For me they all to wear them seem'd 
 When I was born. 
 
 So much for his verse : now for similar thinking in prose: 
 
 These pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the 
 womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the 
 best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe. By 
 the Gift of God they attended me into the world, and by His 
 special favour I remember them till now. . . . 
 
 The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never 
 should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had 
 stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones 
 of the street were as precious as gold : the gates were at first 
 the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first 
 through one of the gates transported and ravished me, 
 their . . . unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and al- 
 most mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonder- 
 ful things. The Men! O what venerable and revered 
 creatures did the aged seem ! Immortal Cherubims. 
 
 At this point I break off to wonder, irreverently, what 
 Traherne would have made of some of my own uncles 
 and aunts; the Calvinistic one. At that age I could 
 have spared them to him or to anyone for experiment. 
 
 And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and 
 maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty ! Boys and 
 girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving 
 jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But 
 all things abided eternally as they were in their proper 
 places. . . . The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be 
 built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was 
 mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and 
 silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 155 
 
 and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun 
 and moon and stars, and all the World was mine; and 
 I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. ... So that with 
 much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty 
 devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as 
 it were, a little child again that I may enter into the King- 
 dom of God. 
 
 So much then, again, for Traherne. But before 
 leaving him I will ask you to note that Donne, Herbert, 
 Vaughan and he the four whose spiritual kinship we 
 have been tracing, came all by ancestry, proud or poor, 
 from the Welsh Marches. Donne's forefathers were of 
 Wales and spelt their name "Dwynne. " The Herberts 
 were lords over Pembroke, the Vaughans over Breck- 
 nockshire, Traherne a poor tradesman's son of Hereford. 
 I distrust generalisations: but there would seem to be 
 something here in "the Celtic spirit." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Before taking up another line of mystics let me deal 
 briefly with three or four who fall to be mentioned 
 here. 
 
 Sir John Davies (1570 or thereabouts- 162 6 another 
 Welshman) and Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650 or so) 
 reduced this great order of the universe to harmony 
 with man, its microcosm, in elaborate poems by quaint 
 methods. Davies in his Orchestra set it all dancing, 
 treading a measure much like his mistress Queen 
 Elizabeth, "high and disposedly. " For a taste: 
 
 For loe the Sea that fleets about the Land, 
 And like a girdle clips her solide waist, 
 
 Musicke and measure both doth understand; 
 For his great chrystall eye is alwayes cast
 
 156 Studies in Literature 
 
 Up to the Moone, and on her fixed fast; 
 And as she daunceth in her pallid spheere, 
 So daunceth he about his Center heere. 
 
 To Phineas Fletcher and to his Purple Island (entranc- 
 ing name) I hied as a boy after buried treasure, only to 
 discover it a weary allegory of the human body and its 
 functions. (His brother, Giles Fletcher, who died 
 young, was an imitator of Spenser and does not come 
 into this purview.) 
 
 Henry King, Bishop of Chichester (1592-1669), 
 though little of a mystic, may come in as a friend of 
 Donne's, one of his legal executors and withal a poet; 
 of extraordinary charm, too, within the short range 
 which he knew how to keep, so that you cannot make 
 his acquaintance but you remember it with pleasure. 
 He is best known, I suppose, by his lyric "Tell me no 
 more how fair she is." But let me quote you a few 
 lines from his lovely Exequy on his Wife: 
 
 Meantime thou hast her, earth: much good 
 
 May my harm do thee! Since it stood 
 
 With Heaven's will I might not call 
 
 Her longer mine, I give thee all 
 
 My short-lived right and interest 
 
 In her whom living I loved best. 
 
 Be kind to her, and prithee look 
 
 Thou write into thy Doomsday book 
 
 Each parcel of this rarity 
 
 Which in thy casket shrined doth lie, 
 
 As thou wilt answer Him that lent 
 
 Not gave thee my dear monument. 
 
 So close the ground, and 'bout her shade 
 
 Black curtains draw: my bride is laid.
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 157 
 
 Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed 
 
 Never to be disquieted! 
 
 My last good-night ! Thou wilt not wake 
 
 Till I thy fate shall overtake: 
 
 Till age, or grief, or sickness must 
 
 Marry my body to that dust 
 
 It so much loves; and fill the room 
 
 My heart keeps empty in thy tomb. 
 
 Stay for me there . . . 
 
 Each minute is a short degree 
 
 And every hour a step towards thee. . . . 
 
 'Tis true with shame and grief I yield 
 
 Thou, like the van, first took'st the field; 
 
 And gotten hast the victory 
 
 In thus adventuring to die 
 
 Before me, whose more years might crave 
 
 A just precedence in the grave. 
 
 But hark ! my pulse, like a soft drum, 
 
 Beats my approach, tells thee I come; 
 
 And slow howe'er my marches be 
 
 I shall at last sit down by thee. 
 
 The thought of this bids me go on 
 
 And wait my dissolution 
 
 With hope and comfort. Dear! forgive 
 
 The crime I am content to live 
 
 Divided with but half a heart 
 
 Till we shall meet and never part. 
 
 Nor is William Habington (1605-1654) quite a 
 mystic. Though a Roman Catholic he might be ranked 
 alongside Herbert, did he own even a measure of Her- 
 bert's capacity for rapture, for fine excess. His much 
 admired Nox Nocti Indicat Scientiam 
 
 When I survey the bright 
 Celestial sphere . . .
 
 158 Studies in Literature 
 
 says little more than Addison's hymn, "The spacious 
 firmament on high," says later on: and that, to tell 
 truth, does not amount to much. Its opening 
 
 When I survey the bright 
 
 Celestial sphere; 
 
 So rich with jewels hung, that Night 
 Doth like an Ethiop bride appear . . . 
 
 is good: or might be, did it not challenge the deadly 
 comparison with Shakespeare's 
 
 0, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! 
 It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night 
 Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear. 
 
 Its close is better: 
 
 For as yourselves your empires fall, 
 And every kingdom hath a grave. 
 
 Thus those celestial fires, 
 
 Though seeming mute, 
 The fallacy of our desires 
 
 And all the pride of life confute: 
 
 For they have watch'd since first 
 
 The World had birth: 
 And found sin in itself accurst 
 And nothing permanent on Earth. 
 
 Quite good commonplace: but commonplace, never- 
 theless. 
 
 As for Christopher Harvey ( 1 597-1 663) , friend of Wal- 
 ton a Cheshire man who became rector of Whitney 
 in Herefordshire (again we are on the Welsh Marches) 
 he was a mystic of the epigrammatic kind. He 
 imitated Herbert and, what is more, didn't care who
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 159 
 
 knew it. The title of his best known volume runs 
 thus The Synagogue: or The Shadow of the Temple. 
 Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations in Imitation of 
 Mr. George Herbert. Printed for Philemon Stephens at 
 the Guilded Lyon in St. Paul's Churchyard. The poem 
 I like best in it is nothing mystical. It opens magni- 
 ficently, thus 
 
 The Bishop? Yes, why not? ... 
 
 but cannot, of course, maintain that level. Two stan- 
 zas, however, may be worth quoting in these days: 
 
 The Bishop? Yes, why not? What doth that name 
 
 Import which is unlawful or unfit? 
 To say The Overseer is the same 
 
 In substance, and no hurt (I hope) in it: 
 But sure if men did not despise the thing, 
 Such scorn upon the name they would not fling. 
 
 Some priests some presbyters I mean would be 
 
 Each Overseer of his sev'ral cure; 
 But one Superiour, to oversee 
 
 Them altogether, they will not endure. 
 
 This the main difference is, that I can see, 
 Bishops they would not have, but they would be. 
 
 IV 
 
 Before speaking of a more important and more 
 mystical mystic, Francis Quarles (1592-1644), I must 
 say just a word upon a tenet of the mystical faith which 
 naturally flows from the two principles we have dis- 
 cussed at some length. If the universe be an ordered 
 harmony, and the soul of man a tiny lesser harmony, 
 vibrating to it, yearning to it, seeking to be one with it : 
 if, again, of recollection it knows itself to have been at
 
 160 Studies in Literature 
 
 some time one with it, though now astray upon earth, a 
 lost province (as I put it, a fortnight ago) of the King- 
 dom of God; why, then, it follows that the King himself 
 passionately seeks to recover, to retrieve, that which 
 was lost. The idea of a Christ bruising his feet end- 
 lessly over stony places, insatiate in search of lost Man, 
 his brother, or the lost Soul, his desired bride, haunts 
 all our mystical poetry from that lovely fifteenth cen- 
 tury poem Quia Amore Langueo, down to Francis 
 Thompson's Hound of Heaven. In a former lecture I 
 read Quia Amore Langueo to you almost in extenso. 
 Suffer me today to recall but two verses of the wounded 
 Christ chanting his bride : 
 
 I crowned her with bliss and she me with thorn; 
 
 I led her to chamber and she me to die; 
 I brought her to worship and she me to scorn; 
 I did her reverence and she me villany. 
 To love that loveth is no maistry; 
 Her hate made never my love her foe: 
 Ask me then no question why 
 Quia amore langueo. 
 
 My love is in her chamber: hold your peace! 
 
 Make ye no noise, but let her sleep. 
 My babe I would not were in dis-ease, 
 I may not hear my dear child weep. 
 With my pap I shall her keep; 
 Ne marvel ye not that I tend her to: 
 The wound in my side were ne'er so deep 
 But Quia amore langueo. 
 
 That cry still haunts out of a small innominate poem 
 of the century with which we are dealing:
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 161 
 
 My blood so red 
 
 For thee was shed, 
 Come home again, come home again; 
 My own sweet heart, come home again! 
 You've gone astray 
 Out of your way, 
 Come home again, come home again! 
 
 It haunts Quarles ; but with Quarles it is rather the cry 
 of the soul, the Bride, seeking the Bridegroom : 
 
 I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in 
 the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I 
 sought him, but I found him not. 
 
 The watchmen that go about the city found me : to whom 
 I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth? 
 
 It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found 
 him whom my soul loveth. I held him and would not let 
 him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, 
 and into the chamber of her that conceived me. 
 
 I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes 
 and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake 
 my love, till he please. 
 
 "So I my best-Beloved's am : so he is mine." That is a 
 refrain of Quarles, and his constant note. But in the 
 one poem I shall quote from him I am redeeming, in 
 some fashion or trying to redeem a wrong. By an 
 error into which no less a man than the late W. E. 
 Henley fell along with me, an old book misled us into 
 giving the lines to so unlikely a man as Rochester. 
 And there they are, in the Oxford Book of English Verse 
 ascribed to Rochester, and the ascription must be 
 corrected though I find it will involve destroying about 
 sixty pages of stereotyped plates. But they are 
 Quarles's. They run :
 
 162 Studies in Literature 
 
 Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why 
 Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny 
 The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye? 
 
 Without thy light what light remains in me? 
 Thou art my life: my way, my light's in thee; 
 I live, I move, and by thy beams I see. 
 
 Thou art my life If thou but turn away, 
 
 My life's a thousand deaths. Thou art my way, 
 
 Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray. 
 
 My light thou art: without thy glorious sight 
 My eyes are darken'd with eternal night. 
 My Love, thou art my way, my life, my light. 
 
 Thou art my way; I wander if thou fly. 
 Thou art my light; if hid, how blind am I! 
 Thou art my life; if thou withdraw'st, I die. 
 
 My eyes are dark and blind; I cannot see: 
 To whom or whither should my darkness flee, 
 But to that light? and what's that light but thee? 
 
 If I have lost my path, dear lover, say, 
 Shall I still wander in a doubtful way? 
 Love, shall a lamb of Israel's sheepfold stray? 
 
 And yet thou turn'st away thy face and fly'st me! 
 And yet I sue for grace and thou deny'st me! 
 Speak, art thou angry, Love, or only try'st me? 
 
 Dissolve thy sunbeams, close thy wings and stay! 
 See, see how I am blind, and dead, and stray! 
 thou that art my life, my light, my way !
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 163 
 
 Then work thy will ! If passion bid me flee, 
 My reason shall obey; my wings shall be 
 Stretch'd out no farther than from me to thee! 
 
 Mention of wings reminds me to say a word it shall 
 be no more on the quaint metrical and typographical 
 devices in which these poets revelled ; artificialities in far 
 worse taste than mere puns and verbal conceits ; very far 
 worse than the rebuses and elaborate emblems around 
 which Quarles, for example, as a symbolist, wrote so 
 many of his poems. It was the day of such affecta- 
 tions; of ring-posies, acrostics, and the topiary art that 
 designed mazes, trimmed yew trees and tortured them 
 to the shapes of lions, camels, huntsmen with hounds. 
 Its worst excess is seen, possibly, in the tricks (dear to 
 Herbert, Harvey, and others) of writing verses to the 
 shape of altars, pyramids, the wings of a bird. And my 
 word upon these I shall borrow from Bacon's Essay Of 
 Gardens: 
 
 As for the Making of Knots, or Figures, with Divers 
 Coloured Earths, that they may lie under the Windowes 
 of the House, on that Side, which the Garden stands, they 
 be but Toyes: You may see as good Sights, many times, 
 in Tarts. 
 
 VI 
 
 Our last poet, Richard Crashaw (1613?-! 649) ran to 
 excesses of verbal conceit which anybody can arraign, 
 albeit Johnson rather unaccountably overlooked their 
 help, which had been priceless, for his indictment of the 
 metaphysical poets. Everyone knows the flagrancies 
 of The Weeper with the Magdalen's tearful eyes:
 
 164 Studies in Literature 
 
 Two walking baths, two weeping motions, 
 Portable and compendious Oceans, 
 
 and the "brisk Cherub" supposed to sip from them 
 each morning, 
 
 and his song 
 Tastes of this breakfast all day long. 
 
 Yes, the flagrancies are flagrant : yet I think too much 
 has been made of them. For (as I hold the business of 
 an examiner is always to discover how much a student 
 does know and never how much he does not), even so 
 I hold that we may overlook a hundred flagrancies for 
 such a stanza as this : 
 
 The dew no more will weep 
 The primrose's pale cheek to deck, 
 
 The dew no more will sleep 
 Nuzzled in the lily's neck : 
 
 Much rather would it tremble here 
 And leave them both to be thy tear. 
 
 Crashaw, one must admit, is often terribly at his ease 
 in Sion: and if one must contrast him with Herbert 
 often so gently familiar, too, with his God why, the 
 difference is that Herbert had, with modesty, a breeding 
 that made him at home in any company. But how 
 Crashaw's tenderness excuses all familiarity in his fare- 
 well to Saint Teresa, going to martyrdom ! 
 
 Farewell then, all the world, adieu ! 
 Teresa is no more for you. . . . 
 Farewell whatever dear may be, 
 Mother's arms or father's knee ! 
 Farewell house, and farewell home! 
 She's for the Moors and Martyrdom. 
 Sweet, not so fast. . . .
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 165 
 
 For a last and longer taste of Crashaw let me read a 
 few verses of the Hymn of the Shepherdmen sung over the 
 infant Christ in his snow-bound cradle : 
 
 Tityrus (they are called Tityrus and Thyrsis) 
 
 I saw the curl'd drops, soft and slow, 
 
 Come hovering o'er the place's head; 
 Off 'ring their whitest sheets of snow 
 To furnish the fair infant's bed. 
 
 "Forbear, " said I; "be not too bold, 
 Your fleece is white, but 'tis too cold." 
 
 Thyrsis. I saw the obsequious seraphim 
 
 Their rosy fleece of fire bestow: 
 For well they now can spare their wings 
 Since Heaven itself lies here below. 
 
 "Well done," said I; "but are you sure 
 Your down, so warm, will pass for pure?" 
 
 Both. No no; your King's not yet to seek 
 
 Where to repose his royal head: 
 See, see, how soon his new-bloom'd cheek 
 'Twixt mother's breasts is gone to bed. 
 "Sweet choice," said we; "no way but so 
 Not to ly cold yet sleep in snow." 
 
 Chorus. She sings thy tears asleep, and dips 
 
 Her kisses in thy weeping eye; 
 She spreads the red leaves of thy lips 
 That in their buds yet blushing lie. 
 
 She 'gainst those mother diamonds tries 
 The points of her young eagle's eyes. 
 
 To thee, meek Majesty, soft King 
 Of simple graces and sweet loves! 
 
 Each of us his lamb will bring, 
 Each his pair of silver doves !
 
 166 Studies in Literature 
 
 At last, in fire of thy fair eyes, 
 Ourselves become our own best sacrifice. 
 
 VII 
 
 In conclusion, you certainly will not charge me, 
 Gentlemen, with having in these lectures withheld any 
 due I could bring of admiration for our seventeenth 
 century mystical poets. Yet for a personal confession 
 I desire not to live very long at one stretch with them. 
 You may put it, if you will, that he is blameworthy 
 who finds them 
 
 too bright or good 
 For human nature's daily food. 
 
 But I find their atmosphere too rare, and at the same 
 time too nebulous, their manna too ambrosial, unsatis- 
 fying to my hunger. I turn from vapours, seeking 
 back to the firm Greek outline, to the art which in 
 Aristotle's phrase, exhibits men and women in action 
 TtpdrTOYTes above all to the breathing, familiar, ador- 
 able bodies of my kind. I want Daphnis at the spring, 
 Rebecca at the well, Ruth stretched at Boaz's feet, 
 silent in the sleeping granary. 
 
 You promise heavens free from strife, 
 
 Pure truth and perfect change of will; 
 But sweet, sweet, is this human life 
 So sweet, I fain would breathe it still; 
 Your chilly stars I can forgo; 
 This warm kind world is all I know. 
 
 Forsooth the present we must give 
 
 To that which cannot pass away; 
 All beauteous things for which we live 
 
 By laws of time and space decay
 
 Seventeenth Century Poets 167 
 
 But O the very reason why 
 
 I clasp them, is because they die! 
 
 So even coming from the presence of Dante, with an 
 old schoolmaster of mine I whisper, "Ariosto, wait for 
 me. ' ' So from symposia of these mystics, rapturous but 
 jejune, as from the vegetarian feast of Eugenists and of 
 other men made perfect, I return to knock in at the old 
 tavern with the cosy red blinds, where I may meet Don 
 Quixote, Sancho Panza, Douglas and Percy, Mr. Pick- 
 wick and Sam Weller, Romeo and the Three Musketeers 
 above all, Falstaff, with Mistress Quickly to serve 
 me. I want the personal Shakespeare, Johnson, 
 Goldsmith, Lamb, among men: of women I need to 
 worship no Saint Teresa, but Miranda the maid, 
 Imogen the wife. For 
 
 There vitality, there, there solely in song 
 
 Resides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs 
 Their forceful cravings the theme are: there it is strong. 
 
 That is the gospel of Meredith, and I subscribe to it. 
 For we come out of earth and fall back to earth; and 
 the spring of our craving soars though it reach to 
 God on the homely jet of our geniture.
 
 THE POETRY OF 
 GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 I HAVE chosen, Gentlemen, to speak of George Mere- 
 dith's poetry, this morning, for two or three reasons ; 
 of which to be honest the foremost is that I delight 
 in it. But, for a second, I think it time to hint at 
 least that the Modern and Medieval Languages Board 
 intend to justify by practice what they meant when, 
 in framing the separate English Tripos, they so far 
 ignored academic tradition and dared the rage of 
 schoolmasters which, like that of the sheep, is terrible 
 as to open the study of English down to our own 
 times, declining to allow that any past date could be 
 settled, even by university statute, as the one upon 
 which English literature took to its bed, and expired, 
 and was beatified. I have possibly as much reason as 
 anyone in this room to know how faulty one's judgment 
 may be about modern work, and specially about modern 
 poetry. Still the task of appraising it has to be done, 
 for the books of our time are the books of our time. 
 They tell us in their various ways "How it strikes a 
 Contemporary": and we shall not intelligently prepare 
 ourselves, here at Cambridge, by drawing an imaginary 
 line somewhere between the past and the present and 
 
 168
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 169 
 
 announcing, "On this side are the certified dead, who 
 are alive; on that, the living, who are non-existent." 
 Hazlitt's remark, "I hate to read new books, " or some- 
 body else's that, whenever a new book came out, he 
 read an old one, is well, just the sort of thing one does 
 say at the beginning of a familiar essay or at the dinner- 
 table; and to press it to absurdity were an easy waste of 
 time. "Ah, sir, " said the lady, "this is a sad, degener- 
 ate age!" "Ah, madam," answered the philosopher, 
 "let us thank heaven that neither you nor I belong to 
 it." 
 
 And, after all, what does it matter to this large world 
 in the long run if a tripos candidate should pronounce 
 a mistaken judgment on the merits of Lascelles Aber- 
 crombie, John Masefield or John Drinkwater? 
 
 Moreover I have insisted, and shall go on insisting 
 while I speak from this place, that upon a school of 
 English here rests an obligation to teach the writing of 
 good English as well as the reading of it : to teach the 
 writing of it through the reading. I want the average 
 educated Englishman to write English as deftly, as 
 scrupulously, as the average educated Frenchman 
 writes French; to have, as at present he has not, at 
 least an equal respect for his language. Nay, our 
 language being one of the glories of our birth and state, 
 I want him to draw self-respect from his use of it, as 
 men of good ancestry are careful not to derogate from 
 their forefathers. I would have him sensible that a 
 sloppy sentence is no more nearly "good enough" than 
 dirty linen is good enough. I want, indeed, Prose "in 
 widest commonalty spread." I desire to put it on 
 merely practical grounds, using a fairly recent example 
 that among us we make it impossible to do again 
 what our Admiralty did with the battle of Jutland, to
 
 170 Studies in Literature 
 
 win a victory at sea and lose it in a despatch. And I 
 use this illustration because many who will hardly be 
 convinced that a thing is worth doing well for its own 
 sake, may yet listen when you show them that to do it 
 ill, indifferently, laxly, means public damage. There 
 used to be a saying in the Fleet and it should have 
 reached the Admiralty that "Nigh-enough is the 
 worst man in the ship." 
 
 Now although our fathers it must be confessed 
 tried harder than we to write prose; although to our 
 age belongs that rampant substitute which I once de- 
 nounced to you under the name of Jargon ; nevertheless 
 it were, as I hold, a folly to hedge off good writing of 
 our day and bid you fasten your study upon remote 
 masterpieces. Admire them, study them, by them im- 
 prove your own style. But improve it also by studying 
 how good writers today are adapting it to express what 
 men and women think and do in our time. For we 
 belong to it. We cannot, as Charles Lamb once 
 threatened in a pet, say ' ' Damn the age ! I will write 
 for antiquity": and as little ought we to surrender 
 to the baser fashions of the present. But we should, 
 I contend, face the arena and make what best use we 
 may of that present use, 
 
 Quern penes arbitrium est, et jus et norma loquendi. 
 II 
 
 You are thinking perhaps that all this lies wide of any 
 talk about George Meredith who, to begin with, is dead, 
 and while alive was a doubtful exemplar of pellucid 
 English. 
 
 Now, for the first point, you must forgive me that I, 
 who had the honour to know him enough to hear him
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 171 
 
 talk frankly, can scarcely think of him as dead, and 
 certainly can never think of him as old. 
 
 "I suppose," he admitted once, "I should regard myself 
 as getting old I am seventy-four. But I do not feel to be 
 growing old, either in heart or mind. I still look on life 
 with a young man's eye. I have always hoped I should 
 not grow old as some do with a palsied intellect, living 
 backwards, regarding other people as anachronisms because 
 they themselves have lived on into other times and left 
 their sympathies behind them with the years." 
 
 He never did. You must understand that while in 
 conversation and bearing he played with innocent ex- 
 travagancies which, in a smaller man, might be mis- 
 taken for affectations in particular with a high Spanish 
 courtesy which was equally at the service of his cook 
 and of his king you soon perceived all this to be 
 genuine; the natural manner of the man. It did not 
 pretend a false sprightliness of 
 
 Days, when the ball of our vision 
 
 Had eagles that flew unabash'd to sun; 
 
 When the grasp on the bow was decision, 
 And arrow and hand and eye were one. 
 
 But he recognised that this had been, and was irrecover- 
 able; that while the time lasted it had been priceless. 
 No poet, no thinker, growing old, had ever a more 
 fearless trust in youth ; none has ever had a truer sense 
 of our duty to it : 
 
 Keep the young generations in hail, 
 And bequeath them no tumbled house. 
 
 None has ever been more scornful of the asserted 
 wisdom of our seniors, who,
 
 172 Studies in Literature 
 
 on their last plank, 
 Pass mumbling it as nature's final page . . . 
 
 and would petrify the young with rules of wisdom, lest 
 as he says scornfully 
 
 Lest dreaded Change, long damm'd by dull decay, 
 Should bring the world a vessel steer'd by brain, 
 And ancients musical at close of day. 
 
 "Earth loves her young," begins his next sonnet: 
 
 Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads 
 
 The ways they walk; by what they speak oppress'd. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I have a more difficult defence to put up against his 
 alleged and, in places, undeniable obscurity. Rather, 
 it would be more difficult if I proposed to put up any. 
 But I do not. 
 
 Let us separate obscurity from ugliness. Let us take, 
 for example, Shakespeare's King Lear, which contains 
 somewhat of both; and I put it to you that our sense 
 of tremendous beauty as we read that play is twin with 
 a sense of the bestial lurking in humankind. Or I ask 
 you to consider Shakespeare's Pericles and say, "Is it or 
 is it not the test of the brothel scenes that passes Marina 
 for adorable?" to consider The Tempest and answer, 
 "Where would be Ariel or where even Miranda, or 
 where the whole lovely magic, with Caliban left out?" 
 But obscurity is failure. It may be a partial failure; it 
 may be an entirely honourable failure, born of bravery 
 to face truths for which, because they are difficult or 
 rugged, the writer can hardly find expressive words, and 
 smooth mellifluous words yet more hardly. Still it is a
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 173 
 
 disability, albeit (let me add) with this compensation, 
 that when the fuliginous clouds are rifted, when, as 
 often with Donne, with Browning, with Meredith, we 
 stand and gaze into a sudden vista of clear beauty, the 
 surprise is strangely effective : it has an awe of its own 
 and a reward not illegitimate. I might quote you from 
 Meredith separate lines or very short passages by the 
 score to illustrate this. Take one example only, sum- 
 marising that love of Earth which, as we shall find, 
 is the master secret he teaches : 
 
 Until at last this love of Earth reveals 
 A soul beside our own, to quicken, quell, 
 Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift. 
 
 ' ' Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift. ' ' Milton 
 taught that line: but for Milton it had never been 
 written : and yet it could never have been written, after 
 Milton, by any but an authentic poet. 
 
 IV 
 
 Fortunately, however, Meredith has left some poems, 
 unchallengeably beautiful, in which a reader impatient 
 of obscurity will discover little or nothing to tease him. 
 And since and although my practice this morning may 
 seem to contradict it no small part of a teacher's 
 duty consists in saving other people's time, let me 
 indicate a few of Meredith's poems which, if you like 
 them, will lead you to persevere with more difficult 
 ones in which, if my experience be of use, you will find 
 much delight : for there is a pleasure in critical pains as 
 well as in poetic. If you like them not, why then you 
 will be in a position to decide on saving further time, 
 though you lose something else.
 
 174 Studies in Literature 
 
 The first Phoebus with Admetus I will read in full. 
 You know the legend: how Phoebus Apollo lord of 
 the sun, of music, of archery, of medicine was exiled 
 by his father Zeus for having slain the Cyclops, and 
 condemned to serve a term on earth, tending the flocks 
 of king Admetus of Thessaly. This is the tale of the 
 shepherds and herdsmen who had known the divine 
 guest and the wondrous great season of plenty he 
 brought: 1 
 
 When by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked, 
 
 Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-God, 
 Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked, 
 
 Who: and what a track show'd the upturn'd sod! 
 Mindful were the shepherds as now the noon severe 
 
 Beat a burning eyebrow to brown evetide, 
 How the rustic flute drew the silver to the sphere, 
 Sister of his own, till her rays fell wide. 
 God ! of whom music 
 And song and blood are pure, 
 The day is never darken 'd 
 That had thee here obscure. 
 
 Chirping none the scarlet cicalas crouch'd in ranks: 
 
 Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk grey : 
 Scarce the stony lizard suck'd hollows in his flanks; 
 
 Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay. 
 Sudden bow'd the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard, 
 
 Lengthen'd ran the grasses, the sky grew slate: 
 Then amid a swift flight of wing'd seed white as curd, 
 
 Clear of limb a Youth smote the master's gate. 
 
 Water, first of singers, o'er rocky mount and mead, 
 First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill, 
 
 1 Mark the triple hammer-beat, closing the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th stan- 
 zaic lines throughout. It is one of Meredith's master-tricks.
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 175 
 
 Sang of him, and flooded the ripples on the reed, 
 Seeking whom to waken, and what ear fill. 
 
 Water, sweetest soother to kiss a wound and cool, 
 Sweetest and divinest, the sky-born brook, 
 
 Chuckled, with a whimper, and made a mirror-pool 
 Round the guest we welcomed, the strange hand shook. 
 
 Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields: 
 
 Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high : 
 Big of heart we labour'd at storing mighty yields, 
 
 Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry ! 
 Hand-like rushed the vintage; we strung the bellied skins, 
 
 Plump, and at the sealing the Youth's voice rose: 
 Maidens clung in circle, on little fists their chins; 
 
 Gentle beasties through pushed a cold long nose. 
 
 Foot to fire in snowtime we trimm'd the slender shaft : 
 
 Often down the pit spied the lean wolf's teeth 
 Grin against his will, trapp'd by masterstrokes of craft; 
 
 Helpless in his froth-wrath as green logs seethe ! 
 Safe the tender lambs tugg'd the teats, and winter sped 
 
 Whirl'd before the crocus, the year's new gold. 
 Hung the hooky beak up aloft the arrowhead 
 
 Redden'd through his feathers for our dear fold. 
 
 Tales we drank of giants at war with Gods above : 
 
 Rocks were they to look on, and earth climb 'd air! 
 Tales of search for simples, and those who sought of love 
 
 Ease because the creature was all too fair. 
 Pleasant ran our thinking that while our work was good, 
 
 Sure as fruits for sweat would the praise come fast. 
 He that wrestled stoutest and tamed the billow-brood 
 
 Danced in rings with girls, like a sail-flapp'd mast. 
 
 Now of medicine and song, of both of which Apollo 
 is God. Song good poetry is always linked with
 
 176 Studies in Literature 
 
 medicine in Meredith's mind: twin restoratives of 
 
 human sanity: 
 
 Lo, the herb of healing, when once the herb is known, 
 
 Shines in shady woods bright as new-sprung flame. 
 Ere the string was tighten'd we heard the mellow tone, 
 
 After he had taught how the sweet sounds came. 
 Stretch'd about his feet, labour done, 'twas as you see 
 
 Red pomegranates tumble and burst hard rind. 
 So began contention to give delight and be 
 
 Excellent in things aim'd to make life kind. 
 
 Last, the invocation to all beasts, leaves, trees, to join 
 in remembering him : 
 
 You with shelly horns, rams! and promontory goats, 
 
 You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew ! 
 Bulls, that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats ! 
 
 Laurel, ivy, vine, wreath'd for feasts not few ! 
 You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays, 
 
 You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent: 
 He has been our fellow, the morning of our days! 
 Us he chose for housemates, and this way went. 
 God ! of whom music 
 And song and blood are pure, 
 The day is never darken'd 
 That had thee here obscure. 
 
 Begin with that, or begin with its fellow, the exquisite 
 gentle tale of Melampus the good physician to whom 
 the woodland creatures in reward that he 
 
 loving them all, 
 Among them walk'd, as a scholar who reads a book,
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 177 
 
 taught their love of medicine, and where to find the 
 herbs of healing: and from Melampus go on to the 
 ringing ballad The Nuptials of Attila, or that favourite 
 of mine The Day of the Daughter of Hades which tells 
 how Persephone (ravished wife of dark Hades, released 
 by him on a day to revisit earth and embrace her mother 
 Demeter) takes with her in the chariot her daughter 
 Skiageneia, child of Shadow; and how this girl-goddess, 
 slipping from the car, confronts a mortal youth, Cal- 
 listes: 
 
 She did not fly, 
 Nor started at his advance: . . . 
 
 for all the wonder and beauty of this upper earth were 
 running through her blood, quickening love and mem- 
 ories half surmised in every drop from her mother 
 inherited "the blood of her a lighted dew"; 
 
 She did not fly, 
 Nor started at his advance: 
 She looked, as when infinite thirst 
 Pants pausing to bless the springs, 
 Refreshed, unsated. Then first 
 He trembled with awe of the things 
 He had seen; and he did transfer, 
 Divining and doubting in turn, 
 His reverence unto her; 
 Nor asked what he crouched to learn: 
 The whence of her, whither, and why 
 Her presence there, and her name, 
 Her parentage: under which sky 
 Her birth, and how hither she came, 
 So young, a virgin, alone, 
 Unfriended, having no fear,
 
 178 Studies in Literature 
 
 As Oreads have; no moan, 
 Like the lost upon earth; no tear; 
 Not a sign of the torch in the blood, 
 Though her stature had reached the height 
 When mantles a tender rud 
 In maids that of youths have sight, 
 If maids of our seed they be : 
 For he said : A glad vision art thou ! 
 And she answered him: Thou to me! 
 As men utter a vow. 
 
 Classical to me it seems; and classically radiant, as if 
 painted by Titian, the Sicilian day that followed for 
 these two: she grandly innocent in his company, 
 recognising and naming the fruits of earth : 
 
 Pear, apple, almond, plum . . . 
 
 And she touch 'd them with finger and thumb, 
 
 As the vine-hook closes: she smiled, 
 
 Recounting again and again, 
 
 Corn, wine, fruit, oil! like a child, 
 
 With the meaning known to men. 
 
 Read this poem carefully (I dare to say), and you will 
 read in this girl-goddess not only what is the secret of 
 the heroines in many of Meredith's novels Lucy Des- 
 borough, Sandra Belloni, Clara Middleton but also 
 the secret of Shakespeare's later heroines Perdita, 
 Imogen, Miranda: and will not wonder how the youth 
 Callistes, when at evening her father's awful chariot 
 rapt her from him, was left with no future but to crave 
 for her until his life's end 
 
 And to join her, or have her brought back, 
 In his frenzy the singer would call, 
 Till he followed where never was track, 
 On the path trod of all.
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 179 
 
 There are those who would counsel you to begin your 
 study of Meredith with Modern Love rather than with 
 the poems I have chosen: and here their counsel may 
 easily be wiser than mine, personal taste interfering to 
 make me wayward. As a poetic form, the sonnet- 
 sequence even when turned as Meredith turns it, from 
 quatorzain to seizain is (unless handled by Shake- 
 speare) about the last to allure me. I should add, how- 
 ever, that Meredith's use of the sixteen-line stanza in 
 Modern Love is exceedingly strong and individual: and 
 that in the past hundred years few quatorzains, or 
 sonnets proper, will match his Lucifer in Starlight, 
 which I read to you last term. As a subject, the 
 relations of the husband, the wife and the other man, 
 especially when rehearsed by the husband, have usually 
 (I state it merely as a private confession) the same 
 physical effect on me as a drawing-room recitation. I 
 want to get under a table and howl. From the outset 
 the recital makes me shy as a stranger pounced upon 
 and called in to settle a delicate domestic difference; 
 and as it goes on, I start protesting inwardly, "My dear 
 sir delighted to do my best . . . man of the world . . . 
 quite understand . . . sympathetic, and all that sort of 
 thing. . . . But really, if you insist on all this getting 
 into the newspapers. . . . And where did I put my 
 hat, by the way?" In short take the confession 
 with the intricacies and self-scourgings of Modern Love 
 I find myself less at home than with the franker tempt- 
 ations of St. Anthony, and far less than with the larger, 
 liberally careless amours of the early gods. 
 
 Nevertheless, and by all means, try both ways and 
 choose which you will, provided it coax you on to search 
 the real heart of Meredith's muse in The Woods of 
 Westermain, Earth and Man, A Faith on Trial, The
 
 i8o Studies in Literature 
 
 Empty Purse, Night of Frost in May, and the like. You 
 will find many thorned thickets by the way; and some 
 out of which, however hard you beat them, you will 
 start no bird. The juvenile poems will but poorly 
 reward you, until you come to be interested in them 
 historically, as Pre-Raphaelite essays which Meredith 
 outgrew. The later Odes celebrating French history 
 The Revolution; Napoleon; France, 1870; Alsace-Lor- 
 raine should be deferred (I think) till you are fairly 
 possessed by the Meredithian fervour. They have 
 their splendid passages; but they are undeniably 
 difficult. Moreover I hold you must acquire a thorough 
 trust in a bard before trusting him at an ode, which is of 
 all forms of poetry the most pontifical ; before you com- 
 pose your spirit to a proper humility while he indues 
 his robes, strikes attitude and harp, and starts telling 
 France what he thinks of her, or anything so great as 
 France what he thinks of it, albeit he may sift our 
 approval and end on a note of encouragement. After 
 reading odes in this strain I, for one, always feel that I 
 hear France or whatever it is murmuring politely 
 at the close, "Thank you so much!" 
 
 VI 
 
 But it is in the poems I named just now, and in others 
 collected under the two general titles A Reading of 
 Earth and A Reading of Life, that you will find the 
 essential Meredith: and, as these titles hint, he is a 
 teacher, an expositor. Now why many of our English 
 poets should be teachers is a dark question to be 
 attempted perhaps though probably not resolved, in 
 some later lecture: as why an expositor, of all men, 
 should be obscure and even succeed in giving us en- 
 lightenment by means of obscurity, is an even darker
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 181 
 
 question although I make no doubt that the genius of 
 this university, sometime adorned by the late and great 
 Dr. Westcott can somehow provide it with an answer. 
 But the philosophy of Meredith, when you come to it, 
 cannot be denied for strong, for arresting, for athletic, 
 lean, hard, wiry. It is not comfortable : Stoical, rather ; 
 even strongly Stoical, as we use the epithet. But it 
 differs by the whole heaven from ancient Stoicism, 
 being reared on two pillars of Faith and Love. And, 
 yet again, the Faith differs utterly from the Faith 
 which supports the most of our religions it can and, 
 as a fact does, consist with agnosticism, and the Love 
 differs utterly from the Love which so often infects so 
 much of saintliness with eroticism and even with slyness 
 in daily life. Let me try to outline his belief, using his 
 own words where I may. 
 
 The man is a modern man, lost in doubt, forlorn in 
 a forest of doubt, but resolved to win through by help 
 of the monitor, the lantern within him. 
 
 I am in deep woods, 
 
 Between the two twilights. 
 
 Whatever I am and may be, 
 Write it down to the light in me; 
 I am I, and it is my deed: 
 For I know that the paths are dark 
 Between the two twilights. 
 
 I have made my choice to proceed 
 By the light I have within; 
 And the issue rests with me, 
 Who might sleep in a chrysalis, 
 In the fold of a simple prayer, 
 Between the two twilights.
 
 1 82 Studies in Literature 
 
 Having nought but the light in me, 
 Which I take for my soul in arms, 
 Resolv'd to go unto the wells 
 For water, rejecting spells, 
 And mouthings of magic for charms, 
 And the cup that does not flow. 
 
 I am in deep woods 
 
 Between the two twilights: 
 
 Over valley and hill 
 I hear the woodland wave, 
 Like the voice of Time, as slow, 
 The voice of Life, as grave, 
 The voice of Death, as still. 
 
 He finds there is no true promise (I am but trying to 
 interpret) in religious promises of a compensating life 
 beyond this one. Those are the 
 
 spells, 
 And mouthings of magic for charms. 
 
 He is not appalled by the prospect of sinking back and 
 dissolving into the earth of which we all are created 
 
 Into the breast that gave the rose 
 Shall I with shuddering fall? 
 
 More and more deeply as he contemplates Earth he feels 
 that from her as we spring, to her as we return so 
 man is only strong by constantly reading her lesson, 
 falling back to refresh himself from her mother-springs, 
 her mother-milk. Even of prayer he writes in one of 
 his last novels, Lord Ormont and His Aminta: 
 
 Prayer is power within us to communicate with the de- 
 sired beyond our thirsts. . . . And let the prayer be as a
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 183 
 
 little fountain. Rising on a spout, from dread of the hollow 
 below, the prayer may be prolonged in words begetting 
 words, and have pulse of fervour: the spirit of it has fallen 
 after the first jet. That is the delirious energy of our crav- 
 ing, which has no life in our souls. We do not get to any 
 heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring from ; and when 
 there is an eternal secret for us, it is best to believe that 
 Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspira- 
 tions. 
 
 To be true sons of Earth, our Mother: to learn of 
 our dependence on her, her lesson : to be frugal of self- 
 consciousness and of all other forms of selfishness; to 
 live near the bare ground, and finally to return to it 
 without whining: that is the first article of his creed. 
 Earth never whines, and looks for no son of hers to 
 whine: 
 
 For love we Earth, then serve we all; 
 
 Her mystic secret then is ours : 
 We fall, or view our treasures fall, 
 
 Unclouded, as beholds her flowers 
 
 Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, 
 Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, 
 
 When lowly, with a broken neck, 
 The crocus lays her cheek to mire. 
 
 To set up your hope on a world beyond this one is 
 (according to Meredith) but lust for life prolonged "a 
 bloodthirsty clinging to life" in Matthew Arnold's 
 phrase demanding a passport beyond our natural term : 
 
 The lover of life knows his labour divine, 
 
 And therein is at peace. 
 The lust after life craves a touch and a sign 
 
 That the life shall increase.
 
 184 Studies in Literature 
 
 The lust after life, in the chills of its lust, 
 
 Claims a passport of death. 
 The lover of life sees the flame in the dust 
 
 And a gift in our breath. 
 
 Transience? yes, and to be gratefully accepted, like 
 human love, for transience! Earth, the Stoic mother, 
 looks on while her son learns the lesson ; she will not coddle : 
 
 He may entreat, aspire, 
 He may despair, and she has never heed: 
 She, drinking his warm sweat, will soothe his need, 
 Not his desire. 
 
 To this extent, then, he is one with the beasts that 
 perish. To this extent he is like Walt Whitman's 
 animals. Says Whitman : 
 
 I think I could turn and live with animals . . . 
 They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 
 They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
 They do not make me sick discussing their duty to Gods. 
 
 But the difference is that man understands: understands 
 that as in his mother Earth, 
 
 deepest at her springs, 
 Most filial, is an eye to love her young. . . . 
 
 so he, seeing how in life the love of boy and maid leads 
 to the nourishing and love of children, must see further 
 that his first duty in life is to love and care for the young. 
 For himself, he must curb our "distempered devil of 
 self, " gluttonous of its own enjoyments. Meredith 
 promises nothing nothing beyond the grave, nothing 
 on this side of it but love sweetening hard fare : 
 
 The sense of large charity over the land, 
 
 Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough, 
 
 And a bell giving thanks for a sustenance meal.
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 185 
 
 VII 
 
 Well, there it is, Gentlemen, for you to take or to 
 leave. I am here to talk about literature to you, not 
 about doctrine. But I think that, after the mystics we 
 discussed last term, you may find the herb of Meredith 
 medicinal, invigorating: a philosophy austere though 
 suffused with love ; mistaken, if you will, but certainly 
 not less than high, stern, noble, meet for men. 
 
 I have indicated some of his poems through which you 
 may arrive at it. But he wrote one poem which stands 
 apart from these and might (you may say) conceivably 
 have been written by another man. If I allowed this, 
 which I cannot, I should still hold that no one short of 
 a genius could have invented it; as I hold that, with 
 Spenser's Epithalamion, it shares claim to be the 
 greatest song of human love in our language, as it is 
 certainly the topmost of its age : all that Swinburne or 
 Rossetti ever wrote fading out like fireworks or sick 
 tapers before its sunshine. I mean Love in the Valley, 
 with a number of stanzas from which I shall this morn- 
 ing conclude, feeling all the while that I have no gift 
 to read them as they deserve. 
 
 Love in the Valley 
 
 Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward, 
 
 Couched with her arms behind her golden head, 
 Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly, 
 
 Lies my young love sleeping in the shade. 
 Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her, 
 
 Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow, 
 Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me : 
 
 Then would she hold me and never let me go?
 
 1 86 Studies in Literature 
 
 Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, 
 
 Swift as the swallow along the river's light 
 Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, 
 
 Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight. 
 Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops, 
 
 Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, 
 She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, 
 
 Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won! 
 
 When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, 
 
 Tying up her laces, looping up her hair, 
 Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded, 
 
 More love should I have, and much less care. 
 When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror, 
 
 Loosening her laces, combing down her curls, 
 Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded, 
 
 I should miss but one for the many boys and girls. 
 
 Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows 
 Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon. 
 
 No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder: 
 Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon. 
 
 Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure, 
 Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less: 
 
 Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with 
 hailstones 
 
 Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless. 
 
 Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping 
 
 Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. 
 Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, 
 
 Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar. 
 Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: 
 
 So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. 
 Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, 
 
 Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.
 
 The Poetry of George Meredith 187 
 
 Stepping down the hill with her fair companions, 
 
 Arm in arm, all against the raying West, 
 Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches, 
 
 Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed. 
 Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking 
 
 Whispered the world was; morning light is she. 
 Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless; 
 
 Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free. 
 
 Happy happy time, when the white star hovers 
 
 Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew, 
 Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness, 
 
 Threading it with colour, like yewberries the yew. 
 Thicker crowd the shades as the grave East deepens 
 
 Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells. 
 Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret; 
 
 Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells. 
 
 Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden, 
 
 Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please. 
 I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones : 
 
 my wild ones ! they tell me more than these. 
 You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose, 
 
 Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they, 
 They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness, 
 
 You are of life's, on the banks that line the way. 
 
 Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose, 
 
 Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three. 
 Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine 
 
 Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me. 
 Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest? 
 
 Not while she sleeps : while she sleeps the jasmine breathes, 
 Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine 
 
 Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths.
 
 i88 Studies in Literature 
 
 Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber 
 
 Where there is no window, read not heaven or her. 
 "When she was a tiny," one aged woman quavers, 
 
 Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear. 
 Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled: 
 
 Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete. 
 Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy 
 
 Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet. 
 
 Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers, 
 
 Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise 
 High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger; 
 
 Yet am I the light and living of her eyes. 
 Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming, 
 
 Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames. 
 Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting, 
 
 Arms up, she dropped : our souls were in our names. 
 
 A Song of Songs, which is Meredith's!
 
 THE POETRY OF 
 THOMAS HARDY 
 
 TN speaking to you, the other day, Gentlemen, on the 
 * poetry of George Meredith, I admitted how faulty 
 one's judgment may be nay almost must needs be 
 upon all modern work. ' ' Still, ' ' I went on, " the task of 
 appraising it has to be done, for the books of our time 
 are the books of our time. They tell us in their various 
 ways, 'How it strikes a Contemporary.'" 
 
 Yes: but I deferred a qualification of this a some- 
 what important qualification to which I shall begin 
 today by asking your assent. 
 
 My qualification is this: We elders from among 
 whom, for various reasons, your professors are chosen 
 as a rule may hope to help you in understanding poets 
 long since dead. For Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, are removed 
 almost as far from us as from you. They have passed 
 definitely into the ward of Time. What was corrupt or 
 corruptible in them is now dust, though we embalm it 
 in myrrh, sandal-wood, cassia : dust equally for us and 
 for you : what was incorruptible flowers as freshly for 
 you as for us. We have but the sad advantage of having 
 studied it a little longer. 
 
 189
 
 190 Studies in Literature 
 
 Now when we come to poets of the time of Tennyson, 
 Browning, Matthew Arnold, our difference of age asserts 
 itself; middle-aged men of the 'sixties, young men of 
 the 'nineties, children of this century, read them at cor- 
 respondent removes, perceptible removes. And, though 
 you may like it not, it is (I believe) good that we seniors 
 should testify to you concerning these men who were 
 our seniors, yet alive when we were young, and gave 
 us in youth, believe me, even such thrills, such awed 
 surmises, such wonders and wild desires as you catch 
 in your turn from their successors. Nay, it is salutary, 
 I believe; for the reason that it appears to be the rule 
 for each new generation to turn iconoclast on its father's 
 poetic gods. You will scarcely deny that on some of 
 you the term "Victorian" acts as a red rag upon a 
 young bull of the pasture : that, to some of you, Tenny- 
 son is "that sort of stuff your uncle read." Well, 
 bethink you that the children of yet another generation 
 will deal so and not otherwise with your heroes : that it is 
 all a part of the continuous process of criticism through 
 which our roseate raptures and our lurid antipathies 
 pass, if not into the light of common day, into that of 
 serener judgment. Blame not your uncle that at the 
 age of fourteen or earlier, in the walled garden screened 
 from the windows of the house, he charged among the 
 vegetables chanting 
 
 A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, 
 
 He rode between the barley-sheaves . . . 
 
 or 
 
 Strew no more red roses, maidens, 
 
 Leave the lilies in their dew : 
 Pluck, pluck cypress, O pale maidens! 
 
 Dusk, O dusk the hall with yew! . . .
 
 or 
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 191 
 
 I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage 
 Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair. 
 
 But thy dark eyes are not dimm'd, proud Iseult ! 
 And thy beauty never was more fair . . . 
 
 or 
 
 And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: and 
 
 sparkles 'gan dart 
 From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a 
 
 start, 
 All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at 
 
 heart. 
 
 For to dream of these things, and to awake and find one- 
 self an uncle that is the common lot. Nor blame him 
 that he continues loyal to them. It keeps him human : 
 it may set you pondering, reconsidering a little; and so 
 may help to advance the true business of criticism. I 
 come down a little further; past Morris and Swinburne 
 to Yeats (say) or Francis Thompson. We admired and 
 admire them as generously as, I hope, you admire them ; 
 but I think not quite in the same way. To us, their 
 almost exact contemporaries, their first poems appealed 
 as youth to youth; with none of the authority they 
 exercise, I dare to say, upon you. To us they carried no 
 authority at all. They carried hope, they bred ardour: 
 but we criticised them freely as poems written by the 
 best of us. They have to wait a few years for the race 
 to deify them. You and we possess them by a different 
 line of approach. 
 
 Now take the young poets who are your contempor- 
 aries. Of them I say sadly, resignedly, that a man 
 even of my years has no right to speak, or very little
 
 192 Studies in Literature 
 
 power to speak usefully. Young poets write not for 
 antiquity, nor for middle-age. They write for you: 
 their appeal is to you. All that we can do is to keep our 
 hearts as fresh as we may; to bear ever in mind that a 
 father can guide a son but some distance on the road, 
 and the more wisely he guides the sooner (alas !) must he 
 lose the fair companionship and watch the boy run on. 
 It may sound a hard saying, but we can only keep him 
 admiring the things we admire at the cost of pauperising 
 his mind. It may sound another hard saying, that the 
 younger poets do not write for us old men ; yet it is the 
 right course of nature. I hope William Cory's apo- 
 phthegm is not strictly true : 
 
 One's feelings lose poetic flow 
 
 Soon after twenty-seven or so; 
 
 Professionising modern men 
 
 Thenceforth admire what pleased them then. 
 
 But if it be (though I plead for some rise in the age- 
 limit), then poetry but consents with the rule of Nature 
 whose highest interpreter she is. Deepest in her too 
 in Meredith's phrase: 
 
 Deepest at her springs 
 
 Most filial, is an eye to love her young. 
 
 II 
 
 After this somewhat wistful opening, let me claim an 
 exception for my subject this morning. Thomas Hardy 
 I cannot call him Doctor Hardy even in a university 
 which not long ago did itself honour in complimenting 
 him Thomas Hardy (long may he live !) is my elder, and
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 193 
 
 so much my elder that for thirty years I have reverenced 
 him as a master : that is, as a master of the Novel. His 
 first novel Desperate Remedies dates back to 1871 : his 
 first artistic triumph Under the Greenwood Tree, to 1872. 
 Pass intervening years and come to the grand close in 
 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895) : 
 on that last date his career as a novelist ceases, and at 
 the age of fifty-five. Three years later, in 1898, he 
 publishes his first book of verse. Now any pettifogging 
 fellow can point out that this volume, entitled Wessex 
 Poems, contains many poems composed long before 1898 
 some so far back as 1865 ; and the more easily because 
 Hardy is careful to print the dates. 1 So for that 
 matter do some of Hardy's later volumes contain 
 early poems, either printed as first written, or as revised. 
 But no petty fog can obscure the plain fact that in 1895, 
 or a little later, Hardy definitely turned his back on prose 
 fiction and started to appeal to a new generation in 
 verse ; as a writer of high poetical verse if the gods should 
 allow. To this purpose he has held. A second volume, 
 Poems of the Past and the Present followed in 1901 ; The 
 Dynasts, Part I in 1903, Part II in 1906, Part III in 
 1908, Time's Laughing Stocks in 1909. Satires of Cir- 
 cumstance were collected in 1914. His latest volume 
 Moments of Vision appeared but the other day, and 
 bears 1917 on its title-page. So, seeing that all this, 
 including that great epical drama, The Dynasts, 
 falls within the ken of the last twenty years, and 
 not without it, you may allow perhaps that it con- 
 cerns men of your age and mine, equally if not 
 similarly. 
 
 1 So that, as Whistler said of an art-critic who judged a water-colour 
 for an oil-painting, "it was accurately described in the catalogue and he 
 had not even to rely on his sense -of smell. "
 
 194 Studies in Literature 
 
 III 
 
 Ah, but you may answer, "By all means let it con- 
 cern you. The point is, can a man of Thomas Hardy's 
 age write what appeals to us?" Well, yes, I think his 
 poetry may appeal to you, as it certainly concerns you. 
 That his Muse is predominantly melancholy I brush 
 aside as no bar at all. If youth do not understand 
 melancholy, why then the most of Shelley, the most of 
 Byron, a great part of Keats, or to come to later 
 instances a great, if not the greater, part of Francis 
 Thompson and Yeats and most of the young poets of 
 the Irish school, is closed to it : which is absurd. "No, 
 no! go not to Lethe" for Melancholy. She dwells 
 neither there nor with middle-age: 
 
 She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die; 
 
 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, 
 
 Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: 
 Ay, in the very temple of Delight 
 
 Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, 
 
 Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue 
 Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; 
 
 His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
 And be among her cloudy trophies hung. 
 
 No, no : it is proper to youth to know melancholy as it 
 is to have raptures. But only to middle-age is it granted 
 to be properly cheerful. Yes, there are compensations ! 
 Let us assure you that only towards middle-age will 
 you burst upon a palate fine the true juice of Chaucer's 
 Prologue, written in his middle-age, or of Montaigne, or 
 of Moliere: as in youth you will choose Rossetti, but
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 195 
 
 later transfer your choice to William Morris, least sick 
 or sorry, best of cheer among the poets of his time. 
 
 As for Hardy's pessimism, that, to be sure, does not 
 consort well with youth. But, as I shall hope to show, 
 it always challenges youth; it is never faded, jejune, 
 effete ; it never plays or, to be accurate, it seldom plays 
 with old mere sentimentalities. Even when it plays 
 with commonplaces it never leaves them conventions. 
 In his depths the man is always thinking, and his per- 
 plexities, being all-important and yet unsolved, are by 
 your generation to be faced, whether you solve them 
 or not. 
 
 IV 
 
 For another point, close beside and yet more impor- 
 tant, we have talked of insensibility to poetry and how 
 with the years it may steal upon the reader. Now 
 most of you remember, I daresay, Matthew Arnold's 
 late and mournful lines on the drying up of poesy in the 
 writer: 
 
 Youth rambles on life's arid mount, 
 
 And strikes the rock, and finds the vein, 
 
 And brings the water from the fount, 
 The fount which shall not flow again. 
 
 The man mature with labour chops 
 For the bright stream a channel grand, 
 
 And sees not that the sacred drops 
 Ran off and vanish'd out of hand. 
 
 And then the old man totters nigh 
 And feebly rakes among the stones. 
 
 The mount is mute, the channel dry; 
 And down he lays his weary bones.
 
 196 Studies in Literature 
 
 Well, at any rate Thomas Hardy contradicts, and in 
 practice, that rather cheap kind of pessimism. (There 
 was always, I think, in Matthew Arnold a tendency to 
 be Wordsworth's widow, and to fall rather exasper- 
 atingly "a-thinking of the old 'un, " who undoubtedly 
 did in later life, for some thirty years "rake among the 
 stones" and died in the end, as the country practitioner 
 put it, "of nothing serious. ") 
 
 I am aware that to support this theory of desiccation 
 in poets many startling instances may be cited. But 
 without saying yea or nay, or supposing it symptomatic 
 of our age, I cannot think it quite accidental that out 
 of the small number of poets I have been privileged to 
 know personally, two should have tapped, quite late in 
 life, a well of poetry abundant, fresh, pure; of lyrical 
 poetry, too, fresher, purer and far more abundant than 
 ever they found as young men. It happened so, at all 
 events, with an old schoolmaster of mine, the late 
 T. E. Brown, whose quality and whose performance 
 are now generally admitted. It has happened so with 
 Thomas Hardy. His first poems or, to say it more 
 accurately, the poems in his first-published volume 
 were stiff, awkward. They often achieved a curious, 
 haunting, countrified lilt; they worked always true to 
 pattern: you felt about them, too, that the verses held 
 the daemon of poetry, constricted, struggling for expres- 
 sion. But in form they resembled the drawings with 
 which the author illustrated that first volume. They 
 were architectural draughts (Hardy had been an archi- 
 tect). When they told a story, you wondered why he, 
 so well able to do it, had not written this particular 
 story in prose. The poetic thought was there : but the 
 words were hard and precise, sometimes scientifically 
 pedantic. For instance, in the last poem I shall read
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 197 
 
 today he drags in the word "stillicide, " which means the 
 drip of water in a cavern, or from eaves. Stevenson 
 has recorded his mingled feelings on discovering, in the 
 process of his scientific studies, that "stillicide" was not 
 a crime. The early poems faceted no rays, they melted 
 into none of those magical, chemical combinations out 
 of which words became poetry and a new thing, "half 
 angel and half bird. " 
 
 Years pass, with their efforts; and then in his latest 
 volume, published by this man at the age of seventy- 
 seven, he discovers a lyrical note which I shall quote to 
 you, not at all because its theme is characteristic for 
 it is not as not at all because it is deep and wonted 
 for it is not. It is, if you will, "silly sooth, and dallies 
 with the innocence of love. " Yes, just for that reason 
 I quote it, and because in a poet of ordinary evolution 
 it would fall naturally among the Juvenilia: 
 
 Lalage's coming: 
 Where is she now, O? 
 Turning to bow, O, 
 And smile, is she, 
 Just at parting, 
 Parting, parting, 
 As she is starting 
 To come to me? 
 
 Lalage's coming, 
 Nearer is she now, O, 
 End anyhow, 0, 
 Today's husbandry! 
 Would a gilt chair were mine. 
 Slippers of vair were mine, 
 Brushes for hair were mine 
 Of ivory !
 
 198 Studies in Literature 
 
 What will she think, O, 
 She who's so comely, 
 Viewing how homely 
 A sort are we! 
 
 Nought here's enough for her, 
 All is too rough for her, 
 Even my love for her 
 Poor in degree. 
 
 Lalage's come; aye, 
 Come is she now, O! 
 Does Heaven allow, O, 
 A meeting to be? 
 Yes, she is here now, 
 Here now, here now, 
 Nothing to fear now, 
 Here's Lalage! 
 
 If that be toe trivial, take another remembering 
 that I give them only as metrical specimens, merely to 
 show how this poet, whose metrical muscles were stiff 
 and hard at fifty-odd has at seventy-odd (the date is 
 1913) worked them supple, so that now the verse ca- 
 dences to the feeling: 
 
 Out of the past there rises a week 
 
 Who shall read the years O ! 
 In that week there was heard a singing 
 
 Who shall spell the years ! 
 
 In that week there was heard a singing, 
 
 And the white owl wondered why. 
 In that week there was heard a singing, 
 And forth from the casement were candles flinging 
 Radiance that fell on the deodar and lit up the path thereby.
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 199 
 Or take him on a lower note : 
 
 I need not go 
 Through sleet and snow 
 To where I know 
 She waits for me; 
 She will wait me there 
 Till I find it fair, 
 And have time to spare 
 From company . . . 
 
 What not upbraid me 
 That I delayed me, 
 Nor ask what stayed me 
 So long? Ah, no! 
 New cares may claim me, 
 New loves inflame me, 
 She will not blame me, 
 But suffer it so. 
 
 I reserve for the whole the most individual quality in 
 Hardy's versifying (to me an individual excellence) 
 which has given it character from the first I mean his 
 country lilt; because I must approach it, and the man, 
 and his philosophy of life, all three by one path. 
 
 First of all, and last of all, he is a countryman. And 
 the first meaning of this is that his mind works like most 
 country minds in this great little island. They are 
 introspective because insular : and their soil is cumbered, 
 piled with history and local tradition : a land of arable 
 inveterately and deeply ploughed; of pastures close- 
 webbed at the root by rain and sun persistently reviving
 
 2oo Studies in Literature 
 
 the blade which the teeth of sheep and cattle persist- 
 ently crop; of its heaths such as Newmarket where 
 racehorses in training gallops beat their hoofs in the 
 very footprints of Boadicea's mares and stallions; of 
 mines, working yet, that paid their firstfruits to Sidon 
 and Carthage, choked harbours, dead empires. In this 
 land of ours, I say, the mind of a native must dig 
 vertically down through strata. Though it be the mind 
 of a farm labourer, it knows its acres intimately; not 
 only their rotation of crops, and slant to wind or sun, 
 but their several humours, caprices, obstinacies of soil; 
 and, always with an eye to windward, hopes for the 
 weather it knows likeliest to profit them. So when, 
 as with Hardy, a countryman has the further knowledge 
 that comes of book-learning, and acquires with it the 
 historical sense, that sense still feels vertically down- 
 wards, through soil and subsoil, through the mould of 
 Norman, Dane, Saxon, Celt, Iber, and of tribes beyond 
 history, to the geological formations layered over by 
 this accumulated dust. 
 
 Further, you know that the tales of old time which 
 haunt a true countryman's imagination are tales of 
 violence, of lonely houses where suppressed passions 
 inhabit to flame out in murder or suicide, to make a 
 legend, to haunt a cross-road or a mile-post: fierce, 
 primitive deeds breaking up through the slow crust of 
 custom: unaccountable, but not unnatural. Along 
 the king's highway, a gibbet where sheepstealers used 
 to swing : in such and such a copse a tree, on that tree 
 such and such a branch where a poor girl hanged her- 
 self for love: at the three roads by the blacksmith's a 
 triangle of turf still called "Betsy Beneath" because 
 there they buried her uncoffined and drove a stake 
 through her.
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 201 
 
 Further, if you know your rural England, you will 
 know that every village in it is a small shop of gossip. 
 "Have you heard? Young Peter Hodge is at upsides 
 with his wife? yes, already, and her only expectin'." 
 "They tell me Farmer So-and-so have a mortgage, if 
 you'll believe, on the Lower Barton Farm. " "So, that 
 girl Jenny is in trouble as I always foretold. " Ven- 
 geance o' Jenny's case! 
 
 Well as I interpret this most genuine, most auto- 
 chthonous of living writers, I see him leaning over the 
 gate of a field with a wood's edge bordering it. He 
 knows the wood so intimately that his ear detects and 
 separates the notes of the wind as it soughs in oak, 
 hornbeam, pine (see the opening of Under the Greenwood 
 Tree, or The Woodlanders, passim). Of the sheep on 
 the pasture he knows when their lambs will fall. He 
 judges the grass, if it be sufficient. He knows that 
 breast-shaped knob on the knap of the hill and how 
 many centuries have worn to this what was the high 
 burial mound of a British chieftain: he knows the lias 
 beneath the chief's grave, and the layered rock still 
 deeper that is, he knows as near as geologists can 
 tell. He knows, having a boy's eye for this, where 
 a nest is likeliest to be, and of what bird. But 
 what more intrigues him than any of these things 
 still as he follows the line of the hedge is that 
 under one innocent-looking thorn such and such a 
 parish tragedy was enacted. Just here, they tell, 
 two brothers quarrelled and one smote the other 
 with a reaping-hook; just there was lovers' bliss 
 and just there, a brief while later, the woman's heart 
 broke. 
 
 For (you must know) though a gossip's, this country- 
 man's heart is strangely tender. Let me pause for proof,
 
 202 Studies in Literature 
 
 by one short poem, that even Blake's heart was not 
 tenderer than Hardy's. It is called 
 
 The Blinded Bird 
 
 So zestfully canst thou sing? 
 
 And all this indignity, 
 
 With God's consent, on thee! 
 
 Blinded ere yet a-wing 
 
 By the red-hot needle thou, 
 
 I stand and wonder how 
 
 So zestfully thou canst sing . . . 
 
 Resenting not such wrong, 
 Thy grievous pain forgot, 
 Eternal dark thy lot, 
 Groping thy whole life long, 
 After that stab of fire; 
 Enjailed in pitiless wire; 
 Resenting not such wrong! 
 
 Who hath charity? This bird. 
 Who suffereth long and is kind, 
 Is not provoked, though blind 
 And alive ensepulchred ? 
 Who hopeth, endureth all things? 
 Who thinketh no evil, but sings? 
 Who is divine? This bird. 
 
 Above all, his pity is for women, partly for the fate 
 that condemns their bloom to be brief and evanescent 
 (unless written in time on a man's heart where it never 
 grows old) so brief the chance, with no term to the 
 after-pain! But he pities them more because he sees 
 the increase of our race to rest on an unfair game, 
 in which, nine throws out of ten, the dice are loaded
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 203 
 
 against the woman; a duel of sex, almost at times an 
 internecine duel, which his soul grows to abhor: for 
 
 Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni, 
 
 and, looking up, he sees God, or whatever gods may be, 
 deriding the victim. We are all flies to these gods who 
 tease us for their sport. Even if man labour and profit 
 his fellows with an idea, yet, in Milton's phrase (as 
 quoted by Hardy) 
 
 Truth like a bastard comes into the world 
 
 Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth. 
 
 But, for women, who, nine times out of ten, pay the 
 price of the great jest, Hardy feels most acutely. 
 "Poor wounded name, " he quotes and inscribes on the 
 title-page of Tess 
 
 Poor wounded name! my bosom as a bed 
 Shall lodge thee . . . 
 
 and in the last sentence of his most sorrowful tale he 
 flings his now famous taunt up at "the President of the 
 Immortals," even as passionately as did Cleopatra for 
 her own loss: 
 
 Iras. Madam ! 
 
 Charmian. O madam, madam, madam! 
 
 Iras. Royal Egypt 
 
 Empress ! 
 
 Charmian Peace, peace, Iras! 
 
 Cleopatra. No more but e'en a woman, and commanded 
 By such poor passion as the maid that milks 
 
 (Tess was a dairy-maid)
 
 204 Studies in Literature 
 
 And does the meanest chares. It were for me 
 To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; 
 To tell them that this world did equal theirs 
 Till they had stol'n our jewel. 
 
 VI 
 
 Say what you will, this indignation in Hardy is noble, 
 is chivalrous, and, as the world is worked, it has much 
 reason at the back of its furious "Why? Why? 
 Why?" It has great excuse when it sours down to 
 bitterest irony, as in this early ditty of two country- 
 bred girls meeting in London and you will note how 
 the old market-jog of rhythm and rhyme ache them- 
 selves into the irony: 
 
 "O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown! 
 Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? 
 And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" 
 "O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she. 
 
 "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, 
 Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; 
 And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three ! " 
 "Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined, "said she. . . . 
 
 "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, 
 And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" 
 "My dear a raw country girl, such as you be, 
 Isn't equal to that. You ain't ruined," said she. 
 
 Women (I think) are more impatient of irony than men : 
 and when Hardy turns his irony upon them as he often 
 does in his novels I have observed that they eye it
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 205 
 
 suspiciously, restively; they would be undetected in 
 their devices, hate instinctively that which shows their 
 secret ways of power at work under show of servility. 
 Hardy, their champion, would break down the servility : 
 and they distrust him for it. 
 
 Well and though they be ungrateful perhaps their 
 instinct is true and his is a childless creed : and for men, 
 though it be manly to face it out and test it, an unhope- 
 ful creed. For women it must be certainly unpromising 
 to read the doctrine of Jude the Obscure, which works 
 out to this, that man's aspirations to make the world 
 better are chiefly clogged by the flesh, and that flesh is 
 woman. To man it can scarcely be less heartening to 
 be barred with the question 
 
 Has some Vast Imbecility, 
 
 Mighty to build and blend, 
 
 But impotent to tend, 
 Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry? 
 
 Or come we of an Automaton 
 
 Unconscious of our pains? 
 
 Or are we live remains 
 Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye 
 
 Well, when it comes to this, I for one can only answer 
 that, if it were, we must yet carry on somehow, sing a 
 song on the raft we cannot steer, keep a heart of sorts, 
 and share out the rations to the women and children. 
 But that word recalls me. It is a childless creed. It 
 has no more evidence than Meredith's: intellectually 
 viewed, I find them equal: but Meredith has hope, 
 hope for the young: and I must put my money on 
 hope.
 
 206 Studies in Literature 
 
 VII 
 
 Further, when I consider, these poems as those 
 novels crowd the sardonic laughter of the gods too 
 thickly. There is irony enough in life, God wot; but 
 here is a man possessed with it. All men, all stories, 
 tramp with him to his titles Life's Little Ironies, Satires 
 of Circumstance, Time's Laughing Stocks, 1 So one 
 hesitates and asks : Is life, after all, a parish full of bad 
 practical jokes ? Is catholic man like this? No : as we 
 take up poem after poem in which human loves and 
 aspirations find themselves thwarted, set astray, or 
 butting against some door that, having opened a glimpse 
 of paradise, shuts by some power idiotically mischievous 
 if not malignant shuts with a click of the latch and a 
 chuckle of mocking laughter we tell ourselves, "These 
 things happen: but in any such crowd they never and 
 in no life happen. " And while we debate this, Hardy 
 confounds us, spreading out his irony upon one grand 
 ironic drama, The Dynasts. 
 
 I suppose The Dynasts to be and I shall not allow 
 for rival Doughty's noble but remote, morose, almost 
 Chinese, epic, The Dawn in Britain (this, too, a product 
 
 1 Why, O why will authors choose loose, woolly, undescriptive titles? 
 To take another writer of genius, why Traffics and Discoveries, Life's 
 Handicap, Many Inventions, The Day's Work ? And, to return to Hardy, 
 what differentiates an Irony of Life from a Satire of Circumstance, and 
 do not both equally make the victim a Laughing Stock of Time? And 
 if there be a difference, are the poems divided by the titles baaed on any 
 fundamentum divisionis ? And, anyhow, what is wrong with The Iliad, 
 King Lear, Don Quixote, John GUpin, Tom Jones, David Copperfield ? 
 What is right with The Eternal Mystery, Some Emotions and a Moral, 
 and so on? Are they not all too loose for their contents? And what is 
 wrong again with a house The House with the Seven Gables, Bleak 
 House, The House with the Green Shutters, The House of Usher, A Doll's 
 House, The House that Jack Built ?
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 207 
 
 of a man well past meridian) I suppose The Dynasts to 
 be the grandest poetic structure planned and raised in 
 England in our time. In the soar and sweep of that 
 drama the poet whom, a moment ago, we were on the 
 point of accusing for provincial, lays Europe beneath 
 us "flat, as to an eagle's eye" a map with little things 
 in multitudes, ants in armies, scurrying along the threads 
 which are roads, violently agitated in nodules which are 
 cities. But let me quote one or two of Hardy's own 
 stage directions and thereby not only save myself the 
 vain effort to do what has been perfectly done for me, 
 but send you, if you would practise the art of con- 
 densed and vivid description, to models as good as can 
 be found in English prose. Imagine yourselves, then, 
 an audience aloft and listening to the talk of such Spirits 
 as watch over human destinies. 
 
 The nether sky opens, and Europe is disclosed as a prone 
 and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and 
 the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular 
 plateau of Spain forming a head. Broad and lengthy low- 
 lands stretch from the north of France across Russia like a 
 grey-green garment hemmed by the Ural mountains and 
 the glistening Arctic Ocean. 
 
 The point of view then sinks downward through space, 
 and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, 
 where the people, . . . are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, 
 and vibrating, in their various cities and nationalities. 
 
 (A picture of Europe today.) Then 
 
 A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, 
 enduing men and things with a seeming transparency, and 
 exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and move- 
 ment in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the 
 display.
 
 208 Studies in Literature 
 
 So the focus slides down and up and again down: it 
 narrows on the British House of Commons, or on a 
 village green, or on a bedroom in a palace : it expands to 
 sweep the field of Austerlitz. I ask you to turn for 
 yourselves to one marvellous scene of a cellar, full of 
 drunken deserters, looking out on the snow- tormented 
 road along which straggles the army of Sir John Moore 
 and struggles for Coruna. . . . But here is a passage in 
 the retreat from Moscow : 
 
 What has floated down from the sky upon the Army is a 
 flake of snow. Then come another and another, till natural 
 features, hitherto varied with the tints of autumn, are con- 
 founded, and all is phantasmal grey and white. 
 
 The caterpillar shape still creeps laboriously nearer: but 
 instead of increasing in size by the rules of perspective, it 
 gets more attenuated, and there are left upon the ground 
 behind it minute parts of itself, which are speedily flaked 
 over, and remain as white pimples by the wayside. 
 
 Pines rise mournfully on each side of the nearing object. 
 . . . Endowed with enlarged powers of audition as of 
 vision, we are struck by the mournful taciturnity that pre- 
 vails. Nature is mute. Save for the incessant flogging of 
 the wind-broken and lacerated horses there are no sounds. 
 
 The diction of the poem itself seldom rises to match 
 its conception. In the rustic scenes we get that incom- 
 parable prose, nervous, and vernacular, yet Biblical, 
 which Hardy has made out of his native dialect : but the 
 major human characters talk in verse which is often too 
 prosy, and the watching Spirits attain but spasmodi- 
 cally to the height of their high argument. Their lips 
 are not touched by any such flame as kindles (for 
 example) the lips of the watching Spirits in Prometheus 
 Unbound. But we must not judge a poem of The
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 209 
 
 Dynasts' range and scope apart from its total impres- 
 sion : and that, in The Dynasts is tremendous. And I at 
 this moment am committing a deadly artistic sin against 
 proportion in attempting to talk of it in a part of a lec- 
 ture. It should have two lectures to itself. 
 
 As for its philosophy, one naturally compares it with 
 that of Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. But 
 whereas Tolstoy and Hardy both see Napoleon as a 
 puppet under Heaven as Plato pronounces Man to be 
 "at his best a noble plaything for the gods" the one, 
 being Russian and an idealist, sees the little great man's 
 ends shaped by a Divinity, watching over Sion, having 
 purpose : the other, a most honest pessimist, can detect 
 no purpose, or no beneficent one. For all he can see, 
 God works if He work a magnipotent Will, but 
 
 Like a knitter drowsed, 
 Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness, 
 The will has woven with an absent heed 
 Since life first was; and ever will so weave. 
 
 And there for today we must leave it. 
 
 VIII 
 
 I fall back, to conclude, upon Wessex; appropriately, 
 I think, upon a churchyard in a corner there, where 
 kinsmen, friends, neighbours, mingle their dust; where, 
 as Hardy's friend and homelier predecessor put it, 
 
 The zummer air o' theas green hill 
 'V a-heav'd in bosoms now all still. 
 
 Faithful to this dust, to ancestry, old associations, the 
 
 Nescio qu& natale solum dulcedine cunctos 
 
 Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui. . . .
 
 210 Studies in Literature 
 
 the native returns: and the dead whisper, and this is 
 what they tell : 
 
 William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at 
 
 plough, 
 Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, 
 
 And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock church- 
 yard now! 
 
 "Gone," I call them, gone for good, that group of local 
 
 hearts and heads; 
 Yet at mothy curfew-tide, 
 And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back 
 
 from walls and leads, 
 
 They've a way of whispering to me fellow-wight who 
 
 yet abide 
 
 In the muted measured note 
 Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide : 
 
 "We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane 
 
 to antidote, 
 
 Unsuccesses to success, 
 Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free 
 
 of thought. 
 
 " No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial 
 
 stress; 
 
 Chill detraction stirs no sigh; 
 Fear of death has even bygone us : death gave all that we 
 
 W. D. "Ye mid burn the wold bass-viol that I set such 
 
 vallie by." 
 Squire. "You may hold the manse in fee, 
 
 You may wed my spouse, my children's memory of me 
 may decry. "
 
 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy 211 
 
 Lady. "You may have my rich brocades, my laces; take 
 
 each household key; 
 Ransack coffer, desk, bureau; 
 Quiz the few poor treasures hid there, con the 
 letters kept by me. " 
 
 Far. "Ye mid zell my favourite heifer, ye mid let the 
 
 charlock grow, 
 
 Foul the grinterns, give up thrift. " 
 Wife. "If ye break my best blue china, children, I shan't 
 
 care or ho." 
 
 All. "We've no wish to hear the tidings, how the people's 
 
 fortunes shift; 
 What your daily doings are; 
 Who are wedded, born, divided; if your lives beat 
 slow or swift. 
 
 "Curious not the least are we if our intents you 
 
 make or mar, 
 
 If you quire to our old tune, 
 If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar 
 
 afar." 
 
 Thus, with very gods' composure, freed those 
 
 crosses late and soon 
 Which, in life, the Trine allow 
 (Why, none witteth), and ignoring all that haps 
 
 beneath the moon, 
 
 William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow 
 
 late at plough, 
 
 Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, 
 And the Squire, and Lady Susan, murmur mildly 
 
 to me now.
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 THE story of Coleridge's life is hard to write and, 
 in a sense, even harder to read: hard to write 
 because the innumerable lapses, infirmities, defections 
 of the will, all claiming as facts to be chronicled, 
 cannot but obscure that lovable living presence to which 
 all his contemporaries bore witness and to which the 
 biographer must hold fast or his portrait misses most 
 that is true and essential ; and hard to read because the 
 reader, at the hundredth instance of Coleridge's^ taking 
 the wrong coach, or forgetting to write to his wife and 
 family, or accepting money and neglecting the conditions 
 on which it was bestowed, is apt to let Christian charity 
 go to the winds, and so on his part, too, to miss, nor 
 care that he misses, the better Coleridge which is the 
 real Coleridge, the affectionate forgiving Coleridge, so 
 anxious to cure his faults, so eager to make people see, 
 so childlike and yet condemned to sit 
 
 obscure 
 
 In the exceeding lustre and the pure 
 Intense irradiation of a mind. 
 
 The story not only exasperates the temper ; it dodges 
 the understanding, and leaves even the patient reader 
 in such bewilderment as, no doubt, afflicted the much- 
 enduring Odysseus after a third attempt to embrace his 
 
 212
 
 Coleridge 213 
 
 mother in the Shades. For Providence (as De Quincey 
 put it) set ' perpetual relays" along Coleridge's path 
 through life. We pursue the man and come up with 
 group after group of his friends : and each, as we demand 
 "What have you done with Coleridge?" answers, 
 "Coleridge? That wonderful fellow? ... He was 
 here just now, and we helped him forward a little 
 way." 
 
 The late James Dykes Campbell (to whose Life of 
 Coleridge the reader is referred) took up his task with 
 enthusiasm and performed it with astonishing success. 
 He honoured the poet's memory a little "on this side 
 idolatry." Yet as we follow his condensed narrative we 
 feel the growth of misgivings in the writer's mind, and 
 at the close he has to make a clean breast of them. ' ' If , " 
 says he, "my presentment of what I believe to be the 
 truth be not found to tend, on the whole, to raise 
 Coleridge in the eyes of men, I shall, I confess, feel 
 both surprised and disappointed. " 
 
 I am sure that the temple, with all the rubble which 
 blended with its marble, must have been a grander whole 
 than any we are able to reconstruct for ourselves from the 
 stones which lie about the field. The living Coleridge was 
 ever his own apology men and women who neither shared 
 nor ignored his shortcomings, not only loved him but 
 honoured and followed him. This power of attraction, 
 which might almost be called universal, so diverse were the 
 minds and natures attracted, is itself conclusive proof of 
 very rare qualities. We may read and re-read his life, but 
 we cannot know him as the Lambs, or the Wordsworths, or 
 Poole, or Hookham Frere, or the Gillmans, or Green knew 
 him. Hatred as well as love may be blind, but friendship 
 has eyes, and their testimony may wisely be used in correct- 
 ing our own impressions.
 
 214 Studies in Literature 
 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 
 1772, at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, 
 the youngest of nine sons by a second marriage. His 
 father, the Reverend John Coleridge, was an amiable, 
 absent-minded scholar, and apparently somewhat un- 
 practical. We are told that he printed several books 
 by subscription, and he tried to improve the Latin 
 grammars in use by calling the ablative case the 
 " quale-quarequidditive. " He died in 1781, and a 
 few months later young Samuel obtained a presentation 
 to Christ's Hospital. 
 
 The school and the Coleridge of those days were 
 afterwards depicted in imperishable colours by Charles 
 Lamb, who, though Coleridge's junior by two years, 
 had become a Blue-coat boy some months earlier. In 
 Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago, by one of 
 those tricks which were dear to him and endear him to 
 us, Lamb professedly supplements his own Recollections 
 of Christ's Hospital with the recollections of a lad not 
 fortunate like him in having a home and parents near. 
 
 I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who 
 should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaint- 
 ances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind 
 to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which 
 they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, 
 soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them 
 to recur too often, though I found them few enough; and, 
 one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone 
 among six hundred playmates. 
 
 the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early home- 
 stead! The yearnings which I used to have towards it in 
 those unfledged years! How, in my dreams, would my 
 native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, 
 and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in
 
 Coleridge 215 
 
 the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wilt- 
 shire! 
 
 The child is Coleridge, of course, and sweet Calne 
 in Wiltshire is sweet Ottery in Devon, disguised. Of 
 course Coleridge felt this loneliness: a nature so sen- 
 sitive could not help feeling it; and sixteen years 
 later in Frost at Midnight he feelingly recalled it, and 
 promised his own child a happier fate. But, equally 
 of course, he did not feel it all the time. His earliest 
 letters contain allusions to half-crowns and "a plumb 
 cake," and in due course, as he grows up, the theme 
 changes naturally to raiment. ' ' You will excuse me for 
 reminding you that, as our holidays commence next 
 week, and I shall go out a good deal, a good pair 
 of breeches will be no inconsiderable accession to my 
 appearance, " the pair in use being "not altogether well 
 adapted for a female eye. " 
 
 In due course, too, he became a Grecian, fell in love 
 and wrote boyish poetry: and both the love-making 
 and the versifying, though no great matters at the time, 
 were destined to have more formidable consequences 
 than usually attach themselves to youthful experiments. 
 The young lady who inspired them was a Miss Mary 
 Evans, a widow's daughter, and sister of a small Blue- 
 coat boy whom Coleridge had protected. 
 
 And oh! from sixteen to nineteen what hours of paradise 
 had Allen [a schoolfellow] and I in escorting the Miss Evanses 
 home on a Saturday, who were then at a milliner's . . . 
 and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the 
 pillage of the flower-gardens within six miles of town, with 
 sonnet or love-rhyme wrapped round the nosegay. 
 
 But not all the inspiration came from Miss Evans. 
 That of the love-making she shared, if a Christ's
 
 216 Studies in Literature 
 
 Hospital tradition be true, with the daughter of the 
 school "nurse"; to whom the poem Genevieve was 
 addressed. ("For the head boys to be in love with 
 these young persons was an institution of long standing, " 
 says Mr. Dykes Campbell.) That of Coleridge's poetic 
 awakening she undoubtedly shared with the Rev. 
 William Lisle Bowles, as we learn from Chapter 'I of 
 Biographia Literaria. Critic after critic has found oc- 
 casion for wonder in this ; though in truth there is none 
 at all. To begin with, Bowles's sonnets are by no 
 means bad; and, moreover, even today they are percepti- 
 bly, if palely, tinged with the dawn that was breaking 
 over English poetry. Doubtless, had the book which 
 fell into his hands as he was entering his seventeenth 
 year been a volume of Blake, or of Cowper, or of Burns, 
 his young conversion would have been more striking; 
 would, at any rate, have made a better story. But by 
 1790 or thereabouts the new poetic movement was "in 
 the air, " as we say: a youth might take infection from 
 any one, nor did it greatly matter from whom. Had 
 Coleridge derived it from a stronger source the results 
 might have been more precipitate, more violent. As it 
 was, the blameless Sonnets these and the equally 
 blameless society of the Evans girls weaned him from 
 metaphysics and theology, on which he was immaturely 
 feeding, and weaned him gently. He swore assent to 
 Bowles: Bowles "did his heart more good" than all 
 other books "excepting the Bible": but in his own 
 attempts at versifying he still observed, even timidly, 
 the conventions. 
 
 In January, 1791, the Committee of Almoners of 
 Christ's Hospital emancipated him, with an Exhibition, 
 to Jesus College, Cambridge. He started well. In 
 1792 he gained the Browne Gold Medal for a Sapphic
 
 Coleridge 217 
 
 Ode on the Slave Trade, and barely missed (on Person's 
 selection) the Craven Scholarship. In November, 1793, 
 he bolted from Cambridge, in a fright of his college 
 debts, or in a wild fit following on Mary Evans's rejec- 
 tion of his addresses. Both causes are suspected, and 
 the two may have acted in combination. At all events 
 he found his way to London, and on the second of 
 December enlisted in the I5th or King's Light Dragoons, 
 sinking all but his initials and his unlikeness to other 
 men in the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. Prob- 
 ably a worse light dragoon he was short of stature, 
 fat, and unwieldy never occupied, or failed to occupy, 
 a saddle. In April, 1794, his relatives procured his 
 discharge, and Jesus College readmitted him. In June 
 he visited his old schoolfellow Allen at Oxford, and 
 there became acquainted with Robert Southey of 
 Balliol. Mr. Robert Southey was then a youth of ' ' vio- 
 lent principles," out of which his friends and Cole- 
 ridge aiding the famous scheme of Pantisocracy was 
 hastily incubated. Mr. Campbell summarises it thus: 
 
 "Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal prin- 
 ciples are to embark with twelve ladies in April next," 
 fixing themselves in some "delightful part of the new back 
 settlements of America. " The labour of each man for two 
 or three hours a day, it was imagined, would suffice to sup- 
 port the colony. The produce was to be common property, 
 there was to be a good library, and ample leisure was to be 
 devoted to study, discussion, and the education of the 
 children on a settled system. The women were to be 
 employed in taking care of the infant children and in other 
 suitable occupations, not neglecting the cultivation of their 
 minds. Among other matters not yet determined was 
 "whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved, if agree- 
 able to one or both parties. " Every one was "to enjoy his
 
 218 Studies in Literature 
 
 own religious and political opinions, provided they do not 
 encroach on the rules previously made. " "They calculate 
 that every gentleman providing 125 will be sufficient to 
 carry the scheme into execution." 
 
 While Pantisocracy was hatching, Coleridge had 
 departed on a walking-tour in Wales. On the thir- 
 teenth of July he reached Wrexham, and there, standing 
 at the inn-window, he spied Mary Evans coming down 
 the street with her sister. "I sickened," he writes, 
 "and well-nigh fainted, but instantly retired." The 
 two sisters, it appears, had caught sight of him. They 
 "walked by the window four or five times, as if anx- 
 iously. " But the meeting, the possible reconcilement, 
 were not to be. Coleridge fled to Bristol, joined his 
 friend Southey there, with other Pantisocrats, includ- 
 ing a family of young ladies named Pricker. Southey 
 married Edith Pricker. Coleridge such things hap- 
 pen in the revulsion of disappointed passion married 
 Sara Pricker. The marriage, says Mr. Campbell, was 
 not made in Heaven. It was in great measure brought 
 about by Southey. 
 
 Heaven alone knows but no one who loves Cole- 
 ridge can help wistfully guessing what Dorothy Words- 
 worth might have made of him, as his wife. We have, 
 perhaps, no right to guess at these things, but we can- 
 not help it. He met her too late, by a little while, as it 
 was all but too late that he met William Wordsworth. 
 The Coleridges, after a brief experience of house-keeping 
 at Clevedon and Bristol interrupted by a tour to col- 
 lect subscriptions for a projected newspaper, The Watch- 
 man hied them down with their first-born to Nether 
 Stowey in Somerset, to be neighbours of Thomas Poole, 
 an admiring friend and a good fellow. To Nether
 
 Coleridge 219 
 
 Stowey, in July, 1797, came Wordsworth and his 
 "exquisite sister, " and were joined by Charles Lamb 
 all three as the Coleridges' guests. (The visit is com- 
 memorated in This Lime-tree Bower my Prison.) At 
 the end of his week's holiday Lamb returned to London ; 
 the Wordsworths, charmed by Coleridge's society, 
 removed themselves but three miles away, to Alfoxden, 
 and set up house. 
 
 Then the miracle happened. Coleridge had already 
 published a volume of verse and brought it to a second 
 edition: but it contained no promise of what was to 
 come. Wordsworth was meditating the Muse, if the 
 word "meditating" can be used of a composition so 
 frantic as The Borderers; but that he (the slower to 
 take fire) would within a year be writing Tintern 
 Abbey was a thing impossible, which nevertheless 
 befell. Brother, sister, and friend these three as 
 Coleridge has testified became one soul. "They saw 
 as much of one another as if the width of a street, and 
 not a pair of coombes, had separated their several 
 abodes"; and in the soul of that intimacy, under the 
 influence of Dorothy herself the silent one, content 
 to encourage, criticise, admire wrapped around by 
 the lovely solitudes of the Quantocks Coleridge and 
 Wordsworth found themselves poets, speaking with new 
 voices in a new dawn. On the thirteenth of November, 
 at half -past four in the afternoon, the three friends set 
 off to walk to Watchet, on their way to the Exmoor 
 country, intending to defray their expenses by the sale 
 of a poem which the two men were to compose by the 
 way. Before the first eight miles had been covered, 
 the plan of joint authorship had broken down, and 
 Coleridge took the poem into his sole hands. He 
 wrought at it until the following March. On the
 
 22O Studies in Literature 
 
 twenty- third of that month, writes Dorothy, "Cole- 
 ridge dined with us. He brought his ballad [The 
 Ancient Mariner] finished. We walked with him to the 
 Miner's house. A beautiful evening, very starry, the 
 horned moon. " We feel that the stars were out with 
 excuse, to celebrate the birth of a star. 
 
 The Ancient Mariner sets one reflecting that, after 
 all, the men of the Middle Ages had much to say for 
 themselves, who connected poetry with magic, and 
 thought of Virgil as a wizard. As we said just now, by 
 taking small pains we can understand that the sonnets 
 of Bowles pale, faded essays as they appear to us 
 wore a different complexion in the sunrise of 1790. 
 But we can ignore the time and circumstance of its birth, 
 ignore the theorisings out of which it sprang, ignore 
 Wordsworth and his prefaces and the taste on which 
 they made war; and still, after more than a hundred 
 years, The Ancient Mariner is the wild thing of wonder, 
 the captured star, which Coleridge brought in his hands 
 to Alfoxden and showed to Dorothy and William 
 Wordsworth. Not in the whole range of English 
 poetry not in Shakespeare himself has the lyrical 
 genius of our language spoken with such a note. 
 
 A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard . . . 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides. 
 
 Its music is as effortless as its imagery. Its words do 
 not cumber it: exquisite words come to it, but it uses 
 and straightway forgets them. Not Shakespeare him- 
 self, unless by snatches, so sublimated the lyrical 
 tongue, or obtained effects so magical by the barest 
 necessary means. Take
 
 Coleridge 22 1 
 
 Or 
 
 The many men, so beautiful ! 
 And they all dead did lie. 
 
 The moving Moon went up the sky, 
 And nowhere did abide; 
 Softly she was going up, 
 And a star or two beside. 
 
 Or 
 
 The body of my brother's son 
 Stood by me, knee to knee: 
 The body and I pull'd at one rope, 
 But he said nought to me. 
 
 Here, and throughout, from the picture of the bride 
 entering the hall to that of the home-coming in the 
 moon-lit harbour, every scene in the procession belongs 
 to high romance, yet each is conjured up with that 
 economy of touch we are wont to call classical. We 
 forget almost, listening to the voice, that there are such 
 things as words. 
 
 And now 'twas like all instruments, 
 Now like a lonely flute; 
 And now it is an angel's song, 
 That makes the Heavens be mute. 
 
 If, in criticism, such an epithet be pardonable, we would 
 call that voice seraphic ; if such a simile, we would liken 
 it to a seraph's, musing, talking before the gate of 
 Paradise in the dawn. 
 
 Critics, allowing the magic of the poem, proceed to 
 stultify the admission by enquiring why Coleridge did 
 not follow it up and write others like it. The question, 
 when foolishness has put it, can in terms of foolishness
 
 222 Studies in Literature 
 
 be readily answered. Coleridge yielded his will to 
 opium. He had already begun to contract the habit, 
 and he soon became a man capable (in Hazlitt's phrase) 
 of doing anything which did not present itself as a duty. 
 Once or twice, in Christabel and in Kubla Khan, he 
 found new and divine openings, but his will could not 
 sustain the flight, and the rest of the story of him as a 
 poet resolves itself into repeated futile efforts to carry 
 Christabel to a conclusion. 
 
 All this is true enough, or at least can be made con- 
 vincing by any one who sets forth the story of Cole- 
 ridge's subsequent aberrations. But before we blame 
 his weakness let us ask ourselves if it be conceivably 
 within one man's measure to produce a succession of 
 poems on the plane of The Ancient Mariner; and, next, 
 if the magic granted, as it must be granted it would 
 not almost necessarily exhaust a man. In other words, 
 let us enquire if, in a man who performed that miracle, 
 his failure to perform others may not be more charitably 
 set down to a divine exhaustion than charged upon his 
 frailties. Surely by Christabel itself that question is 
 answered; and almost as indisputably by Kubla Khan. 
 Coleridge himself tells us that he began Christabel in 
 1797; that is, either before or during the composition of 
 The Ancient Mariner. Between the conception of the 
 two poems there was no interval of opium-taking. Yet 
 who, studying Christabel, can, after the first two or 
 three pages have been turned, believe that the poem 
 could ever and by any possibility have been finished? 
 Coleridge, no doubt, believed that it could: but in his 
 struggles to finish it he was fighting against stronger 
 adversaries than opium ; against fate and a providence 
 under which, things being what they are, their conse- 
 quences will be what they will be.
 
 Coleridge 223 
 
 The metre of Christabel, perfectly handled by its 
 inventor, probably suffers in our ears by association 
 with the jingle of Scott, and the vastly worse jingle 
 of Byron, who borrowed it in turn. It has since been 
 utterly vulgarised, and the very lilt of it nowadays 
 suggests The Mistletoe Bough, melodrama, and the 
 balladry of Bow Bells. Yet, and although the sus- 
 picion may be unworthy, one cannot help tracing 
 something of Bow Bells back to an origin in such lines 
 as 
 
 Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, 
 Murmuring o'er the name again, 
 "Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine"? 
 
 In short, there are some to whom Christabel rings 
 false, painfully false, here and there, in spite of its 
 witchery. Yet, where it rings true, we ask, Was there 
 ever such pure romantic music? 
 
 Is the night chilly and dark? 
 The night is chilly, but not dark. 
 The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 
 It covers but not hides the sky. 
 The moon is behind, and at the full : 
 And yet she looks both small and dull. 
 The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 
 'Tis a month before the month of May, 
 And the Spring comes slowly up this way. 
 
 Of Kubla Kha,n, even if " a person . . . from Porlock " 
 had not interrupted it, who will contend that it could 
 ever have been finished, or even continued to any 
 length? It abides the most entrancing magical frag- 
 ment in English poetry; more than this it never could 
 have been or have hoped to be.
 
 224 Studies in Literature 
 
 Some three weeks after that starry evening on which 
 Coleridge, his immortal ballad finished, walked with 
 his friends, reciting it, we find Wordsworth writing to 
 a friend that he, too, has been "very rapidly adding 
 to his stock of poetry " and that the season is advancing 
 with strides, "and the country becomes almost every 
 day more lovely." The splendour of that summer in 
 the Quantocks has passed into the history of our 
 literature. Coleridge's best harvest was done; Words- 
 worth's longer of continuance, yet brief in comparison 
 with its almost insufferably long aftermath on the 
 point of ripening. The brother and sister quitted 
 Alfoxden at Midsummer. In September Coleridge met 
 them in London and voyaged with them on a happy, 
 almost rollicking, jaunt to Hamburg. The Lyrical 
 Ballads had been published a few days before, Cole- 
 ridge contributing The Ancient Mariner (or, to spell 
 it accurately, The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere), The 
 Nightingale, The Foster-Mother's Tale, and The Dungeon. 
 The two friends had launched their thunderbolt, and 
 went off gaily. It was a real thunderbolt, too; a book 
 to which the overworked epithet "epoch-making" may 
 for once in a way be applied without strain on the 
 truth; but for the moment England took it with her 
 habitual phlegm. Mrs. Coleridge sent news that "the 
 Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all by any. " 
 
 At Hamburg, after a few crowded days, the travellers 
 separated Coleridge for Ratzeburg, intent on acquiring 
 a thorough knowledge of German. He returned to 
 Nether Stowey in July, 1799, and towards the close of 
 the year met the Wordsworths again and toured with 
 them through the Lake Country. Thither in June, 
 1800, he wandered back to them from London and 
 Stowey. They had installed themselves at Dove
 
 Coleridge 225 
 
 Cottage, Grasmere, and in July the Coleridges settled 
 at Greta Hall, Keswick, twelve miles away. Words- 
 worth was not working at the height of his powers : but 
 to Coleridge the renewed intimacy brought no secondary 
 spring. For him there was never to be another Stowey. 
 And here, both fortunately and unfortunately, the story 
 may break off: unfortunately, because his poetic period 
 had come to an end (he had, he writes to Thelwall, "for 
 ever renounced poetry for metaphysics," and moreover 
 was beginning his long slavery to opium) ; fortunately, 
 because its end releases us from following him to Malta 
 and Bristol, through quarrels and patchings-up of friend- 
 ship, through wanderings, returns, vows and defections, 
 partial recoveries, relapses and despairs, to the long- 
 drawn sunset of his life in the home of the Gillmans at 
 Highgate. 
 
 Let two things be noted, however, before we give 
 assent to those who write contemptuously of Coleridge 
 and his infirmity. The first is, that even in the lowest 
 depths he still fought, and in the end he did emerge 
 with the victory. He had won it at a terrible cost ; the 
 fight had killed a hundred splendid potentialities; but 
 though scarred, battered, enfeebled, the man emerged, 
 and with his manhood still in his hands, though they 
 trembled on the prize. Next let us, reading of quarrels 
 and misunderstandings between him and his friends, 
 note how, as time effaces the petty circumstance of each, 
 so the essential goodness of the man shines through, 
 more and more clearly; how, in almost any given quarrel, 
 as the years go on, we see that after all Coleridge was 
 in the right. He knew his weakness: but at least it 
 taught him to be tender towards the weaknesses of his 
 fellows, and no man had a better reason to ask of his 
 sufferings
 
 226 Studies in Literature 
 
 But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? 
 To be beloved is all I need, 
 And whom I love, I love indeed. 
 
 As this affectionate disposition made him all but unin- 
 telligible to the Southeys and Hazlitts of his time, and 
 lay somewhat outside the range of self-centred Words- 
 worth, whose fault in friendship was that of the Dutch 
 in matters of commerce, 1 so the very brilliance of his 
 intellect too often isolated him within the circle of its 
 own light. But on this Shelley has said the last word : 
 
 You will see Coleridge he who sits obscure 
 
 In the exceeding lustre and the pure 
 
 Intense irradiation of a mind 
 
 Which, with its own internal lightning blind, 
 
 Flags wearily through darkness and despair 
 
 A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, 
 
 A hooded eagle among blinking owls. 
 
 In justice and in decency we should strive to imagine 
 Coleridge as he impressed those who loved him and 
 listened to him in his great days of promise; not the 
 Coleridge of later Highgate days, the spent giant with 
 whose portrait Carlyle made brutal play to his own 
 ineffaceable discredit; nor even the Coleridge of 1816, 
 the "archangel a little damaged" as Lamb, using a 
 friend's privilege, might be allowed to describe him in a 
 letter to Wordsworth, a friend of almost equal standing; 
 not these, but the Coleridge of whom the remembrance 
 was the abiding thought in Lamb's mind and on his lips 
 
 1 " But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures 
 are too liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed 
 the mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved by you, 
 for those who love you." Coleridge to Allsop, December 2, 1818. (The 
 reference is to Wordsworth.)
 
 Coleridge 227 
 
 during the brief while he survived him "Coleridge is 
 dead." "His great and dear spirit haunts me. . . . 
 Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see 
 again. I seem to love the house he died at more passion- 
 ately than when he lived. . . . What was his mansion 
 is consecrated to me a chapel. " If we must dwell at all 
 on the later Coleridge, let it be in the spirit of his own 
 most beautiful epitaph : 
 
 Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God, 
 
 And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod 
 
 A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he. 
 
 0, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; 
 
 That he who many a year with toil of breath 
 
 Found death in life, may here find life in death! 
 
 Mercy for praise to be forgiven for fame 
 
 He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! 
 
 None the less, in a world ever loath to admit that 
 omelets involve the breaking of eggs, men will go on 
 surmising what might have been, what full treasures 
 of poetry Coleridge might have left, had he never drunk 
 opium, had he eschewed metaphysics, had he married 
 Dorothy Wordsworth, had he taken a deal of advice 
 his friends gave him in good intent to rescue the Cole- 
 ridge which God made (with their approval) and the 
 creature marred. "He lived until 1834, " wrote the late 
 Dr. Garnett. ' ' If every year of his life had yielded such 
 a harvest as 1797, he would have produced a greater 
 amount of high poetry than all his contemporaries put 
 together." Yes, indeed! and Kubla Khan has this in 
 common with a cow's tail that it only lacks length to 
 reach the moon. And yet, vain though these specula- 
 tions are, we do wrong to laugh at them, for their protest 
 goes deeper than their reasoning; and while fate
 
 228 Studies in Literature 
 
 tramples on things of beauty the indignant human 
 heart will utter it. Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus, 
 when a poet and such a poet is broken in his prime ? 
 On the other hand, the question sometimes raised 
 whether, in the Quantock time, when the pair learnt 
 to be poets, Coleridge owed more to Wordsworth, or 
 Wordsworth to Coleridge is, as Sir Thomas Browne 
 would say, puzzling, but not beyond all conjecture: and 
 we raise it again because we think it usually receives 
 the wrong answer. It is usually argued that Coleridge 
 received more than he gave, because he was the more 
 impressionable. We might oppose this with the argu- 
 ment that Coleridge probably gave more than he 
 received, as his presence and talk were the more inspir- 
 ing. But let us look at a date or two. In June, 1797, 
 Coleridge wrote This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, and 
 it contains such lines as these : 
 
 Yet still the solitary humble-bee 
 
 Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know 
 
 That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure . . . 
 
 and 
 
 No sound is dissonant which tells of Life. 
 
 Frost at Midnight is dated February, 1798, and it con- 
 tains the passage beginning 
 
 Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee. . . . 
 
 The exquisite Nightingale belongs to the summer of 
 1798, and it contains the images of the "night-wander- 
 ing man, " of the nightingale 
 
 That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates 
 With fast thick warble his delicious notes . . .
 
 Coleridge 229 
 
 of the other birds awake in the bushes with 
 Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and f ull . . . 
 
 and that most lovely picture of the infant hushing his 
 woe as he gazes up at the moon through the orchard 
 boughs : 
 
 While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, 
 Did glitter in the yellow moonbeam ! Well ! 
 It is a father's tale. But if that Heaven 
 Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up 
 Familiar with these songs, that with the night 
 He may associate joy. 
 
 Now the first thing to be noted of these lines, these 
 images, is that they are what we now call Words- 
 worthian; some, the very best Wordsworthian ; but all 
 Wordsworthian with an intensity to which (if we study 
 his verse chronologically) we find that in 1798 Words- 
 worth had never once attained or once only, in a 
 couple of lines of The Thorn. When Coleridge wrote 
 these things, Wordsworth was writing We are Seven, 
 Goody Blake, Simon Lee, and the rest. It was only 
 after, though soon after, Coleridge had written them 
 that Wordsworth is seen capable of such lines as 
 
 The still sad music of humanity . . . 
 or of 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place. 
 
 This note Coleridge might teach to Wordsworth, as 
 Wordsworth might improve on it and make it his own.
 
 230 Studies in Literature 
 
 But that other note the lyrical note of The Ancient 
 Mariner was incommunicable. He bequeathed it to 
 none, and before him no poet had approached it ; hardly 
 even Shakespeare, on the harp of Ariel.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and 
 powerful genius, but rather as a delightful and edifying 
 genius. ... He is the most prepossessing and convincing 
 of witnesses to the good of loving light. Because he sin- 
 cerely loved light, and did not prefer to it any little private 
 darkness of his own, he found light. . . . And because he 
 was full of light he was also full of happiness. . . . His life 
 was as charming as his thoughts. For certainly it is 
 natural that the love of light, which is already in some 
 measure the possession of light, should irradiate and beatify 
 the whole life of him who has it. 
 
 MANY a reader of Essays in Criticism must have 
 paused and in thought transferred to Matthew 
 Arnold these words of his in praise of Joubert, as well 
 as the fine passage in which he goes on to ask What, in 
 literature, we mean by fame? Only two kinds of 
 authors (he tells us) are secure of fame : the first being 
 the Homers, Dantes, Shakespeares, "the great abiding 
 fountains of truth, " whose praise is for ever and ever. 
 But beside these sacred personages stand certain elect 
 ones, less majestic, yet to be recognised as of the same 
 family and character with the greatest, "exercising like 
 them an immortal function, and like them inspiring a 
 permanent interest. " The fame of these also is assured. 
 "They will never, like the Shakespeares, command the 
 231
 
 232 Studies in Literature 
 
 homage of the multitude ; but they are safe ; the multi- 
 tude will not trample them down." 
 
 To this company Matthew Arnold belongs. We all 
 feel it, and some of us can give reasons for our con- 
 fidence ; but perhaps, if all our reasons were collected, 
 the feeling would be found to reach deeper into cer- 
 tainty than any of them. He was never popular, and 
 never will be. Yet no one can say that, although at one 
 time he seemed to vie with the public in distrusting 
 it, his poetry missed its mark. On the other hand, 
 while his critical writings had swift and almost instan- 
 taneous effect for good, the repute they brought him was 
 moderate and largely made up of misconception. For 
 the mass of his countrymen he came somehow to per- 
 sonify a number of things which their minds vaguely 
 associated with kid gloves, and by his ironical way of 
 playing with the misconception he did more than a little 
 to confirm it. But in truth Arnold was a serious man 
 who saw life as a serious business and chiefly relied, for 
 making the best of it, upon a serene common-sense. 
 He had elegance, to be sure, and was inclined at any 
 rate, in controversy to be conscious of it ; but it was 
 elegance of that plain Attic order to which common- 
 sense gives the law and almost the inspiration. The 
 man and the style were one. Alike in his life and his 
 writings he observed and preached the golden mean, 
 with a mind which was none the less English and practi- 
 cal if, in expressing it, he deliberately and almost 
 defiantly avoided that emphasis which Englishmen love 
 to a fault. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, 
 the famous Head Master of Rugby, was born on 
 Christmas Eve, 1822, at Laleham on the Thames, 
 where his father at that time taught private pupils.
 
 Matthew Arnold 233 
 
 The child was barely six years old when the family 
 removed to Rugby, and at seven he returned to Lale- 
 ham to be taught by his uncle, the Rev. John Buckland. 
 In August, 1836, he proceeded to Winchester, but was 
 removed at the end of a year and entered Rugby, 
 where he remained until he went up to Balliol College, 
 Oxford, in 1841, with an open scholarship. He had 
 written a prize poem at Rugby the subject, Alaric at 
 Rome; and on this performance he improved by taking 
 the Newdigate in 1843 the subject, Cromwell. But 
 we need waste no time on these exercises, which are of 
 interest only to people interested in such things. It is 
 better worth noting that the boy had been used to 
 spending his holidays, and now spent a great part of his 
 vacations, at Fox How, near Grasmere, a house which 
 Dr. Arnold had taken to refresh his eyes and his spirits 
 after the monotonous ridge and furrow, field and 
 hedgerow, around Rugby ; and that, as Mr. Herbert Paul 
 puts it, young Matthew "thus grew up under the 
 shadow of Wordsworth, whose brilliant and penetrat- 
 ing interpreter he was destined to become." Genius 
 collects early, and afterwards distils from recollection; 
 and if its spirit, like that of the licentiate Pedro Garcias, 
 is to be disinterred, he who would find Matthew Arnold's 
 must dig in and around Fox How and Oxford. 
 
 At Oxford, which he loved passionately, he "missed 
 his first, " but atoned for this, three months later, by 
 winning a fellowship at Oriel. (This was in 1844-5. 
 His father had died in 1842.) He stayed up, however, 
 but a short while after taking his degree : went back to 
 Rugby as an assistant master; relinquished this in 1847 
 to become private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, then 
 President of the Council; and was by him appointed in 
 1851 to an Inspectorship of Schools, which he retained
 
 234 Studies in Literature 
 
 for five-and-thirty years. In 1851, too, he married 
 Frances Lucy Wightman, daughter of a Judge of the 
 Queen's Bench; and so settled down at the same time 
 to domestic happiness and to daily work which, if dull 
 sometimes, was not altogether ungrateful as it was 
 never less than conscientiously performed. 
 
 Meanwhile, in 1849, he had put forth a thin volume, 
 The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A; which was 
 followed in 1852 by Empedocles on Etna, and other 
 Poems, by A. In 1853 he dropped anonymity and 
 under the title Poems, by Matthew Arnold republished 
 the contents of these two volumes, omitting Empedocles, 
 with a few minor pieces, and adding some priceless 
 things, such as Sohrab and Rustum, The Church oj 
 Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar -Gipsy. 
 
 "It was received, we believe, with general indiffer- 
 ence," wrote Mr. Froude of the first volume, in The 
 Westminster Review, 1854. We need not trouble to 
 explain the fact, beyond saying that English criticism 
 was just then at about the lowest ebb it reached in 
 the last century, and that the few capable ears were 
 occupied by the far more confident voice of Tennyson 
 and the far more disconcerting one of Browning: but 
 the fact surprising when all allowance has been made 
 must be noted, for it is important to remember that 
 the most and best of Arnold's poetry was written 
 before he gained the world's ear, and that he gained 
 it not as a poet but as a critic. In 1855 appeared 
 Poems by Matthew Arnold, Second Series, of which only 
 Balder Dead and Separation were new; and in 1858 
 Merope with its Preface: but in the interval between 
 them he had been elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford 
 (May 1857). 
 
 The steps by which a reputation grows, the precise
 
 Matthew Arnold 235 
 
 moment at which it becomes established, are often diffi- 
 cult to trace and fix. The poems, negligently though 
 they had been received at first, must have helped : and, 
 since men who improve an office are themselves usually 
 improved by it, assuredly the professorship helped too. 
 The lectures on Homer which adorned Arnold's first 
 tenure of the Chair strike a new note of criticism, speak 
 with a growing undertone of authority beneath their 
 modest professions, and would suffice to explain if 
 mere custom did not even more easily explain why in 
 1862 he was re-elected for another five years. But 
 before 1865, no doubt, the judicious who knew him had 
 tested him by more than his lectures, and were pre- 
 pared for Essays in Criticism. 
 
 Although we are mainly concerned here with the 
 poems, a word must be said on Essays in Criticism, 
 which Mr. Paul pronounces to be "Mr. Arnold's most 
 important work in prose, the central book, so to speak, 
 of his life. " Mr. Saintsbury calls it "the first full and 
 varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and 
 illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed 
 manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and 
 so one of the epoch-making books of the later nine- 
 teenth century in English" and on this subject Mr. 
 Saintsbury has a peculiar right to be heard. 
 
 Now for a book to be "epoch-making" it must bring 
 to its age something which its age conspicuously lacks : 
 and Essays in Criticism did this. No one remembering 
 what Dryden did, and Johnson, and Coleridge, and 
 Lamb, and Hazlitt, will pretend that Arnold invented 
 English criticism, or that he did well what these men 
 had done ill. What he did, and they missed doing, was 
 to treat criticism as a deliberate disinterested art, with 
 laws and methods of its own, a proper temper, and
 
 236 Studies in Literature 
 
 certain standards or touchstones of right taste by which 
 the quality of any writing, as literature, could be tested. 
 In other words he introduced authority and, with 
 authority, responsibility, into a business which had 
 hitherto been practised at the best by brilliant noncon- 
 formists and at the worst by Quarterly Reviewers, 
 who, taking for their motto Judex damnatur cum nocens 
 absolvitur, either forgot or never surmised that to punish 
 the guilty can be but a corollary of a higher obligation 
 to discover the truth. Nor can any one now read the 
 literature of that period without a sense that Arnold's 
 teaching was indispensably needed just then. A page 
 of Macaulay or of Carlyle dazzles us with its rhetoric ; 
 strikes, arrests, excites us with a number of things 
 tellingly put and in ways we had scarcely guessed to be 
 possible; but it no longer convinces. It does not even 
 dispose us to be convinced, since (to put it vulgarly) 
 we feel that the author "is not out after" truth; that 
 Macaulay 's William III is a figure dressed up and 
 adjusted to prove Macaulay's thesis, and that the 
 France of Carlyle's French Revolution not only never 
 existed but, had it ever existed, would not be France. 
 Arnold helping us, we see these failures for surely that 
 history is a failure which, like Cremorne, will not bear 
 the daylight to be inevitable in a republic of letters 
 where laws are not and wherein each author writes at 
 the top of his own bent, indulging and exploiting his 
 personal eccentricity to the fullest. It has probably 
 been the salvation of our literature that in the four- 
 teenth century the Latin prevailed over the Anglo- 
 Saxon line of its descent, and that in the forming of our 
 verse as well as of our prose we had, at the critical mo- 
 ments, the literatures of Latin races, Italian or French, 
 for models and correctives; as it was the misfortune of
 
 Matthew Arnold 237 
 
 the Victorian period before 1865 that its men of genius 
 wrote with eyes turned inward upon themselves, or, if 
 outward, upon that German literature which, for all its 
 great qualities, must ever be dangerous to Englishmen 
 because it natters and encourages their special faults. I 
 Of Arnold from 1865 onward of the books in which 
 he enforced rather than developed his critical method 
 (for all the gist of it may be found in Essays in Critic- 
 ism] of his incursions into the fields of politics and 
 theology much might be written, but it would not be 
 germane to our purpose. New Poems, including Bac- 
 chanalia, or the New Age, Dover Beach, and the beautiful 
 Thyrsis, appeared in 1867; and thereafter for the last 
 twenty years of his life he wrote very little in verse, 
 though the fine Westminster Abbey proved that the Muse 
 had not died in him. He used his hold upon the public 
 ear to preach some sermons which, as a good citizen, he 
 thought the nation needed. In his hard-working official 
 life he rendered services which those of us who engage 
 in the work of English education are constantly and 
 gratefully recognising in their effects; and we still toil 
 in the wake of his ideals. He retired in November, 
 1886. He died on April 15, 1888, of heart-failure; he 
 had gone to Liverpool to meet his eldest daughter on her 
 return from the United States, and there, in running to 
 catch a tram-car, he fell and died in a moment. He was 
 sixty-five, but in appearance carried his years lightly. 
 He looked and was, a distinguished and agreeable 
 man. Of good presence and fine manners; perfect in 
 his domestic relations, genial in company and radiating 
 cheerfulness ; setting a high aim to his official work yet 
 ever conscientious in details ; he stands (apart from his 
 
 1 That Matthew Arnold himself over- valued contemporary German 
 literature does not really affect our argument.
 
 238 Studies in Literature 
 
 literary achievement) as an example of the Englishman 
 at his best. He cultivated this best deliberately. His 
 daily note-books were filled with quotations, high 
 thoughts characteristically chosen and jotted down to 
 be borne in mind; and some of these such as Semper 
 aliquid certi proponendum est and Ecce labora et noli 
 contristari! recur again and again. But the result 
 owed its amiability also to that "timely relaxation" 
 counselled by Milton : 
 
 To measure life, learn them betimes, and know 
 Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; 
 For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains, 
 And disapproves that care, though wise in show, 
 That with superfluous burden loads the day, 
 And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains. 
 
 To those, then, who tell us that Arnold's poetic period 
 was brief, and imply that it was therefore disappointing, 
 we might answer that this is but testimony to the 
 perfect development of a life which in due season used 
 poetry and at the due hour cast it away, to proceed to 
 things more practical. But this would be to err almost 
 as deeply as those who tell us that Arnold, as he him- 
 self said of Gray, " never spoke out " whereas Arnold 
 habitually spoke out, and now and then even too in- 
 sistently. Again it would be a mistake for us to apply 
 to him au pied de la lettre the over-sad verses : 
 
 Youth rambles on life's arid mount, 
 
 And strikes the rock, and finds the vein, 
 
 And brings the water from the fount, 
 The fount which shall not flow again. 
 
 The man mature with labour chops 
 For the bright stream a channel grand,
 
 Matthew Arnold 239 
 
 And sees not that the sacred drops 
 Ran off and vanish'd out of hand. 
 
 And then the old man totters nigh, 
 And feebly rakes among the stones. 
 
 The mount is mute, the channel dry; 
 And down he lays his weary bones. 
 
 Yet it were stupid not to recognise that here is contained 
 a certain amount of general truth and of truth particu- 
 larly applicable to Arnold. "The poet," Mr. Saints- 
 bury writes of him (and it sums up the matter) , "has in 
 him a vein, or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of 
 the most real and rarest poetry. But the vein is con- 
 stantly broken by faults, and never very thick; the 
 spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops only. " 
 Elsewhere Mr. Saintsbury speaks of his "elaborate 
 assumption of the singing-robe, " a phrase very happily 
 critical. Arnold felt no man more deeply the maj- 
 esty of the poet's function: he solemnly attired himself 
 to perform it : but the singing- robe was not his daily 
 wear. The ample pall in which Tennyson swept, his 
 life through, as to the manner born; the stiff er skirts 
 in which Wordsworth walked so complacently; these 
 would have intolerably cumbered the man who pro- 
 tested that even the title of Professor made him uneasy. 
 Wordsworth and Tennyson were bards, authentic and 
 unashamed ; whereas in Arnold, as Sir William Watson 
 has noted, 
 
 Something of worldling mingled still 
 With bard and sage. 
 
 There was never a finer worldling than Matthew Arnold : 
 but the criticism is just. 
 
 The critics, while noting this, have missed something
 
 240 Studies in Literature 
 
 which to us seems to explain much in Arnold's verse. 
 We said just now that English literature has been 
 fortunate in what it owes to the Latin races; we may 
 add that it has been most fortunate in going to Italy for 
 instruction in its verse, to France for instruction in its 
 prose. This will be denied by no one who has studied 
 Elizabethan poetry or the prose of the ' ' Augustan " age : 
 and as little will any one who has studied the structure 
 of poetry deny that Italy is the natural, France the 
 unnatural, school for an English poet. The reason is 
 not that we understand Italian better than French 
 history and with more sympathy though this, too, 
 scarcely admits of dispute; nor again that the past of 
 Italy appeals to emotions of which poetry is the con- 
 secrated language. It lies in the very structure and 
 play of the language; so that an Englishman who has 
 but learnt how to pronounce the Italian vowels can read 
 Italian poetry passably. The accent comes to him at 
 once ; the lack of accent in French remains foreign after 
 many months of study. Now although Arnold was no 
 great admirer of French poetry (and indeed had a 
 particular dislike for the Alexandrine), France was, to 
 him, among modern nations, the heir of those classical 
 qualities which differentiate the Greek from the bar- 
 barian, and his poetry seems ever to be striving to 
 reproduce the Greek note through verse subdued to a 
 French flatness of tone, as though (to borrow a meta- 
 phor from another art) its secret lay in low relief. But 
 an English poet fighting against emphasis is as a man 
 fighting water with a broom: and an English poet, 
 striving to be unemphatic, must yet contrive to be 
 various, or he is naught. Successfully as he managed 
 his prose, when he desired it to be emphatic Arnold had, 
 in default of our native methods of emphasis, to fall
 
 Matthew Arnold 241 
 
 back upon that simple repetition which irritates so 
 many readers. In his poetry the devices are yet more 
 clumsy. We suppose that no English poet before or 
 since has so cruelly overworked the interjection "Ah!" 
 But far worse than any number of "ah!s" is Arnold's 
 trick of italic type : 
 
 How / bewail you! . . . 
 
 We mortal millions live alone . . . 
 
 In the rustling night-air comes the answer 
 "Wouldst thou be as these are? Live as they V . . 
 
 a device almost unpardonable in poetry. So when he 
 would give us variety, as in Tristram and Iseult, Arnold 
 has no better resource than frequent change of metre : 
 and although every reader must have felt the effect of 
 that sudden fine outburst 
 
 What voices are these on the clear night-air? 
 
 What lights in the court what steps on the stair? . . . 
 
 yet some must also have reflected that the great masters, 
 having to tell a story, choose their one metre and, having 
 chosen, so adapt and handle it that it tells all. Sohrab 
 and Rustum indeed tells itself perfectly, from its first 
 line to its noble close. But Sohrab and Rustum is, and 
 professes to be, an episode. Balder is little more, and 
 most readers find Balder, in spite of its fine passages 
 and general dignity, long enough. Arnold let it be re- 
 peated was not a bard; not a Muse-intoxicated man. 
 He had not the bardic, the architectonic, gift. "Some- 
 thing of the worldling " in him forbade any such fervour 
 as, sustained day after day for years, gave the world 
 Paradise Lost, and incidentally, no doubt, made Mil-
 
 242 Studies in Literature 
 
 ton's daughters regret at times that their father was not 
 as ordinary men. 
 
 Nor had Arnold an impeccable ear for rhyme (in The 
 New Sirens, for instance, he rhymes "dawning" with 
 "morning ") : and if we hesitate to follow the many who 
 have doubted his ear for rhythm, it is not for lack of 
 apparently good evidence, but because some of his 
 rhythms which used to give us pause have come, upon 
 longer acquaintance, to fascinate us : and the explana- 
 tion may be, as we have hinted, that they follow the 
 French rather than the Italian use of accent, and are 
 strange to us rather than in themselves unmusical. 
 Certainly the critics who would have us believe that 
 The Strayed Reveller is an unmusical poem will not at 
 this time of day persuade us by the process of taking 
 a stanza or two and writing them down in the form of 
 prose. We could do the same with a dozen lines of The 
 Tempest or Antony and Cleopatra, were it worth doing; 
 and prove just as much, or as little. 
 
 Something of Arnold's own theory of poetry may be 
 extracted from the prefaces of 1853 and 1854. They 
 contain, like the prefaces of Dry den and of Wordsworth, 
 much wisdom ; but the world, perhaps even more wisely, 
 refuses to judge a poet by his theory, which (however 
 admirable) seldom yields up his secret. Yet Arnold 
 had a considered view of what the poet should attempt 
 and what avoid ; and that he followed it would remain 
 certain although much evidence were accumulated to 
 prove that he who denounced "poetry's eternal enemy, 
 Caprice, " could himself be, on occasion, capricious. He 
 leaves the impression that he wrote with difficulty ; his 
 raptures, though he knew rapture, are infrequent. But 
 through all his work there runs a strain of serious 
 elevated thought, and on it all there rests an air of com-
 
 Matthew Arnold 243 
 
 posure equally serious and elevated a trifle statuesque, 
 perhaps, but by no means deficient in feeling. No one 
 can read, say, the closing lines of Mycerinus and fail to 
 perceive these qualities. No one can read any con- 
 siderable portion of his work and deny that they are 
 characteristic. Nor, we think, can any one study the 
 poetry of 1850 and thereabouts without being forced to 
 admit that it needed these qualities of thoughtfulness 
 and composure which Arnold brought to it. He has 
 been criticised for discovering in Tennyson a certain 
 "deficiency in intellectual power." But is he by this 
 time alone in that discovery ? And if no lack of thought- 
 fulness can be charged against Browning as it cannot 
 is not Browning violent, unchastened, far too often ener- 
 getic for energy's sake? Be it granted that Arnold in 
 poetical strength was no match for these champions: 
 yet he brought to literature, and in a happy hour, that 
 which they lacked, insisting by the example of his verse, 
 as well as by the precepts of his criticism, that before any- 
 thing becomes literature it must observe two conditions 
 it must be worth saying, and it must be worthily written. 
 Also he continued, if with a difference, that noble 
 Wordsworthian tradition which stood in some danger of 
 perishing chiefly, we think, beneath the accumulation 
 of rubbish piled upon it by its own author during his 
 later years. That which Matthew Arnold disinterred 
 and re-polished may have been but a fragment. His 
 page has not, says Mr. Watson, "the deep, authentic 
 mountain-thrill. " We grant that Arnold's feeling for 
 Nature has not the Wordsworthian depth: but so far 
 as it penetrates it is genuine. Lines such as 
 
 While the deep-burnish 'd foliage overhead 
 Splintered the silver arrows of the moon . . .
 
 244 Studies in Literature 
 
 may owe their felicity to phrase rather than to feeling. 
 The Mediterranean landscape in A Southern Night may 
 seem almost too exquisitely elaborated. Yet who can 
 think of Arnold's poetry as a whole without feeling 
 that Nature is always behind it as a living background? 
 whether it be the storm of wind and rain shaking 
 Tintagel 
 
 I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage 
 Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair . . . 
 
 or the scent-laden water-meadows along the Thames, or 
 the pine forests on the flank of Etna, or an English garden 
 in June, or Oxus, its mists and fens and "the hush'd 
 Chorasmian waste. " If Arnold's love of natural beauty 
 have not those moments of piercing apprehension which 
 in his master's poetry seem to break through dullness 
 into the very heaven : if he have not that secret which 
 Wordsworth must have learnt upon the Cumbrian 
 mountains, from moments when the clouds drift apart 
 and the surprised climber sees all Windermere, all 
 Derwentwater, shining at his feet ; if on the other hand 
 his philosophy of life, rounded and complete, seem none 
 too hopeful, but call man back from eager speculations 
 which man will never resign : if it repress, where Brown- 
 ing encouraged, our quest after 
 
 Thoughts hardly to be pack'd 
 
 Within the narrow act, 
 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped . . . 
 
 yet his sense of atmosphere, of background, of the great 
 stage on which man plays his part, gives Arnold's 
 teaching a wonderful comprehension, within its range. 
 "This," we say, "is poetry we can trust, not to flatter 
 us, but to sustain, console." If the reader mistake it
 
 Matthew Arnold 245 
 
 for the last word on life his trust in it will be illusory. 
 It brings rather that 
 
 lull in the hot race 
 Wherein he doth for ever chase 
 That flying and elusive shadow, rest. 
 An air of coolness plays upon his face, 
 And an unwonted calm pervades his breast; 
 And then . . . 
 
 (if after protesting against italics in poetry we may itali- 
 cise where, for once, Arnold missed the opportunity) 
 
 he thinks he knows 
 The hills where his life rose, 
 And the sea where it goes.
 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 I 
 
 How were the roses so fresh and so fair I 
 
 I do not suppose that anybody now alive (I speak of 
 lovers of poetry) who was not alive in 1832 and old enough 
 then to enjoy the first perfect work of Tennyson, has had 
 such a sensation as that which was experienced in the 
 autumn of 1866 by readers of Mr. Swinburne's Poems and 
 Ballads. And I am sure that no one in England has had any 
 such sensation since. 
 
 'T'HUS wrote Mr. George Saintsbury, some twenty- 
 ^ two years ago, in a volume called Corrected Impres- 
 sions: and it is certain that no one survives today to 
 compare the emotional experiences of 1832 and 1866, 
 to report to us. Indeed of the men who in 1866 were 
 old enough to wage war over Poems and Ballads the 
 greater number pre-deceased its author, and by this 
 time a very few remain. Mr. Saintsbury, who happily 
 survives (but will not be called "Doctor"), was an 
 under-graduate in 1866. He tells us: 
 
 The autumn must have been advanced before [the book] 
 did come out, for I remember that I could not obtain a copy 
 before I went up to Oxford in October, and had to avail 
 myself of an expedition to town to " eat dinners " in order to 
 get one. Three copies of the precious volume, with " Mox- 
 246
 
 Swinburne 247 
 
 on" on cover and "John Camden Hotten" on title-page, 
 accompanied me back that night, together with divers 
 maroons for the purpose of enlivening matters on the ensu- 
 ing Fifth of November. The book was something of a 
 maroon in itself. . . . We sat next afternoon, I remember, 
 from luncheon time till the chapel bell rang, reading aloud 
 by turns in a select company Dolores and The Triumph of 
 Time, Laus Veneris and Faustine, and all the other wonders 
 of the volume. 
 
 The hubbub raised over Poems and Ballads in 1866 
 still, after half a century, interrupts criticism with an 
 echo too loud for its real importance, even for its his- 
 torical importance. It was not, to be sure, a mere hubbub 
 of the market-place, and for much of it that sounded in 
 the market-place, Swinburne and his friends were largely 
 to blame. The Pre-Raphaelites had a tribal way of 
 shouting their wares before producing them. In Goblin 
 Market "Come buy! Come buy!" habitually dinned as 
 noisily as in any vulgar one, and Alexander the copper- 
 smith could colourably plead, nine times out of ten, that 
 he had not started the tumult. Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 in particular had always a nervous sense of the public 
 opinion it was proposed to offend ; his own poems ap- 
 peared in circumstances (creditable enough if hidden) 
 which, made public, to an uncharitable world suggested 
 reclame. There can be no doubt, we think (after read- 
 ing many Memoirs) , that his friends did Swinburne little 
 service together with much disservice by puffing his 
 book beforehand. "Now we were told, first, that a 
 volume of extraordinarily original verse was coming 
 out; now, that it was so shocking that its publisher 
 repented its appearance ; now, that it had been re-issued, 
 and was coming out after all." Nor can it be said that, 
 when the storm burst, Swinburne either handled his
 
 248 Studies in Literature 
 
 craft or comported himself in a way to make easy 
 weather. The book did challenge the world: it did 
 contain matter of offence and he well knew it. When 
 we have allowed everything for the sensitiveness of a 
 poet, it remains true that a man who throws down a 
 challenge should be prepared to keep his head when the 
 glove is taken up. 
 
 But the real marvel of Poems and Ballads lay, of 
 course, in its poetry, as in that lay the real innovation. 
 Other poets had been scandalous plenty of them 
 before Swinburne; and the possible changes that true 
 poetry can ring on the libidinous are, after all, pretty 
 few. But here was a man who, five hundred years after 
 Chaucer, in the long line of descent which already 
 boasted Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Words- 
 worth, Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning all so 
 great and all so different had suddenly discovered a 
 new door and thrust it open upon what seemed endless 
 vistas of beauty. Here was a man who, coming after 
 these mighty inventors, could take the language in 
 which they had wrought, and convert it to a music as 
 unlike any of theirs, as absolutely fresh and original, as 
 it was patently the music of a peer. Swinburne con- 
 stantly held that all great poets must be conscious 
 of their greatness. He himself could be as arrogant 
 as any one, when provoked ; but although self-centred, 
 he was too noble a gentleman to be arrogant by habit 
 he was even over-prone to abase himself before the 
 greater gods of Parnassus : and in the following anecdote 
 he is made to assert a claim which many will think not 
 overweening. 
 
 He was not disinclined, on occasion, to refer to himself 
 with an engaging frankness, as if he were speaking of some-
 
 Swinburne 249 
 
 one else. At Jowett's dinner-table R. W. Raper once asked 
 him which of the English poets had the best ear. Swinburne 
 replied with earnestness and gravity: " Shakespeare without 
 doubt; then Milton; then Shelley; then, I do not know what 
 other people would do, but I should put myself. " 
 
 Although our memory reach short of Mr. Saintsbury's, 
 we can bring a small illustration of the sway this genius 
 held over young men in 1880. The wave of enthusiasm 
 had fallen into a trough with Bothwell. The splendid 
 choruses in Erechtheus had lifted it a little; but Erech- 
 theus as a whole failed to "amuse," and the worshippers 
 had an uneasy sense that their master was fumbling in 
 an art for which he lacked instinct as well as tact ; that, 
 when prolixity should have warned him as the surest 
 signal of a mark missed, Swinburne had not even the 
 eyes to see that his prolixity was prolix. But in 1878, 
 with Poems and Ballads, Second Series, on the wonderful 
 crests of such lyrics as The Year of the Rose, A Forsaken 
 Garden, A Wasted Vigil, and the supreme A veatque Vale, 
 the wave surged up anew to its summit : and if we missed 
 the adventurous feeling of naughtiness, that too was 
 restored to us, after a fashion, in 1880, by Heptalogia 
 for youth loves parodies, and to see fun poked at ponti- 
 fical seniors. Memory recalls a night in the autumn of 
 that year, a set of rooms in Balliol but men dropped in 
 from other colleges and stayed until close upon midnight 
 a voice chanting the Heptalogia to wild shouts of 
 laughter, the company taking fire and running back, 
 like flame over stubble, to race through the audacities 
 of Poems and Ballads even back to the Circean choruses 
 of Atalanta ' ' hounds of spring on winter's traces " : 
 
 And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 
 Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
 
 250 Studies in Literature 
 
 Follows with dancing and fills with delight 
 
 The Maenad and the Bassarid ; 
 And soft as lips that laugh and hide 
 The laughing leaves of the trees divide, 
 And screen from seeing and leave in sight 
 
 The god pursuing, the maiden hid. 
 
 And then, almost suddenly even in breasts that con- 
 tinued to echo the memory of it all this enthusiasm 
 had died down ; and while Swinburne went on writing, 
 writing of stars and love, and waves and flames that 
 were deathless or breathless or tattered or battered or 
 shattered, none of them mattered, none of them con- 
 tained any longer any hope; all were galvanic reflex 
 action of genius after death. 
 
 That is the real tragedy which has to be explained in 
 the biography of a man whose life yields the picturesque 
 biographer very little or very little that can be told 
 of incident for escape or resource. It would still be the 
 real tragedy and kernel of the whole matter had Swin- 
 burne's life been crowded with spirited actual adventure. 
 Swinburne was a tremendous force in poetry : the force 
 died; the man outlived it, and died, many years later, 
 solicitously tended. He had in his day the hearts of all 
 young lovers of poetry at his feet. He has left an in- 
 delible mark on English verse: and for this, to the end, 
 the younger generation venerated him as a great figure, 
 a spent god and asleep under the pines (Putney) . He 
 was the last man in the world to leave a cause for a rib- 
 bon or a handful of silver. But he who had inspired 
 parodists innumerable and many pale imitators, has 
 left us no school of poets. Upon the literature of 
 Victorian England he made an amazing irruption, and 
 passed.
 
 Swinburne 251 
 
 II 
 
 It is always a pleasure to read a book by a man who 
 knows how books should be written, and Mr. Gosse's 
 eagerly awaited Life of Swinburne tells the tale vividly, 
 tactfully, adequately, in that excellent prose which, al- 
 though one takes it for granted in the author of Father 
 and Son, still gives so much pleasure that it were ungrate- 
 ful to omit the benedicamus. Moreover the tale not only 
 gives truth of fact, so far as our knowledge enables us 
 to test this, but by nicely apportioning the whole to its 
 subject, and its casual with its more significant and im- 
 portant parts, conveys an impression of truth scarcely 
 less valuable. It omits, to be sure, the one word (of five 
 letters) which, if uttered, might have saved the skilful 
 artist a deal of trouble ; but it does this in obedience to 
 a tradition which makes, no doubt, for literary as well 
 as for parliamentary decency ; and we shall amuse our- 
 selves by copying Mr. Gosse's reticence. 
 
 The genius of Swinburne was something elvish, always 
 and throughout. He had all the precocity of an elf, 
 with no little of its outward guise. Like an elf, he never 
 grew up. Like an elf, he suddenly gave signs of arrested 
 growth, was an old man prematurely, and continued to 
 be an old man for many years, until the moment when 
 he peacefully faded out. There was one reason which 
 in ordinary men would account well enough for this 
 arrested development, but it will not account for 
 Swinburne. 
 
 Even his birth is an elfin mystery. Who could 
 predict who can account for this child as springing 
 from the union of a British Admiral with a daughter 
 of the third Earl of Ashburnham? The ancient and 
 honourable families of Swinburne and Ashburnham
 
 252 Studies in Literature 
 
 have nothing in their records which begins to explain 
 him. He himself has stated that he was born "all but 
 dead, and certainly was not expected to live an hour. " 
 Of this circumstance (probably apocryphal) exact 
 memory can hardly be demanded of him ; but again and 
 again his most definite recollections of his childhood 
 (given in later years in all honesty by one who abhorred 
 falsehood all his life) are shown to be legendary, to say 
 the least "intimations of immortality" rather than 
 slavish records of fact. The fact of importance is 
 that his childhood alternated between two homes his 
 parents' at East Dene, Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight, 
 and Capheaton on the Northumbrian coast, where his 
 Border ancestors had settled in the reign of Elizabeth 
 and where his grandfather, Sir John Swinburne, sixth 
 baronet, kept house as head of the family. The seas 
 off the Wight to swim in the Northumbrian coast to 
 gallop along, chanting verse against the rush of the 
 wind in his face chanting (say) Gastibelza, "the song 
 of songs which is Hugo's" these, heaven to the boy's 
 childhood, were cherished by him to the end as his 
 heavenliest experiences. Only the coasts of Cornwall 
 (Tristram's coast) and of Sark ever competed in his 
 affection with Bonchurch and Capheaton, where 
 
 Through fell and moorland, 
 And salt-sea foreland, 
 Our noisy norland 
 
 Resounds and rings. 
 
 As he never swerved from these first loyalties to place 
 and kindred, so, while pretending to grow up, he but 
 altered, without changing, the strange elvishness of his 
 personal appearance. His cousin, Lord Redesdale, thus
 
 Swinburne 253 
 
 describes his first arrival at Eton (in the summer half 
 of 1849) at the age of twelve: 
 
 What a fragile little creature he seemed as he stood there 
 between his father and mother, with his wondering eyes 
 fixed upon me! Under his arm he hugged his Bowdler's 
 Shakespeare, a very precious treasure bound in brown lea- 
 ther with, for a marker, a narrow slip of ribbon, blue I think, 
 with a button of that most heathenish marqueterie called 
 Tunbridge ware dangling from the end of it. He was 
 strangely tiny. His limbs were small and delicate, and his 
 sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his great 
 head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled 
 mass of red hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero- 
 worshippers talk of his hair as having been a "golden 
 aureole. " At that time there was nothing golden about it. 
 Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakable red, like 
 burnished copper. His features were small and beautiful, 
 chiselled as daintily as those of some Greek sculptor's 
 masterpiece. His skin was very white not unhealthy, but 
 a transparent tinted white, such as one sees in the petals of 
 some roses. His face was the very replica of that of his 
 dear mother, and she was one of the most refined and lovely 
 of women. His red hair must have come from the Admiral's 
 side, for I never heard of a red-haired Ashburnham. 
 
 Against this for a pendant, let us set Mr. Gosse's 
 description of the mature man : 
 
 Algernon Swinburne was in height five feet four and a half 
 inches. He carried his large head very buoyantly on a tiny 
 frame, the apparent fragility of which was exaggerated by 
 the sloping of his shoulders, which gave him, almost into 
 middle life, a girlish look. He held himself upright, and, as 
 he was very restless, he skipped as he stood, with his hands 
 jerking or linked behind him while he talked, and, when he 
 was still, one toe was often pressed against the heel of the 
 other foot. In this attitude his slenderness and slightness
 
 254 Studies in Literature 
 
 gave him a kind of fairy look, which I, for one, have never 
 seen repeated in any other human being. It recurs to my 
 memory as his greatest outward peculiarity. 
 
 His head was bigger than that of most men of his height, 
 as Sir George Young tells us, when he entered Eton at twelve 
 years old his hat was already the largest in the school. 
 Mr. Lindo Myers, who came over with him from Havre in 
 the autumn of 1868, writes to me that, Swinburne's hat hav- 
 ing been blown overboard, "when we got to Southampton, 
 we went to three hatters before we found one hat that 
 would go on, and then we had to rip the lining out. His 
 head was immense." In the late Putney days, when he 
 became bald, this bigness of his head was less noticeable 
 than when it had been emphasised by the vast "burning 
 bush " of his red hair, which in early days he wore very much 
 fluffed out at the sides. . . . The orb of this mop reduced 
 the apparent thickness of his neck, which, looked at merely 
 in relation to his falling shoulders, was excessive, yet 
 seemed no more than was necessary to carry the balloon of 
 head and hair. 
 
 But we must go back to Eton, where " Grub " Brown, 
 the librarian, would point the boy out to visitors as one 
 of the sights of the place, "where he sat, day after day, 
 in a gallery window of the library with a folio across his 
 knees." He devoured the English poets at this time: 
 the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists with a quite 
 amazing voracity. Years afterwards, in 1885, he wrote 
 that the plays of Marston had dwelt in his memory since 
 "I first read them at the advanced age of twelve " ; and 
 in 1887 that those of so obscure a writer as Nabbes had 
 been familiar to him "ever since my thirteenth year. " 
 Thirty years later, too, looking over his bookshelves, 
 he took down a copy of Lamb's Specimens of the English 
 Dramatic Poets and remarked, "That book taught me 
 more than any other in the world that and the Bible.'
 
 Swinburne 255 
 
 There are some of us who hold (with all reverence 
 for Lamb) that he and Swinburne after him in their 
 enthusiasm have exalted these obscurer Elizabethans 
 quite disproportionately and out of perspective, dimin- 
 ishing for the unlearned or unwary reader the true 
 eminence of Shakespeare above them all. But we pass 
 this by: the point for us, just here, being that in his 
 literary loves, as in almost everything else, this fay-like 
 creature never really grew up, never developed as other 
 men develop. " It is particularly important to notice," 
 says Mr. Gosse, "that almost all Swinburne's literary 
 convictions were formed while he was at school"; and 
 later we read, "From the earliest record of his child- 
 hood to that of his last hours at Putney we see him 
 unchanged by conditions and unaffected by opinion. 
 This gives his career a certain rigidity. ..." In 1892, 
 when Tennyson's death left the laureateship vacant and 
 Queen Victoria is reported to have said to Gladstone, 
 "I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best poet in my 
 dominions, " Swinburne gave it as his private conviction 
 that Canon Dixon, author of Mano, had the highest 
 claim for the post, and, failing him, Lord De Tabley. 
 "It will be observed," Mr. Gosse points out, "that 
 each of these poets was older than Swinburne, who had 
 little knowledge of the verse of men born after 1850, and 
 even less curiosity about their careers." His attitude 
 to old men of genius was "adorable in humility to 
 Victor Hugo, to Landor even to old men of talent, 
 such as Barry Cornwall and Wells of Joseph and his 
 Brethren "; but he had learned to worship them at school 
 and each lived to a ripe age to retain his loyalty. Of 
 young men he was incurious: which begins to explain 
 why this innovator never founded a school. 
 
 It was the same with his politics. He sang of Italian
 
 256 Studies in Literature 
 
 liberty, sitting at the feet of Mazzini. Sitting at the 
 feet of Victor Hugo he cursed Napoleon III as never 
 man cursed save his master. He hailed the French 
 Republic: to the end he could preach tyrannicide as a 
 duty, like a schoolboy, academically wreathing his 
 sword in myrtle bough. Yet again we come back upon 
 ossification, both in hate and in hope. 
 
 When Napoleon III died, in pain and obscurity, at Chisle- 
 hurst, having ceased for three years to be a power for good 
 or for evil, France partly forgave him, and even Victor 
 Hugo forgot him. Yet Swinburne neither forgot nor for- 
 gave, and to him it seemed as just to continue to execrate 
 this miserable man six months after his death as it had been 
 to abuse him six months before it. . . . The essence of the 
 series of sonnet-curses, Dirae, was ecstasy that "we have 
 lived to say The dog is dead." 
 
 So he could sing for Italian liberty like a very Simon- 
 ides ("the emotion of the poet . . . gave to the noblest 
 parts of Songs before Sunrise an intensity unique in 
 English literature, and probably to be compared with 
 nothing else written since the Greeks produced cos- 
 mological hymns in the fifth century B. C. "), and, when 
 that liberty was won, could drop all interest in Italy and 
 Italy's future; as, after passionately acclaiming the 
 French Republic, he averted his face and took no fur- 
 ther interest in what happened to France. Yet, after 
 all, what worth is either a new monarchy or a new 
 republic, save as an instrument for furthering new 
 political hopes? 
 
 Ill 
 
 Having to do with a genius so precocious and so pre- 
 maturely ossified, we need make no apology for switch-
 
 Swinburne 257 
 
 ing from Eton to Putney and back. Mr. Gosse opines 
 that at Eton, where his physical strangeness invited it. 
 "he was preserved from bullying by a certain dignity 
 and by his unquestionable courage." His courage, 
 then and through life, was beyond question, and indeed 
 it would be strange if any scion of Swinburne and Ash- 
 burnham lacked that quality. Algernon Swinburne 
 possessed it, at all events. At the age of seventeen he 
 entertained a boyish notion of attaining eminence in 
 life as a cavalry officer, and attempted the climb of 
 Culver Cliff in the Isle of Wight (believed to be impreg- 
 nable) "as a chance of testing my nerve in the face of 
 death which could not be surpassed." He performed 
 the feat, which had to be confessed to his mother. 
 
 Of course she wanted to know why I had done such a thing 
 and when I told her she laughed a short, sweet laugh most 
 satisfactory to the young ear, and said, "Nobody ever 
 thought you were a coward, my boy." I said that was all 
 very well, but how could I tell till I tried? "But you won't 
 do it again?" she said. I replied, "Of course not where 
 would be the fun?" 
 
 As a swimmer he was intrepid, and his rashness twice 
 brought him near to drowning; but on each occasion he 
 saved himself, having no great strength of stroke, by his 
 indomitable persistence. When he was an elderly man, 
 some hulking poetaster, half -mad with vanity, who had 
 sought in vain to drag Swinburne into a correspondence, 
 waylaid him with a big stick on one of his lonely walks. 
 "The antagonist was a powerful man, his victim a sort 
 of fairy; but Swinburne cowed him by sheer personal 
 dignity and serenely continued to walk on, with the 
 blusterer growling behind him." Theodore Watts- 
 Dunton was alarmed, and took out a warrant against
 
 258 Studies in Literature 
 
 the man (had it been legally possible he would have 
 done better to take out a warrant against a few London 
 street-crossings, through the murderous traffic of which 
 Swinburne would plunge and dance, heedless as a child, 
 having a charmed life) . Swinburne merely laughed at 
 the affair : he did not even copy Dr. Johnson's procedure 
 (with Macpherson) and write a letter to the bully 
 which was just as well, perhaps, for we very much 
 doubt if the serenity shown during the actual incident 
 would have translated itself in ink upon paper. 
 
 In spite, however, of his constant and unquestioned 
 courage, evidence could be collected, we fear, that 
 Swinburne did suffer bullying at Eton. The late Vis- 
 count St. Aldwyn, who had been his contemporary 
 there, answered Mr. Gosse's application for a few re- 
 miniscences with "a horrid little boy, with a big head 
 and a pasty complexion who looked as though a course 
 of physical exercise would have done him good": and 
 he who has known the inside of a public school will 
 ponder this unfaltering pronouncement and shake his 
 head. Anyhow the little victim refused to play, pre- 
 ferring to read. He had a trick, too, then and all his 
 life, of jerking his arms and fluttering his hands violently 
 when excited. It resembled "St. Vitus' dance," and 
 is not the sort of thing that makes sympathetic appeal 
 to the average senior and stronger school-fellow. His 
 parents consulted a specialist, who " after a close exami- 
 nation, " reported that these motions resulted from 
 11 an excess of electric vitality." Electric or not, as the 
 boy grew and reached sixteen, this vitality put forth 
 symptoms of turbulence and insubordination, and at the 
 end of the summer half he was withdrawn from Eton 
 "in consequence of some representations." 
 
 This happened in 1853. In January 1856 after two
 
 Swinburne 259 
 
 years and a half spent in out-of-door exercise and de- 
 sultory private tuition he went up to Oxford, matricu- 
 lating at Balliol. Scott was then Master. Jowett, who 
 had been passed over in the 1854 election for headship, 
 was Regius Professor of Greek, but the heresy-hunters 
 still laid their scent upon him and his plans for university 
 and college reform. This persecution of one who 
 became his wise and enduring friend may account in 
 some part for Swinburne's dislike of Oxford, which 
 became inveterate. He resided for three years and a 
 half, and left without taking a degree or having (so far 
 as his contemporaries tell us) excited any particular 
 attention among dons or undergraduates. But : 
 
 It is much to be observed that in later life, though he 
 spoke often and in affectionate terms of Eton, Swinburne 
 was never betrayed into the smallest commendation of 
 Oxford. He was indeed unwilling to mention the Univer- 
 sity. . . . Long afterwards, in late middle life, he railed 
 against Matthew Arnold for his "effusive Oxonolatry," 
 and earlier he had contrived to analyse and commend The 
 Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis without so much as naming the 
 "sweet city with her dreaming spires" which is the very 
 substance of those poems. 
 
 He made friends some good for him, some rather 
 obviously the reverse: he competed for the Newdigate 
 (subject "The Discovery of the North-West Pass- 
 age") and failed, having sent in a composition far 
 better than that which took the prize ; he learned to be a 
 frantic Republican, bought a portrait of Orsini would- 
 be assassin of Napoleon III hung it up in his sitting- 
 room, opposite that of Mazzini, and "pirouetted in 
 front of it in ecstasies of enthusiasm." How much 
 Jowett knew of this does not appear, nor how Swin-
 
 260 Studies in Literature 
 
 burne managed to tolerate in Jowett (whose weakness, 
 if he had one, was for apparent worldly success) a 
 certain admiration for the third Napoleon. But there 
 was never a break in their intimacy, which Swinburne 
 after Jowett 's death commemorated in a chapter of 
 reminiscences, beginning 
 
 Among the tributes offered to the memory of an illustrious 
 man there may possibly be found room for the modest 
 reminiscences of one to whom the Master of Balliol was 
 officially a stranger and Mr. Jowett was an honoured and 
 valued friend. 
 
 Other gracious seniors attempted to take the some- 
 what graceless young man in hand ; notably Dr. (after- 
 wards Sir Henry) Acland, who asked Swinburne to his 
 house. Acland was we can corroborate Mr. Gosse's 
 description "the soul of urbanity," but all the more 
 and none the less an Acland. 
 
 Swinburne was particularly annoyed because Acland, in 
 his boundless sympathy, wished to share "the orgies and 
 dare-devilries" of their little group; and on one occasion 
 they all fled to London, to avoid having tea in a meadow 
 with Acland and his children. They behaved very badly, 
 and like shy and naughty boys, to excellent Dr. Acland, 
 whom they privately called, I do not know why, "the Rose 
 of Brazil"; but the biographer has to admit, with a blush, 
 that Swinburne behaved the worst of all. On one occasion, 
 when Dr. Acland was so kind as to read aloud a paper 
 on Sewage, there was a scene over which the Muse of 
 History must draw a veil. 
 
 Against this we may, skipping forward a little, match 
 an equally unhallowed scene of the year 1862 when 
 Swinburne, preparing his Poems and Ballads for the
 
 Swinburne 261 
 
 press, was given to trying the effect of them on any 
 private audience he conceived as likely to be sympa- 
 thetic. The occasion of the following experiment 
 was a visit to Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) at 
 Fryston : 
 
 In the summer of 1862 a distinguished party assembled 
 at Fryston: it included Venables, James Spedding, the 
 newly appointed Archbishop of York (William Thomson) , 
 and Thackeray, the latter having brought his two young 
 daughters, afterwards Lady Ritchie and Mrs. Leslie Stephen. 
 Lady Ritchie recalls for me that the Houghtons had stimu- 
 lated the curiosity of their guests by describing the young 
 poet. ... On Sunday evening, after dinner, he was asked 
 to read aloud some of his poems. His choice was injudicious ; 
 he is believed to have recited The Leper; it is certain that 
 he read Les Noyades. At this the Archbishop of York 
 made so shocked a face that Thackeray smiled and whispered 
 to Lord Houghton, while the two young ladies, who had 
 never heard such sentiments expressed before, giggled 
 aloud in their excitement. Their laughter offended the 
 poet, who, however, was soothed by Lady Houghton's 
 tactfully saying, "Well, Mr. Swinburne, if you will read 
 such extraordinary things, you must expect us to laugh." 
 Les Noyade; was then proceeding on its amazing course, 
 and the Archbishop was looking more and more horrified, 
 when suddenly the butler "like an avenging angel," as 
 Lady Ritchie says threw open the door and announced, 
 1 ' Prayers ! my Lord ! ' ' 
 
 But our extracts run ahead of the story. In his 
 third year at Balliol "turbulence" again began to 
 exhibit itself, and Jowett expressed a fear that his 
 young friend might be sent down. To protect him 
 from this disaster Algernon was consigned for a term 
 to read history at Navestock in Essex with the Rev-
 
 262 Studies in Literature 
 
 erend William Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford 
 and most renowned of historians, but then vicar of 
 an agricultural parish and almost unknown to fame. 
 Stubbs, who had a sly twist of humour and no mean 
 capacity for telling a story, was used in later days to 
 draw freely on his recollections of this amazing guest's 
 descent upon his country cure. There is no doubt 
 that he and Mrs. Stubbs made the stay a happy one; 
 but soon after Swinburne's return to Oxford his land- 
 lady lodged complaint against "late hours and general 
 irregularities," and on the 2 1st of November, 1859, 
 Swinburne left Oxford, as he had left Eton, prematurely. 
 "My Oxonian career culminated in total and scandalous 
 failure." 
 
 IV 
 
 At Oxford he had made friends with Rossetti, Burne- 
 Jones, and Morris during their famous visit in which 
 they painted frescoes around the debating-hall (long 
 since converted to library) of the Union. They had 
 gone back to London, and thither (after patching up the 
 quarrel with his father, who was naturally incensed over 
 the Oxford fiasco) Swinburne followed them. There he 
 fell easily into the Pre-Raphaelite circle and talked red- 
 republicanism to them. They never doubted his genius 
 or his capacity to express it in poetry if he would choose 
 to try. Rossetti, then their real leader, took from the 
 first the line of elder brother. He "adopted, with a full 
 and almost boisterous appreciation of the qualities of 
 Swinburne, and a tender indulgence to his frailties, a 
 tone of authority in dealing with ' my little Northum- 
 brian friend, ' as he used to call him, which was emi- 
 nently wholesome. " And Swinburne chose to try. In
 
 Swinburne 263 
 
 1860, while writing at Chastelard, he published his first 
 book, The Queen Mother and Rosamond. The insuccess 
 of the venture was conspicuous. "Of all still-born 
 books, ' ' said Swinburne afterwards, ' ' it was the stillest. ' ' 
 Says Mr. Gosse, "Nobody read it, nobody saw it, 
 nobody heard of it." 
 
 The Queen Mother might be turgid and Rosamond a 
 pale study in Pre-Raphaelitism, but the young poet 
 meanwhile was mewing a mighty youth over such 
 lyrics as The Triumph of Time, and for a sample : 
 
 I will go back to the great sweet mother, 
 
 Mother and lover of men, the sea. 
 I will go down to her, I and no other, 
 
 Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me; 
 Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast : 
 O fair white mother, in days long past 
 Born without sister, born without brother, 
 
 Set free my soul as thy soul is free. 
 
 O fair green-girdled mother of mine, 
 
 Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain, 
 Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine 
 Thy strong embraces are keen like pain. 
 Save me and hide me with all thy waves, 
 Find me one grave of thy thousand graves, 
 Those pure cold populous graves of thine 
 
 Wrought without hand in a world without stain. 
 
 It was not until 1865, however, that, with Atalanta 
 in Calydon, he made a second attempt on the public. 
 The Pre-Raphaelites indeed had made some impression 
 by this time with their paintings, but as poets they and 
 their friends had met with the chilliest of receptions. 
 Meredith's first attempt in 1851, his second in 1862, 
 Morris's first in 1858, Swinburne's own in 1860, D. G.
 
 264 Studies in Literature 
 
 Rossetti's in 1861, had missed fire, one and all and com- 
 pletely. It was not until 1862 that Christina Rossetti 
 scored the first success with Goblin Market "Chris- 
 tina, " said Swinburne, "was the Jael who led our host 
 to victory." So the publisher (Bertram Payne, of the 
 firm of Moxon) had small confidence, rested his only 
 hope on making the book beautiful in outward appear- 
 ance, and, confining the first edition to a hundred copies 
 or so, spent pains to cover them in ivory-white buckram 
 adorned with mystic golden spheres. It must have 
 been a high moment in April, 1865, for one or two who 
 opened these covers and came, first, upon the Greek 
 elegiac dedication to Landor : 
 
 oBiuoTe doIi;, flpov, o^xa ffXon; <pfyov o^aac 
 
 and then upon the exquisite opening of the poem itself: 
 
 Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars 
 Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven. . . . 
 
 Here was writing truly Hellenic, of the right line of 
 tradition, and we should despair of the future of our 
 literature watered as it has ever been and renewed 
 from Mediterranean springs if we believed that 
 England will soon lack men of an intellect ready to 
 recognise that, to hail and salute it. No such curse, at 
 all events, had descended upon our nation in 1865. 
 Atalanta, and Swinburne with it, soared into sudden 
 fame. It was a song before sunrise, a shaft of morning 
 after long watches, lighting the hearts of the faithful 
 with hope : 
 
 And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.
 
 Swinburne 265 
 
 We have hinted at the rest of the story in previous 
 pages, and need not dwell on it here nor tell it at length. 
 In particular we would skirt quickly around the throng 
 which vociferated about Poems and Ballads in 1866, 
 because it not only missed infinite good for the sake of a 
 little evil, but, even in so far as it happened to be right, 
 mistook the symptom for the disease. 
 
 The true danger, for poetry, was not so much that 
 Swinburne had fallen into bad courses, as that he might 
 fall into pedantry. Now there is as every student of 
 literature, and especially every student of medieval 
 literature, must know a pedantry which relaxes, as 
 well as a pedantry which binds. The actual disease is 
 a withering up of the man within, by which he loses 
 sense of literature as a grace of life and conies to mistake 
 it for an end in itself, even for life itself. 
 
 Now we make no doubt that Swinburne's way of life 
 helped towards that ossification which overtook his 
 genius. It must have acted so, since (as Burns knew 
 and noted) the true tragedy of profligate living is that 
 "it hardens a' within, and petrifies the feeling." But 
 we think George Meredith came nearer to diagnosing 
 the real trouble when he wrote, " I don't see any internal 
 centre from which springs anything that he does. He 
 will make a great name, but whether he is to distinguish 
 himself solidly as an artist I would not willingly pro- 
 gnosticate." Meredith touched the secret. In this 
 elfin genius, when the rush of fire had spent itself over 
 the twigs, there was no log left "leaning back," in his 
 master Landor's image, with a male, slow, generating 
 core of fire. Set apart Hertha, that glorious poem, 
 Swinburne's own best-beloved, and all the blazing
 
 266 Studies in Literature 
 
 rhetoric of Songs before Sunrise falls short of convincing 
 us that Swinburne ever understood that greatest 
 of all maxims, "Look into thine heart, and write," 
 or even that he had a real heart to look into. It has 
 the fatal chill of a parti pris: it fails to persuade, having 
 neither sap nor growth nor any fecundity: it neither 
 kindles us, where it is right, to passionate assent, nor 
 moves us to forgive where it is wrong. Over it all lies 
 the coming shadow of pedantry. 
 
 So, to speak generally, it is with Bothwell and with 
 almost all his verse after Poems and Ballads, Second 
 Series. Pegasus seems to be at a gallop all the while, 
 but his hoofs are for ever coming down in the same 
 place: and while monotony (as in The Faerie Queene) 
 can be pleasant enough, nothing in the world is more 
 tedious than a monotony of strain. 
 
 Nor, in the middle years, could Swinburne search 
 into himself, to criticise. Having written the opening 
 scene of Bothwell ( 1 87 1 ) he gave it over to Jowett to read. 
 
 Jowett pronounced it much too long. Swinburne was 
 surprised, but having a great respect for Jowett's judgment, 
 took the criticism very seriously. Accordingly next day 
 they were living in the hotel at Tummel Bridge Swin- 
 burne stayed in bed all the morning to work on the scene. 
 He produced it triumphantly at luncheon, when Jowett 
 dryly observed that it was three lines longer than it was 
 before. . . . Later on, at one of Jowett's reading-parties 
 at West Malvern, R. W. Raper saw Swinburne suddenly 
 fling himself on the floor at Jowett's feet, and heard him 
 say, "Master, I feel I have never thanked you enough for 
 cutting four thousand lines out of Bothwell." 
 
 Thus, while still essaying sustained work for which 
 his genius more and more declaring itself to be merely
 
 Swinburne 267 
 
 lyrical was unfitted, essaying work for which at least 
 that genius should have been put to hard schooling, he 
 could never learn that a great poem requires structure 
 based on stern preparation in anatomy, nor see the need 
 of learning. For A Song of Italy, as later for Balen, he 
 was capable of choosing a lyrical measure which, 
 pleasant enough for a snatch of song, maddens the ear 
 by repetition over seventy or a hundred or two hundred 
 pages. His critical odes, such as the Song for the 
 Centenary of Landor, came to have no proportions at 
 all ; and Tristram itself (after the magnificent prologue) 
 hag-rides the reader into utter weariness. Swinburne, 
 who delighted to recite, or intone, his own works, could 
 never understand that his auditor might at any point 
 tire of listening. In 1895, he read Balen through at a 
 sitting to the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, who 
 "did not unreservedly admire his delivery": 
 
 It was too subjective an outpour, and wearisomely im- 
 passioned, like a child's jump against a wall. ... At the 
 first moment, however, when he ceased, I felt a poignant 
 grief that it was over. ... It had been very beautiful 
 ... all the difference between seeing a beautiful woman 
 and feeling her embraces. 
 
 When we read Keats' s Endymion we sigh over the 
 premature death of one who, had the gods seen fit, 
 might have lived to build with his material. Swinburne 
 lived and never built, never arrived at seeing that 
 architectonic is necessary. 
 
 VI 
 
 In London, as at Oxford, Swinburne made friends 
 good and bad for him. Among the latter must be 
 counted the much-travelled Richard Burton, translator
 
 268 Studies in Literature 
 
 of The A rabian Nights. ' ' Burton, a giant of endurance, 
 and possessed at times with a kind of dionysiac frenzy, 
 was no fortunate company for a nervous and yet spirited 
 man like Swinburne " who, it may be told, had already, 
 by his excesses, superinduced a kind of epilepsy upon 
 his habitual twitch. 
 
 It took the form of a convulsive fit, in which, generally 
 after a period of very great cerebral excitement, he would 
 suddenly fall unconscious. These fits were excessively 
 distressing to witness, and produced a shock of alarm all 
 the more acute because of*the death-like appearance of the 
 patient. Oddly enough, however, the person who seemed 
 to suffer from them least was Swinburne himself. The 
 only real danger appeared to be that he would hit himself 
 in his fall, which indeed he repeatedly and severely did. 
 But his general recovery after these fits was magical, and 
 it positively struck one if it is not absurd to say so that 
 he was better after them, as after a storm of the nerves. 
 
 So it happened again and again. The Admiral would 
 be hastily summoned to London to take his son home 
 to the country. In two days' time Algernon would be 
 out and about, a "good boy" chastened, affectionate, 
 extremely docile. Then after some weeks would come 
 the return to London , and in due course more "ir- 
 regularity" more irritability, more quarrels with his 
 best friends, another fit, another telegram to the Ad- 
 miral, another swift recovery. It seemed to work 
 out like a sum with a recurrent decimal ; but actual life 
 is less tolerant of recurrent "irregularity" than is 
 mathematics. In actual life you may expel nature 
 with a thyrsus tamen usque recur ret. The crash 
 came in August, 1879. He had lost his father; he had 
 alienated his friends; he had a fancy for a while to have
 
 Swinburne 269 
 
 nothing to do with his family, even with his mother. 
 He lived lonely in his rooms in Great James Street, 
 " in a state of constant f ebrility and ill-health. ' ' There 
 an illness took him and carried him to the very doors 
 of death, just outside of which Mr. Theodore Watts 
 (afterwards Watts-Dunton) entered upon the scene 
 and saved him. 
 
 VII 
 
 Mr. Watts, a solicitor of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, 
 had come up to London in the year 1872 or thereabouts 
 with an ardent enthusiasm for the group of Pre-Raphael- 
 ites, and had been baffled in a first attempt to make 
 Swinburne's acquaintance. Towards the end of the 
 year, however, Madox Brown advised Swinburne, 
 whose business affairs he knew to be in a tangle, to 
 place them in the hands of Theodore Watts ; which he 
 did, with very happy results. 
 
 In September, 1879, then, armed with the approval of 
 Lady Jane Swinburne, Watts called at 3 Great James 
 Street and, finding the poet in a truly deplorable condi- 
 tion, carried him almost by force to his own rooms, 
 close by, and thence, after a week or two, to the upper 
 storey of a semi-detached villa at Putney, hired for the 
 purpose. Again Swinburne made an amazing recovery. 
 By the middle of October he was able to resume his 
 correspondence, to read, and even to walk out of doors. 
 But he had been near enough to the grave to look into it : 
 and henceforth he put himself into Watts' s tutelage 
 with a childlike and most pathetic trust. A lease was 
 taken of "The Pines," Putney, and there the two lived 
 together for nearly thirty years. Watts supervised 
 the poet's food and drink, administered his moneys,
 
 270 Studies in Literature 
 
 kept away callers (with the help of an inexorable 
 maidservant), and mapped out his days with almost 
 mathematical precision. Towards the middle of every 
 morning Swinburne, no matter what the weather, took 
 a long walk "generally up Putney Hill and over the 
 Heath, but sometimes along the Richmond Road to 
 the Mortlake Arms, and then through Barnes Common 
 as far as Barnes Green and the Church." At the 
 corner-shop of the Misses Frost, going into Wimbledon, 
 he bought his newspapers and ordered his books. 
 
 In storm and rain, always without an umbrella, the little 
 erect figure, with damp curls emerging from under a soft 
 felt hat, might be seen walking, walking ... so that he 
 became a portent and a legend throughout the confines of 
 Wandsworth and Wimbledon. He always returned home 
 a little while before the midday luncheon, or dinner; and 
 at 2.30, with clockwork regularity, he "disappeared to 
 enjoy a siesta," which sometimes lasted until 4.30. Then 
 he would work for a while. ... In the evening his regular 
 habit was to read aloud. ... In these conditions his health 
 became perfect; he developed into a sturdy little old man 
 without an ache or a pain; and he who had suffered so long 
 in London from absence of appetite and wasting insomnia, 
 for the last thirty years of his life at Putney ate like a cater- 
 pillar and slept like a dormouse. 
 
 "Walking, walking," for thirty years. But that 
 which walked was the ghost of the poet who had written 
 Atalanta and Poems and Ballads. It is pretty safe to 
 say that Watts had saved Swinburne's life: it is certain 
 that he had averted a tragedy : and against this positive 
 deed of friendship and thirty years of devotion little is 
 set by sneering at Watts as " a pedicure of the Muses "- 
 which, we believe, was Meredith's phrase for him. It 
 must be allowed, however, that Watts averted tragedy
 
 Swinburne 271 
 
 only by turning these thirty years into comedy, and 
 rather absurd comedy. The worst was not that Watts, 
 in the jealousy of his sway, allowanced the supply of 
 other friends even more sternly than he cut down 
 "The Bard's" liquor; nor that, as elderly ladies suc- 
 cumb to the wiles of the tramp, he and Swinburne, 
 while mostly inaccessible to real authors, were given to 
 open their door to any who oiled its key with praise of 
 Watts's own preposterous novel Aylwin. Nor was it 
 even the worst that, happening in his own way to dislike 
 such faulty but full-blooded poets as Byron and Walt 
 Whitman, he drew Swinburne to abuse both, whom he 
 had formerly admired, and recant noble praise in terms 
 of scurrility. The unpardonable fault was that, ad- 
 miring the rhetorical aptitude which had always been 
 Swinburne's bane, he encouraged him to substitute rhe- 
 toric for poetry and rhetoric for prose: and so, while 
 Swinburne wrote much in these thirty years especially 
 on Shakespeare that was marvellous; though Swin- 
 burne himself be to blame that the more he learned of 
 Mary Queen of Scots the more it got in the way of 
 poetry about her; old lovers of his verse and prose 
 cannot help feeling that "the rest is silence" may 
 be, after all, a better epitaph than "the rest is 
 rhetoric." 
 
 We will not quote for disparagement the worst pas- 
 sages which deal with Byron and Whitman in Mis- 
 cellanies and Studies in Prose and Poetry (1891 and 
 1894) ; but we will append a passage on Byron, written 
 in 1866, to show what a prose-writer was lost in Swin- 
 burne: 
 
 His work was done at Missolonghi; all of his work for 
 which the fates could spare him time. A little space was
 
 272 Studies in Literature 
 
 allowed him to show at least a heroic purpose, and attest a 
 high design; then, with all things unfinished before him and 
 behind, he fell asleep after many troubles and triumphs. 
 Few can ever have gone wearier to the grave; none with less 
 fear. He had done enough to earn his rest. Forgetful 
 now and set free for ever from all faults and foes, he passed 
 through the doorway of no ignoble death out of reach of 
 time, out of sight of love, out of hearing of hatred, beyond 
 the blame of England and the praise of Greece. In the 
 full strength of spirit and of body his destiny overtook him, 
 and made an end of all his labours. He had seen and borne 
 and achieved more than most men on record. "He was a 
 great man, good at many things, and now he had attained 
 his rest." 
 
 VIII 
 
 We have indicated what we think the worst to be 
 lamented of those last thirty years, and, for all our debt 
 to the memory of Mr. Watts-Dunton and our gratitude 
 for the work Swinburne accomplished in those years, 
 it remains lamentable. Desperate causes may require 
 desperate remedies : the devotion which applied these 
 and kept a friend alive and happy cannot, must not, be 
 slighted. But as little can its effect be gainsaid that 
 a biography of Swinburne must, to be true, overbalance 
 the end with the beginning and can hardly, to be told 
 well, escape being told with a touch of ironic humour, of 
 laughter amid tears for humanity and its ways. Mr. 
 Gosse has written it so ; written it with infallible tact ; 
 written it just as well as it could be written. But it is 
 so, and the pity is it should be so. How were the roses 
 so fresh and so fair! . . . This man, who succumbed to 
 frailty, was a splendid poet, and his verse will yet 
 avenge him on Time. Meanwhile
 
 Swinburne 273 
 
 Who shall seek thee and bring 
 
 And restore thee thy day, 
 When the dove dipt her wing 
 And the oars won their way 
 
 Where the narrowing Symplegades whitened the straits of 
 Propontis with spray? 
 
 18
 
 CHARLES READE 
 
 /CHARLES READE was born a hundred years ago, 
 V^ on the 8th of June, 1 8 14 ; he died on Good Friday, 
 April 11, 1884. Then, or about then, Walter Besant 
 could write as follows of 
 
 the position occupied by this writer, which is and has been, 
 since the death of Thackeray and Dickens alone in the first 
 rank. That is to say, alone because he resembles no other 
 writer living or dead not alone because there has been no 
 other writer in line with him. His merits are his own, and 
 they are those of the first order of writers. He cannot be 
 classified or compared ; in order to be classified, a man must 
 be either a leader or one of a following. Reade certainly 
 cannot be accused of following. One can only say that he 
 stands in the front rank and he stands alone. One can only 
 say that this great writer there is no greater praise paints 
 women as they are, men as they are, things as they are ... 
 
 all of which is skimble-skamble thought in slipshod 
 language; a confusion of platitude, falsity, and non- 
 sense stark but inarticulate. (Also George Eliot sur- 
 vived Thackeray and Dickens by some years.) Still it 
 is obviously trying, under a spell of admiration, to say 
 something about Charles Reade ; and the mischief for 
 those of us who admire Reade, albeit differently lurks 
 in a little devil of a doubt that anyone, a hundred years 
 hence, will care either for the something Besant wanted 
 to say or for the reservations we think worth while. 
 274
 
 Charles Reade 275 
 
 Reade as a novelist had merits we can hardly believe 
 to be perishable. To take the most eminent : when he 
 "got going" upon high, straight epic narrative Ge- 
 rard's odyssey, the last voyage of the Agra, the bursting 
 of Ousely dam, the storming of the Bastion St. Andre 
 no one of his contemporaries could touch him; no 
 English writer, at any rate, could get near him. Nor 
 were these efforts mere spurts of invention; but long, 
 strong, masterly running, sustained right to the goal 
 over scores of pages. Could one but pluck these chap- 
 ters out of his books, blot the residue out of existence, 
 and holding them out to posterity (they would make no 
 mean handful either) challenge it to refuse Reade a 
 place in the very first rank, there could be no answer. 
 He had other great merits too ; but with them a fatal 
 talent for murdering his own reputation, for capping 
 every triumph with an instant folly, either in the books 
 themselves or in his public behaviour ; and these follies 
 were none the less disastrous for being prompted by a 
 nature at once large, manly, generous, tender, incapable 
 of self-control, constitutionally passionate, and in pas- 
 sion as blind as a bat. 
 
 He started in life as the youngest of eleven children ; 
 son of a high Tory squire (of tall and noble presence) 
 and a lady who had descended upon Ipsden in Oxford- 
 shire out of the inner social circle of Buckingham Palace 
 and the Regency. To quote the official Memoir into 
 which Reade' s luck followed him (it fills two volumes 
 worthy to survive for brilliance of fatuity even when 
 their subject shall be forgotten), "Charles Reade was 
 born into a refined family circle, for his mother had the 
 bel air of the Court, and his father was a gentleman of 
 the old school. ' ' Further, the mother ' ' was no common 
 woman. Born under the torrid sun of Madras, im-
 
 276 Studies in Literature 
 
 mersed while yet a girl in the life of politics, society, and 
 the Court, she was before all things a lady [!]. Haydn 
 taught her music, and Sheridan epigram and repartee. 
 Her manner was perfect, and her conversational powers 
 so extraordinary as to have fascinated so superior a 
 master of rhetoric as Samuel Wilberforce." In the 
 country she imbibed religion (Calvinism) from a divine 
 who, " though a splendid preacher and a Hebrew scholar 
 never attained to the semblance of a gentleman. In his 
 old age a long pipe and a spittoon were his inseparable 
 companions." Environed by this Arcadian simplicity, 
 Mrs. Reade lived and did her work industriously and 
 happily. She was at once domestic and social, with an 
 aptitude for cultivating the great of the earth. 
 
 Lord Thurlow was godfather to her eldest son; Barring- 
 ton, the Prince-Bishop of Durham, who resided at Mong- 
 well Park, three miles off, became sponsor for her fourth; 
 and Warren Hastings for her youngest daughter. "My 
 dearest Lady Effingham" was the friend of her life-time 
 until that lady in her eighth decade ran away with a Scrip- 
 ture-Reader, when the note changed and she was styled 
 "That horrid old woman." 
 
 She was a daughter of Major John Scott (afterwards 
 Scott-Waring), M.P. for the old borough of Stockbridge, 
 Hants a figure in the polite and the party memoirs of 
 his age ; and, like most women trained in its high politics, 
 she had a sharp eye for "openings." "Her influence 
 with the Board of Directors of the Old East India 
 Company was virtually paramount. She obtained no 
 less than three writerships [i.e., appointments in the 
 Civil Service], together with two cavalry cadetships, for 
 her sons, and an infantry cadetship for a connection by 
 marriage." The elder sons had been sent to public
 
 Charles Reade 277 
 
 schools Rugby, Haileybury, Charterhouse; but she 
 had a whim to subject Charles, her youngest and her 
 darling, to private tuition. 
 
 This was the child's first misfortune, and no slight 
 one. Though the public schools of this land have 
 pretty steadily evolved some four-fifths of its admitted 
 genius, their reputation for discouraging genius is saecu- 
 lar and shall not be disputed here ; but at all events they 
 discourage those abnormalities of temper and conduct 
 to which genius is prone, as by their stern correction it 
 is not infrequently bettered. Reade was committed to 
 a flagellating minister at Ifney, who taught him the 
 Latin irregular verbs; if of a hundred he could repeat 
 all correctly, he escaped ; if but nine-and-ninety, he was 
 caned and being all unlike an elder brother who in the 
 midst of a furious whacking observed pleasantly, " I say, 
 if you keep on at this much longer you'll hurt " Charles 
 was not cured of a sensitive skin by this method of 
 graf ting-on the classics. After five years of penal servi- 
 tude his parents removed him to a far humaner school 
 at Staines ; a change which, in the words of the Memoir, 
 "can only be compared to one from a diet of gall to 
 one of champagne. ' ' Even that (one conjectures) would 
 not suit all stomachs; and the boy, though happier 
 at Staines, missed the right regimen of health for his 
 character. Next came Oxford. His father the squire, 
 who had been at Rugby and Oriel, could not see that 
 Oxford fitted a man for life. (He kept a pack of 
 harriers.) But Mrs. Reade insisted, and Charles went 
 up to stand for a demyship at Magdalen : which he won 
 in the teeth of all probability, not because he sent in
 
 278 Studies in Literature 
 
 a good essay (which he did), nor through parental wire- 
 pulling, but because one of the eight nominee candidates 
 whom the Fellows proposed to job in failed so conspic- 
 uously that old Dr. Routh refused to have him and 
 preferred to admit the outsider who came of good family 
 and could write sound English. Luck and ability com- 
 bined again, four years later, to win him his fellowship. 
 A demy of Magdalen in those days could only succeed 
 to a fellowship on his particular county, and then only 
 if he had taken his degree before the day of St. Mary 
 Magdalen next ensuing after the vacancy. Reade, 
 though privately tutored by no- less a man than Robert 
 Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke), may have been 
 indolent ; at any rate in the early summer of 1835 he was 
 unprepared for "Greats" when quite unexpectedly a 
 vacancy occurred in Oxfordshire, his own county. The 
 month was June, and he had twenty-four hours in which 
 to decide between entering his name for a pass or for 
 honours. For the pass he would have to sit at once; 
 and, though the examination was light as compared 
 with the other, a total ignorance of the books offered 
 would hardly be covered by autoschediastic brilliancy. 
 He therefore entered his name for honours, and in the 
 three weeks' respite read furiously. Thirty-six hours 
 before the examination he began upon the Thirty-nine 
 Articles, which all candidates had to commit to memory 
 rejection on this test invalidating success in all the 
 others. He had a bad memory (ruined, as he always 
 maintained, by ferocious overtaxing at his first school). 
 Lo! when he started upon this task, which he had left 
 to the last, his memory collapsed. To make matters 
 worse, the three weeks' strain had brought on a racking 
 neuralgia. He walked up to the examination table 
 knowing just three Articles by rote; his mind, for the
 
 Charles Reade 279 
 
 remaining thirty-six, a blank. The Article chosen by 
 the examiner chanced to be one of the magic three. 
 Reade repeated it pat, won his degree, and inherited his 
 fellowship. 
 
 Later, and having in the meantime entered at Lin- 
 coln's Inn and begun to study law, he achieved the 
 Vinerian Scholarship, less by luck than by good manage- 
 ment. The Masters of Arts elected to this scholarship; 
 and the Fellows of Magdalen, though etiquette forbade 
 them to vote or canvass against one of their Society, 
 had by this time been chafed more than a little by 
 Reade's "nodosities" and angularities of temper, and 
 would help him to no university backing. It occurred 
 to Reade that, with his father's influence in the shire, 
 he might whip up a number of county gentlemen who 
 happened to be M.A.'s and surprise, perhaps even 
 swamp, the resident voters. 
 
 His mother canvassed the clergy; and, when favourable 
 answers were obtained, offered conveyances free of cost. 
 On the day of election Oxford swarmed with squires and 
 parsons whipped up for Charles Reade, and thus when he 
 came in head of the poll by a substantial majority, some 
 chagrin found expression within the bosom of the college. 
 
 In truth, this contentious, irascible man was no easy 
 fellow for any collegiate society, let alone that of Mag- 
 dalen under Dr. Routh. His colleagues found him gey 
 ill to live with ; while he, smarting as he did under every 
 petty wound, real or imaginary and, for a real one, 
 there had been an attempt to oust him save on a con- 
 dition of his taking orders saw no more of them than 
 he was obliged. He rarely dined in hall : but he swore 
 by the college cook (who swore by him), and in later 
 years even bought himself a set of silver dishes in which
 
 280 Studies in Literature 
 
 his dinners were conveyed from Magdalen to London! 
 But he wished to be quit of college business, though he 
 duly served his term as Dean of Arts in a green coat 
 with brass buttons, a costume at which the late Goldwin 
 Smith took deep umbrage. 
 
 II 
 
 In 1839 Reade left Oxford for a sort of grand tour, 
 Paris and Geneva being the chief resting places. There- 
 after for a few years he wandered a great deal, especially 
 in Scotland as the Memoir puts it : "between the years 
 1837 and 1847 his visits to the land of cakes were 
 chronic." When at home he had, so to speak, three 
 homes Ipsden, Magdalen, and some chambers he 
 rented in Leicester square nor was either of them 
 warned when to expect him: for he kept a separate 
 wardrobe at each, travelled without luggage, and prob- 
 ably would have disdained the telegraph had it been 
 invented. His rooms in Leicester square swarmed with 
 squirrels which he imported from Ipsden. He started a 
 craze for violins ; collected Cremonas, plunged into the 
 secrets of their manufacture, almost desperately of- 
 fended his father by spilling varnishes from his win- 
 dow-sill over the white front of Ipsden; bolted in a 
 huff for the continent and Paris ; almost lost his life as a 
 hated Englishman in the Revolution of 1848; escaped 
 in a cab under a truss of straw; and arrived back at 
 Ipsden travel- stained but cool, as he could be when 
 not enraged by trifles. "My dear Charles," was the 
 greeting, "you have had a narrow escape of your life."- 
 " I have. They put me into a damp bed at Boulogne." 
 
 We come now to that turn in Reade's fate which, if 
 but for it he had never been a writer, must be accounted
 
 Charles Reade 281 
 
 a blessing, as to the last he loudly and sincerely pro- 
 claimed it. But if primarily a blessing in a dozen ways 
 (or we are grievously mistaken) it proved to be a steady 
 curse, though the woman responsible was innocent of all 
 conscious harm. He had always been attracted by the 
 stage. He reckoned drama to be the first of the arts. 
 He left orders to be written on his tomb: "Charles 
 Reade: Dramatist, Novelist, Journalist" in that or- 
 der. About this time, 1849, when "his fine old sire 
 paid the debt of nature" (Memoir}, he wrote a play 
 many plays. He took it to " a distinguished comedian, 
 Mrs. Seymour," then acting with Buckstone at the 
 Haymarket. ' ' She was magnanimous and appreciative 
 and, like many women of her calibre, could recognise 
 the difference between a real and a sham gentleman. 
 Ladies whom the voice of scandal has spared have been 
 less warm-hearted," &c. (Memoir}. "It may, how- 
 ever, be safely predicted [sic] that he (Reade) stood 
 alone in believing her to be a really great artist." He 
 asked for an interview. "The response was in the 
 affirmative ' ' (Memoir} . She did not think much of the 
 play, and showed that she didn't. Reade had called 
 "hat in hand" ; "politely, and without any show of the 
 offence he felt he bowed himself out. " She felt sorry, 
 pitied "a fine man with the bel air of one accustomed 
 to society," jumped (mistakingly) at the guess that he 
 was hard up for money, sat down and wrote a letter. 
 It fetched Reade back with an explanation. 
 
 What passed at that interview is not known. Each had 
 learnt in a moment to respect the other, and we may be sure 
 that a friendship thus commenced was from the outset 
 regarded as sacred. It had moreover to develope. ... It 
 must, however, be categorically asserted [sic] on the individ-
 
 282 Studies in Literature 
 
 ual authority [sic] of the late Mr. Winwood Reade, who was 
 a constant inmate subsequently of their house in Bolton 
 Row, that the friendship between these two was platonic. 
 
 To have done with this egregious Memoir. No one 
 doubts that Mrs. Seymour was an honest lady, or that 
 she started Charles Reade upon writing novels, or that 
 she gave him some sound practical advice by the way. 
 But the crucial test of such a partnership as this (and 
 there have been not a few in the history of letters) is 
 only passed when the silent partner supplies that self- 
 criticism which the active partner lacks. Unless the 
 two are thus complementary if the silent one merely 
 encourages the active performer to the top of his bent 
 the momentum but drives forward an inordinate mass 
 to topple by its own weight; as Lewes drove George 
 Eliot from Scenes of Clerical Life to Deronda. Now 
 Mrs. Seymour, a woman of little cultivation, was quite 
 incapable of correcting, because incapable of perceiving, 
 those defects of taste and temper to which Reade was 
 prone. If she did not foster them she at least left these 
 idiosyncrasies to mar his work. Worse even than this 
 she was an actress, and not a first-class actress, of 
 a very bad period. She saw everything "literary "in 
 the light of the stage, and her stage was of the stagiest. 
 By ill-luck Reade, too, suffered from this false stage-eye. 
 He too saw all his novels first as plays. His earliest, 
 Peg Wqffington, was adapted straight from a short 
 play, Masks and Faces, which still holds the boards in 
 spite (or by virtue) of what Swinburne called " the pre- 
 posterous incident" of the living portrait. Rightly 
 classing this with the burlesque duel in Christie John- 
 stone, Swinburne rightly adds that "in serious fiction 
 they are such blemishes as cannot be effaced and can
 
 Charles Reade 283 
 
 hardly be redeemed by the- charming scenes which 
 precede or follow them." The tedious conclusion of the 
 first of the long novels, It is Never too Late to Mend, with 
 its avenging Jew and its Wicked Bridegroom foiled at 
 the church-door, is but stage-grouping and melodrama 
 carried to the nth power: the same bag of tricks being 
 produced again to affront the reader's intelligence in 
 Put Yourself in His Place. Reade had written The 
 Cloister and the Hearth, Hard Cash, and Griffith Gaunt in 
 the interval between these two, and yet Put Yourself in 
 His Place would seem to prove that he had learnt (or, 
 rather, had unlearnt) nothing. The devices by which 
 the hero is made to vanish and to keep his betrothed 
 without news that he is alive would not impose on 
 a child, and the sawdust puppet Squire Raby becomes 
 almost a thing of horror when we reflect that Reade 
 probably intended him for a portrait of his own father ! 
 Few men can have written a critical sentence wider 
 of the truth than Besant's, "One can only say that this 
 great writer . . . paints women as they are, men as 
 they are, things as they are." That was just what 
 Reade could not learn to do for any length of time, save 
 now and then when left alone in his rooms in Magdalen. 
 When he saw men and women with the help of Mrs. 
 Seymour, or of such playwrights as Tom Taylor 
 and Dion Boucicault, he saw them as dolls making 
 their exits and their entrances behind footlights. He 
 wrote Foul Play in collaboration with Dion Boucicault, 
 which is another way of saying that he submitted his 
 true epical daemon, though it broke loose for a long run 
 in the splendid adventures of the castaways, to be 
 caught and reconsigned to a prison of cardboard. He 
 wrecked Griffith Gaunt, which was coming near to be his 
 best novel, as Shakespeare wrecked The Two Gentlemen
 
 284 Studies in Literature 
 
 of Verona (but Shakespeare lived to learn better), by 
 making his hero for purely stage purposes suddenly 
 renounce his nature and behave like a quite incredible 
 cad ; nor could we readily find by searching the old pages 
 of Bow Bells or The London Journal theatricality stalk- 
 ing in such nakedness as in A Terrible Temptation, one 
 of Reade's later works. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The pity is the greater because he took enormous 
 trouble to be true to fact, and above everything prided 
 himself upon being therefore true to Nature (whereas 
 the two are different things). His method of work, his 
 method of preparation for it, his material and appliances 
 documents, blue-books, note-books, newspaper files, 
 indexes will be found described as accessories to that 
 full-length portrait of himself which (for no artistic 
 reason) he thrusts into A Terrible Temptation along 
 with a picture of his work-room: 
 
 . . . an empty room, the like of which Lady Bassett 
 had never seen; it was large in itself and multiplied tenfold 
 by great mirrors from floor to ceiling, with no frames but a 
 narrow oak beading; opposite her on entering was a bay 
 window, all plate glass, the central panes of which opened 
 like doors upon a pretty little garden that glowed with 
 colour and was backed by fine trees. . . . The numerous 
 and large mirrors all down to the ground laid hold of the 
 garden and the flowers, and by double and triple reflection 
 filled the room with nooks of verdure and colour. 
 
 He used this device in his rooms at Magdalen, which 
 looked upon the college deer park; by mirrors con- 
 triving to bring it indoors and around him while he sat,
 
 Charles Reade 285 
 
 like Chaucer in Longfellow's sonnet "in a lodge within 
 a park": 
 
 The chamber walls depicted all around, 
 [Not] With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound 
 And the hurt deer . . . 
 
 but with the deer alone, unhurt, browsing under green 
 branches. 
 
 Underneath the table was a formidable array of note-books, 
 standing upright and labelled on their backs. There were 
 about twenty large folios of classified facts, ideas, and pic- 
 tures, for the very wood-cuts were all indexed and classified 
 on the plan of a tradesman's ledger. . . . Then there was 
 a collection of solid quartos and of smaller folio guard-books 
 called Indexes. There were Index Rerum et Journalium 
 Index Rerum et Librorum Index Rerum et Hominum and 
 a lot more; indeed so many that, by way of climax, there was 
 a fat folio ledger entitled Index ad Indices. By the side of 
 the table were six or seven thick pasteboard cards, each 
 about the size of a large portfolio, and on these the author's 
 notes and extracts were collected from all his repertories 
 into something like a focus for a present purpose. He was 
 writing a novel based on facts facts, incidents, living dia- 
 logues, pictures, reflections, situations, were all on these 
 cards to choose from, and arranged in headed columns. . . . 
 
 One thing this method taught him at any rate to exert 
 his style upon concrete objects. He might, indeed, dis- 
 tort men, women, things; he did so as often as not; but 
 he ever saw them as tangible, and detested all writing 
 that was nebulous, high-faluting, gushing. His style 
 is ever lively and nervous. It may irritate even the 
 moderately fastidious ; it abounds in errors of taste ; but 
 is always vigorous, compelling the style of a man. We 
 feel the surer that our account of it does no real injustice
 
 286 Studies in Literature 
 
 to poor Mrs. Seymour's influence on observing that 
 Reade's masterpiece The Cloister and the Hearth and 
 Hard Cash (which many rank next) were written at a 
 remove from her, in his college rooms. Anyhow she did 
 not know enough of the times or the materials handled 
 in The Cloister for her opinion to have had even a plau- 
 sible value, and in fact he seems to have done without 
 it. On the other hand, we do her memory the justice 
 to doubt if any tact, any skill, could have taught 
 Reade tact, cured his combativeness, or alleviated his 
 wrathful knack of putting himself in the wrong. He 
 was not only hasty in a quarrel; being in it, he might 
 be counted on to make his friends blush and the cool 
 observer smile. The Memoir contains a letter, written 
 before he commenced author, extending over many 
 pages, addressed to the officials of the Treasury and 
 haranguing them in this fashion because he had been 
 charged what he thought an excessive import duty 
 on some old violins : 
 
 Merit never comes to bear until first filtered through the 
 consideration of name. If then a Man looks at twenty old 
 fiddles, the merits of which he can see, but does not know 
 who made each and how that Maker ranks in the Market 
 where is he? and what is he? a sailor on the wide Pacific 
 without a compass or a star is not more the sport of water 
 and wind than such a man as this is of flighty dreams and of 
 brute chance. ... Oh! my Lords, if you or the Com- 
 missioners would only condescend to look at the things. 
 . . . Malice is a blackguard, but Ignorance is a Wild 
 Beast, &c., &c. 
 
 This kind of thing may not have been ineradicable in 
 Reade, but it was certainly never eradicated. To the 
 end for example when accused of plagiarising from
 
 Charles Reade 287 
 
 Swift in The Wandering Heir he could never fit the 
 word with the occasion or keep any sense of propor- 
 tion between the argument and his temper. A simi- 
 lar tactlessness led him, having accepted a commission 
 from the firm of Cassell, Fetter and Galpin, to affront 
 the readers of Cas sell's Magazine with A Terrible Tempta- 
 tion. Nobody could have been more genuinely amazed 
 and indignant than was Reade at the reprobation 
 it excited; but so recently as twenty years ago a mis- 
 chievous person in search of amusement could count on 
 it if he walked into Messrs. Cassell' s premises and 
 pronounced the name of Charles Reade in a voice above 
 a whisper. Reade, to be sure, had usually moral right 
 on his side, and behind his excesses; and the amount 
 of positive good he did, not only towards reforming 
 social abuses by such works as It is Never Too Late to 
 Mend and Hard Cash, but by pamphlets and letters 
 championing individual victims of injustice, would 
 amount to a fine total. But we are considering him 
 as an artist, and the artistic side and the side of 
 the angels are not conterminous, though they agree 
 roughly. 
 
 The general verdict seems to be that, while Griffith 
 Gaunt and Hard Cash are works of mastery (and the 
 high seriousness of Griffith Gaunt cannot be denied), 
 The Cloister and the Hearth was his masterpiece. With 
 this verdict we entirely agree, and hold that, if there 
 must be a first place among "historical" novels, that 
 work and Esmond are the great challengers for it. 
 For artistry, grace of handling, ease, finish, the delicate 
 rhythm of its prose, nice perception of where to restrain 
 passion, where and how far to let it go, Esmond must 
 carry every vote. The Cloister and the Hearth, moreover, 
 tails out tediously, though the end, when it comes, is
 
 288 Studies in Literature 
 
 exquisite a thing of human blood purified to tears_and 
 tears to divine balm. 
 
 "But now the good fight is won, ah me! Oh my love, if 
 thou hast lived doubting of thy Gerard's heart, die not so; 
 for never was woman loved so tenderly as thou this ten years 
 past." 
 
 "Calm tnyself, dear one," said the dying woman with a 
 heavenly smile. "I know it; only being a woman, I could 
 not die happy till I had heard thee say so." 
 
 In the depth of this, as through the whole story which 
 it closes, shines a something which Thackeray could no 
 more match than he could match the epic chapters 
 wherethrough Gerard adventures with Denys of Bur- 
 gundy, though between the two novelists, on the sum 
 of their writing, there can be, of course, no comparison. 
 None the less, and through all his blindfold mistakes 
 even through his most amazing trivialities Reade 
 carries always the indefinable aura of greatness. Often 
 vulgar, and not seldom ludicrous, he is never petty. 
 "No man, " said Johnson, "was ever written down but 
 by himself." Reade, vain and apt to write himself 
 down in the act of writing himself up, was all but con- 
 sistently the worse foe of his own reputation. It will 
 probably survive all the worst he did, because he was 
 great in a way, and entirely sincere.
 
 PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH 
 LITERATURE. I. 
 
 D Y those who do not understand Socratic irony, or 
 J ' the delicacies of it as rendered by Plato, a great 
 deal of obtuse criticism has been wasted upon the 
 Menexenus, which is a dialogue purporting to be a true 
 account by Socrates of a funeral oration composed to be 
 recited over certain of the Athenian dead who fell in the 
 Peloponnesian war. Let me sketch the introduction : 
 Socrates happens on his friend Menexenus, returning 
 from the Agora . ' ' Where have you been , Menexenus ? ' ' 
 "At the Council, where they were to choose some one 
 to pronounce the customary oration over the dead; for 
 there is to be a public funeral. But the meeting 
 adjourned without deciding on the orator." "O 
 Menexenus, death in battle is a fine thing. The poor 
 fellow, however poor he was, gets a costly funeral and an 
 elaborate speech by a wise man who has prepared it long 
 beforehand. He is praised for what he has done and for 
 what he has not done that is the beauty of it. And the 
 speaker so steals away our souls, Menexenus, that I 
 standing and listening feel myself a finer fellow than 
 ever I have been ; and, if there be any foreigners present, 
 I am made conscious of a certain superiority over them, 
 i 9 289
 
 290 Studies in Literature 
 
 and they seem to experience a corresponding awe of me, 
 and in fact it takes me about three days to get over it." 
 "You are always poking fun at us, Socrates. But what 
 will the poor fellow I mean the orator have to say, 
 at so short a notice?" "Oh, that's easy. If a speaker 
 had to praise Athenians among Peloponnesians, or Pelo- 
 ponnesians among Athenians, he might have some ado 
 to gain credit. But where's his difficulty to win applause 
 among the very people whom he is praising? " "Could 
 you do it, Socrates?" "Well, yes, I have hopes I could 
 praise Athenians to Athenians ; and the more because I 
 can recollect almost word for word a funeral oration I 
 heard Aspasia compose, only last night, on these very 
 dead, putting together fragments of a famous funeral 
 oration which Pericles spoke, but (as I believe) she 
 composed for him. " 
 
 Then follows the oration, carefully absurd in its dates, 
 obviously travestied from Pericles' famous speech as 
 conjectured for him by Thucydides. And the German 
 scholars solemnly doubt (although Aristotle happens to 
 quote the dialogue as Plato's) how the thing can be 
 Plato's, seeing it is so very like Thucydides: and why 
 Plato a serious philosopher should put it into the 
 mouth of Aspasia, of all people ! They incline to think 
 it spurious, on internal evidence: which means, the 
 evidence of their internals. 
 
 We must not suppose, however, because Plato, speak- 
 ing through the mouth of Socrates, lets his irony play 
 like summer lightning around these patriotic encomia 
 upon the dead, that therefore he was no true patriot, or 
 anything less than a fervent one. For, first, observe 
 that what he so gently derides is ready-made patriotism 
 kept in stock and vended to order the sort of thing 
 that in a later age constrained Dr. Johnson to utter
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 291 
 
 suddenly in a strong determined tone the apophthegm, 
 "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Plato 
 more urbanely suggests that it appertains to the stock- 
 in-trade of a good many humbugs. Now it was a great 
 part of the service rendered to mankind by the Greek 
 intellect (and specially by the Athenian intellect) that it 
 insisted on penetrating humbug, to see things as they 
 are, and so has helped men ever since to separate true 
 things from false. "0 Athenian stranger mere in- 
 habitant of Attica I will not call you, but you seem to 
 deserve rather the name of Athene herself, because you 
 go back to first principles" (Plato, The Laws}. It does 
 not follow, because Plato slily derides the sort of stuff 
 Archinus or Dion would have turned out in imitation of 
 Pericles, that he would not be profoundly moved by the 
 great oration which (put into Pericles' mouth by Thu- 
 cydides) has moved the souls of men for two thousand 
 years. 1 It does not follow from Plato's irony that he 
 was a man likely to be left un thrilled by a speech which 
 stands to this day as the locus classicus of patriotism. 
 Rather, the contrary follows. He is separating the true 
 from the spurious imitation served out by second-rate 
 rhetoricians. 
 
 Lastly, on this point let me recall to some of you a 
 word or two spoken in a previous lecture, on the sub- 
 
 1 Here may I interpose a warning that you do not hastily take it, 
 as some do, for Thucydides' own composition. On other speeches 
 in the History he may have practised freely the art of dressing-up to 
 which he pleads guilty. But of so glorious a speech as that every sen- 
 tence would sink into the hearers' hearts. Thucydides must have had 
 a hundred memories from which to collate it; and what is more- 
 he could not only have found it hard, in the "faking," to rise so far 
 above his habitual style, but he could hardly have dared to foist new 
 sentences of his own in place of those which the occasion had left 
 "familiar in men's mouths as household words. "
 
 292 Studies in Literature 
 
 ject of parody. If a man's mind be accustomed, as 
 Plato's was, to move reverently among holy things and 
 so that his appreciation of them has become a second 
 nature, he can afford (whether he speak of poetry, or of 
 art, or of religion) to play with his adored one even as 
 a tactful lover may tease his mistress, and the pair of 
 them find in it a pretty refreshment of love. For he 
 knows exactly where to stop, as she what to allow. So 
 to come to modern times for an instance you re- 
 spond to every noble phrase in Abraham Lincoln's 
 oration over the dead pf Gettysburg : 
 
 We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final 
 resting place for those who have given their lives that a 
 nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that 
 we should do this. 
 
 But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot con- 
 secrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, 
 living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far 
 above our power to add or detract. The world will little 
 note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never 
 forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to 
 be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who 
 fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 
 
 "The world will little note, nor long remember, what 
 we say here; but it can never forget what they did 
 here. " The more intimately you respond to this the 
 more sensitively you feel, with the thrill of the old Peri- 
 clean antithesis, that here, after so many generations, 
 the world has thrown up, in Abraham Lincoln, a man 
 worthy to speak to it once again as Pericles spoke with 
 the lighter courage you can consign all spurious or 
 second-rate imitations to the caressing raillery of Mr. 
 Dooley.
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 293 
 II 
 
 It may seem a long way even a longer way than to 
 Tipperary from the polite irony of Menexenus to the 
 cheerful irony of the English private soldier, now fight- 
 ing for us on the Belgian border. But I suggest to you 
 that his irony too plays with patriotism just because he 
 is at home with that holy spirit ; so much at home that 
 he may be called at any hour of the day or night to die 
 for it. Precisely because he lives in this intimacy, he is 
 shy of revealing it, and from shy turns to scornful when 
 the glib uninitiate would vulgarise the mystery: 
 
 Send for the army and the navy, 
 Send for the rank and file 
 (Have a banana !) 
 
 A well-meaning scholar, having written, the other 
 day, for the British infantry-man a number of ditties to 
 which he will never march, protested that if he pre- 
 ferred to march to this sort of thing, his laureate should 
 be the village idiot ; which pleased me, who have al- 
 ways contended that the village idiot has his uses, and 
 that Mr. McKenna was far too hasty with his Mental 
 Deficiency Act. 
 
 There is a real mental deficiency and most of us 
 who work on recruiting committees have bitter experi- 
 ence of it in well-intentioned superior persons who, 
 with no prospect of dying for their country, are calling 
 on others to make that sacrifice. On platform after 
 platform since August I have sat and seen the ardour 
 of young men chilled by exhortations from intellectual 
 speakers who lacked understanding, by middle-aged 
 people sentimental or patronising who schooled their
 
 294 Studies in Literature 
 
 hearers in what they ought to feel. To the British 
 soldier Tipperary was, if you will, just Tipperary: to 
 some of us who heard him singing and know what he 
 went forth to find, it remains a city celestial. 
 
 After this it was noised about that Mr. Valiant-for-truth 
 was taken with a Summons. . . . Then said he, I am going 
 to my Father's; and tho' with great Difficulty I am got 
 hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the Trouble I have 
 been at to arrive where I am. My Sword, I give to him that 
 shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and 
 Skill, to him that can get it. My Marks and Scarrs I carry 
 with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought his 
 Battles, who now will be my Rewarder. 
 
 When the Day that he must go hence was come, many 
 accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, 
 he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down 
 deeper, he said, Grave, where is thy Victory? So he 
 passed over, and the Trumpets sounded for him on the 
 other side. 
 
 (The Pilgrim's Progress) 
 
 But there are serious good folk who would paraphrase 
 
 Good-bye, Piccadilly, 
 Farewell, Leicester Square 
 into 
 
 Good-bye , Self-indulgence ! 
 Farewell, the soft arm-chair! 
 
 and to these the British infantry-man responds 
 Have a banana! 
 
 Yes; and truly (when one comes to think) it were hard 
 to find, in few words, a better answer.
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 295 
 
 Send for the boys of the girls' brigade 
 
 To set old England free: 
 Send for my mother, and my sister and my brother, 
 
 But for heaven's sake don't send me! 
 
 That is "merry England." The enemy wonders that 
 our men march and so obstinately too to this stuff 
 while by rights they should be chanting Rule, Britannia!: 
 and it would seem that not a few cultivated Englishmen, 
 who of late years have lent too much of their minds 
 to Germanic ways of thought, suffer from an uneasy 
 suspicion that we ought to be answering the perpetual 
 Deutschland uber alles! 'with a perpetual Rule, Britannia!. 
 Nay, the late Professor Cramb who felt the German 
 hypnotism none the less for resenting it conveys the 
 reproach in passages like this : 
 
 It is hard for us in England to understand what the Rhine 
 really means for a German, the enthusiasm which he feels for 
 that River. Treitschke himself says of it, for instance, when 
 he has to leave Bonn: "Tomorrow I shall see the Rhine for 
 the last time. The memory of that noble river" and this 
 is net in a poem, observe, but simply in a letter to a friend 
 "the memory of that noble river will keep my heart pure 
 and save me from sad and evil thoughts throughout all the 
 days of my life. " Try [writes Professor Cramb] to imagine 
 anyone saying that of the Thames! 
 
 Well, I daresay some Old Etonians have felt something 
 like that about the Thames, and have confessed it in 
 private letters. But how could Professor Cramb have 
 missed to see that when we Englishmen lift our thoughts 
 to their stature, our Rhine is not the Thames ? Come, 
 I will answer for once with a Rule, Britannia! Our 
 Rhine, our king's frontier, is no Thames but the royal 
 sweep of seven oceans. The waters of our baptism flow
 
 296 Studies in Literature 
 
 past Dover through the Straits of Hercules, down past 
 the Cape of Storms, to divide again to reach, to coast, 
 to claim Hindostan, Australia. There (if you will have 
 it so) runs our Rhine: our Bonn and Bingen and 
 Drachenfels are the Heads of Sydney, the ramparts 
 of Quebec, the citadel rock of Gibraltar: 
 
 rock which Hercules 
 
 And Goth and Moor bequeathed us. At this door 
 England stands sentry. God! to hear the shrill 
 Sweet treble of her fifes upon the breeze, 
 And at the summons of the rock gun's roar 
 To see her red coats marching from the hill ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 But to be fair let us admit that we do not often 
 open our hearts in this fashion. I suppose that if 
 England ever bred a great "imperialist" in days before 
 our language had coined that unbeautiful word, his 
 name was Sir Walter Ralegh and he has left us, in noble 
 verse, a reminder that 
 
 Passions are liken'd best to floods and streams: 
 The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb. 
 
 I trust as I believe this to be the explanation why 
 we, who seek in English literature for the passion of 
 patriotism, have to pride ourselves on its being every- 
 where implicit. To be sure the patriotic orator can 
 always quote to us the lines of dying Gaunt : 
 
 This royal throne of kings, this sceptr'd isle, . . . 
 This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

 
 Patriotism in English Literature 297 
 
 Which serves it in the office of a wall 
 
 Or as a moat defensive to a house, 
 
 Against the envy of less happier lands, 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 
 
 or the Bastard's equally famous conclusion: 
 
 Come the three corners of the world in arms, 
 
 And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, 
 
 If England to itself do rest but true. 
 
 Yet I think it observable that the one speech is put into 
 the mouth of a febrile and dying man while the other 
 rounds off a play with obvious declamation: and yet 
 more observable that whereas the body of Shakespeare's 
 work is a whole school in itself of patriotic thought and 
 feeling, more than nine-tenths of it is implicit; after 
 King Henry the Fifth almost the whole of it is implicit. 
 
 Certainly if we turn to the body of English poetry 
 we shall find explicit, loud-mouthed patriotism even 
 worse represented than is our pride in sea-power, that 
 particular glory of our birth and "state. When we 
 happen to talk of our country, we are at one, or almost 
 at one. It is only Bubb Dodington who can write : 
 
 Love thy country, wish it well, 
 Not with too intense a care: 
 
 'Tis enough that, when it fell, 
 Thou its ruin didst not share. 
 
 It is true nay, it is part of my argument that when 
 an Englishman talks of art, of literature, of philosophy 
 (I fear me, even of theology), some solid sense of his 
 country's dignity is usually discoverable at the back of 
 his mind. We feel this solid background, for example,
 
 298 Studies in Literature 
 
 all the while we are reading Coleridge's Biographic, 
 Literaria: in a metaphysical passage of De Quincey, 
 as through parted clouds, suddenly will come charging 
 the British dragoons of Talavera; while Dryden opens 
 his famous Essay of Dramatic Poesy with the sound of 
 our navy's gunnery: 
 
 It was that memorable day, in the first summer of the late 
 war, when our navy engaged the Dutch; a day wherein the 
 two most mighty and best appointed fleets which any age 
 had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of 
 the globe. . . . While these vast floating bodies, on either 
 side, moved against each other in parallel lines, and our 
 countrymen, under the happy conduct of his Royal High- 
 ness, went breaking by little and little into the line of the 
 enemies; the noise of cannon from both navies reached our 
 ears about the City, so that all men being alarmed with it, 
 and in a dreadful suspense of the event which we knew was 
 then deciding, everyone went following the sound as his 
 fancy led him; and leaving the town almost empty, some 
 took towards the park, some cross the river, others down it; 
 all seeking the noise in the depth of silence. 
 
 He goes on to narrate how in company with three 
 gentlemen, "whom their wit and quality have made 
 known to all the town, " he took barge down through 
 the crowded merchant-shipping to Greenwich, where 
 the four listened as the air broke about them in little 
 undulations of sound "like the noise of distant thunder, 
 or of swallows in a chimney," until, as "by little and 
 little," it fell more distant, one of the four, lifting his 
 head, congratulated the others on that happy omen of 
 victory, adding the devout wish "that we might hear 
 no more of that noise, which was now leaving the 
 English coast." 
 
 Thus Dryden prefaces a really profound conversation
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 299 
 
 upon Poetry. Now you will not easily find a better 
 combination of poet and true Englishman than in 
 Dryden; and if you would seek the true patriotic in our 
 literature, you must seek it in passages such as the one 
 I have quoted; not in your hearty Rule, Britannias ! 
 Deaths of Nelson, or Battles of the Baltic, where senti- 
 ment infallibly overstrains itself and on the azure main 
 Britons do their duty for England, home and beauty, 
 and the mermaid's song condoles, while the mournful 
 billow rolls in a melody^of souls, and the might of Eng- 
 land rushes to anticipate the scene Which is pretty, 
 but whatever can it mean ? 
 
 IV 
 
 We have no great national epic like the Aeneid, 
 none written to extol the British empire, the men who 
 founded, built it, gave their lives for it. Our greatest 
 epic, Paradise Lost, really has one point of resemblance 
 with our old friend Beowulf, in that as Stopford Brooke 
 once sagely observed "there is not one word about our 
 England" in either poem. 
 
 No: but wait! Let us (as I have preached to you 
 more than once from this desk) constantly refer our 
 minds back to Rome, habitually consult with Latin 
 literature upon any question which puzzles us for the 
 moment concerning our literature in character or origin. 
 
 We have no Aeneid. But open your Horace. You 
 may or may not agree off-hand with what I am going 
 to say : but to me Horace has always seemed far more 
 patriotic in grain than Virgil as it has always seemed 
 to me that (Burke's rhetoric discounted) Horace Wai- 
 pole was in his way as good a patriot as Burke and at
 
 300 Studies in Literature 
 
 least as clear-sighted. But open your Horace, and turn 
 the Odes, page after page. Familiar as they may be to 
 you, I think you will be amazed to note how thickly 
 sown they are with names of nations, tribes, countries 
 east, west, south and north. Asia, Scythia, Parthia, 
 Numidia, Dacia, Dalmatia, the passes of the Alps and 
 the Tyrol over which Rome was spreading conquest 
 in Horace's day and establishing the Pax Romana. No- 
 thing of foreign affairs would appear to escape him, 
 and always his pride in Rome (unlike Virgil's) is quick, 
 alert, practical: as not seldom it is lofty, and never 
 less than absolutely sincere. 
 
 Why does Horace's patriotism ring so true ? Because, 
 if we search to the heart of it, we shall find that very 
 heart, not in the Forum or the boulevard of the Via 
 Sacra, but in his Sabine farm. The Forum and the Via 
 Sacra intrigued him, as the French say ; but as Piccadilly 
 or Whitehall or his club in Pall Mall intrigues an 
 Englishman, who yet knows all the while that these are 
 but arteries; that for the true source that feeds them, 
 the spirit that clarifies, he must seek home to a green 
 nook of his youth in Yorkshire or Derbyshire, Shrop- 
 shire or Kent or Devon; where the folk are slow, but 
 there is seed-time and harvest and "pure religion 
 breathing household laws. " 
 
 I challenge you that here lies the heart of Horace's 
 patriotism. He looks abroad (though he warns Quinc- 
 tius against the habit) eagerly watching 
 
 Quid bellicosus Cantaber et Scythes 
 
 . . . cogiter . . . 
 
 And what the Swede intend, and what the French . . . 
 
 but, for trust to confound their politics, he draws home 
 to the Sabine lads rusticorum mascula militum proles
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 301 
 
 shouldering logs for their mother's hearth; and to their 
 mother herself, rustic Phidyle, paying her vows to the 
 new moon, and her devoirs to the gods with a handful 
 of meal and salt. 
 
 Now as in a former lecture, Gentlemen, 1 I warned 
 you that to a Greek even to an Aristophanes his gods 
 mattered enormously; as, coming to Rome, we saw that 
 a Roman general on active service abroad would carry 
 with him, packed in mule pannier, the tessellae of a small 
 sacred pavement, that, wherever he encamped, his feet 
 might rest on these holy pictures of his gods ; so I warn 
 you here that you will never understand what patriot- 
 ism meant to a Roman unless you connect it with the old 
 religious usage of Latium, with Lar and Terminus and 
 other gods of field and garden, orchard and hearth : 
 
 At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates, 
 Reddereque antique menstrua thura Lari. 
 
 The feeling of this, should the originals be closed to 
 you, you may yet find exquisitely conveyed in the first 
 chapter of Pater's Marius the Epicurean, describing how 
 the lad Marius attended the private annual rites of the 
 Ambarvalia, of "the religion of Numa, " in his country 
 home, and how they impressed the boy's mind: 
 
 At the appointed time all work ceases; the instruments of 
 labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers, while 
 masters and servants together go in solemn procession along 
 the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the 
 victims whose blood is presently to be shed for the puri- 
 fication from all natural or supernatural taint of the lands 
 they have "gone about.". . . Early on that day the girls 
 
 ' On the Art of Writing, pp. 192-3, Cambridge University Press, 1916.
 
 302 Studies in Literature 
 
 of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling large 
 baskets with flowers plucked short from branches of apple 
 and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew before the 
 quaint images of the gods Ceres and Bacchus and the yet 
 more mysterious Dea Dia as they passed through the 
 fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white- 
 clad youths, who were understood to proceed to this office in 
 perfect temperance. . . . The clean lustral water and the 
 full incense-box were carried after them. 
 
 Then, Silence! Favete linguis, before the small homely 
 shrines! No name in the great populace of the "little 
 gods" dear to the Roman home, was forgotten in the 
 long Litany: 
 
 Vatican who causes the infant to utter his first cry, Fabu- 
 linus who prompts his first word, Cuba who keeps him quiet 
 in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom Marius had 
 through life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess 
 who watches over one's safe coming home. 
 
 Favete linguis! As the procession halted before each 
 small shrine, Marius (we are told) strove to answer this 
 impressive outward silence of the ritual by hushing 
 his own boyish heart to that inward tacitness which 
 religious Romans held due to holy things. And its 
 comfort came back as he lay down to sleep that night 
 after the long day's ceremonies: 
 
 To procure an agreement with the gods Pacem deorum 
 exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day 
 been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he 
 would fain have those powers at least not against him. His 
 own nearer household gods were all around his bed. 
 
 "His own nearer household gods were all around his 
 bed. ' ' Hark, think for a moment, and catch the English 
 echo, out of your own childhood :
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 303 
 
 Four corners to my bed, 
 
 Four angels round my head. . . . 
 
 Follow that echo back, and tell me this. When you 
 think of the real England in English poetry of her 
 heart, her meaning, her secret nay even her glory as 
 our singers have come nearest to expressing one or the 
 other or all of these, do you think of Rule, Britannia !, 
 or Ye Mariners of England? Does not whatever is 
 in your heart lift rather to some casual careless line- 
 maybe even some foolish-seeming line such as Chaucer's 
 
 Wite ye nat where ther stant a litel toun 
 Which that y-clepM is Bob-up-and-down 
 Under the Blee? 
 Or this: 
 
 Me liketh ever, the longer the bet 
 
 By Wingestre, that joly cite; 
 
 The town is good and well y-set, 
 
 The folk is comely for to se. 
 
 Benedicamus Domino ! 
 
 Or this of Robin Hood returning in old age to merry 
 Sherwood : 
 
 When he came to greene-wood 
 
 In a merry morning, 
 There he heard the notes small 
 
 Of birds merry singing. 
 
 "It is far gone," said Robin Hood, 
 
 "That I was latest here; 
 Me list a little for to shoot 
 
 At the dunne deer." 
 Or again : 
 
 O Brignall banks are wild and fair 
 
 And Greta woods are green.
 
 304 Studies in Literature 
 
 Or: 
 
 Tis pretty to be by Balinderry 
 
 'Tis pretty to be by Balindoon. 
 Or: 
 
 The bells of Shandon 
 That sound so grand on 
 
 The pleasant waters 
 
 Of the river Lea. 
 Or: 
 
 Clunton and Clunbury^ 
 
 Clungunford and Clun, 
 Are the quietest places 
 
 Under the sun. 
 
 Or if it be a strip of meadow-land, with "daisies pied and 
 violets blue": or if a village "where bells have knolled 
 to church": or if it be but "Scarlet town where I was 
 born " : or if it be London herself, " of townes A per se " : 
 
 O! towne of townes, patrone and not compare 
 
 where John Gilpin keeps shop and Izaak Walton sallies 
 an-angling, to stretch his legs up Tottenham, and all 
 the way with the voice of the Psalmist running in his 
 head: 
 
 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth 
 me beside the still waters. . . . 
 
 it is thus, and incurably thus, that we see England ; as 
 it was thus that Horace, the true Roman, saw Italy: 
 and though in Britain 
 
 Today the Roman and his trouble 
 Are ashes under Uricon 
 
 we keep the lesson learnt. Other nations extend, or 
 would extend, their patriotism over large spaces super-
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 305 
 
 ficially : ours (or so much of it as, in Meredith's phrase, 
 is "accepted of song") ever cuts down through the 
 strata for its well-springs, intensifies itself upon that 
 which, untranslatable to the foreigner, is comprised 
 for us in a single easy word Home. We do not, in our 
 true hours as all our glorious poetry attests brag of 
 England as a world-power, actual or potential. Blame 
 it who will upon our insularity, we do habitually narrow 
 and intensify our national passion upon the home and 
 the hearths now to be defended. And I say this, who 
 said just now that our Rhine was seven seas.
 
 PATRIOTISM IN ENGLISH 
 LITERATURE. II. 
 
 WE talked last time, Gentlemen, of a certain shyness 
 often translating itself into irony shared by 
 our nation with great nations of the past when it comes 
 to talking of that sacred emotion, love of one's country. 
 In ordinary social life we know that a well-bred man 
 naturally inclines to let his ancestry (or his rank; or 
 his riches, if he have them ; or any personal distinction 
 he has won) go silently for granted; not undervaluing 
 them, but taught to see them in their true value as gifts 
 at the best held in trusteeship from the gods. We know 
 the instinct of such a man towards his fellows; that it 
 is constantly courteous, that it never says or seems to 
 say, " I am as good as you, " but always prefers the im- 
 plication, "You are as good as I." We know that he 
 keeps his heart as a mirror for other men's feelings, 
 lest he should wound them; that even in controversy 
 (as Newman says) his disciplined intellect is candid, 
 considerate, indulgent, since he throws himself into the 
 minds of his opponents and accounts for their mistakes. 
 So a nation such as France, or England, whose title- 
 deeds time can no longer question, may cherish indeed 
 certain inveterate foibles even certain inveterate vices 
 306
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 307 
 
 of character which its fellows will smile at or deplore : 
 but it will long ago have realised that it cannot have 
 the moon, that (as the saying is) all sorts go to make 
 a world, that civilised men must give and take. It will 
 long ago have rid itself of bumptiousness, of that itch 
 for self-assertion which is the root-bane of good manners. 
 
 Now the general good manners of Europe have been 
 vexed for a generation by a people, raw in character 
 and uncouth of speech, which has prospered by dint 
 of bravery to a very high degree. Having prospered 
 beyond hope by this pugnacious self-assertion, it has 
 set itself since 1870 not only to philosophise its primi- 
 tive instincts but to impose that philosophy upon the 
 civilised nations into whose circle it had so compla- 
 cently forced a seat. 
 
 "The be-all and end-all of a State is Power" "True 
 Patriotism consists in Self-assertiveness " "What we 
 want, it follows that we must have" I will not weary 
 you, today, Gentlemen, with confuting this doctrine. 
 Long ago, on a hot day in a courtyard in Athens, 
 Thrasymachus announced it, rehearsing all the advan- 
 tages of the unjust man; and was laid on his back, 
 wondering what had happened. 
 
 II 
 
 The high teaching of the world was not to be put 
 down by Thrasymachus, in his day, and is not to be 
 put down in ours by the neo-Darwmists who teach that 
 life, for nations as for individuals, is a kind of dog-fight, 
 and its object self-assertion. Christ at any rate taught 
 that he who would save his soul must first lose it: and 
 that doctrine informs good literature, even down to the 
 artless self -surrender of our own Nut Browne Mayde:
 
 308 Studies in Literature 
 
 Sith I have here been partynere 
 
 With you of joy and bliss, 
 I must als6 part of your woe 
 
 Endure, as reason is: 
 Yet I am sure of one pleasure, 
 
 And shortly it is this 
 That where ye be, me seem'th, parde, 
 
 I could not fare amiss. 
 
 In good literature, as in the Gospel, the self-assertor 
 is, like Malvolio, a self-deceiver. "What is a man 
 profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his 
 own soul ? " " Love thy neighbour as thyself. " " This 
 law," says a much-quoted German general, "can claim 
 no significance for the relations of one country to 
 another, since its application to politics would lead to 
 a conflict of duties." 
 
 Believe me, a man who talks like that has been 
 educated that is to say, has had himself "drawn out" 
 beyond his capacity to bear the strain. These are no 
 times for men to make fetishes of tall words, even of 
 words so tall as "education" and "religion." These 
 are times for clear sight into the values of things. 
 Without clear thinking religion will not help us: for a 
 stupid man, who cannot see clearly what he means by it, 
 religion may easily be and indeed not seldom is the 
 wickedest influence in the world. His heart will bleed 
 over Lou vain while he sacks it, and with gathering 
 confidence he will promise, so he be allowed to do the 
 same to Calais, to reward the Almighty (Who knows 
 about crosses) with the decoration of an iron one. So 
 with education : some men may as easily have too much 
 education as too much religion. It is admittedly bad 
 to have none; it is possibly, nay certainly, worse to have 
 more than by character or intelligence you are adapted
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 309 
 
 for. It has been the curse of Germany that, mistaking 
 the human end of education and misconceiving what 
 "power" means in the saying "Knowledge is Power," 
 she has strained herself to it beyond preparation of 
 ancestry or manners. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Now I propose to examine for a few minutes this 
 morning, first the rationale, and afterwards some results, 
 of this German self-assertiveness as it has invaded in 
 our day the field of study with which we here are 
 particularly concerned I mean the study of English 
 literature. Into what error soever the course of my 
 examination may betray me, I at least commit none in 
 starting from a fact which is one of common knowledge 
 that German professors and scholars have invaded 
 that field with great assiduity. 
 
 You will not so readily agree maybe you will not 
 agree at all with what I am going to say next. But 
 I say it nevertheless. Every literature being written 
 in a language every great literature commanding a 
 masterly style of its own language and appealing to an 
 almost infinitely delicate acquaintance with its mean- 
 ings, an almost infinitely delicate sense of its sounds, 
 even to semi-tones and demi-semi-tones no foreigner 
 can ever quite penetrate to the last excellence of an 
 unfamiliar tongue. I know this to be a hard saying: 
 and I utter it very reluctantly because it is wormwood 
 to me to own myself congenitally debarred though it 
 be in common with all modern men from entering the 
 last shrine of beauty (say) in a chorus of Sophocles. 
 But I am sure that it is so. Lovely as we may divine
 
 310 Studies in Literature 
 
 the thrill to be (or rather to have been for those who had 
 ears to hear) educative as it may be even in tantalising 
 our thirst I am sure that no modern Englishman 
 can ever quite reach back to the lilt of a Sophoclean 
 chorus; still less to its play of vowel notes. I doubt 
 even if by taking most careful thought he can attain to 
 the last beauties of a sonnet by Leconte de Lisle or 
 Heredia. 
 
 You may urge that, Latin and Greek being dead 
 languages which we are agreed in various ways to mis- 
 pronounce, this disability may apply to them, but does 
 not extend to our modern Babel. I answer, first, that 
 if only by structure of his vocal organs a German is 
 congenitally unable to read our poetry; that his eye, 
 perusing it, cannot translate it to any part of him 
 capable of reproducing its finest sound. The late 
 Philip Gilbert Hamerton once illustrated this from a 
 few lines of Tennyson's Claribel. 
 
 Where Claribel low-lieth 
 The breezes pause and die, 
 
 Letting the rose-leaves fall: ... 
 
 At eve the beetle boometh 
 
 Athwart the thicket lone: . . . 
 
 The hollow grot replieth 
 Where Claribel low-lieth. 
 
 Now to an English critic with a musical ear the whole 
 consonantal secret of that little poem resides in the 
 labials, with their suggestion of moonlit lapsing water, 
 and the low "th" sounds in which one feels the very 
 breath of eve softly wafted: 
 
 At eve the beetle boometh 
 Athwart the thicket lone.
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 311 
 
 But a German simply cannot compass the soft "th" 
 sound. He has to introduce his own harsh hiss upon the 
 twilit quiet where never a full sibilant was allowed. 
 As this: 
 
 At eve ze beedle boomess 
 Aswart ze zickhead Ion 
 
 while as for the continuous hushed run of the soft gut- 
 tural to lip and tooth ("Claribel," "throstle," "thick- 
 leaved ambrosial," "the hollow grot") he must rest 
 content with his ancestral habit which has not yet 
 evolved even labials beyond the throat: "Sick-leaved 
 ambhrosial: 
 
 Ze hollo ghrot hrepliez 
 
 Hwhere Chlaribel blow hliez. 
 
 IV 
 
 I say then that it must be extremely hard for any 
 German to feel the last felicities of our language, to 
 respond to its last, most delicate, harmonies. I think 
 it must be impossible, for (to use a plain phrase) I don't 
 see what he has to do it with. But I will content my- 
 self with maintaining that he must naturally find it 
 very hard. r 
 
 And this by no means exhausts the list of his natural 
 disabilities. We know that many scholars have been 
 able to write exquisitely in a dead language, or at any 
 
 I 1 believe that in a less, but yet a very high, degree, a Frenchman 
 finds this natural difficulty with English, and an Englishman with 
 French. Both of them are far more at home with the simpler pro- 
 nunciation of Italian. This, further, seems to me a partial explana- 
 tion of a fact which few will dispute that (to speak only of us English) 
 we have in the past understood Italians better than we have understood 
 the French. In matters of art and literature this will hardly be denied.
 
 312 Studies in Literature 
 
 rate to write it in a way that to us seems exquisite. 
 Cambridge is rightly proud of a long list of sons whose 
 lips in her cradle the very bees of Hybla and of Hymet- 
 tus have visited with their honey. Certain Frenchmen 
 again (M. Jusserand is a notable instance) have written 
 English "as to the manner born" nervous, elastic 
 English, with an added grace of French charm. I 
 doubt if the compliment can, save in politeness, be 
 returned. Swinburne's French poetry, for example, is 
 magnificently eloquent but is it quite French? At all 
 events the German who can write English of any quality 
 has yet, I believe, to be found, unless we accept Max 
 Muller's plastering for marble. To that whole nation 
 or, if you will, to that whole group of nations our 
 language is not only not living but something more 
 than dead. This, when you consider it, throws back 
 some merriment upon their claim that we are or shall 
 we say, have been in some sense cousins of theirs. 
 It might appear that the claim has been set up on 
 grounds not entirely unconnected with expectations of 
 a legacy, and that our death has, as the lawyers say, 
 by our amiable relatives been somewhat too hastily 
 presumed. 
 
 Please understand that I am not belittling the mass 
 of methodical and most helpful work done, during the 
 last twenty or thirty nay, the past hundred years 
 by German scholars upon that side of our literature 
 which they are not congenitally precluded from under- 
 standing. When this war is over, I hope we shall 
 retain no little gratitude for that service of labour, 
 while able with clear eyes to see it in its real relationship 
 to literature ; that is, in its right place. 
 
 For (let us be fair) I do not say, nor do I believe 
 for a moment, in spite of a long malignity now un-
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 313 
 
 masked, the Germans have of set purpose treated 
 English literature as a thing of the past or imposed that 
 illusion upon our schools, with design to prove that this 
 particular glory of our birth and state is a dead posses- 
 sion of a decadent race. My whole argument is rather 
 that they have set up this illusion, and industriously, 
 because they could not help it; because the illusion is in 
 them: because this lovely and living art which they 
 can never practise nor even see as an art, to them is, 
 has been, must be for ever, a dead science a hortus 
 siccus; to be tabulated, not to be planted or watered. 
 
 But I do say that when they impose that halluci- 
 nation upon the schools of English in our universities, 
 whether they impose it deliberately or not, the effect is 
 the same. And I do say it is in a high degree dis- 
 creditable that English scholars, hypnotised (we must 
 suppose) by contemplating the mere mountain of 
 German false doctrine, have consigned to it alike in 
 what they neglected and what they attempted. 
 
 Have it how you will, it disgraces somebody that an 
 undergraduate of this university, from the sixth form 
 of one of our best reputed public schools, coming to 
 me the other day in his desire to know how English 
 should be written (he wanted ardently to know this 
 though, as he put the matter, "it will be no good for 
 me in the Classical Tripos") that this boy should 
 confess to me that in all his schooldays he had never 
 been set to write one English essay, never taught to 
 arrange two English sentences together. 
 
 I have no blame for our enemies, as we must now 
 call them. It is our fault that we treat our beautiful,
 
 314 Studies in Literature 
 
 breathing language as a dead thing. On all that side 
 of the study which allowed them scope they have taken 
 infinite pains, while the immensely more delicate, more 
 significant, more difficult side difficult to us, im- 
 possible to them we have let go by default. Is it any 
 wonder, then, that their general hallucination of culture 
 has spread with a deeper infection of self-conceit, of self- 
 deceit, over a study in which we have accepted them 
 for taskmasters whom nature forbade to be more than 
 hewers of wood for us and drawers of water? 
 
 I remember coming once but cannot remember 
 where upon an ingenious theory that for a period of 
 time in what we call the Dark Ages, everyone in Europe 
 was more or less mad. At the time that seemed to me 
 a cheerfully extravagant hypothesis, though it had the 
 merit of illuminating quite a considerable number of 
 facts the causes of which historians had left obscure. 
 But in our day we are obliged to lay account with some 
 explanation not very far short of this, seeing that the 
 people of central Europe are at this very moment 
 claiming and, it seems, as one man to be apostles 
 of a culture which the surrounding nations can only 
 accept after a confession of insanity. Either we or they 
 must be mad just now, and there can be no third way 
 about it. 
 
 I daresay you read in your Times yesterday of a per- 
 formance of Twelfth Night given in the Old Theatre at 
 Leipzig on October 2Oth with a special prologue written 
 by Ernst Hardt and put into the mouth of the Fool, 
 who appeared in front of the curtain and thus delivered 
 himself I quote the English translation : 
 
 Gentles, in very sooth I do appear 
 
 A fool in semblance ! And behind the curtain,
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 315 
 
 Where now my world is built for your delight, 
 
 I shall be truly I can promise you 
 
 From my heart's depth and by my body's fashion 
 
 A fool indeed! But here, and in these times, 
 
 In front of you, how can I ? Thorough-baked 
 
 I stand as solemn as a whole meal loaf. 
 
 My master, the great poet, who behind 
 
 This curtain built his world, and therewith too 
 
 Innumerous other worlds as marvellous 
 
 Ye 1 know him well, for near as man can climb 
 
 To godhead, he won godhead by his works 
 
 Now this same poet hath commanded me 
 
 In solemn earnest to declare you this: 
 
 Ye unto him have been until today 
 
 His second home; his first and native home 
 
 Was England; but this England of the present 
 
 Is so contrarious in her acts and feelings, 
 
 Yea, so abhorr'd of his pure majesty 
 
 And the proud spirit of his free-born being, 
 
 That he doth find himself quite homeless there. 
 
 A fugitive he seeks his second home, 
 
 This Germany, that loves him most of all, 
 
 To whom before all others he gives thanks, 
 
 And says : Thou wonderful and noble land, 
 
 Remain thou Shakespeare's one and only home, 
 
 So that he wander not, uncomprehended, 
 
 Without a shelter in the barren world! 
 
 VI 
 
 Let us not deceive ourselves. The man who wrote 
 that, meant it : and the man who spoke that, meant it. 
 If I can read honest conviction in verse, honest con- 
 viction is there. These men do honestly believe our 
 Shakespeare Shakespeare nostras, as Ben Jonson af- 
 
 1 "Ye shall be as gods!"
 
 316 Studies in Literature 
 
 fectionately termed him, whose language they cannot 
 speak, cannot write, can but imperfectly understand 
 (for those who can neither speak nor write in a language 
 cannot understand it perfectly) , our Shakespeare's spirit 
 has migrated to a nation whose exploits it benevo- 
 lently watches in the sack of Lou vain, the bestialities 
 of Aerschot, the shelling of Rheims cathedral. These 
 men believe it no less thoroughly than they believe 
 that a telegram is all the better for being forged so 
 that the forgery advantage them. Do not be surprised. 
 As I warned you in certain lectures on Macbeth, a 
 generation that has lived through the consequences of 
 the Ems telegram and dabbled with a German pro- 
 fessorial philosophy, which whether for the purpose or 
 not does in fact excuse cheating at cards, cannot main- 
 tain that the mirage imposed upon Macbeth by the 
 witches, the dream of winning all things by substituting 
 evil for good, has lost its power to hallucinate the 
 intellect, even the strong intellect. 
 
 So let us not blame these men, but ourselves, who 
 tamely suffered this imposture to grow. They could 
 not understand, or understood only that they stood 
 to profit. We had the birthright of understanding as 
 well as the assurance that by allowing our intelligence 
 to be enslaved we stood only to lose. 
 
 VII 
 
 There is only one way, as we see now, of exorcising 
 such a devil when he has been allowed to swell to full 
 growth. The task then passes to the young to the 
 sword in the hands of the young and they will lance 
 this swollen tumour. But at what a cost of lives that
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 317 
 
 might be building the next generation, and living and 
 seeing good days lost to how many through that 
 default of ours ! 
 
 Yes, it is good that the young have the salvation of 
 this race in hand just now, and not our professors and 
 lecturers. But when does ever a nation live, to whom 
 its language is no longer a living thing? To the care 
 of these professors and lecturers our language with its 
 tradition of glorious energy was entrusted, to be treated 
 at least as a living thing. 
 
 But it is ill for a country, Gentlemen I fear we 
 must acknowledge it when her destiny passes into the 
 guidance of professors. That lesson (if I mistake not) 
 is going to be very painfully learnt by Germany in the 
 course of this war; and it will be learnt less painfully 
 by us only because our pedants have earned disregard 
 by choosing to be abject a doubly negative success. 
 If our teachers of English had only would only, even 
 now treat our mother tongue as a living tongue, our 
 pride in it as a pride of practice, our use of it as a quick 
 and perfectible art ! How much can they yet do with 
 their knowledge if they will repent and understand and 
 become if not as little children then at least as men of 
 the world ! 
 
 As it is, the pricking of the bubble of arrogance 
 is left to the clean instincts of our youn^ men. I 
 seem now to read the prophecy of this in two scenes, 
 which suffer me to recall as they stand out now, bitten 
 sharply on my memory the one of Oxford, the other 
 of Cambridge. 
 
 First then I recall a morning scene in Oxford in the 
 early spring of 1912: the day bright, with a touch of 
 frost, the air alive with the spirit of youth borne back 
 how poignantly ! to the heart of a passer-by, revisiting
 
 3i 8 Studies in Literature 
 
 the familiar streets after many years. Under instruc- 
 tions I had posted myself at the corner of the Turl 
 where it debouches into the High. Nor had I long to 
 wait. Punctual as the many clocks competed in 
 striking nine, by Carfax, around the end of St. Aldates 
 swung the head of a column of artillery the O.U.T.C. 
 returning from morning manoeuvres, out Radley way. 
 They wheeled by Carfax into the High and came at a 
 trot down that street of memories. 
 
 Time like an ever-rolling stream 
 Bears all his sons away 
 
 doubtless : but for the moment at Oxford, all has past, 
 everything even to the morning sunshine these tall boys 
 commanded, for behind them they rattled the British 
 guns. A sight to make the heart leap ! But the heart 
 in its exultation cried out, "If it must be, well. . . . 
 Yet not in our time, O Lord!" 
 
 And again, but the date is a year later I see a cavalry 
 troop of the C.U.O.T.C. clattering home over the 
 bridge by Magdalene in a drizzle that at the shut of 
 evening her "gradual dusky veil " made their lighter 
 Cambridge grey all but un distinguishable; these, also, 
 taking charge of the road, calling to one another, as 
 they wheeled by St. John's as if all Cambridge belonged 
 to them as now in retrospection one sees that it did. 
 For these also were in their careless confident way 
 preparing themselves. 
 
 They are gone. They have taken their cheerfulness 
 out of Cambridge: and have left us to an empty uni- 
 versity, to dull streets, the short days, the long nights. 
 And we who, by age or for other causes, must stay 
 behind, must needs question our heavy thoughts.
 
 Patriotism in English Literature 319 
 VIII 
 
 Let me tell you or remind you of this, for a true 
 history and a parable. In the year 1870, in the little 
 village of Arbois in France and in a cottage close by the 
 bridge that crosses the Cuisance river, there abode 
 a small half -paralyzed man, working at his books to a 
 word which he constantly repeated Labor emus. For 
 his school in Paris was closed and he had been sent out 
 of the city as an "idle mouth ; ' and indeed he was 
 clearly unfit to carry arms. "But sometimes," says 
 his biographer, "when he was sitting quietly with his 
 wife and daughter, the town-crier's trumpet would 
 sound : and forgetting all else, he must run out of doors, 
 mix with the groups standing on the bridge, listen to 
 the latest news of disaster and creep like a dumb hurt 
 animal back to his room," where the portrait of his 
 father an ex-sergeant of Napoleon's 3d Regiment of 
 the Line "the brave amongst the brave" hung to 
 reproach him. "Shall we not cry, 'Happy are the 
 dead'?" wrote this paralytic man to one friend; and 
 to another, "How fortunate you are to be young and 
 strong ! why cannot I begin a new life of study and work ! 
 Unhappy France, dear country, if I could only assist 
 in raising thee from thy disasters!" 
 
 Now that man swore in the depth of national defeat 
 in the anguish of a brain active while the body was laid 
 impotent to raise France again to her rank among the 
 nations and by work of pure beneficence. He would 
 never forgive Germany: but he a man warned of his 
 end would live to build this monument, for the glory 
 of France, to shame by its nobility that vulgar ex- 
 crescence raised by Germany over the Rhnie. You 
 may read it all in his Life; how the vow was taken, how
 
 320 Studies in Literature 
 
 pursued, how achieved. I, who quote this vow and its 
 accomplishment, saw the wreaths piled five-and-twenty 
 years later by all Europe prouder trophies for a 
 cathedral than stands of captured colours on the grave 
 of Pasteur. 
 
 "But that which put glory of grace into all that he 
 did, " says Bunyan of Greatheart, "was that he did it of 
 pure love for his Country."
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acland, Sir Henry, 260 
 
 Adoniram, 2 
 
 Alcuin, 15 
 
 Allen, Robert, 215, 217 
 
 Ancient Mariner, The, 220 et seq. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 183, 190-191, 
 
 195, 196, 232 et seq. 
 Atalanta in Calydon, 263 
 Avignon, 17 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 163 
 
 Ballads, 23 et seq. 
 
 Beauty and the Beast, 13 
 
 Bede, 15 
 
 Bentley, Dr. Richard, 56 
 
 Beowulf, 299 
 
 Besant, Sir Walter, 274, 283 
 
 Blake, William, 77, 113 
 
 Blunt, Wilfrid (quoted), 296 
 
 Bossuet, 59 
 
 Bowles, William Lisle, 216 
 
 Brandes, Dr. George, 82, 94 
 
 Bridges, Robert, 61 
 
 Bridgman, Sir Orlando, 151 
 
 Brome, Alexander, 90 
 
 Brooke, Christopher, 104 
 
 Brooke, Samuel, 104 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, 299 
 
 Brooks, W. T., 152 
 
 Brown, Thomas Edward, 196 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 12 
 
 Browning, Robert, 58, 125, 173, 
 
 190-1,234,243,244 
 Bunyan, John, 294, 320 
 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 262 
 Burns, Robert, 265 
 Burton, Richard, 267 
 Byron, George Noel Gordon, 
 
 Lord, 194, 271 
 
 Campbell, James Dykes, 213, 216, 
 217 
 
 Campion, Thomas, 60, 61, 72 
 
 Carew, Thomas, 97 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 236 
 
 Gary, Lucius (Lord Falkland), 
 
 97 
 
 Cassiterides, The, 2 
 Champeaux, William of, 18 
 Chaucer, 18, 21, 79, 121, 194, 285 
 Christabel, 222 
 Churchill, Charles, 52 
 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 
 
 97 
 
 Cleveland, John, 55 
 
 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 287 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37, no, 
 
 212 et seq., 298 
 Collins, William, 75, 88 
 Common Prayer, Book of, 70 
 Conington, John, 52, 54 
 Cory, William (Johnston), 192 
 Cowper, William, 56, 68 
 Crabbe, George, 56-57 
 Cramb, Professor J. A., 296 
 Crashaw, Richard, 163-166 
 Cupid and Psyche, 13 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, 72 
 
 Dante, 121 
 
 Davies, Sir John, 155-156 
 
 Denham, Sir John, 88 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 213, 298 
 
 De Tabley, J. B. Leicester Warren, 
 
 Lord, 255 
 
 Dixon, Richard Watson, 255 
 Dobell, Bertram, 152 
 Dobson, Austin, 69 
 Dodington, George Bubb, 297 
 Donne, Henry, 99. IO 
 Donne, John, 96 et seq., 130, 131, 
 
 Do'riet/Charles Sackville, Earl of 
 67 
 
 321
 
 322 
 
 Index 
 
 Doughty, Charles M., 207 
 Drury, Sir Robert, 105, 106 
 Dryden, John, 56, 97, no, 242, 
 
 298-299 
 Dunbar, William, 19, 20 
 
 Earle, John, 150-151 
 Ecclesiasticus, 42, 119 
 " Eliot, George, " 282 
 Ellesmere, Thomas Egerton, Earl 
 
 of, 103 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 14 
 Essays in Criticism, 235 
 Etherege, Sir George, 67 
 Evans, Mary, 215-8 
 
 Ferrar, Nicholas, 135 
 Fletcher, Giles, 156 
 Fletcher, John, 45 
 Fletcher, Phineas, 156 
 Froude, James Anthony, 234 
 
 Garnett, Dr. Richard, 227 
 Gautier, Theophile, 91 
 Gibbon, Edward, 59 
 Gilbert, Sir William S., 59 
 Gladstone, W. E., 51, 59, 70 
 Godolphin, Sidney, 97 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 56 
 Gorky, Maxim, 82 
 Gosse, Edmund, 251 et seq. 
 Gray, Thomas, 238 
 Grierson, Professor H. J. C., 97 
 Grimm, James, 23, 25 
 Grosart, Dr. A. B., 136, 152 
 Gummere, Dr. F. B., 27, 28, 37 
 
 Habington, William, 157-158 
 
 Hall, Bishop, 55 
 
 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 310 
 
 Hardt, Ernst, 314 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 82, 189 et seq. 
 
 Harvey, Christopher, 158-159, 163 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel, 72 
 
 Hazlitt, William, 169, 222 
 
 Henley, W. E., 161 
 
 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, 
 
 Lord, 131, 132 
 Herbert, George, 81, 114, 131 et 
 
 seq., 139, 140, 143, 163, 164 
 Herbert, Sidney, 132 
 Herder, 23 
 Herodotus, 5 
 Herrick, Robert, 60 
 Hoccleve, Thomas, 48 
 
 Homer, 5, 89 
 
 Hood, Thomas, 136 
 
 Horace, 51 et seq., 101, 299-300 
 
 Horn, sailing ships, 7 
 
 Houghton, R. Monckton Milnes, 
 
 Lord, 261 
 Housman, A. E. (quoted), 303, 
 
 304 
 Hugo, Victor, 255-256 
 
 Ictis, Island of, 2 
 
 Job, Book of, 119 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 45, 97, no, 
 
 "3, 258, 288, 290 
 Jonson, Ben, 60, 79, 97, 317 
 Joubert, 231 
 Jowett, Dr. Benjamin, 249, 259, 
 
 266 
 
 Jusserand, J. J., 17,213 
 Juvenal, 52, 53 
 
 Keats, John, 194, 267 
 Ker, Professor W. P., 28 
 King, Bishop Henry, 97, 156-157 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 37 
 Kittredge, Professor, 24, 26 
 Kubla Khan, 222, 223 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 59, 170, 214, 219, 
 
 226, 255 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 69, 95, 
 
 i 255> A 26 i 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 13, 101 
 Langland, William, 43 
 Lebanon, levy of, 2 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 292 
 Litany, The, 17 
 London Bridge, 1 8 
 Longinus, 93 
 Louyain, 15 
 Lucian, 43 
 Lydgate, John, 48 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
 
 Lord, 236 
 
 Macdonald, George (quoted), 128 
 "Maartens, Maarten," 267 
 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 82, 150 
 Martin, Sir Theodore, 52, 71 
 Marvell, Andrew, 63, 66 
 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 259 
 Meredith, George, 79, 119, 167, 
 
 168 et seq., 192, 205, 263, 265, 
 
 270
 
 Index 
 
 323 
 
 Milton, John, 48, 62, 67, 74, 
 77, 78, 121, 147, 203, 238, 241, 
 299 
 
 Moliere, 194 
 
 Montaigne, 194 
 
 More, Sir George, 104 
 
 Morris, William, 191, 195, 262 
 
 Muller, Max, 312 
 
 Myers, Lindo, 254 
 
 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 
 
 59. 3 06 
 Nut Browne Mayde, The, 307 
 
 Oldham, John, 56 
 Oliphant, Laurence, 58 
 
 Paley, William, 127 
 
 Pascal, 1 6 
 
 Pasteur, Louis, 319-320 
 
 Pater, Walter, 301-302 
 
 Paul, Herbert, 233, 235 
 
 Peele, George, 60 
 
 Percy, Bishop, 38, 47 
 
 Pilgrim Fathers, The, 4, 
 
 Plato, 116, 120, 209, 290-293 
 
 Poems and Ballads, 265 
 
 Poole, Thomas, 218 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 52, 56, 59, 77, 
 
 88 et seq., no 
 Porter, Endymion, 97 
 Powell, F. York, 152 
 Praed, W. M., 69 
 Prior, Matthew, 67 
 Procter, Bryan Waller (Barry 
 
 Cornwall), 255 
 Pythagoras, 120 
 
 Quarles, Francis, 159, 161, 163 
 Quia Amore Langueo, 160 
 
 Rabelais, 16, 59 
 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 296 
 Raper, R. W., 249, 266 
 Reade, Charles, 274 et seq. 
 Redesdale, Algernon Bertram 
 
 Freeman- Mitford, Lord, 252 
 Remigius, 18 
 Richbprough oysters, i 
 Ritchie, Lady, 261 
 Roads, 15-17 
 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 
 
 I6l 
 
 Roman Colonists in Britain, 8 
 Rossetti, Christina, 264 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 247, 262, 
 
 Routh, Dr., of Magdalen, 278, 
 279 
 
 Sahara, The, 12 
 
 St. Aldwyn, Michael Edward 
 Hicks-Beach, Viscount, 258 
 
 Saintsbury, George, 235, 239, 246 
 
 Sappho, n, 93 
 
 Schlegel, A. W., 25 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 37 
 
 Sedley, Sir Charles, 67 
 
 Shakespeare, 13, 77, 113, 172, 178, 
 203,249,297,317 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 77, 194, 226, 
 249 
 
 Shenstone, William, 47 
 
 Sherbrooke, Robert (Lowe), Vis- 
 count, 278 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 79 
 
 Simonides, 256 
 
 Skeat, Professor W. W., 121 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, 280 
 
 South, Dr. Robert, 147-149 
 
 Sou they, Robert, 217 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 48, 72, 78, 79, 
 185, 266 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 65, 197 
 
 Stubbs, Bishop William, 262 
 
 Swift, Jonathan, 52 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 191, 
 246 et seq., 282 
 
 Tarshish, navy of, i 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, 6, 71, 190, 234, 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 59, 71 
 Thompson, Francis, 92, 160, 191, 
 
 194 
 
 Thucydides, 93 
 Tolstoy, 209 
 Traherne, Thomas, 114, 122, 124, 
 
 128, 151 et seq. 
 Tyrrell, Professor R. Y., 64 
 
 Universities, the early, 18 
 
 Vaughan, Henry, 114, 123, J 38 et 
 
 seq., 152 
 
 Vaughan, Thomas, 139 
 Vere, Aubrey de, 52 
 Virgil, 93, 220 
 Voltaire, 59
 
 324 
 
 Index 
 
 Walton, Isaak, 96 et seq., 133 et 
 
 seq., 304 
 
 Watson, Sir William, 240, 243 
 Watts, Dr. Isaac, 73 
 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 257, 269 
 
 et seq. 
 
 Wells, Charles Jeremiah, 255 
 Whitman, Walt, 184, 271 
 Worde, Wynkyn de, 43 
 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 2 1 8 et seq. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 59, 82, 114, 
 119, 129, 146, 147, 150, 196, 218 
 et seq., 239, 242, 243-244 
 
 Wotton, Sir Henry, 60, 96 
 
 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 44, 60 
 
 Yeats, William Butler, 191, 194 
 Young, Sir George, 254
 
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